Lal Bahadur.  Source: Peeplilivethefilm.com

This is not intended to be a review.
*spoiler alert* Some points give away the story line of the movie.
Peepli Live is a slap fest. It’s a slap across the face, for today’s politicians, the government, it’s babus, their yojanas, and above all, the MEDIA and us, it’s viewers.
Live television has long crossed the boundaries of absurdity. An year ago, the CM of Andhra Pradesh (YS Rajashekar Reddy) passed away in a chopper crash, and the media created a mass hysteria among people …

Random YouTube video day – I was astonished to see an acrobatic video about an ancient Indian sport on YouTube. Mallakhamb (Malla=Man + Khamb=Pole) (and yes, I do get the juvenile humor in the name).
The earliest mention of Mallkhamb can be traced back to the 12th Century where it is mentioned in the classic “MANASOLHAS” (1135 A.D.).For about seven centuries after that, the art form remained dormant until it was given a new lease of life by BALAMBHATTADADA DEODHAR, the renowned teacher of PESHWA BAJIRAO-II during the first half of …

A band of boys and girls, from Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh are on their way to creating history after being featured on VH1 with their single – ‘Losing Mind’.
Hailing from diverse backgrounds, vocalist Sumitha is a graphic design student by the day, DJ040 works with a defence establishment mixing djing and missiles, rapper Roll Rida aka Rahul is a B.Tech graduate, vocalist Sanjana is a publishing specialist – all met through common friends and of course, their common interest – music – a year ago.
The Hindu
Here is …

Industry group TechServe Alliance, the American Staffing Association and three staffing companies specializing in H-1B visa holder candidates are pursuing a lawsuit in federal court to protest a ruling that they claim is killing business. At the heart of the matter is the government’s effort to weed out fraud and abuse while making sure employers have daily supervision over H-1B visa workers.
Link
Earlier this year a document from USCIS that has widely come to be known as Neufeld memo (pdf) was released, that documented the somewhat complex definition of  an employer-employee …

From ibiblio.org

India-Burma
2 April 1942–28 January 1945
“We got a hell of a beating,” Lt. Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell told the crowd of reporters in the Indian capital of New Delhi. It was May 1942, and the American general, who had only recently arrived in the Far East to assume the position of chief of staff to Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, was chafing at failure in his first command in the field. Following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor the previous December, the Japanese had won victory after victory, extending their …

And are you a celebrity? Or for that matter even an average person somewhat considerate of unwarranted exposure of your body.
Conspiracy theorist – Alex Jones on his website prisonplanet.com has this to say:
Claims on behalf of authorities that naked body scanner images are immediately destroyed after passengers pass through new x-ray backscatter devices have been proven fraudulent after it was revealed that naked images of Indian film star Shahrukh Khan were printed out and circulated by airport staff at Heathrow in London.
The report is related to a yahoo news article …

60 years ago, when the constitution of India was adopted, our freedom fighters hardly expected the unity to remain fragile 60 years later. We stand united in our love for ‘miley sur mera tumara’ for it’s star value and…wait! Before I can finish my latest news on our unity, there were a few interruptions, mostly controversies this video generated. But, watch the video first…

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Now back to the latest news, (only 10 or 20 min old) depending on whether you watched the second part of the video or not.
Raj Thackeray condemned …

Raj Kumar Hirani is the bearer of a lost art, the art of story telling. The problem is sometimes, he overlaps his piece of art with another of his own, that is still fresh in your memory.
And I’ll try to keep the review clean of any spoilers.
3 idiots is a movie ‘loosely’ based on one of India’s ‘best-selling’ novels, “Five point Someone, what not to do at IIT“, by Chetan Bhagat. A book, that critics love to hate and take a jab at it’s ‘popularity’, while a particular section of …

You may have heard of the movies ‘Bwana Devil’ (first American 3-D Color movie) and ‘The Ghost and The Darkness’ (starring Val Kilmer, Michael Douglas and our very own Om Puri) that were based on real life incidents connected to the Tsavo man-eaters of Kenya.
New research suggests that the number of victims may have been much lesser than previously thought.
Over nine months the two voracious hunters claimed 35 lives _ no small figure, but much less than some accounts of as many as 135 victims.
It was 1898, when laborers from …

This may soon be a reality!
Hebrew, Hindi, other scripts get Web address nod . Link
ICANN – Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the regulating authority for domain names and accreditation authority for website registrars, announced support to non-latin characters (Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew and Hindi) in web addresses and they could be a reality by middle of next year.
ICANN has also called this the ‘biggest change’  since the inception of the internet in its crudest form 40 years ago.
More info from ICANN here:
Link
“The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the …

