(Update - Shivani Sud wins Intel Science Talent Search Competition.)

Eight Desi students have made it to the finals of the Intel Science Talent contest.

Of the eight students, five are girls and they submitted projects in diverse areas including Bioinformatics, Biochemistry, Mathematics, Medicine, Physics, Zoology, Earth and Planetary Science and Chemistry.

The students are in the age group of 17-18.

The eight Desi students will compete with 32 others for the $100,000 grand prize in scholarships. Each finalist will receive at least $5,000 in scholarships and a new laptop.

Here is the list of Indian Americans selected for Intel Science Talent Search Finalists:

1. Avanthi Raghavan, Lake Highland Preparatory School, Orlando Florida

Project Name - Characterization of Novel Protein Trafficking Pathways in Plasmodium falciparum.

Project Area - Biochemistry

Daughter of Chakravarthy and Vasanthy Raghavan, Avanti hopes her Continue Reading…

Click here for Indiralogathil Na Azhagappan Review.

Here are the showtimes for Indiralohathil Na Azhagappan movie starring Vadivelu, Theetha Sharma, Nassar and Shriya Saran in USA.

Indiralohathil Na Azhagappan is releasing on February 1 in New Jersey, Maryland, Bay Area and other centers.

Indiralohathil Na Azhagappan Showtimes in USA

New Jersey

Newark Screens
360-394,Springfeild Avenue
Newark, NJ 07103

Feb 1 |  7:00 PM | 9:45 PM
Feb 2 | 12:30 PM | 3:30 PM | 6:30 PM | 9:30 PM
Feb 3 | 12:00 PM | 3:00 PM | 6:00 PM | 9:00 PM
Feb 4 |  8:00 PM
Feb 5 |  8:00 PM
Feb 6 |  8:00 PM

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Maryland

P & G Wheaton Plaza 11
11160 Veirs Mill Rd
Silver Spring, MD 20902

Feb 1 | 8:30 PM
Feb 2 | 1:00 PM | 5:00 PM | 8:30 PM
Feb 3 | 1:00 PM | 5:00 PM | 8:30 PM
Feb 4 | 7:45 PM
Feb 6 | 7:45 PM

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Boston

Regent Theaters
7 Medford St
Arlington, MA 02474

Feb 2 | 2:00 PM | 5:30 PM

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Bay Area

IMC 6
1433 The Alameda
San Jose, CA 95126

Feb 14 | 4:30 PM | 8:00 PM
Feb 15 | 4:30 PM | 8:00 PM | 11:15 PM
Feb 16 | 1:00 PM | 4:30 PM |  8:00 PM | 11:15 PM
Feb 17 | 1:00 PM | 4:30 PM |  8:00 PM
Feb 18 | 4:30 PM | 8:00 PM
Feb 19 | 4:30 PM | 8:00 PM
Feb 20 | 4:30 PM | 8:00 PM
Feb 21 | 4:30 PM | 8:00 PM

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Chicago

Bloomingdale Court Theaters
324 W Army Trail Rd
Bloomingdale, IL 60108

Feb 1 | 9:15 PM
Feb 2 | 3:00 PM | 6:15 PM |  9:30 PM
Feb 3 | 2:00 PM | 5:00 PM |  8:00 PM
Feb 4 | 8:00 PM
Feb 5 | 8:00 PM

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Irving, TX

Fun Asia Irving
1735 N Story Rd Ste 172
Irving, TX  75061

Feb 1 | 9:30 PM
Feb 3 | 2:30 PM | 6:00 PM 
Feb 4 | 8:00 PM

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Dallas, TX

Fun Asia Cinemas
1210 E Belt Line Rd
Richardson, TX 75081

Feb 2 | 2:30 PM | 6:00 PM | 9:30 PM

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Minneapolis

Brookdale 8 Theater
5810 Shingle Creek Pkwy
Brooklyn Center, MN 55430

Feb 8 | 8:30 PM

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St.Louis

Wherenbergh St. Charles 18 Cine
1830 First Capitol Dr South
St.Louis, MO 63303

Feb 10 | 3:30 PM

Please confirm the movie timings with the theater before going.

Diligenta, a subsidiary of Tata Consultancy Services, has snagged a contract to deliver Business Process Outsourcing services to support Sun Life Financial of Canada UK’s (SLF UK) operations.

Expected to commence in May 2008, the services are estimated to be worth euro 100 million (over US$200 million) over the life of the contract.

Diligenta has been working with SLF UK as preferred supplier since October 2007, following a competitive tender which came towards the natural end of SLF UK’s existing outsourcing agreement.

