Spicy Hot

Best Pcitures of 2011

2011-12-20T05:49:00.000-08:00

Here are some of the Best Pictures of 2011. The top pictures of 2011 is just a perspective on a year gone by and is very subjective.

A Bull Frog hops around as Carlos Costly #13 of Honduras brings the ball up against the USA at Sun Life Stadium on October 8, 2011 in Miami Gardens, Florida

Egyptian soldiers beat up a woman and pull off her abaya (a loose over-garment worn by women in parts of the Islamic world) during clashes at Tahrir Square in Cairo on December 17

A rebel fighter celebrates as his comrades fire a rocket barrage toward the positions of troops loyal to Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi April 14, 2011 west of Ajdabiyah, Libya.

A Palestinian girl weeps as Israeli soldiers detain activists in the West Bank on December 11 during clashes that followed the funeral of a Palestinian demonstrator

Libyans take pictures with their mobile phones of the body of Moamer Kadhafi in Misrata on October 20, 2011.

Riot police walk in the street as a young man consoles his girlfriend, who fell amid the chaos, on June 15, 2011 in Vancouver, Canada. Vancouver broke out in riots after their hockey team, the Vancouver Canucks, lost in Game Seven of the Stanley Cup Finals.


Paint-splattered police officers look on during clashes outside Top Shop on Oxford Street during marches in protest at government cuts on March 26, 2011 in London, England.

Anna Hazare and Anti Corruption Drama

2011-08-21T22:49:00.000-07:00

People are raising their voice across India against corruption, led by Anna Hazare. The government of India is completely at sea in its attempt to deal with the situation. But there is something seriously amiss in this whole scenerio.

It seems that people who are participating in this movement think that corruption is something that is perpetrated by some others who are in power or who are rich. This is partly true but not the absolute truth.

Corruption is entrencehed in the system because of people like you and me and the so called anti corruption agitators. Ask yourself a simple question; How will you respond in a situation where the easy way out is by bribe or influence (Sifarish)? Will you stand in a long queue and wait your turn, or visit a court to pay a traffic fine or would you rather hand over a 100 Rs note to the traffic cop and go home?

There are numerous situations where this choice arises; be it admissions to an educational institutions, getting a driving license, making a file move in a government office at a faster pace than others and so on...

Corruption and bribing is not something the nation and its people learnt over night. We have thousands of years old tradition of bribing our gods for favours asked. If such and such event happens or such and such problem or ailment vanishes I will donate a prasad of Rs. xyz in the temple. It is the same mind set which is carried by the common man when he visits the office of power.

Is it only the people who take bribes corrupt or the giver is equally responsible? The fact is that the petite bourgeoisie-auto rickshaw drivers, and constables, if Haryana Police Sangathan support for Jan Lok Pal's bill is any indication, and low paid government officials and assorted elements-have no idea that they are very much part of the corruption. They believe it is a disease outside them, primarily endemic to the government and its institutions, when they are active players in the drama.

The only major difference in the bills drafted by the government and Anna Hazare, apart from bringing the PM into the bill's ambit, seems to be that the government wants to set up a separate investigative agency while Anna and his team want an existing investigating agency like the CBI to report to the Lokpal committee. That would eventually mean the Lokpal evolving into a parallel power vortex, and might make Parliament redundant. In other words, the people elected by you will not have as much say as those appointed or government nominated Lokpal committee members.

As far as political parties go in India, they have clearly failed to represent the people. They do not have the interests of common man in their agenda. Their primary purpose seems to be how to keep clinging to power and make some money for their future generations rather than think of the benefit and problems faced by the masses.

The system has become such that it is virtually impossible for and outsider to find his footing in the political system without money or connection.

This movement should be more of an awakening call for the people to do a self search rather than the Political parties, which anyways seem numbed and have noy been able to come up with any proper response to this anti corruption movement.

I truly hope that this movement helps wake up the common man to stop bribing officials and seeking favors from political masters in their lives. That would be an eye opener for politicians, bureaucracy, police and the powers that be.

I ll finish this article with some tongue in cheek comments later on..cause this is too insipid for my taste.

CBSE Class X Result and Grading System

2011-05-31T19:48:00.000-07:00

The new Grading System of CBSE is here for the Class X results 2011. Here is a brief guide to understand the grading system of CBSE.

CBSE Grading

(i) Assessment of theory/practical papers in external subjects shall be in numerical scores.In addition to numerical scores, the Board shall indicate grades in the marks sheets issued to the candidates in case of subjects of external examinations. In case of internal assessment
subjects, only grades shall be shown.

*(ii) Letter grades on a nine-point scale shall be used for subjects of external examinations. However, for subjects of internal examination in Class X the assessment shall be made on a five point scale I.e. A,B,C,D & E.

(iii) The grades shall be derived from scores in case of subjects of external examination. In case of subjects of internal assessment, they shall be awarded by the schools.

(iv) The qualifying marks in each subject of external examination shall be 33% at Secondary/Senior School Certificate Examinations. However at Senior School Certificate Examination,in a subject involving practical work, a candidate must obtain 33% marks in the theory
and 33% marks in the practical separately in addition to 33% marks in aggregate, in order to qualify in that subject.

(v) For awarding the grades, the Board shall put all the passed students in a rank order and will award grades as follows :

A-1 Top 1/8th of the passed candidates

A-2 Next 1/8th of the passed candidates

B-1 Next 1/8th of the passed candidates

B-2 Next 1/8th of the passed candidates

C-1 Next 1/8th of the passed candidates

C-2 Next 1/8th of the passed candidates

D-1 Next 1/8th of the passed candidates

D-2 Next 1/8th of the passed candidates

E Failed candidates

Notes :

(a) Minor variations in proportion of candidates to adjust ties will be made.

(b) In case of a tie, all the students getting the same score, will get the same grade. If the number of students at a score point need to be divided into two segments, the smaller segment will go with the larger.

(c) Method of grading will be used in subjects where the number of candidates who have passed is more than 500.

(d) In respect of subjects where total number of candidates passing in a subject is less than 500, the grading would be adopted on the pattern of grading and distribution in other similar subjects.

The results have been extremely good this year and most students have performed well. The new grading system has also been well received by both students and teachers.

Complete Comprehensive Evaluation means the focus has shifted from rote memory of lessons to overall development of the student. Students have managed to register a good performance.

A student who has got grade D and above is qualified for admission to Class 11. Those who have scored below D will be eligible for improvement of performance or not eligible.

CBSE Class X Results 2011

2011-05-31T19:37:00.000-07:00

There has been some major goof up in Declaring Class X results of CBSE by the board. Although the CBSE Class X results 2011 for Chennai and Delhi Region have been announced after some hiccups there has been considerable delay.

The CBSE Class 10 Results for ( Allahabad, Ajmer, Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh, Guwahati and Patna regions) Rest of India are yet to be announced and is expected around 4 P.M. Today.

Click here to Check your CBSE Class X result on line

Or check the Website below

http://cbseresults.nic.in/class1011/cbse1011.htm

We wish all the students and their anxious parents best of luck with their results.

A MOMENT OF SILENCE, BEFORE I START THIS POEM

2011-05-30T21:33:00.000-07:00

I Know it takes time to read the written word but I think this one deserves to be read.

Before I start this poem,
I’d like to ask you to join me
In a moment of silence
In honor of those who died in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon last September 11th.

I would also like to ask you
To offer up a moment of silence
For all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned,
disappeared, tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes
For the victims in both Afghanistan and the U.S.

And if I could just add one more thing…
A full day of silence
For the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the hands of U.S.-backed Israeli forces over decades of occupation.
Six months of silence for the million-and-a-half Iraqi people, mostly children, who have died of malnourishment or starvation as a result of an 11-year U.S. embargo against the country.

Before I begin this poem,
Two months of silence for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa,
Where homeland security made them aliens in their own country.
Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Where death rained down and peeled back every layer of
concrete, steel, earth and skin
And the survivors went on as if alive.
A year of silence for the millions of dead in Vietnam – a people, not a war – for those who know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their relatives’ bones buried in it, their babies born of it.
A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of a secret war … ssssshhhhhhh…
Say nothing
we don’t want them to learn that they are dead.
Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia,
Whose names, like the corpses they once represented,
have piled up and slipped off our tongues.

Before I begin this poem.
An hour of silence for El Salvador …
An afternoon of silence for Nicaragua …
Two days of silence for the Guatemaltecos …
None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years.
45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas

25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans who found their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could poke into the sky.
There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains.
And for those who were strung and swung from the heights of sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, and the west…

100 years of silence…
For the hundreds of millions of Indigenous peoples from this half of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears.
Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the refrigerator of our consciousness …

So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust.

Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won’t be.
Not like it always has been.

Because this is not a 9/11 poem.
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.

This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written.
And if this is a 9/11 poem, then:
This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971.
This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa, 1977.
This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison, New York, 1971.
This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.
This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told
The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and Newsweek ignored.
This is a poem for interrupting this program.

And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children
Before I start this poem we could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.

If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit.

If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window of Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost.
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the
Penthouses and the Playboys.

If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton’s 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful people have gathered.

You want a moment of silence
Then take it NOW,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand,
In the space between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence,
Take it.
But take it all…
Don’t cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime.
But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing
For our dead.

P.S. NO! you were not tired of it because the Poem was too long or repetitive but because it made you too uncomfortable. Think about it!

Emmanuel Ortiz is a third-generation Chicano/Puerto Rican/Irish-American community organizer and spoken word poet residing in Minneapolis, MN. He currently serves on the board of directors for the Minnesota Spoken Word Association, and is the coordinator of Guerrilla Wordfare, a Twin Cities-based grassroots project bringing together artists of color to address socio-political issues and raise funds for progressive organizing in communities of color through art as a tool of social change.

Educating Your Childeren About Sex

2011-05-08T22:42:00.000-07:00

It might cause every parent some discomfort to educate their children about sex, but it is something that has to be done for the sake of child's welfare.

The talk about sex, puberty and sexually related nitty-gritties is an uncomfortable topic for most parents. Ask any child expert and they will not be able to emphasise enough on how important it is for parents to talk to their children about sex, and at an early age itself. Why? So that the misconceptions they develop about the subject, especially from peer group conversations and information gained from the Internet and television, can indeed lead to wrong notions about sex and sexuality.

Unfortunately, talking to your tiny tots about sex is never an easy task. Moreover, it's not comfortable for any of the parties involved — parents are afraid of it and children, mortified by it. That's probably the reason why this talk is often delayed, swept under the carpet or totally ignored with many parents who instead depend on teachers to do the needful. Children are an inquisitive lot and when it comes to sex, the curiosity levels zooms up quite a few notches. Hence, one cannot turn a blind eye and hope someone else does the 'dirty work'. Parents need to be proactive in talking to their children about sex. However, if done wrongly, it can either scare your child completely or just increase their curiosity even more.

"When you're talking to your child about sex, it has to be a very clinical talk, very matter of fact. Don't use any words or phrases that may indicate that it is something dirty or a taboo act. Also, don't talk about a gender bias. Avoid sentences like 'women always do this...' or 'men always do...'," says child psychologists.

According to expertys, the kind of sex talk parents have with their children depends on the age group of the child as at each different age, different things are to be said to a child.

For a child between the age group of seven to 10 years, the sex talk should emphasise on the commitment and bonding angle. Since this is his/her first exposure to sex, talk to your child about how sex is a natural process and a part of the body. Tell them about the beauty of relationships but don't bring up the violence or rape angle.

If your child is aged between 10 years to 13 years, it is the right age to describe the biological facts and of course, the emotional angle. Link your sex talk to the biological changes that they are experiencing in their body.

For a 15 year old the emphasis must be on explaining the actual act of intercourse. "More importantly, explain that sex is not something to be used for any kind of gain or as a sign of power.

"The most important thing when talking to your child about sex is to not make it sound like a bad thing or a taboo," says child experts. According to them, most parents feel shy about talking to their children about sex thus leading to wrong concepts. One must remember, children are very imaginative. If the concept itself is wrong, they will either get scared about sex or extra imaginative about it. Hence, be normal and casual when talking about sex. Explain, as naturally as possible, about anatomy and the related changes.

As kids grow, so does their curiosity, especially about sex. "So when your talking to your six or seven year old about his or her private parts, don't say things like 'chee, it's dirty', 'don't touch it, it's a sin'. Instead, tell them about the functions of these parts and teach them how to keep it clean just as you would tell them to wash their hands of feet," she says.

According to her, young girls need to be told about puberty and the changes it will bring in the body. "Teach them how to differentiate between a good touch and a bad touch. But don't petrify them that every man is just out to get them. For boys, meanwhile, fathers should talk to them about sexual organs, their growth and things like night emissions. When it first happens, the child may get scared or start feeling guilty. Explain to them that it is a natural growth process," she explains.

Make the talk easier

Start early: You'll find it less awkward if you introduce the topic when your child is very young. More importantly, answer questions simply and naturally, don't beat around the bush and use complicated or cliched metaphors.

Use everyday situations to start conversations: TV programmes are often a good opportunity to initiate the talk about sex. You can also talk when you're doing an activity together like washing up, laundry, a jigsaw puzzle, etc. This makes your child feel that sex is a normal part of family life and not a taboo subject.

Use books or leaflets: Finding it too difficult to get into nitty-gritties? Get help. Book stores have plenty of material that tells you how. That apart, there are also books that you can get your child to read or that you can go through together.

Be prepared: There will be those difficult moments when your child will, in the oddest of places, demand for an explanation about something they see. Don't fumble. Instead, say something like 'That's a good question, but let's talk about it when we get home'. Also, make sure you do, don't lose out of a good opportunity.

Be truthful: Forget those old grandmother ways of talking about 'bees and birds', storks, etc. Stories like these will just confuse children.

Ask your child's opinion: Talk to your children and ask them what they think about certain sex related issues, especially if it's in the news. More than anything else, this tells give you a fair idea of how much they know and understand.

Don't shun the issue: Don't ignore it if your child asks you a sex related question. Moreover, don't get angry with them. This will give them an impression that it is not a topic to be spoken about.

Don't beat around the bush: If you don't know the answer, say so and tell them you'll find out and let them know. This is a far better option to bluffing them, they are bound to find out the truth sooner or later.

Recovery

2011-04-17T08:08:00.000-07:00

A man walks in to a restaurant with his young son. He gives the young boy three 5 rupee coins to play with to keep him occupied. Suddenly, the boy starts choking and going blue in the face. The
father realizes the boy has swallowed the coins and starts slapping him on the back. The boy coughs up 2 of the penny coins but is still choking. Looking at his son, the father is panicking, shouting for help.

A well dressed, attractive, and serious looking woman, in a blue business suit is sitting at a coffee bar reading a newspaper and sipping a cup of coffee. At the sound of the commotion, she looks up, puts her coffee cup down, neatly folds the newspaper, places it on the counter, gets up from her seat and makes her way, unhurried, across the restaurant. Reaching the boy, the woman carefully pulls down his pants; takes hold of the boy's' testicles and starts to squeeze and
twist, gently at first and then ever so firmly.. tighter and tighter!!! After a few seconds the boy convulses violently and coughs up the last of the coins, which the woman deftly catches in her free hand. Releasing the boy's testicles, the woman hands the coin to the father and walks back to her seat at the coffee bar without saying a word.

As soon as he is sure that his son has suffered no ill effects, the father rushes over to the woman and starts thanking her saying, 'I've never seen anybody do anything like that before, it was fantastic. Are you a Doctor?'

'No', the woman replied, 'I'm with ICICI Bank Loan Department (Recovery Section!)

Yana Gupta without Panties pics

2010-11-24T08:24:00.000-08:00

Well...I am not so sure if the second rate celebrities do it for cheap publicity or its just one of those things which happens unconsciously. You be the judge of that.

It seems that wardrobe malfunctions were the norm at fashion shows or stage shows of unknown wannabes. What takes the cake is missing pieces of propriety or undies, if you please. In this case Yana Gupta was seen without panties at a social function.

Her short black dress kept getting hitched up and now people are scourging the net for Yana Gupta's pictures and video without panties.

Do let me remind you that certain parts of human anatomy are more fascinating and alluring when not visible. Some pals of mine would even go so far as saying " you seen one you have seen all" To those others would respond " you ain't seen nuthin as yet dude"

To this my rejoinder would be an age old Punjabi joke :
Santa (for want of better name and the effort of using my grey cell I choose tried n tested santa banta nomenclature) comes back from England and Banta is all curious about his escapades with Goris and pesters Santa to tell all.

Santa: I met his mem in the mall and she winked at me and i winked back at her.
Banta: fir ..fir ..fir ki hoya ..(what happened next)

Santa: She invited me over to her apartment and i went with her
Banta: fir ..fir ..fir ki hoya ...

Santa: Well...we kissed and slowly undressed each other...
Banta: fir ..fir ..fir ki hoya ... (while drooling a bit)

Santa ( a lil exasperated by all the pestering by now) : Fir ki hona si..fir ohi hoya jo ludhiany hunda hega... (what the heck could happen..the same that happens back home in Ludhiana)

So guys...Stop searching for Nude pictures of Yana Gupta and she is a Gori anyways..use your common sense and hit a xxx site....saves u lotsa time n effort...

Hilarious 2 Minute Management Course

2010-11-23T22:34:00.000-08:00

Read and apply the following wisdom carefully and you can beat the crap outa all those high fly MBA's

Lesson 1:

A man is getting into the shower just as his wife is finishing up her shower, when the doorbell rings.

The wife quickly wraps herself in a towel and runs downstairs.

When she opens the door, there stands Bob, the next-door neighbor.

Before she says a word, Bob says, ‘I’ll give you $800 to drop that towel.’

After thinking that she has a chance earning $800 within a minute, the woman drops her towel and stands naked in front of Bob, after a few seconds, Bob hands her $800 and leaves.

The woman wraps back up in the towel and goes back upstairs.

When she gets to the bathroom, her husband asks, ‘Who was that?’

‘It was Bob the next door neighbor,’ she replies.

‘Great,’ the husband says, ‘Did he say anything about the $800 he owes me?’

Moral of the story:
Do not share any critical information unless you understand the need of opposite person. It may or may not help him but surely won’t help you.

Lesson 2:

A priest offered a Nun a lift.

She got in and crossed her legs, forcing her gown to reveal a leg. The priest nearly had an accident.

After controlling the car, he stealthily slid his hand up her leg.

The nun said, ‘Father, remember Psalm 129?’

The priest removed his hand. But, changing gears, he let his hand slide up her leg again.

The nun once again said, ‘Father, remember Psalm 129?’

The priest apologized ‘Sorry sister, but the flesh is weak.’

Arriving at the convent, the nun sighed heavily and went on her way.

On his arrival at the church, the priest rushed to look up Psalm 129. It said, ‘Go forth and seek, further up, you will find glory.’

Moral of the story:
If you are not well informed in your job, you might miss a great opportunity.

Lesson 3:

A sales rep, an administration clerk, and the manager are walking to lunch when they find an antique oil lamp.

They rub it and a Genie comes out.

The Genie says, ‘I’ll give each of you just one wish.’

‘Me first! Me first!’ says the admin clerk. ‘I want to be in the Bahamas, driving a speedboat, without a care in the world.’

Puff! She’s gone.

‘Me next! Me next!’ says the sales rep. ‘I want to be in Hawaii , relaxing on the beach with my personal masseuse, an endless supply of Pina Coladas and the love of my life.’

Puff! He’s gone.

‘OK, you’re up,’ the Genie says to the manager.

The manager smiles and say, ‘I want those two back in the office after the lunch-time.’

Moral of the story:
Always let your boss have the first say.

Lesson 4:

An eagle was sitting on a tree resting, doing nothing.

A small rabbit saw the eagle and asked him,‘Can I also sit like you and do nothing?’

The eagle answered: ‘Sure, why not.’

So, the rabbit sat on the ground below the eagle and rested. All of a sudden, a fox appeared, jumped on the rabbit and ate it.

Moral of the story:
To be sitting and doing nothing, you must be sitting very, very high up.

Lesson 5:

A Turkey was chatting with a Bull.

‘I would love to be able to get to the top of that tree’ sighed the Turkey, ‘but I haven’t got the energy.’ ‘Well, why don’t you nibble on some of my droppings?’ replied the Bull. They’re packed with nutrients.’

The Turkey pecked at a lump of dung, and found it actually gave her enough strength to reach the lowest branch of the tree.

The next day, after eating some more dung, she reached the second branch.

Finally after a fourth night, the Turkey was proudly perched at the top of the tree..

She was promptly spotted by a farmer, who shot her out of the tree.

Moral of the story:
Bull Shit might get you to the top, but it won’t help you stay there for long.

Lesson 6:

A little bird was flying south for the winter. It was so cold the bird froze and she fell to the ground into a large field.

While she was lying there, a cow came by and dropped some dung on her.

As the frozen bird laid there in the pile of cow dung, she began to realize how warm it was.

The dung was actually thawing her out!

She lays there all warm and happy, and soon began to sing for joy.

A passing cat hears the bird singing and comes to investigate.

Following the sound, the cat discovered the bird under the pile of cow dung, and promptly dug her out and ate her.

Morals of the story:
[1] Not everyone who shits on you is your enemy.
[2] Not everyone who gets you out of shit is your friend.
[3] And when you’re in deep shit, keep your mouth shut!

Talking Parrot

2010-11-19T06:07:00.000-08:00

A guy is browsing in a pet shop and sees a parrot sitting on a little perch. It doesn't have any feet or legs. The guy says aloud, "Sheeesh, I wonder what happened to this parrot?"

The parrot says, "I was born this way. I'm a defective parrot."

"Holy crap," the guy replies. "You actually understood and answered me!"

"I got every word," says the parrot. "I happen to be a highly intelligent thoroughly educated bird."

"Oh yeah?" the guy asks, "Then answer this -- how do you hang onto your perch without any feet?"

"Well," the parrot says, "this is very embarrassing but since you asked, I wrap my weenie around this wooden bar like a little hook. You can't see it because of my feathers."

"Wow," says the guy. "You really can understand and speak English can't you?"

"Actually, I speak French, Spanish, Sanskrit and English, and I can converse with reasonable competence on almost any topic: politics, religion, sports, physics, philosophy. I'm especially good at ornithology.

You really ought to buy me. I'd be a great companion."

The guy looks at the $200.00 price tag. "Sorry, but I just can't afford that."

