The world famous CAR FESTIVAL

EXPERIENCE OF A LIFETIME

Well exactly seven years from this day (according to Hindu Calendar), I was in the sea of Humanity, huge crowd of devotees was surging towards the three multicolored wooden chariots standing on The Grand Road of Puri. I was nervous and excited at the same time whether I will see the deities in the chariots and whether we would be served with good food and whether there would be proper toilet facilities. These situations aroused in my mind as we were sitting at the top of a building waiting to see the deities. My father was at the front row with his colleagues and his seniors. I approached him and was offered a seat beside him at the front row. There I had a great sight of the entire scenario going on downstairs; roars of priests, beating of drums, mridangas, and trumpets. Devotees ranging from different castes to different states were present with their palms joined and praying. Also there were some mad devotees having their face colored, wearing weird kind of clothes and holding flags of nowhere. My papa asked me a question:

Papa: Do you know the names of the chariots?

Me: No! They even have a name.

Papa: Yes and they are Nandighosh, Talatdhwja, Darpadolana

I became puzzled when I heard the names and was having a series of questions to ask for. Then someone from the background said with a serious tone that Lord Jagannath is giving some difficulties to the priests carrying him.

Me: Papa! How can Lord Jagannath give difficulties to the priests? He doesn’t have life in Him.

Papa: No Beta He has eternal powers and he controls the whole universe and he is giving some strains as he is waiting for some true devotees to come.

Me: Papa! What do you mean by his name?

Papa: Lord Jagannath—clasping his palms said “jagat” means universe and “nath” means Lord. So he is the Lord of Universe.

Me: Ok. But if he is the Lord of the universe then why is he being pulled in this primitive manner? Why not they use air-conditioned cars for his traveling? And you say He is Lord and he even doesn’t have a single security guard near him?

Papa: Lord Jagannath is bound by the ropes of His devotees’ affection. He goes wherever they take him. He rides in a high, open cart because everyone can see Him and he is protected by the love of his devotees. He needs no security.

Me: Why does He have such big, round eyes?

Papa: He is staring wide-eyed at all of us showering everyone with His love. He is thrilled to see his devotees! He is an avatar of Lord Krishna and known as Shyama Sundara Krishna of Vrindavan.

Me: He doesn’t look like the beautiful statues of Krishna I have seen. Why is He called Sundara? His hands are short and His legs are not visible; this idol looks really strange.

Papa: Krishna was barely 12 years old, younger than you are now when He left Vrindavan for Mathura with brother Balarama. He promised His dear companions and His parents Yashoda and Nanda that He will return soon. The people of Vrindavan really missed Him and passed sleepless and hungry nights. He went to Dwarka where He was married and settled there. But as He is God he cannot continue to live His normal life as His devotees and dear companions were yearning to meet Him and they prayed for Him and this made Him to come back to Vrindavan again after many years. When He with his brother Balarama and sister Subhadra reached they were wonderstruck at the deep, intense love of Brijwasis for Krishna despite long years of separation. They were paralysed with shock and Their lotus-petal like eyes widen enormously to become round like saucers. And they became like you are seeing them now

Me: So Lord Jagannath is Shyama Sundara Krishna.
Papa: Yes my child!

All of the members sitting around us rose from their seats and said loudly JAI JAGANNATH.

I also said JAI JAGANNATH.

IIT grads launch India's first Internet search engine

Guruji.com, founded by two Delhi IIT graduates, on Thursday launched the country's first local Internet search engine, with a commitment of $7 million from a leading Indian venture capital firm.

Aimed at the Indian web consumer, Guruji.com is focussed on providing better search results by leveraging proprietary algorithms and data in the Indian context, its co-founder and CEO Anurag Dod said.
Anurag Dod and co-founder and chief operating officer Gaurav Mishra, with significant Internet and search experience returned from the Silicon Valley to start Guruji.com after Sequoia Capital India provided seed funding to the venture. "What sets us apart is our focus on the Indian market and the Indian consumer. We have worked very hard to build the best local search product in the market," Dod said.
A study by the Internet and Mobile Association of India says there are about 65 million people who use search engines in India and the current size for search engine advertising is $ 50 million.

Mishra said 90 per cent of Internet search queries were local in nature and Guruji.com would deliver better search results than any other search engine.
Dod said there were 38 million Internet users in India and it was expected to grow to 100 to 200 million in the next couple of years, thereby, offering a huge potential.

