Sunday, July 31, 2011
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Tag Lines....
To Mr. Dravid,Gautam is taking x ray - will you open? Okay.
Dhoni wants to bowl - will you keep? Okay.over rate slow so captain banned - will you captain? okay.
Sachin didn't hit 100 - will you hit? Okay.India looks like losing - will you save the match? Okay.Zaheer has hamstring injury - will you bowl? erm... Okay!
Century for Scahin !
How Smart Are You?
Friday, July 29, 2011
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Pehla Nasha -Natalie Di Luccio (Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar)
Pehla Nasha -Natalie Di Luccio (Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar)
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Monday, July 25, 2011
Music Director from Indore ............
Songs Of The Twisted Road
Sneha Khanwalkar is Bollywood's third ever and hippest woman music composer, says ISHA MANCHANDA
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| Tuning fork Music composer Sneha Khanwalkar |
IN THE winter of 2008, a Bengali man and a Marathi girl brought us infectious music straight from the heart of Punjab and Haryana — a pleasant surprise after a decade of simplified trash passed off as popular Punjabi music. Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye's music was fresh and startling. Its 24-year-old composer (now in the company of Jaggat Bai and Usha Khanna) was Bollywood's third ever woman composer. She finds that fact peculiar. Peculiar, because she thinks the industry is perfect for women. "I'm still to record with a female musician", she notes, surprised.
Sneha Khanwalkar, Oye Lucky's music composer had been sent from Indore to Mumbai to get into engineering college but she knew at 18 that she wanted to be in the movie business. "My mother's family had musicians from the Gwalior gharana so I learnt music at a very young age. We were asked to perform at every family function so I went through a short period of being anti-music. But I loved movies. Everyday, on my way to school in the bus, I'd play the Rangeelatheme in my head. I would dream of arriving at school in a helicopter, wearing an outfit like Urmila's. After I decided to compose music, I didn't tell my folks. I had changed my mind so many times."
When she heard that Dibakar Banerjee, the director of Khosla Ka Ghosla, was looking for a music composer, she pestered him until he agreed to meet her and explain his brief. She made up her mind that she was going to find a radically new sound which would be relevant to the movie by travelling into rural North India. But just before she set off she had her heart broken. "One moment I'd be down in the dumps and the next I'd be completely overwhelmed by all the great music I was discovering." Such as the folk music of Des Raj Lakhani who sang the moving Jugni.
"Everyone I met on the road was very interested in my age and marital plans." The only girl in a Scorpio full of Jat men, on her way to the Raagini music festival in Haryana, Khanwalkar and her cameraman had serious doubts about what they were doing. "I wasn't about to quit but I did wish I was invisible when I realised I was the only woman at the festival."
Though widely praised for her experimentation, Khanwalkar doesn't wish for the Bollywood peculiarity of song-dance routines to fade away. As she excitedly talks about the industry's promise to young musicians like her, there's no room for the 'struggle' in her conversation.
The soundtrack that Sneha created was deeply layered, desi and modern, repurposing folk for the urban angst of the Punjabi heart of Delhi, talking greed, corruption, isolation — effortlessly mocking all of Bollywood's previous attempts at romps in the mustard fields.
Far from her anti-music spell she now looks at everything as a musical project. While rejecting all offers to do Oye Lucky-like soundtracks she has bizarre dreams. "I passed all my viva exams by composing songs out of them!" She is curently thinking of converting history and civics school syllabi into songs for easy listening.
Express weight Reduction !
"I want you to eat regularly for 2 days, then skip a day, and
repeat this procedure for 2 weeks. The next time I see you, you'll have lost at least 5 pounds."
When the woman returned, she shocked the doctor by losing nearly
20 pounds."Why, that's amazing!" the doctor said, "Did you follow my
instructions?"
The woman nodded. "I'll tell you though, I thought I was going to
drop dead that third day."
"From hunger, you mean?"
"No, from skipping."
