Agatha Sangma, Youngest in the Manmohan Ministry | The Youngest Member of New Indian UPA Government

Agatha Sangma is the youngest minister in the Manmohan Singh cabinet. Daughter of former Lok Sabha Speaker P A Sangma is only 28 years old.
She belongs to the NCP and has won for second time from Tura in Meghalaya. She first entered the previous Lok Sabha through a by election and was re-elected this time also.
She said, “It was a very pleasant surprise. Because, I had thehonour to receive a call from the Prime Minister. He informedme that he has inducted me into his Cabinet.”
She went slow and fumbled twice, but the entire hall at Rashtrapati Bhavan erupted in applause and smiles as Agatha Sangma, the youngest Agatha Sangma, daughter of former Lok Sabha speaker P A Sangma, waits to take the oath as the youngest minister in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's cabinet. (AFP Photo)
minister in the Manmohan Singh government, took oath on Thursday.
Wearing a traditional stole and sarong in beige and white, 28-year-old Sangma folded her hands into a gentle namaste for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and United Progressive Alliance (UPA) chairperson Sonia Gandhi sitting in the front row, before taking her place beside President Prathibha Patil to take oath in Hindi.
However the mike had to be specially adjusted for the petite first-time minister.
Daughter of former Lok Sabha speaker PA Sangma, who was present at the swearing-in ceremony Thursday and looked on appreciatively as his daughter took oath, Agatha hails from Meghalaya and is a lawyer by profession.
Quite a few faces had an anticipatory look as Agatha Sangma fumbled more than once mid-sentence. However, Sonia Gandhi kept smiling throughout her oath taking, nodding appreciatively and then clapping with everyone else as Agatha completed her oath taking.
Walking back to take her seat, a number of people either folded their hands into a namaste to greet her or shook hands with the young minister.

“Foreign origin was an issue blown out of proportion. I think it has followed my father longer than it should have,” Agatha said today, soon after she came to know that Manmohan Singh had selected him for his council of ministers.
“He has never opposed the suggestion of Rahul Gandhi as Prime Minister,” Agatha added.
It was after Sangma’s statement on Sonia’s foreign origin that the former Speaker fell out with the Congress.
But Agatha’s selection has come as a lifeline for the Garo leader who was gravitating towards the NDA. Sources said it had rekindled hopes of sustaining his and his family’s political future.
Agatha said her selection was a “collective decision” of NCP leader Sharad Pawar, Manmohan and Sonia.
The youngest of four siblings in the Sangma household, she said being a minister at the Centre had “humbled” her.
Clear about her priorities, the young leader wants to “integrate the Northeast with the rest of India”. She also wants the Northeast included in educational syllabi.
“We have leaders like Togan Nengmenja (a Garo Hills hero who fought the British) whose names should be known by others,” said the lawyer-MP.
Jitin Prasada of Congress, who was the minister ofstate for steel, was the youngest minister in the previous UPAgovernment at 35 years of age.

More About ZooZoo. Making of Vodafone Ads....

The vodafone ads featured by ZooZoo characters are the biggest hit of Indian Premier League second season. Here are some funny facts about these super hit ads.....

See some of the ads first, here..



Making of ZooZoo Ads...

More Stories about ZooZoo Ads....

No, they aren’t animated characters. They are human beings who were made to wear body suits. “The design of the characters is such that one gets fooled into thinking it is animation,” shrugs Rao, which was indeed the very illusion that had to be created. “In a sense, it is ‘live’ animation!” he quips, referring to the fact that it was all shot live.

Prakash Varma, ad filmmaker, Nirvana Films, has directed the commercials, and reveals that the Zoozoos were a big challenge to create. The practical aspects of how they will move, talk, gesticulate and emote were very important. Essentially, costume design and artwork were crucial elements.

“It took me three weeks of pre-production to understand how it will work,” says Varma. There were two fabrics that were considered for the body suits, and one was rejected for it had too many wrinkles and was shiny. The wrinkles would have shown when the characters moved, thereby shattering the illusion of animation. “So we chose the more practical, thicker fabric,” Varma explains.