In the first couple of months, they expect a traffic of 100,000 hits a day, they said, pointing out that 90 per cent of Indian internet users do a search every day. At a later stage, they expect releases in different Indian vernacular languages also.
Crawl technology used by Guruji.com is a complex computing system that crawls the web identifying Indian content using sophisticated algorithms.
It crawls the web, indexes the data that it gathers and provides the user with a simple keyword based interface to get to the data quickly and efficiently, they said.
Mishra said they were growing database and would first focus on top 20 cities where there is a reasonable amount of Internet penetration.

Anurag has 10+ years of extensive software engineering experience which includes key contribution in two successful startups. As an Engineering Manager in Wisenut Search Engine, he was instrumental in developing its Core Search Technology and has a patent pending for that. Wisenut was acquired by LookSmart in 2002. He also held senior engineering positions in EBay, Synopsis and Delsoft. Anurag holds B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Delhi and Masters in Computer Science from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. While at IIT Delhi he was a recipient of Summer Undergraduate Research Award .

Gaurav has over 10+ years of software development and has worked in senior engineering positions for Microsoft, Pillar Data Systems and Nokia. In his previous assignment in Intellisync which got acquired by Nokia, Gaurav was the architect for design and development of an instant messaging solution for Blackberry, Treo and other PDA’s. He has extensive experience in startups and large companies and has played a key role in shipping complex system software products. Gaurav holds a B.Tech from IIT Delhi in Computer Science and a Masters of Science from State University of New York, Buffalo .

Milking phoney patriotism-7 Wonders voting

Just hours after this story goes to press, the verdict will be out. In Lisbon, a list of the "New7Wonders" will be announced in a glitzy ceremony. The fortunate monuments will be the winners of an 18-month-long worldwide poll through phones and the Internet. And the fate of the Taj Mahal will be clear. The last few weeks, millions of Indians were implored through various forms of media to vote for the Taj in the interest of national loyalty. It is easy to appeal to the patriotic fervour of Indians, especially when hard work is not involved, but what many did not realise is that the whole New7Wonders (N7W) campaign was a private commercial enterprise.

The brainchild of Bernard Weber, a Swiss businessman who has also dabbled in films, the campaign was orchestrated by his for-profit corporation called New Open World Corporation (NOWC). Weber roped in Federico Mayor, a former UNESCO director-general, to be part of this project, but UNESCO itself was not involved. Needless to say, this campaign has miffed experts who question the integrity of a private body that will declare a new set of seven wonders. History gives sanctity to only one list of Seven Wonders, the one that was compiled by Greek mathematician Philon of Byzantium in 200 BC.

The money-spinner for the campaign was mobile phone voting. In India, the voting rights belonged to a private company called I Media Corporation Limited (IMCL). It controls the number 4567 you sent your SMS votes to. For every rupee spent on sending the SMS, 15 paise went directly to the government in the form of a wireless planning coordination fee. Sixty-four paise went to the cellphone operator you used to vote. The bulk of the remaining rupee was divided in equal halves between a company called IMI which collected all the votes in an electronic vault-like space and media partners like IMCL. Weber made two to three paise for every rupee that was spent on the voting. A remarkable aspect of this poll was that nothing stopped a person from voting many times.

Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni has said that the project was "absurd" and described Weber, as a man, "concerned primarily with self-promotion". Nagib Amin, an Egyptian expert on world heritage sites, has pointed out that, "In addition to the commercial aspect, the vote has no scientific basis." Egypt has voiced its concerns that such campaigns may undermine the preeminence of its pyramids, the only surviving Wonder among the historical Seven Wonders of the World compiled by Philon. In reaction to such opposition, Weber made the pyramids of Giza an "Honorary New7Wonders Candidate". This meant that the place of the pyramids was secure as an additional Wonder to the seven being voted upon.

There was no such outrage in India. Instead, radio jockeys and advertisements tried to whip up a fear. They said grimly that the Taj is lagging by millions of votes and that Indians must quickly do something about this. They said, if you really loved India and by that association, the Taj, you must vote. A commercial even had a blind boy asking Indians to vote. "I have heard it is beautiful," he said in a heartbreaking way. The N7W campaign proved how overtly and how easily nationalism can be exploited to make money for a few.

