Mein aur meri Tanhayee

When the night has come, And the land is dark...

2007-11-13T14:53:00.001-07:00

Dedicated to You Know Who ...

#1 R&B and #4 Top 40 hit from 1961
Re-released in 1986 for the movie of the same name and hit #9 on the Top 40 charts

Song: Stand By Me (1961)
Artist: Ben E King
Lyrics:

When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we'll see

No, I won't be afraid,
No, I won't be afraid
Just as long as you stand,
Stand by me.

So darling darling, stand by me, oh, stand by me,
Oh, stand, stand by me, stand by me.

If the sky that we look upon
Should tumble and fall
Or the Mountain should crumble in the sea,

I won't cry,
I won't cry,
No I won't shed a tear.
Just as long as you stand, stand by me.

So ,darling, darling, stand by me, oh, stand by me
Oh, stand, stand by me, stand by me.

John, Johnny, Janardan - SRK style

2007-10-24T10:00:00.000-06:00

Making of the song Deewangi from the latest blockbuster from the team of ShahRukh Khan and Farah Khan - Om Shanti Om where they bring together 31 of the biggest stars from the Indian film industry in one song.

The Last Lecture ...

2007-10-15T18:36:00.004-06:00

Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch, who is dying from pancreatic cancer, gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving talk, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," Pausch talked about his whole life, his perspectives and things he has learned and seen, and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals.

It's highly inspiring....and there's lots of intelligent talk. He is pretty smart too!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=362421849901825950

The video can also be downloaded from his site (255MB).
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/

Here's a clip from an appearance by Randy Pausch on Oprah

Here's an article by Bob Evans of InformationWeek. Do we nurture creativity and enthusiasm, or squash it?

Mute button for email?

2007-10-03T21:08:00.000-06:00

Official Gmail Blog: “M” is for…mute:

Just like you, I get a lot of email. Much of it requires my reply, some is simply FYI, and some is the result of overactive mailing lists, like the one for Google’s San Francisco commuters. I take the shuttle to work, so I need to stay on top of announcements about route and schedule changes. But when there’s an alert about a route on the other side of the city, or a co-worker’s comment spurs a long thread about bus etiquette, I use the “m” shortcut key to mute the conversation and spare my inbox. As new messages are added to the same conversation, they bypass my inbox. If someone puts my email address directly on the To: or cc: line, the conversation immediately re-appears; otherwise, irrelevant messages sent to the mailing list are archived. That way I can refer back to them when I really need to find out about changes to the route when there’s a Monday night game at the 49ers stadium, or want to revisit the debate about dogs on the bus. To use the “m” shortcut key, first click “Settings” in the top right corner of Gmail and select the option “Keyboard shortcuts on.” Then, when you’re reading a conversation you want to mute, just press “m.”

This sounds awesome, but will I ever use it?

Indian Idol Final moments

2007-09-25T12:38:00.000-06:00

Munnabhai Sanjay Dutt does the Sri Ganesh of Voting lines on Indian Idol.

Here are the final moments as the results were announced by John Abraham. Too much drama for my liking. I was pissed since Emon got voted out anyways.

Wash Instructions

2007-09-05T14:44:00.001-06:00

Funny Impressions

2007-08-28T12:23:00.000-06:00

This is Hilarious. Watch especially for the Seinfeld (in detail below), Robert De Niro and Robin Williams bits.

Frank Caliendo does every Seinfeld character

Pablo Francisco with the Movie Preivews' voice

India’s answer to John and Paul...

2007-07-30T12:33:00.000-06:00

Richard Hobson at Times Online

If the India middle order are the equivalent of the Fab Four, then their latest album was a worthy, three-star affair. There was no easy genius of Eleanor Rigby or ground-breaking shift of Sergeant Pepper. But it had enough to satisfy fans, who will feel confident of finishing in the No 1 position by the end of the second npower Test.

A stand between Sachin Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly is the same as a Lennon/McCartney collaboration. Tendulkar is Paul: melodic, clean-cut and brilliant in an orthodox fashion. He needed only to wink and give a thumbs-up on completing his half-century for the comparison to be complete.

Ganguly is John, a hero, if not of the working class. He, too, loves nothing more than to sneer at authority.

That leaves Rahul Dravid and V. V. S. Laxman to fight for the George Harrison role. Neither would appreciate being cast as Ringo Starr – though the much-maligned drummer’s finest moment of Octopus’s Garden, with its couplet “I’d like to be/Under the sea”, can now be reassessed as a prophetic insight into life after global warming.

After the criticism that followed the near-defeat at Lord’s, these chastened batsmen must have longed for yesterday. They scored 261 runs between them, 63 more than the entire England XI in the first innings. Suddenly the idea of tearing up the record deal to make space for younger artists seems to be somewhat out of key.

