Bhooshan Pandya | Interface & Usability Analyst

The annual Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon 2008 is just a few days away – 20th January 2008 to be precise. This year Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is the associate sponsor of this mega event which is unarguably Asia’s largest marathon. TCSers are preparing wholeheartedly to run for their organization and many of my colleagues will be participating for an NGO (non-government organization) or a cause which is closer to their heart. It’s obvious that winning or competing is the last thing on their minds.

On the other hand, I had the privilege of offering my creative skills to the official TCS Mumbai Marathon 2008 website on the Indiatimes.com portal, which has details on our association with the event and more. One can submit stories, pictures and videos from the marathon which would be showcased in the galleries post event. Happy surfing and hoping to see you at the Mumbai Marathon 2008 this time.

As I was focusing on some work of the day, my colleague came running towards me and announced the launch of the much hyped Tata Motor’s 1 lakh car aptly named ‘Nano’. I was waiting for the event for a long time to come. It was being shown Live on TV from 11:30am onwards but by the time I reached, the ceremony had got over and the journalists and photographers had started crowding around the small car (I could only see the rooftop). After few minutes, I got the first glimpse of the white ‘Nano’ which was driven by Mr. Ratan Tata himself (coincidentally in Gujarati ‘Nanu’ means small although pronounced differently). Just yesterday some channels were busy speculating the name of the small care – Atom, Jeh, etc.

Post the car launch there are discussions on the effect on the environment and the stress that it will put on India’s infrastructure, etc. On one hand I am happy that the Tata’s have launched a product which specific to a particular segment of the society. On the other, I shudder to think about when the car would flood the roads of Mumbai and the high possibility of a traffic snafu that it will generate. For this moment though, I am waiting to see the car run on the road pretty soon.

» Visit the Tata Nano Website

There cannot be a perfect culmination to my long Christmas break then watching Taare Zameen Par (TZP) in the theatre. Before I begin talking about the movie itself, I must first congratulate Aamir Khan who has taken a grave risk (as always) by opting to produce, direct and act in what seems to be a complete non-commercial storyline. In other words, to a lay man this project would have looked good in a book or a short story somewhere in a children’s magazine. But it only proves that Aamir is (who else?) the only commercial actor in the Hindi film industry in a class of his own who believes in making meaningful cinema — one you can easily relate yourself with.

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In what I consider to be a breakthrough feat, Mozilla has released the Persona extension that should revolutionize the skinning of browsers in the coming days. The extension uses the JSON feed to dynamically load the URLs remotely to skin the Firefox browser. Moreover, besides making the browser lightweight it does not require a restart anymore to see the theme in action. For all Firefox fans.

The official Google Blog carried the announcement of their new project called Knol. The aim is to encourage writers to contribute articles of significant importance and share it with the internet community, in what seems to be a head-on challenge to Wikipedia.