‘I only cook when it can potentially lead to sex,” says Aasif Mandvi, “The Daily Show” correspondent and co-writer and star of “Today’s Special,” which opens the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival tonight at the Paris Theatre. This means that all the hot and heavy slicing and dicing he appears to have mastered in the film won’t help him get laid.

:: via nypost.com

Indian students, in particular, seem to be the most disenchanted with U.S. graduate schools; enrollment from first-time students from India was down 16%, the largest decline ever reported by CGS. On the flip side, first-time enrollment from China was up 16%. Both India and China are the two countries that send the most graduate school students to the U.S., so the net effect ended up being “a washout,” says Bell.

:: via businessweek.com

Robert Wright, left, of Bloggingheads.tv and Nicholas Schmidle, author of "To Live or to Perish Forever," discuss whether Pakistan can end its fixation on India.

:: via nytimes.com

Dr Rajiv Shah, the senior-most Indian American in the Barack Obama [ Images ] administration, has been nominated as the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development -- the country's top foreign assistance programme. Dr Shah, 36, currently serves as Under Secretary for Research, Education and Economics and Chief Scientist at the United States Department of Agriculture. In nominating Dr Shah, Obama said.....

:: via rediff.com

'Postwar guilt was also closely related to post-colonial guilt, and post-colonial guilt was the reason why some countries, notably France and Britain, initially opened their doors so widely to Algerians, Tunisians, Bangladeshis, and Pakistanis, among others. Surely, the argument went, their former imperial rulers owed something to the inhabitants of the British Commonwealth and the Francophone world.'

:: via tnr.com

As more U.S. companies send their sophisticated R&D offshore, America must provide worker retraining to maintain its tech leadership. ..American companies are also moving major portions of their operations abroad. IBM employs nearly 100,000 workers in India, HP has 26,000, Microsoft (MSFT) has 5,500, and Cisco (CSCO) has 5,000. Pfizer employs 4,000 in China and 2,300 in India. These companies are developing some of their most sophisticated products abroad, often to target the same markets.

:: via businessweek.com

Sudhir Kapoor, 25, got the call from his employer late last year. It was bad news: The economic downturn meant the technology company had to let him go. .He had arrived on an H-1B visa for highly skilled workers—but the layoff left two options: quickly find another job or go back home. In a few weeks, he was on a plane to Mumbai

:: via wsj.com

The characters could have been lifted from an airport thriller. On one side stands a moneyed intellectual who ditched a career in chartered accountancy in London to lead a cadre of ruthless Maoist rebels in the jungles of India for 30 years. On the other is a Government now intent on injecting him with a truth serum to force him to betray his comrades. the Indian Government’s efforts to drug Mr Ghandy may prove controversial beyond the question of the reliability of the information the procedure might have extracted. A source with knowledge of the events leading to his capture in Delhi says that the Maoist leader had surfaced only after forging a deal with the authorities to leave behind his underground life to receive medical care. The Government reneged on this deal and took him into custody, the source said. “The authorities turned it into a media circus,” the source added. That version of events has a certain logic to it: it currently suits the Indian Government, shaken by a recent increase in Naxalite violence, to appear tough on the Maoists’ ringleaders

:: via timesonline.co.uk

A grand Pengratep ritual marked the celebrations of the Kuningan festival on Serangan Island on Saturday, which saw thousands of Balinese Hindus gather at the island's Sakenan Temple. Kuningan is the closing festival of a series of ceremonies celebrating the victory of dharma (virtue) against adharma (vice). Kuningan falls 10 days after Galungan, the largest celebration in the series. Wearing their best Balinese attire and bearing offerings, devotees lined up at the entrance of the Sakenan Temple, the center of the Kuningan celebrations. They took turns to perform prayers and participate in the Pengratep ritual. The Sakenan Temple was built in the 12th century by Mpu Kuturan or Mpu Rajakretha, one of the most respected religious figures in Bali.

:: via thejakartapost.com

"Was there a swimming pool there as well?" my mate Laurie asked when I told him about the Hindu temple I visited in Ilford. I forgive him his irreverence, because the temple in question is a converted leisure centre – and not the only one in London.

:: via guardian.co.uk