Indian-American Sameer Mishra has won the 2008 Spelling Bee competition.

Sameer Mishra is a 13-year-old, 8th grade student at the West Lafayette Junior/Senior High School in West Lafayette, Indiana.

The word that earned Sameer the coveted championship was “guerdon,” a noun meaning a reward.

As the Bee Champion, Sameer Mishra took home $35,000 in cash, a $2,500 savings bond and other prizes.

There were at least four Indian-Americans in the top 12 of the competition.

Sameer Mishra: Bee Champion
(Photo courtesy: Spelling Bee)

The second place in the 2008 Spelling Bee went to 12-year-old Sidharth Chand, a 7th-grade student of the Detroit Country Day Middle School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Kavya Shivashankar tied for the 4th place and Jahnavi Iyer

Continue Reading…

The bozos at ailing IT firm Sun Microsystems have done a bad job on servers yet again while rivals HP, IBM and Dell turned in a decent performance.

In the first quarter of 2008, Sun’s server market share by revenue fell by 1.8% even as the worldwide server market grew 3.5% to $13 billion, according to market researcher IDC.

This marks the second consecutive quarter of revenue share decline in servers for Sun, according to the IDC numbers.

IDC estimated that over two million servers were shipped for the second consecutive quarter and a unit shipment growth of 7.8% year over year in 1Q08.

In contrast to Sun’s poor showing, its rivals HP, IBM and Dell increased Continue Reading…

Pentax has launched a 10-megapixels Optio W60 waterproof digital camera priced at $329.95.

Optio W60’s design is said to allow the camera to be operated in up to 13 feet underwater for two hours and at temperatures well below freezing.

Besides the waterproof feature, the compact Optio W60 digital camera is dustproof against dirt, sand and dust, and comes with Continue Reading…

IBM screwed American information technology workers by opening a Global Delivery Center in Pune (India) to provide its automotive clients worldwide with business consulting and application services.

The Pune center will focus on product lifecycle management, manufacturing productivity, business consulting, human capital management, financial services, technology services, and solutions for small and midsize automotive manufacturers. 

The new center is IBM Global Services’ fourth site in Pune.

IBM’s Pune center will also address requirements from the company’s clients in the travel, transportation, chemical, petroleum, energy and utility industries.

IBM plans to expand its workforce in Pune Continue Reading…

Sanjaya Malakar, an interesting former contestant on American Idol will feature in a new ad for insurance and financial services company Nationwide.

Sanjaya will be the next star in the Life Comes at You Fast campaign, which has previously included Kevin Federline, Fabio and MC Hammer.

In the Nationwide ad, Sanjaya visits a monastery in India to seek advice and is told that he needs a retirement plan, and some work on his hair, which was one of the highlights of his American Idol appearance.

Nationwide said this is the third year it has created advertising targeting the South Asian market.

Sanjaya’s ad is one of six new spots to specifically target the South Asian market.

Tariq Khan, Nationwide’s vice president for Market Development and Diversity said:

The rapidly growing South Asian market is very important to us. The creative work in these print ads and TV spots reflect traditions and situations that South Asians can relate to.

BJP, the party of Ram Bhaktas notched up yet another electoral victory - this time in the South Indian state of Karnataka - but fell just three seats short of a clear majority.

Here’s the latest Karnataka Election tally:

Party        Seats Won     Seats Won
               2008          2004
              
BJP            110            79   
Congress      80            65
JD (S)          28            58
Independents  6            13   
Others           0            10
Total          224           225

In 2004 Assembly elections too, none of the major parties got a clear majority. Initially Congress and Janata Dal Secular formed a coalition Government which however did not last long. HD Kumaraswamy withdrew support to Congress-Janata Dal coalition Government in January/February 2006.

Janata Dal (S) joined hands with BJP and formed the Government. As a result the first time member of Karnataka Assembly HD Kumaraswamy Continue Reading…

Providence Equity Partners is investing $640 million in Indian wireless communications company Aditya Birla Telecom.

Providence’s investment, which is one of the largest private equity investments in India, will be used to fund the network rollout and ongoing operations of Aditya Birla Telecom.

Aditya Birla Telecom owns the telecom UAS license for the Bihar service area and will hold a 16% stake in Indus Towers, a joint venture company formed  by Vodafone Essar, Bharti Airtel and Idea Cellular to provide passive infrastructure services to various mobile operators in 16 telecom service areas.

The fedora is there.

And for sure, there’s Harrison Ford beneath the fedora.

Yes, Steven Spielberg is there again - calling the shots behind the camera as director, as he was for the previous three Indiana Jones movies.

But the magic just ain’t there in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which comes nearly two decades after the previous movie in the series.

Made on a lavish $195 million budget (excluding the mega-marketing budget), the latest instalment of the Indiana Jones series is a rollercoaster ride without a coherent, gripping story to tie it all together in a pleasing package.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull reminds us of the ugly Bollywood movies where a coherent story is often an afterthought, if at all.

Just as our Bollywood directors bamboozle us with skimpily-clad heroines, foreign locales and silly songs in lieu of a story, in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull Steven Spielberg tries in vain to bedazzle us with treks through thick jungles teeming with big snakes, shrieking monkeys and scary red ants, slides down high waterfalls, moving columns of stones and fast car chases along steep mountain roads in illusory hopes that we’ll come along for the wild ride.

But a jolly good ride, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull certainly is not.

