Google is warming up to India with more doodles

Google on Thursday marked the 135th birth anniversary of freedom fighter and poet Sarojini Naidu with a doodle. She was born in Hyderabad on February 13, 1879.

The doodle has a caricature of the Naidu in place of the second O and a pen for L.

Sarojini Naidu, one of the leading lights of India’s freedom movement, was also called the Nightingale of India.

Of late, the frequency of India specific doodles seems to be going up. The last one was to mark Republic day

Over the past decade, Google’s now-iconic doodle has become a cultural icon on its own, often an indicator of the global mood, at least the online kind. And that is something unprecedented for what is essentially just a corporate logo.

Strangely, the first doodle in 1998, was anything but an effort to make a cultural statement. The sticky figure drawing on the homepage then was just Google founders Larry and Sergey’s way of indicating that they would be attending the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. The next doodle appeared in 2000 to mark Bastille Day and since then there have been 700 doodles that have rustled the imagination of people around the world. Over the years, doodles have tried to be funny, imaginative and interactive, always drawing appreciation from netizens.