India celebrates 60th Republic Day

New Delhi (PTI): Kaleidoscopic images of India's rich cultural diversity and the might of its military were on full display on the magnificent Rajpath here on Monday as the nation celebrated its 60th Republic Day amid an unprecedented security cover.

An impressive and colourful parade, a traditional attraction of the national event, marched down the thoroughfare connecting the Rashtrapati Bhawan and the historic India Gate as President Pratibha Patil took the salute from marching contingents.

Armed forces in battle regalia proudly marching before their supreme commander, scintillating show of air power, fascinating tableaux depicting the diverse culture and hundreds of colourfully-dressed dancing school children were part of the parade.

The march-past was watched by the Republic Day chief guest Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev, Vice President Hamid Ansari, Defence Minister A K Antony and the country's top political and military brass, including UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi, besides a large enthusiastic crowd that had gathered on either sides of the Rajpath.

As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is recuperating from his bypass surgery in All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Antony performed all the customary duties of the Prime Minister during the Republic Day celebration.

Minutes before the parade began, Antony and chiefs of Army, Navy and Air Force laid wreaths at 'Amar Jawan Jyoti', the British-era World War-I memorial at India Gate, where an eternal flame burns in memory of those who laid down their lives while defending the nation's frontiers.
Patil and her Kazakh counterpart arrived at the Rajpath escorted by the President's bodyguards riding well-trained, impeccably-bedecked horses.

Antony received the President and the nation's guest at the saluting dais in the absence of the Prime Minister.

A massive ground-to-air security apparatus was put in place in the national capital to prevent any 9/11-type terror attack, which the intelligence agencies had warned of. Snipers of the National Security Guards (NSG) were deployed at all high-rises all along the parade route.
The unfurling of the tricolour by Patil and the playing of national anthem by military bands followed by a customary 21-gun salute by 299 Field Regiment.

Gallantry awards

Maharashtra Police ATS chief Hemant Karkare, Additional Commissioner Ashok Kamte and four others killed fighting Pakistani terrorists in Mumbai were among nine security personnel who received the Ashok Chakra, the country's highest peace-time gallantry medal.
Following this, the parade began, as four Mi-17 helicopters of the Indian Air Force flew past with the national flag as well as those of the three defence services slinging below.

The first to appear in the parade were winners of the Param Vir Chakra and Ashok Chakra followed by mounted columns of the 61st Cavalry by Lieutenant Colonel Navjit Singh Sandhu.
Major General KJS Oberoi, General Officer Commanding of Delhi Area of the Army, led the parade.

Showcasing strength
The Army then showcased its impressive armoury before the nation including frontline T-90S battle tanks, indigenous Brahmos missile, OSA-AK system, the most modern and versatile air defence weapon.

The Chariot of Victory -- the state of the art infantry combat vehicle, the bullet proof vehicle Takshak Striker and the Network Operations Centre, which is capable of providing high quality information services in various terrains were also showcased.

The indigenously-built Advanced Light Helicopter 'Dhruv' of Army Aviation was also displayed.
Then colourfully-attired military contingents made their entry into the Rajpath.

The Army contingent included personnel drawn from the Parachute Regiment, Maratha Light Infantry Regiment, Rajput Regiment, Garhwal Rifles, Kumaon Regiment, Jammu and Kashmir Rifled, Ladakh Scouts, and Territorial Army (Punjab).

Smartly-dressed Navy personnel came along with a tableau depicting a model of INS Jalashwa, the replenishment vessel acquired in 2007 from the US to provide India major amphibious warfare capabilities.

The naval team comprising 144 men drawn from three Commands of the Navy was led by Lt Commander Anshul Awasthi.

The IAF displayed its air power in the form of a tableau showcashing some of its recent acquisitions including 'Hawk' Advanced Jet Trainer and SU 30 MKI air superiority fighter aircraft and the indigenous Rohini 3D radar. Its tableau was modeled on the IL-76 aircraft-mounted Airborne Warning and Control Systems (AWACS) that India purchased from Israelis. However, the system is yet to be inducted into the IAF.

The 148-strong IAF contingent, led by Squadron Leader Robinder Singh Zenda marched to the tunes of "Air Warrior".

The DRDO columns included Brahmos missile, advanced air defence missile, Akash surface-to-air missile and Agni-III ballistic missile.

