How to build your inhouse magazine.

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Indian Video Vaults like youtube for Desi Janta

as manishxing reports
After the huge success of youtube and being aquired by google for 2.4Billion dollar, lots of indian startups are coming on same domain to make it big like youtube. Not sure if any one can become as big as youtube but definately some of the companies would give birth to focused content for desi junta .

I have compiled a list youtube clones for desi content with there alexa ranking..

rajshri.com : 8,407
videodubba.com : 62,078
apnatube.com : 67,576
meravideo.com : 77,517
aapkavideo.com : 93,864
konkan.tv : 108,342
tumtube.com : 167,170
punjabitube.com : 210,495
toad.in : 332,292
infeedia.com : 411,612
canaravideo.com : 434,736
4indian.tv : 471,324
sixer.tv : 476,685
crictv.com : 537,556
connectfilms.com : 568,903
merovideo.com : 918,255
tubedesi.com : 952,068
motionflicks.com : 1,110,983
layfile.com : 1,696,130
nautanki.tv : 2,297,228
desiscreen.com : 3470,560

IIT IIM Grads introduce in mouse to bell the CAT

I stumbled upon this cool free portal for CAT guys http://www.catindiaonline.com/. The site offers online mock CAT tests. This site s very different and has many more features than what one may think of. I must say catindiaonline.com impressed me from the word go! Their test framework is quite cool and analysis part is something that I bet that you can’t find anywhere else. Their best part is their in-depth analysis that gives gory details of one’s performance - topic wise, difficulty wise, time requirements wise, comparative analysis of performance etc… etc… The analysis really blew me off and very precisely pointed out the issues with my preparation. In the end, I found there is something call recommendations which was recommending me how you should have taken the test to maximize your score…they didn’t ask much to register and everything seems really cool…Go and check out its fun to try it irrespective of CAT aspirants.

How to build Google like team

1. Teams size should be less than 5.

2. All leaders no followers.

3. Don’t hire spotless people, Look for spots in the people which matters the most.

4. Punish mediocre success and reward excellent failures.

5. Don’t award TOP 1% and create 99% people unhappy. Award TOP 99% and Fire rest 1%, create 100% happy employees.

6. Freedom to loose = Celebrate failures = Team which looses most wins on creativity.

7. Kill “Lick my ass” kinda managers.

8. Kill project meetings instead go for drink parties and fight over your creative opinion.

9. Don’t work on a project instead own project.

10. Bring design and creativity in all aspect of work.

11. Don’t work when your energies are low as your work requires the best times of the day.

12. Fire managers and buy Leaders.

13. Creativity is driven by stomach so don’t work with empty stomach instead eat best food you love.

14. Don’t earn money earn reputation.

15. First build the product than collect the requirement than do project planning than test it and if it sucks.

Repeat the above cycle.

Aravind Adiga - Profoundly Indian - UMA MAHADEVAN-DASGUPTA

An excellent article in Frontline about the Indias new celebrity - Aravind Adiga... Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker Prize-winning debut novel, “The White Tiger”, is the story of India’s underclass and its life.

IN June 2006, in an essay titled “My Lost World” published in Time magazine, Aravind Adiga wrote about a personal search he made in the Indian city where he grew up. That city was Mangalore, nestled alongside the Western Ghats on the Karnataka coast. Born in Madras (now Chennai) in pre-liberalisation India, Adiga spent his early childhood years in that city before moving with his family to Mangalore, where his father worked as a doctor.

In Mangalore, Adiga first attended Canara High School and then St. Aloysius High School. Despite the loss of his mother to cancer shortly before his secondary school leaving certificate examinations, he reportedly stood first in the State. He knew the importance of education. “When I was growing up,” he wrote in the Time essay, “young men of all religions were united by shared values of hard work, enterprise and a desire to get out of Mangalore as quickly as possible. My brother left when he was 18. I left when I was 16. Many of those who got out never returned. There was no need to go back because the place never seemed to change.”

Adiga left Mangalore in 1991 when his father moved to Australia. Returning to the city 15 years later as a journalist with Time, he found it vastly changed. The population had doubled. Shopping malls and high-rise apartment buildings had reshaped the skyline. There were now five medical colleges, four dental colleges, 14 physiotherapy colleges and 350 schools, colleges and polytechnics.

The new affluence seemed to have come at a price, however, as Adiga wrote: “I met neighbours, relatives and classmates, and each had done well in some way – one had his own house, another a car. But each also had some sorrow we could hardly have imagined. A Catholic friend’s daughter had married a Hindu, and her family no longer spoke to her. A Hindu friend’s daughter had been divorced by her husband. Divorce, extramarital affairs, interreligious marriages, homosexual flings – the doors of experience had swung open in Mangalore. The small city had grown up.”

