Can't believe this is for real..!!!! 'Pataka Cool'...'Hasmukh'...sound like good summer drinks or something!.

After kids and the young Indian male, it is now the turn of urban Indian women to be 'studied' and segmented

The findings give five distinct segments with more details about the demographic, lifestyle, psychographics and brand skew of these segments. Lowe India has labelled these as Mrs. 'Hasmukh' Popular (27 per cent), Mrs. 'Meri Awaaz Suno' Attention Seeker (31 per cent), Mrs. 'Gharelu' Homepride (18 per cent), Mrs. 'Pataka' Cool (12 per cent) and Mrs. 'Hey Bhagwan' Moaner (12 per cent).

- via MediaMusings Blog

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Apparently, there was a survey late last year that rated India as the second-sexiest nation (beating Brazil by 0.2%).

Well... like one of the comments at this post says.. Our capacity to delude ourselves is unlimited.

Everyone's read doomsday forecasts about how the aging population in Europe is going to doom them ....but a sign of the times to come for Europe as Italy votes to possibly elect a 87 year old as Senate Leader?!!! My granddad is 89 and I cannot imagine anyone 85+ being a leader of anything!! These guys are in trouble...

'Italy is a phallic gerontocratic society' ....

'What future for youth in a country where a man of 87 is being proposed as the next leader of the Senate, an 85-year-old may be re-elected president, and the prime minister-elect is one of the few major world leaders born before the outbreak of World War II? Fueling the debate are statistics released this week showing that the elderly form an increasingly large slice of the population: Nearly 20 percent of Italians are over 65, with that figure projected to rise to 34 percent by 2050. Still more strikingly, nearly two-fifths of the population is older than 50.'

Book by Kaavya Viswanathan faces plagiarism controversy - contains similarities to other works - apparently 29 to 40 passages of her book were straight straight from books by author Megan Mcafferty, who Kaavya admits to have read voraciously as a teenager and been influenced by.

Update: The book has been withdrawn from bookstores by its publisher. Mcafferty has said she is not pressing any charges and just wants to forget this whole episode and move on.)

Can't help but opine here... (damn.. sound like Bill OReilly...he really loves the word, opine..doesn't he use it at the end of his show every time when he asks for viewers..his faithful followers...to 'opine'? I havent seen his show in ages..but when I had seen it, he said that word almost every time..at the end..)... since this one particularly bothers me maybe because she is Indian..maybe because she writes chic-lit, which I deem inane (see rant below), or maybe because there was a hint of jealousy in reading that even a 17-year old could get a book contract - although to be fair I have also been riled up by other cases of plagiarists - Indian as well as Non-Indian. Cheating, by any other name, is cheating and its NOT COOL in my book (pun unintended.)

Surely Kaavya will recieve a lot of flak in the next few days and months for what she has called a "unintentional and unconscious" infringement (implausible, I say! Influenced in style is one thing - copying entire paragraphs is not unconscious!! See these examples - Unpardonable, IMO) from many online like us who do not even know her nor will ever read her books to others in the publishing world as well as people she knows! She was on a high with some big contracts, making newspaper articles locally and maybe internationally...and probably enjoying the positive attention. How she handles the negative press and criticism is unknown but given that in todays world, in the US but more and more in India too maybe, notoreity is not a bad thing , she just might be ok - if, as a 17 year old, she can handle the pressure of this "infamy" and learn how to use it to her advantage. No big $$ contracts or fame like a vikram seth or vikram chandra maybe but she'll continue to write pulp novels like she does.. and nothing dishonorable in doing that - IF SHE LEARNS NOT TO PLAGIARISE/GET INSPIRED/WHATEVER U WANT TO CALL IT....