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Rahul Dravid's 33 centuries
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Monday, July 18, 2011
Why My Father Hated India
From The Wall Street Journal (16/7/2011)
By Aatish Taseer
My father, Salman Taseer, sent out a tweet about an Indian rocket that
had come down over the Bay of Bengal: "Why does India make fools of
themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my
advice."My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province,
and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have
delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into
Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India, the country from which it was carved
in 1947.Though my father's attitude went down well in
Pakistan, it had caused considerable tension between us. I am half-Indian,
raised in Delhi by my Indian mother: India is a country that I
consider my own. When my father was killed by one of his own bodyguards for
defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, we had not spoken for
three years.
get a sense of its special edge & its hysteria, it is necessary
to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at
the heart of the idea of Pakistan. This is not merely an academic
question. Pakistan's animus toward India is the cause of both its
unwillingness to fight Islamic extremism and its active complicity in
undermining the aims of its ostensible ally, the United States.The idea
of Pakistan was first seriously formulated by neither a cleric
nor a politician but by a poet. In 1930, Muhammad Iqbal,
addressing the All-India Muslim league, made the case for a state in which
India's Muslims would realize their "political and ethical
essence." Though he was always vague about what the new state would be, he was quite clear about what it would not be: the old pluralistic society of
India, with its composite culture.Iqbal's vision took concrete shape in
August 1947. Despite the partition of British India, it had seemed
at first that there would be no transfer of populations. But
violence erupted, and it quickly became clear that in the new homeland for
India's Muslims, there would be no place for its non-Muslim
communities.
lives and the largest migration in history.This shared experience of
carnage and loss is the foundation of the modern relationship between
the two countries. In human terms, it meant that each of my
parents, my father in Pakistan and my mother in India, grew up around
symmetrically violent stories of uprooting and homelessness.
questions, in cultural and civilizational terms, about what its
separation from India would mean.In the absence of a true national
identity, Pakistan defined itself by its opposition to India. It turned its
back on all that had been common between Muslims and non-Muslims in the
era before partition. Everything came under suspicion, from dress to
customs to festivals, marriage rituals and literature. The new country
set itself the task of erasing its association with the subcontinent,
an association that many came to view as a contamination.Had
this assertion of national identity meant the casting out of
something alien or foreign in favor of an organic or homegrown
identity, it might have had an empowering effect. What made it
self-wounding, even nihilistic, was that Pakistan, by asserting a new Arabized
Islamic identity, rejected its own local and regional culture. In
trying to turn its back on its shared past with India, Pakistan
turned its back on itself.
the border, and it was still its composite, pluralistic self, a place
where nearly as many Muslims lived as in Pakistan. It was a daily
reminder of the past that Pakistan had tried to erase.Pakistan's
existential confusion made itself apparent in the political turmoil of the
decades after partition. The state failed to perform a single legal
transfer of power; coups were commonplace. And yet, in 1980, my father
would still have felt that the partition had not been a mistake, for
one critical reason: India, for all its democracy and pluralism, was an
economic disaster.Pakistan had better roads, better cars; Pakistani
businesses were thriving; its citizens could take foreign currency
abroad. Compared with starving, socialist India, they were on much
surer ground. So what if India had democracy? It had brought
nothing but drought and famine.
to occur in the fortunes of the two countries. The advantage that
Pakistan had seemed to enjoy in the years after independence evaporated,
as it became clear that the quest to rid itself of its Indian
identity had come at a price: the emergence of a new and dangerous brand
of Islam.As India rose, thanks to economic liberalization,
Pakistan withered. The country that had begun as a poet's utopia was
reduced to ruin and insolvency.The primary agent of this decline has
been the Pakistani army. The beneficiary of vast amounts of American
assistance and money, $11 billion since 9/11, the military has
diverted a significant amount of these resources to arming itself
against India.
stability but rather a backyard, which, once the Americans leave, might
provide Pakistan with "strategic depth" against India.In order to
realize these objectives, the Pakistani army has led the U.S. in a
dance, in which it had to be seen to be fighting the war on terror,
but never so much as to actually win it, for its extension meant the
continuing flow of American money. All this time the army kept alive a
double game, in which some terror was fought and some, such as
Laskhar-e-Tayyba's 2008 attack on Mumbai, actively
supported.The army's duplicity was exposed decisively this May, with the
killing of Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad. It was
only the last and most incriminating charge against an institution
whose activities over the years have included the creation of the
Taliban, the financing of international terrorism and the running of
a lucrative trade in nuclear secrets.This army, whose might
has always been justified by the imaginary threat from India, has been
more harmful to Pakistan than to anybody else.
annually a quarter of the country's wealth, undermined one civilian
government after another and enriched itself through a range of
economic interests, from bakeries and shopping malls to huge
property holdings.The reversal in the fortunes of the two countries,
India's sudden prosperity and cultural power, seen next to the
calamity of Muhammad Iqbal's unrealized utopia, is what explains the
bitterness of my father's tweet just days before he died. It captures the
rage of being forced to reject a culture of which you feel
effortlessly a part, a culture that Pakistanis, via Bollywood, experience
daily in their homes.This rage is what makes it impossible to reduce
Pakistan's obsession with India to matters of security or a land
dispute in Kashmir. It can heal only when the wounds of 1947 are
healed. And it should provoke no triumphalism in India, for behind the
bluster and the bravado, there is arid pain and sadness.