Greg Chappell, the former coach, tried and briefly succeeded in dropping Ganguly from his playlist, citing musical differences. That is one reason why he is a former coach. John Wright, his predecessor, had the right idea, avoiding battles that he could not win and unleashing frustration on the pages of his private diaries instead.

One newspaper yesterday carried a report about Shane Warne helping England by offering his thoughts on young players. He has been doing this for years, in an informal way, but he probably did Ganguly a favour last week by suggesting that the former captain represented the weakest link in the batting lineup.

With a pointed retort that would have impressed Lennon, Ganguly answered suggestions of weakness against the short-pitched ball by hooking Chris Tremlett for six. To underline his superiority, he then made the bowler wait before he had admired his own shot on the big-screen replay.

Things were more tricky at the other end. Tendulkar managed to score from only three of the 48 balls he faced in Ryan Sidebottom’s first spell, a ratio that he would not have been allowed earlier in his career. Batsmen, like musicians, move with the times; even Bob Dylan is in the process of being remixed as rap.

Nobody has accused Tendulkar, unlike his partner, of being awkward. Nobody has accused him of much, other than being past his best as a batsman. Even then it is couched in favourable terms because he is considered too nice for full-on criticism. Any Frog Chorus moments – a lax shot here and there – are lamented with a quiet shake of the head.

Eighteen years on from his Test debut, Tendulkar can no more bat with the freedom that enabled him to score 177 on the same Trent Bridge stage in 1996 than McCartney can write another Penny Lane. The question that should be asked is not whether these people are as good as they were, but whether they are still good enough.

The audience and marketing men clearly think that they are. According to one Ganguly website, calling itself “the home of the Bengal tiger”, he at present has 16 commercial endorsements, while a section of tributes presents a never-ending list of accolades from the great and the good of cricket, Bollywood and family.

It is a curious roll-call where Steve Waugh and Nasser Hussain mix alongside Sunil Shetty and Dona Ganguly, who says of her husband: “He is a nice person, though he is a bit quiet.” The suggestion of timidity may surprise those who credit Ganguly with giving India the aggression that enabled them to beat Waugh’s Australia.

Nevertheless, this must amount to a farewell tour. India are not due back here until 2011, and even their own board, with a capacity for filling every spare day with a concert of some sort, will go easy on their commitments from now on. The ICC World Twenty20 in September is to proceed without Tendulkar and Ganguly. Let it be.

New "Last Supper" theory ...

2007-07-28T16:08:00.000-06:00

A new theory that Leonardo's "Last Supper" might hide within it a depiction of Christ blessing the bread and wine has triggered so much interest that Web sites connected to the picture have crashed. It is already the focus of speculation after author Dan Brown based his "The Da Vinci Code" book around the painting, arguing in the novel that Jesus married his follower, Mary Magdelene, and fathered a child.

Now Slavisa Pesci, an information technologist and amateur scholar, says superimposing the "Last Supper" with its mirror-image throws up another picture containing a figure who looks like a Templar knight and another holding a small baby.

In the superimposed version, a figure on Christ's left appears to be cradling a baby in its arms, Pesci said, but he made no suggestion this could be Christ's child. Judas, whose imminent betrayal of Christ is the force breaking the right-hand line of the original fresco, appears in an empty space on the left in the reverse image version. Pesci also suggests that the superimposed version shows a goblet before Christ and illustrates when Christ blessed bread and wine at a supper with his disciples for the first Eucharist.

The original Da Vinci depicts Christ when he predicts that one among them will betray him.

Here's a attempt to see this by Australian News.

Nice Review of Harry Potter 7

2007-07-26T12:44:00.000-06:00

MTV News' Potter expert says spoilers don't matter: Rowling's masterful storytelling is what counts - 'Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows': Sad And Satisfying

The Visitor

2007-07-12T07:59:00.001-06:00

A nice forward...

A few years after I was born, my Dad met a stranger who was new to our small Texas town. From the beginning, Dad was fascinated with this enchanting newcomer and soon invited him to live with our family. The stranger was quickly accepted and was around from then on.

As I grew up, I never questioned his place in my family. In my young mind, he had a special niche. My parents were complementary instructors - Mom taught me good from evil, and Dad taught me to obey. But the stranger...he was our storyteller. He would keep us spellbound for hours on end with adventures, mysteries and comedies. If I wanted to know anything about politics, history or science, he always knew the answers about the past, understood the present and even seemed able to predict the future! He took my family to the first major league ball game. He made me laugh, and he made me cry. The stranger never stopped talking, but Dad didn't seem to mind. Sometimes, Mom would get up quietly while the rest of us were shushing each other to listen to what he had to say, and she would go to the kitchen for peace and quiet. (I wonder now if she ever prayed for the stranger to leave.)

