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IN the blink of an eye, India has gone from faith, prudence and chastity to ... Brittany, Courtney and Tiffani. On Sunday, a team of Washington Redskins cheerleaders landed in Bangalore to help create India’s first cheerleading squad. According to the Redskins’ Web site, the cheerleaders will “conduct a national audition of Indian women.” The aim of the exercise is to set up a squad of indigenous pompom wielders for the Bangalore Royal Challengers, one of eight teams that will play in the Indian Premier League, a rich new Indian cricket league. “Cheerleading is a unique American spirit and the...

India likes to trumpet its corporate successes, and this week the emerging global power had plenty to shout about with the appointment of Indian-born Vikram Pandit to head troubled financial giant Citigroup. But even as it celebrated, India Inc. was also up in arms over perceived slights to its ability to run two of the world's most prestigious brands. India's currency comes of age, spurring complaints among exporters and bringing cheer to wealthy globetrotters First, a group of U.S. Jaguar dealers said they opposed the possibility that Ford, Jaguar's owner, might sell the British luxury car brand to an Indian...

NEW DELHI: Increasingly suspicious that its policy for the rehabilitation of militants who surrendered was being exploited, the government has asked Army to discontinue offering any more amnesty to "misguided youth" who are offering to come back from Pakistan and lay down arms. Rehabilitation of surrendered militants was part of the healing touch policy unveiled by the government on the assumption that some of the youth who crossed over into Pakistan to take up guns were no longer enamoured of the jehad in Kashmir and may, feeling fatigued, be allowed to return and given the opportunity to turn a new...

NEW DELHI: Terror groups operating with the support of Pakistan have resorted to carefully charted manipulation of Indian stock exchanges through ghost companies to raise millions of dollars for planning and carrying out strikes against India. The operation allows jehadi outfits like Lashkar-e-Taiba, Hizbul Mujahideen and Al-Badr to tap funds through an ostensibly legitimate route. The companies, which often exist only on paper with addresses in the Middle East, are fronts for Pakistani agencies. The stunning disclosure, which marks the evolution of anti-India terrorism into a well-choreographed, sophisticated operation and points to the resolve to sustain the campaign against India,...

MUMBAI: Kumar Mangalam Birla’s Hindalco Industries has offered to pay up to $6 billion for Novelis Inc, a Canadian aluminium sheet manufacturer. At $44.93 per Novelis share, the company’s board of directors have recommended to its shareholders that they accept the Birla offer. If the bid is accepted, this will be the largest acquisition by any Indian company in North America. Overall, this will be the second largest acquisition after Tata Steel, which brought Corus out for $12 billion. It will also propel Hindalco into the list of Fortune 500 companies. Subsequent to the acquisition, Hindalco will be the 5th...

Vodafone buys Indian mobile firm Indian models with mobile handsets India's mobile market is expanding rapidly Vodafone has bought a controlling stake in Indian mobile phone firm Hutchison Essar for $11.1bn (£5.7bn). The deal for 67% of the company gives Vodafone access to India's rapidly growing mobile phone market, where Essar has a share of about 16%. It ends a long bidding war for the Essar stake owned by Hong Kong's Hutchison Telecommunications. UK firm Vodafone is moving into emerging economies to make up for slow growth in mature markets like Europe. According to Vodafone, India is the fastest growing...

WASHINGTON: A $ 2 million gift in 2000 to Cleveland State University, where he had earned an MBA, and which named a six-story, 120,000 square feet business school building after him, wasn't good enough for Monte Ahuja to thank America for what it had done for him. On Tuesday, in one of the biggest philanthropic acts by an Indian immigrant in the US, the 60-year-old entrepreneur wrote down a whopping $ 30 million for Cleveland's University Hospitals to build what will be called the Ahuja Medical Center -- a full service hospital. The contribution dwarfed the $ 18.5 million that...

NEW DELHI, Nov. 24 — Even those who caution against “illusions of grandeur and power,” as the head of India’s governing coalition, Sonia Gandhi, did last week, cannot hide their sense of pride at the idea of India as a nation that extends the concessions of secular democracy to its many castes, creeds and faiths. Yet that notion has come under some strain in recent days, with an official panel having concluded that Muslims, India’s largest religious minority, are “lagging behind” on most things that matter. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s office, which is reviewing the report, summarized the panel’s biting...

