Some things stood out immediatly :
Things are super expensive as surprise surprise 1 Euro (no Kroner, Euro everywhere) is about 1.45 US dollars. I can rapidly see my Euro back pack dreams going up in smoke.
Adult material is prominently displayed and sold everywhere.
As I type this I also notice that there is a "Euro" sign on the "5" digit on the keyboard.
Airport is nicely functional, not as glitzy as some American or South East Asian airports.
People are very friendly and everyone speaks/understands English with an almost desi type of accent.
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Kournikova, Sharapova, Graf, Pierce, Sabatini ..add one more to the list, our own Mirza ..What's with tennis and cuteness ? :) . I am sure she is the only one with a nose ring and nine piercing's on her ear though.
However all of those in love with her, (like half of the Indian male
population), a little wait might be required..
Didnt know that guys were worrisome though :) ¶ permalink 1 commentsCandidly admitting that she does not have a boy friend, Sania says,"It's not the right time to have a boy friend. It's time to focus on my game and not worry about guys."
The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.Correct me if I am wrong but doesn't it sound a tad hypocritical. Let's look at some of US's closest allies in the "War against terror" and biggest trading partners Pakistan, run by a General who refuses to step down as army chief, Saudi Arabia, autocratic monarchy and China, a communist nation which doesn't have a concept of what human rights really mean.
We will encourage reform in other governments by making clear that success in our relations will require the decent treatment of their own people. America's belief in human dignity will guide our policies, yet rights must be more than the grudging concessions of dictators; they are secured by free dissent and the participation of the governed. In the long run, there is no justice without freedom, and there can be no human rights without human liberty.
And where is the money ? and where are the troops ? Is this what the philosophy of conservatism is ?
America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal instead is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way.Oh I see, that's the way they want to do it now. Remember Iran-Contra ? Rejoice the LTTE's, the Lashkar-e-Toiba's and the Hamas's.
Taking over countries on false evidence and without a plan on how to go about it. Yes.
Renewed in our strength - tested, but not weary - we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.
India thinks he is great for us, however.
Have a look at ragzp's blog. He's copied several posts from yumnyum and lazygeek. He has even copied yumnyum's design !
And wonder of wonders he even has one of my posts !! I wrote sometime before about the comics and serials we grew up in the 80's here and Mr.Ravi Shankar has blissfully copied it here.
I wonder how many more of these kinds we have lurking in the crooks and crannies of the blogsphere. Too bad that he is from Hyderabad, my home town ..
Unbelievable, so stupid that you can ultimately only laugh at it.
Picasa, the digital photo manager from Google has just released its second version ! (Ever noticed how all Google "tools" have this rainbow color scheme, the main Google text ofcourse, the Google desktop icon and the above one). Get it here.
I had a look at it last night for a short time and found in addition to the cool features that the original version had (automatic chronological ordering of all the digital photos, superbly intuitive interface, ability to create cool slideshows), there were a couple of things which looked instantly useful.
For those of us who are not really power tweakers (read Adobe Photoshop and Gimp gurus), it gives twelve basic filters to manipulate your digital photos. God send for the artistically challenged like me. Second, the photographs can be emailed through your gmail account right from the application itself. So you can go ahead and select the photograph(s) you want to send and it opens a nice little browser window right there with your photographs attached, along with your normal gmail auto-complete et-al. Nice! No more trying to remember those pesky digital camera auto-generated names when attaching photographs to send in emails.
They are some other small trinkets of efficiency put in too, they now have a link to Hello! right from Picasa itself, so that you can post pictures to your blog right from it. Hello! also now has a IM for photos, so you can exchange photos with friends with an IM like interface. Haven't tried that though !
Its pretty cool, I was thinking though that the reason that Picasa will/is getting a lot of press and users is because its a Google company and also because its free ! (That again, is as a consequence of it being bought by Google). I am sure there are many such tools which are better but cant be free and don't have the Google aura with them. Ah well! Quite an obvious muse that one :)
On the subject of tools, Yahoo has come out with its desktop search too. I think its based on X1 and supports an amazing number of file formats. Why would you want the Google desktop search now ?
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It has been for some time now, earlier though they were the inevitable articles on the rise of outsourcing in India. I was pleasantly surprised though, to see two programs on an another uniquely Indian entity, Bollywood on major TV news magazines.
Aishwarya Rai was all her giggly self on CBS's venerable TV magazine 60 minutes and Bollywood was the subject of a 30 minute segment on ABC's Nightline.
I liked this quote from the latter :
"I would say what soccer is to sport, Bollywood is to entertainment," said Richard Corliss, a film critic for Time magazine and a self-confessed Bollywood fan. "That is to say, it's only a minority taste in the United States, but throughout the Indian subcontinent, in North Africa, the Middle East, Asia straight through to Indonesia, large parts of Eastern Europe, it's the most popular form of entertainment in the world."Monsoon Wedding first, then to a certain extent, Bend It Like Beckham and ofcourse Lagaan which was nominated for the Oscars have furthered the cause too. Bombay Dreams(which I happened to watch on its penultimate showing on Broadway) though, a brave attempt to sell Bollywood style song and dance to the world masses was simply not good enough.
Is this important ? Do we have to be "validated" here in the US ? Is it just a plug for the release of Gurinder Chadha's Bride & Prejudice soon to be released in the US ? I tend to think that its very important and is a welcome development. One reason that the US is revered (and also despised in some places) all over the world is the soft invasion that its been so successful in affecting in the form of Hollywood and the McDonalds. Bollywood in some way, also "sells" India to the biggest consumer of all, the US. It showcases our culture and our life in a much more effective way then anything else, we are something else, other than the smart science and math wizards, we have a way of life too which is interesting and entertaining, wouldn't you buy some of it oh great flush-with-money Uncle Sam ?
On another level, its a whole confidence thing, even pride in who we are. We should be careful of jingoism ofcourse, however I do think that now many Indians have a new sense of belief in who they are, and realize that they are OK ! :)
Even the CIA seems to think so ! Zakaria talks about this "confidence" in his latest article too.
To understand how much and how fast India is changing, look at its response to the tsunami. I don't mean the government's reaction but that of individual Indians. In the two weeks after the tidal wave hit, the Prime Minister's Relief Fund, the main agency to which people make donations, has collected about $80 million. After the Gujarat earthquake of April 2001, it took almost one year to collect the same amount of money. And remember that the 2001 earthquake was massive (7.9 on the Richter scale), killed more Indians (30,000) than the tsunami appears to have, and also got intense media attention (Bill Clinton headed the fund-raising efforts). What has changed in these four years is the most important new reality about India: the growing wealth, strength and confidence of Indian society.This change in attitude helps on every level, for long the IT industry in India has been reviled as a back office producer of software services. People ask for all this IT brouhaha in India, name one Indian product which is widely used all over the world. It will come. The natural cycle which ends on a product, involves a huge amount of investment and again a core belief in oneself, both of which is happening know. MIT's Technology Review says so too, in this article, Two Sides of Outsourcing,
