Like it or not, Apple is dropping a bomb on March 7 and we expect the iPad 3 to be announced at the upcoming Apple Event. There are lots of expectations in terms of making a lot of improvements. Some of these include improving the Retina Display Resolution by twice the existing one. Other than it will also feature a quad core processor, LTE connectivity to name a few.

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Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy made Oscar history late Sunday, as she became the first Pakistani to win the coveted award for her documentary film Saving Face. Chinoy’s triumph is, rightly, being celebrated with much vigour and the country’s prime minister has announced the highest civilian award for the filmmaker.

Chinoy’s story regarding acid attack victims punished by men and are then giver reconstructive surgery by a British surgeon beat the competitor’s documentaries like Japan’s deadly tsunami and Iraq war. Saving Face touched the several hearts by highlighting the most critical issue of women in Pakistan on global level.

Recently in Pakistan, a bill was passed against such acts of violence against women, last month. While the bill has been hailed as a great achievement, it remains to be seen how effective it will be in restricting violence against women. We do not know that will this Oscar win and the subsequent attention on the subject, help bring an end to such barbaric acts? While it is unfortunate that it took such a humiliating subject to bring Pakistan its first Oscar, is Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s Oscar win the biggest moment in the history of Pakistan’s arts and entertainment industry?

Other filmmakers should realize Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy as their role models and super heroes, so more relevant deliverable can be produced by Pakistanis. So lets be positive and share your concerns, feedback, suggestion in comment section. You can also connect us through RSS, Facebook & Twitter.

Reported by Dawn.Com

By George Packer for The New Yorker

President Kennedy’s 1960 speech on religious freedom makes Rick Santorum “throw up.” “What kind of country do we live in that says only people of nonfaith can come into the public square and make their case?” Santorum says. It’s a central part of his campaign strategy to distort such things as a Kennedy speech, or an Obama speech, to whip up outrage at the supposed war on religious people in America. Here’s what Kennedy said:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the President—should he be Catholic—how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference, and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him, or the people who might elect him… I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair.

Kennedy said much more, but this is the strongest passage of that famous campaign speech to a group of ministers in Houston, in which he argued that the election of a Catholic President who believed in the Constitution shouldn’t concern any American who believed in the Constitution—and, Santorum says, “That makes me throw up.” Santorum’s rhetorical eloquence is about equal to his analytical skill. Kennedy had nothing to say against believers entering public life, or believers bringing their religious conscience to bear on public policy. He spoke against any move to make religion official. The Constitution speaks against this, too—Article VI establishes an oath to the Constitution as the basis for public office, and explicitly prohibits a religious test, while the First Amendment forbids the official establishment of religion and protects its free practice. Santorum claims to be a constitutionalist, but that’s just rhetoric and opportunism. Santorum believes in a religious test—that may be all he believes in. (Mitt Romney believes in a religious test of a slimy, halfway, Romneyesque variety: in 2007, he reportedly dismissed the idea of appointing a Muslim to his Cabinet, saying, “Based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a Cabinet position would be justified.” So does Newt Gingrich, who has made atheist-baiting a central part of his political business.)

Kennedy seemed to have someone like Santorum in mind when he warned, “For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been—and may someday be again—a Jew, or a Quaker, or a Unitarian, or a Baptist. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that led to Jefferson’s statute of religious freedom. Today, I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you—until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped apart at a time of great national peril.” In 1960, it would have been hard to imagine how thoroughly religious sectarianism and intolerance would infect American politics, and especially one major party. The outcry over Obama’s policy on health insurance and contraception has almost nothing to do with that part of the First Amendment about the right to free religious practice, which is under no threat in this country. It is all about a modern conservative Kulturkampf that will not accept the other part of the religion clause, which prohibits any official religion.

Santorum, like most conservatives these days, says he is a constitutionalist. Jefferson wrote, and Madison worked to pass, the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, which held that “all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.” Jefferson included an even stronger phrase that was eventually struck out by amendment: “the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction.” Presumably, all of this originalist nonsense makes Rick Santorum heave, gag, vomit, and puke.

