Kolkata: 

“Its the pride of Bengal,” Mamata Banerjee said at a press conference after the meeting as she held up the gift for the TV cameras. “She has given me this… aguner poroshmoni choawo praney. She even remembered the great song.”

Aguner Poroshmoni is indeed one of Tagore’s most popular songs.

With Mamata waving the gift around, the fine print escaped notice. But on Tuesday, a day after the historic meet, when newspapers blew up photographs of the gift, there was shock.

Not only are there spelling mistakes in the lyrics embroidered around the edges of the mat, even the words are wrong.

For instance, the song goes….”e jibon purno koro“….but in the gift, “purno” has become “rhinno” and “dhonno“.

The “e ki matra” in the word “jibon“, too, is wrong.

With the Mamata-Hillary meet still fresh in their minds, people would not comment on the faux pas. But in the cyberworld, pictures of Mamata holding up the mat have gone viral.

So has the condemnation.

“I think this is an insult to tagore and to all bengali speaking people,” says one netizen.

And it’s a sentiment echoed by dozens.

In fact, there is at least one online petition demanding an apology from the US embassy in Delhi for the mistakes and a correction of the same, though how that can be done is not clear.

And that’s not all. While the mistakes were not Mamata’s, her baiters have found fault with her nevertheless. She described the gift as an aashon, which is something you sit on, sacrilege as it has Tagore’s portrait on it.

“She has given me a small aashon. There is a picture of Tagore on the aashon,” Mamata said.

Most feel the gift was a wall hanging or a wall mat, and many are wondering if somewhere along the way wall mat and Walmart got mixed up leading to confounding confusion.

New Delhi: 

1)  The Delhi High Court has declared the strike illegal.

2) By evening, 26 more pilots have been sacked. Doctors are being sent to homes of 50 pilots who called in sick. 10 pilots were also fired yesterday.

3) The pilots say the strike will continue till Sunday. The main representative of the pilots, Jitendra Ahwad, said the management has not invited them for talks. “I’m ready to withdraw 99% of the demands, but we expect one step forward from the management,” he said.

4) 10 international flights had been cancelled till 2 pm today. At least six flights were cancelled yesterday.

5) The management yesterday derecognized the union of Air India pilots, called the Indian Pilots’ Guild. The union has 250 members.

6) The pilots are upset because they say commitments made to them about promotions are not being met.

7) They also say that pilots from Indian Airlines must not be trained to fly the Boeing Dreamliner, scheduled to join the carrier’s fleet this month. Air India pilots say this should be their prerogative and a way of preserving their seniority.

Civil Aviation Minister Ajit Singh told NDTV yesterday that he believes the government “cannot and should not run any service industry.” “The time for national carriers is gone,” he said. When asked if the government should sell the bleeding airline, he said, it would have serious repercussions, including a possible hike in air fares. He also said that Air India has 17% of passenger traffic currently.

9) A month ago, the government cleared a Rs. 30,000 crore bailout for Air India.

10) Air India was merged with the domestic national carrier Indian Airlines in 2007 – an unhappy marriage for pilots from both airlines. Air India operates about 50 international flights everyday.

Bhubaneswar:

Assistant Sub Inspector Kruparam Majhi had been kidnapped near Budhas village in Nuapada district, about 550 km from here, Deputy Inspector General of Police Soumendra Priyadarshi told IANS.

Just hours later, his body was found, riddled with bullets and his hands and legs tied.

He had been abducted from a spot about 15 km away from a paramilitary force camp, the official said.
The incident comes just days after Maoists released Odisha’s ruling Biju Janata Dal (BJD) legislator Jhina Hikaka, more than a month after they had kidnapped him.

Hikaka had been abducted from Laxmipur in Koraput March 24 and released on April 26. Before him, Maoists in the state had abducted two Italian nationals but subsequently released them.

In neighbouring Chhattisgarh, Sukma district collector Alex Paul Menon was released May 3, after 12 days of captivity.

The 2006 batch Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer had been abducted at gunpoint April 21 by rebels from a forested location, while he was interacting with tribals. The Maoists shot dead his two guards who resisted his abduction.

And, although we haven’t had time to review it fully – including a more in-depth play with TouchWiz and the user interface other than specific new features – it’s looking good. Very good indeed.

The handset itself is massive, measuring 136.6mm tall, 70.6mm wide and boasting a waistline of 8.6mm – which is basically as thin as its predecessor, the Samsung Galaxy S II, but much bigger.

It’s heavier, at 133g, although that’s really because of the extra glass needed to front the gorgeous 4.8-inch HD Super AMOLED touchscreen, which is eye-searingly vibrant. And that extra weight doesn’t matter much in the hand, you’d barely notice (too busy looking at the tasty display).