Meanwhile, the Taj is yellowing. The pollution around it is slowly destroying it. The Yamuna, on whose banks this monument has stood for centuries, is a national embarrassment. And Agra continues to be a miserable, filthy town, an unworthy host to a magnificent symbol of love. Saving the Taj will require the kind of heroic political effort that has not been witnessed in free India. And it is improbable that such an effort will be undertaken. When it comes to expressing vacant patriotism, Indians have always chosen the easier option. In the case of Weber's gambit, lakhs of Indians had to just press some buttons. And they apparently did.

Some websites of Great Indian Singers

If you are a big fan of yesteryear's Indian singers then these are the web-sites to be

Mohd. Rafi-(http://www.mohdrafi.com/)
Some Interesting Facts:
*First performance at the age of 13
*Rafi's song from the film Gumnaam (1966), Jaan Pehechaan Ho, was used on the soundtrack of Ghost World (2001)

Kishore Kumar (http://www.yoodleeyoo.com
,http://www.kishorekumar.org/)

Some Interesting Facts:
*Has sung in many Indian languages including Hindi, Bengali (his mother tongue), Marathi, Assamese, Gujarati, Kannada, Bhojpuri, Malayalam and Oriya.

*Kishore Kumar was married four times, to the following women:
* Ruma Guha Thakurta, (aka Ruma Ghosh,1950 - 1958)
* Madhubala (1961-23Feb1969)
* Yogeeta Bali (1976-4Aug1978)
* Leena Chandavarkar (1980-13Oct1987)


Kailash Kher(http://www.kailashkher.com/)
*Manages the web-site by himself and he has a great idea on web-designing and also good knowledge on Java apart from the talent of singing.

SO who is the real MR.BEAN

Rowan Sebastian Atkinson (born 6 January 1955) is an English comedian, actor and writer, famous for his title roles in the British television comedies Blackadder and Mr. Bean.

Atkinson was born to Ella May and Eric Atkinson, Anglican farmers in the town of Consett, north-west of the city of Durham.[2] His oldest brother is Rodney Atkinson, a eurosceptic economist who narrowly lost the United Kingdom Independence Party leadership election in 2000.

He was educated at Durham Choristers School, followed by St Bees School, and studied electrical engineering at Newcastle University. He continued with an MSc at Queens College, Oxford, first achieving notice at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1976.
At Oxford, he also acted and performed early sketches for the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS), the Oxford Revue and the Experimental Theatre Club (ETC), meeting writer Richard Curtis and composer Howard Goodall, with whom he would continue to collaborate during his career.

Married To an Indian

Atkinson married Sunetra Sastry in 1990, having met her professionally on the set of Blackadder. They married quietly at the Russian Tea Room in New York City, USA with Stephen Fry acting as the best man. The couple have two children, Lily and Benjamin, and live in an Oxfordshire village.


Real Craze for CARS

With an estimated wealth of £100 million, Atkinson is able to indulge in a passion for cars that began with driving his mother's Morris Minor around the family farm.
Atkinson's car collection is dominated by Aston Martins, including the DB7 used in Johnny English.

Atkinson has also raced in other cars, including a Renault 5 Turbo for two seasons. He owns two McLaren F1s,one of which was involved in an accident with an Austin Metro. Other cars he owns include an Audi A8, a green Ferrari 456GT with raspberry leather, three Mercedes-Benzes including a silver taxi Mercedes-Benz 500E with over 320hp, and also a Bentley Mulsanne, Honda Civic Hybrid, Lancia Delta Integrale, MG XPower SV, and Subaru Sherpa.

iPhone

The iPhone is a multimedia and Internet-enabled mobile phone by Apple, announced by company CEO Steve Jobs during the keynote at the Macworld Conference & Expo on 9 January 2007, that is scheduled to be released on 29 June 2007 in the U.S. at 6 p.m "local time" limit two per person.

The iPhone's functions include those of a camera phone, a multimedia player, mobile phone, and Internet services like e-mail, text messaging, web browsing, Visual Voicemail and wireless connectivity. iPhone input is accomplished via touchscreen with virtual keyboard and buttons. The iPhone is a 2G quad-band GSM phone, though Jobs mentioned in his keynote that Apple has a "plan to make 3G phones" in the future.