Mr. Taseer is the author of "Stranger to History: A Son's
Journey Through Islamic Lands." His second novel, "Noon," will be
published in the U.S. in September.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Compare the Statements
Here's the statement issued by Prime Minister Dr Singh after Mumbai Blasts:
"I strongly condemn the bomb blasts in Mumbai this evening. I have asked the Chief Minister of Maharashtra to do whatever is possible to provide relief to the injured and to the families of the deceased citizens. I have also asked Union Home Minister, Shri P Chidambaram to provide all possible expert assistance to the state government. I appeal to people of Mumbai to remain calm and show a united face."
Here is the part of the statement issued by President Bush after New York attack
"These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat. But they have failed. Our country is strong. A great people has been moved to defend a great nation.
The search is underway for those who are behind these evil acts. I've directed the full resources for our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them."
How Did Pie Die !
Towards the nineteenth century, the pie was the smallest minted coin in India. It constituted 1/3 rd of a pice and was officially termed 1/12th of an Anna. 3 pies made a pice; 4 pice made an anna and 16 annas made a rupee. One rupee, thus consisted of 192 pies. (No wonder arithmetic daunted the faint-hearted then!!) In the wake of the second world war, India witnessed an inflationary situation as well as a scarcity of metals that had to be imported. It was in this context of rising prices that the minting of the copper pie was discontinued after 1942. Ten years later,there was a proposal by the Mint Master that the pie be reintroduced as a part of the coinage of Republic India. The proposal, however, was very gently squashed by the then Finance Secretary, Shri K.G. Ambegaokar on cost-benefit considerations.
C.D. Deshmukh, the former Governor of the Bank was then the Finance Minister. He as "Minister" wrote the last word ending the saga of the humble pie. Ambegaokar stated "Much as I admire the valiant efforts made to rescue the 'picayune coin', I must, I am afraid, albeit with a heavy heart, write
The Epitaph of the Pie
Low and high We all will sigh
When the poor little pie Bids her last goodbye
. But her cost's is so high;
And what can she buy?
What trade can she ply?
She needs must eat the humble pie;
So let us not vie
To keep alive the pie
And without a plaintive cry
Peacefully let her die.
If you want the reason why
There need not be hue and cry
Remember she'll in honour lie
With the silver rupee high!
Will the "Minister" say the last word? (K.G. Ambegaokar)
Secretary July 12, 1952
In the note, C D Deshmukh concurred stating
"Let not the 'press' of men Disturb a museum piece
When life's extinct, oh then The pie shall lie in peace.
C.D. Deshmukh July 13, 1952
Speed test !
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Saturday, July 16, 2011
Manhattanhenge
More Potassium for Heart
Decades of research have suggested that our sodium habit is killing us via hypertension andheart disease. But other research suggests it's not salt's fault after all. So, which is it?
Salt, it turns out, has not been acting alone. A new study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, implicates potassium, too. Not enough potassium. [Quanhe Yang, et al., "Sodium and Potassium Intake and Mortality Among US Adults"]
The study surveyed more than 12,000 Americans, and found that both men and womenconsumed way more sodium and way less potassium than is recommended. And after 15 years, people with the better balance of sodium and potassium were more likely to still be alive.
In whole plants, sodium is scarce and potassium is plentiful. But when foods are processed, that ratio is usually flipped. The two elements have opposite effects on blood vessels: sodium restricts blood flow and potassium helps it. The researchers thus suggest cutting back on salt and taking in more potassium. So forget the chips—a banana is a safer snack for your health. Just watch where you toss the peel.
—Katherine Harmon ( Scientific American)
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Dhoni should have been punished
West Indies v India, 2011
Dhoni should have been punished - Harper
July 14, 2011
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Daryl Harper, the former international umpire, has said the ICC's failure to take any action against India captain MS Dhoni for criticising his decisions in the first Test against West Indies reflected the advent of "selective management" in cricket for various teams.
This was the chief factor in his decision to retire prematurely from umpiring. He said he felt targeted by the Indian team during the game and was speaking out now on those incidents because the ICC "chose not to".
Harper, who quit before his scheduled 96th and final Test in Dominica, also revealed an incident that occurred after Praveen Kumar was removed from the attack for repeated running on the pitch. Dhoni, Harper claimed, approached him after that and said "We've had problems with you before, Daryl", which the umpire interpreted as an attempt to intimidate.