The production team divided the outfit into two parts: the body and the head. The body part of the outfit was stuffed with foam in some places, while the head was attached separately. To make it look bigger than a human head, a harder material called Perspex was used, which in turn was stuffed with foam (with scope for ventilation).
If one wishes to understand the size of this head, here’s a fact: a human head would typically reach up to the mouth level of this giant Zoozoo head. “We kept the hands and legs thin, which is why we cast women – and occasionally children – wearing the costumes,” says Varma. The thin limbs, contrasted with big bellies and a bulbous head, all add to the illusion that these creatures are ‘smaller’ than humans. Sets were created to suit the size of the Zoozoos.
Cinematically, this ‘size’ was a trick: the creatures look smaller than they actually are on screen, to portray a different world of sorts. For this, the speed of shooting was altered: Nirvana shot it in a high-speed format to make them look the size that they do.
Furthermore, simple sets/backdrops were created and spray painted with neutral Greys – a colour of choice so that attention isn’t diverted from the main characters. For a supposedly ‘outdoor’ shot, even the shadow of a Zoozoo was kept ‘live’ and not done in post production: it was painted in a darker shade of grey on the ground. An even lighting was maintained throughout.
There was virtually no post production work done.
The films were shot by Nirvana in Cape Town, South Africa, with the help of a local production house there, called Platypus. Incidentally, the same combination of people also worked on the ‘Happy to Help’ series last year. When asked whether Cape Town is fast becoming a tourist spot for Vodafone and Nirvana, Varma laughs, saying, “Oh no! It’s just that we are very comfortable with the team there and know what sort of work to expect from them.”
Nagpal adds here that the production cost had to be minimal for unveiling such a large number of commercials. “Otherwise, our production costs would exceed media spends,” he quips.

Major Winner and Losers of Indian Pariliamentary Election.

WINNERS
Shashi Tharoor, Congress, Kerala. Author, peacekeeper, refugee worker and human rights activist, made an unsuccessful bid to become UN secretary-general in 2006.

Mohammad Azharuddin, Congress, Uttar Pradesh. Former Indian cricket captain whose career ended under a cloud when he was accused in a match-fixing scandal.

Shatrughan Sinha, BJP, Bihar. Former Bollywood actor, famous for his action roles and popularly known as "Shotgun Sinha" in his heyday as an actor.

Chiranjeevi, Praja Rajyam, Andhra Pradesh. Star of nearly 150 Telegu language films, won a state seat on his political debut though his new party appeared to have drawn a blank at the national level.


LOSERS
Renuka Chowdhury, Congress, Andhra Pradesh. Prominent anti-poverty campaigner who has served as minister for women and child development.

Gopalswamy Vaiko, MDMK, Tamil Nadu. Party is seen as close to Tamil Tiger leader Prabhakaran, and has taken a strident line on the war that the Sri Lankan government now claims to have won.

Ram Vilas Paswan, LJP leader, Hajipur. Congress ally and minister for steel, once held the Guinness world record as the candidate who had won an election by the biggest margin.

Chetan Chauhan, BJP, Delhi. Long-time opening batsman for India's national cricket team, later became the team's manager.

The Making of ZooZoo, The Vodafone Advertisement.

Meet the Zoozoos, the stick-like figures with egg-like heads that appear in TV ads for Vodafone and have become all the rage in India.
So much so that the company’s plans to air 30 different commercials featuring the Zoozoos during the Indian Premier League’s (IPL) Twenty20 cricket series seems like a strategic masterstroke, although it is likely to come as a surprise to viewers that the ads aren’t animated—there are really people inside those Zoozoo costumes.
But this much is known: Zoozoo is definitely anthropomorphic, and was created by the creative team at Ogilvy and Mather (O&M) India.
The ads, 13 of which have been aired until now, have become popular with viewers. So much so that one of them, an ad for beauty tips over the phone, was viewed 13,000 times last week on YouTube. The Zoozoos have also taken Facebook by storm. They have nearly 35,000 friends.
That’s quite a bit more than the 1,200 and 4,000 India’s prime ministerial candidates in the ongoing elections, L.K. Advani and Manmohan Singh have respectively.
“With approximately 300 seconds of media being spent each day (on IPL), we had to figure out a way to communicate as many services as possible in a way that would not cheese off the customer,” said Harit Nagpal, director (marketing and new business) at Vodafone Essar Ltd.
Each of the 30 ads will promote a different value-added service on offer by Vodafone, from maps to stock alerts.
Several characters were drawn up and considered by executive creative director (South Asia) Rajiv Rao and his team at O&M India, before they settled in on Zoozoo.
“We were very close to what you see as the final version of Zoozoo. The only difference was that we had two options, one that looked more like Mr. Potato Head, a completely round body with thin limbs… the other, a thinner version with a big head and scrawny limbs. We picked the latter as it was easier to have head and body movements in that costume,” says Rao.
And then, in two-and-a-half months, the agency had to come up with the films, each of which is 20-30 seconds long.
“We had to shoot, edit and finish sound recording for 30 different television commercials in 10 days. The whole thing, pre-production included, took a little over a month and was shot completely in Cape Town, South Africa,” says Rao.
There were other challenges as well.
The characters, all local theatre actors, had to perform in costumes, which came with their own set of problems. Wearing an enlarged headpiece, for example, meant that all the actors were practically blind.
“They couldn’t see where they were going, so we had several funny instances where the actors would walk right out of the frame during shooting. Also, it was very difficult for them to breathe with those headpieces on, so the actors would take them off every few minutes for some air. But after the first few days, we got into the groove of things and managed just fine,” says Prakash Varma, director at Nirvana Films.
And because the shooting schedule was punishing, the film-maker had to use adult actors—all slim-built women—as opposed to children, who would have been better suited to play the part of the Zoozoos. As a result, to make the characters look tiny, all the sets and props had to be larger than life. The expressions on the faces of the Zoozoos, deliberately simplistic and limited in number, were all made in rubber and pasted onto their heads. While the change in expression and the characters could have been animated, it would have taken several years to finish 30 television commercials and come at a huge cost to the advertiser. According to Nagpal, the entire shoot cost approximately Rs3 crore.
The rising popularity of the Zoozoos can also be attributed to the platform provided by IPL, which garnered two billion eyeballs in its inaugural season last year. “There’s also the curiosity factor piquing viewers who wonder, who are the Zoozoos really? Are they alien?” says Prasanth Mohanachandran, executive director (digital) at OgilvyOne Worldwide. On the Zoozoos Facebook page, people can view new commercials, download images and wallpapers, and participate in a “What kind of Zoozoo are you?” contest. In the pipeline are a spot, titled “A day in the life of Zoozoo” on Twitter, and merchandise such as key-chains, mugs, T-shirts, and mobile phone stands.
However Mahesh Murthy, founder and chief executive officer of Pinstorm, a digital agency, sounds a word of caution. “While their media strategy to blast these ads during IPL has worked for the brand, the downside is that the characters are bigger than the story being sold. People have a limited capacity to remember features, so it may have worked to release the ads in a phased manner rather than hammer them out one after the other.”
Still, on TV, the Zoozoos have come as a breath of fresh air providing a much-needed respite from the staple diet of cricket and politics that most viewers are living on—one of the objectives of the agency and the film-maker.
“We wanted to create something unique. A character that would always be memorable… somewhat alien and yet, very human,” says Varma, who made the films. “When we started out, the idea was to ensure that no one should be watching cricket. Everyone should be talking about Zoozoo.”