Without reading her book, one last comment on the general genre of writing - I had no idea when I had initially blogged about her on my Indian Subcontinent Literature thread that she was a chic-lit writer - to each their own..what can i do if people want to read nonsense like a book titled ' How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life ' - what kind of a book title is that?!! uugggh... Is it a play on 'How Stella got her groove back', a book whose popularity with women has really ended up in more and more of this chicklit garbage ending up on bookstore shelves. Can understand it though - women are a big target market-group and maybe there was a unmet need for a Mills-n-boons for the cynical relationship-jaded women of our generation? (I am posing these as questions as I have not read them and so do not know if my bias against them is justified)... if people want to read such garbage on how someone got their groove back, or kissed, or cuddled or got wild and got married instead of reading great authors of the day like Ishiguro, Mcewan, or even a Vikram Seth - let alone going back to classics from the past like Turgenev or Balzac or Proust or...heck, even a Chaucer or a Shakespeare...then so be it! I myself have no time for such inanities...so much to read ...so little time... too many distractions..too many books...too many interests....

enuf said..

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Others have also opined ;) and she's been already added to the blacklist on the Plagiarism entry at wiki.

Plagiarism and punishment - We should find a way to treat Kaavya Viswanathan and William H Swanson as we do our errant students.

29 to 40 passages of her book were lifted straight from author Megan Mcafferty’s books.

Falstaff 1 and 1, Sepia Mutiny 1 and 2 - links I found via Amit Varma's post at India Uncut who writes about an interesting aspect of this unseemly affair - something I had not read about before...

But this isn't all that is unpalatable in this episode. Apparently a 'book-packager' called Alloy Entertainment helped put this book together, as also many others in its genre. The more I read about them, the more the lines blur between the author and her 'consultants,' whose role seems similar, as Manish Vij speculates here, to the music industry guys who manufacture boy bands.

Another unrelated article in the NY Times on the competitiveness for college admissions has another interesting tidbit about an interesting consulting outfit she used in getting into Harvard as an example of students going to extremes and possibly even cheating to get a leg up. She is called the 'Barry Bonds' of today's college crowd....

Kaavya Viswanathan.., a Harvard sophomore won admission to the university partly through the ministrations of a consulting outfit named IvyWise, which charges $10,000 to $30,000 for its services. Then she wrote a roman à clef about the process, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life. Now, Miss Viswanathan has been accused of plagiarism, and, in an interview with The New York Times, has acknowledged an "unintentional and unconscious" pattern of appropriation from two other books. Of course, Barry Bonds has insisted that all he ever knowingly took were nutritional supplements.

UPDATE- May 2, 2006 She really thought she would get away with it....aaj ke duniya mein!!??

Sepia Mutiny, a blog I sometimes read (the guy who had the great pictures from Bandra recently), is mentioned in this Outlook article.

What is significant is that almost all the new "revelations" seem to have been the results of close readers posting their comments on various blogs and sharing their findings with each others or mainstream media.

The similarities in passages with Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories (HATSOS) were brought out on the weblog Sepiamutiny.com where it was pointed out how the passage in Rushdie's book where his hero, Haroun, enters a bus depot and passes by several admonitions written on the walls surrounding the depot's courtyard found its echoes in Viswanathan's book where her protagonist, Opal Mehta, helps another student place posters on a wall that discourage drug and alcohol use.

On page 35 of Rushdie's HATSOS, one of the warnings reads: "If from speed you get your thrill / take precaution ”make your will."

On page 118 of Viswanathan's HOMGKGWAGAL, one of the posters reads: "If from drink you get your thrill, take precaution ”write your will."

On page 31 of Rushdie's HATSOS, another warning reads: "All the dangerous overtakers / end up safe as undertaker".

On page 119 of Viswanathan's HOMGKGWAGAL, another poster reads: "All the dangerous drug abusers end up safe as total losers."

And so on ...so forth...!!

Guilty Kaavya hopefully survives: Rushdie Financial Express, India
Rushdie enters row over young author's 'plagiarism' Scotsman
Salman Rushdie: 'Kaavya a victim of her own ambition' Hindustan Times
Salman has no sympathy for Kaavya CNN-IBN

Listen to BBC's Chernobyl: the lessons learned - What is the truth behind the Chernobyl? And why, on the 20th anniversary of the disaster, is the nuclear industry seeing an upturn in its fortunes?