Diligenta will continue to run the operation in Basingstoke where SLF UK’s Head Office is based.

TCS created Diligenta to provide BPO services to the UK life assurance industry.

Rupert Murdoch’s social networking site MySpace has named Amit Kapur Chief Operating Officer.

Kapur will be responsible for leading development and implementation of all global business operations.

Amit Kapur

MySpace is said to have 110 million users worldwide.

Kapur will also oversee growth and expansion of MySpace partnerships across the upcoming Developer Platform and popular features including MySpace Mobile and MySpaceIM with Skype.

Kapur, 26, joined MySpace in 2005 as the company’s first business developer.

Before joining MySpace, Kapur worked at NBC-Universal in the strategic planning and business development group.

Kapur received his BS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.

Sanjay Mehrotra is a co-founder of Silicon Valley-based SanDisk, manufacturer of removable storage cards, flash drives and MP3 players.

SanDisk’s products are used in digital cameras, multi-function mobile phones, USB flash drives, digital audio/video players and other digital consumer devices

Before becoming President and COO of SanDisk in April 2006, Sanjay worked as Director of memory design and product engineering, VP of product development and Senior VP of engineering.

Sanjay Mehrotra

As SanDisk’s President and COO,  Sanjay is responsible for manufacturing operations, engineering, marketing and sales.

Besides SanDisk, Sanjay is also involved in another semiconductor company FlashVision as Executive VP. FlashVision is a joint venture of Toshiba and SanDisk and manufactures advanced NAND flash components.

Sanjay previously worked for Intel, Seeq Technology, Integrated Device Technology and Atmel in the area of design engineering and engineering management, mostly in EPROM and EEPROM product development.

Sanjay has BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.

This is a story that could happen only in India.

Apparently, 500 poor people in the North Indian city of Gurgaon have lost their kidneys to an unscrupulous gang of greedy doctors who removed the kidneys and sold them to rich Indians and foreigners.

Describing the literal theft of the kidneys of poor folks, the New York Times writes:

Although several kidney rings have been exposed in India in recent years, the police said the scale of this one was unprecedented. Four doctors, five nurses, 20 paramedics, three private hospitals, 10 pathology clinics and five diagnostic centers were involved, Mohinder Lal, the police officer in charge of the investigation, said.

“We suspect around 400 or 500 kidney transplants were done by these doctors over the last nine years,” said Mr. Lal, the Gurgaon police commissioner.

Sadly, the latest Gurgaon kidney scam is not an exception.

In the mid-1990s, there were media reports that several poor people in Bangalore had their kidneys removed without their consent.

Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, who just butchered 4,200 jobs the other day for so-called expense management reasons, got about $26.7 million in stock (1.094 million shares) on January 22, 2008, according to the bank’s regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Vikram Pandit also received options on three million Citigroup shares, with strike prices ranging from $24.40 to $36.60.

 
Vikram Pandit
Desi Butcher of NYC

On the bank’s Q4 earnings call on January 15, Vikram Pandit blabbered on about expense management, reengineering and rightsizing staffing levels.

So we expect this desi butcher to hack away at several thousand more jobs at Citigroup.

Way to go, Vikram.

But just spare us the bullshit about how people are your most important asset as you did the other day on the earnings call.

U.S. Presidential candidate Barack Obama trounced rivals Hillary Clinton and John Edwards in the Democratic primaries in South Carolina.

Obama got 55% of the votes while Hillary secured 27% and Edwards 18%.

Following his decisive victory in South Carolina, Obama said:

Tonight, the cynics that said what began in the snows of Iowa was just an illusion were told a different story by the good people of South Carolina. After four great contests in every corner of this country, we have the most votes, the most delegates and the most diverse coalition of Americans we’ve seen in a long, long time.

Smart South Carolina voters gave Hillary and her husband former President Bill Clinton, who campaigned aggressively for her, the heave ho.

We are happy.

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and his wife Melinda Gates are giving $27 million through their charitable foundation to assist Indian farmers in developing micro-irrigation techniques.

The grant is being routed through International Development Enterprises.

The goal of the project is to assist up to 250,000 smallholder farm families—1.75 million people—in 14 states of India and boost farmers’ income by a minimum of $400 per year, and expand the agricultural economy by $300 million at the grassroots level.

To accomplish this goal, IDE plans to distribute affordable, scalable micro-irrigation systems though a newly-created private sector supply chain, train farmers to use micro-irrigation and link them to high-value crop markets, using their own existing resources.

Bill Gates announced the grants to Indian farmers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland as part of a $306 million package of agricultural development grants to boost yields and incomes of small farmers in the developing world so they can lift themselves and their families out of hunger and poverty.

