Wiki Info-”Micromax is the 12th largest handset manufacturer in the world, with one per cent share globally. Micromax, according to a Strategy Analytics report, is now larger than global Japanese handset makers like Sharp and NEC and is closing the gap with Sony Ericsson globally.”

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Ninja A50 has already been in spot light with the ‘Value for Money‘ tag; With price just below Five Thousand Indian Rupees it provides features equivalent to phones with almost double its price. Compare Samsung Galaxy Y s5360, LG Optimus L3 E400 & HTC Explorer with Ninja; I am sure that you won’t be surprised. Almost every feature is similar. Though screen resolution and camera quality is not good for the Indian mobile; other key features are fine. I will jot down a few features which are highlights of this phone; Compare these features of a50 with the above models are you will understand why people say ‘Value For Money phone’.

Key Features:

• Display-  TFT Capacitive Touchscreen 256 Colors
• Size- 3.1 inches
• 3G  – HSDPA2100
• WLAN – WI-Fi 802.11,WiFi hotspot also.
• Bluetooth – v2.0
• OS  – Android OS v2.3.6 Gingerbread
• CPU  – 650MHz
• RAM – 256MB
• External Memory – expandable upto 32GB

Additional Highlights

•     Dual SIM
•     Aisha voice assistant – Artificial Intelligence Speech Handset Assistant
•     MP3/WAV/WMA/AAC player
•      MP4 player

Micromax a50 Ninja	LG Optimus L3-E400	HTC Explorer	Galaxy y-s5360
INR 5000/-	INR 11,000/-	INR 8000/-	INR 7200/-

I respect him for two reasons perseverance & self confidence.Soon after the La Liga victory, rumours started floating, about him moving
to his the former club Chelsea.But he says “I am staying with Madrid”. When asked about the champions league setback his response was solid. Asked if that defeat made him determined to stay on at Madrid and attempt to win the competition again next year,Mourinho replied: “Absolutely.”

How this person turned individuals into a team(Real Madrid), money into trophies & mementos(Chelsea) was a mystery for me. Many say his methods are boring, but I think his idea is ‘When in Rome do as the Romans do’. Chelsea has never lifted a major title before his time, so for a players moral to be high, what he needed to convey was ‘win at any cost’; so the games were sort of dry. But with Real it was different story, 31 league titles in the rack and they cant play dirty games.Mourinho plays like an underdog when his team is an underdog which means playing ugly and he plays like a favorite when the stage calls for it.
I searched for his coaching methodologies and came across an article in Guardian dated 1st August 2004 . It starts like this “Some call him arrogant, but no one questions his ability. José Mourinho has taken on football’s biggest challenge: to convert Chelsea’s millions into trophies. Mark Honigsbaum meets the manager – and reveals the secrets of his past”.

Excerpts from the interview:
It says his bitter experience as a player at Rio Ave, a first division Portuguese club was the point were he decided to be a coach.”For Mourinho, method is everything. Steeped in Uefa training manuals and fitness theory (he holds several physical education qualifications), he is obsessed with detail and preparation. From the moment his Chelsea players get up, to the moment they go to sleep, every minute of their day is programmed by Mourinho and his young assistants from Portugal, Rui Faria and Andre Villas Boas.”

    ” From here each practice, each game, each minute of your social life must centre on the aim of being champions,’ Mourinho wrote to his squad.

” First-teamer will not be a correct word. I need all of you. You need each other. We are a TEAM.” To underline his point, at the end of the letter to the team, Mourinho inscribed a gnomic equation: ‘Motivation + Ambition + Team + Spirit = SUCCESS.”

