The world's largest plasma TV!

The world's largest HD Plasma TV is out for sale. The manufacturers of this TV giant is Panasonic USA. The Panasonic 103V inch Plasma TV was first showcased at CES in January. The TV had lot of curious onlookers to get a better look at the 103 inch wide screen Plasma TV.

The Panasonic 103V inch Plasma Tv supports a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels and has a contrast ratio of 3000:1. The pixel pitch of Panasonic 103 inch plasma TV is 3.8".

The demand for large screen Plasmas are very high in the USA says Panasonic. Panasonic plans to produce 5000 of these giant Plasma displays every year. The manufacturing will be carried out in the factory at Amagasaki,Japan.

North America will get a majority of the shares, 50%. 20% will be sold in Europe and the rest goes to Asia and Japan. The pricing of Panasonic 103V is not available yet.

Motorola V3 razr

The good: The Motorola Razr V3 has a striking design and comes with a worthy list of features including Bluetooth, a speakerphone, and world phone support.

The bad: Unfortunately, the Motorola Razr V3 supports only video playback, the controls take acclimation, and the call volume is a bit low.

The bottom line: The original thin phone, the Motorola Razr V3 has a sexy design and useful features, but its performance isn't always up to par.

Specifications: Carrier: Cingular Wireless; Band / mode: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 (Quadband)

The poor indians!

The overwhelming impression? Poverty. Two recent 24 hour journeys in second-class compartments on trains, and I came home stunned -- I mean this, I was simply stunned -- at the number and variety of people who streamed through the coach asking for coins. Or who did so from the stations we stopped at. Or who were obviously destitute and desperate even if they did not beg.

Eunuchs; blind men; blind couples; men on their behinds with a leg draped around their necks, one with a bag of grapes hanging from his toes; young kids doing some little act; young girls singing tunelessly; boys and men and women sweeping the compartment, some with the shirts off their backs; filthy mothers with a seemingly lifeless kid lolling in their arms; a bearded midget who didn't say a word; men without one or more limbs; men on crutches; a young man who picked up discarded watermelon rinds from under the train and chewed on them; a smiling old man who switched from Tamil to English to Tamil again, asking for money all the while; assorted others. From early in the morning, all through the day, well into the night. On and on.

I've travelled second-class for over 35 years now: short journeys, long ones, in every part of the country. For the sense it gives you of what India is about, it is indisputably the best way to travel. It occurred to me that on none of those journeys, over all those years, did I see so many beggars, so much poverty. All of which, like always, gave me a sense of what my country is about, circa 2005.

Yes, this is 2005. We are a decade-and-a-half into reforms and liberalisation and the tearing down of socialism that, we have been told, is addressing India's gargantuan problem of poverty in the most efficient way possible. The proponents of this great exercise will quote arguments and figures at length to make that case, to persuade us that poverty is on the wane. And if you look at their figures, you will indeed be persuaded. Figures are like that.

But then I do this second-class journey, and I am left with fumbling, groping questions: Why can't I see it, this dramatic decrease in poverty that's supposed to be chugging along so nicely? Why, in all the years that I've noticed and been aware of realities in my country, have I not felt there is a perceptible drop in the number of poor people? And on this one journey, why do I see more beggars -- many more -- than I ever have on such a trip?

Anecdotal evidence, those proponents will say, supercilious smile spreading on their faces because they believe they know better. Anecdotal evidence doesn't count. You have to look at the numbers. If you do, you will understand what we've been saying: the move to free markets is bringing more people out of poverty faster than anything else ever has, at any time in our history. In fact, it's a proven fact that free markets are the only mechanism there is to truly address poverty.

So just give it some time.

Oh yes, time. After all, who would expect an end to widespread poverty overnight? It must and will take time.

Then again, the reforms have been in place nearly 15 years. That's over a third of the time from 1947 till liberalisation began. By any standards, that hardly qualifies as "overnight" any more. By any standards, after 15 years during which droves of people escaped from being poor, I should see around me some perceptible decrease in poverty.

On this trip, I didn't.

Look at it this way: let's say I've been piling our household trash outside my front door for a year. Let's say I've steadily ignored my wife's pleas to clean the godawful mess that's now built up there. Until today, when I finally tell her I'm going to clean up. It's a huge job, but I do get started on it. Every day, I show my wife figures of the number of truckloads of dirt I've carted off from our door to the city dump.

Four months from now -- one-third of the year that I dumped garbage uncaringly at our front door -- would she be entitled to expect that the rubbish pile has visibly diminished?

And if she doesn't see this -- if she instead sees it looming just as large, perhaps even larger -- would she be entitled to think, this husband of mine is doing something wrong. If he's doing anything at all. What's more, would it make sense for me to smile superciliously at her worries and whip out my figures again? Tell her that her fears about the non-decreasing pile amount to just so much anecdotal evidence, and that doesn't count?