The iPhone will be available from the Apple Store and from AT&T Mobility, formerly Cingular Wireless, with a price of US$499 for the 4 GB model and US$599 for the 8 GB model, based on a two-year service contract. Apple intends to make the phone available in Europe in Q4 2007 and in Asia in 2008.


Features

Apple has released a Guided Tour video explaining all of iPhone's features through a series of simple demonstrations.

Touch screen

The 3.5 inch (8.9 cm) liquid crystal display (320×480 px at 160 ppi) HVGA touch screen topped with optical-quality glass is specifically created for use with a finger, or multiple fingers for multi-touch sensing. No stylus is needed, nor can an ordinary one be used, as the touch screen requires touch by something with the physical properties of bare skin to operate.

For text input, the device implements a virtual keyboard on the touchscreen. It has automatic spell checking, predictive word capabilities, and a dynamic dictionary that learns new words. Notably, the predictive word capabilities have been integrated with the dynamic virtual keyboard so that users will not have to be extremely accurate when typing — i.e. touching the edges of the desired letter or nearby letters on the keyboard will be predictively corrected when possible. Additionally, an optional landscape mode for text entry with the virtual keyboard has been mentioned by Apple executives as a possibility for iPhone, but Apple has not yet come to a final decision as to its inclusion in the shipping version of iPhone. A possible advantage of landscape text entry would be the availability of larger keys to ease text entry, especially for individuals with larger fingers.

The iPhone varies from common desktop interfaces by using a direct manipulation model of scrolling. Where a typical desktop GUI achieves scrolling by using a scroll-arrow to push a view-window down and thus the content itself up (or the reverse, clicking up to move content down), the iPhone interface enables the user to move the content itself up or down by a touch-drag-lift motion of the finger, much as one would slide a playing card across a table. Additionally, the speed desired for scrolling is computed based on the speed and acceleration with which the drag motion is performed.

Scrolling through a long list works as if the list is pasted on the surface of a wheel: the wheel can be "spun" by sliding a finger over the display. After the finger is lifted from the display the wheel continues to "spin" for a short moment before coasting down. In this way, the iPhone seems to simulate the physics of a real object, which, it is thought, should give a natural feel to the whole process.

The UI also features other visual effects, such as horizontally sliding sub-selections and co-selections from right and left, vertically sliding system menus from the bottom (e.g. favorites, keyboard), and menus and widgets that turn around to allow settings to be configured on their back sides.

The photo album and web page magnifications are examples of multi-touch sensing. It is possible to zoom in and out of objects such as web pages and photos by respectively "unpinching" and "pinching" them, that is, placing two fingers (usually thumb and forefinger) on the screen and moving them farther apart or closer together as if stretching or squeezing the image. This scaling is done uniformly and proportionally based on the image in question so there is no distortion of the image itself, as would be the case if the image were actually stretched or squeezed.

Other inputs

The display responds to three sensors: a proximity sensor that shuts off the display and touchscreen when the iPhone is brought near the face to save battery power and to prevent spurious inputs from the user's face and ears, an ambient light sensor that adjusts the display brightness which in turn saves battery power, and an accelerometer, which senses the orientation of the phone and changes the screen accordingly, albeit in only one 90 degree direction.

A single frontal hardware button brings up the main menu. Subselections are made via the touchscreen. The iPhone utilizes a full-paged display, with context-specific submenus at the top and/or bottom of each page, sometimes depending on screen orientation. Detail pages display the equivalent of a "Back" button to go up one menu.

The iPhone has three physical switches on its sides: sleep/wake, volume up/down, ringer on/off. All other multimedia and phone operations are done via the touch screen.

Phone

The iPhone allows conferencing, call holding, call merging, caller ID, and integration with other cellular network features and iPhone functions. For example, a playing song fades out when the user receives a call. Once the call is ended the music fades back in.

The iPhone will include a Visual Voicemail feature in conjunction with AT&T Mobility, formerly Cingular Wireless, which allows users to view a list of current voicemail messages onscreen, without having to call into their voicemail. Unlike most other systems, messages can be listened to in a non-chronological order, by choosing messages from an on-screen list. AT&T completely reworked their voicemail infrastructure to accommodate this new feature designed by Apple.

SMS messages are presented chronologically in a mailbox format similar to Mail, which places all text from recipients together with replies. Text messages are displayed in speech bubbles (similar to iChat) under each recipient's name.