"Pssssssst," says the parrot, "I'm defective, so the truth is, no body wants me cause I don't have any feet. You can probably get me for $20; just make the guy an offer!"

The guy offers $20 and walks out with the parrot.

Weeks go by. The parrot is sensational. He has a great sense of humor, he's interesting, he's a great pal, he understands everything, he sympathizes, and he's insightful. The guy is delighted.

One day the guy comes home from work and the parrot goes, "Psssssssssssst," and motions him over with one wing. "I don't know if I should tell you this or not, but it's about your wife and the postman."

"What are you talking about?" asks the guy.

"When the postman delivered the mail today, your wife greeted him at the door in a sheer black nightie."

"WHAT???" the guy asks incredulously. "THEN what happened?"

"Well, then the postman came into the house and lifted up her nightie and began petting her all over," reported the parrot.

"NO!" he exclaims. "And she let him?"

"Yes. Then he continued taking off the nightie, got down on his knees and began to kiss her all over....."

Then the frantic guy demands, "THEN WHAT HAPPENED?"

"Damned if I know. I got a hard-on and fell off my perch!"

Simple solutions to Complex problems

2010-11-18T06:59:00.000-08:00

EVER SINCE I WAS A CHILD, I'VE ALWAYS HAD A FEAR OF SOMEONE UNDER MY BED AT NIGHT. SO I WENT TO A PSYCHIATRIST AND TOLD HIM 'I've got problems. Every time I go to bed I think there's somebody under it. I'm scared. I think I'm going crazy.'
'Just put yourself in my hands for one year,' said the psychiatrist. 'Come talk to me three times a week and we should be able to get rid of those fears.'
'How much do you charge?'
'Eighty dollars per visit,' replied the doctor.
'I'll sleep on it and if needed I will come back to you,' I said.
Six months later the Psychiatrist met me on the street.
'Why didn't you come to see me about those fears you were having?' he asked.
'Well, Eighty bucks a visit three times a week for a year is an awful lot of money! A bartender cured me for $10. I was so happy to have saved all that money that I went and bought me a new SUV.
'Is that so!' With a bit of an attitude he said, 'and how, may I ask, did a bartender cure you?'
'He told me to cut the legs off the bed - ain't nobody under there now!

LEAVE THOSE PSYCHIATRISTS.. GO HAVE A DRINK & TALK TO YOUR BAR TENDER. There is always another way to solve a problem. I drink to that.

Childish Humor !!..not at all..a must read for grown ups..

2010-11-18T06:10:00.000-08:00

A 1st grade school teacher had twenty-six students in her class. She presented each child in her classroom the 1st half of a well-known proverb and asked them to come up with the remainder of the proverb.

It's hard to believe these were actually done by first graders. Their insight may surprise you. While reading, keep in mind that these are first-graders, 6-year-olds, because the last one is a classic!

The italics are the real rejoinders by the kids...
1. Don't change horses...........until they stop running.

2.Strike while the............bug is close.

3.It's always darkest before..............Daylight Saving Time.

4.Never underestimate the power of.............termites.
5.You can lead a horse to water but...................How?
6.Don't bite the hand that...................looks dirty.
7.No news is...............................impossible
8.A miss is as good as a..............Mr.
9.You can't teach an old dog new............Math
10.If you lie down with dogs, you'll..............stink in the morning.
11.Love all, trust..............................Me.
12.The pen is mightier than the.............. pigs..
13.An idle mind is....................................the best way to relax.
14.Where there's smoke there's............pollution.
15.Happy the bride who.....................gets all the presents.
16.A penny saved is.........................not much.
17.Two's company, three's.............the Musketeers.
18.Don't put off till tomorrow what............you put on to go to bed.
19.Laugh and the whole world laughs with you, cry and.............You have to blow your nose.
20.There are none so blind as..................Stevie Wonder.
21.Children should be seen and not.............spanked or grounded.
22.If at first you don't succeed...................get new batteries.
23.You get out of something only what you...............See in the picture on the box
24.When the blind lead the blind .......................get out of the way.
25.A bird in the hand................................is going to poop on you.
And the WINNER and last one!
26.Better late than............................Pregnant

Now its pretty debatable if the last one is the best one but I had to trick you into reading all of them....soooo...But you have to agree that there are some profound insights in those proverbs.

THE TEENAGER DAUGHTER OWNER'S MANUAL

2010-11-18T05:53:00.000-08:00

Instructions for all those with teenage daughters, or who will soon have a teenage daughter....
Congratulations! You are now the proud new owner of a teenaged daughter. Please read this manual carefully, as it describes the maintenance of your new daughter, & answers important questions about your warranty, which does NOT include the right to return the 'product' to the factory for a full refund.

IF YOU FEEL YOU HAVE RECEIVED YOUR TEENAGER IN ERROR:
To determine whether you were supposed to receive a teenaged girl, please examine your new daughter carefully. - Does she:
(a) look very similar to your original daughter, only with more makeup & less clothing?
(b) refuse to acknowledge your existence on the planet Earth. (except when requesting money)?
(c) Sleep in a burrow of dirty laundry?

(d) Has one ear glued to the phone?

(e) Lives in a room which looks like the aftermath of Iraq bombing raid!

(f) Has body piercing and tattos which you didn't even know existed in human anatomy?
If any of these are true, you have received the correct item.

BREAK-IN PERIOD
When you first receive your teenaged daughter, you will initially experience a high level of discomfort. Gradually, this discomfort will subside, & you will merely feel traumatized and totally disoriented. This is the "Break-In Period," during which you are becoming accustomed to certain Behaviors that will cause you concern, anxiety, & stress. Once you have adapted to these behaviors, your teenager will start acting even worse.

ACTIVATION
To activate your teenaged daughter, simply place her in the vicinity of a telephone or Instant Messenger. No further programming is required.

SHUTDOWN
Several hours after activation, you may desire to shut down your teenaged daughter. There is no way to do this.

CLEANING YOUR TEENAGED DAUGHTER
Having a teenaged daughter means learning the difference between The words "clean" & "neat." Teenaged daughters are very clean, because They take frequent showers and or baths that last more than an hour. They will scrub themselves with expensive, fragrant soaps which you must purchase for them because "like I'm sure I'm going to use like the same kind of soap my mom & dad use. DUH!" When they have completely drained the hot-water tank, they will step out & wrap themselves in every towel in the bathroom, which they will subsequently strew throughout the house. If you ask them to pick up the towels, you are confusing "clean" with "neat." Teenagers are very busy & don't have time to be neat. They expect others to pick up after them. These 'others' are called "parents."

FEEDING YOUR TEENAGED DAUGHTER
Your teenaged daughter requires regular meals, which must be Purchased for her at restaurants because she detests everything you eat because, "It is like so disgusting." She doesn't want you to accompany her to these restaurants, because some people might see you &, "Like I'm sure I want my friends to see me eating dinner with my parents." Either order take-out food or just give her the money. If you order pizza, never answer the doorbell because the delivery boy might see you &, "OHMIGAWD! HE IS SO HOT!" Yes, your daughter's idea of an attractive man is the pizza delivery boy!

CLOTHING YOUR TEENAGED DAUGHTER
Retailers make millions of dollars a year selling stylish & frankly, sensible clothing which will look adorable on your daughter. If you enjoy shopping, you will love the vast selections which are available to you. Unfortunately, your teenaged daughter wants to dress like a lap dancer. You may be able to coerce her into putting on a cute outfit before leaving the house, but by the time she walks in the school door (if she is not skip school to hang out with her buddies), she will be wearing something entirely different.

OTHER MAINTENANCE
Teenaged daughters require one or two levels of maintenance: "High," & "Ultra High." Of course, YOUR daughter is "Ultra High." This means that whatever you do won't be enough, & whatever you try, won't work.

WARRANTY
This product is not without defect because she has "your" genes, for heaven's sake! If you think this is not fair, talk to your parents, who think it is hilarious. Your teenaged daughter will remain a teenager for as long as it takes for her to become a woman; which in her opinion, has already happened, & as far as you are concerned, never really will. If you are dissatisfied with your teenaged daughter, well, what did you expect? In any event, your warranty does not give you your little girl back under any circumstances, except that deep down she's actually still there - you just have to look for her. Go ahead, try it -- you just might find her!

Bill Gates speech: 11 rules your kids did not and will not learn in school

2010-09-09T05:59:00.000-07:00

Although I knew most of these rules but this still did not help me set up Microsoft or make a few billions in pocket money. The italics are mine, and the rest is Mr. billion dollars. I mean would you still be reading it if Gates had not made his moolah!!! You would have gone " BILL WHO!!!"

Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it!(I'm trying dammit!!! I'm trying)

Rule 2: The world doesn't care about your self-esteem (errr neither do I). The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE (DUH! wud ve got it without the capital letters) you feel good about yourself.(I used to feel good when i was sozzled till they told me it was not counted as an accomplishment)

Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.(orrrr steal a car with a car phone)

Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. (my teacher was hot and I'm unemployed so eat that Mr Gates)

Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.(for free food!)

Rule 6: If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.(I'm still learning everyday)

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now(Yeah, they had sex! i know). They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.(Lice have rights too you know)

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life. (So why am i still in high school!!!)

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time. (I 've hard time finding employers dude)

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs. (What about Live shows and porn!! that's real life... ain't it??)

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.(NERD...he he he i know gates is never gonna hire me..so NERD again)

Music never fails to raise the spirit

2010-08-20T22:59:00.000-07:00

Usually i do not like to blog videos as they detract me from writing weird stuff, but once in a while one comes across music which raises the spirit into a free flight. This one is not only a audible but a visual delight too.

I am certain that after watching this video you are going to get a pirated version or a free download of this (thus hurting coca cola revenues maybe) but coke has given us enough burps so they wont even notice.

More about the singers and the concept once i am through with the videos. I know you hot dudes are dying to know more about the beautiful babe in the video. Well she is the daughter of a Pakistani actress and a top model in Pakistan besides being an excellent singer. So to help your hormones a bit here are a couple of more videos of Messha Shafi

And here is the cokestudio video of Chori Chori by Messha Shafi. A must watch not only for the beautiful Meesha Shafi (you you you lustful dudes) but for her beautiful voice.

More about this later. I got to watch some of this again. If anyone knows free download links please post them in response. Lotta pirates will be grateful to you.
Meantime have fun.

Just Statistics for Fun

2010-07-22T09:48:00.000-07:00

Doctors vs. Gun Owners

Doctors

(A) The number of physicians in the U.S. is 700,000.

(B) Accidental deaths caused by Physicians per year are 120,000.

(C) Accidental deaths per physician is 0.171.

Statistics courtesy of U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Now think about this:

Guns

(A) The number of gun owners in the U.S. is 80,000,000.

(Yes, that's 80 million)

(B) The number of accidental gun deaths per year, all age groups, is 1,500.

(C) The number of accidental deaths per gun owner is .000188.

Statistics courtesy of FBI

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

So, statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Remember, 'Guns don't kill people, doctors do.'

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

FACT: NOT EVERYONE HAS A GUN,

BUT

Almost everyone has at least one doctor.

This means you are over 900 times more likely to be killed by a doctor as a gun owner!!!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Please alert your friends to this alarming threat.

We must ban doctors before this gets completely out of hand!!!!!
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Out of concern for the public at large, I withheld the statistics on lawyers

for fear the shock would cause people to panic and seek medical attention!

Send oldies to the war

2010-07-16T05:13:00.000-07:00

After all those heart warming stories here is one practical humrous one from an old gentleman with lots of common sense and practical reasoning. I am all for it. Let the oldies gas the terrorists.

I am over 60 and the Armed Forces thinks I'm too old to track down terrorists. You can't be older than 42 to join the military. They've got the whole thing ass-backwards. Instead of sending 18-year olds off to fight, they ought to take us old guys. You shouldn't be able to join a military unit until you're at least 35.

For starters, researchers say 18-year-olds think about sex every 10 seconds (I thought it was once every micro second). Old guys only think about sex a couple of times a day, leaving us more than 28,000 additional seconds per day to concentrate on the enemy.

Young guys haven't lived long enough to be cranky, and a cranky soldier is a dangerous soldier. 'My back hurts! I can't sleep, I'm tired and hungry.' ...bang! bang! bang!...we are impatient and maybe letting us kill some dirtbag who desperately deserves it will make us feel better and shut us up for awhile.

An 18-year-old doesn't even like to get up before 10am. Old guys always get up early to pee, so what the hell. Besides, like I said, I'm tired and can't sleep and since I'm already up and cranky, I may as well be up killing some fanatical son-of-a-gun.

If captured we couldn't spill the beans because we'd forget where we put them. In fact, name, rank, and serial number would be a real brainteaser. We will also be a liability because of the medicines the enemy would need to supply just to keep us alive in captivity.

Boot camp would be easier for old guys.. We're used to getting screamed and yelled at and we're used to soft food. We've also developed an appreciation for guns. We've been using them for years as an excuse to get out of the house, away from the screaming and yelling of wife n kids.

They could lighten up on the obstacle course however... When have you ever seen an enemy dangle a rope over a 20-foot wall for you to climb, or who does push ups after chasing and shooting the enemy!!!. Actually, the running part is kind of a waste of energy, too... I've never seen anyone outrun a bullet.

An 18-year-old has the whole world ahead of him. He's still learning to shave, to start a conversation with a pretty girl. He still hasn't figured out that a baseball cap has a brim to shade his eyes, not the back of his head.

These are all great reasons to keep our kids at home to learn a little more about life before sending them off into harm's way.

Let us old guys track down those dirty rotten coward terrorists. The last thing an enemy would want to see is a couple million pissed off old farts with attitudes and automatic weapons, who know that their best years are already behind them. We could also gas the enemy with eco friendly gases (ever heard of a fart)

HEY!! How about recruiting Women over 50...in menopause!!! You think OLD MEN have attitudes??

Ohhhhhhhhhhhh my God!!! If nothing else, put them on border patrol. They'll have it secured the first night!

Send this LINK to all of your senior friends...it's in big type so they can read it.

Tell me who you love and I will tell you who you are !

2010-07-13T00:09:00.000-07:00

In between all the nude or semi nude pictures and hot mms links that I post I do like to post these heart warming stories once in a while, because, believe me or not someday, if you live long enough, your horniness will dwindle and fade away and you will truly search for the meaning of your existence and true happiness. These random stories might help a bit in your search.

John stood up from the bench, straightened his Army uniform, and studied the crowd of people making their way through Grand Central Station. He looked for the girl whose heart he knew, but whose face he didn't, the girl with the rose.

His interest in her had begun thirteen months before in a Florida library. Taking a book off the shelf he found himself intrigued, not with the words of the book, but with the notes penciled in the margin. The soft handwriting reflected a thoughtful soul and insightful mind. In the front of the book, he discovered the previous owner's name, Miss Judith May.

With time and effort he located her address. She lived in New York City. He wrote her a letter introducing himself and inviting her to correspond. The next day he was shipped overseas for service in World War II. During the next year and one month the two grew to know each other through the mail.

Each letter was a seed falling on a fertile heart. A romance was budding. John requested a photograph, but she refused. She felt that if he really cared, it wouldn't matter what she looked like. When the day finally came for him to return from Europe, they scheduled their first meeting - 7:00 PM at the Grand Central Station in New York.

"You'll recognize me," she wrote, "by the red rose I'll be wearing on my lapel." So at 7:00 he was in the station looking for a girl whose heart he loved, but whose face he'd never seen. I'll let John tell you what happened next:

A young woman was coming toward me, her figure long and slim. Her blond hair lay back in curls from her delicate ears; her eyes were blue as flowers. Her lips and chin had a gentle firmness, and in her pale green suit she was like springtime come alive.

I started toward her, entirely forgetting to notice that she was not wearing a rose. As I moved, a small, provocative smile curved her lips. "Going my way, sailor?" she murmured. Almost uncontrollably I made one step closer to her, and then I saw Judith May.

She was standing almost directly behind the girl. A woman well past 40, she had graying hair tucked under a worn hat. She was more than plump, her thick-ankled feet thrust into low-heeled shoes.

The girl in the green suit was walking quickly away. I felt as though I was split in two, so keen was my desire to follow her, and yet so deep was my longing for the woman whose spirit had truly companioned me and upheld my own.

And there she stood. Her pale, plump face was gentle and sensible, her gray eyes had a warm and kindly twinkle. I did not hesitate. My fingers gripped the small worn blue leather copy of the book that was to identify me to her. This would not be love, but it would be something precious, something perhaps even better than love, a friendship for which I had been and must ever be grateful.

I squared my shoulders and saluted and held out the book to the woman, even though while I spoke I felt choked by the bitterness of my disappointment. "I'm Lieutenant John, and you must be Miss Judith May. I am so glad you could meet me; may I take you to dinner?"

The woman's face broadened into a tolerant smile. "I don't know what this is about, son," she answered, "but the young lady in the green suit who just went by, she begged me to wear this rose on my coat. And she said if you were to ask me out to dinner, I should go and tell you that she is waiting for you in the big restaurant across the street. She said it was some kind of test!" It's not difficult to understand and admire Miss Judith May wisdom. The true nature of a heart is seen in its response to the unattractive.

"Tell me whom you love," Houssaye wrote, "And I will tell you who you are..."

Priceless

2010-07-11T21:21:00.000-07:00

A husband wakes up at home with a huge hangover. He forces himself to open his eyes, and the first thing he sees is a couple of aspirins and a glass of water on the side table.

He sits down and sees his clothing in front of him, all clean and pressed. He looks around the room and sees that it is in perfect order, spotless, clean. So is the rest of the house.

He takes the aspirins and notices a note on the table. "Honey, breakfast is on the table, I left early to go grocery shopping. Love You!"

Totally shocked with the note , he goes to the kitchen and sure enough there is a hot breakfast and the morning newspaper. His son is also at the table, eating. He asks, "Son, what happened
last night?"

His son says, "Well, you came home around 3 AM, drunk and delirious. Broke some crockery, puked in the hall, and gave yourself a black eye when you stumbled into the door".

Confused, the man asks, "So, why is everything in order and so clean, and breakfast is on the table waiting for me? I should expect a big quarrel with her!"

His son replies, "Oh, that! Mom dragged you to the bedroom, and when she tried to take your clothes n shoes off, you said, "LADY LEAVE ME ALONE! I'M MARRIED!"

Moral :
Self-induced hangover - $ 400.00
Broken crockery - $ 800.00
Breakfast - $ 10.00
Saying the Right Thing While Drunk - PRICELESS

Don't waste your time reading this

2010-07-09T00:38:00.000-07:00

In the movie, Scent of a Woman, there's a scene where Al Pacino asks a girl to dance and she replies, "I can't, my boyfriend will be here any minute now". To which Al responds, "A life is lived in an instant". Then they dance to a tango.

Many of us live our lives running behind time, but we only reach it when we die of a heart attack or in a car accident rushing to be on time. Others are so anxious of living the future that they forget to live the present, which is the only time that truly exists. We all have equal time throughout the
world. No one has more or less. The difference lies in what each one of us does with our time.

We need to live each moment. As John Lennon said, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans".

Congratulations for reading till the end of this message. There are many who would have stopped in the middle so as not to waste time.

Am I considerate or what!

2010-07-08T23:54:00.000-07:00

The first time I was in Sweden, one of my colleagues picked me up at the hotel every morning. It was September, bit cold and snowy. We would arrive early at the company and he would park far away from the entrance (2000 employees drive their car to work).

The first day, I didn't say anything, either the second or third. One morning I asked, "Do you have a fixed parking space? I've noticed we park far from the entrance even when there are no other cars in the lot." To which he replied, "Since we're here early we'll have time to walk, and whoever gets in late will be late and need a place closer to the door. Don't you think?

Well I like my parking place to be the closest to the entrance of the venue be it a wedding or a funeral. (I do forget that on my own funeral the van carrying me will have the privilege of entering the venue itself). If I am late I try to double park and block other vehicles. How dare they encroach on the VIP parking place. In India everyone is a VIP (very immature person). Why should we be blamed we take the lead from the leaders.

Any car with a red beacon on top would drop its occupants right up to the event location, if they could they would drive it up the stage to disgorge the privileged neta or bureaucrat. At diespersal time all the Red beacon-ed cars would back up as close to the VIP exit as they can without tripping the VIP him/herself. (they probably would run over the bride or the groom or both if they could drive up to the lagan mandap. Hello ji congratulations ji on Pappus wedding..where is pappu..under your right rear wheel Neta ji. oh..and the bride ..well she is leaving for the funeral parlor as we speak.

Either Indian bureaucrats/policemen/local netas cant walk or their drivers have bets as to who can get the car closest to their VIP's knee. I think it must be the later cause these guys run well when they are being chased by the Tax men, vigilance bureau or CBI sleuths.

Your Choice

2010-07-06T22:23:00.000-07:00

Two Choices

What would you do? ...you make the choice. Don't look for a punch line, there isn't one. Read it anyway. My question is: Would you have made the same choice?

At a fund raising dinner for a school that serves children with learning disabilities, the father of one of the students delivered a speech that would never be forgotten by all who attended. After extolling the school and its dedicated staff, he offered a question:

'When not interfered with by outside influences, everything nature does, is done with perfection.

Yet my son, Shay, cannot learn things as other children do. He cannot understand things as other children do.

Where is the natural order of things in my son?'

The audience was stilled by the query.

The father continued. 'I believe that when a child like Shay, who was mentally and physically disabled comes into the world, an opportunity to realize true human nature presents itself, and it comes in the way other people treat that child.'

Then he told the following story:

Shay and I had walked past a park where some boys Shay knew were playing baseball. Shay asked, 'Do you think they'll let me play?' I knew that most of the boys would not want someone like Shay on their team, but as a father I also understood that if my son were allowed to play, it would give him a much-needed sense of belonging and some confidence to be accepted by others in spite of his handicaps.

I approached one of the boys on the field and asked (not expecting much) if Shay could play. The boy looked around for guidance and said, 'We're losing by six runs and the game is in the eighth inning. I guess he can be on our team and we'll try to put him in to bat in the ninth inning.'

Shay struggled over to the team's bench and, with a broad smile, put on a team shirt. I watched with a small tear in my eye and warmth in my heart. The boys saw my joy at my son being accepted.

In the bottom of the eighth inning, Shay's team scored a few runs but was still behind by three.

In the top of the ninth inning, Shay put on a glove and played in the right field. Even though no hits came his way, he was obviously ecstatic just to be in the game and on the field, grinning from ear to ear as I waved to him from the stands.