A.R.Rahman Find Place in TIME Most Influencial 100 People

Oscar winning music director AR Rahman of Slumdog Millionaire fame, his Sri Lankan co-performer MIA of the hit O Saya song and Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani have made it to the Time's 100 list of the World's Most Influential People.
The new list to be published in the May 11 annual Time 100 issue is the pick of the magazine's editors and may not be confused with the popular choice in TIME.com's online poll that "just happened to be" won on Monday by "moot - the mysterious 21-year-old creator of the influential Web message board 4chan.or".
"In our annual TIME 100 issue, we do the impossible: name the people who most affect our world," said the editors as they relegated moot to the 35th position and instead chose ailing Democratic senator Edward Kennedy for the top spot.
British premier Gordon Brown makes it to the second spot, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in the eighth place, Pakistan army chief Ashfaq Kayani is sitting pretty at the 19th position, just a spot ahead of President Barack Obama.
AR Rahman, who gets the 59th position in the editors list, "won two Oscars, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA for giving Slumdog Millionaire its frenetic sound", notes Padma Lakshmi actress, author and the host of Bravo's Top Chef, in an accompanying piece. (Source: Hindutstan Times)

The content in The Times

In India, a country of a billion inhabitants, where film and pop music are one, A.R. Rahman, 43, dominates the music industry so totally that he has supplied the sound track for a whole generation. He enjoys the godlike devotion of India's youth, but everyone from the street child who sweeps train platforms to the middle-aged doctor in Mumbai's posh Malabar Hill hums his tunes.
Born in Chennai (formerly Madras) and raised on Tamil movies and music, Rahman converted to Sufism — a mystical form of Islam — in the late 1980s. It is easy to hear these influences in his work, but his genius lies in tying many forms of music together to make a sound that is at once familiar and new. He first gained widespread notice for Mani Ratnam's Tamil film Roja (1992), then branched out into Hindi films and has succeeded in making Indian film music a global phenomenon. He has worked with Andrew Lloyd Webber and with Shekhar Kapur on Elizabeth and has influenced other gifted directors like Baz Luhrmann. This year he won two Oscars, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA for giving Slumdog Millionaire its frenetic sound.
Rahman is a shy and quiet man, but his music has emotional force. Renowned for his immense range, he'll do a traditional score for a conventional film, then blend exotic vocals with Japanese music and Western classical arrangements in his next project. A veritable Pied Piper, he has no competition, yet he makes it a priority to discover new talent and promote it. He has shaped modern India's music for more than a decade. Now the "Mozart of Madras" has the world's foot tapping along with him.