Looking around the transformed city, he also noticed “a group of drifters and homeless men, some carrying rolled-up mattresses” – part of the underclass who seemed to have been left out of the story of India’s growth. Adiga was curious and troubled by the sight, and during his travels in India as a journalist, he wanted to find out more. The White Tiger, Adiga’s Man Booker Prize-winning debut novel, is the story of this underclass and its life – begging for food, sleeping under concrete flyovers, defecating on the roadsides, shivering in the cold, struggling, in the 21st century, for its freedom. The White Tiger gives this underclass a voice: one that is intelligent, savagely funny and quite unforgettable. It is a voice that seeks out and understands the power of beauty: “If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India.” But it is also a voice of anger and protest, and it is almost completely unsentimental. “I did my job with near total dishonesty, lack of dedication, and insincerity – and so the tea shop was a profoundly enriching experience.”

The novel is structured as a series of letters written to the Chinese Premier by a former car driver from Bihar. Why the Chinese Premier? “Because,” the narrator Balram Halwai, now based in the city of Bangalore, writes, “the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, mobile phone usage and drug abuse.”

Balram explains, further, why he is writing in the language of the “erstwhile master”: “Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.” Things like Balram’s story of “entrepreneurship”. The Premier of “the Freedom-Loving Nation of China” is apparently interested in the story of Indian entrepreneurship; Balram, the narrator of the novel, is an entrepreneur based in the city of start-ups. His story, he assures his addressee, will not be found in the white-washed version or the cellophane-wrapped pirated copies of business bestsellers that are sold at traffic signals: “Don’t waste your money on those American books. They’re so yesterday,” he writes. “I am tomorrow.”

He is, furthermore, “The White Tiger” of the title: “A Thinking Man/And an entrepreneur/Living in the world’s centre of technology and outsourcing Electronics City Phase 1 (just off Hosur Main Road), Bangalore, India.” The India of that address is actually two countries in the novel: one of “Light” with access to education, health care, good roads, electricity, running water, as well as hope and justice; and the other of “Darkness”, where there is only deprivation and injustice. Balram’s story is about how he clawed his way out of the Darkness into the Light.

Balram, or Munna as he was named by his parents in the Darkness where he was born, is the younger son of a rickshaw-puller, “a human beast of burden”, in Laxmangarh, a tiny village in Gaya on the banks of the river Ganga. One of Munna’s first lessons in growing up comes when he follows his family members on his mother’s funeral procession. “My mother’s body had been wrapped from head to toe in a saffron silk cloth, which was covered in rose petals and jasmine garlands. I don’t think she had ever had such a fine thing to wear in her life. (Her death was so grand that I knew, all at once, that her life must have been miserable. My family was guilty about something.)”

Refusing to call him “Munna” because that is not a name at all, the teacher at the local primary school gives him a new name. But Balram is not destined to remain in school for very long: there is a wedding in the family, they have the girl, and therefore, as Balram writes, they are “screwed”. The family has taken a loan to pay for the wedding and the dowry, and they must now work for the moneylender to pay off the loan. So Kishan, Munna’s brother, takes him out of school and to the tea shop where they will spend their future working as “human spiders”, mopping the dirty floors or smashing chunks of coal against a brick.

Years later, while telling his story, the narrator reflects on this part of his life: “Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you’ll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep – all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.”

If we see the physicality of poverty (“My father’s spine was a knotted rope… cuts and nicks and scars, like little whip marks in his flesh, ran down his chest and waist…. The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.”), we also see the carefully protected lifestyle of the ultra-rich: security guards, Alsatian dogs and, literally, bags of money.

The two worlds intersect within the strict bounds of the master-servant relationship. In Laxmangarh, the rich landlords are a pack of animals – stork, buffalo, wild boar and raven – who feed on the village until there is nothing left for anyone else, and the rest are forced to climb onto the packed buses that lead to the world outside – Dhanbad, Calcutta (Kolkata), Delhi – to find work.

In Delhi, the rich are driven around in air-conditioned cars, protected from the pollution that takes years off a man’s life. But Balram, as he drives the rich around in their cars, will always be a member of the world outside – a member of the servant class. The servant who washes his master’s legs in a bucket of dirty water and massages them; the servant who pours out the drinks while keeping one hand on the steering wheel and an eye on the road; the servant who can be smilingly cajoled into taking the rap when his employer, in a drunken haze in the middle of the night, drives the car over a small, dark ragged shape that might have been some sort of small animal but actually turns out to be someone’s child.

SHAUN CURRY/AFP

Aravind Adiga with the 2008 Booker Prize, in London on October 14.

