Commonwealth Games 2010 saw a grand opening in Delhi a couple of hours ago. All the controversy that surrounded it was kept aside as people witnessed most spectacular show ever.
Here is a link to the spectacular live performance of the CWG Theme song by AR RAHMAN-
And here’s a link to video of the opening ceremony-
For those of you who are outside India, you can watch live web stream here-
* India – Doordarshan, DD Sports
* Australia – Network Ten, Foxtel
* Fiji – Mai TV
* Canada – CBC, CBC Bold
* Cyprus – Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation
* Namibia – Namibia Broadcasting Corporation
* New Zealand – Sky Network Television and Prime (New Zealand TV channel)
* Nigeria – Broadcasting Organisation of Nigeria
* Malaysia – Astro
* Seychelles – Seychelles Broadcasting Corporation
* Singapore – MediaCorp Channel 5
* South Africa – South Africa Broadcasting Corporation
* Tanzania – Tanzania Broadcasting Corporation
* United Kingdom – British Broadcasting Corporation
* United States – Video Sound Inc.
Here’s to next 13 days of rigorous games, fun, and party!
President Obama makes a toast in honor of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
President Obama makes a toast in honor of India Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. If you watch the you tube video here, it appears he actually said “Prime Minister Mohammad Singh”. He welcomed all in hindi, “aapka suagut hai.“
Mont Blanc's $24,763 Mahatma Gandhi Pen on Gandhi Jayanti
Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday celebration has reduced to mere efforts to monetize . Mont Blanc has launched 241 limited edition 18k gold plated $24,763/ each pens. The pen is engraved with Gandhi’s image and tricked out with a saffron-colored mandarin garnet on the clip and a rhodium-plated nib. A billboard put up this week over Mumbai’s teeming slums shows a gaunt Gandhi next to an image of the swanky pen, with golden threads woven around it to represent Gandhi’s spinning wheel. This one is oozing with irony! Gandhi who lived and preached life of minimalism, his name, today, is being used as a sales gimmick for the opulent and could-not-care-less types. Mont Blanc got it all wrong.
Traffic moves past a billboard displaying a portrait of Mohandas Gandhi, the ascetic father of India's independence, besides an image of a Montblanc pen in India.
Internet search giant Google paid tribute to Mahatma Gandhi on Friday on the 140th anniversary of his birth, replacing the ‘G’ in its colorful logo with a picture of the Indian independence hero. Nice gesture.
Our job is to show how it is possible to take an illiterate woman and make her into an engineer in six months and show that she can solar-electrify a village.- Bunker Roy, Founder Barefoot College (Tilonia, Rajasthan).
The students are mostly women. Some are grandmothers. Hundreds have come through here from villages across India and a dozen other countries to learn how to install and maintain solar energy in rural areas. Even though it’s sophisticated coursework, the only pre-requisite for admission to the Barefoot College is that there are no pre-requisites, not even to speak the language.
Bunker Roy founded the Barefoot College in 1972. Projects have always compromised of basic underlying principle of sustainability or self reliance in all aspects of life. Bunker Roy believes,’Any technology that brings in dependency on anybody on the outside is not a technology that will work.’
Over the years Barefoot College has addressed problems of drinking water, girl education, health & sanitation, rural unemployment, income generation, electricity and power, as well as social awareness and the conservation of ecological systems in rural communities. The campus spreads over 80,000 square feet area and consists of residences, a guest house, a library, dining room, meeting halls, an open air theatre, an administrative block, a ten-bed referral base hospital, pathological laboratory, teacher’s training unit, water testing laboratory, a Post Office, STD/ISD call booth, a Craft Shop and Development Centre, an Internet dhaba (cafe), a puppet workshop, an audio visual unit, a screen printing press, a dormitory for residential trainees and a 700,000 litre rainwater harvesting tank. The College is also completely solar-electrified.
Today solar energy drives not just the equipment. This is a larger social experiment to improve the lives of some of the world’s poorest people. It begins in the classroom run by instructors who themselves have little or no formal education. Instruction is delivered with a mix of body language, a few essential terms in English, and lots of hands-on practice.
The students create an illustrated manual they’ll take home. It’s the closest thing to a diploma certifying their training as solar technicians. But just coming here is an unlikely achievement for students like 56-year-old Sarka Mussara, a widowed grandmother and many others who never attended school or even left her village.