What makes me throw up is the story of Hamza Kashgari. It’s a shame that every American doesn’t know his name. He’s a young, slender, philosophical-minded columnist and blogger from Saudi Arabia who, earlier this month, dared to tweet phrases of an imagined conversation with the Prophet Mohammad: “I have loved things about you and I have hated things about you and there is a lot I don’t understand about you…I loved the rebel in you…I will not pray for you.” Within twenty-four hours, more than thirty thousand furious replies had been posted on Twitter. Within a few days, more than twenty thousand people had signed on to a Facebook page called “Saudi People Want Punishment for Hamza Kashgari.” (So much for Arab liberation by social media.) One commenter wrote, “The only choice is for Kashgari to be killed and crucified in order to be a lesson to other secularists.”

Kashgari backed down, apologized profusely, and continued to be attacked. He went into hiding. Clerics and government officials threatened him with execution for blasphemy. He fled to Malaysia, hoping to continue to fly to New Zealand, where he would ask for asylum. But Malaysian officials, behaving against law and decency, had him detained at the airport and sent back to Saudi Arabia, where he was promptly arrested. Since mid-February there’s been no word of Kashgari. The Saudis have said they will put him on trial. What a pity there’s no First Amendment to protect him.
If only he had more powerful friends—if only Christopher Hitchens were still alive—Hamza Kashgari would be called the Saudi Rushdie. There would be a worldwide campaign to pressure the Saudis into releasing him. The United States would offer him asylum and quietly push our friends the Saudis into letting him go. But we’ve come to expect these things from our friends the Saudis.

We’ve come to expect these things from the Muslim world. We expect Afghans to riot for days and kill Americans and each other because a few NATO soldiers were stupid enough to burn copies of the Koran along with other objects discarded from a prison outside Kabul. Yes, those soldiers were colossally, destructively insensitive. Yes, we should know by now. Yes, the reaction has a lot to do with ten years of war and occupation and civilian deaths and marines urinating on Taliban corpses. Still, can we have a little outrage at the outrage? Can we reaffirm that human lives are more sacred than books? Can we point out that every time something like this happens, there’s a manufactured and whipped-up quality to much of the hysteria, which has its own cold political calculation (not unlike the jihad against secularists by Sean Hannity and other Salafist mouthpieces)?

Saudi Arabia needs an absolute separation of religion and state so that Hamza Kashgari can say things that other people don’t like without having to flee for his life. Afghanistan needs it, too, and so does Pakistan, so that mob violence and political assassination can’t enjoy the encouragement of religious authorities and the tolerance or acquiescence of government officials. And America needs it so that our Presidents’ religious views remain their own private affairs, and Rick Santorum and his party can’t impose dominion of one narrow, sectarian, Bible-based idea of the public good over a vast, pluralist, heterodox, freedom-loving democracy.

Filed under: Democracy, Freedoms, Hate Crime, Islam, Muslims, Mysticism, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sufism, United States, US Commission on International Religious Freedom Tagged: Afghanistan, American Muslims, Baptist, Catholic President, Commonwealth of Virginia, Constitution, First Amendment, Hamza Kashgari, JFK, Kabul, Kennedy Speech, Malaysia, Mitt Romney, New Zealand, Newt Gingrich, Obama Speech, Pakistan, President John F Kennedy, Quaker, Rick Santorum, Saudi Arabia, Unitarian, US Constitution

Lets agree with us that our majority of Pakistani men have a staring problem. Either we sit on seven star hotel or waiting room of hospital we stare the women. We give very hard time to even women’s ten minutes walk from bus stop to her house irrespective to her dressing, her job and even her physical appearance.

Men from local labors to professionals, university students to school students and even old age people are found involved in staring situation. Women from school girls to university girls, maids to professionals and even hijab wearing ladies are victims of staring problem. Majority of women in Pakistan are victim of staring problem and might be smiling right now by reading this article. Nurses, school teachers, students, are big part of staring scene.

There are several relevant problems, which can not be resolved ever in our nation. But by improvising individual views and civilization we can minimize the risk for women specially working women. Similarly if we move anywhere else in this world we behave like a good kid and follow all civil and moral ethics, so why not in our own nation? It is very sad that how we rape our civilization and culture values. Promise us and your nation that you will bring positive change in Pakistan by minimizing the threats of staring scene and you will respect the women.

