The Army has been called in to assist the city police to combat the terrorists as operations against them were still on after more than four hours in the Taj mahal Hotel and the Cama hospital, close to the Chharapati Shivaji railway terminus.

The terrorists resorted to firing at as many as eight places, mostly in south Mumbai.

Maharashtra Anti Terrorist squad chief Hemant Karkare, encounter specialist Vijay Salaskar and Additional Commissioner of Police Ashok Kamte were among those killed in the operations. The police have gunned down two terrorists and taken into custody nine others during the operations.

Taj in flames

Taj burning to ashes

India suffered one of its deadliest terrorist attacks last night when gunmen ran amok in the wealthiest part of Mumbai, killing hundreds of people, storming hospitals and luxury hotels, and taking a number of foreigners hostage.

MUMBAI MAYHEM: At least 160 people, including some foreign tourists, have been killed in the terror attack.

A charred vehicle at the site of a bomb blast on the western express highway near airport in Mumbai.

Blood stains the floor amid scattered luggage after an attack at the Chattrapati Shivaji train station in Mumbai.

HP petrol Pump destroyed

Firemen try to douse fire at the Taj Hotel

Martyr Hemant Karkare, Chief, ATS

Encounter Specialist, Vijay Salaskar .. Dead

The Rascals

Tears roll down as I hear this sad news of Colonel unfortunate and untimely demise. Undoubtedly a true patriot, a great soldier, a true friend, a guide and what not in every aspect of life, one could see his true and energetic involvement. His presence always ventilates an aroma of liveliness among others. His pleasant and vivacious personality was perfect to bring someone out of the depression to elation. His relentless struggle to diverse issues on national/ international and regional problems through his emails used to be an eye-opener for many of us who are finding it difficult to keep ourselves updated on current happenings and their implications. As rightly pointed out he will always be remembered as a great Kargil hero for his valiant contribution to safeguard our frontiers, contribution to UN House II and Red Cross after his career in Army.

Colonel Sudhakar Satpathy (53) died of electrocution at Barang, 20 km from here, while he had gone for a picnic with 50 other military officials on Sunday. Police sources said Satpathy came in contact with an 11-KV electric line while roaming at a nearby mountain. The electric lines had been suspended above three feet from the ground. He was awarded for his heroic deeds during the time of the Kargil war. A case of unnatural death was registered with the police and his body was sent for autopsy. He was paid guard of honour by the city-basedSainik School and cremated at the Swargadwar at Puri. Satpathy, who stayed in the city, is survived by his wife Gayatri and son Saurav.

Colonel’s absence will always be felt by everyone dear to him. His unfortunate death is surely a great loss to our country. The pain that the bereaved family must be going through is indeed unbearable. Let us all unite and stand by the side of his family at this time of crisis.

I pray to almighty for this supreme soul to rest in peace!

With Deep Condolences
S.N.Pattanaik & All SSBians

Karthik Purnima was considered the most auspicious day by the traders (sadhabas) of Orissa to venture on a journey to distant lands namely the islands of Bali, Java, Sumatra, Borneo and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Tourism of Orissa offers tours to Orissa during the Bali Yatra fair and festival so that you can get a glimpse of Orissa’s rich cultural history and colorfully vibrant present on your tour of Festivals in Orissa.

Bali Yatra is a hugely popular fair held on the banks of Mahanadi River in the fort area of Cuttack city from where the traders of Orissa (sadhabas) undertook voyages, along the sea trade route, on huge boats called Boita. To celebrate the glory of the ancient times, the people in Cuttack as well as in the rest of Orissa float small boats made of cork, colored paper and banana tree barks in the river and water tanks.

The ritual of launching tiny paper boats lit by lamps placed within its hollow is known as Boita Bandana. You too can marvel at the spectacle of thousand lamps afloat in the rivers and tanks on your tour of Festivals in Orissa with Tourism of Orissa tour packages.

As images of Karthikeswar are worshipped and immersed in the waters of river Mahanadi, near the Shiva Temple, to mark the end of the month of Karthik; the banks of the river in Cuttack come alive with chants and rejoicing people. Suddenly Bali Yatra takes a life of its own.

