While Abhinav Bindra made those among the billion Indians who get a chance to bother about Olympics (enough to check it on the news) proud, it saved the same billion from what could have been a huge embarrassment of a much publicized event. But then, several things may go unnoticed or just shadowed.

This report for instance which asserts on, but never quite gets noticed when it says:

"And Sports Minister M S Gill had the last word.

I congratulate all including myself. This will boost the confidence of all other participants," he stated.

(emphasis mine)

Let us congratulate ourselves for being Indians, shall we?

Low intensity or not, would just condemning the terror attacks suffice? There has to be some serious rethinking of how media portrays acts like these, how we as people react to it and how much of it we remember enough to do something about it. What strikes blatantly though is how devastation and death becomes just the content for News Channels and withers away in the memory of the public.

Indian Express reports that one more person has been arrested for his posts on Orkut.

The Pune police on Saturday arrested one more person for posting derogatory content about Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi on an orkut community.

The Cyber Crime Cell had contacted the authorities of Google Company seeking details about the persons who posted offensive message about the Congress chief on an orkut community named "I hate Sonia Gandhi."

It was known that some offensive messages were posted using an email nithin.sajja@gmail.com. Investigations revealed that email id belonged to Nithin Sajja of Hyderabad.

(rest of the article)

Let us just hope that they've got the IPs right this time. The last time they did this, a wrong person was held in a shabby prison for 50 days!

Image Courtesy: AmarChitraKatha.com

True to its name, Amar Chitra Katha has always been the lively comic book with the tinge of Indian culture. When I was a kid, these books were unaffordable to my Mom (and my father never bothered to buy me books), so I always had to read them at libraries. But for my nephew, that is not the case. All of us keep buying Amar Chitra Katha whenever we catch them at the book store. But funny side is that he fancies watching Hattori (!) on Nick, Noddy and Mr. Bean on Pogo rather than read something!
The lovely digital pictures that Tata Sky puts directly to home from the satellite without interruptions isn't helping him much, either.

Looking at this little announcement of sorts on The Hindu today, I remembered how we used to search corners of the library to fish out the unread titles. The number of titles released in this series is huge. I used to enjoy the Kannada translations of these books the most. Apparently, the translations had gone into good hands and we never felt that it was actually a translated version that we were reading. The then ignorance and quality of Kannada on the translated books sometimes made me believe that Amar Chitra Katha first came out in Kannada and was then translated to English (which clearly was not).

Hello all at MoreStore,

We walked into your Store at Nagarbhavi, Bengaluru partly curious to
witness to what extent Aditya Birla has changed Fabmall :-)

But I should say that I was very disappointed with the quality of
supply and the unpolished attitude of apparently untrained personnel.

Several goods that are well beyond their declared shelf life (expiry)
are still dogging for customer's attention. Soft Drinks with labels
stripped off, Soft Drinks with leaked bottles, Dusty packs of fruit
juice, stale vegetables (at the door and inside) are mostly to be seen.
It is a mess! Much of the commodities we see in better supermarkets are
missing.

The Hindu has an interesting article today on Metro Plus that features an interview with Senegalese filmmaker Moussa Toure.

The interview covers his take on various issues, but this comment is striking (especially in the Indian context):

Moussa notes that “Movies make you dream, rather than open your eyes.” The francophone filmmaker feels to bridge the gap between the rich and poor, there has to be a change in the subjects and issues explored in cinema.

Here's another piece that is relevant:

He declares that people who try to be like the Caucasians are the “new blondes of the world”. He states that the Senegalese are the true Africans, as they don’t try to whiten their skins. “We are essentially people of the sea and from the fishing community – so we are recognized anywhere as we have the darkest skins!”

A nice hidden message in it for us Indians, eh? Less "Fair & Lovely" and more sense needed?

The Hindu has a report today about a subsidiary of Disney investing in India's UTV - an entertainment company.

UTV is a company that has produced some very different kind of cinema in India that include Khosla Ka Ghosla, The Blue Umbrella (Chatri Chor) and now Jodha Akbar. While the former two I've mentioned here are good examples of some classic cinema, the latter is a huge budget cinema that would probably line up to Hollywood scale in technology. One of their earliest production seems to be the famous television soap Shanti. I still remember how everyone at our home used to sit together to watch this TV series like they watched Mahabharath earlier or like they watched Mayamrugra(Kannada) just few years back.