Read more : Mark Honigsbaum meets the manager

 The 2012 F1 season continues to enthrall us, as we have the fourth different team and driver win in as many races this year. Sebastian Vettel looked like a shadow of himself compared to his dominant performance last season, as he was consistently out-qualified and out-raced by team-mate Mark Webber. But, it looked a 2011 flashback as the World Champion clinched pole, got off to the perfect start, opened a gap, still looked-after his tyres, did not make any mistakes, and soaked-in a bit of pressure to come home victorious. A few set-up changes to the RBR exhaust seemed to have worked the magic, and as soon as the Red Bull beacame a quick car Vettel dominated his team-mate yet again. The Lotus-Renault team had a great weekend, as the returning former World Champion Kimi Räikkönen won his first podium of the season, and the F1 greenhorn Romain Grosjean picked-up the first podium finish of his short career.

It was Grosjean who was the man on the move in the opening laps, as he passed Webber for third place then caught and passed Hamilton for second. Kimi, who had started from 11th, stormed through the field after the first pit stop and came closing-up on his team-mate. There were no team-orders as such, but Kimi was on fresher rubber, and Grosjean didn’t put-up much of a fight. kimi then went about Vettel-chasing and got within a second behind after the second stop. He tried to dive to the inside resulting in Vettel shutting the door, and Kimi veering to the outside. From there-on, the gap between the pair opened-up again. And, after the third and final pit stop, it looked like Kimi  was nursing his tyres home  – shy from his Shanghai disaster. McLaren had a forgettable race. The team had a couple of horrible pit-stops, both in which Hamilton was the victim, and Jenson picked-up a punture, and then ran into retirement with a horrible-sounding engine. Webber continued his run of finishing fourth in every race this year. Rosberg made a late pass on di Resta to claim fifth. Alonso, Hamilton, Massa and Schumacher all picked-up points, as they finished from 7th to 10th.

Vettel with this win, snatched the lead in the driver’s championship. Even if he is to win this championship, it is a certainity that he would be made to work a lot harder for this, and that the others wuld be in the running a lot closer. The teams now have an in-season teasting – a new introduction for this season – in Mugello, before we head-over for the European leg of the championship. Ferrari sure needs to make goos use of this test as they need to find a few tenths. Every other team might also progress, and the next race at the Circuit de Catalunya would give a fair reflection of the pecking-order. normally, the Spanish venue gives a good indication of how the rest of the season tends to pan-out. We the racing addicts, can only hope that the entire three halves of the grid – the top, mid and rear-ends – are as evenly matched as they have been for these four races. Catch you all in Spain!

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2010 Formula 1 Gulf Air Bahrain Grand Prix (Sakhir)

                It is humans and their welfare that has to be measured and tabulated instead of calculating the income and commodities they possess. Money do have significance in our lives, but is not just money always that determines the living standards of a person. When we talk about living standards the following parameters are to be considered, say a person earning USD50 and living near equator and another earning same living far to the artic wont be having same living conditions due the climatic conditions, one living near the artic needs to spend a significant amount in keeping himself warm, the services around that region will be costlier as well.

        These thoughts made them devise this new way to evaluate the human conditions and quality of living. Consider health,education & living standards as the three dimensions of HDI. To formally define HDI- It is a comparative measure of life expectancy, education and standard of living of countries worldwide. HDI is measured in scale of zero to one and the score indicates whether a country is developed, developing or under developed. HDI value is an aggregate of the 3 parameters mentioned above in which the education is further broken into two sub sections- Mean years of schooling & expected years of schooling.

To calculate dimension index of each of these the following equation is used:
Dimension index = (actual value – minimum value)/(maximum value – minimum value)
The maximum value is the highest observed values in the time period. The minimum values are conceived of as subsistence values. The minimum values are set at 20 years for life expectancy, at zero years for both education variables and at $100 for per capita gross national income (GNI).

Life Expectancy Index: A long and healthy life is the indicator of high quality of life and hence contributing 1/3rd to the HDI value. Life expectancy Index(LEI)is calculated by considering 85 and 25 years as the extreme values(till 2011). Since 2011 the extreme values considered are 83.4 & 20.LEI is calculated by considering the life expectancy at birth of a country.(Current world life expectancy at birth is 67.2 years, for India it is 66.8 as of Jan-2012(Wiki Information))
LEI = (Life expectancy of your country-20)/(83.4-20).