News articles on the 20th anniversary:
20 years on: the horrors of Chernobyl still linger
Measuring Chernobyl's Fallout
Farms still affected by Chernobyl
UK farmers face Chernobyl horror - 20 years on
Chernobyl's Tiniest Victims
Chernobyl: the final word is yet to be said
Lukashenko equates material losses from Chernobyl, World War II
Normalcy coming back to Chernobyl-hit Belarus areas 20 years on
Survivors struggle with sickening legacy

Chernobyl: wet rugs and a run on vodka - oped piece a IHT, where the writer, Schmemann, writes: 'The greatest catastrophes take on a personality, a name: Bhopal, Oklahoma City, Sept. 11, the tsunami. These names and others have entered the language as symbols of apocalyptic tragedies. Each disaster has its own unique attributes. Chernobyl, for me, stands for a fear that many have described in recent days, a fear of an evil that cannot be seen or fathomed. I was a reporter in Moscow at the time and lived through the anxiety and questions that gripped us all in the hours, days, weeks and even months after we got the first word of the disaster - one paragraph from Tass that still ranks as one of the great understatements of all time: "An accident has occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant as one of the reactors was damaged." That's all. Unlike most of the natural or manmade threats we confront, this one had no face, no presence, no visible menace. There was no black thundercloud firing bolts of lightning, no powerful wind bending trees to the ground, no huge building disappearing into a vast cloud of dust. There was only the knowledge that a great, invisible, mysterious killer had been loosed on the world.' .....

And finally, President Gorbachev marks 20th Anniversary of Chernobyl
Meanwhile, a Russian newspaper has published transcripts of a politburo meeting during which the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev suggested covering up the real circumstances of the accident.

Chernobyl Here and Now: Global Engagement, Local Encounter To listen to speakers and find out more about this important conference which took place in Madison Wisconsin in March 2006. Two other conferences recently concluded in countries affected the most by the disaster include:

International Conference “20 Years after Chernobyl: Strategy for Recovery and Sustainable Development of the Affected Regions” (19-21 April 2006, Belarus)

International Conference “Twenty Years after Chernobyl Accident. Future Outlook” (24-26 April 2006, Ukraine)

Other Online Resources and Information:
Greenpeace report says Chernobyl death toll has been underestimated

The United Nations and Chernobyl

The Lesson Of Chernobyl

Chernobyl Disaster - Information about the Chernobyl accident. Includes causes, sequence of events, health consequences, and social, economic, political and environmental consequences

The Report on Chernobyl An independent scientific evaluation of the health and environmental effects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster with critical analyses of recent reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the World Health Organisation (WHO)

Chernobyl Pictures Collection of photos of the Chernobyl area including walkdown comments, accident information and radioactivity data measurements. Also see Ghost Town chronicling Elena's motor cycling through the Chernobyl "dead zone". Provides her pictures, maps and stories.

Chernobyl Page

Chernobyl

Chernobyl: A Nuclear Disaster

Reading The 360 Degree Leader - Developing Your Influence from Anywhere in the Organization by John C. Maxwell

Probaby be good to simultaneously go through The 360 Degree Leader Workbook

Other related books by John Maxwell:

• 25 Ways to Win with People : How to Make Others Feel Like a Million Bucks
  
• Winning With People : Discover the People Principles that Work for You Every Time
  
• The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership
  
• The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader: Becoming the Person Others Will Want to Follow
  
• Developing The Leader Within You

Other good books to read:
Revolutionary Wealth by Alvin Toffler, Heidi Toffler
Creating the Good Life :Applying Aristotle's Wisdom to Find Meaning and Happiness by James O'Toole
The Highest Goal: The Secret That Sustains You in Every Moment by Michael Ray, Jim Collins
Change Your Questions, Change Your Life: 7 Powerful Tools for Life and Work by Marilee G. Adams, Berrett-Koehler

Reservations now for "Other Backward Classes"!!!

Amit Varma's blog post and links therein to some other good posts on the subject eloquently tell us why reservation is a ridiculous, even immoral, and definitely counter-productive concept. Some strong reaction against it by India's corporate leaders and industry bodies of the retrograde suggestion by Manmohan Singh (ye tu, Brutus!) that 'the private sector would do well to voluntarily consider affirmative action in jobs in order to make the employee base 'more representative.'', with even some suggestion that they will go to court if forced to implement job reservations in the private sector. The Confederation of Indian Industry has also stated that mandatory reservation in any form is not conducive to competencies and therefore will not be acceptable.