In the bottom of the ninth inning, Shay's team scored again.

Now, with two outs and the bases loaded, the potential winning run was on base and Shay was scheduled to be next at bat.

At this juncture, do they let Shay bat and give away their chance to win the game?

Surprisingly, Shay was given the bat. Everyone knew that a hit was all but impossible because Shay didn't even know how to hold the bat properly, much less connect with the ball.

However, as Shay stepped up to the

plate, the pitcher, recognizing that the other team was putting winning aside for this moment in Shay's life, moved in a few steps to lob the ball in softly so Shay could at least make contact.

The first pitch came and Shay swung clumsily and missed.

The pitcher again took a few steps forward to toss the ball softly towards Shay.

As the pitch came in, Shay swung at the ball and hit a slow ground ball right back to the pitcher.

The game would now be over.

The pitcher picked up the soft grounder and could have easily thrown the ball to the first baseman.

Shay would have been out and that would have been the end of the game.

Instead, the pitcher threw the ball right over the first baseman's head, out of reach of all team mates.

Everyone from the stands and both teams started yelling, 'Shay, run to first!

Run to first!'

Never in his life had Shay ever run that far, but he made it to first base.

He scampered down the baseline, wide-eyed and startled.

Everyone yelled, 'Run to second, run to second!'

Catching his breath, Shay awkwardly ran towards second, gleaming and struggling to make it to the base.

B y the time Shay rounded towards second base, the right fielder had the ball . The smallest guy on their team who now had his first chance to be the hero for his team.

He could have thrown the ball to the second-baseman for the tag, but he understood the pitcher's intentions so he, too, intentionally threw the ball high and far over the third-baseman's head.

Shay ran toward third base deliriously as the runners ahead of him circled the bases toward home.

All were screaming, 'Shay, Shay, Shay, all the Way Shay'

Shay reached third base because the opposing shortstop ran to help him by turning him in the direction of third base, and shouted, 'Run to third!

Shay, run to third!'

As Shay rounded third, the boys from both teams, and the spectators, were on their feet screaming, 'Shay, run home! Run home!'

Shay ran to home, stepped on the plate, and was cheered as the hero who hit the grand slam and won the game for his team

'That day', said the father softly with tears now rolling down his face, 'the boys from both teams helped bring a piece of true love and humanity into this world'.

Shay didn't make it to another summer. He died that winter, having never forgotten being the hero and making me so happy, and coming home and seeing his Mother tearfully embrace her little hero of the day!

AND NOW SOME FOR YOU TO PONDER ABOUT:

We all send thousands of jokes through the e-mail or pass on the links to sites without a second thought, but when it comes to sending messages about life choices, people hesitate.

The crude, vulgar, and often obscene pass freely through cyberspace, but public discussion about decency is too often suppressed in our schools and workplaces.

If you're thinking about sending a link about this message, chances are that you're probably sorting out the people in your mind who aren't the 'appropriate' ones to receive this type of link, I believe that we all can make a difference.

We all have thousands of opportunities every single day to help realize the 'natural order of things.'

So many seemingly trivial interactions between two people present us with a choice:

Do we pass along a little spark of love and humanity or do we pass up those opportunities and leave the world a little bit colder in the process?

A wise man once said every society is judged by how it treats it's least fortunate amongst them.

You now have two choices:

1. Forget about this story
2. Ask others to read it

M.S. Dhoni and Shaksi Singh Rawat engaged pictures

2010-07-03T23:25:00.000-07:00

M.S. Dhoni the 28 year-old Indian cricket team captain got engaged to Sakshi Singh Rawat, a Kolkata girl in her early 20s. Dhoni and Shaksi got engaged at a quiet ceremony in Dehradun in Uttra Anchal 3rd July Saturday night. Dhoni's family sources in Ranchi confirmed the development.

Dhoni, chose a hill station for the simple ceremony. The Dhoni Shaksi engagement function, took place at Bhagirathi Resorts at Selaqui, about 20 km from the Dehradun.

Sakshi Singh Rawat is a 20 something,Sakshi, who studied at the Welham Girls' School in Dehradun is a 3rd year student at Institute of Hotel Management (IHM), Aurangabad, and she has recently completed her training at Taj Bengal's front office.

According to people close to Shaksi she is a very pretty girl and Dhoni is lucky to have got her. She is like a little bird, chirpy and full of life and she was fairly good in studies as well as extra-curricular activities.

These are the pictures of Shaksi Singh Rawat.

The engagement ceremony of Dhoni and Shaksi took place at 6.30 pm where they exchanged rings the presence of relatives from both sides who arrived in three buses. India players Ashish Nehra and Harbhajan Singh were among those present for the ceremony.

The couple had been seeing each other for nearly two years and they had holidayed together in Mussoorie and Dehradun last year.

According to family members of Mahendra Singh Dhoni no date for marriage has been fixed as yet but maybe the couple will tie the knot after the Australian series at home which gets over on October 24th.

MMS scandals of Isabel Kaif and MTV roadie Tamanna

2010-06-29T22:37:00.000-07:00

More mms scandals keep coming out on the net. Few recent ones are the Katrina Kaif's sister Isabella Kaif MMS scandal and MTV Roadie Tamanna hot mms. The MMS has a girl who looks like Isabella Kaif in the nude and the Tamanna mms has some indian girl who is wearing the same kind of locket that Tamanna was wearing in her pictures.

After steaming MMS of Sahid Kapoor Kareena Kapoor made news, it is now the time for other hot MMS of celebrities making the rounds on the net.

This homemade hot mms features Isabel look alike. Some are trying to brush this MMS aside by claiming that a look alike of Isabel has been a part of the video. The video which has been shot in December 2009 is probably made public when Isabel Kaif is trying to find a foothold in this industry. Isabel’s nude MMS first made rounds in UK and no confirmation or denial had been

Labeled as Katrina Kaif sister’s sex scandal this video had been made public on You Tube. Isabel Kaif's scandalous video was hosted on video sharing websites. The video first started to circulate with the title "Katrina's Sis Isabel Kaif s3x scandal."

The Kaif family -- especially the girls' mother has strongly denied that the girl in the video is Isabel and will take legal action if they find the person responsible for the video. The general consensus seems to be that the video likely does not depict Isabel Kaif, but the speculation surrounding the video has affected her fledgling film career.

The second hot mms in circulation and the most downloaded mms is of the MTV Roadie Tamanna. The so called 'Tamanna MMS video' features a 37-second sex tape with a girl, who stunningly resembles to the MTV Roadie, having sex with a boy.

People are searching for links to the MTV Roadie Tamanna mms and links to Isablel kaif hot mms on the net.

Earlier, Shahid Kapoor and Kareena Kapoor, Riya Sen and Ashmit Patel were the victims of Sex scandal through MMS.

Sex videos showing look-alike of celebrities have been doing the rounds of the cyber space for years. Often police complaints are filed and culprits hunted down.

MiD DAY broke the news of a sex-tape involving a Noida B-school student in February. In fact, there are a number of video sharing websites, which thrive on such tapes.

By the way this too is one such blog in case u missed the point. Give the people the poison they want is my motto. Darn!! didn't even know i had a motto. But this blod provides other fun stuff besides Hot mms video clips of celebrities.

Farting faux pas-Hilarious

2010-06-26T00:19:00.000-07:00

A woman goes to her boyfriend's parents' house for Christmas dinner.

This is to be her first time meeting the family and she is very nervous.

They all sit down and begin eating a fine meal.

The woman is beginning to feel a little discomfort, thanks to her nervousness and the broccoli casserole. The gas pains are almost making her eyes water. Left with no other choice, she decides to relieve herself a bit and lets out a dainty fart.

It wasn't loud, but everyone at the table heard the poof.

Before she even had a chance to be embarrassed, her boyfriend's father looked over at the dog that had been snoozing under the woman's chair, and said in a rather stern voice, 'Skippy!'.

The woman thought, 'This is great!' and a big smile came across her face.

A couple of minutes later, she was beginning to feel the pain again.

This time, she didn't even hesitate. She let a much louder and longer rrrrrip.

The father again looked at the dog and yelled, 'Skippy!'

Once again the woman smiled and thought 'Yes!' A few minutes later the woman had to let another rip.. This time she didn't even think about it.

She let a fart rip that rivaled a train whistle blowing.

Once again, the father looked at the dog with disgust and yelled, 'Skippy, get away from her, before she shits on you!'

Ten Commandments of Marriage.

2010-06-26T00:15:00.000-07:00

While on the topic of commandments might as well add a few more

Commandment 1.

Marriages are made in heaven.
But so again, are thunder and lightning.

Commandment 2.

If you want your spouse to listen and
pay strict attention to every word you say,
talk in your sleep.

Commandment 3.

Marriage is grand -- and divorce is at least 100 grand!

Commandment 4.

Married life is very frustrating.
In the first year of marriage,
the man speaks and the woman listens.
In the second year, the woman speaks
and the man listens.
In the third year, they both speak and
the neighbours listen.

Commandment 5.

When a man opens the door of his car
for his wife, you can be sure of one thing:
Either the car is new or the wife is.

Commandment 6.

Marriage is when a man and woman
become as one; the trouble starts when
they try to decide which one.

Commandment 7.

Before marriage, a man will lie awake
all night thinking about something you
said.. After marriage, he will fall asleep
before you finish.

Commandment 8.

Every man wants a wife who is beautiful,
understanding, economical, and a good
cook. But the law allows only one wife.

Commandment 9.

Every woman wants a man who is handsome,
understanding, economical and a considerate
lover, but again, the law allows only
one husband.

Commandment 10.

Man is incomplete until he marries.
After that, he is finished.

Bonus Commandment story..................

A long married couple came upon a wishing well.
The wife leaned over, made a wish and threw in a penny.
The husband decided to make a wish too.

But he leaned over too much, fell into the well, and drowned.
The wife was stunned for a moment but then smiled, "It really works!"

How the Jews got their Ten Commandments

2010-06-26T00:12:00.000-07:00

In the beginning, God went to the Arabs and said, ”I have Commandments for you, that will make your lives better "
The Arabs asked, "What are Commandments? Can you give us an example? "
God said, ”For example........... Thou shall not kill”
The Arabs were shocked, ”What ? Not kill ? No way!
Killing and massacring innocent people is our birth-right and the only reason for our existence. No. We are not interested!"

So God went to the Africans and said, ”I have Commandments”
The Africans wanted an example.
God said, ”For example ........... Honour thy Father and Mother "
The Africans were dismayed. They said, ”Father ? Yo maan !
Can't tell for sure, who our fathers are, maan ! "

So God went to the Mexicans and said, ”I have Commandments "
The Mexicans wanted an example.
God said, " For example ........... Thou shall not steal”
The Mexicans were flabbergasted. They said, ”No steal ? No steal ??? Hey Senor, we no steal then how we live, huh ?
Gracias, but no ! "

So God went to the French and said, ”I have Commandments”
The French wanted an example.
God said, " For example ........... Thou shall not commit adultery”
The French were stunned. They said, ”What ? Not commit ze adultery ....... ? Non, Non, Non. Non Monsieur. Pardonnez nous.
We ze French, must have ze romance "

So God went to the Jews and said, " I have Commandments "
They asked, ”Commandments? How much do they cost "
God replied, ”They are free "
The Jews answered, ”Good. We shall take Ten!!!

Change for better!

2010-06-26T00:10:00.000-07:00

There's an old sea story in the Navy about a ship's Captain who inspected
his sailors,and afterward told the Chief that his men smelled bad. The Captain
suggested perhaps it would help if the sailors would change underwear occasionally.

The Chief responded, "Aye, aye sir, I'll see to it immediately!"

The Chief went straight to the sailors berth deck and announced,

"The Captain thinks you guys smell bad and wants you to change your
underwear."

He continued, "Pittman, you change with Jo nes, McCarthy, you change with
Witkowski, and Brown, you change with Schultz. Now GET TO IT!"

THE MORAL OF THE STORY IS:

Someone may come along and promise "Change", but don't count on things
smelling any better.

Shah Rukh Khan Old Pictures and Trivia

2010-06-23T23:06:00.000-07:00

Shahrukh Khan was born on 2nd November 1965. He was brought up in Delhi. He has a sister named Shehnaaz.

Shahrukh Khan studied in St. Columba's school, New Delhi, where he was awarded the 'Sword of Honor', essentially the award for best student.He Was not very good at Hindi in school, until his mother promised to take him to the cinema if he passed. As he loved films,he got top marks from then on.

At school he was an ace in Hindi, Electronics and Biology but wasn't good at all in Mathematics.

He had captained all teams in football, cricket and hockey and even played cricket at Zone and National level.

Had Graduated from Hansraj College, Delhi University and followed it up with a Masters Degree in Mass Communications (Film making) from Jamiya Milia Islamiya University, in New Delhi, but after a year Shah Rukh opted out as he had to make his acting career in Bollywood.

For a short span of time Shahrukh ran a restaurant in Dariya Ganj in New Delhi, India. Shah Rukh Khan joined Barry John's theatre group (TAG) in New Delhi and learned acting from him.

His parents died before he entered movies. Shahrukh considers it a big regret that they couldn't see what their son was to become.His Father Meer Mohammed Taj Khan died of Cancer in 1981 and his Mother Lateef Fatima Khan died of complications in Diabetes in 1991.

He married Gauri Khan on 25 October 1991. They have two children, son Aryan Khan (b. 1997) and daughter Suhana (b. 2000).

The First Grader

2010-06-18T21:45:00.000-07:00

A first-grade teacher, Ms Neely (Age 28) was having
trouble with one of her students

The teacher asked, "Boy what is your problem?"

Boy answered, "I'm too smart for the first-grade. My
sister is in the third-grade and I'm smarter than she is! I think I
should be in the third-grade too!"

Ms Neely had enough. She took Boy to the Principal ' s
office. The principal told Ms Neely he would give the boy a
test and if he failed to answer any of his questions he was to go back
to the first-grade and behave. She agreed.

Boy was brought in and the conditions were explained to
him and he agreed to take the test:

Principal: "What is 3x3?"

Boy: "9"

Principal: "What is 6x6?"

Boy: "36"

And so it went with every question the principal thought
a third-grade should know. The principal looks at Ms Neely and tells
her, "I think the boy can go to the third-grade."

Ms Neely says to the principal, "I have some of my own
questions. Can I ask him?" The principal and Boy both agree.

Ms Neely asks: "What does a cow have four of that I
have only two of?

Boy, after a moment: "Legs"!

Ms Neely: "What is in your pants that you have but I do
not have?"

Boy: "Pockets"!

Ms Neely: "What starts with a C and ends with a T, is
hairy, oval, delicious and contains thin whitish liquid?"

Boy: Coconut

Ms Neely: " What goes in hard and pink then comes out
soft and sticky?" The Principal ' s eyes open really wide and before he
could stop the answer, Boy quickly answered..

Boy: Bubblegum

Ms Neely: "What does a man do standing up, a woman does
sitting down and a dog does on three legs?" The Principal ' s eyes again open really wide and before he could stop the answer...

Boy: Shake hands

Ms Neely: "Now I will ask some "Who am I" sort of
questions, okay?"

Boy: "Yep"

Ms Neely: "You stick Your poles inside me. You tie me
down to get me up.. I get wet before you do."

Boy: "Tent"

Ms Neely: "A finger goes in me. You fiddle with me when you ' re bored. The best man always has me first."

The Principal was looking restless, a bit tense and took one large Vodka on the sly.

Boy: "Wedding Ring"

Ms Neely: "I come in many sizes. When I ' m not well, I
drip. When you blow me, you feel good."

Boy: "Nose"

Ms Neely: "I have a stiff shaft. My tip penetrates. I come with a quiver."

Boy: "Arrow"

Ms Neely: "What word starts with a ' F ' and ends in ' K '
that means lot of heat and excitement?"

Boy: "Firetruck"

Ms Neely: "What word starts with a ' F ' and ends in ' K '
& if u don ' t get it u have to use your hand"

Boy: "Fork"

Ms Neely: "What is it that all men have. It ' s longer
for some men than on others. The nuns don't need it. The pope doesn't
use his and a man gives it to his wife after they ' re married?"

Boy: "SURNAME"

Ms Neely: "What part of the man has no bone but has
muscles, has lots of veins, like pumping, & is responsible for making
love?"

Boy: "HEART"

The principal breathed a sigh of relief and said to the teacher:
"Send this Boy to University, I got the last ten questions wrong myself!"

The Battle of Saragarhi

2010-06-03T22:57:00.000-07:00

"21 Sikhs" is the incredible story of 21 men of the 36th Sikh Regiment (currently the 4th Sikh Regiment) who gave up their lives in devotion to their duty during the Battle of Saragarhi. This battle, like any others fought by the Sikhs, highlights the heroic action by a small detachment of Sikh soldiers against heavy odds. This encounter took place on 12 September 1897 in the Tirah region of North-West Frontier Province (now in Pakistan, which then formed part of British India). In keeping with the tradition of the Sikh Army, they fought to the death rather than surrender.

The contingent of the twenty-one Sikhs from the 36th Sikhs was led by Havildar Ishar Singh. They all chose to fight to the death. Sikh military personnel and Sikh civilians commemorate the battle every year on 12 September, as Saragarhi Day.

The Battle at Saragarhi is one of eight stories of collective bravery published by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). It has been mentioned as one of the five most significant events of its kind in the world which includes the Battle of Thermopylae associated with the heroic stand of a small Greek force against the mighty Persian Army of Xerxes I in 480 B.C.

The British colonial rulers had constructed a series of forts to control the NWFP (North West Frontier Province - today a state in Pakistan) and to provide security to troops against marauding tribesmen and their lashkars (large body of troops). Most of these forts had initially been built by Maharaja Ranjit Singh as part of the consolidation of the Sikh empire in Punjab and the British added some more. The British had only partially succeeded in gaining control over this region, consequently, skirmishes and sometimes serious fights with the tribals were a frequent occurrence. However, the NWFP was a good training ground for the Indian Army to hone its skills and techniques.

Two such forts on the Samana ridge of the Hindukush & Sulaiman ranges that is Fort Lockhart and Fort Gulistan were a few miles apart. Since these forts were not inter-visible, a signalling relay post called Saragarhi was located mid-way on a bluff to provide heliographic (A heliograph is a simple device for sending Morse code using a mirror catching the sunlight) communications between them. This post or picket had been fortified to provide safety and protection to the signalling detachment. In 1897 there was a general uprising in the NWFP engineered by Afghans as part of their policy, which came to be known as the 'prickly heat policy' to direct the wrath of the tribals against the British. In this uprising, Mullahs (Muslim religious leaders) played a prominent role. It was the duty of the 36th Sikh to occupy Gulistan and Lockhart forts. On 3rd and 9th September 1897, Orakazai and Afridi lashkars attacked Fort Gulistan. On both occasion the attacks were beaten back. A relief column was sent from the fort to assist in beating back these attacks.

The relief column from Lockhart on the return trip reinforced the signalling detachment at Saragarhi making its strength to 1 NCO (Non-Commissioned Officer) and 20 ORs (Other Ranks). In a renewed effort, on 12 September 1897, hordes of tribesmen laid siege to Fort Lockhart and Saragarhi, with the aim of overrunning the latter and at the same time preventing any help from the former. The Commanding Officer of 36th Sikh, Lt. Col. Haughton, was at Fort Lockhart and was in communication with the Saragarhi post through helicograph. The defenders of Saragarhi under the indomitable and inspiring leadership of their detachment commander, Havildar Ishar Singh, resolved to defend their post in the best tradition of their race and regiment. They were not there to hand over the post to the enemy and seek safety elsewhere. Havildar Singh and his men knew well that the post would fall, because a handful of men in that make-shift fort of stones & mud walls with a wooden door could not stand the onslaught of thousands of tribesmen. These plucky men knew that they will go down but they had resolved to do so fighting to the last.
From Fort Lockhart, troops and the Commanding Officer could count at least 14 standards and that gave an idea of the number of tribes and their massed strength against the Saragarhi relay post (estimated at between 10,000 to 12,000 tribals). From early morning the tribals started battering the fort. The Sikhs fought back valiantly. Charge after charge was repulsed by the men of the 36th Sikh. The tribal leaders started to make tempting promises so that the Sikhs would surrender. But Havildar Singh and his men ignored them. For quite some time, the troops held their own against the determined and repeated attacks by the wild and ferocious hordes. A few attempts were made to send a relief column from Fort Lockhart but these were foiled by the tribals.

At Saragarhi, the enemy made two determined attempts to rush the gate of the post and on both occasions the defenders repulsed the assault. While the enemy suffered heavy casualties, the ranks of the defenders too kept dwindling as the fire from the attackers took its toll and their ammunition stocks were depleting. Unmindful of his safety, Sepoy Gurmukh Singh kept signalling a minute-to-minute account of the battle from the signal tower in the post to Battalion HQs. The battle lasted the better part of the day. When repeated attacks failed, the enemy set fire to the surrounding bushes & shrubs and two of the tribesmen under cover of smoke, managed to close in with the post's boundary wall in an area blind to the defender's observation and rifle fire from the post holes. They succeeded in making a breach in the wall. This development could be seen from Fort Lockhart and was flashed to the post.
A few men from those defending the approaches to the gate were dispatched to deal with the breach in the wall. This diversion by the enemy and the defenders' reaction resulted in weakening of the fire covering the gate. The enemy now rushed the gate as well as the breach. Thereafter, one of the fiercest hand-to-hand fights followed. One of the Havildar Singh's men, who was seriously wounded and was profusely bleeding, had taken charge of the guardroom. He shot four of the enemy as they tried to approach his charge. All this time, Sepoy Gurmukh Singh continued flashing the details of the action at the post. Beside this the Commanding Officer of 36th Sikh and others at Lockhart Fort also saw his unique saga of heroism and valour unfold at Saragarhi. The battle had come too close for Sepoy Gurmukh Singh's comfort, so he asked Battalion HQs for permission to shut down the heliograph and take up his rifle. Permission was flashed back. He dismounted his heliograph equipment, packed it in a leather bag, fixed bayonet on his rifle and joined the fight. From this vantage point in the tower he wrought havoc on the intruders in the post. He died fighting, but took 20 of the enemy with him.