So lets be positive and share your concerns, feedback, suggestion in comment section. You can also connect us through RSS, Facebook & Twitter.

If you have been waiting for an iTunes like Music store in India that offered “legal” music, here’s an exciting bit of news. Flipkart, India’s most loved online store, has expanded beyond physical goods and they have just added a new MP3 section to their website.

Here’s a quick video overview of what it’s like to buy downloadable MP3 music from Flipkart.

Flipkart’s MP3 Store, like the Amazon MP3 store, offers DRM-free songs in MP3 format that you can download and listen on any computer or mobile device. Or you can save the MP3s to your Dropbox folder and even enjoy them in the web browser.

You can either buy an entire music album or just your favorite tracks. The cost of individual music tracks vary anywhere between 6 and 15 (for newer songs). Also, you download any of the purchased songs a maximum of four times from the Flipkart website.

The “Cash on Delivery” payment option is not available for MP3s so you either need to have a credit card or use your net banking account for purchasing downloadable music. Also, Flipkart’s MP3 store is only available on the desktop browser – you can’t buy music from your mobile phone yet.

This story, [Video] Flipkart Now Selling Downloadable Songs in DRM-Free MP3 Format, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 27/02/2012 under Mp3, India.

If you ever used your credit card to shop at the Microsoft Online Store in India, it may be a good idea to stop everything you’re doing and call your bank to get your credit card blocked. That’s because your credit card number, your address and everything else that a fraud needs to use your credit card online, could later become available in the underground market.

The story so far..

Earlier this month, the Microsoft India Store website was hacked and Microsoft, the following day, sent out an email saying that email addresses, passwords and shipping address of users may have been stolen. The email also said that payment information was not exposed to hackers.

We have confirmed that databases storing credit card details and payment information were not affected during this compromise. However, exposed account details may include non-financial related information including e-mail address, password, order details and shipping address.

The Microsoft Store was hacked more than two weeks ago but the website is still down indicating that the impact was much larger than they initially imagined.

Latest update..

And it is. Microsoft sent another email this morning confirming that hackers may have stolen credit card details of customers as well.

Further detailed investigation and review of data provided by the website operator revealed that financial information may have been exposed for some Microsoft Store India customers.

Microsoft had outsourced their online store to an advertising and digital marketing agency called Quasar Media and this company was probably storing customers confidential data in plain text inside a Microsoft Access database that hackers got hold of.

This is extremely disappointing.

This story, Not Just Email Addresses, Credit Card Numbers also Stolen from Microsoft India Store, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 27/02/2012 under Hacked, Microsoft, India.

This post is a follow up comment to @Jordan Kurzweil published on TechCrunch (Print is Dead! Long Live Print?)

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My last blog on this subject titled “What is Success? Concept Re-defined!” talked about how people perceive success.

I continued reading stuff on this topic and found that Anthony Robbins in his book “Awaken the Giant Within” provided an excellent set of 10 Emotions that could lead to a successful life.

These Emotions are:

Love and Warmth

In my opinion only dead are unable to express love and warmth. There is only one way to prove that you are alive and still have soul in your body – love and warmth. Anthony writes that “love can melt almost any negative emotions, hence generate warmth”.

Appreciation and Gratitude

Is there any doubt that humans rarely appreciate what they have and as a result do not express gratitude. We have beautiful things around us, we need eyes to see and appreciate. Look around, you will find the beauty.

Curiosity

Continuous learning is the only way to gain knowledge. This comes from curiosity. Giving example of kids, Anthony says that “If you really want to grow in your life, learn to be as curious as a child”. Curiosity can improve your ability to understand difficult things that others might not have tried to learn. It opens new avenues of success and pleasure.

Excitement and Passion

If you are not exited and passionate about your life and career, it is highly unlikely for you to succeed. These are two ultimate emotional powers that can push you quickly towards the path to success.

Determination

Determination adds extreme value to the above mentioned emotions. For example, if you want to wake-up at a specific time and are determined to do so, your mind will download a software which will make it happen. If however, you do not get out of the bed as planned, the software will receive a bug and start malfunctioning.

