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| Sportscene |
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| Icc In No Mood To See |
| Ian Chappell has never believed in pulling his punches. He took over as Australia’s captain from Bill Lawry in 1971 when Australian cricket was on a downswing, and made sure that in four years, the side didn’t lose a single series.He played a key role in the fructification of Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket, and has since graduated into a wonderfully insightful commentator and columnist who always speaks his mind, and doesn’t sit on the fence.In this chat with... |
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| Back To Square One |
| Fabio Capello arrived in London four years ago with a sparkling CV but for all his club success he departed still barely able to speak English and with his adopted country rent with division and long shots for success at Euro 2012. It is ironic that the his tenure was effectively ended by an interview given in his native Italian, when he said he disagreed completely with the FA's decision to strip John Terry of the England captaincy. Capello, rich beyond dreams, with trophies and titles... |
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| Bruno Ready To Script A Different Senna Story |
| Bruno Senna's grandparents have never attended any of his races and, as he prepares for a new start in Formula One with Williams, he does not expect them to do so now.The Brazilian says his family is completely supportive as he treads in the footsteps of his late uncle Ayrton but the 28-year-old also recognises that the pain of the past will always be there.Ayrton, perhaps the greatest of all grand prix drivers and certainly one of the most charismatic, died in a Williams at the 1994 San... |
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| Tragedy Of Olympian Proportionstragedy Of Olympian Proportions |
| Peeling paint flakes from Athens' Olympic park. Its entrances locked, this once sparkling edifice to sporting greatness lies rotting and largely unused -- maintenance costs too high for near-bankrupt Greece to operate. The rate of decay and dilapidation in just eight years provides a visual clue to the Greek scenario, one as effective as any economist's report or politician's statement. "Like heaven and hell," Greek athletics federation chief Vassilis Sevastis told Reuters,... |
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| Gallery |
| South Sudan eager to join the big partySouth Sudan, the world's newest country, hopes to send athletes to the London Olympics but is racing against time to secure membership of various sporting federations and the International Olympic Committee.Declared independent last July, South Sudan also wants to send a wheelchair basketball team, made up of amputees injured in the conflict in the country, to the Paralympics, sports minister Cirino Hiteng Ofuho said. "Right now we are... |
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| Sunday Herald |
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| Heart And Sold |
| For Valentine’s Day, as the country turns all pink hearts and red roses, Manjul Bajaj wonders if it’s about time we took a pledge to honour the heart and hold it sacred.The month of February has changed its colours since I was a kid. Back then, it wore the yellows and oranges of Vasant, our festival of spring, and brought with it the promise of the multi-hued Holi celebrations — when we would fill up our water-pistols with pink and purple and green water and spray the... |
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| All The World Loves A Love Story |
| What really is love? It’s a question we all tend to think about around Valentine’s Day, and perhaps the reason we celebrate. Shinie Antony attempts to find answers in literature.‘Love’ drives just about everyone — the layman, the lover, the littérateur, not to mention the entire greeting card industry. Four letters that launch a million SMSs every day, inspire crude graffiti as well as haunting haiku, turn verbose or tongue-tie. The magic word that bursts... |
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| Sunday Herald articulations |
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| Having The Last Word |
| From Gandhi to Guevara to Gaddafi, they’ve all had their last words. But who knows whether they were really uttered or not, wonders Giridhar Khasnis. Last October, television channels throughout the world were frantically breaking news on the death of Libyan dictator, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. No one seemed to know the exact circumstances of his death, but what seemed fairly certain was that the 69-year-old erstwhile ruler who was on the run had been captured from his hiding in a... |
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| Sealed With A Kiss |
| Love is a matter of chemistry. Valentine’s Day is here. It’s celebration time for the young and the old. A time for romance and flowers, roses and champagne, and kisses.Swift said, “Lord, I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing”. What’s in a kiss? Anthropologists state that 90 per cent of people kiss. If you are a romantic at heart, you believe that a kiss can unite two souls. I got around to gathering a few hilarious definitions. I am certain that... |