Education Index: measures a countries relative achievement in literacy, which in turn projects the quality of life. This index also contributes 1/3rd to the HDI value.
EI= (Square root(MYSI * EYSI))-0)/(0.978-0)

MYSI = (MYS-0)/(13.2-0)
EYSI = (EYS-0)/(20.6-0)
MYS- Mean years of schooling ; Years that a 25 year or older person has spent in schools.
EYS- Expected years of schooling ; Years that a 5 year old child will spend with his education in his whole life.

Income Index: is considered to calculate HDI so as to represent all other paramter in a person’s life (other than education and health). Gross National Income at purchasing power parity in US dollars is used to measure the income index.To compare economic statistics across countries, the data must first be converted into a common currency and hence dollar is used.

II = (ln(GNIpc)-ln(100))/(ln(107721)-ln(100))

GNIpc – Gross national income at purchasing power parity per capita.

Now we have all the 3 indices; to calculate HDI take the cube root of the product of these three indices.

To answer a question which came to my mind when i was reading about HDI,
Where do data for the HDI come from?
Life expectancy at birth is provided by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs; mean years of schooling by Barro and Lee (2010)(data set providers); expected years of schooling by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics; and GNI per capita by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.While actively advocating for the improvement of human development data, as a principle and for practical reasons, the Human Development Report Office does not collect data directly from countries.

Yes, you read that right! Nico Rosberg, son of the illustrious F1 driver of yesteryear Keke Rosberg, clinched the first race win of his career after a pretty long wait. And it was also the first win for Mercedes as a ‘works’ team since they re-entered the sport in 2010. That much for the statistic-hungry group! And for the average F1 fan like you and me, the Chinese round of the 2012 season was another fantastic race. The starting grid itself was pretty exciting, as the two Mercs locked-out the front row (Nico leading Michael Schumacher) and Kamui Kobayashi’s Sauber lined-up in P3. With Shanghai’s long straight working prefectly to the strenghts of the Mercedes W03′s trick DRS wing system, the silver arrows had a huge straight line speed advantage here. However, the big question mark facing the team was how long they could make the tyres last – the team had a tough time in Australia and Malaysia on this front. And Schumacher’s race did come to a premature end with tyre issues – not tyre wear issue, but he got released from the box with the right-front wheel incorrectly fitted. An improved set-up gave the tyres a much easier time, and Rosberg largely went unchallenged throughout the race.

At the start, Rosberg got-off to the perfect start and Schumacher also maintained position. While Kamui Kobayashi went backwards from third place, Button came through from fifth to take up the running behind the Mercedes drivers, ahead of Kimi Raikkonen. Nico managed to open-up a healthy lead of about 3 seconds over his team-mate, after which the 7 time champion had to retire from the race. At one stage no fewer than nine cars were running nose to tail in the fight for the runner-up slot behind Rosberg. The only real challenge for Rosberg came from Jenson Button, as the Brit began eating-up huge chunks from his lead after the second round of pit stops. Sadly though, the winner of that battle was decided in the pit lane as the McLaren team wilted under presure. The left-rear wheel was slow to go on, and while McLaren avoided Mercedes’ mistake of sending the car out too soon, it cost Button precious time and a shot at victory. He eventually finished second, and Lewis Hamilton took his third sucessive P3 finish after he was uncharacteristically circumspect through the race. Hamilton finds himself leading the championship for his consistency, although he has no race wins to show yet.