Flexibility

Flexibility allows learning and adapting new things. People with rigid thoughts have limited knowledge, they do not want to accept new concepts and are generally argumentative when shared new ideas. This damages the gifted quality of innovation and creativity!

Confidence

Your confidence level increases only when you are able to do things with perfection. Did you see a chef cutting vegetables on his chopping board? The speed, perfection and timings are well aligned with his hand and eye movement. He knows that every cut will be perfect! This confidence is a result of continued practice.

Cheerfulness

Do you like to meet a happy face, or a grim person? I am sure answer will be a happy face. Cheerfulness brings people around you. It helps in ensuring people care about you and remember you as a delightful person.

Vitality

Energy to achieve your objectives is perhaps the most important ingredient to this recipe. Taking care of your physical body is solely your responsibility. Obese or skinny people are slow in moving up the ladder of success. They usually do not possess the vitality required to jump, run and fly high. Oversleeping, or under sleeping both are poor habits and deterrent to vitality.

Contribution

Your actions in life if are boomerangs! Whatever you give comes back to you multiplied several times. If you contribute happiness, in return you get joy. If you contribute financially, you are rewarded with wealth. It is important to keep contributing towards your community, country, family and friends – Socially or Financially.

Success will be yours!

You can join me on Facebook or Twitter

This post was originally written at Hammad Siddiqui Blog (Hammad Siddiqui Blog) by Hammad (Hammad Siddiqui). You can read this post at 10 Emotions that give you Power to Succeed.

By Damayanti Datta for India Today

On February 7, three Karnataka ministers were captured on television poring over a phone screen, watching a woman in a petticoat gyrating wildly. They lost their jobs for watching pornography in the sacred precincts of the Legislative Assembly. The incident is a high-profile sample of a definitive reality: porn is pervasive through the Internet across India, easily and freely available, not just to leery politicians but to children and adults in millions of ordinary homes.

It is a sign of the times that the most famous international porn star has Indian roots and was on Indian television. Sunny Leone, 30, appeared on the reality show Big Boss 5 and has now launched a clothes-on Bollywood career. Her fake breasts, that won the 2010 fame Award for Favourite Breasts in Los Angeles, have brought her the honour of being named among the 50 Most Desirable Women by the nation’s biggest daily this month.

The organised $12 billion (Rs.60,000 crore) American adult entertainment industry, to which Leone belongs, has bred explicit images beyond the limits of imagination. And they are free. Fuelled by the Internet and facilitated by high-speed data service, pornography, born in dozens of studio lofts around the world, has entered teenagers’ mobile phones with the force and sweep of a dangerous flood. It threatens to swamp conventional notions of morality, raise tensions in bedrooms, lure children into a world they do not understand, and initiate a culture that threatens the mores of family life as we know it.

The writing is on the wall. Google Trends show the search volume index for the word ‘porn’ has doubled in India between 2010 and 2012. With instant Net connectivity and flexible payment options, online porn is increasingly affordable, accessible and acceptable. Seven Indian cities are among the top 10 in the world on porn search, reports Google Trends, 2011. One out of five mobile users in India wants adult content on his 3G-enabled phone, according to an 2011 IMRB Survey. Over 47 per cent students discuss porn every day, says a public school survey by Max Hospital in Delhi. Porn tops the list of cyber crimes in India, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.

Rape, penetration, oral, anal, lesbian, gay or group porn are yesterday’s news. There is now a hectic crossover of porn subcultures on the World Wide Web. Consider MILF (or Mothers I Like to F***) porn. “Check out the most notorious hot, mature moms going crazy and getting f****d by young studs,” invites one of the 40,600,000 MILF websites. “A hot and sexy bride is getting raped brutally,” says a ‘ravished bride’ porn site. There is ‘pregnant porn’ (“Are you ready to see these moms-to-be in action?). There is ‘incest porn’ that welcomes you to sites with “xxx videos full of mother and son, dad and daughter”. Child porn blends with ‘teen porn’, promising “fascinating porn actions starring our young models”.