The tribals set fire to the post, while the brave garrison lay dead or dying with their ammunition exhausted. Next morning the relief column reached the post and the tell tale marks of the epic fight were there for all to see. The tribals later admitted to figure of 180 dead and many more wounded. This episode when narrated in the British Parliament, drew from the members a standing ovation in the memory of the defenders of Saragarhi. The story of the heroic deeds of these men was also placed before Queen Victoria. The account was received all over the world with awe and admiration. All the 21 valiant men of this epic battle were awarded the Indian Order of Merit Class III (posthumously) which at the time was one of the highest gallantry awards given to Indian troops and is considered equivalent to the present-day Vir Chakra. All dependants of the Saragarhi heroes were awarded 50 acres of land and 500 Rupees. Never before or since has a body of troops - that is, all of them won gallantry awards in a single action. It is indeed a singularly unique action in the annals of Indian military history.

The names of the 21 recipients of the gallantry award are:

1. Havildar Ishar Singh (regimental number 165[10])
2. Naik Lal Singh (332)
3. Lance Naik Chanda Singh (546)
4. Sepoy Sundar Singh (1321)
5. Sepoy Ram Singh (287)
6. Sepoy Uttar Singh (492)
7. Sepoy Sahib Singh (182)
8. Sepoy Hira Singh (359)
9. Sepoy Daya Singh (687)
10. Sepoy Jivan Singh (760)
11. Sepoy Bhola Singh (791)
12. Sepoy Narayan Singh (834)
13. Sepoy Gurmukh Singh (814)
14. Sepoy Jivan Singh (871)
15. Sepoy Gurmukh Singh (1733)
16. Sepoy Ram Singh (163)
17. Sepoy Bhagwan Singh (1257)
18. Sepoy Bhagwan Singh (1265)
19. Sepoy Buta Singh (1556)
20. Sepoy Jivan Singh (1651)
21. Sepoy Nand Singh (1221)

Miss USA Rima Fakih Pole dancing Pictures and Video Controversy

2010-05-18T19:05:00.000-07:00

The world goes gaga over a Lebanese-born first ever Muslim to wear the Miss USA crown. There is a slap in the face of conservatism. But is it really so! Seems the liberal west has its own moral guidelines as to how much fun a woman can have.

Yes you can walk the ramp in a bikini but you can not pole dance fully clothed.For the ignorant lot out there pole does not refer to Polish nationals ( miss USA is allowed to dance with Poles but not pole dancing).

Rima Fakih, 24 seems to have landed in trouble after news surfaced of her winning a pole dancing contest at a strip club in Detroit in 2007. They can take her crown away for this. Although she would be allowed to keep the pole and sex toys she won in the competition.

Fakih was photographed sliding up and down a stripper’s pole in a blue tank top, hot pants and high heels. Other photographs from the competition showed her wearing a bra stuffed with dollar bills

The photos were posted on the website of a Detroit-based radio show following her triumph at the beauty pageant Sunday in Las Vegas. I wonder why the sleazy radio shows are not banned for throwing up muck.

The radio show’s producers claim they have been contacted by the organisers of the Miss Universe competition requesting additional information regarding Miss Fakih’s involvement. I am sure they want to get their hands on the nude pictures of Miss USA for personal viewing.

It is not known if organisers of Miss USA were aware of Miss Fakih winning the ‘Stripper 101′ contest three years ago at a women-only striptease class at the Coliseum Gentleman’s Club. She is believed to have won a variety of prizes, including adult toys and a stripper’s pole.

Her winning the contest and the crown is a shakes the booties of both Muslims and middle class Americans. Americans must be wondering whats next; and rightly so. First son of a black Kenyan becomes US president and now a Lebanese Muslim wins the Miss USA title...

Last year’s winner Carrie Prejean was stripped off her title after it emerged she had made a sex tape. I hope they do not do the same to Miss USA Rima Fakih for dancing with a pole and winning all those sex toys. Maybe they should take away her pole as punishment for having fun or better still bomb the poles. (With my due apologies to the Poles for the pun but would the Americans know the difference!)

This Happens only in India

2010-05-08T09:11:00.000-07:00

This Happens only in India

These pictures go a long way in showing why India is the second fastest growing economy in the world. Things which would be unimaginable anywhere else are routine matter here. How we deal with this is an amazing aspect of being Indian.

Who is Connected to who!!! Where is the fault in this connection.

A Must Read For All The Spiritually Inclined

2010-04-23T04:53:00.000-07:00

Although personally I have nothing against all the so called Gurus and spiritual teachers (Swami Nityanand included). Whether they do it for money or Sex; its their business and of those who are paying for it or getting paid/laid for it. If it brings happiness and peace of mind to some (specially the Gurus who are getting paid and laid) so be it. I can be envious as hell but I do not mind. But here is a point of view that is like a breath of fresh air. It does not matter whether you agree or disagree with it, but its worth a thought. Why I say worth A thought is because if one was capable of more than a single thought one would not be running after the gurus anyways.

More than two years ago (on March 14, 2008), Hindi poet and film lyricist Javed Akhtar (also known for his efforts to promote education and women’s rights) spoke at the India Today conclave, which discussed the theme “Leadership for the 21st century”.

An atheist, Javed Akhtar headed a session on “Is spirituality relevant to leadership?” Here is his speech on the occasion – controversial but thoughtful, old but not dated.

I am quite sure ladies and gentlemen, that in this august assembly nobody would envy my position at this moment. Speaking after such a charismatic and formidable personality like Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is like coming out of the pavilion to play after Tendulkar has made a sparkling century. But in some weak moment I had committed myself.

There are certain things that I would like to make very clear at the very outset. Don't get carried away by my name – Javed Akhtar. I am not revealing a secret, I am saying something that I have said many times, in writing or on TV, in public…I am an atheist, I have no religious beliefs. And obviously I don't believe in spirituality of some kind. Any kind.

Another thing. I am not standing here to criticize, analyze, or attack his gentleman who is sitting here. We have a very pleasant, civilized relation. I have always found him to be an extremely courteous person.

One is talking about an idea, an attitude, a mindset. Not any individual.

I must tell you that when Rajeev opened this session, for a moment I felt that I have come to the wrong place. Because, if we are discussing the philosophy of Krishan and Gautam and Kabir, Vivekanand, then I have nothing to say. I can sit down right now. I am not here to discuss a glorious past of which I suppose every Indian is proud, and rightly so. I am here to discuss a dubious present. India Today has invited me and I have come here to talk about spirituality today.

Let's not be confused by this word spirituality, you can find two people with the same name and they can be totally different people. Ram Charit Manas was written by Tulsidas. And the television film has been made by Ramanand Sagar. Ramayan is common but I don't think it would be very wise to club Tulsidas with Ramanand Sagar.

I remember, when Tulsidas wrote Ramcharit Manas, he had faced a kind of a social boycott. How could he write a holy book in such a language like Avadhi? Sometimes I wonder fundamentalists of all hues and all colors, religions and communities…how similar they are. In 1798, a gentleman called Shah Abdul Qadir, in this very city, for the first time translated Quran in Urdu, and all the ulemas of that time gave fatwa against him that how could he translate this holy book in such a heathen language.

When Tulsi wrote Ramcharit Manas and he was boycotted, I remember achowpai that he had written.

"Dhut kohu, abdhut kohu, rajput kohu, ki julawa kohu

Kohu ki beti se beta na biahab, kohu ki jaat bigaar na chahu

Mang ke khaibo, mehjid ma raihbo, lebe ka ek na debe ka dohu"

Ramanand Sagar, when he made his television serial, he made millions.

I am not undermining him, but obviously he is much lower in the rung.

I will give you another example. Perhaps it would be more direct and more appropriate. Gautam came out of a palace and went into the wilderness to find the truth. But nowadays we see, the modern age gurus, come out of the wilderness and wind up in the palaces. They are moving in the opposite direction. We can't talk of them in the same breath. So let us not hide behind names which are dear and respectable for every Indian.

When I was invited to give this talk, I felt that yes, I am an atheist, try to be a rationalist in any given situation, Maybe that's why I have been called. But suddenly I have realized that there is
another quality that I share with modern age gurus. I work in films. We have lot in common. Both of us sell dreams, both of us create illusions, both of us create icons, but with a difference. After three hours we put a placard – the end. Go back to reality. They don't.

So ladies and gentlemen, let me make it very clear that I have come to talk of this spirituality that has a supermarket in the world. Arms, drugs and spirituality – these are the three big businesses in the world. But in arms and drugs you really have to do something, give something. That's the difference. Here you don't have to give anything.

In this supermarket you get instant nirvana, moksha by mail, a crash course in self realization, cosmic consciousness in four easy lessons. This supermarket has its chain all over the world, where the restless elite buy spiritual fast food. I am talking about this spirituality.

Plato in his dialogues has said many a wise thing, and one of them is – before starting any discussion decide on the meanings of words. Let us try to decide on the meaning of this word spirituality. Does it mean love for mankind that transcends all religion, caste, creed, race? Is that so? Then I have no problem. Except that I call ithumanity.

Does it mean love of plants, trees, mountains, oceans, rivers, animals? The non-human world? If that is so, again I have no problem at all. Except that I call it environmental consciousness.

Does spirituality mean heartfelt regard for social institutions like marriage, parenthood, fine arts, judiciary, freedom of expression. I have no problem again sir, how can I disagree here? I call it civil responsibility.

Does spirituality mean going into your own world, trying to understand the meaning of your own life? Who can object to that? I call it self-introspection, self assessment.

Does spirituality mean yoga? Thanks to Patanjali, who has given us the details of yoga, yam, yatam, aasan, pranayam…We may do it under any name, but if we are doing pranayam, wonderful. I call it health care. Physical fitness.

Now is it a matter of only semantics. If all this is spirituality, then what is the discussion. All these words that I have used are extremely respectable and totally acceptable words. There is nothing abstract or intangible about them. So why stick to this word spirituality? What is there in spirituality that has not been covered by all these words? Is there something? If that is so then what is it?

Somebody in return can ask me what is y problem with this word. I am asking to change it, leave it, drop it, make it obsolete but why so? I will tell you what is my reservation. If spirituality means all this then there is no discussion. But there is something else which makes me uneasy. In a dictionary, the meaning of spirituality is rooted in a word called "spirit". When mankind didn't know whether this earth is round or flat, he had decided that human beings are actually the combination of two things. Body and spirit.

Body is temporary, it dies. But the spirit is, shall I say, non-biodegradable. In your body you have a liver and heart and intestines and the brain, but since the brain is a part of the body, and mind lies within the brain, it is inferior because ultimately the brain too shall die with the body, but don't worry, you are not going to die, because you are your spirit, and the spirit has the supreme consciousness that will remain, and whatever problem you have is because you listen to your mind.

Stop listening to your mind. Listen to your spirit -- the supreme consciousness that knows the cosmic truth. All right. It's not surprising that in Pune there is an ashram and I used to go there. I loved the oratory. On the gate of the lecture hall there was a placard. Leave your shoes and minds here. There are other gurus who don't mind if you carry your shoes. But minds? Sorry.

Now, if you leave your mind what do you do? You need the Guru to find the next station of consciousness. That hides somewhere in the spirit. He has reached the supreme consciousness, he knows the supreme truth. But can he tell you. No sir, he cannot tell you. So can you find out
on your own? No sir, you need the guru for that.

You need him but he cannot guarantee that you will know the ultimate truth… and what is that ultimate truth? What is the cosmic truth? Relating to cosmos? I have really not been able to understand that. The moment we step out of the solar system the first star is Alpha.Centueri. It is just four light years away. How do I relate to that!! What do I do!!

So the emperor is wearing robes that only the wise can see. And the emperor is becoming bigger and bigger. And there are more and more wise people who are appreciating the robe.

I used to think that actually spirituality is the second line ofdefence for religious people. When they get embarrassed about traditional religion, when it starts looking too down-market, they
hide behind this smokescreen of cosmos and super consciousness. But that is not the complete truth. Because the clientele of traditional religion and spirituality is different.

You take the map of the world, you start marking places which are extremely religious, within India or outside India, Asia, Latin America, Europe…wherever. You will find that wherever there is lot of religion there is lack of human rights. There is repression. Anywhere. Our Marxist friends used to say that religion is the opium of poor masses, the sigh of the oppressed. I don't want to get into that discussion. But spirituality nowadays is definitely the tranquilizer of the rich. You see that the clientele is well heeled, it is the affluent class.

Alright, so the guru gets power, high self esteem, status, wealth…(which is not that important), power…and lot of wealth too. What does the disciple get? When I looked at them carefully I realized that there are categories and categories of these disciples. It's not a monolith.

There are different kinds of followers. Different kinds of disciples. One, who is rich, successful, doing extremely well in his life, making money, gaining property. Now, since he has everything he wants absolution too. So guru tells him - whatever you are doing, is "niskaam karma" – you are playing a role, this is all "Maya", the money that you are making everyday and the property that you are acquiring, you are not emotionally involved with it. You are just playing a role. You come to me because you are in search of eternal truth. Maybe your hands are dirty, but your spirit and soul are pure.

And this man, he starts feeling wonderful about himself. For seven days he is exploiting the world, and at the end of the seven days when he goes and sits at the feet of the guru, he feels – I am a sensitive person.

There is another category. That too comes from the affluent class. But he is not the winner like the first one. You know winning or losing that is also relative. A rickshaw-wallah if he is gambling on the pavement and wins hundred rupees will feel victorious, and if a corporate man makes only 300 million dollars, while his brother is a billionaire, he will feel like a failure.

Now, what does this rich failure do? He needs a guru to tell him – who says that you have failed? You have other worlds, you have another vision, you have other sensibility that your brother doesn't have. He thinks that he is successful…wrong. The world is very cruel, you know. The world tells you honestly, no sir, you have got three out of ten. The other person has seven out of ten. Fair. They will treat you that way and they will meet you that way. There he gets compassion. There he plays another game.

Another category. And I will talk about this category not with contempt or with any sense of superiority, not any bitterness, but all the compassion available one that is a very big client of this modern day guru and today's spirituality, is the unhappy rich wife.

Here is a person who put all her individuality, aspirations and dreams, and her being at the altar of marriage and in return she got an indifferent husband. Who at the most gave her a couple of children. Who is rather busy with his work, or busy with other women. This woman needs a shoulder. She knows that she is an existential failure. There is nothing to look forward to. She has a vacuous, empty, comfortable yet purposeless life. It's sad, but it is true.

Then there are other people. Who are suddenly traumatized. They lose a child. The wife dies. The husband dies. Or they lose the property, they lose their business. Something happens that shocks them and they ask – why me? So who do they ask? They go to the Guru. And the guru
tells him that this is Karma. But there is another world if you follow me. Where there is no pain. Where there is no death. Where there is immortality. Where there is only bliss.

He tells all these unhappy souls – follow me and I will take you to heaven, to the paradise, where there is no pain. I am sorry sir, it is disappointing but true that there is no such paradise. Life will always have a certain quota of pain, of hurt, a possibility of defeat. But they do get some satisfaction.

Somebody may ask me if they are feeling better, if they are getting peace then what is your problem. It reminds me of a story that I have read. It's an old Indian story told by a sage, that a hungry dog finds a dry bone and tries to eat it and in the process bites its own tongue. And the tongue is bleeding and the dog feels that he is getting nourishment from the bone.

I feel sad. I don't want them, these adults, to behave like this because I respect them. Drugs and alcohol are also supposed to give mental peace and serenity, but is that kind of peace or serenity
desirable or advisable? The answer is no. Any mental peace that is not anchored in rational thoughts is nothing but self-deception. Any serenity that takes you away from truth is just an illusion – a mirage. I know that there is a kind of a security in this which is like the security of a tri-cycle. If you are riding a tri-cycle you can't fall. But adults do not ride tricycles. They ride bi-cycles. They can even fall. It is a part of life.

There is one more kind. Like everybody who is the member of the golf club is not fond of golf. In the same way everybody who is seen in an ashram is not a spiritual person. A film producer who is an ardent follower of a guru, whose ashram is about two hours from Delhi once told me that you must go to my Guru. You will see the who's who of Delhi there. Let me tell you my Guruji is another Chandraswami in the making. Now this is a contact point for networking.

I have great respect for people who are spiritual, or religious, and in spite of this they are good people. And I have a reason. I believe that like every emotion or feeling, you have a limitation.

You can see upto a point. And you can't see further. You can hear upto a point, but beyond that you won't be able to register sounds. You can mourn upto a point and then you will get over your mourning. You will feel happy upto a point and then you will be through with your happiness. Same way, I am sure that you have a certain capacity for nobility also. You can be as noble and no more.

Now suppose we count this capacity for nobility in the average man as ten units, now anybody who goes to pray in a mosque five times is consuming his five units, there anybody who goes to the temple or sits in the feet of the Guru, he is consuming his quota of nobility there. And in a totally non-productive manner.

I don't go to pray. I don't pray. If I don't go to any guru, or mosque or temple or church, what do I do with my quota of nobility. I will have to help somebody, feed somebody, give shelter to somebody. People who use their quota in worshipping, praying, adoring religious figures and spiritual figures, in spite of that, if they are left with some nobility, hats off to them.

You may ask me, that if I have this kind of ideas about religious people, why should I show such reverence for Krishan and Kabir and Gautam? You can ask me. I'll tell you why I respect them. These were the great contributors in the human civilization. They were born in different points of time in history, in different situations. But one thing is common in them. They stood up against injustice. They fought for the downtrodden. Whether it was Ravana, or Kansha or the pharaoh
or the high priests or the British Samrajya in front of Gandhi – or the communal empire of Firoze Tughlaq in the times of Kabir, they stood against that.

And what surprises me, and confirms my worst feelings, that today, the enlightened people who know the cosmic truth, none of them stand up against the powers that be. None of them raises his voice against the ruling classes and the privileged classes. Charity, yes, when it is approved and cleared by the establishment and the powers that be.

But I want to know which was that guru which took the dalits to those temples which are still closed to them. I want to know which was that guru who stood for the rights of the Adivasis against the thekedaars and contractors. I want to know which was that guru who spoke about
the victims of Gujarat and went to their relief camps. They are humanbeings.

It is not enough to teach the rich how to breathe. It is the rich man’s recreation. It is the hypocrites' pretension. It is a mischievous deception. And you know that in the Oxford dictionary, mischievous deception is a term that is used for a word, and that word is…HOAX.

Sania Mirza Sohaib Malik Marriage

2010-03-29T22:03:00.000-07:00

Indian tennis star and heart throb of millions of Indian youngsters Sania Mirza is finally all set to marry Pakistani cricketer Shoaib Malik in April. Sania had broken her engagement because of incompatibility with her childhood friend Sohrab Mirza barely two months earlier.

Sania's father Imran Mirza and other family members were not available to comment on reports by a Pakistani television channel that former Pakistani captain would marry Sania.

According to Geo News, Shoaib Malik's mother met the family of Sania, and sought Sania for her son. The channel claimed that Sania's family has accepted the proposal and the two families are all set to conduct the engagement the two.

The channel even claimed that the engagement ceremony was expected to take place next month.

Confirming the news, Sohaib Malik wrote in his Twitter page, "Thanks for all your support. And the news of me marrying to Sania is true. Inshallah will get married in April."

"I fully understand what it takes to be an international sports person and I will support Sania in her career as long as she wishes to play," he said.

"Representing India at the 2012 Olympics is very important for her and I will be the proudest husband if she can win a medal for her country," he added.

A statement by Sania's father Imran Mirza also stated that 23-year-old Sania and the 28-year-old all-rounder will be based in Dubai, where Malik is a resident.

"This is a unique case where the husband and wife will represent their respective countries in sport," said Mirza in Hyderabad.

"My wedding, inshallah, is going to be the biggest day of my life. I have been in the constant glare for too long and would appreciate privacy at this very personal moment in my life," Sania was quoted as having said in a statement.

"I hope to be fully fit to represent India in the Commonwealth and Asian Games that are scheduled for later this year," she said.

Sania's mother, Nasima said, "Marriages are made in heaven."

We wish the couple good luck and the very best although i know how you guys feel about Sania Mirza finally getting married. As consolation here are some hot pictures of Sania Mirza for you.

Driving Tips for Indian Roads

2010-03-24T22:39:00.000-07:00

Driving in India - Some Tips

For the benefit of every one visiting India and daring to drive on Indian roads, here are few hints for survival. They are applicable in every place in India except Bihar, where life outside a vehicle is only marginally safer.

Indian road rules broadly operate within the domain of karma where you do your best, and leave the results to your insurance company which will settle all your claims by your next rebirth.

The hints are as follows:

Do we drive on the left or right hand side of the road?

The answer is "both". Basically one starts on the left of the road, unless it is occupied. In which case, go to the right, unless that is also occupied. Then proceed by occupying the next available gap, as in chess.
Just trust your instincts, ascertain the direction, and proceed. Adherence to road rules leads to much misery and occasional fatality. Most drivers don't drive, but just aim their vehicles in the intended direction. Don't you get discouraged or underestimate yourself except for a belief in reincarnation, the other drivers are not in any better position.

Don't stop at pedestrian crossings just because some fool wants to cross the road. You may do so only if you enjoy being bumped in the back. Pedestrians have been strictly instructed to cross only when traffic is moving slowly or has come to a dead stop because some minister is in town. Still some idiot may try to wade across, but then, let us not talk ill of the dead.

Blowing your horn is not a sign of protest as in some countries. We horn to express joy, resentment, frustration, romance and bare lust (two brisk blasts), or, just mobilize a dozing cow in the middle of the bazaar. Sometimes honking in a no sound zone like a hospital can restart an arrested heart or cause a heart attack, anyways things even out.

Keep informative books in the glove compartment. You may read them during traffic jams, while awaiting the chief minister's motorcade, or waiting for the rainwaters to recede when over ground traffic meets underground drainage.

Occasionally you might see what looks like a UFO with blinking colored lights and weird sounds emanating from within. This is an illuminated bus, full of happy pilgrims singing bhajans. These pilgrims go at breakneck speed, seeking contact with the Almighty,often meeting with success.

Auto Rickshaw (Baby Taxi): This triangular vehicle carries iron rods, gas cylinders or passengers three times its weight and dimension, at an unspecified fare.
After careful geometric calculations, children are folded and packed into these auto rickshaws until some children in the periphery are not in contact with the vehicle at all. Then their school bags are pushed into the microscopic gaps all round so those minor collisions with other vehicles on the road cause no permanent damage. Of course, the peripheral children are charged half the fare and also learn Newton's laws of motion en route to school.
Auto-rickshaw drivers follow the road rules depicted in the film Ben Hur, and are licensed to irritate.

