Commonwealth Games 2010: Time to Play

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!

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Gandhi Lost In Monetization

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.

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Mahatma Gandhi Gets an IPhone App

Mohandas Gandhi Quotes: IPhone App

Well, Mahatma Gandhi now has an Iphone app of his own.

Get all your favorite Mohandas Gandhi quotes all in one place. Pay homage to Gandhi’s intuition with the Mohandas Gandhi Quotes application.

Every time you want to take a peek at one of Gandhi’s quotes, just shake your cell phone or tap the screen with two fingers. This app also gives you a chance to favorite the ones you like.

Just wondering, if only Mahatma Gandhi knew of this viral technology, would he have said more or different.

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Bright Ray

Satyajit Ray at 5

This was published in India Today in January 1979. The text of the article in India Today :

Bright Ray

As a child, Satyajit Ray, the world famous filmmaker, never once thought that he would make films. He grew up in his ancestral mansion in Calcutta, drawing and painting. He would doodle the long summer afternoons away hoping that his attempted portraits and cartoons would appear in his family’s famous children’s magazine Sandesh. As a Brahmin, his family regarded the cinema and theater as frivolities.

His first boyhood wonder was his father’s printing press. He remembers having been lifted up to look through the ground-glass view finder of the tall halftone camera. He often visited Shantiniketan where he played with Rabindranath Tagore’s grand-daughter.

He has fond memories of the florist’s shop in New Market and stately horse-drawn carriages giving way to automobiles. As a child, all he wanted when he grew up was to be a painter.

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Ecstasy Of Life In Color

“In the silence of the night when I take a break from my work, and sit alone in the balcony, I see a young boy with a bag on his shoulder and a drawing board in his hand. Black clouds cover the sky while people take shelter from the rain, but the boy sits on the steps of the monument under an open sky – and the rain pours. The streets are full of crowds and everyone is running. He does not know for what? He is sitting on the huge iron pipes at Metro Railways, placed on the mud hills on the sides of Park Street. He sits for hours – from evening to midnight – with no one to ask for any explanation! Freedom?

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Dalrymple Lives in The Land of The Last Mughal

William Dalrymple’s love for India is not unknown. He has penned six books, of which five have embraced Indian life as their storyline and have been award winning. India has sewn itself into his life since long now with him spending a lot of time in New Delhi India apart from London and Edinburgh.

However, since last couple of years Jaunapur (a small village on the outskirts of Delhi) has been home to the the author and his family. Delhi has been the backdrop for many of Dalrymple’s books including The Last Mughal, a prizewinning account of the Indian uprising of 1857, and the fall of the Mughal dynasty. The book has sold more than 100,000 copies worldwide.

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Madhubala: Screen to Stamp

Venus of the Indian screen Madhubala is honored by Indian Postal Service: on 18 March 2008 a stamp was released in her memory. After Nargis, Madhubala is the second Indian actress to have a stamp released in her honor.

The Indian Postal Service organized a special two-day event in Mumbai on Indian cinema titled Magic of Film Through Postage Stamps along with a philatelic exhibition titled Mahafilmpex. They also showcased a few landmark movies.

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Padmavati: Performance in Paris

Sanjay Leela Bhansali of Devdas fame got standing ovation at Theatre du Chatelet in Paris. Not for another Bollywood movie, but for an opera-ballet titled Padmavati: Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s adaptation of the 1923 opera-ballet by Albert Roussel, one of the greatest yet least understood masters of twentieth-century French music.

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Cirque du Inde Called Jodhaa Akbar

If Emperor Akbar were to watch Ashutosh Gowariker’s Jodhaa Akbar, he would have said, “Wow man! What opulence, very impressive indeed.” And if Jodhaa and Akbar were to watch Jodhaa Akbar together, they would have definitely fallen in love with each other even if they did not back then. Jodhaa Bai would have told Jodhaa of the story, “Cut that fuss out lady! What else do you need?”

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Romance in The Land of Rama

You like it or not, Valentine’s Day is upon us. It is a recent import: came in the same box with McDonald and outsourcing – accidentally. Like most invasive imported species, it is thriving in the new land, surpassing its success in the native land. That is not a surprise. There was a saying in our childhood about the food habit of a Hindu who just converted to Muslim: he eats more beef than a life long Muslim.

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