Dhoni's more publicised remarks came after the Kingston Test and followed a series of umpiring errors. "If the correct decisions were made the game would have finished much earlier and I would have been in the hotel by now," he said at the post-match press conference. His criticism was described as "unfair" by the ICC general manager of cricket David Richardson, but neither he nor the presiding match referee Jeff Crowe elected to charge the Indian captain.
"That was my opinion [that he should have been censured], those were inappropriate comments," Harper told ESPNcricinfo from Adelaide after sending out a statement on Thursday, in which he explained his side of an episode that saw him heavily criticised in the Indian media. "Any suggestion that if the correct decisions had been made, I would've been in my hotel room a lot earlier, I think that's definitely inappropriate.
"Especially when only one decision in the match would have been reversed had it been a DRS situation. And I read yesterday that I made nine mistakes in the game, so yes I thought it was time someone spoke up because unfortunately the ICC choose not to.
"I think there are other factors afoot that are infringing on the game and I think the game's too valuable to allow that to happen. I'm not a politician, I'm not an administrator, I'm just an umpire, and it seems to me the treatment I was receiving from the Sabina Park Test was telling me that perhaps I shouldn't treat everyone the same way, which is a system that's worked pretty well for a long time.
"Five days passed from the time my Test had finished, until the time I worked my way through an email from the ICC that listed a number of articles coming out of India. It wasn't until then that I realised things were going a bit pear-shaped and I expected the controlling body would do the controlling.
"If it happens on my watch I take care of it, but if it happens post-match - and I didn't know about this for five days - as far as I was concerned it was up to the controlling body to look after that aspect and I don't believe that was happening in any way."
Harper said he felt he had been singled out by Dhoni and his team in response to earlier incidents in which he had pulled up various members of the Indian team up for their on-field behaviour. Praveen Kumar was removed from the Indian attack for repeatedly running on the pitch, while Dhoni was admonished after the close-in fielder Abhinav Mukund charged at Harper's opposite number while appealing for a bat-pad catch.
| It seems to me the treatment I was receiving from the Sabina Park Test was telling me that perhaps I shouldn't treat everyone the same way, which is a system that's worked pretty well for a long time. | |||
"Praveen Kumar transgressed a number of times, and TV actually highlighted it with a red mat showing how many times he was running straight down the pitch," Harper said. "One criticism I received on the field was that they thought I was particularly harsh on a player in his first Test match.
"My comment to that would be a Test match is not a warm-up for anything higher, it is the pinnacle form of the game, why should someone playing their first game be any different to someone playing their last? On top of that he had played 52 ODIs for India, so he was hardly a new boy on the block.
"Abhinav, one of the close-in fielders at one stage ran more than halfway up the pitch, charging towards Ian Gould holding the ball, appealing for a bat-pad catch, which Ian turned down. I simply made a point of coming in from square leg and drew Dhoni's attention to the fact he was responsible for his team's behaviour, he was responsible for upholding the spirit of the game.
"He clearly didn't like me admonishing him for that situation, he didn't want to look at me, but I insisted the message had to be received before the next ball was bowled and the game continued. He reluctantly acknowledged I was on the planet and we moved on.
"I've got no doubt that applying the laws of the game in those two situations in particular were quite probably at the base of the criticism, the unwarranted criticism."
Following the Kumar incident, Harper said that Dhoni approached him and said "we've had problems with you before, Daryl", which the umpire interpreted as an attempt to intimidate.
"I decided what he meant was that I was one umpire not influenced by any personalities or teams or boards," said Harper. "He hadn't been able to intimidate me, I think that was part of it."
Harper also criticised the ICC for a lack of support in the face of concerted pressure from India's players and media, which ultimately saw him hounded out of Test cricket a match earlier than he was scheduled to retire during the Caribbean series.
"I'm disappointed for the game of cricket that management has allowed this to happen. I think there was basically a hive of inactivity in Dubai," he said. "I think it would have been very simple to apply the code of conduct that umpires have to apply on the spur of the moment in every game they umpire.
"There was a five-day period when those [codes] could have been applied - that's enough time to play a whole Test match, let alone make a decision when you're standing behind the stumps. Nothing happened, so I guess someone had to show some leadership when it came to such an important issue for the game's future.
"It's a wonderful game and I don't want to see it going down the tube by selective management. And I am also concerned about the lowering of standards of behaviour. I've never been willing to say 'it's just a sign of the times'. Cricket has survived too long to give in to that sort of behaviour and accept it as part and parcel of the 21st century."
