Posing for the cameras

This is a picture(courtesy : AFP and The Hindu)
of Lin Dan expressing himself after winning a badminton match. Isn't it unusual? Don't those sports guys react to the crowd rather than so clearly looking into the eye of the camera?
Well, in this case there was another lensman watching :-)

Lok Sabha and Marhi Da Deeva

Yesterday surfing through various TV channels, on one of the channels "Lok Sabha",
I saw Deepti Naval wooing Raj Babbar in Punjabi. I found it interesting. It was a movie
"Marhi Da Deeva" that was being shown. It has a tragic ending. It also is one of
the best cinematic works around.

It has been directed by Surinder Singh and based on a novel by the same name
authored by Gyanpeeth award winner Prof. Gurdiyal Singh. Here is a
synoposis from IMDB :

"The film is a social tragedy born out of the gradual transformation of feudalism into capitalism.
It concerns the predicament of the protagonist Jasgir who becomes the victim of the exploiters
tendencies of the Young landlord. His father was treated kindly by the elder landlord but the son
Bhanta tries to retrieve all what his father had given to Jagsir. Against the background of this
external oppression Jagsir is also deprived of normal life because he belongs to low caste and
cannot marry from among his own people as his parents marriage itself was not acceptable to his
maternal grandparents, who discarded his mother. Jagsir is thus condemned to live and dies
without a child who will light a lamp at his tomb. Jagsir however falls in love with his friend's
wife Bhani. Does love hold any promise for the future or is Jagsir to drag his life to death and
become extinct without anybody to light his tomb?"

Movie boasts of an impressive cast line, most of them of Punjabi origin,including Pankaj
Kapoor, Deepti Naval, Raj Babbar, Parikshit Sahani, Asha Sharma and Kanwaljeet singh.

A must watch.

Although I had a tough time finding out the name of the movie. I looked it up in Times of India,
but it doesn't carry program schedule for "Lok Sahba", I looked it up in zipzap.com, but to
no avail, since "Lok Sabha" is not so popular a channel. Eventually I found it at two places.
Firstly in "The Hindu", the newspaper and secondly here. It was heartening to know that
"Lok Sahba" has its schedule online.

North East takes Centerstage

In December,1995 as a 13-year old I had attended a "National Integration Camp"
in Itarana,Alwar as an NCC cadet. It witnessed cadets from almost 20 states,
IIRC. There the best of the singers belonged to Darjeeling.

And now they have come to the fore.

Never before in the history of Indian media has North-East been so mainstream.
In the currently ongoing Indian Idol 3, 3 out of final 6 contestants are from the
North-East. Amit Paul from Shillong, Prashant Tamang from Kolkata and of
Nepalese origin and to top the list Meiyang Chang from Dhanbad but more
importantly of Chinese origin.

While Chang is being described as the "cutest" contestant, it is Tamang who
has generated the maximum buzz, being the only one to have a Wikipedia
entry dedicated to him.

Personally I think Tamang/Amit are the best singers of the lot,
but Indian Idol is not simply a singing competition anyway. It's
more of a performance event.

On a different note I think this edition of Indian Idol is a big leap forward
in truly mingling North East with rest of the India.

Startup scene in NCR is heating up

2 important milestones have been achieved in past month, announcement
of Yahoo's 35 pc stake acquisition in Tyroo and Oracle's acquisition of
Auptyma(yet to come to press). It once again shows that NCR might lag
behind Bangalore in terms of numbers of startups but when it comes to
quality it's one up.