Held over 3-4 days till the full moon day, the fair of Bali Yatra is attended by thousands of enthusiasts and is marked with fun and frolic at the riverbanks where countless shops selling food, clothes, curios and miscellaneous items and swings come up during the evenings. You can indulge your shopaholic side or go on boat rides under the full moon on your tour to the Bali Yatra festival in Orissa with Tourism of Orissa tour packages.

A brief summary on why a relationship doesn’t last long.

In an early stage of a relationship, you will feel excited. When you gone too far, both of you will encounter problems. We are humans and definitely humans are not perfect. You can never acquire all attitudes of an ideal partner, but you can grow, learn and change.

Falling out of love is one reason why love fails. In some cases, people who fall out of love experienced too much pain and heartaches. In the long run , they will wake up one day to the fact that they are not anymore in love with their partner.

Another is lack of proper communication. It plays an important part of a relationship because good communication brings you closer together. If your relationship lacks communication, it may lead to misunderstanding and misunderstanding may lead to arguments and arguments may lead to break- ups.

Some people abused their partner physically and emotionally. Why? Because they feel that if they do bad things to their partner, they will still be loved, but they don’t know that bad things makes their partner stronger and a strong person can easily find the right path and move on with their life without the abused partner.

Trust is one thing that makes a relationship last, but a relationship will last if both trust each other. If somehow, infidelity, lies and broken promises come into your relationship, the trust will be damaged but you can always rebuilt it. In rebuilding trust, it’s hard and it takes time, but you must be patient enough to save your relationship.

A partner who is honest to himself/herself is also honest to his/her partner. If both of you are honest, probably, there will be no doubts.

If you are really in love with the person no matter what she is, what kind of attitude she has, you will still love her. Nobody is perfect, love can wait, love can change you from bad to good. Love really grows, I believe on that. If your partner doesn’t change his insecurities at all after so many years, I don’t think its love.

Love is priceless. Love can make you strong. Love can make you weak. Always remember that Love is a gift. Don’t withhold it because it will come unexpectedly.

The country’s independence from colonial rule in 1947 might have seemed like the right moment for a form of expression that would match the significance of the occasion. However, it appears that art does not always take its cues from events seen as historical or defining; and if it does, seems to make references that appear to veer sharply from the direct. The so-called ‘artists of transition’, for instance, seem to be engrossed in a contemplation of life’s simpler pursuits, the everyday, small and trivial. Perhaps it was a way of suggesting that now that the overriding objective had been attained, it was time to savour the pure sense of being alive. These artists, among them Sailoz Mukherjea, N.S. Bendre, K.K. Hebbar and Shiavax Chavda, seemed at peace with life around them, and aimed to capture its fleeting, joyous moments. This innocent interlude is characterised by simplified forms and lively colours.

The response of the Progressive Artists Group (founded in 1947) in Bombay, too, seemed apolitical, the fact of their coming together in the year of Independence being purely coincidental. What these artists were more exercised about was the fact that art as practised in India till then had to change. Their manifesto called for a total break with the past and its stultifying constraints, both cultural and artistic. F. N. Souza, S. H. Raza, K. H. Ara, M.F. Husain, S. H. Gade and S. Bakre were determined to fashion an art that was entirely Indian but also modern. Their work did contain the latter two elements in ample degree, though the modernism, in the spirit of the Nehruvian internationalism of the time, relied a great deal on Parisian abstract Expressionism and post-Impressionism. The group was joined briefly, in the fifties, by others like Mohan Samant, V. S. Gaitonde and Krishen Khanna.

Sculptors, too, broke away from the naturalism and portraiture of colonial art and experimented with different materials and techniques to lend a more personal and reflective quality to their work. Among the modern vanguard of Indian sculptors were Dhanraj Bhagat, Sankho Chaudhuri, Adi Davierwalla, Pillo Pochkhanwalla and Meera Mukherjee. In addition, printmakers like Krishna Reddy and Jyoti Bhatt championed means of artistic expression that had not been taught and explored in India during the preceding decades, opening up several new possibilities for artists in the country.