Mopeds: The moped looks like an oil tin on wheels and makes noise like an electric shaver. It runs 30 miles on a teaspoon of petrol and travels at break-bottom speed. As the sides of the road are too rough for a ride, the moped drivers tend to drive in the middle of the road; they would rather drive under heavier vehicles instead of around them and are often "mopped" off the tarmac.

Leaning Tower of Passes: Most bus passengers are given free passes and during rush hours, there is absolute mayhem. There are passengers hanging off other passengers, who in turn hang off the railings and the overloaded bus leans dangerously, defying laws of gravity but obeying laws of surface tension. As drivers get paid for overload (so many Rupees per kg of passenger), no questions are ever asked. Steer clear of these buses by a width of three passengers.

One-way Street: These boards are put up by traffic people to add jest in their otherwise drab lives. Don't stick to the literal meaning and proceed in one direction. In metaphysical terms, it means that you cannot proceed in two directions at once. So drive, as you like, in reverse throughout, if you are the fussy type. Least I sound hypercritical; I must add a positive point also.

Speed Breakers: Rash and fast driving in residential areas has been prevented by providing a "speed breaker"; two for each house. This mound, incidentally, covers the water and drainage pipes for that residence and is left untarred for easy identification by the corporation authorities, should they want to recover the pipe for year-end accounting.

Night driving on Indian roads can be an exhilarating experience (for those with the mental makeup of Chenghis Khan). In a way, it is like playing Russian roulette, because you do not know who amongst the drivers is loaded.
What looks like premature dawn on the horizon turns out to be a truck attempting a speed record. On encountering it, just pull partly into the field adjoining the road until the phenomenon passes. Our roads do not have shoulders, but occasional boulders.

Do not blink your lights expecting reciprocation. The only dim thing in the truck is the driver, and with the peg of illicit arrack (alcohol) he has had at the last stop, his total cerebral functions add up to little more than a naught.
Truck drivers are the James Bonds of India, and are licensed to kill. Often you may encounter a single powerful beam of light about six feet above the ground. This is not a super motorbike, but a truck approaching you with a single light on, usually the left one. It could be the right one, but never get too close to investigate. You may prove your point posthumously. Of course, all this occurs at night, on the trunk roads.
During the daytime, trucks are more visible, except that the drivers will never show any Signal. (And you must watch for the absent signals; they are the greater threat). Only, you will often observe that the cleaner who sits next to the driver, will project his hand and wave hysterically.

This is definitely not to be construed as a signal for a left turn. The waving is just a statement of physical relief on a hot day.

If, after all this, you still want to drive in India, have your lessons between 8 pm and 11 am-when the police have gone home and The citizen is then free to enjoy the 'FREEDOM OF SPEED' enshrined in our constitution.

Having said all this, isn't it true that the accident rate and related deaths are less in India compared to US or other countries!!?

Premarital sex or Live in relationships no offence-Supreme Court

2010-03-23T19:37:00.000-07:00

In a slap in the face of so called moralists of the society the Supreme Court of India ruled that pre marital sex and Live in relationships constituted no offence.

“When two adults want to live together, what is the offence? Does it amount to an offence? Living together is not an offence. It cannot be an offence,” Chief Justice of India K.G. Balakrishnan, heading a three-judge bench, said, hearing petitions against Tamil actress Khusboo. The actress had said in a magazine that pre-marital sex was fine. ( I think the complainants were sore since she did not have designs on them).

Even Lord Krishna and Radha lived together according to mythology, the judges pointed out, adding no law prohibited either pre-marital sex or live-in relationships. “Please tell us what is the offence and under which section? Living together is part of right to life given in the Constitution,” the bench said.

The argument of the counsel was that her comments allegedly endorsing pre-marital sex would adversely affect the minds of young people leading to decay in moral values and country's ethos.

"Please tell us what is the offence and under which section. Living together is a right to life," the apex court said apparently referring to Article 21 which granted Right to Life and Liberty as a Fundamental Right.

The apex court further said the views expressed by Ms. Khusboo were personal.

"How does it concern you? We are not bothered. At the most it is a personal view. How is it an offence? Under which provision of the law?" the bench asked the counsel.

The apex court further asked the complainants to produce evidence to show if any girls eloped from their homes after the said interview.

"How many homes have been affected can you tell us," the Bench asked while enquiring whether the complainants had daughters. When the response was in the negative, they shot back, "Then, how are you adversely affected?"

The judges said activities perceived to be immoral by sections of society could not be branded an “offence”, trying to make a distinction between the two concepts.

Ms. Khusboo had approached the apex court after the Madras High Court in 2008 dismissed her plea for quashing the criminal cases filed against her throughout Tamil Nadu.

Actress Ranjitha and Swami Nityanand clarify

2010-03-16T04:45:00.000-07:00

In an interview to a TV channel in Haridwar on Saturday Swami Nithyananda Paramahamsa claimed that he was in a trance when the sleaze video was being recorded. He neither denied nor confirmed that it was him on the tape.

Tamil actress Ranjitha, who went into hiding after being caught on camera while indulging in sexual acts with Swami Nityananda, finally come to fore too. Clearing her stand, she justified her acts by saying that she was just giving her offerings (some offerings man) to the god man.

The 33-year-old god man said he was ''in a state of samadhi (trance)'' when the video, showing him in a compromising position with an actress, was taken. (Man i would be in a trance too if an actress was friggin me). He said, the video has been ''misinterpreted, morphed and manipulated.'' He alleged that the media onslaught on him was without any basis and that he was being held guilty without a trial.

Transcript of the interview: Was that you in the sleaze tape?

There's a lot of misinterpretation, manipulation and morphing. Now, we are working to find out which part was recorded and which was manipulated. When that video was taken, I was in a state of trance. My personal life has been misrepresented and my privacy has been invaded. Media has even taken pictures of me when I am changing my clothes after a bath. This has been done to defame me.

It is being said that the tape was taken in December 2009? Were you sick then?

I was sick for a very long time. Consciously, I was in a samadhi... physically I was not well. Some of the things have been misinterpreted by the onlookers. Or rather it has been misinterpreted by those who wanted to do it.

Has life changed for you in the last two weeks?

In the thirty-three years of my life I have seen fame. I was the most watched guru on YouTube. Now, in the last few days I have been the most watched scandal. Both have taught me many things about life. But what shocked me most is the thought that there is so much enmity against me. The good thing from all this is I am getting millions of emails, phone calls and a flood of support from people who are not even my devotees. My disciples are feeling so bad that someone's private life has been misinterpreted and abused.
Was the actress in your ashram then?

She has been serving me for a very long time. She was volunteering to take care of me when I was sick. All her family members have been my devotees. There is no denying that she is a devotee.

Do you think it's because of stand-off with people in power?

I don't have any political ambition. I did not fight with anybody. I don't want to disrespect anyone.

Good luck swamiji. May you find your foothold, ashram, nirvana and the actress again. OM!

Swami Nityanand spam

2010-03-15T11:45:00.000-07:00

This is the best chain mail message I received till date :}

Om Nityananda swamiye namaha..........send this to 25 people. You ll get to bed an actress within one week....

One man broke the chain...He now goes to bed with his wife.

Swami Nityananda’s sex scandal video

2010-03-03T19:00:00.000-08:00

After Kalki Bhagavan’s scam, Swami Nityananda’s sex scandal video has surfaced shaking the devotees faith in the religious leaders and god-men, who are treated equivalent to gods by followers. Don't make me say I told you so, but I did tell you bozos so!

The video shows Swami Nityananda and two actress Ranjitha and Ragasudha (The actresses name seems to have been added to make the news spicey, there is no confirmation on this) which are supposed to be parts of sex scandals by the Nityananda.

A video showing swamiji (we still like to add ji suffix to the name of the fun loving exalted swami as it might hurt the sentiments of fun loving people) in compromising position (compromising is putting it lightly, swami was having fun dude) with a popular Tamil actress was released by Sun News on Tuesday, Mar 2, leading to violence at the Swamiji’s ashrams.

There is doubt about the man in the video is Swami Nityanand but there is speculation as to the identity of the woman in the video. While some speculate that the actress in the video is Ragasudha, others suggest that the woman is Tamil actress Ranjita.

The video, which came as a massive shock to the godman’s followers (because he was having all the fun alone. While he made them just sit and meditate he got masturbated), has led to widespread protests (understandable when one person has all the goodies). In Coimbatore, angry followers took to streets and vandalised property,the Swami’s Ashram in Bidadi is also seeing similar scenes.

Paramahamsa Nithyananda is (WAS) a spiritual guru. He was born on January 1, 1978 in Tamil Nadu, India. He is the founder of Dhyanapeetam, a worldwide movement. The foundation has its headquarters in Bengaluru (Bangalore),India.

In 2007, he was elected chairman of the Hindu University of America, also known as the International Vedic Hindu University, an institution in the U.S. state of Florida. I wonder if they will sack him now or hire a new chairman.

Life Bliss Foundation is Nithyananda's movement (although the video shows swami enjoyed other kind of movements as well). Established in 2003, it now consists of over 1000 centers in 33 different countries. The foundation also owns Nithyananda Meditation Academies (NMAs) worldwide.

For all those looking for spiritual enlightenment I can only suggest the following: Do not follow Swami's and Godmen, Dude become a Swami or godman and con people and make money and generally have a good time.

Kalki Bhagavan and Amma Bhagawan Fraud

2010-03-03T18:48:00.000-08:00

The gods in heaven must be smiling at the leela of their avatar's on planet earth but the followers of these self proclaimed swamis are not a happy lot. In fact most of them have got that sheepish look on their faces.

Down south the Telugu News Channel are tripping over one another exposing the so called divine swamis. First one off the blocks is Kalki Bhagavan scam or Kalki Bhagavan and Amma Bhagawan Fraud.

TV9 has aired live programs in which Vijay Kumar Naidu alias Kalki Bhagavan and Amma Bhagawan are being targeted. The allegations of land grabbing, drugs, sexual escapades are making strong rounds in the ashram.

Sri Kalki Bhagavan alias Vijay Kumar was born in Arcot district, Tamil Nadu, and at various times has also used names such as Mukteshwarand Sri Bhagavan.

Bhagavan and Amma claim to be two divine beings, or Avatars. They reside at Golden City, near Chennai, in India. Their stated mission is to bring all of humanity into the Golden Age. (They had made a good start by reaching the golden state of living by fleecing people themselves)

They claim that they will fully enlighten 64,000 people in the world. These people in a highly enlightened state of communion would transform the rest of the humanity by 2012. (Talk about chain reaction and pyramid marketing. I thought that was illegal, but who cares!)

According to them, this state of enlightenment is offered to seekers through a process known as deeksha (in other words open your wallet dumbos), which is a transfer of divine energy ( to the devotee and money to the bhagwan... fair transfer) that is said to be so powerful it has the ability to break through the concepts and conditioning of our mind .

According to an ex-devotee for the darshan of Amma’s padam the devotees pay 5000 Rupees and for Special Darshan 25,000 Rupees, They took 60,000 Rupees from each devotee for Homam. ( you can touch my feet for free if you can bear the smell and I too have god in me or so I was told..lol)

And for Foreigners (ah! how could they forget the cash cows of foreign lands who are looking for nirvana) they have 21 days package. And each devotee should pay entry fees. With the name of Amma Pooja the Kalki trust collected 240 Crores. Kalki trust is running 9 businesses, one of them is Real Estate which is running by Bhagvan’s son he earned nearly 3,000 crores with the company.

Another swami scam to follow soon. Keep up dudes.

Mona Chopra MMS Scandal

2010-02-15T04:58:00.000-08:00

Mona Chopra who began her film career with the movie 'Time Pass', has been the latest victim of an MMS scandal. Her other movies are 'Naughty Boy' and 'Red Swastika.

A nude MMS of Mona Chopra has been in circulation for the last few months but the authenticity of the Mona Chopra mms is in doubt. The actress has seen the MMS but is not sure about the woman in the video.

Speaking on the issue Mona Chopra said that she undresses herself so many times during shooting for costume changes that it is difficult to pinpoint when the said mms might have been filmed. It is possible that someone secretly placed a camera in her dressing room and filmed her in the nude.

Mona called the act a serious breach of her privacy and wants that the culprits should be punished. Mona Chopra is planning to take legal advice from her lawyer on the dare-bare act featuring her in a video that has circulated all over through MMS.

In the said MMS Mona Chopra (or someone) is seen changing her clothes during a movie shoot and is topless.

Yes I am planning a legal action this is something below the belt and cannot be ignored. Today it is me tomorrow it could be someone else. Such perverts should not have a field day, the actress said.

It might just be a publicity stunt or some voyeur's dirty handiwork but the topless MMS clip of Mona Chopra has created quite a flutter.

In case you are really curious check out the following link to take a look :

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/99070/mona_chopra_mms_scandal/

What they say what they mean

2010-02-12T23:13:00.000-08:00

Dictionary

WOMEN’S ENGLISH:

1. Yes = No
2. No = Yes
3. Maybe = No
4. We need = I want
5. I am sorry = you’ll be sorry
6. We need to talk = You’re in trouble
7. Sure, go ahead = You better not
8. Do what you want = You will pay for this later
9. I am not upset = Of course I am upset, you moron!
10. You’re certainly attentive tonight = Is sex all you ever think about?

---

MEN’S ENGLISH:

1. I am hungry = I am hungry
2. I am sleepy = I am sleepy
3. I am tired = I am tired
4. Nice dress = Nice cleavage!
5. I love you = Let’s have sex now
6. I am bored = Do you want to have sex?
7. May I have this dance? = I’d like to have sex with you
8. Can I call you sometime? = I’d like to have sex with you
9. Do you want to go to a movie? = I’d like to have sex with you
10. Can I take you out to dinner? = I’d like to have sex with you

Women in Uniform

2010-02-12T22:53:00.001-08:00

Women are in step, if not ahead, of men in most areas. Finally the last male bastion of fighting forces has been invaded by women. Do men mind, hmmm I think not. So here is a quick look at women from all over the world in the uniform...Some are more dangerous than others...

The Russian Army

The US Army

The Indian Army

The Brazilian Army

The Chinese Army

The Korean Army

The Israeli Army

And Last but not the least.....

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
The Pakistani Army

Boys will be BOYZZZ

2010-02-12T22:21:00.000-08:00

Ever Wondered why your folks were so hard on you or why your grandparents chose to move to a retirement home away from you!! Well the following is just a glimpse into some of the reasons
why boys will be boys :

One Liners

2009-12-05T17:31:00.000-08:00

Q: What did the lonely banana say?
A: I'm a"kela".

Q: What did the green peas say?
A: Nothing. They just "mutter"ed.

Q: What did the potato say when it answered the phone ?
A: "Aaloo?"

Q: Where do cauliflowers hang out?
A: In the Gobi desert.

Q: What did the flower say to its girl-friend?
A: Why do phools fall in love?

Q: What did the fat car say?
A: I'm a mota car.

Q: What did the confused egg say?
A: I don't unda-stand.

Q: Where do earrings go on holiday?
A: Bali

Q: What do shrimps sing on Christmas?
A: Jhinga Bells.

Q: What did the half eaten naan say?
A: I wish I was puri.

Q: What did the lonely potato sing?
A: "Aaloo lonesome tonight?"

Q: What language do carrots speak?
A: Gajar-ati.

Q: What do you call a bald poet?
A: Ik-bal.

Q: What did the first pizza slice say to the other pizza slice so it
would move?
A: Pizza - "HUT"

The Cruelest Tattoo Known To Man

2009-10-06T18:49:00.000-07:00

We all know that it can be painful to get tattooed. But here is a Tattoo which is painful to guys who look at it because of where she got it tattooed and what it says.

The tattoo read:
YOU MUST BE AT LEAST THIS TALL TO ENJOY THIS RIDE

How to make a Woman happy !

2009-10-06T18:39:00.000-07:00

It's not difficult to make a woman happy. A man only needs to be:

1. a friend
2. a companion
3. a lover
4. a brother
5. a father
6.. a master
7. a chef
8. an electrician
9. a carpenter
10. a plumber
11. a mechanic
12. a decorator
13. a stylist
14. a phsiotherapist
15. a gynaecologist
16. a psychologist
17. a pest exterminator
18. a psychiatrist
19. a healer
20. a good listener
21. an organizer
22. a good father
23. very clean
24.. sympathetic
25. athletic
26. warm
27. attentive
28. gallant
29. intelligent
30. funny
31. creative
32. tender
33. strong
34. understanding
35. tolerant
36. prudent
37. ambitious
38. capable
39. courageous
40. determined
41. true
42. dependable
43. passionate
44. compassionate

WITHOUT FORGETTING TO:

45. give her compliments regularly
46. love shopping
47. be honest
48. be very rich
49. not stress her out
50. not look at other girls

AND AT THE SAME TIME, YOU MUST ALSO:

51. give her lots of attention, but expect little yourself
52. give her lots of time, especially time for herself
53. give her lots of space, never worrying about where she goes

IT IS VERY IMPORTANT:

54. Never to forget:
* birthdays
* anniversaries
* arrangements she makes

HOW TO MAKE A MAN HAPPY:

Hmmm... I know what you are thinking. Yes a BJ will do :)

Who Was Jesus !

2009-10-06T18:25:00.000-07:00

Three Proofs of Jesus ...

THREE PROOFS THAT JESUS WAS JEWISH:
1. He went into his father’s business
2. He lived at home until the age of 33
3. He was sure his mother was a virgin, and his mother was sure he was God

THREE PROOFS THAT JESUS WAS IRISH:
1. He never got married
2. He never held a steady job
3. His last request was a drink

THREE PROOFS THAT JESUS WAS PUERTO RICAN:
1.His first name was Jesus
2.He was always in trouble with the law
3.His mother did not know who his father was

THREE PROOFS THAT JESUS WAS ITALIAN:
1. He talked with his hands
2. He had wine with every meal
3. He worked in the building trades

THREE PROOFS THAT JESUS WAS BLACK:
1. He called everybody brother
2. He had no permanent address
3. Nobody would hire him

THREE PROOFS THAT JESUS WAS CALIFORNIAN:
1. He never cut his hair
2. He walked around barefoot
3. He invented a new religion

THREE PROOFS THAT JESUS WAS A REDNECK:
1. He was always talking to sleazy women
2. He was always hanging around his buddies telling fish stories
3. Everybody crucified him

Mandira Bedi Maxims and Fashion Show pictures

2009-09-14T21:49:00.000-07:00

Of course you remember Mandira Bedi the spaghetti strapped cricket hostess on TV. Viewers thought she looked hot in those saris. Many non cricket fans were there to watch Mandira Bedi host the show. The lady has moved on from those spaghetti strap days to much more daring picture shoots and skin show.

Many wonder if she really needed to do this as her image as a classy dame was well established. Infact she herself is reporeted to have said that she is not very sure if she should have done the Maxim's cover shoot. Personally I thought Madira Bedi's Maixm pictures were brealy all right. Nothing much to write home about. Yes, she looked good and hot but it was pretty tasteful.

That was untill her recent disaster at the Kolkata Fashion week. The usually well turned out Mandira Bedi stepped out draped in a black embroidered zari Satya Paul sari and a low-cut (and when we say low-cut we mean real low-cut) blouse. The blouse was ill fitted with her bust literaly falling out. Most people present thought that Mandira Bedi was not the right choice to model the sari.

We are wondering why she has to go on wearing less and less clothes (not that we mind) ? Is Mandira really so desperate for work that she has to show it all for work?

Sheetal Mafatlal Arrested, Jailed

2009-06-08T05:19:00.000-07:00

Sheetal Mafatlal, a socialite and president of Mafatlal Luxury(Ghar ki Dukan) was arrested on Monday for carrying undisclosed jewelery and diamonds worth several lakhs of rupees. Mafatla has been sent to judicial custody till June 12.

Sheetal Mafatlal was detained on Sunday when she landed at the Chhatrapati Shivaji International airport. The Customs officials searched the socialite at the airport on specific information and recovered undisclosed jewellery estimated to be between Rs 53 lakh and one crore from her bag.(This will embarrass Sheetal Mafatlal,because 1 crore is too less in the circles she moves.)

Exact value of the recovered ornaments is yet to be ascertained.(this is ray of hope for Sheetal, She should claim it to be worth 10 crore to save face..errr but that could sent her to jail for a long time. What a paradox!)

Mafatlal, who arrived in a British Airways flight was detained for declaring the jewelry worth Rs 1 cr. as mere Rs 30 lakhs.(are you sure it was not the other way around?)
Meanwhile, Mafatlal’s lawyer has said that that the arrest has been done at the instance of some "disgruntled opponent"(does this mean the jewellery charge was fabricated by the customs?) of Atulya, her husband and scion of Mafatlal industries. “Sheetal was arrested on Saturday night when she was returning from London after the police was tipped by some disgruntled opponent(might as well have blames it on Pakistan and ISI, two birds with one stone) of the Mafatlal family and industry,” Lawyer claimed outside the Esplenade court in Mumbai where Sheetal will be produced.

Sheetal had 51 items in her possession including bangles, chains and rings and the most valuable jewelery was worth Rs 2.5 lakh, he said adding that he would file a bail application. “The jewelery was given to her by her father-in-law and was used ones. According to a Supreme Court ruling, if the value of the gold is less than Rs one crore and the duty is less than Rs 30 lakh then the offence is bailable,” he said. (lawyer ki to ban gayi yaro. 10 lakh fees to hogi hi)

All we can do is pray that the mosquitos don't faint after biting her in jail and prisoners do not choke on her perfume odour.

As for Sheetal Mafatlal, one lucky dame, now she will regale people at those Page 3 parties with her jail escapade. What an adventure man.

Indo Canadian MP Ruby Dhalla in hot Movie

2009-03-14T22:17:00.000-07:00

Who is the sexiest Indian Politician in the world? Well not Sonia Gandhi for sure. Indian-Canadian MP Ruby Dhalla is listed as the third sexiest women politicians in the world by Maxim magazine. Dhalla and British Columbia Conservative MP Nina Grewal are the first Sikh women to serve in the Canadian House of Commons.

Ruby Dhalla was an aspiring bollywood actress before she jumped into politics. She acted in a lead role in the film “Kyon Kis Liye” made in Canada. Dhalla is shown in some hot steamy scenes in the movie Kyon Kis Liye with the film’s producer and co-star Charanjit Sihra.

The 35-year-old Doctor of Chiropractic Medicine, Dhalla says the scenes in the film, and distribution posters for DVDs have been “doctored” to malign her.

