Indicast Podcast Network - Mother Feed

There is a new trend i Australia - Beat the Indians. Until a month ago, it was only on the cricket field but now its on the street. Indian students are being targetted and beaten up in hate crimes. While this is going on in Australia, Indian Sikhs are killing each other in Austria. As a result people went crazy in Punjab and caused damages worth Rs. 7000 crores that too in recessionary times. Other topcis include Afzal Guru mercy plea, air traffic woes, Cabinet ministers and other ramblings

The initial euphoria of the UPA win in the recently held Indian elections refuses to die down and in this podcast we bring to you what's in store for the Indian business class following the UPA win. What can our new Finance Minister Mr Pranab Mukherjee do to accelerate the Indian GDP growth in times like these? We discuss policy issues ranging from FDI to disinvestment to deregulation of oil. The IPL has come and gone and its time to start raking the moolah. We discuss the actual winners of the IPL. Tata has done it once again!! From people's car to low cost housing, Tatas seem to be taking CK Prahlad's Botton of the Pyramid model very seriously. Listen to our 28th epsiode to know more.

Congress scores a big win in the World's largest democratic election. It no longer depends on any of its alliance parties to keep it in Power but will that mean better and sensible governance remains to be seen. In the other big news, LTTE chief Prabharakaran has been killed by Sri-lankan. We talk about what the LTTE has given the world. You will be surprised to know that the list is pretty interesting.

We made a passing reference to Bofors deal in the last episode which made a research it a bit and thought that it would be good to talk about what the big deal about it was and sub inspector has been punished for possibly doing his job. Other topics include women topping the UPSC exams this year, and ISI training women for terrorism.

After all the drama and ruckus created by the Mumbaiites post 26/11, it was a no show on election day. Only 43% of us decided to vote while the rest most probably enjoyed a long weekend but a few voters in Madhya Pradesh decided to cast a "no-vote". This episode also covers the suprising death of the man who discovered pebbles in Ambani's helicopter, how the slowdown has resulted in the increase in UPSC applications, and why a tigress in Ranthambore was conferred the Lfetime achievement award.

Satyam made headlines not too long ago. Now Tech Mahindra has brought it back in the news. Satyam will soon be bought out by Tech Mahindra. Most of this rather short podcast focuses on the deal and what is there in it for Tech Mahindra which had to pay more than a 1000 crore for this deal. Quarter 4 results are out and surprisingly a few of India's IT companies have posted profits.

The performers are ready. The biggest democracy drama is set to unveil itself. In this podcast we wonder what it would be like if Advani and Dr Manmohan Singh were to debate aka Obama and Mc Cain. But then we have Mulayam Singh Yadav wanting to ban English in schools since it soils our culture. In another news, a son kills his dad for voting for a wrong party .And IPL has kicked off and Bhajji and Dhoni are in the news for other reasons

Continuing our election updates, BJP released its election manifesto containing all the things that they would do if elected and how did congress react? Congress says that 70% of the manifesto has been ripped from UPA's manifesto. Also, you know that its election time when a leader choses to address the a rally through his cell phone. The other updates include Karnatak topping the list of voters ready to sell their votes for cash, Pooja Chopra winning the Miss India 2009, Kasab getting a lawyer and the Queen gets a new iPod from Obama.

We spent 21 of the 22 minutes talking about politics or the lack of it. Aditya and I ended up at two ends talking about Mayawati, the politician with a not so impeccable track record and Meera Sanyal, the ABN Amro bank head who has nothing to her credit yet, but is taking baby steps in contesting this years elections. Politics and entertainment are never mutually exclusive; we have SRK campaining for Congress. In another news, Congress has reserved 50 per cent seats for NRIs and Aditya is livid!

Indcast got a chance to catch up with Sanjay Manjrekar, a technically sound batsmen who doesn't believe in the significance to technique in cricket. We start the conversation talking about about the on field energy during the 1996 India-Pakistan World Cup match and then move on to other topics like why Indian's struggled in fielding, his career as a commentator and then his passion for singing. He also talked about his grossly misunderstood article about Sachin Tendulkar, his thoughts about Azharuddin getting into politics as well as the match fixing scandal.