Link via Chicago Tribune
Chicago based Samir Zia Chowan [sic](Chowhan), an immigration attorney, lists an ad for a secretary in the adult section of Craigslist, and requests ‘physical measurements’ along with a photo, strangely enough he gets a response and hat gets him bold enough to inform the job aspirant that fulfilling his ‘adult entertainment’ fantasies are also part of the job, including sexual interactions with him and his partner, sometimes together, sometimes separate.
And such it goes, the text of the e-mail response, other counts of legal offenses can be seen …

Rediff reports:
Obama’s Diwali celebration upsets Indian-American community.
Here’s the back story – ex-president Bush started the practice of hosting a Diwali event since 2003, courtesy request of the Indian-American community and it’s been a practice ever since. Some of the events have been full fledged and upto two hours long, while some, like last year’s,  have been less flashy.
While the article about the first Obama-era Diwali, quoted above, points out reasons why Indian Americans are upset (mostly elderly immigrant Indians), the rest of the article quotes two second generation desis – …

CNN video had this short clip via source pangeaday.org

One most important thing that is inherently Indian, is the respect given to Gurus in India. The first question as a graduate student the first week in Amrika was do I stand up when the professor walks in? I mean, logically I would follow what the rest of the class does, assuming there were non-Indians in the class . And from what I understand this is not the normal practice in American schools. But as a kid growing up (and fully grown up),  students in schools were expected to …

This is a real spirited performance. What’s especially touching about this piece is that almost all the performers in this group are daily wage brick kiln workers, from Berhampur, Orissa.  Typically Indian daily wage workers live on anywhere between 40 Rupees to 60 Rupees a day, according to the Indian govt. stats in 2003-2004. (Roughly earning somewhere between 82 cents – $1.25 a day), with men earning more than women and children for the same job.
The physically challenged performers put up a great show too, and the choreography and the …

Prof. Ravi Shankar is a published poet, and a faculty member at the Central Connecticut State University. On July 10th this year, he was arrested on false charges, and detained for more than 30 hrs in a NY detention facility while being hurled with racial epithets. His record only had an unpaid speeding ticket, but he was being arrested as he ‘fit’ the description of a 140 pound caucasian male, while being a 200 pound, East Indian male.
After being produced before a magistrate after 30 hrs of detention and being …

India’s top chefs have warned Scottish MPs to keep their hands off the rights to chicken tikka masala.
Link
So here’s the story, Scottish MPs made an attempt to ‘patent’ the name Chicken Tikka Masala, claiming the dish was made in Glasgow, in 1970’s. They got a spicy reply back from Indian food historians who trashed the claim and suggested that the dish has been around for decades (some others claim centuries).
Wikipedia suggests, this (without a reference, though)
The literal meaning of tikka in Panjabi is “bits, pieces” (fron Sanskrit ṭikka, m., “Cake.” …

Is 25 years enough? India inc., has opted to import the power engines for India’s indigenous aircraft and has invited bids from European and American companies.
This comes after the indigenous Kaveri engine failed to pass muster even after two decades of development at a cost of Rs 2,839 crore. While the first 20 Tejas will be powered by GE-404 engines, the next six Tejas Mark-II squadrons (16-18 jets in each) will have the new more powerful engines. Link

That’s approximately 6 billion USD over 25 years, not adjusting for inflation (very …

*missed call – calling someone with the callerID feature on, and terminating the call before  the receiver takes up the call and either of you gets charged a penny (or a paisa)
Ever been part of a conversation like this?
Caller 1: When will you start from your home?
Caller 2: About 5 PM.
Caller 1: Are you sure?
Caller 2: I’ll give you a missed call when I start, how about that.
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This seems quite normal to me, and according to TOI, it’s because I’m an Indian. Though the report titled – “Only Indians make, …

*ing Neil Nitin Mukesh, Irrfan Khan, Katrina Kaif and John Abraham

New York is a good watch! Especially since it’s not a typical Hindi film that we are so used to. And as any other movie, there are certain aspects of it that I liked, and certain that I didn’t. I was VERY surprised to see the Rediff rating for that movie, and I can’t understand why in the world someone would trash the movie and its actors that bad, especially since the acting was reasonably good.
**spoilers ahead**
What I liked –
All …