Absurd, of course. By themselves, figures mean nothing. The anecdotal evidence gives them heft and credibility.

Again, look at it this way: If I never had seen Indians defecating on the tracks, on the rocks at low tide, by the side of the road -- yes, if I never had seen such sights, it would be difficult to believe the troubling statistic that nearly seven of every 10 Indians lack access to reasonable sanitation. But I have seen them. That's why I have a sense that the figure is likely to be true. What's more, it's the only way I have of judging the truth in the figure.

In much the same way, our encounters with poor Indians are the anecdotal evidence that allows us to judge the truth about levels of poverty; about claims that those levels have decreased. What's more, they are the only way we have to judge those claims.

There's no doubt in my mind: reforms must happen. But 15 years after the process began, I can't help feeling that something is wrong about the way we are pursuing them. For I am yet to see the one effect they must have, first and above all: a visible lessening in the level of Indian poverty. Fewer poor Indians around us. I can't see that.

This train journey, in which Indian poverty streamed past me as if we were t some surreal alternate Republic Day parade, showed me as much.

Rich indian or american?

Let us take a look at a life of an IIT alumnus changing lifestyle ..

It's 9 p.m. on a Saturday. Peeyush Ranjan's Sammamish home is buzzing with people, games and loud music. It's party time, and a few geeky Indians from Amazon.com, Google, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Wipro Technologies have converged with their families to let down their hair.

Outside, Lexus and Mercedes drivers jostle for parking space. Inside, the music is Hindi. The movies are Bollywood. The drink is Scotch. And the food is Litti, an east Indian dish made of wheat dough wrapped around roasted spiced stuffing.

Up a spiral staircase, kids are in a different world. Over a platter of macaroni and cheese, strawberries and Indian desserts, they have divided into groups to compete with their GameBoys, play chess and watch a "Harry Potter" movie.

Miles away from their country, amid success, wealth and material comforts, Indians like Ranjan have created a mini-India for themselves -- the only thing this land of opportunity could not give them.

Weekend dinners with Indian friends. Shopping at Indian grocery stores, dining at Indian restaurants -- India isn't very far from their lives anywhere.

But for Ranjan, something is still missing.

Despite the busy social life and his successful career -- in more than 10 years in the United States, Ranjan has pursued two postgraduate degrees, changed jobs four times, set up two investment portals and landed a job with one of the nation's top technology companies -- he longs for India.

"I would want to go back home, to India," says Ranjan, a Hewlett-Packard manager and an IIT alumnus, the top engineering college in India.

His change of heart began last year in June when he visited Bangalore for the first time. "I knew India had changed, but did not know how much until I saw Bangalore," he said.

It has world-class office complexes, well-equipped with health centers, minigolf courses, playgrounds and child day care centers.

Bangalore city life, too, had changed. Sprawling residential complexes came equipped with swimming pools. There were pubs and glitzy malls. Ranjan saw Indians savoring life in the fast lane of commercialism, with its trendy gadgets and swanky cars.

For decades, India has witnessed a brain drain. Thousands of bright and well-educated Indians packed their bags for better job prospects and a higher quality of life overseas. Now the Indian economy is surging, its gross domestic product almost doubled from $317 billion in 1990 to $601 billion in 2003.

The brain drain is becoming brain gain. A BBC story in April on returning Indians estimated that more than 25,000 expatriate Indian infotech professionals have returned home in the past four years.

Predictably, techies have been at the forefront of the trend. Indian employees of information technology companies such as Microsoft are happily returning to India. Many are quitting well-paying jobs to set up new businesses back home.

Part of the reason is that money goes further in India. A full-time nanny costs $100 a month, a chauffeur can be hired for as much or less, a cook for $50. Material comforts of the United States don't compete with that, many Indians admit. What's more, India offers proximity to family members.

But these attributes were always there.

What's changed are the career prospects for returning Indians. Job opportunities for well-qualified executives in India have expanded in virtually every sector.

Telecommunications and consumer electronics sectors, for example, are posting double-digit industry growth. The financial services sector is bullish with consumer lending rising from $10 billion in 2001-02 to about $30.6 billion in 2004-05. The information technology industry, which barely existed in 1991, now employs more than 1 million people and generated revenue of $28 billion in 2004-05.

More than 100 Fortune 500 companies have set up research and development facilities in India. Salaries have been rising rapidly. According to Hewitt Associates, India witnessed the steepest salary increases of any nation in the Asia Pacific region last year. And it is expected to maintain the momentum.

In some ways, it's the same kind of promise of opportunity that lured Ranjan and many other Indians to places like Seattle.