Good discussion of the issues in the following media articles:

Who needs Quotas? - Outlook

The caste factor: Show me the numbers - Rediff

Caste Dragon - Who Can Slay It? - Patna Daily

Also read: Affirmative action is not without problems. If only there was good education for everyone...

Should be simply inacceptable.. happens every year and we continue. Malaise and apathy :(

Destitute and dying
Suicides on Indian farms reflect greater malaise. (Slide show)

The one-off unique instance like the 2nd test against Bangladesh, where Australia have gone in with 3 spinners (MacGill, Warne, and debutant Dan Cullen) notwithstanding, in a team whose bowling has been dominated by such stalwarts such as McGrath, Gillespie, Brett Lee, and..Warne, Australia has not had many occasions to play both Stuart MacGill and Shane Warne. And so, MacGill, quite a spinner in his own right, has lived and played in the shadows of Warne for some time now... but an analysis of tests where both have played show that MacGill has stolen the show again and again ...

What's the best method to reduce Shane Warne's potency? Ensure that Stuart MacGill plays alongside him. Playing with the best legspinner in the world for the 15th time, MacGill hogged the limelight once more, taking 8 for 108 in the first innings even as Warne registered his most expensive figures in a Test innings, going for 112 in 20 overs. Admittedly, an elbow injury reduced Warne's potency, but it wasn't the first time MacGill stole the thunder from his more illustrious partner: the last time they played together, against South Africa at Sydney earlier this year, MacGill managed 4 for 135 to Warne's 2 for 151. Of the 15 occasions they have played together, MacGill has been the more effective ten times, most emphatically when he routed England with 12 for 107 at Sydney, while Warne struggled for his two wickets, conceding 110 runs. Warne's biggest hurrah came on the tour to Sri Lanka in 2003-04: in the two Tests they both played, Warne had a massive haul of 20 wickets for 314, while MacGill had a measly five for 232. As the table below shows, Warne averages five runs per wicket more when he plays with MacGill.

Stuart MacGill - Second fiddle, first class

Help me help you - MacGill believes he can extend Warne's career

Irony that Bush is considering dropping nukes to prevent Iran from developing nukes..bizarre logic, huh?

Looks like it is showdown time with Iran!

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared on Tuesday (April 11th) that Iran has joined the nuclear club by claiming a breakthrough in enriching uranium on a small scale for the first time had succeeded on a small scale in enriching uranium, a key step in generating fuel for a reactor or fissile material for a bomb. The U.N. Security Council has demanded that Iran stop all enrichment activity because of suspicions the program's aim is to make weapons. However, Iran has said that it intends to expand its uranium enrichment program and enrich uranium on a scale hundreds of times larger than its current level, signaling its resolve to expand a program that various world leaders across the international community, insist it halt. Ahmadinejad in turn has asked the “corrupt powers” to disarm.

Fuel grade vs. Weapons grade Uranium enrichment - Understanding the differences & the science.
The Iranians claim to have produced enriched uranium "to the 3.5% level". That is pure enough to use as nuclear fuel, though nowhere near what would be needed to make a bomb. Experts say the bank of 164 centrifuges that the Iranians used is not enough to churn out significant amounts.

Seymour Hersh, America's best known investigative journalist, has repeatedly been saying that Iran is in the US cross-hairs. In the latest New Yorker magazine, he concludes once again that the Bush administration is even considering the use of a tactical nuclear weapon against deep Iranian bunkers, but that top generals in the Pentagon are attempting to take that option off the table.

Among the revelations in Hersh's article:

• "One of the military's initial option plans ... calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites." Hersh reported that a lack of "reliable intelligence" on certain underground sites "leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons."

• According to a "former senior intelligence official," the "attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ... and some officers have talked about resigning." The official also said that the Joint Chiefs "sought to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans for Iran," but were unsuccessful.

• According to a "senior Pentagon adviser on the war on terror," even though the Joint Chiefs "had agreed to give President Bush a formal recommendation stating that they are strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran," the "idea of using tactical nuclear weapons ... has gained support from the Defense Science Board, an advisory panel whose members are selected by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld."