Its resolution is HD at 1280 x 720 with a 306 PPI, so much sharper and clearer than on the previous model and, if pushed, we’d say it is better when looked at in direct comparison to an iPhone 4S Retina display, certainly with colour representation, anyway.

Our initial thoughts are that off-angle it performs better than the Samsung Galaxy Note, which can introduce a green tinge when looked at it acutely, but we’d have to spend more time with it to find out for sure. It can definitely shine brightly though, with the maximum brightness setting being dazzling.

The other thing you notice immediately is that – contrary to much of the rumoured nonsense that has littered the internet of late – there is a home button, which is solid and very tangible, and Menu/Recent Apps and Back icons either side on the fascia itself – they glow when in use, fade away when not.

On the rear there’s an 8-megapixel camera and LED flash, while the front houses a 1.9-megapixel webcam that is also employed for face recognition purposes. This is one of the SGSIII’s stand-out new features, which Samsung has called Smart Stay. The phone intelligently sees when you’re looking at it and ensures that the screen never dims when it has eye contact.

As Min Cho, senior manager of Samsung’s Korean HQ’s Sales & Marketing Team, Mobile Communications, told us in an exclusive chat: “The phone only sleeps when you do.

And that’s not the only interesting new control function. There’s also Direct Call, which allows you to call back someone who has left a message, sent a text or communicated with you in a number of other ways by simply lifting the phone to your ear. As long as they are in your contacts list, the Galaxy S III automatically dials the number. We tried it, and it worked as easy as you like. You can also turn off the mode if you don’t want to call people accidentally when moving about.

Perhaps, though, the most useful feature, and one that is probably going to be talked about more than any other, is S Voice, Samsung’s equivalent of Siri that does so much more than Apple’s technology.

S Voice not only allows you to control certain functions, like with former Android voice recognition technology, but it now also understands a massive gamut of natural phrases. Plus, it can be customised with up to four separate wake-up commands. For example, you can set it to respond with the phrase “Galaxy” or “get up”. This will unlock the screen and get the whole shebang going. And as that specific function will  respond only to your voice, there’s no concerns over security.

Samsung has also integrated voice recognition into certain embedded applications, such as the camera app. Where before you had to scrabble to find a button -either on screen or off – in order to take a shot, you can now just bark commands. “Hi Galaxy, picture,” will open the camera app, for instance, then “capture” or “cheese” will take a picture. It’s very effective, and a better use of vocal triggering than asking your iPhone aloud to find a nearby restaurant when on a crowded train (only to be met with “I can only look for businesses in the United States…”).

You can also now control your music on the phone, even if it is playing a song loudly in the background. It’s all quite similar to the way Microsoft has integrated Kinect voice recognition into its Xbox 360 UI, which we’re fond of here at Pocket-lint.

The camera application has also had a few significant improvements. The Samsung Galaxy S III is capable of recording video in Full HD (1080p) – much like other Samsung top end phones – and 720p through the front-facing cam, and while you’re capturing footage you can now also take stills without halting the process. Like with the normal photo modes, there’s zero shutter lag too, and minimum saving time.

There’s also a funky new mode called Burst Shot, which, when enabled, takes 20 photos in quick succession (at six frames per second) and automatically chooses the one it judges to offer the quality based on a number of parameters. As the phone’s rear camera has multiple face recognition properties of its own, it will look to see if your subject is closing his or her eyes, whether they are smiling, etc.

NEW DELHI (Reuters)

The postponement on the so-called general anti-avoidance rule (GAAR) is the latest in a string of delays and reversals by an embattled government that has struggled to seize the policy initiative.

Investors breathed a sigh of relief, lifting the rupee and pushing stocks into positive territory after they had lost nearly 2 percent earlier in the day.

However, Monday’s changes to the finance bill do not appear to give any respite to Britain’s Vodafone , which India wants to tax over its 2007 acquisition of Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa’s <0013.HK> mobile operations in India.

“To provide more time to both the taxpayer and tax administration, to address all related issues, I propose to defer the applicability of GAAR provisions,” Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee told parliament on Monday.

He said a committee would submit its recommendations on GAAR by May 31. The rule will apply to income starting from the financial year that begins in April 2013.

Expectations for a delay had been building in recent days as investor disquiet sent the rupee skidding, exacerbating India’s balance of payments shortfall. Wide current account and fiscal deficits mean India needs to bolster foreign investment.

The rupee is down 9 percent since the start of March, taking it close to a record low. In March and April, India saw net portfolio outflows of $540 million, compared with $13 billion in inflows in January-February.