New jargon and innovative formats, borrowed from foreign cultures, are trendy on the web. For the uninitiated, chikan (“to grope” in Japanese) porn is all about public molestation in trains. ‘Bukkake’ parties involve repeated ejaculation on a woman by several men. Shemale and futanari porn mean “live action” with transsexuals. Anime and manga refer to Japanese formats of sexually-explicit comics and animation. A new focus is the service sector, with “shy massage girls” seducing clients, doctors and “hot babes in nurse uniforms” getting wild. In ‘corporate porn’ “busty secretaries” go down on their knees to pleasure their boss.

Sunny Leone (or Karen Malhotra) takes credit for the ‘pornification’ of India. “My presence on Bigg Boss has empowered a lot of people to be open about their sexuality,” she tells India Today. One of the richest adult actresses in the industry, with her SunLust Pictures in Los Angeles reporting a top line of over $1 million (Rs.5 crore), she is now getting ready to debut in filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt’s Jism 2, playing a professional body double. The most-searched Google celebrity-powered by India, Bangladesh and Pakistan-she has 1,47,326 Twitter followers.

Leone’s success indicates the greater acceptability of porn in daily life. Internet is the new tool, exploding every embarrassing sexual adventure of public personalities and making every lurid detail an item of private consumption. Coming after the midwife Bhanwri Devi’s sex cds with Rajasthan politician Mahipal Maderna in November 2011, public reaction to the Karnataka fiasco has ranged from indignation to amusement, but not shock: if political parties engaged in a morality-in-politics war, social activist Anna Hazare demanded the ministers be sent to jail and media professional Pritish Nandy summed up Bollywood’s reaction by calling them the “3 idiots”.

“A porn star doesn’t automatically mean prostitute,” says Leone, now seeking respectability. She talks about her parents’ initial shock turning into respect, how they taught her to be a “good person”, years of hard work, restrained personal life, professionalism and lack of regrets. Like the girl-next-door, she tweets how she is learning Hindi, cooking sabzi and massaging hair oil. Her endeavour will not be too difficult. Young adults, who grew up with cable TV, DVD players and the Internet, have been exposed to much more adult material than their parents. As filmmaker Pooja Bhatt points out, “Young people don’t respond negatively to Sunny because they have already logged on to her website.”

She is not wrong. Even school students discuss porn. Dr Samir Parikh, chief psychiatrist, Max Healthcare, calls it “risky indulgences”. In a survey on 1,000 children from top public schools in Delhi in 2010, he found 47 per cent boys and 29 per cent girls visiting porn sites and talking about it in school. “I understand sexual inquisitiveness and peer pressure around sexuality, but pornography on the Internet is fake, unreal, often violent and downright perverted,” he says. “Moreover, a new technology in young hands could lead to irresponsible behaviour and ruin their lives.” He obviously has in mind the stream of MMS scandals that have hit campuses across the country since 2004, when two Class XI students of a school in Delhi created a sensation. In many of these cases, either one partner was not aware of being filmed or did not anticipate the videos would get circulated-as in May 2011 when JNU student Janardan Kumar, 22, made a video of the girl he was intimate with and used it to blackmail her after being rejected.

Campus porn is a thriving subterranean culture. Try talking to students in various campuses of Delhi: “Have you ever heard of MMS videos of students being circulated on the campus?”

Diksha Singh, 20: “Every couple of months there is a fresh case. It’s so common, I don’t even blink.”

Raghav Verma, 19: “All the time. It’s shocking to see a classmate’s intimate details on video camera.”

Mehak Suri, 18: “My ex-boyfriend tried that with me, and when it didn’t work he sent me threatening emails and messages.”

Amaira Kapoor, 20: “You will be surprised to know how many cases go unreported and unaccounted for.”

Sakshi Wakhlu, 21: “A year ago, one girl got high, went with a group of boys and had sex with them. The men came back and talked.”

The arrival of smartphones is changing the country’s porn landscape further. India has the lowest penetration of smartphones, 10 per cent, among the youth globally. But with email, social networking, chatting, messaging and gaming, it is a device every youth craves for. And now there are even porn applications. Imagine a ‘pocket’ girlfriend or boyfriend, who can strip, talk dirty, make sexual noises. “These are some of the ‘apps’ that can be downloaded on smartphones,” says Pranesh Prakash, programme manager with Bangalore-based think-tank Centre for Internet and Society. “App download data shows the popularity of sex-themed apps on smartphones, apart from the adults-only stores,” he says. Age restrictions for applications? Mostly a pop-up asking if one is over 17. With over 50 per cent of all Internet users in the country accessing the web via mobile phones already, as estimated by TRAI, smartphones are the future of anytime-anywhere porn.