Similarly, an April 9 Washington Post article by staff writers Peter Baker, Dafna Linzer, and Thomas E. Ricks noted that "Pentagon planners are studying how to penetrate eight-foot-deep targets and are contemplating tactical nuclear devices." - From Media Matters


Bush has however dismissed this saying that any talk about an inevitable strike on Iran is "wild speculation." However, Mr. Bush has remained steadfast in his statements that a nuclear Iran is unacceptable and "no option is off the table" to prevent it.

So, Is Iran next?, wonders Mark Sappenfield, staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor, as he analyzes the calculus of military strike while Fred Kaplan at Slate tries to decode the options - Are We Really Going To Nuke Iran?
(Earlier last week, he wondered if 'Washington and Tehran are playing a game of global chicken')

The US is planning military action against Iran because George Bush is intent on regime change in Tehran - and not just as a contingency if diplomatic efforts fail to halt its suspected nuclear weapons programme, it was reported yesterday.

Why dropping nukes may not be the best way for President Bush to 'save' Iran or secure his place in history , argues Stuart Jeffries.

I saw a great documentary on PBS recently, titled Voyage to the Mystery Moon. The documentary chronicles 'a bold voyage of discovery by the Cassini/Huygens mission, which has been studying Saturn and its various moons, particularly Titan, for nearly two years. I have always been fascinated with astronomy and decided to find out more information about this mission for a blog post about the same.

And where best to start than news released just today from a senior scientist working on the Cassini spacecraft, who thinks that Saturn's tiny moon Enceladus, not Titan, may be the best place to look for life elsewhere in the Solar System.

Anyways, for starters, here are some links for the Cassini-Huygens Mission via BBC. I will update this with some other good links as and when time permits.

Cassini-Huygens, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

Cassini-Huygens, NASA

Cassini-Huygens, European Space Agency (Esa)

Ciclops - Cassini Imaging Website

Destination Saturn: An Animated Tour

Cassini pictures spongy Hyperion

Enceladus delights and baffles

Saturn rings have atmosphere

PLANET AND RINGS

Saturn ring particles 'fluffy'

Cassini sees lightning on Saturn

Saturn probe's stunning images

New Saturn ring discovered

MOON VISITS

New Saturn moon makes waves

Saturn probe spies 'cheese' moon

Iapetus moon bulges at equator

Phoebe is 'cosmic time capsule'

TITAN TARGET

Titan moon occupies 'sweet spot'

Titan dark spot may be large lake

Titan probe's pebble 'bash-down'

Huygens probe lands on Titan

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European Space Agency's Venus Express probe, launched in November from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, has gone into orbit around Venus, after a five-month journey. In addition to shedding further light on mechanisms of climate change on earth, a study of Venus, deemed Earth's 'evil twin', should also resolve various unknowns about earth's nearest neighbour. (Also read this interview with Prof. Fred Taylor of University of Oxford in UK about why studying Venus is important.) The last mission to Venus was NASA'S Magellan probe, launched in 1989. It completed more than 15,000 orbits between 1990 and 1994, and mapped almost all of Venus, revealing towering volcanoes, gigantic rifts and sharp-edged craters.

A photo of the south pole of Venus taken by the Venus Express spacecraft was released Thursday, April 13th, 2006 -- revealing a twist of cloud swirling around the far end of Earth's neighbor that closely resembles cloud formations around the more familiar north pole.

ESA's Mars Express probe, launched in June 2003, has also been sending back valuable information - including signs of a 'frozen sea', a 'Hourglass'-shaped crater, Libya Montes valley, a 'Happy face' crater, 'Kissing craters' which reveal glacial activity, an aurora* ,and many other beautiful images from the red planet.

* The Martian aurora is unique in the Solar System because it is linked to areas of magnetized crustal rock rather than to any planetary magnetic field. Mars has no intrinsic magnetic field, unlike Earth and the outer planets.

