Indian cricketing legend, Sachin Tendulkar, is trending on Twitter …….. in 3 different spots! Things related to India trending on twitter are starting to become fairly common. The other day a viral tag titled #awesomeindianthings (which loosely translates to …… uberdesi) was #1 for a while on Twitter. Sachin Tendulkar became the first batsman to score 200 in a one day international match against South Africa earning him 3 different spots on Twitter trends.
Update: Turns out being politically incorrect when referring to Sachin Tendulkar as batsman as opposed to …

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 …

CEO of HCL Technologies, Vineet Nayar, reportedly proclaimed American grads as being unemployable, setting off a controversy.

HomeSpun: Smithsonian Indian American Heritage Project as the name suggests is a desi endeavor with the Smithsonian. It is basically “a national grassroots effort to create an exhibit chronicling the history of both immigrants from India and their descendants in America”. While the project itself was launched in 2007, the web presence received a boost thanks to the redesign of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program website of which Homespun is a part of.
Some more information on the project:
HomeSpun seeks to establish a permanent presence—through exhibits, research, collections, and public …

This monkey is Chinese but has plenty of desi connections. Journey to the West was a popular TV series adapted from the Chinese novel by Wu Cheng’en. Apparently, the dubbed versison of this TV series was quite popular in the west in the 70s and 80s. The main character of this novel/TV show the Monkey King (or Sūn Wùkōng) drew inspiration from our very own macaca, Hanuman.
His primary weapon is the rúyì-jīngū-bàng (“will-following golden-banded staff”), which he can shrink down to the size of a needle and keep behind his …

Rajeev Motwani, a Stanford professor who mentored the founders of Google and also backed up Paypal, was found dead in his swimming pool. Like a lot of desis, Motwani did not know how to swim and may have accidentally drowned in his own pool, say sources. He was only 47. [CNET]
Motwani was born in Jammu, India and followed the ultimate desi grad student route to U.C.Berkeley via IIT Kanpur. His research spanned a veritable list of computer buzz words:
His research spanned a diverse set of areas in computer science, including …

As things stand, socially, culturally and numerically, it’s a daunting task for most single Indian males to find sex in real life. Then you have Hindu nationalists and a veritable army of moral police who want to ban sex from the media. Now we have Microsoft doing the ultimate KLPD by denying sex on the last bastion of lonely desi males, Al Gore’s Internet.

So I decided to run the term “uberdesi” on Microsoft’s latest search engine, Bing (no relation to Chandler).

Karhik (via email) points us to this spoof of a Microsoft ad by Sarcastic Gamer (via Engadget). The spoof features a desi kid and subtitles in Hindi. To be noted: the girl shows the drawing of a dog while proclaiming “mere paas billi hai” (I have a cat). Is this was an oversight on part of the spoofers or a deliberate dig at the bugs and easter eggs in MS software?

India may not have made a mark yet in auto Industry like Germany in engineering superiority, or Japan in durability and innovation.  But we do have a new feather in the cap – the world’s cheapest car – that comes with a distinct set of advantages and disadvantages. Tata motors have claimed their fulfillment of a promise to India and to offer a safer alternative (compared to 2-wheelers) when it comes to mode of transport in India and possibly other developing countries where Nano is set for launch in the …

Following last week’s scandal in his D.C. office and Kundra’s sudden leave of absence from his brand new position as Obama’s I.T. czar, we had a cautionary note for our readers warning them against assuming that Kundra was automatically involved in this scandal.
Turns out Kundra was just following standard government protocol of going on leave regardless of guilt for being involved in an investigation, and is now back in his new office. [Network World]
“Mr. Kundra has been informed that he is neither a subject nor a target of the investigation, …

The FBI raided the office of D.C. CTO and the Obama administration CIO, Vivek Kundra. [CNN] (Anantha via Twitter)
Among those arrested in the connected scandal were Sushil Bansal and Yusuf Acar.
Acar is an information security officer who was also, according to online requests for proposals, responsible for contracting. Bansal is listed on the city’s procurement website as the CEO of the Advanced Integrated Technologies Corporation, which was awarded two technology contracts last year worth a total of $350,000.
Acar is from Turkey and Bansal, obviously, from India or of desi origin.
Kundra …

