We’ve never been great fans of Indian IT giant Wipro’s Chairman Azim Premji.

But tonight, as we slowly sip our White Russian into a stupor the old man Premji is our hero.

Really.

In a blistering attack penned in an Indian newspaper, Premji belatedly questions in rhetorical style the wisdom of a poor country like India hosting the upcoming commonwealth games:

The term ‘commonwealth’ originally meant public welfare, things that are for the greater good of society. Do the Commonwealth Games pass this commonwealth test? Is this Rs 28,000-crore drain on public funds for the greater common good?….

(G)iven the thousands of crores being spent on the Delhi Commonwealth Games, we need to ask if this is money spent wisely.

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Following a guilty plea for exposing his dick to a lady co-passenger on a Southwest Airlines’ flight from Philadelphia-Denver, Telugu bidda and SAP consultant Murali Krishna Nookella has been ordered by the U.S. District Court in Denver, Colorado to complete a program of mental health treatment and not travel on Southwest Airlines.

Here’s an excerpt from the court judgment in the Nookella case, dated August 19, 2010:

The defendant shall participate in and successfully complete a program of mental health treatment, as deemed necessary by the probation officer, until such time as the defendant is released from the program by the probation officer. The defendant shall pay the cost of treatment

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I have never taken drugs in my life.
- Tamil film star Trisha Krishnan

Source: Times of India

Never too late, sweetie.

What’s life without a few highs!

Voila, Slumdog Millionaire star Freida Pinto is on the cover of the Sunday New York Times Style Magazine (not to be confused with the more prestigious New York Times Sunday Magazine).

Image: NYT

Just yesterday, at the Lincoln Plaza in Manhattan just before Robert Duvall’s much talked about Get Low started we espied Freida in a preview (trailer) of Woody Allen’s upcoming You’ll Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

Som Mittal, chief of India’s software association Nasscom, has lost the battle to prevent the Obama administration from going ahead with a Border Security bill funded by imposing higher fees on H1B Visas used by Indian IT companies.

U.S. President Obama signed the $600 million bill Friday.

The bill is expected to fund an additional 1,000 border security agents on our Southern border besides supporting the hiring of more Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

Won’t Help
We’re not convinced that throwing more money at our southern border with Mexico will stem the tide of illegal immigrants, which currently is down to a trickle because of the recession in the U.S.

The late detective novelist Agatha Christie is the most widely read novelist in history, according to the New Yorker, which has an essay on the popular author in the latest issue (August 16 & 23, 2010 p.82-88)

Back in the old days, we read a few dozen Agatha Christie books.

And for the most part, we enjoyed them. The Hercule Poirot series, the Miss Marple books and the other Agatha Christie novels were all easy reads that we could knock off in a couple of hours max.

Some of Christie’s books like Murder on the Oriental Express (Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Vanessa Redgrave, Michael York and Anthony Perkins) were even made into popular movies adding to her fame.

Describing the authoress as a ‘broad cultural phenomenon,’ Joan Acocella writes in the New Yorker that Agatha Christie’s novels have been translated into 45 languages and sold over 2 billion copies.

Now, isn’t that 2 billion figure more than India’s population or have the desi mosquitoes been breeding more than usual lately?