Links from BBC, which has a great in-depth website on the Mars Express probe

Mars orbiter reaches Red Planet

Martian dunes hide water secret

Ice belt 'encircled Mars equator'

Martian volcanoes 'may be active'

Rover's image from Mars hill peak

Europe aims lone rover for Mars

Mars probe launches at third try

Mars Express radar boom success

Image may be Mars Polar Lander

RED PLANET GUIDES

Q&A: Nasa's Mars orbiter

How to take pictures of Mars

Mars Express mission briefing

Martian exploration timeline

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NASA recently successfully launched its New Horizons mission to Pluto in January 2006. The mission will take 10 years and cover about 3bn miles. It was launched just in time to use Jupiter's gravity to pick up speed in a slingshot maneuver.

Where to next, you ask? well... First planets have been viewed beyond the solar system ...

...or maybe I should title this as 'Geeks know how to have fun too' :)

I was walking around along Memorial Drive in Boston last weekend and walked across the street last weekend to MIT campus and saw this cannon... wanted to take a picture with the cannon but didn't have a camera. Now its gone (back) --- Caltech students rescue icon swiped by MIT (See flemingcannon.com for all the details) --- Oh well..

Read the links below to get the story/history about the latest prank from last week...

The LA Times had the story. So did the Pasadena Star-News, and the Boston Globe, and even the CalTech PR office. But the best description of the hack (or prank) was in MIT’s student newspaper, The Tech, which delves into the lore and customs of the rivals across the continent.

Other Related Links from various webpages online about this great hack:

MIT Hackers Appropriate Caltech Cannon

Caltech vs MIT

CalTech Gets Pranked... Again
Hackers Have Blast With Caltech Cannon
Shoot! We've just lost our two-ton cannon in ultimate student ...
How & Ser Moving Co’s MIT Cannon website
Keeping Score: Caltech vs MIT
20 years ago, Harvey Mudd stole the cannon. Naturally there’s a web page all about it.
NEW: College Cannon Coeds, who, um, wish they all could be California girls (?).
NEW: The shoot of the bikini shoot.

Btw, MIT kids have indulged in these kinds of hacks on their own campus often in the past. One of the famous pranks included assembling a whole life-like cop-car replica on top of the MIT dome! This is so much a part of MIT lore that there is a 'Hall of hacks' gallery exhibit on the MIT campus, a book about the 'hacks', and even professors speak about the pranks in celeberatory tones! Read and see more at The MIT Gallery of Hacks to learn about pranks perpetrated over the years.

Nothing new..but want to foment some comment and discussion here...

This is something every Indian should be ashamed and outraged about...

Female foeticde: Why many baby girls are under threat in India

India 'loses 10m female births'

India's lost girls

Female Infanticide in Tamil Nadu, India

Gendercide Watch: Female Infanticide

Female foeticide still a problem in 21st century India

Abortion, Infanticide Foeticide India

Female infanticide in India

More on Indian foeticide here.

Indian reality - more female foeticide with more development

Female foeticide on the rise in India

Female foeticide: The collusion of the medical establishment

The laws exist... but it is the attitudes that need to change as otherwise in a country where there is little accountability, policing and implementation becomes almost impossible. People just find ways to get around the laws..

Religions target female foeticide
Ban diagnostic technology to control female foeticide in India: Study
India targets female foeticide
Female Foeticide- An India based group aiming to end selective sex abortions and female foeticide.
'Commitment needed to prevent female foeticide

A minor hurrah earlier this month - India sex selection doctor jailed

HOLY COW... what a stunner..! Looks like this test will be different than the the low-scoring first innings but high scoring 2nd innings routine in the first test draw. A result is definite here..its only day 2 and 28 of a possible 40 wickets have already fallen and Jayasurya is unlikely to bat...so, only 1 more SL wicket to fall before Pakistan come out to bat again tomorrow morning..

End of Day 2:
Sri Lanka 279 & 73/8 (24.4 ov)
Pakistan 170
Sri Lanka lead by 182 runs with 2 wickets remaining

This Mohammad Asif is turning out to be quite a find for Pakistan... After consistently taking 3-4 tickets in the matches so far, he has marked his arrival with this test.. where he has totally ripped out the SL batting.. - 6 wickets in first innings and already has figures of 12-6-27-5 in 2nd outing for SL, who must have come out on a high after Murali, with his 51st 5-wicket haul, spun out Pakistan for a paltry 170 earlier today.