Arriving in the United States in 1995 with barely $300 in his pocket, Ranjan -- a graduate of the India Institute of Technology -- finished his master's at Purdue University in 1997 and took his first job with Hewlett-Packard in the San Francisco Bay Area.

But within six months he joined Microsoft, a company that offered him a challenging job and good salary in Seattle.

By 1999, bitten by the dot-com bug, he joined InfoSpace only to quit and join a startup in 2002. Last year he became a Hewlett-Packard employee when it bought out the company.

Now with a full-time job, he is pursuing a master's in business administration from the University of Washington and managing two investment portals that he started in June. He is busy and making good money.

His wife of eight years -- he married straight out of college and she was an undergraduate -- works at Microsoft. Their 6-year-old son, Ankit, goes to a private school, plays basketball and soccer and has enrolled for Hindi and Bollywood dance classes.

Weekend parties and getaways with friends, mostly Indians, are frequent. Last month they went camping with friends; this month they are planning a holiday in Europe.

But the United States no longer feels exciting, Ranjan says.

"With attractive salaries, ample jobs and good lifestyle in India, the value in getting out and working here isn't that great anymore."

Well,well,well a blog at last...

Hi

At the outset i would like to tell u tat i've jus been browsing the other blogs and this has made me to start a blog...so moved...so influenced??!!?..nah!..

I used 2 wonder why so many use their blog pages to flaunt , to expose , to share wat they are undergoing in their daily life...

People used to pen down their emotions in a diary , ages before...!?!.. (I dont find any1 dary-crazy except my frd gkl ;)..) What really is the need to pen down or type it out ??...so wierd na...

Yeah..life is seriousy this wierd , u dont have reasons for wat u r now..or wat u'll be tomo... wat u know now is tat u r living...n living for wat?..not many have a spontaneous reply to it...some say ambitions...some jus for the sake of living...n some have this gut feeling to tel...TO DIE ANOTHER DAY..

For the ppl with kinda attitude..all seems possible...Wat makes a billion-dollar stakeholder to goto streets the next morning....wierd???
YEAH>>>LIFE IS WEIRD ...(dare to accept it)..
arios...dpk.

Life at the lowest strata of the society!

I wanted to highlight the ups and downs of life in a single city...MUMBAI!!

Let us now take a look at the asia's largest slum...DHARAVI








This year, for the first time in human history, there will be more people living in towns and cities than in the countryside. That is the conclusion of a new study from the Population Division of the United Nations.

And the steady migration of people from rural areas to cities brings huge problems in its wake. Few places demonstrate this as clearly as Mumbai in India.

Mumbai - according to the UN - has a population of 19 million. And the UN forecasts that total will rise to more than 26 million by 2025.

At that point, it would be the most heavily populated "urban agglomeration" in the world, apart from Tokyo and its surroundings.

Mumbai's increase in population will partly be caused by increasing life expectancy and partly by migration from other, poorer, parts of India.

Construction has started on India Tower, a new 60-storey (301 meters) world-class Park Hyatt hotel, retail, and residential tower located in South Mumbai, India. The developer is committed to making India Tower a United States Green Building Council (USGBC) LEED Gold-rated project. Construction is expected to be completed in 2010.

India Tower is located in the prestigious South Mumbai coastal area fondly referred to as the Queens Necklace. The tower’s rotated form emerges in response to the 3-acre site (1.2-hectares), the building’s functional requirements, and its mixed-use program that changes with each rotation of the tower. This circulation pattern separates retail, a custom-designed residential-style Park Hyatt hotel and serviced apartments, and long-lease and duplex penthouse condominium apartments.

The design concept for India Tower was informed by Mumbai’s climate, the site, and the desire to create distinctive indoor and outdoor spaces with optimum views, inspirational settings, and personalized contemporary accommodations for all users. Designed to have the least possible impact on the environment, the tower will integrate current innovative sustainable systems and technologies throughout the building – solar shading, natural ventilation, daylighting, rainwater harvesting, and green interior finishes and materials – to make it one of the greenest skyscrapers in India.

India Tower’s 3-story podium will include restaurants and cafés, luxury-brand retail stores, a health/fitness club with a swimming pool, and a nightclub/lounge. When arriving at India Tower, Park Hyatt guests will be directed to the Sky Lobby (levels 30-35) to check-in, then descend to levels 14 through 28 to their hotel residences.

India Tower’s long-lease apartments will be located on levels 38 through 50, and will feature stylish and spacious two-story living spaces that have been specially designed to take full advantage of the expansive views from this height. Levels 52 to 59 of the tower will house one-of-a-kind duplex penthouse condominium apartments with unparalleled panoramic views.

Now what do u exactly call this?...life is weird ...isn't it??