Any reasonable person who’s had the misfortune of watching the Fox News channel in the U.S. knows only too well its “Unfair and Unbalanced” tone.

So, it’s with deep regret we note that News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch has finally managed to get his grubby hands on one of the world’s finest newspapers - the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) - by his purchase of the paper’s parent company Dow Jones.

India and Indians have special reason to worry - and be extremely wary - because of Murdoch’s perceived softness when it comes to news coverage of China and the dictatorship running that Communist country.

And no one ever said China was a friend of India. 

Besides the ugly Fox TV network, New York Post, The Times of London, Star TV and DirecTV also form part of News Corp’s vast media empire that stretches from Australia to India to the U.S.

It’s a Dark Day for Newspaper lovers, few as they are in the U.S.

Of course, we had little doubt that Murdoch would win. After all, we live in a society where money trumps everything else.

Murdoch with his $60 per share bid, a 67% premium over Dow Jones stock price at the time of his offer three months back, had made it all but impossible for the offer not to go through.

Ultimately, it took just $5 billion to bring to an end a fine era.

The Wall Street Journal will be Murdoch’s heavy artillery as he launches a business channel to take on the stupid CNBC.

The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times remain Continue Reading…

India’s Ministry of Information & Broadcasting has banned two underwear ads on the grounds of vulgarity.

Officials from India’s Ministry of Information & Broadcasting said advertisements of ‘Lux Cozy Underwear’ and ‘Amul Macho Underwear’, which are being telecast on several television channels, have been considered indecent, vulgar and suggestive. 

The ban prohibits transmission or retransmission of the advertisements of ‘Lux Cozy Underwear’ and ‘Amul Macho Underwear’ on all broadcasting platforms with immediate effect.

You can watch the Amul Macho ad here and the Lux Cozy ad here and decide for yourself if they are vulgar.

India’s hopelessly incompetent Tourism Ministry has launched an e-commerce portal on the Incredible India web site.

The aim is to let visitors to the Incredible India web site make online reservations at a variety of hotels and Bed & Breakfast establishments.

India’s Tourism Minister Ambika Soni, a fossil from the Sanjay Gandhi days, wants to add medical tourism to the e-commerce portal.

UK IT firm Eviivo is providing the technology for the e-commerce portal.

Eviivo’s technology is supposed to integrate third party consolidators and multiple partners to enable the Tourism Ministry to provide an open platform for all participants in the tourism industry.

Desiya.com, Travelguru.com, Yatra.com, Ezeego1.com, Makemytrip.com, Etoursonline.com, Indiatimes.com and Cleartrip.com are joining the Tourism Ministry’s initiative as partners though their exact role is not clear.

Hopelessly inefficient, Indian tourism officials have done a pitiful job in attracting tourists to the country.

According to statistics from the World Tourism Organization, India got a piffling 3.91 million international tourists in 2005 compared to 8.47 million international tourists for Croatia, a country most Indians have probably never heard of. In the same year,  India’s communist neighbor China got a whopping 46.81 million tourists.

Wall Street Journal (subscription required) columnist Bret Stephens has lashed out at India’s supposedly growing defense ties with Iran in a hard-hitting column on Tuesday.

Citing articles in DefenseNews and the Washington Quarterly as well as actions by the U.S. State and Justice Departments, Stephens charges India with providing miliary technology to Iran, a pariah state for the U.S. establishment.

The U.S. is deeply concerned about Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Iran is also one of the three countries in U.S. President George Bush’s Axis of Evil (the other two are North Korea and Iraq).

In his column Tuesday, Stephens wrote:

[I]f Congress is going to punch a hole in the NPT to accommodate India — with all the moral hazard that entails for the nonproliferation regime — it should get something in return. Getting India to drop, and drop completely, its presumptively ceremonial military ties to Iran isn’t asking a lot.

As for the Indians, they don’t seem unduly worried about the criticism over the Indo-Iran military relationship describing it as “ceremonial”.

India’s Deputy Chief of Mission in Washington DC Raminder Singh Jassal is quoted in the WSJ piece as saying:

We are aware of our responsibilities and we know the danger of an Iran with nuclear weapons.

