This post is authored by Tomosha Bhattacharjee.

Nepal, a popular tourist resort has natural and artistic backdrop. Nestled in the majestic Himalayas it is overwhelmingly beautiful. One can reach Nepal from India either by air or by train. We- a group of four decided to take the latter. One has to get down at Raxaul and then take any form of conveyance to reach Birganj a dusty border town in Nepal.

A night’s rest in Birganj and then we started for the first leg of our tour – a trip to pokhara. If you journey by local bus a seven hours trip will invariably lengthen to nine or ten hours.

By the time we reach Pokhara we are sapped of energy. A night’s rest is a must. The next morning we went for local sight seeing. Pokhara is no longer the small idyllic spot that is supposedly a tourist’s paradise. It is quite a busy town. A number of hotels have sprung up along the lake side. A stroll down the lake side is pleasant in the evening. Boat ride in Pokhara lake is a popular tourist activity. Our sight seeing itinerary included a view of the sun rise, Bindubasini temple, Davis falls, Mohendra cave etc. The walk through the cave was indeed a novel experience. In the evening we bought some curios from the shops that lined the lake side.

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To many a poor amongst us, this has happened at least once. You work hard on your blog, and during one fine session, you realize that your blog is full of spam comments, dangerous iframes that contain malware, having been infected with key-logger programs! Puff! Everything in jeopardy!

I totally remember one such occasion when this nasty piece of iframe got through my pc via my ftp client straight into my blogs and oh well, that was pretty hellish

And then I searched and researched. And found a set of highly acclaimed and popular wordpress plugins that guaranteed my site’s security, free of cost

I suppose this post will help you locate some of those security plug-ins essential for any wordpress-enabled site.

1) For SPAM protection, forever and Always,  you can rely upon the Akismet Continue reading…

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The age of smart-phones has ushered in an age of economy with an eye for the best features. With the top mobile proprietors responding to the demands of customers based on the current trend of Get More, Pay Less, its obvious that a number of phones have sprung up with competing features and flexible options.

While choosing one for a family member, I felt this need of a single list that could include at least the most competent mobiles in the sphere of flexible budgets.If, however, you feel I skipped a particular model, feel free to suggest it to me

1) The first phone that comes to my mind is Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic. It runs on Symbian S60 5th Edition which is pretty old actually considering the present market being dominated by android phones. But somehow it has managed to  connect to many people because of its cheap price and package. Let’s see what it has.

Nokia 5800 has a 3.2-inch touchscreen with 640×360 pixel resolution and 16 million colors. It has a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus and Carl Zeiss optics and 3x digital zoom. It comes with an inbuilt 140 mb and 8GB Micro SD Card  which can be extended up to 16GB.

5800 has Stereo FM with RDS. There’s a TV-out and a stylus included in the package. Although in some parts of the country, it comes without one. Call me old-fashioned, i still love using one

Data connectivity includes Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, integrated GPS.

Nokia 5800 is priced at Rs. Rs. 12,600 INR

2) Nokia 5530 Xpressmusic is a cheaper version of Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic with its 3.2 MP camera coupled with a powerful LED flash and a 4GB memory card(extendable up to 16 GB) and 70 MB internal memory, you can simply spoil yourself with media. Continue reading…

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Trust me, its truly difficult to sort all the following classics into an order of ascendancy or vice-versa and its precisely for this reason that I will rather cite the names and give you my impressions of the books that have enthralled the reading public across the world.

• The very first name that comes to my mind when trying to comprehend the term “classic” is Pride and Prejudice

Author: Jane Austen

Date of Release: 1813

This book remains the sweetest and most charming romantic comedy ever produced by any woman, that too, quite ironically with the Civil War at the background. Austen chose to completely ignore the vicious battles that England was engaged in and presents in front of us a bourgeois Victorian society dipped in the brush-strokes of Horatian satire.

The very first line of the novel: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife sets the light, comic and subtly ironic tone of the novel. As is obvious, the novel explores human relationships both on micro ad macro levels of the society and exposes various hypocrisies related to material possessions, sham glamour and matrimony. Feminists across the world point out Austen’s embedded interpolated plot to redefine the position of women in the society and their inter-related and complimentary financial and emotional dependence.