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| India’S Rural Olympics |
| The divine symbol of Omkar emblazoned on the blue painted stone shone in the late afternoon sun as Jagdev Singh, all of 76 years, lifted the 80 kg stone with relative ease. His feet were firm and his knees didn’t buckle as the crowd broke into rapturous applause. A veteran farmer from Sangrur and a teetotaller, his eight buffaloes back home provided him a daily diet of four litres of milk, 250 gms of butter and an equal measure of desi ghee. And that was the recipe for his longevity and... |
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| Sunday Herald entertainment |
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| Soul Of The Song |
| Having sung some popular numbers for Indian films, Javed Ali is an established playback singer in the music industry today. Juanita Kakoty speaks to the singer on how he’s literally sung his way to the top.It’s as if music has not only shaped his life but also his bearing. Poised and humble, Javed Ali, one of the much sought after singers in Bollywood today, told me that music is what he lives for. And that music is what has been around him from the very beginning. “I... |
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| Beyond The Material... |
| Ten years after he entered the profession, the greatest satisfaction Kailash Kher has had is that his success has not been restricted to its material sense. “There is spiritual progress within me as well,” says the maverick singer, composer and writer. “The almighty has given mesome skills, that alone explains how an untrained artiste like me has reached this height and is loved by the people and associates.”His latest album, Rangeele, with its wide assortment of songs... |
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| Music Reviews |
| Party favouritesI Am the Club Rocker is the second full-length studio album by Romanian recording artist Inna. Un momento is an up-tempo Latin house song which incorporates elements of synthpop. The lyrics are sung in both Spanish and English which results in Spanglish lyrics. Club Rocker incorporates elements of electro house. House is going on, the third track, develops high inflections of electronica music. Endless is an electropop song with a downbeat all over it. Sun is up is the... |
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| Reeling Off Reality |
| As real life ventures into celluloid space, a new genre of cinema can be culled out — one that allows the audience to deconstruct and relive a few moments from their own time, writes Vatsal Verma.Not very long ago, watching a Hindi film would predominantly mean watching a three-hour-long melodrama unfold. Every other movie was being woven around stereotypical themes of romance amidst resentful parents and love triangles or family sagas with a generous amount of martyrs and long-lost... |
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| Ninety-Plus And Counting |
| Pran — that’s how his name appeared on the screen in at least 250 of his 350-plus movies in Hindi, beginning with Khandaan in 1942. He had acted in several Punjabi films in Lahore before moving to Mumbai on August 14, 1947. He has had an amazing career graph since then, a long innings as a dreaded villain as well as a loveable character-actor. Walking woes and other health problems forced him out of action, and he decided to retire in 2004 at the ripe age of 84. Ziddi, co-starring... |
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| Sunday Herald art & culture |
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| Fusing Identity |
| Rashid Johnson’s photographs, sculptural installations and films have always drawn inspiration from larger-than-life figures who challenge conventional models of behaviour, writes Dorothy Spears.Rashid Johnson was discussing his coming exhibition at the Hauser & Wirth gallery recently, when Marc Payot, a gallery partner, mentioned that a previous owner of the gallery’s sleek town house on East 69th Street in Manhattan was the boxing promoter Don King.Johnson, a longtime boxing... |
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| Creative Looms |
| Benarasi, Chanderi, Paithani, Ikat, Baluchari... the great weaving traditions of India make up a long and luminous list, and the fabled fabrics continue to enjoy great popularity despite changing dress codes. But, try to locate the Rhimai, Mising, Konyak weaves on this list, and you’ll draw a blank. These are just three of the vast repertoire of handloom weaves produced in each tribal home in villages in India’s northeastern states. Although they are as beautiful as their famous... |
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| Kantha: Needled Narration |
| Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, whose 150th birth anniversary was celebrated across the globe recently, although most famed for his poetry, was a creative genius who played a crucial role in the cultural renaissance of the country in the 19th and early 20th centuries. His multifaceted talent also found expression in reviving traditional and folk art forms while at the same time drawing on world cultural influences. At Sriniketan, situated close to Shantiniketan, there was a focussed... |
