With the new avatar of the popular ''Mile Sur Mera Tumhara'' song, which won the hearts of millions of Indians in '90s, getting a lukewarm response, its makers are planning a revised version featuring Sachin Tendulkar and some other cricket icons.

'Too much Bollywood, where is Sachin, Kalam in Phir mile sur?'

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A Dalit woman from Lakshmisagar village in Chitradurga district, Karnataka, has filed a case against eight men of Nayak community for assaulting her and parading her naked on the village's streets on January 17.

The men, belonging to a dominant Nayak community of the village, accused the woman of helping a Dalit man and a Nayak girl elope from the village.

Eyewitnesses said a group of about 40men beat up 25-five-year-old Bhagyamma before parading her on the streets.

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Targeting the large number of Hindus in the United States, an Atlanta-based company headed by an Indian-American has launched a series of custom-made postage stamps depicting Hindu gods and goddesses.

The first set of such postage stamps in denomination of 44 cents was launched in January by USA-postage.com, the Atlanta-based firm, depicting Sai Baba, Lord Venkateshwara, Lakshmi, Murugan, Vinayaka, Shiva–Parvathi and Sri Krishna.

Such postage stamps depicting Hindu gods and goddesses have been launched for the first time in the US taking the benefit of a six-year-old law of the US postal service that permit issuing of customised postages.

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Indian judokas, weightlifters and cyclists landed gold medals on the third day of the 11th South Asian Games at Dhaka on Sunday.

Balvinder Singh and Vikram Solanki grabbed the gold medals in the mens 73 and 90 kg categories of the judo event at a BKSP, Savar, which is 40 k.m. away from the capital city, lifters Omkar Otari and Rustam Sarang gave India a gold and a bronze in the men’s 62 kg class.

In the morning, the men’s cycling quartet of Amandeep Singh, Harpreet Singh, Rajendra Bishnoi and Sabu Ganager, earned India gold with a time of 1:44:11.81s in the 80 km team time trial at Khulna. Pakistan (1:45:59.11s) took the silver and Bangladesh (1:46:44.11) the bronze.

Balvinder won against Pakistan’s Karamat Butt en route to the gold medal while Vikram Solanki downed his Sri Lankan rival D.K. Priyadarshana.

Srinivas disqualified

There was a setback for India in the weightlifting arena as the Indian entry, V. Srinivas, competing in the 56 kg class, was disqualified for failing thrice in the snatch event. In a field of five competitors,

Srinivas began after the other four finished at 102 kg. The Indian attempted to clear 103 and failed thus denying India a medal from this class.

In an interesting incident, all the three medal winners in the men’s 62 kg tied on points. India’s Omkar Otari, Pakistan’s Istiaq Ghafoor Muhammad and Rustam Sarang of India tallied 258 kg in snatch and clean and jerk. Omkar’s lesser body weight (61.30kg) gave him the gold while Ghafoor (61.47) took the silver. Rustam (61.50) had to settle for the bronze medal.

GOOD SHOW

Indian shuttlers were looking for a clear sweep in the team events as both the teams made it to the finals of the team event without much difficulty. The men’s team had no difficultly in walloping host Bangladesh 5-0, the women made short work of Nepal also by the same margin.

India’s final opponent will be Sri Lanka whose ladies beat Bangladesh 5-0 and the men outplayed Nepal by an identical margin.

Oinam Bembem Devi struck a hat-trick against Pakistan to enable India win by a half a dozen goals in its second game at the National Stadium. India, which had won against Sri Lanka 8-1 in the opening game, led 5-0 at half-time.

Captain Bembem, who plays as an attacking midfielder, combined superbly with the strikers in rotating the ball in the rival’s zone.

After Sashmita Mallick drew the first blood in the seventh minute, Bembem got into the act scoring in the 10th, 11th and 17th to bamboozle the Pakistanis.

read more@ Hindu

Opera has published its State of Mobile Internet report for the month of December 2009 and the top visited sites from India are:

1. google.com
2. orkut.com
3. facebook.com
4. wikipedia.org
5. yahoo.com 
6. youtube.com
7. songs.pk
8. zedge.net
9. cricinfo.com (new)
10. wap.in

And interestingly, all the top handsets belong to Nokia, topped by Nokia 5130 XpressMusic, followed by Nokia 2700c and N70.

Moreover, it’s important to note that Gmail fell off the top 10 list (and is that because of the pop/new nokia phones are better integrated with gmail pop features)?

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In an elective course called 'Learning What is Not Taught (LWNT)' in the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA), in-house and visiting faculties are adopting the line of 3 Idiots and teaching students to learn about life from beyond the textbooks and curriculum. The course took off on Saturday.

Executive director of Tata Sons Ltd R Gopalakrishnan who is the lead instructor of LNWT said, "What the students learn in the classrooms is only the beginning of learning. The rest of the lessons are to be learnt from what life teaches them."

He said that the early success of young management graduates, these days, makes them feel that they have achieved a lot in life and makes them overconfident as they feel that they could do much better than their predecessors. One of the purposes is to correct this false attitude. Under the elective course, we will teach students the integrity of management and will try to explain it to them through movie clips, anecdotes and experiences on how the mere act of chasing success brings failure.

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Our ability to adapt other cuisines to our tastes: Hot and Sour Chinese soup has desi tadka. Sandwiches aren’t thinly sliced and lightly buttered slices of bread with slivers of cucumber. We add green chutney and sliced aloo and beetroot. We invented Chicken and Veg Manchurian, developed Udipi pizzas, concocted onion omelettes, created vegkheema, de-Japanesed Japanese food by cooking up gajjar-ka-sushi, and now are well on the way to Indianising the seafood diet of penguins in Antarctica just in case that becomes the hot new phoren cuisine of 2010. 
 