India’s burgeoning ties with Iran is prompted by its growing energy needs. The two countries are working on a 1,600 mile-long, multi-billion dollar gas pipeline deal to move gas from Iran to India via Pakistan. The U.S. is opposed to the gas pipeline project.

Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt was sentenced to six years of Rigorous Imprisonment on Tuesday for possession of illegal weapons acquired from those involved in the Mumbai bombings that killed 257 people in 1993.

In November last year, Sanjay Dutt was convicted for possessing an AK 56 rifle and a 9mm pistol.

The 48-year-old actor, who was present in the court, when the verdict was read, was immediately arrested.

Sanjay Dutt’s lawyer plans to appeal the verdict.

Sanjay Dutt is the most high profile of the 100 people who have been found guilty in the Mumbai bombings trial.

Judge Pramod Kode, who pronounced the sentence in a crowded court room, also fined the actor Rs 25,000, an insignificant sum for a star who earns several millions of Rupees for each Bollywood movie. 

Sanjay Dutt had earlier been cleared of the more serious terrorism and conspiracy charges related to the Mumbai bombings that happened in retaliation for the razing of the Babri Masjid mosque in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

Son of two late Bollywood actors Sunil Dutt and Nargis, Sanjay Dutt is a former drug addict and a controversial figure for over two decades now.

Did anyone say that politics makes strange bedfellows?

Ah, how true. How true.

Beleaguered Pakistan President and military chief Pervez Musharraf has held secret talks for a second time with his bitter foe Benazir Bhutto, the leader of the Pakistan People’s Party and former Prime Minister of the country.

The secret meeting is believed to have taken place in Abu Dhabi on Friday, July 27, 2007.

Both sides are mum on the discussions.

Reporting on the meeting between Musharraf and Benazir, the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) wrote on Monday:

A senior Pakistani cabinet minister said the meeting between the two leaders was part of an effort to develop a consensus on major political issues.

Benazir is currently in exile and divides her time between London and Abu Dhabi.

News reports say that this is the second hush-hush meeting Continue Reading…

VMware scores again. 

EMC’s virtualization unit VMware has now snagged a $150 million investment from Cisco.

Virtualization is a hot technology that lets companies save on hardware costs by running multiple operating systems and applications on a single machine. It’s a key enabler of server consolidation, crucial for large corporations.

VMware is the leader in the virtualization market with an estimated 85% marketshare.

Cisco’s investment gives it a 1.6% stake in VMware and comes close on the heels of Intel’s decision on July 9 to invest $218.5 million in the virtualization outfit.

After VMware’s upcoming IPO and upon closing of the deal, Intel will own 2.5% of VMware’s total outstanding common stock.

Other key players in the virtualization market include Virtual Iron and SWsoft.

Software Goliath Microsoft is also working on a Windows Server virtualization technology called Continue Reading…

No, No, No.

We are not talking here about Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington’s controversial thesis on the Clash of Civilizations.

We are talking about Huntington’s earlier work, Political Order in Changing Societies (Yale University Press, 1968).

In that now forgotten classic, Huntington famously argued in the opening sentence:

The most important political distinction among countries concerns not their form of government but their degree of government.

As Iraq collapses into complete chaos, it’s worthwhile to reexamine Huntington’s 42-year-old argument (originally outlined in an essay Political Order and Political Decay in the academic journal World Politics in 1965).

Huntington framed his argument on the importance of order in context of rising violence in modernizing countries across the world. In perhaps the best sentence by a contemporary political thinker, Huntington wrote:

Men may, of course, have order without liberty, but they cannot have liberty without order.

Fast forward to Iraq.

Saddam Hussein was a monster, the likes of whom have seldom walked the face of this planet. Some 200,000 people died or disappeared during his decades-long rule in addition to the several hundred thousand who perished in the Iraq-Iran war and the first Persian Gulf War.

But Saddam and his Baath Party were also a bulwark against terrorists in Iraq and ensured order and stability in the country, mostly through repressive measures.