Using the example of the three players charged under the ICC code of conduct in the Kingston Test, Harper said the two West Indians Darren Sammy and Ravi Rampaul had shown far more contrition than the Indian legspinner Amit Mishra, who was also sanctioned.
"Three players were reported, and that's above average. Two of them came into the umpire's room afterwards, and they realised they were wrong in what they'd done," Harper said. "They both apologised profusely, they were humbled, they came in and they expressed their disappointment with their actions, they didn't avoid the issue, they owned up.
"One was reprimanded, Darren Sammy, Ravi Rampaul was fined 10 per cent of his match fee, and those boys were apologetic. In the other case, the first player reported was Amit Mishra, and even on the fourth day of the game he was still adamant that he'd got a bad decision.
"That couldn't be confirmed either way by replays … but regardless of where it came from, for my money that guy missed the point. There's no code of conduct for good decisions or bad decisions. The code of conduct is there to test out the strength of character, and on that occasion his character failed to respond in the appropriate way, and four days later he still hadn't worked out that he'd breached the code of conduct and thought he was quite justified.
"For me that's very sad, and shows a total lack of what the spirit of cricket is all about."
No stranger to controversy or criticism of his decisions, particularly since the introduction of the DRS, Harper had nonetheless officiated in 94 Test matches before he was replaced on the ICC elite panel earlier this year. His tenure was to conclude with two more matches in the West Indies, but ultimately did so a match early after he decided not to stand in the second Test of the series.
"I was going to be on a hiding to nothing if I officiated in Dominica. It would have been all about my performance in my 96th Test," Harper said in his statement. "I'm not sure if any more scrutiny was actually possible. I loved my role but I didn't want to see the focus switch to me when it should centre on the players and the contest.
"In an ICC media release to explain my withdrawal from the third Test, ICC Manager, Cricket Operations David Richardson wrote 'the reality of the situation is that Daryl's statistics show his correct decision percentage in Tests involving India is 96 per cent, which is considerably higher than the international average for top-level umpires'. If this type of support had been forthcoming before the horse had bolted, I would have stayed and officiated in my 96th Test match."
The ICC intend to make a presentation to Harper, recognising his contribution to the game, during the next Test match to be held at the Adelaide Oval, his home ground. It will be played against India.
Daniel Brettig is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo
Feeds: Daniel Brettig© ESPN EMEA Ltd.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
The Official Perfect Indian Diet
After 13 years, there is a new official Indian diet in place, with the Hyderabad-based National Institute of Nutrition coming out with modifications to its old dietary guidelines. The manual, released on 4 July, has an exercise-cum-diet plan for the average Indian as per Indian Council of Medical Research norms (the diet).
The new norms also call for exclusive breastfeeding of babies for more than six months (revised from the earlier four), increase in vegetable and fruit intake from the present 150 gm a day to 300 gm, increase in minimum fat percentage in terms of total calorie intake from 15 gm a day to 20 gm a day, cutting daily salt intake to 6 gm, reduced usage of processed foods, and drinking lots of water.
"Since physical activity among Indians has come down, we have also recommended it in our new guidelines,'' NIN Director Dr B Sesikeran said. Both men and women have been advised to do a bit of household work, walk briskly, run, play a sport or simply dance.
Another suggestion pertains to the use of microwave ovens. Though it is convenient and preserves nutrients, it reheats or cooks unevenly, leaving cold spots in the food from where harmful bacteria enter our bodies. As a solution, NIN discourages putting large amounts or big pieces in the microwave.
The ideal breakfast is four idlis or three dosas or one-and-a-half cups of upma or four slices of bread, or two cups of porridge or two cups of cornflakes with milk, or one cup of poha or two slices of toast or four pieces of dhokla.
Beverage Half-a-cup (one cup equals 200 ml) of milk and either two cups of tea or one cup of coffee.
Lunch
Two cups of rice, two phulkas, half-a-cup of dal, three-fourths cup of vegetable curry, eight slices of vegetable salad and half-a-cup of curd. (Non-vegetarians may substitute one pulse portion with one portion of egg/meat/chicken/fish).
Dinner
Two cups of rice, two phulkas, half-a-cup of dal, three-fourths cup of vegetable curry and 100 gm of fruit.
FOR THE SEDENTARY ADULT INDIAN FEMALE
The ideal breakfast for Indian women is three idlis or two dosas or one cup upma or three slices of bread.
Lunch
Same as men, but with only one cup of rice.
Dinner
Same as men, but with just one cup of rice.