Indicast Podcast Network - Mother Feed

We are back after a long time. Blame it on my laptop which completed its 5th Anniversary and I had to gift it with a new Hard Disk and adorn it with a few accessories. Yeah, it was a costly affair, but, what the heck? We are back! Thank you for all the comments and the patience! "I am a cheerleader, I am a promoter, I am a salesman, I am a debt collector, and there are other aspects I still have to discover," Annan has said in describing his job. Will Shashi Tharoor join the select few from across the globe to head the most important post in the United Nations? We, at Indicast root for him. Also, Bollywood doesnt stop amazing us especially when its an item girl. When Rakhee did it to a girl, it's a kiss. When Mika does it to Rakhi, it's blasphemy! We try to get our minds to decipher this anamoly. I love it when when we talk on topic as diverse as the ones we covered today. Also to spice it up a bit check out this Rakhi Sawant interview on YouTube. I love the reason she gives for being an item girl. "Mujhe

Today, I walked past waiting patients to the quadrangle at the heart of AIIMS, where striking doctors prepare to go hungry for another night. There were candles all around, remnants of a quiet vigil from an hour ago. Little groups of students huddled everywhere, some on benches, others stretched out on red carpets in the centre of the ground. Around them, strung up everywhere, are banners. There's a joke painted on one. It's about Manmohan Singh telling George W Bush of a plan to send Indians to the moon next year. "How many," asks Bush. "100," Singh replies. "25 OBCs, 20 SCs, 15 STs, 5 handicapped, 5 sports personnel, 2 Kashmiri migrants, 8 politicians, 18 generals and, if possible, 2 astronauts." Another poster read: "I am leaving for the US. I was disowned by my own country." This is what it has come to?

One fine morning, the 19 year old Harvard sophomore, Kaavya Vishwanathan wrote a book, got rich, got famous, and then, got caught. While she seems to have been only "inspired" by one of her favourite authors and that the similarities between her book, 'How Opal Mehta Got kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life' and Sophie Kinsella's 'Can You Keep a Secret' were only coincidental, we at indicast discuss the fine line between inspiration and plagiarism. The NGO that we researched about this week is by the name of Apne Aap, an NGO which has taken up the daring initiative to end sex-trafficking in India.

With the summer season at its peak, this May, has been an eventful one for the shining brand called 'India'. In the past couple of years, India has appeared in more publications and magazines across the world than it has in the past 8-10 years put together! Was India built in a day? We discuss India and its tryst with fame in this episode.

The summer has always been hot but this time around adding fuel to the fire is the daily load shedding ritual for about 3 hours. I have heard stories where 8 hour load shedding has become a norm. So we decided to take that topic up and present our views on it. I tried hard but couldnt help giving out a few numbers. Abhishek has the honour of hosting the show this time. You will also hear dogs barking in the background for about 2 mins, those are my two dobermans. I tried but couldnt clear the barking from the original recording.

Has the Indian judicial system become like a cricket umpire where a few bad decision are part of the game? Killers are being let go and then rearrested, rape sentences are being handed out like the christmas cake. And to top it, the quota system is back. We are for merit based selection but at the same time the under previleged have to be helped out. Abhishek presents a solution. What do you say?

For this episode we have picked up two topics concerning women but one of them remains a big issue while the other one is a "fabricated" issue by the traditional media. The sentencing in the Marine drive rape case caught our eye and Abhishek went on a number hunt to get a few facts while I took a look into the Indian Penal Code and its definition of rape. The other topic we cover was about the goof-ups at the lakme India Fashion week. In fact, we were in two minds while talking about it since the traditional media and the politician hyped it up so much but we had to tell them to shut up, let go and move on!!

We are (like any other Indian) passionate about cricket. So we had initially planned this episode to be about what we feel about the Young Team India. But as it happened, we recorded this episode the same day that Team India was embarrassed by a depleted England team so it ended up being a rant. Then the second topic that we squeezed in was the Miss India Contest.

This week we aren't late and had a guest with us for this show. A friend of ours, Shalin Mody, works at NASA and we had him over to chat about his experiences. We didn't go into details about ISRO and talked generally about space exploration. The topics covered are Asteroid mission being cancelled, zero gravity, space tourism, Vision for Space explroation.

Its becoming a habit for us to release episodes with a sorry for the delay but this is the last time. A lot of things happened but nothing that we could talk about for 15 mins entirely with boring you people so what we have done is spent time on several topic. So here is Indicasts episode # 15 for you.

Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or NPT ( don't ask me why they dont call it NNPT) is in the spotlight with Bush's upcoming visit to India. He's coming over to discuss some Indo-US nucleur deal for civilian use. So we just thought about giving you some gyan about what the hell NPT is about and why is this such a big deal.

we decided to talk about Rang De Basanti (needless to say that its a must watch) and discuss a few facts that were mentioned in the movie (dont worry we havent given out the plot) but just picked on a particular thing that a character says. The discussion lead us to talk about IAS and how to get into it and importantly discuss facts about it.

We are back after a 3 week hiatus and we apologise for that but the schedules kept clashing. That's the trouble having a sales guy as a co-host ;-) . We used up this entire episode to talk about things that happened in 2005. Rediff had a special end of the year article about various things about 2005. So we picked the top ten things that made us (Indians) happy in 2005 and top ten trends that rocked India in 2005.

The vocalist for fabulous Indus Creed and the awesome Alms for Shanti, Uday Benegal, makes an appearance on IndiCast. I had asked him to join us to talk about the past, present and future of his band and also about generral things happening around him. As usual, we had to battle a few technical problems and had to edit a few awesome moments out of our chat. This episode does contain a few fucks here and there and it would have ruined the episode if we took them away. Morover, almost 75% of the people who took our survey said they would be fine with it.

We are huge Sachin fans so we decided to dedicate this episode to Sachin Tendulkar for reaching yet another milestone. The episode contains snippets of sachin's first mainstream interview with Tom Alter and also various incidences as experienced by many greats like Anil Kumble, Dravid, Richie Benaud.

After struggling to get good internet connection, we were able to find a stable connection and record this episode. I invited a college friend, Porus Satwe, to talk about talk NRI related finance stuff. This porbably might be the most informative IndiCast to date. Porus explains the difference between NRE,NRO and FCNR accounts as it relates to NRIs. We had decided to talk about investing options as well but had to cut it short and follow it up in another episode.

I am back from India (grrrrr...) and back to my routine in the US. It was too short a trip but I was amazed at the changes I could see and feel all over the place so I persuaded abhishek to talk about it so its just me and him this week. We decided to mix it up a bit and let Abhishek play the host for this episode.

Rashmi Bansal and Vikram Nanivadekar (Nani) shared the mic with me for this episode. I wanted to be a bit adventurous and record this episode at CCD (my cousin who is in SYJC says calling it Cafe Coffe Day is being unhip) but it was just too noisy so we recorded it at JAMs office.

Toral Mehta from Apprentice joins Indicast for an informal talk, her experiences as a desi on Apprentice. She shares the good and bad experiences that she had on one of US's most popular TV reality show.

The episode features a talk on FDI and our support for it especially for retail industry. We have protected ourselves for a long time and its time to play with the foriegn companies. We change the topic and talk about Sachins response to the critical media. We love you Sachin.