The threshold of what can be called ‘pornography’ is shifting. Mainstream and hardcore entertainment are coming closer. The Dirty Picture, biopic of south siren Silk Smitha, raked in Rs.50 crore in its very first week in December 2011, with its noisy orgasms, titillating cleavage and fiery dialogues. It’s also hard to draw the line between porn and art in raunchy item numbers, from Sheila ki Jawani to Munni Badnam Hui. “What heroines do in films today is what vamps did yesterday,” says filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt. Some item numbers are more obscene than nudity, he feels. “People tell me, how can someone who made Saaransh, Arth and Zakhm, make films like Jism and Murder” he adds. “I say, get off the high horse.”

Kolkata certainly is getting off the high horse. A city with the least taste for pornography, going by India Today Sex Surveys, is also one of the top seekers of porn online, reports Google Trends. Leone’s CDs are bestsellers here. Teenage boys creep up and ask, “Sunny Leone ka CD chahiye?” (Want Sunny Leone’s CDs?), at Chandni Chowk market in central Kolkata, the city’s piracy hub. Step inside the dingy alleys between shops selling electronic goods, and piles of pirated blue film come out of hiding-Rs.120 for just a CD and Rs.250 for one with Leone on the cover. Ask too many questions and they show you the door. The police are their friends, although motorcycles stand ready for sudden crackdowns. “Sunny’s CD is selling like hot cakes, 200 a day,” says one. Leone is not pleased. “If you are stealing my movies in Kolkata, that is flipping horrible,” she has tweeted. But who cares? A 33-year-old customer puts away her CD in his plastic bag with quiet satisfaction. “I will have to watch when the wife is not looking,” he grins.

If a married man watches porn,is it considered cheating??

My husband secretly watches porn. Why are men like this? He knows I hate porn.

My husband watches porn alone. He refuses to watch it with me.

My husband watches porn very often. Should I be worried?

I feel insulted whenever my boyfriend watches porn.

There are 2,690,000 such postings on Google, from wives and girlfriends globally, on a range of sites on the web-health, marriage, empowerment, agony.

Watching porn alone is a rising trend among men, thanks to the Internet. Check out India Today Sex Surveys: in 2009, with video as the most popular porn format, just 10 per cent men out of 2,661 watched porn alone. This year, with smarter access and gadgets, it zoomed to 44 per cent. “It is usually a sign of cybersex addiction,” says Dr Vijay Nagaswami, Chennai-based expert on sexual psychotherapy. “Compulsive pornwatchers often become dysfunctional. They stay up late for online porn to get active on instant messengers, webcams, demand more private time, neglect family, work and normal sexual activity.”

Even five years back, it was difficult to get locals to dub foreign porn films in Gujarati. But now, mobile shop owners in Ahmedabad do brisk business in porn, supplying primarily to youngsters. They download content on hard discs and then transfer those to the memory cards of eager youngsters-Rs.100 to Rs.200 for a 30-minute film. “It’s good business. Sometimes I get more than six customers, all boys,” says Rajesh Patel, a porn-provider.

It’s good business in Chennai, too. In a small shop opposite the high court in Burma Bazaar, the hub of pirated movies in Chennai, Ramu is doing his puja. He throws flowers at the gods, and looks at his customer. “English, Tamil also.” His voice goes an octave lower, “Triple.” Who cares for storylines? Many of these films are shot in the city or taken off the Net. Ramu sells at least 100 discs a day, mostly to distributors. The CDs are mostly of Indian couples having sex, sometimes verging on rape. “This business can’t be hit by recession,” Ramu says. “People will always buy porn.”