Even Balram’s God is a master who demands gratitude for the scraps he gives him, as we read in one unforgettable scene. Once, returning to his village, Balram climbs to the top of a hill, to the black fort, and looks down at the view below him. “Up in the blue skies, God spreads His palm over the plains below, showing this little man Laxmangarh, its little tributary of the Ganga, and all that lies beyond: a million such villages, a billion such people. And God asks this little man: Isn’t it all wonderful? Isn’t it all grand? Aren’t you grateful to be my servant?”

Born in Chennai, brought up in Mangalore, writing about Delhi, and living in Mumbai, Adiga loves Tamil, speaks Kannada and writes in English. And in this language of the “erstwhile master”, without exoticism and without sentimentality, he has written a profoundly Indian story. It is not as if other writers have not written about the other, forgotten side of India.

For example, Amitav Ghosh, whose novel Sea of Poppies also appeared on the Man Booker shortlist for this year, has written memorably, with rich detail, compassion and wisdom, about those on the margins of history and geography as has Kiran Desai, in her Man Booker Prize-winning second novel, The Inheritance of Loss. Adiga’s prose is not quite so elegant, but the force of his writing comes from its savage humour and its strength of feeling.

The pages of the 34-year-old Adiga’s novel, however, are different, in their dark humour.

They are also incandescent with anger at the injustice, the futility, the sheer wrongness of a life such as the one from where a bright little boy called Munna, who was later called Balram Halwai in his school records, and then called the White Tiger of the jungle because of his good performance during a school inspection, was pulled out of school and told to smash coal for a tea shop. Where private armies roam about the fields, men and women live sad and stunted lives, and dreams are cut short even before they are fully formed.

Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta is in the Indian Administrative Service. The views expressed in
this article are personal.

Indians fear Adiga's Revelation - Telegraph Reports

Indians fear Aravind Adiga's 'The White Tiger' says too much about them - Telegraph reports

Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger was praised for highlighting the injustices and poverty present in the rapidly changing India when it won the Man Booker Prize, but now many Indian critics have expressed outrage at the judges' decision.

Many Indians feel that Aravind Adiga's Booker Prize winning novel - The White Tiger - presents their country in a poor light Photo: EPA

For some, Adiga's savage indictment of the way the rich treat the servant class panders to western prejudices.

"I felt the book took us back three decades," said folk art expert Ritu Sethi. "It had every stereotype going in it. The BBC used to show nothing but cows on the roads for years. We're back to that with this book."

Others criticised the novel for being dull and demeaning. Author and playwright Manjula Padmanabhan dismissed it as "a tedious, unfunny slog".

She agreed that much of the recent hype about India as an emerging superpower was dishonest and complacent but asked: "Is this schoolboyish sneering the best that we can do?"

Having bought the book, affluent Indians may shift uncomfortably in their seats. The daily inhumanity shown by the rich towards their domestic staff in The White Tiger is something of which many will realise they too are guilty.

The fearful crime which the protagonist Balram Halwai commits will send a frisson of fear up their spines.

Adiga says the Indian middle class is paranoid about servants and their "laziness", "greed" and "thieving" tendencies but expresses amazement that, given the huge disparities of wealth, so few actually commit any crime.

"Look at the intimate access that servants have to their masters in their homes, and yet there are very few murders or attacks. But that doesn't reassure the middle class. It is becoming more insecure than before because it is richer now and has more to lose," says Adiga.

The White Tiger marks a new departure in India by portraying the emotions, sorrows, and aspirations of the hitherto invisible poor. For Adiga, his achievement is capturing "something new" in India, a stirring, a glimmer of a refusal by the poor to accept the fate ordained for them by their masters.

But this flicker of an "awakening" does not mean the end of the current social order where the poor slave 24/7 as cooks, cleaners, drivers, nannies and maids so that the well off can feel comfortable.

"The system is beginning to deteriorate but it remains. It will remain, but with higher levels of crime and lower levels of security," says Adiga.

The author looks at India with the perspective both of an insider, having grown up in India, and as outsider, having emigrated for years and then returned.

"As an immigrant in the US and England, I was an outsider. I spent a lot of time being confused, trying to figure things out. That was how I understood how Indian villagers feel when they move to the big cities for work," Adiga says.

William Green, former Time Asia Edior understands why the book has raised Indian hackles. "It is an unsettling novel, it touches very raw nerves, but I think he captures the complexity and subtlety of India in fiction in a way that you don't see in journalism," he says.

For some Indians, The White Tiger is an appalling regression. Just when they thought they had finally shed the old image of India as a land of poverty, cows and snakecharmers and started being respected as a hi-tech, prosperous nation, along comes Adiga to, as it were, rub their noses in the dirt again.

"I used to hate Naipaul for talking contemptuously about India, about how cleaners mop the floor in restaurants by crouching and moving like crabs and all that talk about Indians defecating in the open," said a freelance editor, Anjali Kapoor. "Adiga is the same, focussing on everything that is bad and disgusting."