The film is based on the local Sukhinder Dhillon murder case in which the wife was poisoned by her husband to collect insurance money . Kyon Kis Liye was released in India and Canada without much success. But the present controvery might rake in the moolah for the producer with sale of DVD's of Kyon Kis Liye picking up.

But Dhalla has mounted a legal challenge to stop it. A 1993 Miss IndiaCanada runner-up, Dhalla claims she is being misrepresented through objectionable scenes. “...they put my face on someone else’s body , in clothes I never wore,” she told local daily Toronto Sun.

“I have worked extremely hard to get to where I am and will not be exploited by individuals.” But producer and co-star Charanjit Sihra, who owns a body shop in Hamilton, said Dhalla had given her consent in writing for the distribution of the film DVDs.

The movie producer said there was “nothing sexual” in the film (just too bad). “Her mother was there every day (during the shooting of the film)... there is no nudity, or sex(Yikes! whats all the fuss about dude),” he said.

He said, "She wanted to be in Bollywood films...she had a passion for the movie, but she's a politician now and doesn't want the DVD of the film released.'' Sihra said he had first met Dhalla in 1993 after she became a runner-up in the Miss Canada-India beauty contest.

Well we would certainly like to watch the objectionable nude and steamy scenes from movie Kyon Kis Liye. Post the link to the Video of Kyon Kis Liye please.

Just in case you are wondering who is the sexiest woman politician in the world here is a picture of Mara Carfagna, an Italian . Mara Carfagna is a Member of Chamber of Deputies (Campania 2), Minister for Equal Opportunity (Brings a smile to your face,does't it!)

Don't we deserve some hot looking politician like her!!! I mean look at the cut outs of Adavani, Manmohan Sigh, Mayawati, Jayalalitha, Lalu Parsad....We must be voting for the wrong kinda people here. And if we had to have an imported Italian politician why couldn't we get someone like Mara Carfagna. Jago India Jago.

Slumdog Millionaire bags 8 Oscars at the 81st Academy Awards

2009-02-22T21:05:00.000-08:00

The 81st Oscars winners list is finally out. Slumdog millionaire swept the Oscars winning eight Academy Awards in total. A.R. Rehman bagged two Oscars for Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original score) and Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original song). This was a proud moment for Indian artists and technicians who participated in the making of Slumdog Millionaire.

A.R.Rehman made history when he became the first Indian to win an Oscar. The following is the complete list of all the nominees and winners of the 81st Oscars. The winner of the Oscar is in highlighted in red italics.

Nominees & Winners for the 81st Academy Awards

Performance by an actor in a leading role

* Richard Jenkins in “The Visitor” (Overture Films)
* Frank Langella in “Frost/Nixon” (Universal)
* Sean Penn in “Milk” (Focus Features)
* Brad Pitt in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.)
* Mickey Rourke in “The Wrestler” (Fox Searchlight)

Performance by an actor in a supporting role

* Josh Brolin in “Milk” (Focus Features)

* Robert Downey Jr. in “Tropic Thunder” (DreamWorks, Distributed by DreamWorks/Paramount)

* Philip Seymour Hoffman in “Doubt” (Miramax)
* Heath Ledger in “The Dark Knight” (Warner Bros.)
* Michael Shannon in “Revolutionary Road” (DreamWorks, Distributed by Paramount Vantage)

Performance by an actress in a leading role

* Anne Hathaway in “Rachel Getting Married” (Sony Pictures Classics)
* Angelina Jolie in “Changeling” (Universal)
* Melissa Leo in “Frozen River” (Sony Pictures Classics)
* Meryl Streep in “Doubt” (Miramax)
* Kate Winslet in “The Reader” (The Weinstein Company)

Performance by an actress in a supporting role

* Amy Adams in “Doubt” (Miramax)
* Penélope Cruz in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” (The Weinstein Company)
* Viola Davis in “Doubt” (Miramax)
* Taraji P. Henson in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.)
* Marisa Tomei in “The Wrestler” (Fox Searchlight)

Best animated feature film of the year

* “Bolt” (Walt Disney), Chris Williams and Byron Howard
* “Kung Fu Panda” (DreamWorks Animation, Distributed by Paramount), John Stevenson and Mark Osborne
* “WALL-E” (Walt Disney), Andrew Stanton

Achievement in art direction

* “Changeling” (Universal), Art Direction: James J. Murakami, Set Decoration: Gary Fettis
* “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Art Direction: Donald Graham Burt, Set Decoration: Victor J. Zolfo
* “The Dark Knight” (Warner Bros.), Art Direction: Nathan Crowley, Set Decoration: Peter Lando
* “The Duchess” (Paramount Vantage, Pathé and BBC Films), Art Direction: Michael Carlin, Set Decoration: Rebecca Alleway
* “Revolutionary Road” (DreamWorks, Distributed by Paramount Vantage), Art Direction: Kristi Zea, Set Decoration: Debra Schutt

Achievement in cinematography

* “Changeling” (Universal), Tom Stern
* “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Claudio Miranda
* “The Dark Knight” (Warner Bros.), Wally Pfister
* “The Reader” (The Weinstein Company), Chris Menges and Roger Deakins
* “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), Anthony Dod Mantle

Achievement in costume design

* “Australia” (20th Century Fox), Catherine Martin
* “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Jacqueline West
* “The Duchess” (Paramount Vantage, Pathé and BBC Films), Michael O’Connor
* “Milk” (Focus Features), Danny Glicker
* “Revolutionary Road” (DreamWorks, Distributed by Paramount Vantage), Albert Wolsky

Achievement in directing

* “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), David Fincher
* “Frost/Nixon” (Universal), Ron Howard
* “Milk” (Focus Features), Gus Van Sant
* “The Reader” (The Weinstein Company), Stephen Daldry
* “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), Danny Boyle

Best documentary feature

* “The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)” (Cinema Guild), A Pandinlao Films Production, Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath
* “Encounters at the End of the World” (THINKFilm and Image Entertainment), A Creative Differences Production, Werner Herzog and Henry Kaiser
* “The Garden” A Black Valley Films Production, Scott Hamilton Kennedy
* “Man on Wire” (Magnolia Pictures), A Wall to Wall in association with Red Box Films Production, James Marsh and Simon Chinn
* “Trouble the Water” (Zeitgeist Films), An Elsewhere Films Production, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal

Best documentary short subject

* “The Conscience of Nhem En” A Farallon Films Production, Steven Okazaki
* “The Final Inch” Vermilion Films in association with Google.org, Irene Taylor Brodsky and Tom Grant
* “Smile Pinki” A Principe Production, Megan Mylan
* “The Witness - From the Balcony of Room 306” A Rock Paper Scissors Production, Adam Pertofsky and Margaret Hyde

Achievement in film editing

* “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall
* “The Dark Knight” (Warner Bros.), Lee Smith
* “Frost/Nixon” (Universal), Mike Hill and Dan Hanley
* “Milk” (Focus Features), Elliot Graham
* “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), Chris Dickens

Best foreign language film of the year

* “The Baader Meinhof Complex” A Constantin Film Production, Germany
* “The Class” (Sony Pictures Classics), A Haut et Court Production, France
* “Departures” (Regent Releasing), A Departures Film Partners Production, Japan
* “Revanche” (Janus Films), A Prisma Film/Fernseh Production, Austria
* “Waltz with Bashir” (Sony Pictures Classics), A Bridgit Folman Film Gang Production, Israel

Achievement in makeup

* “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Greg Cannom
* “The Dark Knight” (Warner Bros.), John Caglione, Jr. and Conor O’Sullivan
* “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” (Universal), Mike Elizalde and Thom Floutz

Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original score)

* “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Alexandre Desplat
* “Defiance” (Paramount Vantage), James Newton Howard
* “Milk” (Focus Features), Danny Elfman
* “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), A.R. Rahman
* “WALL-E” (Walt Disney), Thomas Newman

Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original song)

* “Down to Earth” from “WALL-E” (Walt Disney), Music by Peter Gabriel and Thomas Newman, Lyric by Peter Gabriel
* “Jai Ho” from “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), Music by A.R. Rahman, Lyric by Gulzar
* “O Saya” from “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), Music and Lyric by A.R. Rahman and Maya Arulpragasam

Best motion picture of the year

* “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), A Kennedy/Marshall Production, Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall and Ceán Chaffin, Producers
* “Frost/Nixon” (Universal), A Universal Pictures, Imagine Entertainment and Working Title Production, Brian Grazer, Ron Howard and Eric Fellner, Producers
* “Milk” (Focus Features), A Groundswell and Jinks/Cohen Company Production, Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen, Producers
* “The Reader” (The Weinstein Company), A Mirage Enterprises and Neunte Babelsberg Film GmbH Production, Anthony Minghella, Sydney Pollack, Donna Gigliotti and Redmond Morris, Producers
* “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), A Celador Films Production, Christian Colson, Producer

Best animated short film

* “La Maison en Petits Cubes” A Robot Communications Production, Kunio Kato
* “Lavatory - Lovestory” A Melnitsa Animation Studio and CTB Film Company Production, Konstantin Bronzit
* “Oktapodi” (Talantis Films), A Gobelins, L’école de l’image Production, Emud Mokhberi and Thierry Marchand
* “Presto” (Walt Disney), A Pixar Animation Studios Production, Doug Sweetland
* “This Way Up” A Nexus Production, Alan Smith and Adam Foulkes

Best live action short film

* “Auf der Strecke (On the Line)” (Hamburg Shortfilmagency), An Academy of Media Arts Cologne Production, Reto Caffi
* “Manon on the Asphalt” (La Luna Productions), A La Luna Production, Elizabeth Marre and Olivier Pont
* “New Boy” (Network Ireland Television), A Zanzibar Films Production, Steph Green and Tamara Anghie
* “The Pig” An M & M Production, Tivi Magnusson and Dorte Høgh
* “Spielzeugland (Toyland)” A Mephisto Film Production, Jochen Alexander Freydank

Achievement in sound editing

* “The Dark Knight” (Warner Bros.), Richard King
* “Iron Man” (Paramount and Marvel Entertainment), Frank Eulner and Christopher Boyes
* “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), Glenn Freemantle and Tom Sayers
* “WALL-E” (Walt Disney), Ben Burtt and Matthew Wood
* “Wanted” (Universal), Wylie Stateman

Achievement in sound mixing

* “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), David Parker, Michael Semanick, Ren Klyce and Mark Weingarten
* “The Dark Knight” (Warner Bros.), Lora Hirschberg, Gary Rizzo and Ed Novick
* “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), Ian Tapp, Richard Pryke and Resul Pookutty
* “WALL-E” (Walt Disney), Tom Myers, Michael Semanick and Ben Burtt
* “Wanted” (Universal), Chris Jenkins, Frank A. Montaño and Petr Forejt

Achievement in visual effects

* “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Eric Barba, Steve Preeg, Burt Dalton and Craig Barron
* “The Dark Knight” (Warner Bros.), Nick Davis, Chris Corbould, Tim Webber and Paul Franklin
* “Iron Man” (Paramount and Marvel Entertainment), John Nelson, Ben Snow, Dan Sudick and Shane Mahan

Adapted screenplay

* “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Screenplay by Eric Roth, Screen story by Eric Roth and Robin Swicord
* “Doubt” (Miramax), Written by John Patrick Shanley
* “Frost/Nixon” (Universal), Screenplay by Peter Morgan
* “The Reader” (The Weinstein Company), Screenplay by David Hare
* “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), Screenplay by Simon Beaufoy

Original screenplay

* “Frozen River” (Sony Pictures Classics), Written by Courtney Hunt
* “Happy-Go-Lucky” (Miramax), Written by Mike Leigh
* “In Bruges” (Focus Features), Written by Martin McDonagh
* “Milk” (Focus Features), Written by Dustin Lance Black
* “WALL-E” (Walt Disney), Screenplay by Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon, Original story by Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter

Noida MMS Scandal video link

2009-02-19T22:09:00.000-08:00

Here is another MMS scandal from Noida that has hit the net. The Noida MMS clip showing a girl doing a striptease was circulated by her estranged boyfriend. She had turned down his marriage proposal.

I do feel bad for the people involved in this episode, specially the the girl and her family and friends. I feel this is very unfair on part of the boyfriend who circulated the Noida MMS among his friends and finally on the net. This is backstabbing at its worst.

Relationships break and go through rough patches, but that does not mean that one should make public anything that once was given to you in confidence and trust. I wish some girls would make Nude MMS of guys and circulate them but then two things come to my mind:

1. No one would be interested in watching those Nude MMSes

2. Girls usually do not stoop this low as for them a nude video or MMS clip of a guy is no conquest. Where as guys love to flaunt their score with females foolishly without even thinking about the consequences of such act for the girl. It is a shame.

The guy shot some pictures of the girl and then he hacked into the girl's mail account and sent off the video clips, making it appear that she was sending them.

The girl alleged the two families had been friends for long, to the point that the boy's family wanted the girl's hand in marriage when she was much younger. "My father did not say yes but insisted that we complete our studies first. Later, the boy became increasingly insecure about me. Then he insisted I marry him,'' the girl said.

The girl said that she turned him down as he had shown scant regard for her when her father was seriously ill for two months.

From the clips it is obvious that girl willingly posed for the video, although that does not give the boy any right to make them public. But i do feel that girls need to be more aware of getting themselves clicked in the nude by their boy pals as we get hit by one MMS scanadal after another.

Although there is nothing much scandalous in these Noida MMSes but still they can ruin the reputation of a girl. What we do in private should remain so.

I hope that girls and guys are aware that even when they delete sexy or nude pictures or MMSes from the phone these can still be retireved and eventually made public.

So be aware and be warned, there are plenty of other ways to have fun than getting yourself shot in the nude.

The Noida MMS and the other Nude mmses on the net are a fair warning to everyone who thinks they are safe.

I do not host such MMS on my site but there are links that you can follow to watch such and other MMS on the net.

P.S. sorry guys! I have removed the links to the Noida MMS scandal because I didn't feel too good about posting the links to the MMS. Post in comments and someone might still give you the link to the Noida and other scandal MMS sites.

Shoe thrown on President Bush

2008-12-15T08:45:00.000-08:00

An Iraqi journalist threw a shoe at US President George W Bush at a Baghdad news conference.

The Iraqi TV reporter who threw his shoes at President Bush during a news conference remained in custody Monday, while judicial officials decided whether to charge him with assault. Muntadhar al-Zaidi, a reporter for the TV channel Al-Baghdadia, faced testing for alcohol and drugs to determine his state of mind, said a government official, who requested anonymity.

At Sunday's news conference, the journalist whipped off his shoes and hurled them at Bush during the president's unannounced stop in Baghdad. The reporter called his shoe-throwing, a traditional insult in Arab culture, a "farewell kiss" to a "dog" who launched the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Bush swiftly ducked the shoe missile and later told reporters aboard Air Force One that the "bizarre" incident was not a sign of popular opinion in Iraq.

Watch the Video of shoe thrown at Bush:

Miss World 2008 winner from Russia

2008-12-15T06:29:00.000-08:00

Kseniya Sukhinova was crowned the 58th Miss World on Saturday. The 21-year-old blue-eyed blonde beauty, who is pursuing an engineering degree, was crowned Miss World 2008 in an extravagant African-themed pageant held in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The second runner up was Gabrielle Walcott of Trinidad and Tobago and the first runner up Parvathay Omanakuttan of India. The other two finalists were South Africa and Angola.

She said her immediate ambitions included meeting Russia's president, and that she planned to return soon to her studies at the Tyumen Oil and Gas University in her home region of northwestern Siberia.

"I am so happy to be here," Kseniya Sukhinova said of South Africa, which was hosting its sixth Miss World final. "I am so excited. It's amazing."

Sukhinova, who in a biography on the Miss World website listed becoming a supermodel as a goal, also had won the contest's top model award and was third in the swimsuit competition. She was a crowd favourite - though not as popular as hometown beauty Miss South Africa, Tansey Coetzee. Coetzee made the final five.

Miss World 2008 Bathing Suit Contest:

The winners of the Miss World bathing suit contest: Miss South Africa, Tansey Coetzee won third place; Miss Mexico, Anagabriela Espinoza won first place and Miss Russia, Kseniya Sukhinova won second place in Miss World 2008 Swim Suit competition in Durban, South Africa.

Miss India in swim suit contest

Winners of Miss World 2008 Bathing Suit Contest

Miss World 2008 Bikini parade.

Miss Venezuela, Hannely Quintero Ledezma, parades before the judges in the 2008 Miss World bathing suit contest in Durban.

Laura Bush killed a guy in car accident

2008-12-07T22:20:00.000-08:00

In May 2000, a two-page police report pertaining to a fatal accident that had taken place near Midland, Texas, in 1963 was made public, according to which Laura Bush killed a guy in a car accident.

According to a public police report, Laura Bush (then known as Laura Welch) was involved in a fatal car accident in 1963. According to the report, Laura Welch allegedly had been driving when her car passed a stop sign and struck a sedan driven by 17-year-old named Michael Douglas. No charges were filed as a result of the accident. There was another female teenage passenger in Laura (Bush)Welch’s car.

News reports stated that Michael Douglas died after suffering a broken neck in the car accident with Laura Bush. He was pronounced dead on arrival at Midland Memorial Hospital.

There have been numerous rumors over the years regarding Laura Welch’s conduct at the time and whether she was at fault for the accident. Some have insinuated that Laura Welch was criminally negligent and/or she had been drinking. However, no lawsuits or charges were ever filed. There is no evidence of wrongdoing on her part.

Laura Welch was taken to the hospital after the accident and treated for minor injuries. Michael Douglas was a star athlete at Laura Welch’s high school. According to news reports, he was very popular among his peers.

''It was a very tragic accident that deeply affected the families and was very painful for all involved, including the community at large,'' said Mrs. Bush's spokesman, Andrew Malcolm. ''To this day, Mrs. Bush remains unable to talk about it.''

Laura Bush, asked at a campaign stop about the crash said, ''I know this as an adult, and even more as a parent, it was crushing ... for the family involved and for me as well.''

There had been published accounts of the accident, but city officials had declined to release the records because those involved were under 18. The police report was released in response to an open-records request that was submitted to Midland officials in March.

According to the two-page accident report, Laura (Bush) Welch was driving her Chevrolet sedan on a clear night shortly after 8 p.m. on Nov. 6, 1963, when she drove into an intersection and struck a Corvair sedan driven by 17-year-old Michael Douglas.

Although previous news accounts have reported Douglas was thrown from the car and broke his neck, those details were not in the report.

The speed of Laura Bush's car was illegible on the report. The speed limit for the road was 55.

Laura Bush and her passenger, Judy Dykes, also 17, were taken to a hospital and treated for minor injuries, according to an accident account printed at the time in the Midland Reporter-Telegram.

O.J. Simpson trial and sentence

2008-12-07T07:27:00.000-08:00

O J Simpson who was acquitted of double murder in 1995 was sentenced Friday to up to 33 years in prison for robbing two memorabilia dealers.

He will not be eligible for parole before 2017 and that means atleast nine years behind the bars.

Simpson delivered a tearful five-minute apology to a packed courtroom. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry for all of it," Simpson said.

Simpson, 61, told the judge that he went to a down-market Las Vegas hotel on Sept. 13, 2007, to recover family heirlooms—including his slain ex-wife's wedding ring—to pass down to his children.

"This was the first time I had an opportunity to catch the guys red-handed who had been stealing from my family," said O J the NFL Hall of Fame running back, dressed in navy jail garb.

"In no way did I mean to hurt anybody, to steal anything from anybody. I just wanted my personal things," he said. When Simpson finished, his shoulders slumped and his face fell.

According to O.J.Simpson's lawyer what O J was doing truly was a retrieval of his own property. What it was was a highly emotional, stupid act that violated the law.

"Stupidity," he added, "is not criminality."

But the judge Jackie Glass had other ideas and said,"When you take a gun with you and you take men with you in a show of force, that is not just a 'Hey, give me my stuff back.' That's something else, and that's what happened here,"

The Judge Glass also made is clear that the sentencing of O. J. Simpson was not "payback" for the double-murder acquittal that devided the Americans into for and against O.J.Simpson camps.

Jennifer Aniston Nude calender makes a splash

2008-12-05T08:44:00.000-08:00

Jennifer Aniston nude photos from the much anticipated scene from the 'Break Up' have been splashed online despite legal threats from Jennifer's attorneys. At the time the movie was being filmed Jen said that she didn’t panic over the scene although she admits it was the one of the few times she ever watched the dailies. “Luckily I had been hitting the gym before that already,” said Aniston. “No, you don’t panic about your physical shape. You panic that you just need to be naked, period.”

Jennifer Aniston Nude Photos Hit the Web

Jennifer Aniston did not use a body double for the picture. “No, I definitely didn’t. The problem is because the way it was shot, it was so specifically me. They wanted to make it a tricky camera so you saw the face and then you go to the back. It was hard to cut, unless you did it. You don’t want to do a butt double really. That’s iffy.”

Now the photos are making the rounds on the Internet. The photos appear to be scanned from French magazine Choc. She looks absolutely fabulous in the film and even though the images are a bit blurry, Jennifer Aniston also looks great on the cover of the magazine.

IPL team Deccan Chargers' stake sale

2008-11-06T07:12:00.000-08:00

The IPL bidding wars have begun. The first team on the block is Deccan Chargers with at least 10 firms, including a few media houses and some of the leading private equity funds in the race to acquire a majority stake in Hyderabad’s Deccan Chargers, the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket team currently owned by the Deccan Chronicle group.

According to highly placed sources, KPMG, the advisors for Deccan Chronicle Group on the stake sale of Deccan Chargers, is currently in talks with at least 8-10 ‘interested parties’.

“There are a couple of leading media houses and some private equity funds (including some international funds) that have shown interest in Deccan Chargers. We should be closing the deal quickly,” a source close to the development said on conditions of anonymity.

The Hyderabad IPL cricket team has been on the block since last month after the Deccan Chronicle group acquired it earlier this year by paying $107 million (about Rs 502 crore) to the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI).

Deccan Chargers is the second IPL team hunting for investors after Rajasthan Royals, which represents Jaipur and won the maiden tournament, has been on the lookout, sources said.

It might be a bit tough to sell the stake in Deccan Chargers in times of financial turmoil in the economy, however, sources in KPMG say that IPL, as a television property, generated high viewership ratings consistently between April and June and therefore has proved to be an event that attracts both viewers and advertisers.