The Red Bulls had a pretty forgettable weekend, and Webber again out-shone his world champion team-mate. The pressure is mounting on Vettel, as there are rumours that this season’s car is more suitable to Webber’s driving style. Webber, Vettel, Grosjean, Senna, Maldonado, Alonso and kobayashi finished from 4th to 10th. Kimi Räikkönen lost out big at the closing stages of a race in which he had run P2 for a good number of laps, as he tried to hold-on to a worn set of Medium tyres with dire consequences. Next race on the calendar is the Bahrain round. The Bahrain race last year was cancelled owing to political unrest gripping the country. The situation has still not improved in 12 months, but Bernie Ecclestone and party are adamant that F1 will go to Bahrain this year.The field seems to be divided in opinion, and a huge number of F1 fans are against the idea of a race this year – some have even gone to the extend of declaring a boycott of the race, as a mark of protest. It is still uncertain whether the race would happen, but Formula1 needs to steer clear of such political controversy. If the race goes on then it would look like a show of support for the ruling regime, and if the race gets called-off then it might look like F1 is taking sides with the protestors. It sure is a dicey situation.

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2011 Formula 1 UBS Chinese Grand Prix (Shanghai)

The Intel powered Lava Xolo 900 made its debut in Indian markets yesterday.The Xolo 900 is to be made available from April 23 at Rs. 22,000. The Xolo 900 will be powered by a single core Atom processor running at 1.6 GHz with hyper threading. The phone runs on Android 2.3(Gingerbread) version, but a upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich will be possible.

Other features on the Xolo 900 improves its appeal. The Xolo comes with a 4.03-inch display with 1024 x 600 resolution ,a 8 megapixel rear snapper with flash capable of full HD video recording at 1080p and a  1.3 megapixel front camera. The Xolo also has a 1GB RAM which should provide very good performance when coupled with the hyper threaded Atom processor. The Xolo even has the NFC built in support, though the use of it does look limited as of now.

The Xolo is certainly a good phone but whether people are going to impressed by the processor alone remains to be seen. Major manufacturers are also likely to come with Atom powered processors and that should pose a threat to the ARM processors. With Microsoft ditching Intel in favor of ARM processors, the foray into the Androids marks a very important phase for Intel in the smart phone and tablet arena.

Lava has also announced plans for two more smart phones with Intel Inside.

I am ashamed when I write this, not because I am writing something bad; the reason is I should have written this at least 5 years back (or heard about this). Now I am a proud Keralite especially after reading articles about my state by eminent economists.

A small state located in the south west coast of the Indian sub-continent, whose GDP is less than the country GDP nominal of USD 1527(2011). Till now I was aware of only the pre-historical sites like Edakkal caves(Wayanad) and Muniyara (marayur), the beauty spots like Munnar, the backwater tourism spots like Kumarakom. The piece of information on “Kerala Model Development” really was news for me. So from this point I am trying to explain what it is..? Or what I perceived from the term Kerala Model.
Food, Water and Shelter were the primary needs of cave man. After we crossed colonial era and industrialization era there still remains billions of people who lacks those primary needs and drenched in poverty. The economists coined a term to quantify the human development, HDI/Human Development Index. HDI is a comparative measure of literacy, life expectancy and standard of living. And HDI is used to rank countries worldwide. The usage of HDI to indicate the development of a country is being extensively used now (criticisms are also there).
In an economist’s eye development was always the result of money, quality of life increases only with enough pooling of money and this very belief was challenged in Kerala and that is how the term Kerala Model became famous. Let me feed you with some facts,
India has an HDI value of 0.547(2011) and ranked 134 among 187 countries.
Norway the first with HDI value 0.943.
HDI Value of Kerala is 0.920.

Now compare the HDI value of Kerala with Norway or let’s compare it with Australia, Netherlands and United States of America (these three countries are the 2nd, 3rd, 4th highest in the list of HDI). How can Kerala’s HDI be so high when the National HDI is as low as 0.547? In spite of low incomes (Income is only small fraction of the countries compared above) the state has high literacy rates, healthy citizens and a very politically active population. (Though HDI is high, industrial and economic developments are low). The Kerala model got recognition since the inception of HDI in the 90’s to evaluate the quality of human life…To Be Contd….