In the late fifties and intermittently over the next two decades, the centre of artistic endeavour seemed to shift to Baroda, where the Fine Arts department of M. S. University had been very ambitiously put together. The result was the collective of practitioners, the Baroda Group (including artists Sankho Chaudhuri, N.S. Bendre, Nasreen Mohamedi, Gulammohammed Sheikh and later Bhupen Khakhar, Jeram Patel and K.G. Subramanyan), whose experiments in abstraction, Pop Art and Neo-Dada considerably deepened Indian art’s engagement with modernism.

As though in reaction, the overarching need for a ‘national’ art came to a head around the same time. J. Swaminathan and his Group 1890, declared that Indian artists must reject the hybrid mannerisms imported from Europe. Another group of artists, from the Cholamandal Artists Village outside Madras consciously attempted to distil an Indian idiom through the use of techniques derived from rural handicraft traditions and textile design. While some artists adopted the rural South Indian kavacha and kreeta traditions of beaten sheet metal, others like Meera Mukherjee worked with the tribal dokhra style of metal casting in the creation of her bronzes. It was also late in this decade that several artists, Biren De, Shanker Palsiker and G.R. Santosh among them, turned to an abstraction inspired by the geometric ecstasies of Tantric art.

The seventies saw an intense turn towards the social and political, primarily through figuration. The 1971 war with Pakistan, the famine and Naxalite Movement in Bengal, and the imposition of Emergency by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi formed the backdrop for this phase. In the cities of Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi, Tyeb Mehta, Rameshwar Broota, Gieve Patel, Somenath Hore, Ganesh Pyne and Bikash Bhattacharjee, among others, felt it their responsibility to directly refer to the national situation and document the pain of the people. The role of the artist in a developing country and the need for social responsiveness were interrogated by these practitioners. This decade also saw many more women artists come forward on the artistic scene, the majority of them delineating a point of view that combined the feminist and the subjective. Nalini Malani, Arpita Singh, Madhvi Parekh, Navjot and others often addressed the issues of subjectivity and victimhood, but also expressed introspective and apolitical themes in their work.

3. Contemporary Indian Art (1985-present) 

It is clear that the modernism of the preceding decades prefigured the tone of Indian artistic practice in the late eighties and nineties. However, during this time, the preoccupations of the earlier part of the century were considerably attenuated and, with some younger artists, even become a non-issue. The hard facts of disappearing borders and a globalised economy made post-modernism the preferred artistic mode. In keeping with the tenor of the times, photo and hyperrealism, installation art, new media creations, and digital representations found their way into Indian artistic and public awareness. The ?hybrid mannerisms? excoriated by Jagdish Swaminathan became ?hybrid signs?, and ironically, began to seem normal and familiar.

However, even as many of the earlier divides blurred, and the borders between imported and indigenous seemed to suture, some rough edges continued to show. During the 1990s, a pluralist and fragmentative mood dominated the creation of contemporary art, highlighting the difficulties associated with the dawn of an age of information and instant gratification, and with the emergence and novel concerns of ‘the global Indian’. Dually charged by the excessive information they received and their personal responses to this environment, the work of artists like Shibu Natesan, Surendran Nair, Jayashree Chakravarty, Rekha Rodwittiya and G. Ravinder Reddy responded to newer and greater numbers of stimuli than any of their predecessors could have imagined.

With the old, outmoded dualities loosened, Atul Dodiya’s metaphoric montages took cognisance of the space in which Indians found themselves face to face with other citizens of the world, while Subodh Gupta used his paintings and installations to filter and magnify the everyday experiences of rural and middle-class Indians for a global audience. In the work of Baiju Parthan, the past and the present cohered without dissonance in a new, digitized realm, and Anju Dodiya’s personal struggles with the violence of the creative process were spelled out for viewers in her watercolours.