“The fact that IPL ratings beat the ratings of several leading entertainment channels confirms that the format worked. Investors and all interested parties believe that there is a lot of return value in owning an IPL team,” a source close to negotiations with the potential investors said.

Deccan Chargers was the most expensive IPL team after Mumbai and Bangalore and the Deccan Chronicle group paid $107 million over ten years to the BCCI. Later, Group M, the leading advertising agency group, acquired 20 per cent in it, sources said.

The team spent over $5.88 million (Rs 28 crore) acquiring 11 players (both domestic and international). Australian all-rounder Andrew Symonds was one of the highest-paid IPL players, with a fee of $1,350,000, almost double Adam Gilchrist’s and over four times captain VVS Laxman’s earnings.

Surfing the net stimulates your brain functions

2008-10-19T23:02:00.000-07:00

Those of you who think you are losing your marbles here is some cheerful news for you (provided you are reading this on the net and not with a printout handed to you by your exasperated spouse)

Reading books and paper is not the only way to stimulate your mind, for a new study has suggested that surfing the Internet boosts the brain more than going through a book.(That includes reading stuff on the net dude and not just ogling at porn sites. Although that is pretty stimulating too, but not for the brain, if you get my drift)

Researchers at California University have found that browsing the web triggers centres in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning, particularly in older and middle-aged adults.(Study will also show those are the ones who ogle at porn sites the max)

In fact, the study, which looked at brain activity during web searches, resulted in a fascinating finding: Middle -aged to older people who know their way around the Internet had more stimulation of decision-making and complex reasoning areas of the brain than peers who were new to web surfing.

What's more is that reading didn't stimulate the same number of brain areas as Internet searching.(and that finally, includes porn sites as a stimulation...so surf on dude)

The first of its kind to access the impact of Internet searching of brain performance, the study is to appear in an upcoming issue of 'American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry', according to the University.

"The study results are encouraging, that emerging computerised technologies may have physiological effects and potential benefits for middle-aged and older adults.

"Internet searching engages complicated brain activity, which may help exercise and improve brain function," said lead researcher Dr Gary Small of the University's Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behaviour.

He added: "A simple, everyday task like searching the web appears to enhance brain circuity in older adults, demonstrating that our brains are sensitive and can continue to learn as we grow older."

Alas the body does not cooperate with the brain as you go along...and that includes with or without Viagra.

Twenty 20 cricket inventor concerned about sport

2008-10-11T04:43:00.000-07:00

The marketing man credited with inventing Twenty20 cricket has some concerns about the super-shortened format's effect on the sport.

Stuart Robertson was marketing manager of the England and Wales Cricket Board in 2000 when he devised the format for the 20-overs-a-side game, trying to overcome dwindling crowds at county matches.

Now star players having come out of retirement to sign lucrative contracts with the cashed-up Indian Premier League and the game, packaged perfectly for three hours of television or an afternoon or night away at a stadium, could spread to the United States and even China.

Robertson said on Thursday that he's not sure whether the sport and its stars can be stretched so many ways in a schedule full of international commitments.

"That's going to be a really tricky and interesting one going forward," Robertson, now the commercial director of English country Hampshire, said at a Cricket Victoria lunch.

"If the model is to replicate the IPL, the IPL is so powerful because it has all of the world's stars playing in it, I guess you're going to come to a point where it gets saturated."

England will next year host the second world championship and England, Australia and South Africa are also planning to improve their domestic competitions by attracting foreign players.

India will also host the inaugural Champions League competition later this year, featuring eight domestic Twenty20 teams representing five countries.

Robertson urged the International Cricket Council to monitor the amount of Twenty20 tournaments played, to prevent the risks of too much cricket and players getting burned out. "I kind of wonder if the ICC should be playing a stronger role perhaps in managing it," he said.

Robertson admitted the priorities of elite cricketers could change if Twenty20 continued its popularity. "If you ask a current player, they've been brought up since they were 5, 6, 11, 12 knowing test cricket is the pinnacle of their sport," said Robertson, who remains a supporter of test and 50-over matches.

"It would be interesting to ask a young Indian player who's now 16 or 17 who is breaking into a Twenty20 environment, and ask them in five years what the most important part of their sport is."

57% of men and 64% of women unhappy with sexlife

2008-10-03T04:46:00.000-07:00

If you have been wondering about your sex life lately, then let me assure you that you are not the only one . According to a survey as many as 57% of men and 64% of women in the Asia Pacific region are not very satisfied with their sex lives.

This was revealed in an Asia Pacific survey conducted in India and 12 other countries. ( have you ever wondered who are the people surveyed, cause no one ever asks you!)

The AP SHOW survey reveals that in India discussion about sexual experience is still a major concern among couples ( Men discuss sex with men and women with women and I am not talking about gays). Sex ranks seventh out of the seventeen life priorities for men(r u wondering what are the other six priorities), while for women it ranks near the bottom at fourteen(always knew that).

Family life is clearly the most important aspect of life for both men and women. Other life priorities include being a spouse, work or career, being a parent, financial well-being and physical health. The same life priorities appear on the top of women’s list.

The survey reveals that sexual satisfaction is strongly associated with satisfaction in overall physical health, and love and romance.

The key findings of the survey are:

· As much as 57% of men and 64% of women in the Asia Pacific region are not very satisfied with their sex lives

· Greater satisfaction with sex is strongly associated with greater satisfaction with life overall

· For men and women, greater satisfaction with erection hardness is linked to greater satisfaction with sex (Thats why all those fake viagras)

· Satisfaction with erection hardness is associated with satisfaction with sex, love & romance, family life, and role as spouse/partner – for men and women

· Men with suboptimal erections have sex less often, are less satisfied with sex and other aspects of the sexual experience, and are less positive about life overall

India, the survey showed that adults who are less than satisfied with sex are less likely to be satisfied with life overall.

There is also a clear link between satisfaction with erection hardness and satisfaction with sex for people in India.

The AP SHOW survey confirms the importance of sexual health to overall wellness in life. The survey also reveals that sexual dissatisfaction is high among men and women.

The survey, conducted among 3,957 sexually-active men and women (2,016 males and 1,941 females) from the general public aged between 25 and 74 years, was designed to gather information on attitudes towards sexual health in Asia Pacific, a region characterized by diverse cultural beliefs and practices.

Ask for help if you are not happy with your sex life. Talk and discuss it with your partner, find out their needs and desires and if nothing works, get professional help.

Human Jet Croses English Channel

2008-09-26T07:32:00.000-07:00

Human Jet, Swiss adventurer Yves Rossy, known as Fusionman, successfully crossed the English Channel using his homemade jet-propelled wing Friday, the first man to perform the feat.
Yves Rossy makes a safe landing after successfully crossing the English Channel.

Yves Rossy makes a safe landing after successfully crossing the English Channel.

Rossy leapt from a plane more than 8,800 feet or a mile and a half from the ground, before firing up his jets.He had postponed his flight earlier because of poor visibility. "It's not so safe to fly across water if you can't see," Rossy told National Geographic Channel in a live television interview Thursday. "I don't have any instruments, and I need to be able to see the landing site."

The human jet made the 22-mile trip from Calais in France to Dover in England in a little under 15 minutes.

He began the Friday flight just before 1207 GMT; by 12:15 GMT, Rossy was above British soil and looped over onlookers before opening his parachute, with his wings still strapped to his back.

He touched down in a field near the famous white cliffs of Dover.

The trip across the Channel is meant to trace the route of French aviator Louis Bleriot, the first person to cross the narrow body of water in an airplane 99 years ago.

Google phone in India by December

2008-09-25T22:09:00.000-07:00

High Tech Computer (HTC), a Taiwanese handset manufacturer, is planning to launch the Android platform-powered phone (popularly referred to as the Google phone) in India by December

The phone is priced Rs 8,200 ($179) in the US, but in India the price will be much higher. The main reason for this is that these handsets (Apple iPhone, T mobile Google Phone) are subsidized in the US by the operators.

HTC (India) is keen on tie up with some local operator for the Google phone.

Android is a Linux-based operating system for mobile devices that was announced in November last year and developed by the Open Handset Alliance — a group comprising players like Google, HTC, Intel, Motorola and Samsung.

To spur the growth of third-party applications, Google recently announced the Android Market, similar to Apple's App Store, where consumers can buy and download content for its mobile platform.

Labelled as competition to Apple’s iPhone, which is priced at Rs 31,000 for the 8GB model, the HTC G1 could be priced cheaper to maintain an edge in India. Currently, HTC has smart-phones in the Indian market priced between Rs 10,000 and Rs 35,000.

HTC’s device is a 3G phone with a touch-screen, slider keyboard, GPS and Wi-Fi.

HTC India hopes to sell 600,000 mobile devices in 2009, having doubled sales this year from 100,000 in 2007. Research firm Strategy Analytics has predicted that the G1 could sell 400,000 units by the end of 2008, accounting for 4 per cent of the smart-phone market.

Nokia N96 Vs iPhone

2008-09-24T23:02:00.000-07:00

The top end slot in phones is getting crowded and it is difficult to pick and choose any clear winner. Yesterday TMobile Google phone was in news and today let us compare the Nokia N96 and iPhone 3G from Apple

Both Nokia N96 and Apple iPhone 3G have their pluses and minuses and no clear winner emerges in a comparison between the two. The two phones are neck to neck on a host of applications available or bundled. If N96 fails in terms of an impressive interface, the iPhone stumbles on security and storage.

Let us take the comparison a bit further:

Looks and Interface:
The iPhone wins hands down from Nokia N96 as far as the looks are concerned. N96 though a smart slider phone, has bleak black looks which reveal none of the phone's power and capability. There’ is hardly any design innovation on Nokia’s part.

Multimedia and Applications:
Nokia N96 screen (diagonally) is 2.8 inches; the iPhone’s is 3.5 inches and here size matters. Being a video-oriented phone, the N96 adds support for more video formats, including H.264, Flash video, ensuring you can watch YouTube clips on the phone, and Windows Media Video version 9. The N96 includes dedicated DSPs and video acceleration chips.

The picture quality on the iPhone is good and you can watch in either vertical or horizontal mode.

Camera:
The iPhone has a 2 megapixel built-in camera, but it takes adequate photos in daylight. Compared with N96’s 5 megapixels camera (with flash support) it seems inadequate.

Games:
Nokia has included three great games to begin with, but the iPhone offers more variety in games.

GPS:
Nokia has taken a lot of pains to make the GPS simpler and detailed, even adding a pedestrian mode. Apple’s newly-added assisted GPS offers pinpoint locations with the help of Google maps, but is nowhere close to Nokia’s accuracy.

Apple iPhone 3GInternet and Mail:
On the iPhone mail can be configured to ‘fetch’ (iPhone term) mail every 15 minutes, 30 minutes, hourly, or manually. N96’s symbian OS is a familiar one, with web security and remote lock features weaved in.

Storage:
Nokia N96 packs in attention-grabbing features like inclusion of DVB-H digital TV and strikingly high specifications. It comes with 16 GB of onboard and 8 GB of replaceable flash storage, and has a pronounced focus on video and music.

Even the form factor and bundled kick-stand suggest this model is a TV-phone, let alone the numerous hardware specifications like the STMicroelectronics chipset that make it video-relevant.

Battery life:

Nokia has invested a lot in making the battery life longer and one can happily dismiss the fear that the low-capacity battery used in Nokia N96 (950 mAh) won’t be enough for comfortable operation. N96 averages a solid 6 hours while iPhone battery fizzled out in about 5 hours.

Price:

The Nokia N96 (16 GB) is now available for 34,999 while Apple iPhone (16 GB) retails at Rs 36,100 and the 8GB iPhone for Rs 31,000 with Airtel and Vodafone. Nokia’s phone is operator independent.

T-Mobile Google Phone

2008-09-23T22:25:00.000-07:00

How long did you think that Google will take to enter the mobile communications market? Well, if you ask me they are bit late already, but like they say "better late than never". All you gizmo freaks are going to love this bit. tmobile Google Phone looks snazzy and with Google parentage it might pack a punch.

T-Mobile will be the first carrier to offer a mobile phone powered by Google’s Android software, according to people briefed on the company’s plans. The phone will be made by HTC, one of the largest makers of mobile phones in the world, and is expected to go on sale in the United States before Christmas, perhaps as early as October.

The t-mobile Google phone is expected to match many of the capabilities of Apple’s iPhone and other so-called smartphones that run software from Palm, Research in Motion, Microsoft and Nokia to access the Internet and perform computerlike functions.

The HTC phone, which many gadget sites are calling the “dream,” will have a touch screen, like the iPhone. But the screen also slides out to expose a full five-row keyboard.

Apps in the gizmo

Google Maps Street View

With Google Maps, Google's groundbreaking maps service, T-Mobile G1 users can instantly view maps and satellite imagery, as well as find local business and get driving directions, all from the phone's easy-to-use touch interface.

The TMobile G1 also includes Google Maps Street View, allowing customers to explore cities at street-level virtually while on the go. Without taking a step, customers can tour a far-away place as if they were there -- standing on the street corner. Even better, the Google Maps feature syncs with the built-in compass on the phone -- an industry first -- to allow users to view locations and navigate 360 degrees by simply moving the phone with their hand. Google Maps Street View is available today in many U.S. locations and soon in European countries.

Communicating on the Go

The tmobile g1 features a rich HTML e-mail client, which seamlessly syncs your e-mail, calendar and contacts from Gmail as well as most other POP3 or IMAP e-mail services.

The tMobile G1 multitasks, so you can read a Web page while also downloading your e-mail in the background. It combines Instant Messaging support for Google Talk, as well as AOL, Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live Messenger in the U.S. With access to high-speed Web browsing and a 3-megapixel camera with photo-sharing capabilities, the T-Mobile G1 is ideal for balancing a busy lifestyle, whether sharing pictures, checking the latest sports scores or accessing social networking sites.

Embracing User-Generated Content

Customers can use the T-Mobile G1's 3G and Wi-Fi connection to attach and share pictures over e-mail and MMS or download music from their favorite Web sites, and soon, upload and post pictures to their personal blog.

Built-in support for You Tube allows customers to enjoy You Tube's originally created content, easily navigate through You Tube's familiar video browsing categories or search for specific videos.

Music at Your Fingertips

The T-Mobile Google Phone comes pre-loaded with a new application developed by Amazon.com that gives customers easy access to Amazon MP3, Amazon.com's digital music download store with more than 6 million DRM-free MP3 tracks.

Using the new application, T-Mobile Google phone customers are able to search, sample, purchase and download music from Amazon MP3 directly to their device (downloading music from Amazon MP3 using the T-Mobile G1 requires a Wi-Fi connection; searching, sampling and purchasing music can be done anywhere with a cellular connection). The T-Mobile Google Phone will be the first device with the Amazon MP3 mobile application pre-loaded.

Android Market

The T-Mobile Google Phone is the first phone to offer access to Android Market, which hosts unique applications and mash ups of existing and new services from developers around the world. With just a couple of short clicks, customers can find and download a wide range of innovative software applications -- from games to social networking and on-the-go shopping -- to personalize their phone and enhance their mobile lifestyle. When the phone launches next month, dozens of unique, first-of-a-kind Android applications will be available for download on Android Market, including:

ShopSavvy: an application designed to help people do comparative shopping. Users scan the UPC code of a product with their phone's camera while they are shopping, and can instantly compare prices from online merchants and nearby local stores.

Ecorio: a new application developed to help people keep track of their daily travels and view what their carbon footprint looks like. With access to tips and tricks, Ecorio allows users to record the steps they take throughout their day to help offset their impact on the environment.

BreadCrumbz: a new application that enables people to create a step-by-step visual map using photos. Customers can create their own routes, share them with friends or with the world.

A video of the T-Mobile Google phone on YouTube.

Bangla Players to Play in Indian Premier League (IPL )

2008-09-19T20:32:00.000-07:00

The next Indian Premier League season is to begin on April 10, 2009 but things have started stirring up a bit already. The auction of IPL teams is to take place in January 2009, two months before the IPL twenty twenty 2009 season begins.

More players will be included from different regions. For example the BCCI has promised the Bangladesh Cricket Board to rope in more cricketers from the neighboring country into the lucrative Indian Premier League in its second season April next year.

IPL Chairman Lalit Modi said the Indian Cricket Board will help Bangladesh recover from the exodus of 13 top players to 'rebel' Indian Cricket League by also including a team from Bangladesh in the 2010 Champions Twenty20 League. It looks like that BCCI and politicians are already playing a tournment of one up man ship between Indian Premier League (IPL) and Indian Cricket League (ICL).

"We will definitely play an active role in helping them out. We are looking at adding a few Bangladesh players for the next IPL auction. And we are also looking at a team from Bangladesh participating in the Champions League from 2010 onwards," Modi told cricinfo website.

Left-arm spinner Abdur Razzak is the only Bangladesh player currently in the IPL, signed up by Bangalore Royal Challengers for $50,000.

National Boards will receive a significant sum for participating in the Champions Twenty20 League, along with a separate participation fee for the domestic Twenty20 teams that are invited.

End of the World or a New Dawn

2008-09-09T05:24:00.000-07:00

They are going to fire up that particle accelerator called Large Hadron Collider (LHC) [no dude , it is not hard on] on Wednesday and many people are afraid it might be the end of the world. Why ? Because mini black holes will be created in that experiment.

I don't think the earth will be destroyed but yes, it will be an end of an era in human evolution (yes dude, I'm sure it is not hard on collider).

In the most complex scientific experiment ever undertaken, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be switched on Wednesday, accelerating sub-atomic particles to nearly the speed of light before smashing them together.

Deep underground on the border between France and Switzerland, the world's largest particle accelerator complex will explore the world on smaller scales than any human invention has explored before.

The test, which takes place Wednesday, is a major step toward seeing if the the immense experiment will provide new information about the way the universe works, or why it is there in the first place and what is the basic building block.

The collider consists of a particle accelerator buried more than 300 feet near Geneva, Switzerland. About $10 billion (yes, that could have given you many a hard ons instead of just one hadron) have gone into the accelerator's construction, the particle detectors and the computers, said Katie Yurkewicz, spokewoman for CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which is host to the collider.

In the coming months, the collider is expected to begin smashing particles into each other by sending two beams of protons around the tunnel in opposite directions. It will operate at higher energies and intensities in the next year, and the experiments could generate enough data to make a discovery by 2009, experts say.

Although renowned British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has bet 100 dollars (70 euros) that this experiment will not find an elusive particle seen as a holy grail of cosmic science. (you think those guys spent $10 billion to win $ 100!!!)

Experts say the collider has the potential to confirm theories about questions that physicists have been working on for decades including the possible existence of extra dimensions. They also hope to find a theoretical particle called the Higgs boson, which has never been detected, but would help explain why matter has mass.

The collider will recreate the conditions of less than a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, when there was a hot "soup" of tiny particles called quarks and gluons, to look at how the universe evolved, said John Harris, U.S. coordinator for ALICE, a detector specialized to analyze that question.

Why should the layperson care about this particular exploration? Years ago, when electrons were first identified, no one knew what they were good for, but they have since transformed our entire economy.

Fears have emerged that the collider could produce black holes that could suck up anything around them -- including the whole Earth. Such fears prompted legal actions in the U.S. and Europe to halt the operation of the Large Hadron Collider, alleging safety concerns regarding black holes and other phenomena that could theoretically emerge.

Although physicists acknowledge that the collider could, in theory, create small black holes, they say they do not pose any risk. A study released Friday by CERN scientists explains that any black hole created would be tiny, and would not have enough energy to stick around very long before dissolving.

On Wednesday the first protons will be injected into a 27-kilometre (16.9-mile) ring-shaped tunnel, straddling the Swiss-French border at the headquarters of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN).

Physicists have long puzzled over how particles acquire mass. In 1964, a British physicist, Peter Higgs, came up with this idea: there must exist a background field that would act rather like treacle.

The standard quip about the Higgs is that it is the "God Particle" -- it is everywhere but remains frustratingly elusive. This is what they are hoping to find.

And yes, it might give some scientists a hard on if they find it. Good luck!

Google to launch Internet Browser "Chrome"

2008-09-01T22:09:00.000-07:00

To end the dominance of Microsoft, Google Inc. is releasing its own Web browser which will ensure easy access to its own search engine.

The free browser, called "Chrome," is supposed to be available for downloading from Tuesday . Google said it's still working on versions compatible with Apple Inc.'s Mac computer and the Linux operating system when it announced its latest product on the Labor Day holiday.

Microsoft is unveiling of a test version of its latest browser update Internet Explorer 8 which will include tools for Web surfers to cloak their online preferences, creating a shield that could make it more difficult for Google and other marketing networks to figure out which ads are most likely to appeal to which individuals.

Google's lead in the lucrative Internet search market is nearly as commanding, with its engine processing nearly two-thirds of the Web's queries.

Google has been trying to take advantage of its search engine's popularity to compete with Microsoft in software for word processing and spreadsheet applications.

Google has tried to make its alternatives more appealing and accessible by hosting them for free over Internet connections instead of requiring users to pay a licensing fee to install them on individual computers, as Microsoft typically does.

Microsoft has also tried, though unsuccessfully, to invade Google's realm by investing billions in the development of its own search engine and making an unsuccessful attempt to buy Yahoo Inc. for $47.5 billion.

Until now, Google had been trying to undermine Internet Explorer by supporting Firefox, a Web browser developed by the open-source Mozilla Foundation. Bolstered by an advertising partnership with Google's search engine, Firefox ranks as the second most popular browser, with a market share of more than 10 percent. Google recently extended its advertising alliance with Firefox through 2011.

Bearing the stamp of Google's renowned brand, Chrome could be an even more formidable rival to Explorer.

Still, Google's name is no guarantee of success. For instance, Google's instant messaging service hasn't made come close to catching up to the market-leading products made by Yahoo, Microsoft and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL.

In a blog post Monday, Google touted Chrome as a more sophisticated Web browser better suited for displaying the dynamic and interactive content blossoming on the Web as people migrate from television, radio and newspapers.

"The Web gets better with more options and innovation," Sundar Pichai, Google's vice president of product management, and Linus Upson, Google's engineering director, wrote in the posting. "Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the Web even better."

Only time will tell if the new browser from Google becomes popular with surfers.

Killer Hurricane Gustav to Hit US Coast today

2008-08-31T23:14:00.000-07:00

Three years after hurricane Katrina now comes the mother of all storms “Hurricane Gustav”. The Category Three storm is due to make landfall soon from the Gulf of Mexico

Maps of Gustav's path show that it could strike southern Louisiana and other areas battered by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.

