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Apple iPad 2

Ever since we got it, the baby has always been held close to our bosom.

Of all the digital media gadgets we’ve accumulated in a long life time, none has afforded us as much pleasure as the iPad 2.

Watching live Indian TV, music, playing YouTube videos, streaming Netflix movies, reading books and newspapers, playing chess, we can do all of this and more with our iPad 2.

Well, word must have spread because in its latest fiscal quarter, Apple sold 9.25 million iPads despite a widespread shortage of the second generation tablets.

Apple’s iPad unit sales in the third quarter represented a 183% jump increase over the year-ago quarter.

In revenue terms, iPad sales rose 179% to $6.05 billion.

These are ominous times for all the other tablet vendors in the world.

Samsung, Motorola, HP, Blackberry, Acer, Asus, Sony (coming), Vizio (coming), are you reading this?

Apple Sales by Product Fiscal 3Q, 2011Image Source: MacWorld

Related Stories:
iPad 2 Review – SI Buys the Only Tablet Worth Buying
Some Nice iPad Apps for Indians

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If Bollywood actor and NYC restaurateur Shiva Natarajan had just one whit of shame, he’d take a long dagger and plunge it deep into his stomach, ritually disemboweling himself in a harakiri a la the Samurai of yore when their honor was questioned.

Alas, since shame is in short supply lately and the Samurai have gone AWOL we’re unlikely to see such atonement.

Folks, in a long life we’ve come across scores of hypocritical Indian swines.

But we’ve rarely dealt with a two-faced monster like Bollywood actor Shiva Natarajan, who plays minor villain roles in crappy Hindi films.

Great Nonsense

The garrulous fella opens his mouth and the tiresome drooling starts – his charity work for orphans in Chennai, his acting prowess, his friendship with Bollywood stars Aishwarya Rai, Ajay Devgn and Akshay Kumar, his father’s stage talent, his reverence for the works of Swami Sivananda, his daughter’s sorrow over our blog posts, his threats to unleash lawyers on us, his cooking skills and other assorted juvenilia.

But alas the milk of kindness in Shiva’s breasts never extends to New Yorkers (if you go by the NYC Health Department inspection reports).

Endangering New Yorkers

For few Indians in NYC have endangered New Yorkers as much as Shiva Natarajan through his callous, reckless disregard for the most basic hygiene at his Indian restaurants in the Big Apple.

A remorseless, shameless, merciless scrooge, Shiva Natarajan has turned his Indian restaurants Dhaba, Bhojan and Tadka into unhygienic shitholes without a thought of the health horrors he might be inflicting upon unwitting hungry New Yorkers who flock to his eateries.

Some of his restaurants like Dhaba have repeatedly failed NYC Health inspections and yet this shameless bozo fails to fix the hygiene horrors as if showing the middle finger to his customers.

Are we to wait for the plague, a great calamity before Shiva decides to clean up his shitholes?

Dhaba NYC – A Horror Museum

Live Roaches, Improper Pesticide Use, Live Mice/Mice, Live Rats/Rats, Flying Insects and Inadequate Personal Hygiene by Shiva’s staff are only a small fraction of the hygiene violations the NYC Health Department has unearthed at Dhaba NYC over the last few years.

Yeeeeks!

We’ve dined at Dhaba and, no, we wouldn’t offer such garbage even to our Pakistan Terroristan foes. Both the food and service are hopelessly, disgustingly bad at Dhaba NYC.

C Grade for Dhaba

But now Shiva has gotten his comeuppance.

After yet another unsatisfactory inspection, the NYC Health Department recently slapped a C Grade on his Dhaba NYC at 108 Lexington Ave in Murray Hill.

A C-grade to a NYC restaurant is kinda like being told that your debauched daughter or profligate son has contracted HIV after weeks of cocaine-fueled orgies near abandoned rail-road tracks.

The NYC Health Department issues out a C-grade only to those dirty, unhygienic restaurants that have 28 or more violation points. Dhaba NYC scored a pathetic 33 in the April 27 inspection.

Oh, we almost forgot. As per the NYC Health Department’s recent inspection:

Dhaba NYC has Live roaches present in facility’s food and/or non-food areas.

Bon appetit.

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ZNMD 2nd Wknd BO – Better Than Singham 1st Wknd

Hey, who’s surprised?

Not us.

Zoya Akhtar’s Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara has found favor with moviegoers, as the wise SI predicted.

For the July 15-17, 2011 opening weekend, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara did close to a million dollars. Well, $960,548 to be precise.