Announcing the grants, Bill Gates said: 

If we are serious about ending extreme hunger and poverty around the world, we must be serious about transforming agriculture for small farmers—most of whom are women. These investments—from improving the quality of seeds, to developing healthier soil, to creating new markets—will pay off not only in children fed and lives saved. They can have a dramatic impact on poverty reduction as families generate additional income and improve their lives.

Infosys Technologies Limited is considered a paragon of virtue among Indian businesses.

That of course is fiction.

You don’t believe us?

Go look at Infosys’ IPO documents dating back to the early 1990s. What did Infosys tell you they were raising money for in the IPO prospectus? Did the company do as promised in the immediate aftermath of the IPO?

Recently, troubling questions have been raised once again about this media darling.

This time, the issue is Infosys’ recent settlement with the California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement (DLSE) towards possible overtime payment to certain employees in California for a total amount of $26 million.

The payment pertains to the last three years and such back wages are to be paid to employees in due course.

Infosys announced the California Overtime settlement as part of its Q3 2007-2008 results.

The Infosys settlement document provided to us by some folks in California is your usual legal gobbledegook.

To put it in plain English, Infosys is saying it may have inadvertently broken some California or federal laws and is trying to cover its ass in the litigious U.S. business environment.

Were laws broken by Infosys? If laws were broken, was it inadvertent? Why did Infosys act the way it did?

Only a full trial and subpoena of documents can Continue Reading…

If you thought Ajith’s Billa was bad, you ain’t seen real bad until you’ve seen Vikram’s Bheema.

Bheema achieves the odious distinction of having nothing going for it.

Not the story. Not the acting. Not the music. Not the dances. And definitely not the action scenes.

Dooming this worthless piece of garbage from the getgo, is the poor attention to the story.

The story lurches around the rivalry between two criminal gangs led by Chinna (Prakash Raj) and Periyavar (Raghuvaran) with Sekhar (Vikram) joining his childhood idol Chinna’s gang and taking it to greater heights.

But the plot lacks finesse or depth.

Further, a story that centers around enemity between two criminals gangs has been recycled far too many times in Tamil films to provide any joy to fans.

Barring Prakash Raj to some extent, none of the other actors distinguish themselves in Bheema. Not even Vikram, who is an actor of high calibre as ably demonstrated by his exemplary performance in Anniyan a few years back.

But in Bheema, Vikram delivers a ho-hum Ajith-like performance.

Raghuvaran and Trisha are the worst performers in Bheema.

Raghuvaran is usually a decent actor but in Bheema, he is a caricature of his usual self.

As for Trisha (the heroine of Bheema), this young girl of bathroom video fame is pathetically unequal to the task of acting and sheer agony to behold on the screen. In Bheema, Trisha plays Vikram’s love interest.

A graceless actress and a graceless dancer, Trisha is the kiss of death for a movie. Surely, even the Kaiyya/Vaaya girls on Marina Beach must display more grace in their actions than this bimbo. Right?

No surprise then that while Trisha’s peers like Asin and Shriya Saran are moving on to bigger Continue Reading…

Frankly, we think Bobby Jindal stinks.

At least, Jindal’s views on abortion do.

We also think Jindal is a phony, a Christian fanatic (or at least pretends to be in a state where religion is very important to its citizens) and lacks the experience to handle a complex task like governing a backward and corrupt state like Louisiana.

But here in Louisiana, Bobby Jindal has raised very high hopes that he will usher in big changes in this backward state and break the cycle of politics as usual.

Remember when Rajiv Gandhi became Prime Minister of India in 1984. The mood is like that now in Baton Rouge, capital of Louisiana, where Bobby Jindal made history when he took the oath on Monday as the first Indian-American Governor.

Bobby Jindal at his inaugural

At 36, Jindal (son of Indian immigrants) is the youngest sitting governor in the U.S.

In his Kennedyesque inaugural address on Monday, Jindal said:

Under the spotlight of the world, with generosity from many and a clear call to common purpose, we have the opportunity to make lasting and positive change….With clarity of purpose and commitment to our pursuit, we will not fail.

When we expressed our opposition to Jindal, a local American lady,  who works as an bookkeeper in Baton Rouge, loudly voiced her irritation and opposition. “He is a good man. I go to church with him,” she told us.

We hope that we are wrong about Bobby Jindal. But count us among the pessimists.

By the way, we did not meet Bobby Jindal in Baton Rouge but we did have the pleasure of meeting Mike the Tiger, the mascot of the Louisiana State University.