Katrina, a Category 3 storm, flooded most of New Orleans, flattened beach towns in Mississippi and killed more than 1,800 people.

The exodus of an estimated 1.9 million people from the Louisiana coast is said to be the largest evacuation in state history. An estimated 95 percent of Louisiana's 2 million coastal residents had fled ahead of Hurricane Gustav by Sunday evening in the largest evacuation in state history, Louisiana's governor said.

Roads out of New Orleans - much of which lies below sea level - were crammed with traffic throughout Sunday.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal appealed to residents: "If you're hearing this, seeing this, if you've not evacuated, please do so. There's still a few hours left."

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin told local TV only about 10,000 residents remained in the city, where rain began falling at sunset on Sunday.

A dusk-to-dawn curfew is in force in New Orleans, which is described as being like a ghost town. The mayor has warned looters will be sent to jail.

Crime was a major problem in the New Orleans area in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which hit the city three years ago, causing disastrous floods.

He said the first storm winds could hit New Orleans at daybreak on Monday and Hurricane Gustav could reach Category Four strength.

Dangerous storm surges of 10 to 14 feet above normal tides are expected near and to the east of Hurricane Gustav's center, forecasters said. Rain accumulations between 6 to 12 inches are possible over parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas, with isolated amounts of up to 20 inches, through Wednesday morning, according to forecasters.

Gustav killed at least 51 people in southwestern Haiti and eight in the neighboring Dominican Republic last week before moving to Cuba. It was in the Caribbean on Friday and intensified just before it hit Cuba.

The US Republican party's convention has been scaled back as nearly 2m people flee Hurricane Gustav, which is now nearing New Orleans.

Senator John McCain, due to accept his party's nomination for president, said it was no time for party politics.

Do emails Stress you out?

2008-08-29T06:00:00.000-07:00

Have you checked your email today? Do you check email every few minutes? What is your response time to emails in your in box? Do emails in your in box stress you out?

The speed at which you reply to an email could reveal whether you're stressed, driven or relaxed, say researchers.

The familiar "ding" of an email landing in a colleague's inbox has become as common a sound in offices today as the ring of the telephone.

But, according to researchers, the speed at which workers respond to a new message provides a fascinating insight into their character.

In a recent survey, experts discovered that email users fall into three categories: relaxed, driven and stressed.

Dr Karen Renaud, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow, who carried out the research, said that while some people were happy to respond to emails in their own time, others felt compelled into reacting as soon as they arrived and became stressed if they had too many to deal with or were delayed in responding.

Women, in particular, felt more pressure to respond quickly to a new email than men, she said.

"The relaxed group don't let email exert any pressure on their lives," The Daily Telegraph quoted her, as saying.

"They treat it exactly the way that one would treat the mail: 'I'll fetch it, I'll deal with it in my own time.'

"The second group felt driven to keep on top of email, but also felt that they could cope with it. The third group, however, reacted negatively to the pressure of email," she added.

To reach the conclusion, researchers found 34 per cent of workers, who fell into the "stressed" category, felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of emails they received each day and obliged to respond quickly to meet the expectation of the sender.

A further 28 per cent were "driven" email users because they saw them as a source of pressure, while around 38 per cent were "relaxed" because they felt comfortable not replying until up to a week later.

So, Chill out dude. There will be time enough to reply to that email or better still "hit delete" and exhale.

FAREWELL LETTER FROM A GENIUS

2008-08-28T23:49:00.001-07:00

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, famous writer from Colombia, and Nobel Peace Prize winner for literature, has retired from public life for reasons of health. He has a form of cancer, which is terminal. He has sent a farewell letter to his friends.

It is recommended reading because it is moving to see how one of the best and most brilliant of writers expresses himself & with sorrow. (Even as I'm SURE this would have sounded TWICE as good in Spanish, let us enjoy the English version nonetheless....)

He says:

If God, for a second, forgot what I have become and granted me a little bit more of life, I would use it to the best of my ability.

I wouldn't, possibly, say everything that is in my mind, but I would be more thoughtful of all I say. I would give merit to things not for what they are worth, but for what they mean to express.

I would sleep little, I would dream more, because I know that for every minute that we close our eyes, we waste 60 seconds of light.

I would walk while others stop; I would awake while others sleep.

If God would give me a little bit more of life, I would dress in a simple manner, I would place myself in front of the sun, leaving not only my body, but my soul naked at its mercy.

To all men, I would say how mistaken they are when they think that they stop falling in love when they grow old, without knowing that they grow old when they stop falling in love.

I would give wings to children, but I would leave it to them to learn how to fly by themselves.

To old people I would say that death doesn't arrive when they grow old, but with forgetfulness.

I have learned so much with you all, I have learned that everybody wants to live on top of the mountain, without knowing that true happiness is obtained in the journey taken & the form used to reach the top of the hill.

I have learned that when a newborn baby holds, with its little hand, his father's finger, it has trapped him for the rest of his life.

I have learned that a man has the right and obligation to look down at another man, only when that man needs help to get up from the ground.

Say always what you feel, not what you think. If I knew that today is the last time that that I am going to see you asleep, I would hug you with all my strength and I would pray to the Lord to let me be the guardian angel of your soul.

If I knew that these are the last moments to see you, I would say 'I love you'.

There is always tomorrow, and life gives us another opportunity to do things right, but in case I am wrong, and today is all that is left to me, I would love to tell you how much I love you & that I will never forget you.

Tomorrow is never guaranteed to anyone, young or old.

Today could be the last time to see your loved ones, which is why you mustn't wait; do it today, in case tomorrow never arrives. I am sure you will be sorry you wasted the opportunity today to give a smile, a hug, a kiss, and that you were too busy to grant them their last wish.

Keep your loved ones near you; tell them in their ears and to their faces how much you need them and love them. Love them and treat them well; take your time to tell them 'I am sorry';' forgive me',' please' 'thank you', and all those loving words you know.

Nobody will know you for your secret thought. Ask the Lord for wisdom and strength to express them.

Show your friends and loved ones how important they are to you.

Send this letter to those you love. If you don't do it today...tomorrow will be like yesterday, and if you never do it, it doesn't matter either, the moment to do it is now.

For you,
With much love,
Your Friend,

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Shilpa Shetty to marry Raj Kundra

2008-08-27T09:40:00.000-07:00

Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty, who became an international celeb following her success in the UK-based reality show Big Brother, has revealed that she plans to marry her year-long boyfriend Raj Kundra in another year and a half.

Asked to comment on her relationship and whether marriage is on the cards, Shilpa told The LondonNews, "I normally don't talk about my personal life, but his name is Raj Kundra. We met a year ago."

"For the next 18 months, I've got my hands full with work, so I can't really think of marriage yet but, after that, I definitely want it to culminate in marriage. And, of course, I'm dying to have a family - at least two children," she said.

Earlier Shilpa had been spotted with Raj a number of times and it was rumoured that she is responsible for the divorce between Raj and his former wife. Shilpa’s publicist, on the other hand has denied any reports of any kind of a romance brewing between the couple as he says that they are just “good friends”.

Now it seems that the cat is out of the bag with Shilpa herself admitting the marriage plans.

Hillary Clinton Speech

2008-08-26T22:31:00.000-07:00

Hillary Clinton sent out a strong and clear message in her speech at the Democratic National Convention that she was fully behind the presidential nominee.

Sen. Hillary Clinton introduced herself as a "proud supporter of Barack Obama" at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday as she called on her party to rally behind her former rival.
Sen. Hillary Clinton, with daughter Chelsea Clinton, received a standing ovation from the Democratic delegates.

"Whether you voted for me, or voted for Barack, the time is now to unite as a single party with a single purpose. We are on the same team, and none of us can sit on the sidelines. This is a fight for the future. And it's a fight we must win together," she said.

Leading up to her address, there was a lot of speculation about what she would say and whether she would make a strong enough call for unity. But she made a very strident case for Obama's candidacy.

"No way. No how. No McCain. Barack Obama is my candidate. And he must be our president," Clinton said. Her speech, which was the last of the night, followed a line up of other Democrats who used their time at the podium to attack President Bush's record and McCain's policies.

Appearing strong and energized, Clinton thanked her voters for supporting her historic campaign as a female candidate and reached out to those wary of Obama by telling them they weren't in this for her, but for her cause. That cause, she said, is the same thing that Obama and the rest of the Democratic Party are fighting for.

How the iPhone will raise your phone bill by 30 percent

2008-08-25T22:52:00.000-07:00

The long wait for iPhone fans is over now. The much sought after iPhone is finally available in India, though for a steep price. (There is no subsidy on iPhone in India unlike USA where the price is subsidized by the telcos)

Many agree that the iPhone is a touch above the rest, what many do not know is that this touch-screen handset from Apple Inc is also expected to raise its users' monthly bills far more than other hi-end mobiles in the market.

In fact, according to telecom industry experts , an iPhone might increase billing charges by up to 25-30 per cent. And that's where Vodafone and Bharti Airtel - the two service providers who launched the gizmo in India on Friday - would make the killing.

Both telecos have come up with special iPhone-specific data plans that are basically aimed at promoting net-surfing on their networks.

While Vodafone is giving 250 MB and 600 MB data usage free per month on a plan of Rs 799 and Rs 999, respectively, Bharti Airtel is offering free 500 MB per month on iPhone-specific plans that will have a basic rent of Rs 600 per month.

You will need to change your current plan.

But telecom analysts feel that these plans are not economical enough, as the iPhone will encourage users to spend more through its value added services (VAS) and bundling stratergies.

"iPhone will increase its owners' bills by more than 25-30 per cent of what they used to pay earlier, especially if he uses all the functions that the phone offers in the country ," said Romal Shetty, Executive Director of the research firm KPMG.

He further pointed out that this latest gizmo, even otherwise , is too expensive, putting it out of the reach of most Indians. For Manoj Mohta, head of another analysis firm CRISIL Research, it's the lack of 3G services that makes the iPhone too expensive for too little in return. "Only after 3G comes in will the service providers launch more of data-oriented plans. But until then it will remain an expensive proposition," said Mohta.

He even hinted that this may actually disappoint iPhone owners, especially when there is also not sufficient Indian-specific content available for such a phone.

Also, iPhone users will need to repeatedly use iTunes (the copyrighted software created by Apple for its products and which has to be paid for) to download content. This is because the iPhone does not have any Bluetooth services that can transfer or get music from another phone.

Sanjay Gupta, chief marketing officer for mobile services at Bharti Airtel , told Mumbai Mirror that 98 per cent of people who use the iPhone globally have heavy data usage.

"Our aim will be to promote that data usage here too. The iPhone is already known for its VAS like GPRS, maps and iTunes," said Gupta.

So if you finally managed to acquire the gizmo be ready to part with cash every month for its upkeep. Sounds like marriage, where upkeep is higher than the acquisition cost.

US Open Tennis

2008-08-25T07:17:00.000-07:00

Top Tennis players have arrived for the US Open and are looking forward to the fourth Grand Slam tournament of the year (Other three being the Australian Open , French Open and Wimbeldon).

Rafael Nadal, the new world No. 1 and Olympic gold medalist, arrived in New York on Monday from Beijing and has been enjoying some off-court activities since he arrived, including seeing "Phantom of the Opera" one night and visiting Central Park.

“All tournaments are very important. Here is the last Grand Slam of the season, so it is going to be important, very important for everybody,” he said of the US Open. “If I play a good tournament here, I am going to have chances to continue to be No. 1 for more time. For sure, New York is an important city and one of my favorite cities. To be here is a pleasure, (and) New York is big motivation.”

The 2008 US Open is Nadal’s first Grand Slam with the No. 1 world ranking and the No. 1 seed, but it has not changed the Spaniard’s preparation or focus entering the tournament, where he plays qualifier Bjorn Phau in the first round.

This year, Roger Federer, the four-time defending champion, is the No. 2 seed after a tough year for the Swiss. He lost to Nadal in the finals of both Roland Garros and Wimbledon.

“Maybe it's nice to go into a Grand Slam for a change maybe not having No. 1 next to me, and it should be interesting,” he said.

The Americans, Andy Roddick and James Blake, could not agree more about how special the US Open is. Roddick, the 2003 US Open champion, has battled a shoulder injury since the spring, but he said it is feeling much better now, and after playing a few tournaments in the Olympus US Open Series the past few weeks, feels like he is getting back into match shape after not playing much since Wimbledon.

Roddick faces 35-year-old Fabrice Santoro in the first round – not any easy opening match – who lost a tight five-set match to Blake last year in the second round.

Blake, who is originally from nearby Yonkers, N.Y., and grew up in Fairfield, Conn., is entering the 2008 US Open with a lot of confidence after defeating Federer for the first time in his career at the Olympics last week, where he lost to Novak Djokovic in the bronze-medal match.
Djokovic, who lost to Federer in the 2007 US Open final, enters the tournament this year now as a Grand Slam champion, having won his first major at the 2008 Australian Open.

And as far as Djokovic bringing the entertainment this year with his famous impressions of fellow players – stay tuned – if he does them, it is a spontaneous decision.

Serena and Venus found themselves in the same section of the draw when it was released on Thursday, meaning they could meet as early as the quarterfinals.

In the first round, Venus plays Samantha Stosur, and Serena plays Kateryna Bondarenko. The two feel like they are playing great, with Venus winning her fifth Wimbledon title in July – defeating Serena in the final – and winning the doubles gold medal at the Olympics.

Dinara Safina has had one of the best seasons on the WTA Tour, including winning the Olympus US Open Series and winning 15 of her last 16 matches. She reached her first Grand Slam final at Roland Garros and is now looking to win her first at the US Open, where her older brother Marat Safin won the men’s title in 2000.

She will play a qualifier in the first round and is in the same section of the draw as Ana Ivanovic, to whom she lost in the Roland Garros final. But Safina is playing the best tennis of her career this year, and the turning point for her was capturing the title in Berlin in the spring.

For Jelena Jankovic, who reached the No. 1 ranking for the first time in her career recently but is now No. 2, battling jet lag was an issue after the Olympics, and she went home to Serbia after to see her doctors about a calf injury she struggled with in Beijing. She has battled several injuries this season but is feeling better now and doing her best to train as usual as she pursues her first Grand Slam title.

US Open begins on August 25 and finishes on September 7. players are competing for a prize money of US $ 2.5 million-the largest in the tennis history.

Rita Rudner Quotes

2008-08-24T23:53:00.000-07:00

Some of the more famous quotes from Rita Rudner.

A man will go to war, fight and die for his country. But he won't get a bikini wax.
Rita Rudner

Before I met my husband, I'd never fallen in love. I'd stepped in it a few times.
Rita Rudner

I don't plan to grow old gracefully. I plan to have face-lifts until my ears meet.
Rita Rudner

I got kicked out of ballet class because I pulled a groin muscle. It wasn't mine.
Rita Rudner

I know I want to have children while my parents are still young enough to take care of them.
Rita Rudner

I love being married. It's so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.
Rita Rudner

I love to shop after a bad relationship. I don't know. I buy a new outfit and it makes me feel better. It just does. Sometimes I see a really great outfit, I'll break up with someone on purpose.
Rita Rudner

I think men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage. They've experienced pain and bought jewelry.
Rita Rudner

I want to have children, but my friends scare me. One of my friends told me she was in labor for 36 hours. I don't even want to do anything that feels good for 36 hours.
Rita Rudner

I was a vegetarian until I started leaning toward the sunlight.
Rita Rudner

I was going to have cosmetic surgery until I noticed that the doctor's office was full of portraits by Picasso.
Rita Rudner

I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult.
Rita Rudner

In Hollywood a marriage is a success if it outlasts milk.
Rita Rudner

It wasn't that no one asked me to the prom, it was that no one would tell me where it was.
Rita Rudner

It's so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.
Rita Rudner

Marriages don't last. When I meet a guy, the first question I ask myself is: is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?
Rita Rudner

Men reach their sexual peak at eighteen. Women reach theirs at thirty-five. Do you get the feeling that God is playing a practical joke?
Rita Rudner

Men who consistently leave the toilet seat up secretly want women to get up to go the bathroom in the middle of the night and fall in.
Rita Rudner

Men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage - they've experienced pain and bought jewelry.
Rita Rudner

Most turkeys taste better the day after, my mother's tasted better the day before.
Rita Rudner

My boyfriend and I broke up. He wanted to get married and I didn't want him to.
Rita Rudner

My grandmother was a very tough woman. She buried three husbands and two of them were just napping.
Rita Rudner

My husband and I are either going to buy a dog or have a child. We can't decide whether to ruin our carpet or ruin our lives.
Rita Rudner

My husband gave me a necklace. It's fake. I requested fake. Maybe I'm paranoid, but in this day and age, I don't want something around my neck that's worth more than my head.
Rita Rudner

My mother buried three husbands - and two of them were only napping.
Rita Rudner

Neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them. My mother cleans them.
Rita Rudner

Some people think having large breasts makes a woman stupid. Actually, it's quite the opposite: a woman having large breasts makes men stupid.
Rita Rudner

Some women hold up dresses that are so ugly and they always say the same thing: 'This looks much better on.' On what? On fire?
Rita Rudner

Someday I want to be rich. Some people get so rich they lose all respect for humanity. That's how rich I want to be.
Rita Rudner

The time you spend grieving over a man should never exceed the amount of time you actually spent with him.
Rita Rudner

The word 'aerobics' came about when the gym instructors got together and said: If we're going to charge $10 an hour, we can't call it Jumping up and down.
Rita Rudner

They usually have two tellers in my local bank, except when it's very busy, when they have one.
Rita Rudner

To attract men, I wear a perfume called "New Car Interior."

We've begun to long for the pitter-patter of little feet - so we bought a dog. Well, it's cheaper, and you get more feet.

When I eventually met Mr. Right I had no idea that his first name was Always.

Whenever I date a guy, I think, 'Is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?'
Rita Rudner

Sherlyn Chopra in Big Boss

2008-08-20T05:10:00.000-07:00

The Big Boss TV show has suffered a set back with the exit of Jane Goody but it might recoup its ratings through the entry of sexy Sherlyn Chopra.

With Jade Goody on her way back to Britain from Indian reality show Bigg Boss after she was diagnosed with cancer, speculations are rife that item girl Sherlyn Chopra will take her place.

"For Sherlyn to say 'yes' to Bigg Boss, she needs a great incentive," her publicist Dale Bhagwagar said in an official release. "She will agree to be on the show only if she gets what she deserves to be away for a full three months from the promotions of her latest musical success Dard-e-Sherlyn," he added.

Sherlyn was earlier approached for the show, but she was dropped because she had asked Endemol India, the production house, to pay her Rs 30 million for her stay in the Bigg Boss house.

She had even asked the production house to allow cameras to be installed in the bathrooms of the house so that she could flaunt her vast collection of colourful bikinis and inner wear while bathing.

To this, Bhagwagar said: "With her characteristic boldness and flamboyance, she is capable of making the Television Rating Points (TRPs) of any TV programme hit the roof." The publicist, however, made it clear that "Sherlyn won't be interested in the show without the perks."

Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty, who won the Celebrity Big Brother in Britain, is hosting the show. The show is facing protests from conservative sections of the society with some political leaders gaining cheap mileage by inciting people.

It might boomrang on them as it is bringing more publicity for the Big Boss.

Abhinav Bindra wins Gold for India

2008-08-10T21:54:00.000-07:00

World champion Abhinav Bindra created history today by winning the Gold Medal at Beijing olympic.

The 24 year old won a gold medal for India and ended a 28 year drought. India last got a hockey gold in 1988. This is a great individual effort and makes the entire nation proud.

Abhinav Bindra ended the poor run of Indian shooters at the Beijing Olympics by qualifying for the men's 10m air rifle event finals here today and finally winning the gold medal for the event.

Bindra's final score was 700.5 and the seilver medalist had 699.7.

This gold medal by Bindra is a proud moment for the entire nation which had been starved of any medal leave aside gold medal. This is a proud and happy moment for the entire nation.

Bindra, a Khel Ratna awardee, finished the qualifying event joint fourth with Romania's George Alin Moldoveanu after the duo shot a score of 596/600.

The bespectacled shooter managed a series of 100,99,100,98,100 and 99.

Meanwhile, Finland's Henri Hakkinen qualified first for the event with a score of 598/600 after shooting a series of 100,100,99,100,100 and 99.

China's Qinan Zhu was a point adrift of Hakkinen with a series of 100,100,100,100,99 and 98.

Congratulations to Abhinav Bindra, his family and the nation for winning the first gold medal at Beijing Olympics. This is a proud moment for the nation as we get our first individual gold medal at Olympics.

J.K. Rowling at Harvard

2008-08-02T22:05:00.000-07:00

We all know that J.K. Rowling the author of the famed Harry Potter series has a vivid imagination which helped her create her master pieces. Many of you might be aware of the Rowlings life story from rags to riches before and after Harry Potter publications.

This lecture she delivered at Harvard describes in her own words how these factors; "imagination and failure in life" contributed to make her what she is today; a rich world famous writer of unparalleled genius. A must read for everyone who is dealing with life (that includes you too dude)

THE FRINGE BENEFITS OF FAILURE, AND THE IMPORTANCE OF IMAGINATION

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates,

The first thing I would like to say is 'thank you.' Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I've experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world's best-educated Harry Potter convention.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called 'real life', I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor. I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.

What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience.

Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person's idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my eduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain , without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea.

And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never suffered.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International's headquarters in London . There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind. I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country's regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares about some of the things I saw, heard and read. And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before. Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places. Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise. And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid. What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality. That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people's lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world's only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders.

That is your privilege, and your burden. If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better.

We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children's godparents, the people to whom I've been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I've used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

I wish you all very good lives.

Thank you very much.

If you would like to watch this go to this link:

http://harvardmagazine.com/go/jkrowling.html

World's most expensive and amazing ad

2008-08-01T07:37:00.000-07:00

This is the world's costliest Advertisement and the winner of this year's best Ad of the world.

It took 606 takes and re-takes to make this commercial and the total cost was $ 6.2 million( Rs.26 crore) for this 90 second commercial.

You could probably make a movie for that kind of money (In India at least) !

Everything is real with no graphics used and still look at the precision. The team that made this commercial won many awards.

The precision is mind boggling and the engineering and technical skill needed to make this advertisement is awesome.