Other contingents to march in the parade included veterans from the three services led by 85-year-old World War-II Flying Officer M M Shukla, Border Security Force's foot soldiers and their camel units, Assam Rifles, Coast Guard, CRPF, ITBP, CISF, Sashastra Seema Bal, RPF and the Delhi Police.

Bands from all these armed forces and paramilitary forces played martial tunes, as also the massed pipes and drums from several Army regiments.

Among the youth contingents were the NCC's senior division boys and girls cadets, along with their band, and the National Service Scheme.

Showcasing culture

The vibrant diversity of the country's traditional art and culture, industrial progress, scientific development and rich natural resources came alive when 18 tableaux, representing 12 states and six union ministries/departments rolled along the Rajpath, against last year's 26.
The colourful state tableaux were led by Andhra Pradesh which was a tribute to legendary saint Annamacharya followed by Assam which depicted the state's rich wildlife in its splendour.
Then came Madhya Pradesh which was a ode to a tribal leader, the local Robinhood, who was hanged by the British for being an anti-social.

Other states which followed were Kerala, Orissa, Rajasthan, Jammu and Kashmir, Uttarakhand Tripura, Orissa, Kerala, Bihar, Tamil Nadu and Maharastra.

The department of Science and Technology in its tableau presented the advancements made by India in the field of astronomy.

As the tableaux turned the corner, the little heroes who won the national bravery awards made their entry on decorated jeeps instead of elephants. Twenty children, including one posthumously, have been honoured with the award for exemplary courage.

Indian Railways showcased the prestigious Jammu to Baramulla new rail link in its tableau while Ministry of Power will highlight village electrification.

Unlike previous years, there was no elephant ride for the bravery award winning children because of "security reasons".

A colourful tableau on women's empowerment followed this.

Then came song and dance performances by North East Zone Cultural Centre followed by the dare devil motorcycle team of the Corps of Signals which performed some breathtaking stunts.

As the dare devils left, all eyes were towards the skies as IAF fighter jets roared over their heads.

The stupendous fly past, with precision and high speeds, included the Mi-35 armed choppers, the IL-76 transporters along with An-32s and Dorniers, and the IL-78 air-to-air refuller that can extend the range of fighters midair along with its Su 30 MKI fighter components.

These flying machines apart other fighters to fly over the Delhi skies were deep penetration strike fighters Jaguars and MiG-29s, and Su 30 MKI's performing their signature 'Trishul' formation.

The year's parade went on for a curtailed duration of about one-and-half hours in view of the security situation in the wake of the Mumbai terror attacks. This year, the Defence Ministry allowed only two performances by school children.

From Books, New President Found Voice

In college, as he was getting involved in protests against the apartheid government in South Africa, Barack Obama noticed, he has written, “that people had begun to listen to my opinions.” Words, the young Mr. Obama realized, had the power “to transform”: “with the right words everything could change -— South Africa, the lives of ghetto kids just a few miles away, my own tenuous place in the world.”

Much has been made of Mr. Obama’s eloquence — his ability to use words in his speeches to persuade and uplift and inspire. But his appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have not only endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas to millions of Americans while contextualizing complex ideas about race and religion, they have also shaped his sense of who he is and his apprehension of the world.

Mr. Obama’s first book, “Dreams From My Father” (which surely stands as the most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography written by a future president), suggests that throughout his life he has turned to books as a way of acquiring insights and information from others — as a means of breaking out of the bubble of self-hood and, more recently, the bubble of power and fame. He recalls that he read James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and W. E. B. Du Bois when he was an adolescent in an effort to come to terms with his racial identity and that later, during an ascetic phase in college, he immersed himself in the works of thinkers like Nietzsche and St. Augustine in a spiritual-intellectual search to figure out what he truly believed.

As a boy growing up in Indonesia, Mr. Obama learned about the American civil rights movement through books his mother gave him. Later, as a fledgling community organizer in Chicago, he found inspiration in “Parting the Waters,” the first installment of Taylor Branch’s multivolume biography of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

More recently, books have supplied Mr. Obama with some concrete ideas about governance: it’s been widely reported that “Team of Rivals,” Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book about Abraham Lincoln’s decision to include former opponents in his cabinet, informed Mr. Obama’s decision to name his chief Democratic rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as Secretary of State. In other cases, books about F. D. R.’s first hundred days in office and Steve Coll’s “Ghost Wars,“ about Afghanistan and the C.I.A., have provided useful background material on some of the myriad challenges Mr. Obama will face upon taking office.

Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading — ruminating upon writers’ ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry.

His predecessor, George W. Bush, in contrast, tended to race through books in competitions with Karl Rove (who recently boasted that he beat the president by reading 110 books to Mr. Bush’s 95 in 2006), or passionately embrace an author’s thesis as an idée fixe. Mr. Bush and many of his aides favored prescriptive books — Natan Sharansky’s “Case for Democracy,” which pressed the case for promoting democracy around the world, say, or Eliot A. Cohen’s “Supreme Command,” which argued that political strategy should drive military strategy. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, has tended to look to non-ideological histories and philosophical works that address complex problems without any easy solutions, like Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings, which emphasize the ambivalent nature of human beings and the dangers of willful innocence and infallibility.

What’s more, Mr. Obama’s love of fiction and poetry — Shakespeare’s plays, Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and Marilynne Robinson‘s “Gilead“ are mentioned on his Facebook page, along with the Bible, Lincoln’s collected writings and Emerson’s “Self Reliance“ — has not only given him a heightened awareness of language. It has also imbued him with a tragic sense of history and a sense of the ambiguities of the human condition quite unlike the Manichean view of the world so often invoked by Mr. Bush.

Mr. Obama has said that he wrote “very bad poetry” in college and his biographer David Mendell suggests that he once “harbored some thoughts of writing fiction as an avocation.” For that matter, “Dreams From My Father” evinces an instinctive storytelling talent (which would later serve the author well on the campaign trail) and that odd combination of empathy and detachment gifted novelists possess. In that memoir, Mr. Obama seamlessly managed to convey points of view different from his own (a harbinger, perhaps, of his promises to bridge partisan divides and his ability to channel voters’ hopes and dreams) while conjuring the many places he lived during his peripatetic childhood. He is at once the solitary outsider who learns to stop pressing his nose to the glass and the coolly omniscient observer providing us with a choral view of his past.

As Baldwin once observed, language is both “a political instrument, means, and proof of power,” and “the most vivid and crucial key to identity: it reveals the private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger, public, or communal identity.”

For Mr. Obama, whose improbable life story many voters regard as the embodiment of the American Dream, identity and the relationship between the personal and the public remain crucial issues. Indeed, “Dreams From My Father,” written before he entered politics, was both a searching bildungsroman and an autobiographical quest to understand his roots — a quest in which he cast himself as both a Telemachus in search of his father and an Odysseus in search of a home.

Like “Dreams From My Father,” many of the novels Mr. Obama reportedly admires deal with the question of identity: Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” concerns a man’s efforts to discover his origins and come to terms with his roots; Doris Lessing’s “Golden Notebook” recounts a woman’s struggles to articulate her own sense of self; and Ellison’s “Invisible Man” grapples with the difficulty of self-definition in a race-conscious America and the possibility of transcendence. The poems of Elizabeth Alexander, whom Mr. Obama chose as his inaugural poet, probe the intersection between the private and the political, time present and time past, while the verse of Derek Walcott (a copy of whose collected poems was recently glimpsed in Mr. Obama’s hands) explores what it means to be a “divided child,” caught on the margins of different cultures, dislocated and rootless perhaps, but free to invent a new self. (The New York Times)

Pranab Mukherji says 26/11 conspirators must face Indian Justice

Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Friday (January 16) said that the preprators of last year's Mumbai attack must be handed over to face "Indian justice" and clarified that there is "no dilution" of that stand.

"The fact that dastardly terror crimes have been committed in India, therefore the perpetrators must face Indian justice. This is not an either or situation as these things are not mutually exclusive," said Pranab, while addressing media persons in India's national capital.

Indian foreign minister added that perpetrators must be handed over to India.
"We have never given up the demand that perpetrators of the terror acts should be handed over to India. There is no question of that we have given up that demand or we have climbed down," said Pranab.

Mukherjee also asked Pakistan to conduct a sincere and transparent investigation so as to unearth the entire episode.

Good reader, Aamir, updating his history knowledge

Is Aamir Khan is working on another periodical? Surprised, these days, the Ghajini star is refreshing his history knowledge.

The renowned bollywood star is busy in reading the work of noted Indian historian and biographer Ramachandra Guha.

Aamir is going through 'India After Gandhi', a book on post independence India.

Khan described this book as informative.

"I’m reading a great book. Its called India After Gandhi, by Ramchandra Guha. It is a book on Indian History post 1947. Very informative," wrote Aamir in his blog.