Roy says a key to sustaining rural jobs and development is to use technology that can be managed by the local community, like solar lanterns and technology that’s more familiar, like rainwater collectors. All the roofs of this whole campus are connected underground to a 400,000 liter tank. We collect every drop of rain that falls on the campus.
These women, who come here to train themselves, are obviously going to have a very positive effect on the society. They are going to make sure that their daughters go to school or train themselves to be self reliant in life.
Barefoot College is not only a blessing for women of India, but even outside India. Women from Africa, Afghanistan, and other under-developed parts of the world come here to get trained. Barefoot College has solar electrified some 350 villages across India and dozens more in sub-Saharan Africa and even war-torn Afghanistan.
A R Rahman, now know as Mozart Of Madras, picks up three Oscars for his work in Danny Boyle’s Oscar winning Slumdog Millionaire. Rahman is the third Indian to win an Oscar, after costume designer Bhanu Athaiya for her work in Gandhi in 1983 and director Satyajit Ray in 1992.
“I just want to thank again the whole crew of Slumdog Millionaire, especially Danny Boyle, for giving me such a great opportunity,” he said, while accepting the award.
Slumdog Millionaire took the best-picture Academy Award and seven other Oscars today, including director for Danny Boyle, whose ghetto-to-glory story paralleled the film’s unlikely rise to Hollywood’s summit. It was a big winner at the Golden Globe Awards. It won film of the year and two other awards at the Richard Attenborough Film Awards, voted on by British critics. The movie has British director, producer, writer and studio. Nevertheless India has claimed it as its own perhaps because of the cast, crew, and location.
However the film has not been much loved in India. Not only did the film failed to capture the imaginations of Indian film goers; it’s also been dogged by controversy over its name and the treatment of its child stars. Some have called it poverty-porn.
Residents of a Mumbai slum show their displeasure over the name of the hit film Slumdog Millionaire in a protest outside the office the film's co-star, Anil Kapoor.
“If ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ projects India as Third World dirty underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations,” leading actor Amitabh Bachchan said in a posting on his blog from Paris, France. “Its just that the ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ idea authored by an Indian and conceived and cinematically put together by a westerner, gets creative global recognition,” he added.”The commercial escapist world of Indian cinema had vociferously battled for years, on the attention paid and the adulation given to the legendary Satyajit Ray… and not a word of appreciation for the entertaining mass-oriented box office blockbusters that were being churned out from Mumbai. “Ray portrayed reality. While, the other – escapism, fantasy and incredulous posturing. Unimpressive for Cannes and Berlin and Venice (film festivals),” he explained.
Smile Pinky: Best Documentary Short Subject
While Slumdog Millionaire won eight Oscars, it’s not the only film shot in India that was nominated and won. A 40-minute documentary about an eight-year-old girl Pinky Sonkar from Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh, Smile Pinky by American filmmaker Magan Mylan has also been nominated for Best Documentary.
Pinky had stopped smiling, even stopped going to school because she was ashamed of her cleft lip, a deformity 35,000 children are born with in India every year. Then this year, The Smile Train arrived in Pinky’s village and her world changed forever. The story was captured by American filmmaker Magan Mylan for the world in a film he called Smile Pinky. While Pinky was getting ready getting her passport and visa ready to walk on the red carpet, she did not know why. Pinky’s mother could not watch the Oscar ceremony since she does not have access to television set.
This is a scanned copy of the 69-page dossier of material stemming from the ongoing investigation into the Mumbai terrorist attacks of November 26-29, 2008 that was handed over by India to Pakistan on January 5, 2009.
Recap the madness of last year (from the financial crisis to the Presidential election to Elliot Spitzer and Miley Cyrus) and then thank your lucky stars the year is over.
Life is trying to return to normal in Mumbai. But will all be the same as before… will this event be forgotten as if nothing had happened.
Mumbai attack has definitely left behind lot of bitterness, lot of unanswered questions, and lot of fear. People are no longer taking politicians on face value. They are not accepting pittance for the untimely death of their loved ones. They are no longer accepting condolences but demanding action and answers. Politicians responsible for Mumbai’s security have resigned. But is that enough for an answer?