The 4th innings of the test is going to be real interesting.. that first inning lead of a 109 will ensure that Pak chase a 200+ score..which might be really tricky against Murali...considering he got them for 170 in the first outing.

Australia steal a two-wicket thriller..

With Langer injured, it was always going to be close if RSA took a couple quick wickets this morning...44 runs with 4 wickets in hand was really 44 runs from tail-enders...but having got his highest test score in the first-innings, it was up to Brett Lee to once again be the wall between RSA and an unlikely victory...

After Hussey and Martyn made a victory possible yesterday through a great partnership, today it was Lee who kept the RSA bowlers at bay after the early fall of Martyn right after reaching his century..and in what was really the last wicket for Australia (Langer was padded up to bat..but not sure how successfully he would have fended off the RSA bowlers hungry with the scent of victory.. what a disastrous 100th test for Langer..faced all of 1 ball in the test and that he took on his head!!), Lee and Kasprowicz took Aussie to a clean sweep of the series. (This 'last' wicket partnership of 19 to secure the victory reprised memories of a similar but greater effort by these two in the 2nd test against England at Edgbaston in the last Ashes series, where the same two batsmen had a great partnership of 59 for the last wicket before painfully falling short and losing the match by 2 runs...)

A token win for RSA would have been nice - esp. for Ntini, who bowled with great vigor and jigar in this test to claim 10 wickets in the test.. but in the end, as usual, someone or the other stood up when it it mattered for the Aussies.. (But...should be noted (see below for an example from the 3rd day) that a few criticial umpiring decisions, which sometimes can make all the difference in a close test like this, also went in the Aussies favor.)

I had dismissed Lee as a total waste..in the Akhtar mold.. all fired up but no control and not really effective as a wicket taker other than occasional bursts against certain teams that get unnerved by their pace but not only has his bowling this season been really good but he has also turned out to be quite a good consistent batsman in this series!!

Anyways, end of a good series.. An unprecedented 3-0 whitewash for RSA to go with the 2-0 series loss in Australia earlier this season.. but RSA gave a good fight in this series albeit in short sessions...but the Aussies have proven once again that against them you really need to keep fighting every single season...give them a little room and they come back and dominate and win easily like in many series in the past few years. (The Aussie-SL series in SL from two years ago (March 2004) where Aussies were dismissed for first innings totals of 120 & 220 but went on to win each of the tests convincingly to accomplish the almost-improbable tast of sweeping SL at home.. always comes to mind!!)

Cricinfo's series-end wrapup - Australian marks out of ten | South African marks out of ten

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Umpiring Decisions: (Gleaned from Cricinfo reports)

Shaun Pollock was promoted to No. 6 in a bid to increase the score quickly and he re-floated South Africa as they coped with the loss of their two rocks Jacques Kallis and Ashwell Prince. Clark collected Kallis for 27 when he won an lbw decision from Tony Hill while Warne knocked over Prince to a catch that was so doubtful Andrew Symonds didn't seem to appeal for his take at leg slip. Steve Bucknor sensed an edge and South Africa stuttered as they lost 3 for 20.

And earlier today..

Brett Lee posted his highest Test score with 64 from 68 balls. Lee's second installment was a controversial and entertaining one as he collected his third half-century and walloped Ntini for a square-leg six. However, Lee escaped an lbw appeal from Shaun Pollock on 45 and next ball cut to Dippenaar at first slip, standing his ground until the umpires surprisingly gave him not out.

Sarita Rai writes in the IHT - A long road remains to free-floating rupee

Need subscription to read this article in The Economist on the Convertibility of the Rupee - In a difficult political environment, Manmohan Singh, India's prime minister, has a knack for pursuing reform by stealth. An important proposal was announced on March 18th not in parliament but in Mumbai at a humdrum book launch of the third volume of a history of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the central bank. Mr Singh said he had asked the RBI to revisit the issue of full convertibility of the rupee.

Roadmap for free float of the Indian rupee

India's move to float rupee to boost investment, say analysts