It was another wet Malaysian Grand Prix, and it was again another absolute thriller. The race was won by Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso from Sauber’s Sergio Perez and McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton. The result has added extra pressure on Felippe Massa, as there were already rumours that Perez – a member of the Ferrari driver development programe – could replace him at Ferrari. Massa again struggled, as he finished a lowly 15th. Alonso was at his best, as he drove an error-free race to push that dog-of-a-car to victory, helped along by good strategy and excellent work by his pit crew. However, Perez’s drive  was even better, as he picked-up his first podium finish. Hamliton drove a quite race to finish P3 again, but he looked more pleased than he was a week ago.

The rain fell lightly to begin with, beginning before the start of the race and leading most drivers to start the race on intermediate tyres. Pole-sitter Hamilton made a clean getaway, and was anxious to protect the inside line as he did not want to repeat the mistake he made a week back. Button also got-off perfectly, as he held P2. The rain soon got heavier, and Button was first to switch to the full wets. Shortly, a storm had hit the Sepang circuit and the race got red flagged after the Safety Car was out for a few laps. Thus Hamilton led Button to a halt on the start/finish line, followed by Perez (who’ made an early switch to full wets), Webber, Alonso, Vettel (who’d had an off), Vergne (who had yet to pit), Massa, Rosberg (who’d also been off), the amazing Narain Karthikeyan (who had not stopped thanks to starting his HRT on the full wets and was running a fabulous 10th), Hulkenberg and Force India team mate Paul di Resta, Raikkonen, Maldonado, Schumacher, Kobayashi, Pedro de la Rosa (who like Karthikeyan had started on full wets), Ricciardo, Petrov, Glock, Kovalainen, Pic and Bruno Senna. Grosjean was thus far the only retirement, going off for good into the gravel in Turn Six on Lap Four.

The race was restarted behind the safety car on lap ten, and after four laps of touring around the field were unleashed. Button was again the first to pit, as he changed for Inters. Despite these correct and early strategy calls, he only managed to finish 14th since he had made contact with NK’s HRT while racing for position. Alonso moved ahead of Lewis in the pits, and then passed Perez on track. From there on, it was a two-way battle between the top two. Alonso first opened-up a lead, but Perez then started bringing it down. By then, the track had dried-out enough, and Alonso pitted sooner to give him an advantage through the under-cut. Perez again begain eating-into Alonso’s lead, and at one stage, it looked like it was only a matter of time before the Mexican would make the pass, as the Sauber being kinder on its tyres, looked much better than the Ferrari. When Perez was within striking distance, he had a slight moment as he slid-off a wet patch. That sealed the race in favour of Fernando. Beind them, Webber, Räikkönen, Senna, di Resta, Eric Vergne, Hulkenberg and Schumacher finished from 4th to 10th. Thus, there were 9 different manufacturers finishing from P1 to P10.

The next race is the Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai. Alonso’s totally unexpected victory puts him into the lead of the world championship with 35 points to Hamilton’s 30 and Button’s 25, with Webber fourth on 24, Perez fifth on 22 and Vettel on 18. McLaren still lead the constructors’ world championship, with 55 points, with Red Bull second on 42 from Ferrari on 35 and Sauber on 30. Lotus have 16, Force India 9, Williams 8 and Toro Rosso 6.

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2011 Formula 1 Petronas Malaysia Grand Prix(Kuala Lumpur)

The 2012 MotoGP season got flagged-off at Qatar. Jorge Lorenzo clinched victory, but was closely-followed home by the two Honda boys – Dani Pedrosa and Casey Stoner. It was a three-way battle throughout the duration of the 22-lap race. It was also a superb start to the new 1000cc era in MotoGP, as the CRT machines also made their debut in an action-packed race. Initially, Lorenzo and Stoner fought for supremacy. Pole-sitter Lorenzo got off to a descent start until Stoner made a pass on the third lap. He held-on to the lead till there were just 3 laps to go. Pedrosa, who started from row 3 on the grid, shot into P3 at the start. He finally made a great pass on his team-mate on the penultimate lap to clinch P2. There was another great battle between the Monster Yamaha Tech 3 pair, and eventually Cal Crutchlow finished 4th and ahead of Andrea Dovizioso. Nicky Hayden, Alvaro Bautista, Stefan Bradl, Hector Barbera and Valentino Rossi finished from 6th to 10th, in that order.