Between a private sector CTO and a public sector official, the Obama administration went with the latter and appointed India-born-Tanzania-bred Vivek Kundra as its Chief Information Officer. Fortunately for the Obama administration, Kundra does not need them to sponsor a H1B visa. [TOI]
Kundra is no slouch and is well known for his innovative approach to mundane government IT problems. [WP]
Here’s an interesting story from the Washington Post article on Kundra:
One of his earliest memories after moving to Maryland is seeing a TV commercial for dog food. “I was shocked,” he …

Bharatmatrimony unviels a facial search feature with it’s own unique desi twists (and prejudices). [linky] (via Patrix’s twitter)
Men can search for women who resemble their favorite female Bollywood stars and further filter by, you guessed it, language, religion and caste.
Women may do the same, but in the true fashion of our patriarchal society, the males get a break in the looks department. It’s not all movie stars with A.R.Rahman and Abhinav Bhindra thrown in for relief in the looks department. It’s not that these two guys look like trolls or …

There are two ways of presenting the technological boom India is experiencing.
A: The poor are left behind. Boohoo sob sob.
B: The poor are unleashing it to better their lives.
An instance of option B is presented below.
Henna designs, now available in HDimg: via BBC
BBC has this neat story on how economically disadvantaged women in Hyderabad, India, are using computers and Al Gore’s creation to turn their lives around. [BBC]
A project named “Technology For The People (TFTP)” offers opportunities to women with artistic skills to market their skills and designs.
“Technology for the …

A internet-equipped psychedelic double decker from Goog is all set to bring the Internet to folks in rural Tamil Nadu via satellite, providing content in both English and Tamil. In other unrelated news, Las Vegas is now taking bets on the odds of a spike in google searches for “Bharati picture blouse bra” and illegal downloads of the latest A.R.Rahman hits originating from the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent. [PC World] [via] (tip Karthik via Google Reader)
img: via Engadget

A UNIX engineer from India has been accused of plotting to sabotage Fannie Mae servers. [IW] (tip Sidhu via email)
What is mind boggling is the simplicity of the alleged plot ….
According to the affidavit of FBI special agent Jessica Nye, the Unix engineer who found the malicious script, identified only as SK, did so by accident. “The malicious script was at the bottom of the legitimate script, separated by approximately one page of blank lines, apparently in an effort to hide the malicious script within the legitimate script,” the affidavit …

if it’s technology they must be desis. [BusinessWeek] (Tip Karthik via email)
Two Indian-born technology executives are the leading candidates for the incoming Obama Administration’s newly created position of federal chief technology officer, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation. They are Padmasree Warrior, the chief technology officer of Silicon Valley networking giant Cisco Systems (CSCO), and Vivek Kundra, who holds the same title in the government of Washington, D.C., the sources say.
While they both are obviously desis, they could not come from more contrasting backgrounds, Warrior a …

On the occasion of President Barack Obama’s inauguration, people at my company were bombarded with spam mail, claiming Obama doesn’t want to be a president anymore (as opposed to he is becoming one, I guess). Here’s the desi connection, the spam appears to be from Satyam, at least that is what the “From:” email address says.

From: Kate Walters [mailto:jjbuckner@satyam.com]
Sent: Sunday, January 18, 2009 11:52 AM
To: *** edited ***
Subject: The coming collapse of the United States
Obama doesn’t want anymore to be a president http://store.superobamadirect.com/
Best regards,
Kate Walters

Remember the lawsuit against the popular Facebook application, Scrabulous, brought by Hasboro Inc. which owns the North American rights to Scrabble? [Previous UD story]
Satisfied with the changes made to the application in its new incarnation, Wordscape, by its makers Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, brothers from Calcutta, India, Hasboro has dropped the lawsuit against the Agarwalla brothers. At this stage it is not known whether Mattel, which owns the rights to Scrabble outside of North America, has withdrawn its lawsuit against the Agarwalla brothers also, but one has to think with …