“But after these recent attacks, people are saying let’s not pretend everything’s all right. We don’t need to make a show of the Mumbai spirit when what we need now is to make sure this will not be forgotten, all will not be normal again.”
After The Smoke Has Cleared Up- Click on Image for more
Mumbai has been attacked once again. This time luxury hotels, hospitals, railway stations, and restaurants have been made target. More Americans and British than Indians. Again, lives have been lost.
The firing and bombing apparently started close to the Gateway of India. The gunbattle then moved on towards CST and raged on for over 45 minutes from 10 pm. Gunfire has been reported from Nariman House, Cama Hospital, Metro cinema, Leopold Cafe. BP gas station blown up. Oberoi, Dadar stations evacuated, VT trains stopped. Terrorist gunfire also reportedly came from a Qualis van with police markings. 195 dead (updated) , scores injured.
Army Enters Oberoi Hotel
Mumbai Under Alert
Once again human life has been shaken with fear. Once again freedom has been challenged.
India’s Olympic history has not been very bright or much heard of. However, with Bindra bagging first-ever individual gold in Bejing has sparked lot of celebrations and hopes. India had only won four individual medals, none of them gold, since sending their first team to the Summer Games in 1928.
“For me life will go on. All my life I have just been punching holes in a blank piece of paper target.
Day after Bindra ponders, “They have all been telling me what a huge achievement winning Gold is. I realize that but frankly the enormity of the goodwill generated has caught me by surprise. Honestly enough it really has not changed me, I am still the same Abhinav who just a day ago was hanging around alone in my room in the Olympic village. Frankly, all the attention is a bit overwhelming. I am not much good at making loud public pronouncements. That in no way means that this is not the most intense experience of my life…
…For more than a decade now my life has been all about my sport. In fact, I do not have a life beyond the confines of the 10m range. I have had a range built in my own home to cut down any possibility of distraction and to be able to practice my sport whenever the fancy strikes me. It all did pay off, didn’t it? It has all still not sunk in. I will post more once the feeling settles…
…I ran away from all the media and official attention yesterday after I had done the bit I had do in keeping with my new-found status. Instead I chose to go to a quiet dinner with some friends.
Mahatma Gandhi rarely spoke in English. He would address crowds in Hindi, Gujarati and even other Indian languages but never in English. There have been only two instances when he addressed people in English.
A rare recording of his speech in English made 7-8 months before his assassination has been found in Washington DC. This speech was made to a conference of Asian leaders convened by Jawaharlal Nehru.
Journalist Alfred Wagg recorded the speech in New Delhi on April 2, 1947 and produced four 78-rpm LPs that included both Gandhi’s voice as well as Wagg’s own commentary about the man revered as Father of the Indian Nation.
It had been lovingly preserved for 60 years by John Cosgrove, a former president of the National Press Club in the US capital, who discovered the significance of the recording during a chance encounter withRajmohan Gandhi, Mahatma’s grandson and biographer.
Fashion Designer Satya Paul has done it again. This time for designing a Google inspiredsareecalled Ooogle / Oogle. Satya Paul has been known to be inspired by nature, people, and beautiful things around him.
Starting in the 50’s, Pop art is a reflection of popular culture in art. Pop art is neither praise nor condemnation but explores the everyday imagery that is so much a part of contemporary consumer culture. It often uses media, advertising, packaging, celebrity and comic book art styles to bring art closer to real life.
The fabric is georgette jacquard and it is a printed saree. Priced at affordable $ 299.88 (Rs. 11.950). The url in the web address bar on the saree, of course, points to Satya Paul’s online shop! Rest of the saree showcases the google search page.
What are we going to see next- iphone lehnga or Microsoft Vista Punjabi suit? Not sure if Indian women would like the idea of being walking billboards.
Amitabh Bachchan and Anil Ambani have come together to form a new film production company. This deal is worth Rs. 1500 Crore. The deal includes film production, television series, reality shows, Internet and mobile content besides live shows. Reliance Big Entertainment will be taking care of the managerial aspects of the projects in the deal while the four Bachchans will be looking after the creative side.
Says Big B,”Yes, we are coming together in a JV to be partners in creating international property, sharing profits and assessing rights in perpetuity. The venture will be a separate entity and not AB Corp though AB Corp will provide assistance in creatives and execution.”