Dad ruled our household with certain moral convictions, but the stranger never felt obligated to honor them. Profanity, for example, was not allowed in our home... Not from us, our friends or any visitors. Our longtime visitor, however, got away with four-letter words that burned my ears and made my dad squirm and my mother blush. My Dad didn't permit the liberal use of alcohol. But the stranger encouraged us to try it on a regular basis. He made cigarettes look cool, cigars manly and pipes distinguished. He talked freely (much too freely!) about sex. His comments were sometimes blatant, sometimes suggestive, and generally embarrassing. I now know that my early concepts about relationships were influenced strongly by the stranger. Time after time, he opposed the values of my parents, yet he was seldom rebuked... And NEVER asked to leave.

More than fifty years have passed since the stranger moved in with our family. He has blended right in and is not nearly as fascinating as he was at first. Still, if you could walk into my parents' den today, you would still find him sitting over in his corner, waiting for someone to listen to him talk and watch him draw his pictures. His name?...
. .
. . .
. . .
.
. . .
. . .
. . We just call him, "TV."

* *Note: This should be required reading for every household in America!**

He has a wife now....We call her "Computer."

Mauli Dave, Texas, on Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Challenge

2007-07-10T18:42:00.000-06:00

Superb performance by Mauli Dave from Texas on Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Challenge 2007. The reaction of the celeb judges (after the first stanza) says it all! Vishal, Shekhar look like signing her right away.

Other fabulous Sa Re Ga Ma Pa performances

Karle Pyaar Kar Le

Albela Sajan

Average performance - Soniye

Yeh Waada Raha pop

Here are a few other of her performances clips:-

Live with Band Sargam:

Beedi

Baahon Mein Chale Aaoo

Kaisi Paheli

Lag Ja Gale

Aarti

Vande Mataram

Russell Peters with a difference

2007-06-21T13:28:00.000-06:00

There is absolutely no doubt that Russell Peters is FUNNY. Here's a slightly serious video that I found on his claim to fame - YouTube.

An interview/bio on Russell Peters that aired on CBC's The National the week of May 30th, 2006 - in three parts.

Dil hum hum kare ...

2007-06-20T07:49:00.000-06:00

When I first saw this, I thought it was a Fevicol ad. But it is pretty funny.

Kevin Pietersen…playing golf?

2007-06-16T13:16:00.000-06:00

Nice Video of Kevin Pietersen…playing golf or so it seems.

Indian Idol initial rounds clip

2007-06-14T09:23:00.000-06:00

I agree. The twins were pretty good. The rest of the clip is good too.

Sonia with a twist

2007-06-14T09:10:00.000-06:00

Pretty good attempt at recreating Hrithik and Kareena in You are my Sonia by American students.

Ford vs Emburey - Who should coach Team India?

2007-06-09T13:03:00.000-06:00

Most articles and experts have already ruled in favor of Ford for the job of coach of Indian Cricket Team. Here's a scathing article on why it shouldn't be Emburey or why he was even short-listed.

I agree with the sentiment but disagree with the over-criticizing tone of the article. Ford will probably be the choice. Emburey may or may not be a good coach but I think that he would not fit with what the Indians currently need. I think India need the aggression of an Aussie. Also, the reason for disqualifying Whatmore (who will probably be going to Pakistan like Moody went to Sri Lanka last time around after India preferred Chappell) was not justified. It's interesting to note that Sri Lanka are going after Aussie state coaches and India after English county coaches. I think it was purely because Gavaskar doesnt like Whatmore or doesn't like Australians in general. He was the one who came up with Emburey since there had to be some nominal competition to the players' choice.

At some point in the future rebuilding phase we should look at getting Wright and/or Shastri back, probably after all the big stars have retired after the next world cup.

Dallas Maverick Dirk Nowitzki is NBA's MVP

2007-05-15T14:54:00.000-06:00

Perhaps the Mavericks' first-round playoff failure shouldn't taint all that Nowitzki and his team accomplished from November to April, but it has and it will forever. Dirk Nowitzki, 2007 NBA MVP, will always be the first-ever No. 1 seed bowing to an 8-seed in a best-of-7 series. Does he deserve to be MVP? I think so.

Excellent article by By Warren Blatt

Because the Dallas Mavericks had a disappointing showing in the playoffs, questions regarding Dirk Nowitzki's selection as the NBA's MVP have started to pop up. But, the fact remains it is an award based on the regular season, not the postseason.

Granted, Nowitzki did not come through in the first round of the playoffs for the Mavericks, who were stunningly eliminated by Golden State in six games. Once again, playoff performances do not figure into the voting for the NBA's awards.

The Mavericks finished the 2006-07 campaign with a league- and franchise-best 67-15 record. They were the top seed in the Western Conference and owned home- court advantage throughout the postseason. Unfortunately for Dallas, the eighth-seeded Warriors were hot and proved to be a bad matchup.