He also expressed his gratitude to his fans.

"My sincere and heartfelt thank you for the responses y’all have sent for Ghajini. I am so happy that the film has gone down so well with audiences. I am thrilled with the big opening that the film got and the kind of history it creating at the box office. I am touched and deeply moved by the faith you have shown in me. Thank you," wrote overjoyed Aamir.

The actor is busy in shooting of his upcoming flick ‘3 Idiots’ at the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore.

Meanwhile, Aamir's debut directorial venture 'Taare Zameen Par', has failed to impress the jury members at the 81st annual Academy awards.

A.R. Rahman bags the Golden Globe Award

Indian music director A.R. Rahman bagged the prestigious Golden Globe Award for the best original musical score in "Slumdog Millionaire." He became the first Indian to win this rare award.

The Indian maestro won this eminent entertainment award for his musical score in the song "Jai Ho", for which Gulzar (eminent Indian lyricist) penned the lyrics.

"Slumdog Millionaire" bags three other awards for the best Picture/ Drama, Direction and Screenplay.

Slumdog Millionaire bags the Golden Globe Award for the best picture drama.

Complete list of 66th Golden Globe Awards, are presented annually by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) to recognize outstanding achievements in the entertainment.

-Picture, Drama: "Slumdog Millionaire."
_Picture, Musical or Comedy: "Vicky Christina Barcelona."
_Actor, Drama: Mickey Rourke, "The Wrestler."
_Actress, Drama: Kate Winslet, "Revolutionary Road."
_Director: Danny Boyle, "Slumdog Millionaire."
_Actor, Musical or Comedy: Colin Farrell, "In Bruges."
_Actress, Musical or Comedy: Sally Hawkins, "Happy-Go-Lucky."
_Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger, "The Dark Knight."
_Supporting Actress: Kate Winslet, "The Reader."
_Foreign Language Film: "Waltz With Bashir."
_Animated Film: "Wall-E."
_Screenplay: Simon Beaufoy, "Slumdog Millionaire."
_Original Score: A.R. Rahman, "Slumdog Millionaire."
_Original Song: "The Wrestler" (performed by Bruce Springsteen, written by Bruce Springsteen), "The Wrestler."
TELEVISION:
_Series, Drama: "Mad Men."
_Actor, Drama: Gabriel Byrne, "In Treatment."
_Actress, Drama: Anna Paquin, "True Blood."
_Series, Musical or Comedy: "30 Rock."
_Actor, Musical or Comedy: Alec Baldwin, "30 Rock."
_Actress, Musical or Comedy: Tina Fey, "30 Rock."
_Miniseries or Movie: "John Adams."
_Actress, Miniseries or Movie: Laura Linney, "John Adams."
_Actor, Miniseries or Movie: Paul Giammatti, "John Adams."
_Supporting Actress, Series, Miniseries or Movie: Laura Dern, "Recount."
_Supporting Actor, Series, Miniseries or Movie: Tom Wilkinson, "John Adams."
Cecil B. DeMille Award: Steven Spielberg.

Somdev Devvarman enters in Chennai Open finals

India's emerging tennis sensation Somdev Devvarman entered the final of the $450,000 ATP Chennai Open tennis tournament.

Somdev created history when he bacame the first Indian to enter the finals of Chennai Open.

He will take on Marin Cilic, who surpassed Marcel Granollers of Germany 6-4, 6-3.
A wild card Devvarman's scheduled semi-final opponent, fifth seeded Rainer Schuettler of Germany, withdrew citing a wrist injury.

Ramalinga Raju sent for judicial custody

Former Chairman of Satyam Computer Services was was taken into judicial custody until Jan. 23.

Ramalinga and his brother B. Rama Raju was produced in court on Saturday (January 10) and was taken into judicial custody until Jan. 23.

Addressing reoprters in Hyderabad his lawyer S. Bharat Kumar said that he would move the bail plea of Raju brothers on Monday.

“Now he is taken to Chanchalguda central jail. His blood pressure was fluctuating abnormally and the honourable magistrate had directed the jail doctors to monitor his health constantly and provide treatment. Ramalinga Raju and his brother B. Rama Raju never sought the permission for the hospital treatment,” Kumar said.

Chairman and founder Raju resigned on Wednesday after revealing years of accounting fraud at Satyam, including an admission that about $1 billion, or 94 percent of the cash and bank balances on Satyam's books at end-September, did not exist. (Agencies)