Like painting, contemporary sculpture evolved in accordance with new shifts in ideology and paradigm. Sculptors found that the only limits imposed on the techniques and materials they could use were those of their own imaginations. Traditional media like stone and metal were subjected to new treatments and unusual combinations, and inventive techniques like site-specific installations and kinetic sculpture gained popularity. In addition, boundaries between traditional disciplines like painting and sculpture were dissolved, with artists like Sudarshan Shetty, Anandjit Ray, Jagannath Panda and G.R. Iranna hybridizing the two through their practices.

With this contemporary wave came the opening up of the market for Indian art abroad, as also the profusion of art galleries within the country, meaning that the Indian artist now had no choice but to address a more diffuse audience, through themes that resonated with the local as well as the global. Today, the work of artists from the Indian diaspora, the blurring of design and art, and the videos, installations and digital spaces of an even younger generation of artists have all added new dimensions to Indian contemporary art, a seemingly nebulous concept ever-receptive to growth and change.

Through the trials and tribulations of its practitioners, Indian art has yielded a picture of a vital and vigorous creative practice over the last century. It is this frequently bewildering heterogeneity, this multiple and plural nature of Indian art which, perhaps, will eventually deliver up the insights its practitioners continue to pursue so dedicatedly.

Washington, Nov 6 (IANS) US President-elect Barack Obama has picked Indian-American Sonal Shah, an eminent economist who heads Google’s philanthropic arm, as one of the advisers to help him assemble his White House team.

Shah, 40, is part of an advisory board comprising individuals with significant private and public sector experience who will offer their expertise in their respective fields to Obama’s transition team, according to US media reports.

Meanwhile, reports suggest that India-born Preeta Bansal, a Harvard-educated lawyer who was part of Obama’s team of advisers during his election campaign, may be a potential candidate for the office of the Solicitor General, a post yet to be filled by a woman in US.

Sonal Shah along with other members of the advisory board will help the transition team headed by former White House chief of staff John Podesta, longtime Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, and Pete Rouse, the President-elect’s Senate chief of staff.

Others on the list include former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Carol Browner, Obama friend and former Commerce Secretary William Daley, University of California-Berkeley law school dean Christopher Edley and Obama law school friends and advisers Michael Froman and Julius Genachowski.

Shah, who was named the ‘Person of the Year 2003′ by India Abroad publication, currently works for Google.org on their Global Development team, where she is engaged in defining their global development strategy and promoting the firm’s philanthropy work.

Before joining Google, she was vice president at Goldman, Sachs and Co. and developed and implemented its environmental strategy. She has also served as the Associate Director for Economic and National Security Policy at the Centre for American Progress, where she worked on trade, outsourcing and post-conflict reconstruction issues.

Earlier, she worked for eight years at the Department of Treasury on various economic issues and regions of the world. She was the director of the office covering sub-Saharan Africa, worked in Bosnia and Kosovo after the war, and served as the senior adviser to the Under Secretary at the Department of Treasury during the Asian financial crisis.

Shah is the co-founder of the US-based non-profit organisation Indicorps, which offers one-year fellowships for Indian-origin Americans to work on specific development projects in India.

Her father moved from Gujarat to New York in 1970 and she along with her sister and mother joined him in 1972. She also has a brother.

Among names being suggested for the post of Solicitor General, the ‘The Am Law Daily’, citing some unnamed advisers of the Obama campaign, reported that India-born Bansal, 42, who has advised Obama on foreign policy and judiciary matters, is among possible appointees.

‘The Solicitor General is the only position where the statute requires that the officer be learned in the law,’ it quoted O’Melveny and Myers’s Walter Dellinger as saying.

Bansal, a product of Harvard Law School and a partner at the international law firm of Skadden Arps, has earlier served as the New York state Solicitor General.

Dellinger said that for the post, experience as a state Solicitor General would be valuable, as would be a record of advocacy before the court, the report said.

Bansal, a member of what an Obama lawyer playfully calls the ‘Harvard Law School mafia’, was part of Bill Clinton’s White House and Justice Department in 1993-96. She was also the first Indian-American to head the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.