Beef Vindaloo

A new insurance rule has drawn the ire of cyber cafe owners across the country. According to the new rule, cyber cafes will not be eligible for insurance claims if they have been attacked by angry mobs who are upset with online resources. Insurance companies believe that there might be a nexus forming where cyber cafe owners offer their premises to angry mobs to destroy in order to gain publicity and recognition. The losses they incurred due to the insurance coverage in 2008 were in the region of Rs 2 crore in Bombay alone.

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After years of trying to shut down one of the Internet’s most famous torrent sites, The Pirate Bay, Hollywood producers are turning to Bollywood to understand the reason for their success. Until date, there are no torrents available for Bollywood films and according to the people behind The Pirate Bay, there never will be either. Hollywood studios are trying to understand exactly what it is about Bollywood movies that keep the Pirates away and hope to incorporate some of those qualities in their films as a bid to cut down on Torrent downloads.

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Rockstar Games, the company behind the legendary Grand Theft Auto game franchise, might have to thank Paresh Tukulamani if the sales of GTA IV in India exceed their expectations. The Indian engineer, a long-time fan of the game series has designed a crack that he is currently distributing free of cost online. The crack would enable people to use auto rickshaws in the game. The crack consists of pressing the controller buttons in a particular sequence that would activate the cheat, similar to other cheats that the game is well known for. The website calls the crack Grand Theft Auto Rickshaw and Tukulamani expects it to be a big hit with the game’s Indian fan base.

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Industry body, NASSCOM announced today that the growth of technology exposure in India in the first quarter of the calendar year of 2008 is touching a phenomenal 100%. The information technology in India, which has seen unprecedented growth in recent years because of the outsourcing boom, shows no sign of a slow down despite global concerns of the weakening dollar. The exposure growth, according to NASSCOM comes, rather surprisingly from the fact that every day, thousands of people, most of them in the villages, are touching a computer for the first time.

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Social networking’s blue-eyed boy, Facebook, has declared that they are looking to strengthen their India presence by promoting a slew of localised, India based applications. After the unprecedented success of the Agarwalla brothers created Scrabulous, Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg said that he is keen to have more Indian developers on board to develop these applications. The news spread like wildfire through India’s software developers and applications like janam kundalis, darshans and protest marches are already in the works.

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Non-vegetarian Indians, numbering roughly 1% of the population, are outraged. They claim that the bird flu in the state of West Bengal is another conspiracy to shut them out of their eating habits. They believe that what started with making beef the hardest meat to buy in India, that vegetarians in the country are know going after chicken as well. Since this population is too small to destroy enough shops and taxis in Mumbai, they are taking their protests out to the public in new ways. They have launched a campaign on YouTube targeting the 0.25% of the vegetarian population who have heard of the Internet.

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Though the Internet in India has been slow to catch on, websites are doing all they can to grab loyalties from every user. MSN India’s latest venture is just another example of this fight for fingertips. The company announced a new emoticon package for their email and chat programmes that feature only India-centric icons. This package, free to download, is a feature open to everyone. The company said that registered users would benefit by getting upgrade packs not available to non-registered users.

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