The leading bollywood directors who will be at the helm of the first films coming out of the joint venture have also been decided. The director of the hit film ‘Bluffmaster’, Rohan Sippy is to make a film with Abhishek Bachchan in the lead role. Film maker Chadrprakash Dwivedi who directed ‘Chanakya’ will be making a movie with Amitabh Bachchan.
Indians want Obama as the new President of the United States. In India, Obama leads McCain by 33 to 28 percent, according to the survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project.The survey covered 24,000 people in 24 countries between March 17 and April 21.
Mc Cain is not the preferred candidate in any country except for three where he matches Obama’s popularity- United States, Jordan, and Pakistan. In countries like France, Germany, and Spain Obama is heading with 88% popularity and confidence to do the right thing vote. Margins are narrower in Great Britain though.
Among the people who have been following the election, large majorities in France (68 percent), Spain (67 percent) and Germany (64 percent) say they believe that US foreign policy will improve after the election. This sentiment is also common in the African countries included in the survey – Nigeria (67 percent), South Africa (66 percent) and Tanzania (65 percent). However, in Jordan and Egypt people disagree.
Five years after the start of the war in Iraq, the image of the US abroad remains far less positive than it was before the war and at the beginning of the century. The survey also finds a widespread belief that U.S. foreign policy “will change for the better” after the inauguration of a new American president.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal along with wife Supriya are spending the Memorial Day weekend at Republican presidential nominee John McCain’s ranch in Arizona. There is speculation that Jindal might be called Mc Cain’s Vice President. Mc Cain may present Jindal with the opportunity to speak at the 2008 Republican National Convention, in a similar fashion to Barack Obama at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, cementing a place for him in the party and opening the gate for a future run for the presidency.
At 36, this first-generation Indian-American Rhodes Scholar is America’s youngest governor in a southern state with a long history of racial discrimination.
To everyone’s surprise, price tagged at $ 2 Billion, Antilla (named after the mythical island) is in India and is World’s First Billion Dollar Home. Indeed, like its name, it houses stuff that surrounds myth!
Owner is India’s richest, Mukesh Ambani of Reliance fame whose net worth was 43 Billion in March of this year and was the 5th richest in the world.
The only remotely comparable high-rise property currently on the market is the 70 million dollar triplex penthouse at the Pierre Hotel in New York, designed to resemble a French chateau, and climbing 525 feet in the air.
When the Ambani residence is finished in January, completing four years of design and construction, it will be 27 story and 550 feet high (height which normally houses 60 floors) with 400,000 square feet of interior space. Click on the picture to see the video.
However, all of this has not been without its share of controversies. Antilla is being built on land sold to Ambanis’ to be used as orphanage by Waqf Board.The land measuring 11793 sq yards was sold in 2004 by the trust for a charitable purpose of looking after the destitutes and orphan children belonging to the Khoja Mohammedan community. The land was given to the Maharashtra State Board of Waqf by Jivagi Raje Scindia in 1957. The MoU was signed with four companies namely Antillia Commercials, Saphire Realtors, Rockline Constructions and Baun Foundation trust.
The Waqf Board has told the Supreme Court that it sold the property thinking it was to be used for an orphanage and that commercial buildings are not allowed on Waqf land. Property having a market value of Rs 400 crore was sold only for Rs 21.05 cr to M/s Antillia Commercial, a company of Reliance group of Industries. Rs 16 crores were also paid to Waqf Board for No Objection Certificate.
The Supreme Court on Friday decided not to intervene in the construction of the building on Waqf board land in Mumbai and has directed the matter back to the Bombay high court.
Critics have also said that showing off such extravagant wealth in a country rife with poverty is insensitive and ethically questionable. This is excessive and ostentatious given that more than 65 percent of Mumbai’s 18 million residents live in tenements.
NS Harsha is a gifted story teller who captures everyday life from India as seen through the lens of news and world events on his canvas through the medium of paints and color.
Miniature art form is not unknown in India. In fact, it has been used through the ages to depict life from courts of kings to humble settings of huts or villages. However, Harsha has picked up this technique to bring to the world his observations of Indian society which at times are whimsical and at times absurd, or even tragic or significant on the world scene.
Perhaps painting is just a medium to express the philosopher and the thinker in him. Perhaps brush is Harsha’s tool in an attempt to bring a social change, and awareness and curiosity that surrounds humanity.
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