In the absence of a gripping story, the dialogs sound banal, the action scenes seem disjointed, contrived and tiresome after a while, and the overall effect is one of Continue Reading…

Update: Tamil Nadu Bhavan Re-opened by NYC Health Dept

Our earliest memories of South Indian restaurants are of dark and dingy interiors, food served in dirty plates or banana leaves and water poured into tall tumblers by sweat-drenched waiters in the dusty small towns and cities of Tamil Nadu in South India.

Four decades and 10,000 miles later, a visit to a South Indian restaurant remains a mishap-prone, dirty journey into the unknown.

We’ve visited scores of Indian restaurants in the New York metropolitan region and have found several of them to be dirty.

Indians, it seems, bring all their dirty baggage - literally and figuratively - to America.

Our latest knowledge of a dirty South Indian restaurant is Tamil Nadu Bhavan on Lexington Avenue in the Curry Hill area of New York City. The Murray Hill area in Manhattan, where Tamil Nadu Bhavan is located, is referred to as Curry Hill for its proliferation of Indian restaurants. 

But even by the stinking standards of dirty Indian restaurants in New York City, Tamil Nadu Bhavan a.k.a New Saravana Bhavan Dosa Hut in Manhattan is a rat hole.

Evidence of Rats, Mice, Roaches and Flying Insects are only some of the problems identified by the NYC Health Department in its April 23, 2008 inspection of Tamil Nadu Bhavan, which earned this ugly Indian restaurant an astounding 80 violation points.

Tamil Nadu Bhavan - A New York Rat Hole
102 Lexington Ave, New York, NY 10016
Ph: 212-679-4497

In the same inspection report, the NYC Health Dept inspector also wrote: Food item spoiled, adulterated, contaminated or cross-contaminated. 

And by the way, this restaurant is not vermin proof.

In less than four months after Tamil Nadu Bhavan opened, the NYC Health Department of Health & Mental Hygiene ordered this dumpster to be shut down.

Tamil Nadu Bhavan has the dubious distinction of failing the New York

Continue Reading…

May 18, 2008 will forever remain a dark day in Indian cinema.

After all, this is the day when Indian cinema made an ass of itself on the world stage.

If reports are correct, today is the market screening of that Tamil horror show Billa at the Cannes Film Festival.

No one in his right mind would ever allow Billa to be screened in the official Cannes competition.

So, Billa gets screened in the market screening category, which is primarily a vehicle for business development not a stage to showcase art or talent.

Starring that non-actor Ajith Kumar, Continue Reading…

Before the Rains
Language: English
Year: May 2008
Actors: Rahul Bose, Nandita Das, Linus Roache, Jennifer Ehle
Director: Santosh Sivan
Producer: Mark Burton
Music: Mark Kilian
Screenplay: Cathy Rabin 

When bimbos like Kareena Kapoor and Nayantara or buffoons like Abhishek Bachchan and Ajith Kumar show a faint spark of acting talent, we are startled.

When talented artistes like Nandita Das or Rahul Bose fail to live up to the standards they’ve led us to expect from them, we are saddened.

And saddened we were with Before the Rains, the new English film featuring Nandita Das, Rahul Bose and Linus Roache.Before the Rains has just had a limited release in the U.S. and is playing in few theaters across the country.

Faced with the choice this weekend between watching Jannat in North Brunswick (New Jersey) or Before the Rains in Philadelphia, it was really a Hobson’s choice for us - we opted instinctively for the latter having been exposed previously to the talents of both Nandita Das and Rahul Bose.

But Before the Rains fails at many levels.

The narrative is not gripping enough, the acting by the dramatis personae is less than impressive and the visual effects are nothing extraordinary except perhaps in a few stray frames.

Set in the lush green mountainside of Kerala in colonial India (1937, if you must know the exact date), Before the Rains is an effete story of romantic betrayal and its consequences.

Sajani (Nandita Das) is a maid in the home of an English planter Henry Moores (Linus Roache), who is building a road in the middle of the jungle.

But Sajani is more than just a maid to Moores (whose wife and son are in England): this young dark-skinned native - married and with a suspicious and violent husband in the village - also warms her fair-skinned master’s bed.

Sajani’s White master swears he loves her and Continue Reading…

Bhoothnath is a disaster at the U.S. box office.

This crap of a movie grossed a pitiful $330,246 in its opening weekend (May 9-11, 2008) in the U.S.

Eros Entertainment was the distributor for Bhoothnath in the U.S.

It’s no surprise that Bhoothnath was a damp squib at the box office here. As SearchIndia.com wrote last week:

Some Bollywood movies hit the big screen more dead than alive.

Like the scarily mediocre Bhoothnath, for instance.

There were all of 11 people for the 6:30PM show on Friday at the Regal Cinemas in New Jersey. Yes, less than a dozen people for the 6:30PM show on opening night.

And you know what? In retrospect, all those who failed to turn up for Bhoothnath were infinitely smarter than the handful of people who did. They knew what us dumb folk didn’t - Bhoothnath is a movie to stay away from.

U.S. Box Office Reports for Some Recent Bollywood Films

                    Opening          Rank  Theaters Average
                     Gross                                    Gross
Om Shanti Om   $1,764,131      11    114    $15,474

Jodhaa Akbar   $1,300,000       19    100    $13,000

Race               $802,254         18     96     $8.356

U Me Aur Hum   $642,923         19     89     $7,223

Saawariya       $542,192          24     85     $6,378

Bhoothnath    $330,246           20      64      $5,160

Krazzy 4          $322,426         27     59     $5,464

Tashan           $301,226          24     75     $4,016