The buzz is, although the Karnataka ministers claimed they were watching clips of a real-life gang-rape at a rave party, they were either watching Indonesian hardcore ‘abik’ porn or model Poonam Pandey’s YouTube video, Bathroom Secrets. But what do most Indians watch? Google Trends indicates that the average Indian pornwatcher opts for more tame keywords, ‘sex’ and ‘how to kiss’, the most. New research by computational neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam from Boston University, US, on a billion porn and erotic web searches across the world, shows that the five most popular porn sites for men are webcam or video sites featuring anonymous graphic sex, with a monthly traffic of 7-16 million visitors. For women, the most popular is the “erotic” site fanfiction.net, which gets over 1.5 million visitors a month and has more than two million stories, 50 per cent being “romance”.

How big is pornography in India? Of the 500 top Indian websites this month ranked by the leading global web information company Alexa, at least 24 are porn sites. Nearly a dozen porn sites are more popular than some leading news sites and that of the Bombay Stock Exchange. Leone, one of the top five global porn stars, says 80 per cent of her web traffic and 60 per cent of her “high six figures” revenue come from India. The content, she says, is “everything and above”. “I can sell anything you want as long as you have a credit card.”

The only other major-league porn actor of Indian origin in the US, Priya Anjali Rai, also says she has a lot of fans in India, but not many paying customers. Adopted from New Delhi by American parents and brought up in Arizona, Rai keeps her Indian name for her work: “That’s what makes me different from everybody else.” Both Leone and Rai insist they only do “vanilla” porn, “boy-girl stuff”. The US, specifically the Los Angeles area, has the biggest porn industry in the world, followed by London and Budapest, estimated between $4 billion (Rs.20,000 crore) and $15 billion (Rs.75,000 crore) annually. Top porn stars easily earn a quarter of a million dollars annually.

Those who think production and distribution of pornography in India are not allowed, think again. “A lot of amateur videos are being produced,” says Namita Malhotra, author of Porn: Law, Video and Technology. “They have been there for long. But now from print they have gone digital. Amateur videos are a new phenomenon,” says a lawyer associated with Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore. “It’s unorganised,” says a Bangalore-based photographer involved with the porn industry. There are a few big houses who run multi-crore businesses. The small players use small video cameras so that they can be seen on mobile phones. “Ever since the mms scandal, we make false scandal videos, called kaand,” the photographer says. “It’s normal sex. Not like those foreign videos where they use horses and 10 men at the same time.” Do they go online? Sometimes they are sold, but always with the permission of the model, “No force,” he insists. “The money is good, so that we don’t tell anyone.” His best moment? When a model asked him to shoot her in different ways, to try to create a scandal and get noticed.

Has the battle against porn been lost? Anti-porn feminists in the US have admitted defeat. India is not quite there. Despite the hyper-sexualised climate, ministers do get thrown out over porn. To cyber law expert and senior associate of SNG & Partners Rahul Sud, India is on the right track. “Personal consumption of porn has never been an offence,” he points out. “Child pornography, publishing and transmitting are.” Press Council of India Chairperson Justice Markandey Katju has rolled out the red carpet for Leone, but not before comparing her to history’s “fallen women”, Amrapali or Mary Magdalene.

Does Leone care? She is busy stretching, bending and sweating. Not in a girl-boy-girl orgy online but on a Bikram Yoga mat in Hollywood. “OMG, I’m so tired,” she tweets. She has the same vital statistics as Marilyn Monroe, 36-24-34, and she is determined to look her best for those semi-nude scenes in Jism 2. “We Indians are proud of you!,” tweets one of her admirers. “Thank you,” she tweets back. She has every reason to be grateful.

- With Indira Kannan, Nishat Bari, Kiran Tare, Gunjeet Sra, Shravya Jain, Avantika Sharma, Lakshmi Kumaraswami, Uday Mahurkar and Tithi Sarkar contributing.

Pakistanis for Peace Editor’s Note- The porn phenomena is not isolated to just India in the subcontinent. Across the border, Pakistan was recently ranked as first in the world in terms of pornographic Google searches. This is a result of two conservative societies where sex is a taboo. One can only hope that these ancient and slow changing cultures can adapt to the new realities regarding sex.