Faith and spirituality: Tell someone you don’t believe in God. Go on. You’ll find yourself arguing so vehemently to make your case that you could well be accused of having a severe case of faith – faith in no God in this case. Because that’s what we do – believe. Hard. With passion. In anything we want to believe. Which is why practically every faith known to God is right here in India, and we’re not above inventing several more if we think we haven’t enough.
 
The way we are so flexible: Checked anyone’s filofax lately? Know anyone who has a filofax? We may set off in the morning expecting to follow a strict schedule of assignments and appointments, but we are always happy to chuck all our plans at a moment’s notice, particularly if the alternative involves partying.
 
Our many and varied stories: Our history goes back 5,000 years – and so do our epics that contain every emotion, possibility and philosophy that humans have ever managed to come up with. Not to mention a frightening amount of maths, if we’re considering the ages that make up the four yugas. Add to that the epics of Islam and Christianity, local folk traditions and tales that simply emerge from our fertile brains, and we’re wondering why our TV channels need to import bad reality shows from phoren and inflict them on us.

Chai: It’s raining. We need chai. It’s cold. We need chai. It’s hot and sweaty and miserable. We need chai. Yes chai, not tea. The over-boiled, over-milked and over-sweetened stuff that could rot our teeth and turn our insides into shoe leather, yet never fails to put life back into our tired frames. Then there’s also tea. Darjeeling, Assam, Nilgiri, Kangra... Mmmm, the fragrance.

Monsoon mania: Who needs marijuana or Ecstasy? The monsoon is what we get high on. After a long summer spent gazing up at the sky through a magnifying glass looking for the merest hint of a cloud (and in imminent danger of setting our eyebrows on fire), we see the sky begin to darken, then the first drops of rain hit the earth, then we breathe deep and our nostrils fill with the delicious scent of wet earth... and then we complain bitterly about floods.
 
Weddings and family occasions: Our weddings are attended by family, relatives, friends, past and present neighbours, people who invited you to their or their siblings’ weddings, past and present colleagues, random strangers because we had 300 wedding cards extra and didn’t want to waste them, plus gatecrashers – a guestlist so long it rivals the population of the whole of Africa. If however, our homes are filled with the population of only one small country, like Bangladesh, we’re just having a family dinner.

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Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency has claimed to have traced down 20 terrorists, who were wanted in connection with the November 2008 Mumbai terror attacks.

The FIA's Special Investigation Group has booked all the wanted extremists, who allegedly provided logistical and monetary support to the ten terrorists who attacked Mumbai on November 26, 2008, The Daily Times reported.

According to sources, the SIG had also gathered photographs of the attackers and several other important information from the arrested terrorists.

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On the driveway of Gordon Ramsay’s huge house near Wandsworth Common, South London, are five cars. All have personalised numberplates and are clean, new and expensive looking. There is a 4x4 and a slinky sports car and ... well, let’s just say that although Ramsay has taken a mighty bashing, personally and financially, in the past year, it hasn’t reached as far as his cars or home.

“Yeah, but it’s been a kick up the arse,” he says almost as soon as we have settled in his vast kitchen. “It’s been a shit 12 months. I got to where I am by busting my arse and then, suddenly, it all turned around and bit me on the arse. But, you know, I wasn’t the only one. No one saw the recession coming and I got caught up in it all.”

That is why, in the midst of a difficult year, Ramsay disappeared to India. “I just had to get away,” he says. “It was me and a rucksack and a month of being on the road going back to what I love doing best — cooking.” He asked his wife, Tana, if he could go and, just as his business empire was teetering on the brink in mid-2009, boarded a plane and flew to Delhi to film Gordon’s Great Escape.

“It was humbling,” he says. “One minute I was all over the newspapers, the next I was on a continent where no one really knew who I was. I’d had enough, really. I thought it was a good idea to escape and I’ve been fascinated by Indian cookery ever since my mum took me for a curry when I was a child. It wasn’t running away. I could see the way everything was going. It was about getting back to something that excited me.”

In Gordon’s Great Escape, Ramsay travels across India, eating and cooking, and embracing vegetarianism on an ashram. “I loved it,” he says. “I now apologise to all vegetarians for being rude about them. I love them. I loved being on an ashram. I thought I would hate it, but I could’ve stayed there for a long time.”

The programme could also go some way to rehabilitating Ramsay as a chef and a person rather than the slightly comical reality TV character that he was in danger of becoming. He cooks vegetable curry almost continuously on a long train journey. He sweats profusely as he digs a vast hole in the desert to roast a goat for a feast. He makes kebabs for the most discerning set of wedding guests that he has probably ever encountered. It’s a one-man show about him meeting people, charming people and getting back to his cooking — someone who can seriously cook rather than just shout.

“I learnt so much,” he says. “I haven’t sweated that much in years. I felt like Shrek most of the time, constantly putting my foot in it and getting things slightly wrong. I cooked street food in Calcutta. It’s hard to beat the food that is already on offer. You can get anything there. It’s simple and fresh and the street is packed, but I tried bringing some different flavours into my food and we sold out. I can’t tell you how good that felt.”

It certainly does seem more of a personal journey than merely a commercial idea (although it isn’t always easy to separate the two: Ramsay has recently taken to leaving his home prominently displaying a copy of Ramsay’s Great Escape when he thinks he might be papped). “Yeah, it was just me getting back to what I am good at doing,” he says. “It was like learning again; it was a very simple way of being, and it made me realise how superficial life can be.

read more@ TimesOnline