A six-time All-Star, Nowitzki led the Mavericks in scoring (24.6 ppg) and rebounding (8.9 rpg) in 78 games during the regular season. He dished out a career-best 3.4 assists per game and shot 50.2 percent from the floor, including an impressive 41.6 percent from beyond the arc, and 90.4 percent from the charity stripe.

There is no doubt that Nowitzki was the top player for the best team in the league, but the emergence of fellow All-Star Josh Howard and the solid play of Devin Harris, Jerry Stackhouse and Jason Terry did have a huge impact on Dallas' success.

The 28-year-old Nowitzki was the focus of the opposition's game plan, as teams concentrated on him defensively, which made life on the court easier for Harris, Howard, Stackhouse and Terry. Nowitzki, who was 10th in the NBA in scoring and 11th in rebounding, saw a double-team virtually every time he touched the ball.

Did the seven-foot Nowitzki deserve to take home MVP honors? Was he the most valuable player for his team during the regular season?

The answer is yes, with an interesting theory. While Nowitzki's buddy, Steve Nash, again had an incredible year, the fact remains he was not going to be the first player since Larry Bird (1984-86) to win the award three straight years. Wilt Chamberlain (1966-68) and Bill Russell (1961-63) are the only other players to win the MVP three straight years.

A third straight MVP would have put Nash into super-elite status. Is he a Hall of Famer? Probably, but not among the greatest to ever play the game.

Michael Jordan, arguably the greatest player of all-time and a six-time NBA champion, won the MVP five times (1988, 1991, 1992, 1996, 1998), while Magic Johnson captured the honor three times (1987, 1989, 1990). Jordan and Johnson never took home the honor three straight years.

Nash, who finished second in this year's voting, averaged 18.6 points and a league-best 11.6 assists in 76 games for the Phoenix Suns, who finished 61-21 during the campaign and captured their third straight Pacific Division title. The 6-3 Nash is the best pure point guard in the league and makes all of his teammates better because of his incredible play-making ability.

Don't argue Kobe Bryant or LeBron James this year. Obviously, Bryant and James are two of the best players in the NBA, but their teams did not have the success that Dallas or Phoenix enjoyed this past season. Tim Duncan had a great year for San Antonio, but there was a reason Dallas finished nine games ahead of the Spurs in the Southwest Division standings.

A strong argument can be made for Nash. The Santa Clara product did it all again for the Suns, but was he really going to receive the award for a third straight year?

The fact is that Nowitzki was the best player for the team with the most wins during the regular season.

If the Mavericks finished with the same amount of wins as the Suns, maybe Nash would have hoisted his third straight MVP trophy. But because of Dallas' incredible regular season, Nowitzki deservedly got the nod over his best friend.

Is it a hollow feeling following the playoff disaster? Probably. But, again, it is a regular season honor and he was the best during the regular season.

Bula, Ilikena Bula

2007-05-15T13:39:00.000-06:00

Surely, the longest last name in Cricket history. Cricinfo's player page solemnly records that Mr Bula's full name was "Ilikena Lasarusa Talebulamainavaleniveivakabulaimainakulalakebalau", which is 49 letters. It was probably very good news for the scorers that he didn't mind being abbreviated. Apparently his name means "returned alive from Nankula hospital at Lakemba island in the Lau group". Bula played nine matches now recognised as first-class, on two tours of New Zealand with the Fijians - in 1947-48 and 1953-54. He scored two centuries, one on each tour, against Canterbury both times. According to our records Bula is still alive at 85.

Funny Indian comedian - Ali Rizvi in Canada

2007-05-11T15:27:00.000-06:00

Stand Up comedy clip of comedian Ali Rizvi performing from the critically acclaimed Nubian Disciples of Pryor Night at Yuk Yuk's Toronto.

Sony vs Motorola, Hrithik vs Abhishek

2007-05-07T16:12:00.000-06:00

I think Hrithik has the moves and the punch line but Abhishek's ad is funnier and creates a lasting impression

High-tech Comfort

2007-05-07T15:43:00.000-06:00

Did some one mention high-tech comfort for the bed-room?

Big B, Tabu in Cheeni Kum

2007-05-07T15:12:00.001-06:00

One movie I am looking forward to is Cheeni Kum which stars the inimitable Big B and the brilliant Tabu. (Namesake deserves an award!) I am pretty sure Paresh Rawal will also be brilliant.

Update:
Cheeni Kum will be premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 21st May which would be followed by another premiere in London on 22nd May, and then another premiere on 24th May in Mumbai. I really hope the movie lives up to its hype as its not often you see Tabu and Big B sharing screen time together!

Google = MCP ?

2007-05-07T14:45:00.000-06:00

There was an argument at work about women not inventing anything useful. In an attempt to prove the men wrong some one suggested Googling "She invented" only to have ask Did you mean "He invented" !