In the Moto2 class, Marc Márquez (Team CatalunyaCaixa Repsol) beat Andrea Iannone (Speed Master) to victory, and Pol Espargaró finished third. Similar to last season, the field was pretty evenly-matched and at one point, there were 7 riders battling for the lead.  Pol Espargaró was closely followed to the flag by his team-mate Esteve Rabat. Thomas Lüthi (Interwetten Paddock) looked like he was set for a perfect weekend, as he had clinched pole on Saturday. He was in the mix at the sharp-end of the grid, until he ran wide at Turn 1 going into the final lap. He still finished 5th.

And, in the first ever Moto3 race, Maverick Viñales (Blusens Avintia) took victory. The Rookie of the Year 2011 seemed to have continued from where he left-off. Delivering an equally-impressive performance was debutant Romano Fenati (Team Italia FMI), who finished second. Sandro Cortese (Red Bull KTM Ajo) finished 3rd after battling with Luis Salom (RW Racing GP), Miguel Oliveira (Estrella Galicia 0’0), Zulfahmi Khairuddin (Airasia-SIC-Ajo) and rookie Arthur Sissis (Red Bull KTM Ajo).

The action now moves to Jerez in Spain, and there is an agonizing three-week wait before that. However, the high-voltage stuff that MotoGP fans were treated to at the Losail Circuit should be enough to satisfy our racing-appetites for this period. Both Yamaha and Honda seems to be pretty evenly-matched, and Ducati again seems to be left-behind a little. Two riders who really need to up their performance are Ben Spies and Valentino Rossi, as they had got beaten by their team-mates pretty convincingly. But, Jerez might unfold a different script – we never know. So long!

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Commercialbank Grand Prix Of Qatar 2011

Bajaj currently owns about 39% shares in KTM and the launch of the KTM Duke is their first launch in India with KTM. The KTM Duke 200, which is priced at 1.17 lakhs will compete with the likes of the Hero Karizma, the Honda CBR and the Yamaha R15. The price definitely gives the Duke 200 an edge in this competition, but its not the price that makes the Duke 200 an amazing bike. The 200 cc engine on Duke 200 generates around 25 Bhp power and a maximum of 19.2 torque, which are both much
higher when compared to the above mentioned competitors. Add the amazing style and the easy ride it gives, this bike is sure to stack up some sales sooner or later.

The head lamp is stylishly place near the front cowl and the handle bar enhances the fronting of the Duke 200. But its the rear section and the tank that blows your mind away. The stylish large and bumpy tank enhances the overall design of the Duke 200. The rear tail light comes merged with the LED indicator, which gives it a very different appeal.The huge back tyre and the huge allow that goes with ,gives the rear end the ‘heavy’ look that everyone aspires on a sports bike. Add the dual muffler exhaust to it, which further enhances the overall looks of the bike.

The riding position may not give you the all sporty feel that the CBR gives you, but the ride is amazingly comfortable on the Duke 200 and with the ‘macho’ looks the bike offers,you are never going to complain. The Duke 200 will be offered through Bajaj’s pro biking showrooms and KTM is expected to launch 250 cc and 300 cc versions of the Duke in the near future. If you aspire for a sporty bike with macho looks, get the Duke. It will not dissapoint you.

Specifications:
Displacement : 199.5 cc
Engine: Single cylinder 4 stroke liquid cooled engine
Max Power: 25 Bhp @10000 rpm
Max Torque:19.2 Nm @ 8000 rpm
0-60 : 3.4 seconds
Brakes: Front and rear disk
Price: 1.17 Lakhs
Color: Black+ Orange( only one shade available now. Perhaps one area where the Duke is a bit of a
letdown)