The movie came in at No-15 at the U.S. box office and had an average gross of $9,605 (a very good average, in our not-so-humble opinion).

Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara
Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara’s box office performance is a lot better than all but a handful of Bollywood films.

We’re pleased as punch to tell you that Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara did better than that Bollywood murderer Salman Khan’s Ready and Dabangg. ;)

With Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara’s strong showing, we expect Zoya Akhtar is now a hot commodity in Bollywood. Good for the babe.

Here’s how Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara did compared to a few prominent Bollywood films in the U.S.:

Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara U.S. Box Office

Related Stories:
Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara Review – Karan Johar has Sex Change Operation, Turns into Zoya Akhtar
ZNMD 2nd Wknd BO – Better Than Singham 1st Wknd

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Indians have been slow to climb on the bandwagon of the iPad or other tablets, presumably because of the price and the absence of WiFi in most homes in India.

Not surprisingly, Indian developers have been slow to build applications for the iPad or for its successor, the iPad 2.

But in the U.S., the iPad is making strong inroads with consumers and to some extent among corporates as well.

Anecdotal evidence suggests Indians in the U.S. have slowly started hopping on the tablet train.

Since the iPad is by far the largest selling tablet in the U.S., we’ll assume desis are mostly buying the iPad rather than the Samsung Galaxy, HP TouchPad, the Blackberry PlayBook, Acer, Asus or any of the other tablets.

Here are a bunch of apps for the iPad that Indians are likely to find useful:

* Yupp TV – One of the best apps for the iPad.

Yupp TV provides Live TV access to NDTV (English and Hindi), Times Now, ET Now, Raj Music (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam), Zoom (Hindi), Jaya Max (Tamil) and more. There’s also a separate NDTV iPad app but we prefer the Yupp TV version of NDTV since there’s no buffering and it starts quickly.

And did we tell you Yupp TV is free. ;)

Yupp TV for iPad Offers Live Indian TV Channels

* Times of India – An excellent free application for India’s most read English newspaper. This one is perhaps the only Indian newspaper built specifically for the iPad. We’ve looked a couple of times but couldn’t find any other Indian newspaper app built expressly for the iPad.

Times of India for iPad

Times of India for iPad

* Galatta Cinema – Indian movie fans will love this free app with its strong focus on South Indian cinema. Unfortunately, the Galatta app works only in portrait mode but not in landscape mode.

Galatta for iPad

* Desi Radio – If Indian music be your addiction, then Desi Radio is a must-have app.

With tons of Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi, Kannada, Malayalam and English radio stations, there’s a cornucopia of music here.

* Netflix – No, Netflix is not just for Hollywood DVDs anymore. There are quite a few Bollywood movies in Netflix’ Instant Play including recent trash like Tees Maar Khan.

Besides our above favorites, there are several Indian language dictionaries and some cricket apps. We skimmed through a bunch of them but didn’t find them alluring enough to download.

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Finito!

Our favorite brick and mortar book store chain, the troubled Borders Group is shutting down after failing to find any bidders.

Over the years, we’ve lost track of the number of books we’ve purchased at Borders stores in NY, NJ, PA, CA, DE and MD.

Not just for books, we headed to Borders for magazines, music CDs and Coffee as well.

We confess that at one point in the 20th century when our home was close to a Borders store we even read a few books completely free by sitting in the air-conditioned comfort of the store.

Hey, two of our favorite music collections (Ennio Morricone’s three-CD 50-Movie Theme Hits and Inglourious Basterds) came from Borders.

As we type this post, we’re listening to the haunting music in Morricone’s Il Trio Infernale.

Borders Store at Madison Square Garden, NYCBorders Store at Madison Square Garden, NYC
(iPhone Photo by SearchIndia.com)

Why Did Borders Fail

Borders failed for many reasons.

* Shifting Loyalties – As the Internet became more pervasive and online booksellers like Amazon offered books much cheaper than Borders, we and countless others shifted our loyalties to save a few bucks. While we all are to blame, we’re not completely culpable because books increasingly became very expensive. As we cut down our purchases at Borders, we started buying at Amazon. It was only when we found a 40%-off coupon in our e-mail, that we’d head to Borders. Continue reading »

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Who says life is certain?

Tragedy sometimes strikes with stunning, cruel swiftness.

Here, watch the below video of an unfortunate incident that occurred today at the Patalpani Water Falls in Indore, Madhya Pradesh.


(Via Vasanth’s FB account)

Related Stores:
Indore: Family on picnic swept away by wave
Indore City Guide, Hotels, Colleges

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