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Often we come across works of art that create long-lasting impressions in our minds and hearts, something which in the words of William Wordsworth:

“The music in my heart I bore

Long after it was heard no more”

I will put Amitava Ghosh’s Shadow Lines in a similar category. Although it’s highly resistive to categorizations- it can be called a memory novel owing to the myriad of stupendously iridescent shards of memories embedded within its framework. Similarly, it claims a righteous placement right in between the manifold literature on post colonialism. At the same time, it’s a really loud cry against the prevailing nationalistic tendencies of the contemporary world in which Ghosh was writing. The highly definitive and descriptive imagery containing the maps, mirrors, reflections etc are in themselves, reflexive of the narrator’s personalized and depersonalized selves. What’s more, it’s also a great work full with modernist techniques.

The non-linear chronological progression of the novel coupled with the drifts across the worlds via the imaginative precepts of the mind is a fantastic method, to me, to bring out the confusions created by memories, remembrances and recollections. The novel begins in the year 1939 with Mayadebi’s departure with her husband and Tridib, her nine- year old son to England and concludes somewhere around 1970’s with the narrator’s exposure to the final “redemptive mystery” with May Price regarding Tridib’s death. It spans three generations of the Dutta Chowdhuries and the Prices and binds England, Cairo, Ceylon, India etc in a web of cartographic interpretations, transcendence of territorial boundaries and limitations of nations.The core of the story is the death of Tridib Dutta-Choudhuri, the narrator’s uncle, an archaeologist who presents the narrator-child worlds to travel in and

Nationalism in Shadow Lines is pitted against Internationalism. Reading from a gendered perspective, the narrator’s Thamma, a middle class teacher with deep nationalistic tendencies which ultimately are disillusioned towards the middle of the novel, is contrasted with his cousin Ila, the perfect globetrotter who distinguishes countries in terms of the standards and locations of Ladies’ Toilets in airports.

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Racism has “swam” literally from Australia to United States of America. A young Sikh student working part-time as a pizza delivery boy has been reportedly physically assaulted a group of unscrupulous US citizens when he came to deliver a pizza to their house, the Skh Coalition, a community advocacy group said. The attackers neither paid him for the pizza nor were decently behaving with him. They have hurled racial abuses at him. Although the real identity of the student or the attackers or the place of the incident has been withheld, it happened somewhere in Texas.

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Popularity: 28%

Nitin Gadkari, Maharashtra BJP’s leader has been sworn in as BJP’s new President. The politician, right after ascending to the throne, has made open acknowledgements to RSS as one of BJP’s prime supporters. Gadkari, famous for maintaining a really low-profile thus becomes the youngest president for the party. Fearless as he asserts himself to be, the Maratha President echoes the importance of willpower to the credit of the individual: “When there is a strong political will, all problems can be solved,” he was heard saying.

Reminding us once again, the former PWD minister of Maharashtra talks about his previous feats such as the fact that he had built the Mumbai-Pune Expressway in just two years and at a cost of Rs2,000 crore when more expenses is expected in projects such as these in other states. He informed the media that he always is willing to vouchsafe for politics as the most important factor in developing social and economic conditions of the country. Thus he said, ” I don’t work as if I am making a political career. I work for the poor and downtrodden sections of society who don’t have food to eat, house to live in or clothes to wear. I strive to bring about a transformation in their lives.”

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As Telangana stands suspended, Pranab Mukherjee ensured while meeting a delegation of Congress MPs from the state’s Andhra and Rayalaseema regions in the Parliament House that the statehood of Telangana will not be discussed in Lok Sabha unless and until Andhra Pradesh passes  a resolution keeping into view the wishes and demands of the leaders for another separate state of Telangana.

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Its time to tighten security. The metros are under alert. Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata have gone under scanner after rumours and hints about the presence of LeT militants loomed over the cities. Apparently, the terror groups have already installed their men for suicide bombings across the metros.

Sources have confirmed that trained suicide squads have been sneaked into India to carry out these suicide bombings and terror activities. This comes few weeks after India silently observed the infamous 26/11 anniversary.

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After FBI’s revelation of David COleman Headley being one of the voice commanders present in LeT control room when Mumbai 26/11 attack took place last year, comes another crashing exposure that has long since been a prick to the Indian security system. FBI has apparently confirmed that a “section of serving Pakistan army officers”  have been secretly serving chosen terror groups such as LeT and JeM against India. This confirmation was conveyed to India when a special FBI team visited India to interrogate suspects.

Headley a.k.a Daood Gilani has confessed  that these officers have been working with Lashkar on ‘Karachi project’ against India that as a major objective, works in recruiting Indian Muslims to spread Jihad in India.These young men after being trained Pakistani army officials return to India and breed terror as home-spurn and thus, save Pakistan from any involvement.

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Popularity: 24%