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The Hindu :

Royal Challengers Bangalore has made a rousing start to its Indian Premier League campaign despite the opening game loss at Kolkata

PHOTO: BHAGYA PRAKASH K.Off to a flyerThe Royal Challengers have been the team to beat this IPL season

In a gripping metamorphosis from being whipping boys to emerging as men who can sneak in the last laugh, Royal Challengers Bangalore has made tremendous progress in the DLF Indian Premier League’s brief history of three years. In the inaugural edition, the team finished seventh among eight squads. The script changed dramatically in the second season in South Africa when Anil Kumble guided his team to the summit clash.

And the soaring performance graph seems set for higher glory with the men in red and yellow, notching four victories in five games so far to lead the points table in the latest version. It helps to have a captain, who leads from the front as evident in his bowling figures of 4-0-15-1 in the recent match against Chennai Super Kings.

“Anil Kumble’s bowling and body are in better rhythm than ever and even at his age, he still has a lot to offer. Never under-estimate him,” says RCB coach Ray Jennings.

The team is high on confidence and Robin Uthappa, who has churned up a few storms with his attacking batting, says: “Last year, we had lost four matches on the trot and still made the final. Each individual knows his responsibilities very well and each one is executing his responsibilities to the best of his ability.”

Kumble’s men have thrived on Jacques Kallis’ all-round skills and on the varied bowling skills of Dale Steyn’s pace, Praveen Kumar’s street-smart approach and Vinay Kumar’s big heart. Add to it the team’s refusal to be overawed by the opposition and you do have a bunch of men, who believe that the world can be conquered.

RCB silenced Yusuf Pathan’s big-hitting…More

The Hindu : y>Social networking sites are doubling up as virtual bazaars where people buy anything from phones to pets from trusted friends, says NEETI SARKAR

It was sometime in the mid 90s when online shopping took the world by storm. eBay was the epic revolution. Winning an auction of anything from celebrity memorabilia and Ferrero Rocher chocolates to porcelain teapots and Christmas decorations used to be exciting. Of course most of us also got around to shopping through Amazon, Flipkart and Craigslist. But with the dawn of the ubiquitous social networking era, the old is being replaced by the new. All it takes to market one’s second hand iPod is his status message/update. The responses one gets are usually overwhelming. Even “friends” one hasn’t ever met but heard about through a “mutual friend” respond to such updates.

Knowing the seller

Have social networking sites come to replace exclusive shopping sites or are they proving to be strong competitors at least? Says Business Management student Tanushree Kedia: “Buying and selling stuff on Facebook is far simpler than doing the same in an online shopping forum. Here, the buyer and the seller are quite obviously known to each other so there is less scope of getting cheated.”

Dhiraj Kumar, 19, who bought a cell phone through Facebook, recalls his experience: “I bought my touch screen phone through a common friend who knew I was on the lookout for a second hand phone and when he read my buyer’s status, he immediately informed me about the offer. He even helped negotiate the deal and I got my phone at a very reasonable price.”

He adds: “The entire process was friendly and highly interactive. I could get my innumerable doubts cleared. I even requested to test use the phone for a day before I decided to buy it. This is definitely something that can happen only through social networking sites and not on…More

The Hindu : y>

Kung fu fighting The Bruce Lee story

When Bruce Lee died in 1973, he was on the brink of international stardom. His intense physical presence and personal fighting system, Jeet Kune Do had revolutionized the world of martial arts. “Bruce Lee – Tale Of the Dragon” will be aired on Fox History at 10 p.m. tomorrow. The documentary features interviews with Lee’s wife, Linda, his daughter, Shannon and producer, Fred Weintraub and tells the remarkable story of the legendary martial arts master.

On June 6, 1968, hours after winning the Californian Democratic primary election, Senator Robert Kennedy was shot fatally. The assassin was a 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant, Sirhan Sirhan, who fired five shots . Were more people involved in the assassination? One of the most charismatic leaders in the struggle for Irish independence from British rule, Michael Collins, realised that only compromise could secure southern Ireland’s independence and peace. Many of his former colleagues disagreed and on August 22, 1922, as newly-independent Eire lapsed into civil war, Collins was gunned down in an ambush. “Battling Terror” on Fox History tonight at 10 p.m. looks into these assassinations.

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The Hindu :

There is a thin line between tolerance and indulgence and can turn into thinly-veiled impatience

THE BUBBLE BURSTS When tolerance wears thin

A successful relationship often has less to do with the number of things we have in common than with the number of quirks we can tolerate — Okay, the quote is from Cathy Thorne’s cartoon, but, it’s no less pertinent!

The old song goes thus: ‘love makes the world go round’ — love between lovers, parents and children, siblings, friends, pets, and not necessarily in that order. All around us, love waxes, wanes, waxes again. Look closely, and you’ll see the cycle depends on indulgence. Sample this. Nisha finds Rohit’s Formula One fixation entertaining; he is amused by the way she answers every question with a question.

Elsewhere, Kanmani tells friends that Karthik’s habit of leaving wet towels around the house drives her mad, but there is no mistaking the good humour in her tone; just as there is no mistaking the pride Karthik takes in Kanmani’s proficiency on the salsa dance floor, given that he has two left feet himself!

Sometimes, indulgence is just another form of tolerance. When indulgence throws its velvet cloak around people, the most irksome of quirks are tolerated, even flaunted. Those quirks become the habits that, in our minds, set this one person apart from others.

Peace pipe

What others may find ridiculous, impudent and obnoxious in the indulged, the indulger sees as funny, clever, and eccentric.

This indulgence is not peculiar to couples alone. Parents allow children many liberties, telling themselves this is a passing phase; on the other side, children cut their parents a lot of slack, seeing their compulsive habits as part of the ageing process. Siblings indulge temper tantrums in their brother or sister. Friends put up with a whole lot of what one part of their intellect terms nonsense. Well, we let our pets sleep…More

The Hindu :

Abhishek Majumdar talks about the process of creating a world peopled by those he has met, and their quirks

When Abhishek Majumdar started writing “An Arrangement of Shoes”, all he had in mind was this image — a girl on stage with lots of shoes and nothing to hold on to in life, except the shoes. That girl turned out to be 28-year-old Rukhsar. All the characters, complete with their quirks, were drawn from people around him.

Rukhsar’s story, set in a railway colony in Barauni, took shape from Abhishek’s own fond memories of living with one of his uncles in a railway colony in Lucknow.

“Sub-consciously, I used to love that cocooned, self-contained world,” he says. Life on the JNU campus with his parents added to a world view from within that cosseted space.

As he wrote, the story that emerged was one of hope, of how large movements of the world affect people in small towns in extraordinary ways — something that goes largely ignored. Our perception of the large things in life — such as religion, language, differences in gender — affect smaller things, something we again don’t acknowledge, he argues.

“How much can you understand humanity? So, one tends to hold on to little things — a picture, a town…,” says Abhishek.

Abhishek insists he never sets out to write anything; there’s no plan. “The stories write themselves. I never write a play to tell a story. The first draft is like me listening to the story for the first time.”

Rukhsar’s god-fearing and religious Dadajaan with his regimented life is as endearing as the cinema-loving Dadijaan who’s relieved to be in a big town where there’s “a school, a playground and a cinema hall — everything that children need to grow.” Then, there’s Nisar, Rukhsar’s twin sister — the methodical stealer of shoes, the inheritor of the love of cinema, the…More