In the aftermath of Saddam’s ouster, the institutional vacuum has produced Continue Reading…

Bollywood director David Dhawan has lifted an entertaining Hollywood romantic comedy Hitch (2005) and turned it into a pathetic, unwatchable nightmare called Partner.

Outstandingly executed, Hitch was an amazingly funny movie featuring strong performances by Will Smith (as the Date Doctor Alex Hitch), Eva Mendes (in the role of gossip columnist Sara Melas) and Kevin James (as Albert Brennaman in love with a heiress).

Gosh, there were so many memorable scenes in Hitch - Will Smith teaching Kevin James the 90-10 Kiss Rule, Kevin James teaching Amber Valletta to whistle at the basket ball match, Kevin James’ weird dancing and so many more.

Partner does not have a single memorable scene in 153 minutes. Just excruciating agony. Zero entertainment value.

Partner provides as much entertainment as an overflowing municipal garbage truck rolling down smaller Indian cities. In short, Partner stinks.

Partner fails at every imaginable level - acting, screenplay, editing, music and above all directing.

Salman Khan and Govinda are no patches on Will Smith and Kevin James respectively. Doing similar roles, Salman Khan and Govinda come across as rank amateurs with their unpolished performances cheating Bollywood fans of any hope of entertainment.

Playing a bumbling, accident-prone finance executive in love with the very rich owner of his company, Kevin James’ electrifying performance was a treat to watch. Cast in a similar role in Partner, Govinda is an unbearable agony to behold.

Most of our Bollywood stars have grown fat on the money and Continue Reading…

Search giant Google has joined the Band of Angels in India as an institutional investor.

Band of Angels is a bunch of Angel investors looking to invest in early stage businesses in the areas of IT products & services, retail, high end BPO, biotech & pharma, Internet, media & entertainment and leading edge technology in telecom & embedded domains.

Other Band of Angels’ institutional members include Lightspeed Venture, Punjab Venture Capital Ltd, SIDBI Ventures and Naukri.

Typically, the Band of Angels looks at investing from $100,000 to about $1 million, and exiting over a three-to-five period through an IPO, M&A or strategic sale.

Google’s move to join the Band of Angels as an institutional investor is in line with the high profile the company has been taking in India.

As the Business Standard reports,

In addition to being an active direct investor in companies, Google has also invested in three early-stage funds — Seed Fund, Erasmic Fund and VentureEast TeNet Fund in India

A mediocre Indian politician Pratibha Patil was elected as the country’s first woman President.

The nominee of the ruling coalition at the center, 72-year-old Patil is a lightweight politician with little achievement to her credit.

Patil won two-thirds of the electoral college votes defeating her rival Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, who was backed by the opposition parties.

Fortunately the office of the President is a symbolic post in India with little real power usually. But the President can play a crucial role in selecting the governing party if there’s a hung parliament with no political party having an absolute majority of its own.

Real power in the Indian politicial arena lies with the Parliament and its elected leaders and the leadership of the major parties.

Medical researchers in the U.S. have discovered that Turmeric, a key ingredient of Curry that gives the spicy Indian food its distinctive yellow color, has properties that can fight the dreaded Alzheimer’s disease.

Named after the German physician Alois Alzheimer, Alzheimer’s is a disease that attacks the brain and is the most common form of dementia. There is no cure for the disease, which gets worse over time and makes growing old a harrowing experience for many millions.

Alzheimer’s symptoms include forgetfulness, confusion, trouble with organizing and expressing thoughts, misplacing things, getting lost in familiar places and, personality and behavior changes.

A team of researchers including Milan Fiala and John Cashman have isolated bisdemethoxycurcumin, the active ingredient of curcuminoids, which is a natural substance found in turmeric root.

Bisdemethoxycurcumin may help boost the immune system in clearing amyloid beta, a peptide that forms the plaques found in Alzheimer’s disease.

With the help of blood samples from Alzheimer’s disease patients, researchers found that bisdemethoxycurcumin boosted immune cells called macrophages to clear amyloid beta, which clogs the brains of Alzheimer’s patients and kills brain cells.

Some five million Americans have Alzheimer’s.