NEW DELHI: India will 'go up in flames' if it hangs a Muslim militant convicted for his role in an attack on Parliament in 2001, former J&K chief minister Farooq Abdullah was quoted as saying. Last month a New Delhi court set October 20 as the date for the hanging of Kashmiri Mohammed Afzal, triggering violent protests in Indian Kashmir. "You want to hang him? Go ahead and hang him ... this nation will go up in flames because the terrorists will do things which will destroy the relationship of the Hindus and Muslims here," Abdullah told CNN-IBN news channel....

NEW DELHI: Unknown to most, the airport security in India has started to conduct passenger profiling. Even before the trans-Atlantic air terror plot prompted UK to introduce its new security measure of seeking in advance the profiles of all air passengers coming into the country, India had quietly joined a small band of 11 countries where such profiling is already being done. Though yet to be made official, the home ministry discreetly introduced Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) in July, asking international airline pilots flying to India to provide information about the passengers and crew on board within 15 minutes...

"Is keeping beard a sin in this world?" screams Abdul Kadar Kolsawala, 70, on the top of his voice in his two-room apartment at Memon Colony in Jogeshwari, a north-western suburb of Mumbai. "The terrorists get away all the time but it is only innocent Muslims who are caught," says Kadar. "It has become difficult to move around with a beard. The police doubt your credentials all the time. My son is innocent and he has nothing to do with terrorism," he adds. Kolsawala's son Ayub was detained by the Dutch police along with eight friends and two cooks at...

NEW DELHI: The next few days are likely to be very tense for the US embassy here. For a top IB official has sent a letter to security agencies with a chilling message the American embassy is expected to be targetted any time between now and July 30 by terrorists owing allegiance to an Iranian terror group. This intelligence input has already sent security agencies scampering to plug real or imagined weaknesses in the security ring around the mission. Sources revealed on Monday that the input was received early last week and has been circulated among all security agencies in...

A man accused of planning to blow up the national electricity grid or a Sydney defence site has been found guilty of serious terror offences. Faheem Khalid Lodhi, 36, is the first person in the country to be convicted of planning a terrorist act and faces a maximum penalty of life in jail. Before he was arrested, Lodhi had gathered maps, chemicals and recipes for poisons and homemade bombs to carry out his plan. Before delivering its verdict just after 2pm today, the NSW Supreme Court jury of six men and six women had deliberated for five days. The jury...

KABUL (Reuters) - Don't telephone an Afghan at 8.30 in the evening. Chances are, he or she will be settled down in front of the television for a daily fix of an Indian soap opera. And they won't want to be disturbed. The series "The mother-in-law was a daughter-in-law once too", or "Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi" in its original Hindi, has transfixed the country. Men, women, young and old -- anyone, it seems, with access to a television -- is enthralled by the family drama. It centres on Tulsi, a young bride from a poor family who married because...

Reactions to the latest measures that benefit the lower castes have been stormy as the population battles for coveted spots in universities The scenes from the streets of Bombay, Delhi, and other big Indian cities have shocked India. As medical students and young doctors peacefully protested a government initiative to reserve another share of seats in colleges and universities for members of lower castes, police set upon the marchers, beating many of them with truncheons. Even more shocking to many, officials later claimed that although a few students were hospitalized, the police had not used undue force. One politician even...

ew Delhi, March 21: The Supreme Court on Tuesday held that indifference and frigidity towards wife and sexual abstinence constitute mental cruelty and could be valid grounds for divorce. “The general rule in all questions of cruelty is that the whole matrimonial relations must be considered, that rule is of special value when the cruelty consists of not violent acts but of injurious reproaches, complains, accusations or taunts. It may be mental such as indifference and frigidity towards wife, denial of a company to her, hatred and abhorrence for wife or physical, like acts of violence and abstinence from sexual...

A worldwide economic boom has yielded a record number of dollar billionaires in the past year, according to Forbes. Their number rose by 15% to 793 with India taking the lead in Asia and new Russians lining up to fill the gap left by jailed Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Microsoft's Bill Gates tops the list for the 12th year running, with a net worth of $50bn (£29bn). The combined net worth of the 793 is $2.6 trillion and US billionaires account for just under half the amount. TOP FIVE BILLIONAIRES Bill Gates (US, Microsoft) - $50bn Warren Buffett (US, investor) - $42bn...

President Bush, right arm over the wicket March 04, 2006

President Bush at Purana Quila President Bush with farmers in Hyderabad,India President Bush with young entrepreuners in Hyderabad,India