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| Animated Encounters |
| Negotiating different cultural spaces and finding resonance with an audience from a country with a strong tradition of puppet theatre like India is never easy, but not impossible either. Stephan V Lowis, the producer of ‘Sanjay and His Master’, an Indo-German puppet theatre performance, tells Varshini Murali.The ticket said ages six years and up. And so, there we were at Ranga Shankara — two 24-year-olds alongside two maamis gracing 50, one being my very own mother. You... |
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| Hitting The High Notes |
| You can’t miss the tousled hair and the boho look that she carries off with such aplomb. Dig deeper and you discover her infectious charm and an ingenious musical mind — all part of this incredible package called Imogen Heap or ‘Immi’, as she is popularly known amongst her fans.And from what we saw during her visit to India, last year, there is surely no dearth of fans for this British, Grammy award winning musician who drew in the crowds at each of her performances in... |
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| Sunday Herald books |
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| Life Of A Recluse |
| A Life,’ by Kenneth Slawenski, is earnest, vigorously researched and revealing, without resorting to voyeuristic speculation, writes Michiko Kakutani.The well-known dedication of J D Salinger’s Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction reads: “If there is an amateur reader still left in the world — or anybody who just reads and runs — I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways... |
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| Book Rack |
| Bollywood’s top 20 superstars of indian cinema Edited by Bhaichand Patel Penguin 2012, pp 279, 599 This book is a collection of essays by renowned writers on cinema, paying tribute to Hindi cinema’s biggest stars. It looks into the lives of Bollywood most exceptional legends, their struggles and triumphs, downfalls and scandals, and also the x-factor that made them who they are in the industry — superstars of Indian cinema. Urban shots — crossroadsEdited... |
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| Corporate Craft |
| Suits: A woman on wall streetNina GodiwallaHachette2011, pp 348395Delivering one of the immortal monologues of Hollywood, Gordon Gekko, Michael Douglas’ Oscar winning character in Wall Street (1987), proclaims “Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.” Nina Godiwalla’s smartly narrated, heavily autobiographical Suits looks at the not-so- noble qualities of this greed as it motivates, lures and... |
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| Know Your Rights |
| Fundamental rights and their enforcementU R RaiPHI Learning2011, pp 794550Eminent academic Professor Udai Raj Rai’s recently published book, Fundamental Rights and Their Enforcement, is an in-depth study of the enumeration and evolution of fundamental rights under our constitutional framework. Rather than adopting a chronological approach or a purely case-law based approach, the book proceeds through a narrative of legal developments in various cases decided by the Supreme Court and... |
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| Sunday Herald travel |
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| Beyond The Tea |
| Ian watkinson offers a taste of real Assam, a taste that lingers on much after you have finished your morning cup of tea.This was a part of India that was rarely visited by Indians and foreigners due to social and political instability. A legacy of the British for the manner in which they insensitively carved up the Northeast India before partition, and created East Pakistan, Assam is experiencing stability and progression unheard of until recently. It is justifiably keen on capitalising on... |
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| Shanghai Stopover |
| The new ‘bullet’ train from Beijing was speeding at 308 kmph across the Chinese countryside. There was nary a soul in sight all through. Even the stations we raced through were deserted. Where are the 1.3 billion, I wondered. Shanghai provided a part of the answer. It has 23 million of them, including one taxi driver who, on learning that we were from India, crooned “Abaala hooon.”We had taken the train with some trepidation because earlier, there had been reports of... |
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| Exploring Both Sides Of The Danube |
| Budapest, a lively and cosmopolitan city, where Strauss’s Blue Danube is played all the time, is not just Hungary’s capital but its heart and soul. It’s a spa capital with thermal baths, the medicinal effects of which were known to the Romans who took full advantage of them. To get the real feel of the city, the visitor can stroll through streets at night and see the brilliantly lit monuments. The Danube runs between the twin cities of Buda and Pest. Along the river bank,... |
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