Filed under: Bangladesh, Democracy, Desi, Freedoms, India, Mumbai, Pakistan Tagged: Banaglore, Bangladesh, Big Boss, Bollywood, California Porn Industry, Chandni Chowk, Chennai, Delhi, Google Trends, India, Jism 2, Karen Malhotra, Los Angeles, Mahesh Bhatt, Mahipal Maderna, MILF, Mumbai, Pakistan, Porn, Porn Industry, Pornification, Sex, SunLust Pictures, Sunny Leone

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NADEEM MALIK

We are planning to take live questions through Skype, Facebook and Twitter in Islamabad Tonight from Friday onwards. Monday-Friday 8pm Live

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Please Join us at 8pm Islamabad Tonight Friday

Nadeem Malik

Filed under: CURRENT AFFAIRS

Whether you are looking to add a basic “Contact Me” form to your website or need to create a complex online poll with conditional branching, Google Docs is an excellent tool for you. It offers a variety of themes, data can be easily exported and, unlike other polling software, your Google Docs forms can accept any number of responses without the fee.

There’s one limitation though. Google Docs can send email notifications as soon as people submit your online form but, as shown in the above screenshot, there’s no form data included in that email message. You’ll have to open the corresponding Google Docs spreadsheet to see that actual form data which is not always a very convenient option.

From Google Docs Form to your Email Inbox

Should you wish to receive Google Docs form data in an email message as soon as a user submits the form, there’s an easy workaround as explained in the following video.

The trick is that you associate a send mail routine with your Google Docs form that triggers as soon as a “form submit” action happens. And this routine, written using Google Apps Script, does all the magic – it reads the form values that were just submitted and sends them all in one message to a pre-defined address.

Here’s how you can add email capabilities to your Google Forms step by step:

1. Create a new form in Google Docs (or use any of your existing forms) and switch to the Spreadsheet view.
2. Go to Tools –> Script Editor and copy-paste the following code in that code editor window. Replace the value of variable “email” with your own email address.

function sendFormByEmail(e)
{
  // Remember to replace XYZ with your own email address
  var email = "XYZ";
  // Optional but change the following variable
  // to have a custom subject for Google Docs emails
  var subject = "Google Docs Form Submitted";
  // The variable e holds all the form values in an array.
  // Loop through the array and append values to the body.
  var message = "";
  for(var field in e.namedValues) {
    message += field + ' :: '
               + e.namedValues[field].toString() + "\n\n";
  }
  // This is the MailApp service of Google Apps Script
  // that sends the email. You can also use GmailApp here.
  MailApp.sendEmail(email, subject, message);
  // Watch the following video for details
  // http://youtu.be/z6klwUxRwQI
  // By Amit Agarwal - www.labnol.org
}

3. Next go to Triggers –> Current Script’s Triggers and associate the Send Mail function with “On Form Submit” event.
4. Save the Google script, authorize Google Docs to access your Gmail account (for sending email) and you’re done.

Advanced users can further customize the script to have custom email subject lines that match one of the form fields. Alternatively, you can specify the form submitter’s email address as the replyto address and thus you can directly respond to the user by replying to that email notification.

Also see: Perform Mail Merge in Gmail using Google Docs

This story, Get Form Data from Google Docs in an Email Message [Video Tutorial], was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 23/02/2012 under Google Docs, Polls, Internet.

El pasado Diciembre fue un mes complicado para todo. Para ver cine también. Pero bueno, aquí está lo poco que ha caído.

Lo mejor, sin duda, El tren de las 3:10 (2007), una de vaqueros clásica, amable y con personajes tópicos pero muy bien logrados. Sin nombre (2009) también es una buena peli que habla sobre la inmigración ilegal y el mundillo de las maras latinoamericanas. No profundiza en en ninguno de ambos terrenos, pero lo poco que cuenta parece creible y se deja ver bastante bien.

Para acabar, El último gran día (2009) cuenta la historia de un anciano amargado y con fama de cascarrabias que decide celebrar su funeral antes de morir para invitar a todo el pueblo y dar cuentas de su pasado. No me llegó, lo siento…

Compártelo:

Microsoft  has launched a new online service called msnNOW, which is a social media powered trends and news aggregator. It analyzes data from Twitter, Facebook, Bing and some other services to identify, curate and display the latest news stories and trends. It is like a mash-up of Google News and Google Trends, but instead of search, it is powered by social data .