The highlight of this episode was the JesusPhone (some call it iPhone too) and the announcement of the features that would be in its upcoming firmware upgrade. Meanwhile in India, Symantec has ranked India as the 3rd most spamming country in the world. Bebo, a little late to the game, has announced its entry into India. Other topics in the episode include, Facebook bug revealing your private data, launch of IE8, Yahoo Flickr announcing a deal with Getty Images, and the Pwn2Own Contest.

Cut back to your school days when on the sports day, the entire class would split into two halves to play the tug of war. It was a fun PT period for us at school. But not so much for the RBI which is trying hard to pull with all its might against both inflation and deflation. Recently, RBI cut the repo rates and the reverse repo rates to boost the economy. Ritika gives us a run down of what these jargons mean. The Federal Reserve has shown its benevolence to AIG again with its third bail out package. Citibank announcing a quarterly profit was some good news at BiziNation after a long time.

India celebrated Holi just like any other year, but this time with some organic flavour. After the bomb blasts less than a fortnight ago, Pakistan is confident of hosting cricket matches by the end of this year. Aditya opines that Pakistan has bigger problems and that list is endless. India is not making any healthy headlines either. A 19 year old lost his life to careless college ragging. In cricket, India beat New Zealand and Sehwag became the fastest Indian to score a century in an ODI. May be that's the only good news that we've read in the papers for a long time now.

The technology news on the Indian shore included the selection of companies to managed the much required Mobile Number portability and delay in launch of Bhuvan, a desi version of Google Earth being developed by ISRO. Other news included Microsoft finally providing users a tool to remove windows components including IE8, Blackberry's App World, Flock divorcing Firefox, Google Docs being careless, Flickr opening up videos for everyone now. We also have Godaddy as our sponsor for TKM.

The interim budget was as bland as Russian food. But Pranab Mukharjee spiced it up just in time for the elections. With the benevolent excise duty, service tax and a few other rate cuts, the consumer will have to spend less on mobile phone bills, buying an LCD TV, etc. In the corporate sector, after the Satyam debacle, SEBI has asked for full disclosure from the promoters of companies who pledge their shares to raise more money. In cricket, the multi million IPL season will kick off very soon. On other side of the world, in England, Sir Allen Stanford, the man who sponsored the million dollar T20 tournament in West Indies has been booked for fraud.

Pakistan cricket must have stepped closer to its grave with the recent brutal attempt to assassinate the touring Lankan team. Taliban, like a malignant tumor is spreading across Pakistan and the government seems helpless which does not bode too well for India. Back home, the election dates have been announced, but India doesn't surprise the educated world by coming up with options like one Ansari who has a string of legal charges going against him (or for him) on his resume.

Saket eloquently puts its in this episode that everybody and their aunt is coming up with an App Store in response to the announcements made by Nokia and Microsoft at the Mobile Web Congress. But before that we talk about the computers at Ministry of External Affairs getting hacked and the new various amendments to the 9 year old IT Act of 2000. The other topics that we covered this week include the Hotmail's Captcha cracked, facebook TOS revolt, Last.fm handing user data to RIAA, Norway's revolt against IE 6, and the pirate bay Trial.

And we are back after a pretty long time, but nothing much has changed since we spoke about bad news that surrounded the world economy. In fact, things have only gone downhill. Layoffs have begun even in India. The US economy is reeling and is hoping under Barack Obama's slogan of Hope, not fear. The US congress has approved the $700 billion odd stimulas package. In other news from India, Subhiksha, the ailing retail chain is fighting hard to survive bankruptcy.

The Indian scientists at the Nationation Institute of Dairy cloned a buffalo cafe but unfortunately it couldnt make it beyond 4 days and they same will be said about twitter if it doesnt find a revenue stream. We talk about a possible revenue stream and hope that twitter makes it throug the current turbulent times. Google also continued its product release spree with announcing PowerMeter along with another location based feature. Microsoft also announced the upgrade policy for its awesome Windows 7 operating system which we try to explain.

This week saw the much talk about $10 laptop from India disappoint the whole world and sort of embarass India. The supposed laptop had neither a display nor an input device! The week also saw NDTV launch a new hullu like website currently having around 50000 video from its own network. Stories from the usual suspects, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook also came up during the discussions.