Camera

The iPhone features a built in 2.0 megapixel camera located on the back, the camera cannot record video at this time. It also includes software that allows the user to upload, view, and e-mail photos. The user zooms in and out of photos by "unpinching" and "pinching" them through the Multi-touch interface. The software will interact with iPhoto on the Mac.

Multimedia

The layout of the music library differs from previous iPods, with the sections divided more clearly alphabetically, and with a larger font. The Cover Flow, like that on iTunes, shows the different album covers in a scroll-through photo library. Scrolling is achieved by swiping a finger across the screen.

Like the fifth generation iPods introduced in 2005, the iPhone can play video, allowing users to watch TV shows and films. Unlike other image-related content, video on the iPhone plays only in the landscape orientation, when the phone is turned sideways. A two-fingered tap is used to switch between the video's true wide-screen aspect ratio (with black bars on the top and bottom of the screen) and a zoomed mode (to fill the iPhone's screen).

The iPhone has built-in Wi-Fi, with which it will be able to access the Internet (through a wireless network) via a modified version of the Safari web browser. The iPhone will also be able to connect to the Internet through AT&T's EDGE network but will not be able to utilize AT&T's 3G/HSDPA network, however Steve Jobs' mentioned at the Keynote presentation that 3G support would be a future feature.The web browser displays full web pages as opposed to simplified pages as on most non-smartphones. However, as of WWDC 2007, the iPhone does not support Flash technology. Web pages may be viewed in portrait or landscape mode and support automatic zooming by "pinching" or double-tapping images or text. The iPhone also has Bluetooth 2.x+EDR built in. It works with wireless earpieces that use Bluetooth 2.0 technology and allows file transfer.

Microsoft Surface Computer

Microsoft Surface (Codename: Milan), is a forthcoming product from Microsoft which is developed as a software and hardware combination technology that allows a user, or multiple users, to manipulate digital content by the use of natural motions, hand gestures, or physical objects. It was announced on May 30, 2007 at D5, and is expected to be released by commercial partners in November 2007. Initial customers will be in the hospitality businesses, such as restaurants, hotels, retail, and public entertainment venues.

Surface is essentially a Windows Vista PC tucked inside a black table base, topped with a 30-inch touchscreen in a clear acrylic frame. Five cameras that can sense nearby objects are mounted beneath the screen. Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by setting real-world items tagged with special barcode labels on top of it.

Surface has been optimized to respond to 52 touches at a time. During a demonstration with a reporter, Mark Bolger, the Surface Computing group's marketing director, "dipped" his finger in an on-screen paint palette, then dragged it across the screen to draw a smiley face. Then he used all 10 fingers at once to give the face a full head of hair.

In addition to recognizing finger movements, Microsoft Surface can also identify physical objects. Microsoft says that when a diner sets down a wine glass, for example, the table can automatically offer additional wine choices tailored to the dinner being eaten.

Prices will reportedly be $5,000 to $10,000 per unit. However Microsoft said it expects prices to drop enough to make consumer versions feasible in 3 to 5 years.

The machines, which Microsoft debuted May 30, 2007 at a technology conference in Carlsbad, California, are set to arrive in November in T-Mobile USA stores and properties owned by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. and Harrah's Entertainment Inc.

Microsoft notes four main components being important in Surface's interface: direct interaction, multi-touch contact, a multi-user experience, and object recognition. The device also enables drag and drop digital media when wi-fi enabled devices are placed on its surface such as a Microsoft Zune or digital cameras.

Surface features multi-touch technology that allows a user to interact with the device at more than one point of contact. For example, using all of their fingers to make a drawing instead of just one. As an extension of this, multiple users can interact with the device at once.

The technology allows non-digital objects to be used as input devices. In one example, a normal paint brush was used to create a digital painting in the software. This is made possible by the fact that, in using cameras for input, the system does not rely on restrictive properties required of conventional touchscreen or touchpad devices such as the capacitance, electrical resistance, or temperature of the tool used (see Touchscreen).

The computer's "vision" is created by a near-infrared, 850-nanometer-wavelength LED light source aimed at the surface. When an object touches the tabletop, the light is reflected to multiple infrared cameras with a net resolution of 1280 x 960, allowing it to sense, and react to items touching the tabletop.

Surface will ship with basic applications, including photos, music, virtual concierge, and games, that can be customized for the customers.