Take a chill swill

The monsoons are here, and it is cooler, yet Srikanta Taparia continues to be flooded with demands for her sharbats. While home-made sharbats are no novelty, her flavours are. The usual suspects include orange, pineapple, aam panna, kesar, rose, badam, thandai and badam-kesar. The off-beat ones are mogra, chandan, jamun, juhi, phalsa, lemon ice tea and cold coffee. Taparia uses fruits, flowers and spices to revive old flavours and create new ones.

Thanda thanda cool cool
The speciality of her sharbats is the absence of colour or preservative that bring in a synthetic taste. These sharbats also have ingredients with therapeutic value. The jamun sharbat is good for diabetics, the variyali or saunf for indigestion and chandan cools the body. However, much depends on the availability, quality and price of the raw ingredients. She laments on the quality of juhi flowers, rues the unavailability of chandan and sighs over the high prices of phalsa.

Dadi ma ke nuskhe
Taparia prepares her sharbats using her grandmother’s recipes. She says, “I grew up in Kolkata where humidity levels are high. So sharbats are always welcome.” Taparia has been making sharbats for almost 35 years. But it was only six to seven years ago that she started taking orders. Though she employs help, she insists on concocting the sharbats herself. She says, “It’s my hand that makes all the difference. Also, while making sharbats it’s important to get the proportions right.” A bottle of fruit or flower- flavoured sharbat is priced between Rs 110 and Rs 140. The ones with badam, kesar, chandan are priced slightly higher.

Lahiri's new book is NYT's bestseller

Indian American Jhumpa Lahiri's new book Unaccustomed Earth, which has been receiving rave reviews in the US press, has zoomed to the top in the list of best-selling fiction within two weeks of its April 1 launch.

The book, New York-based Lahiri's second collection of short stories, debuts at No. 1 slot in the list to appear in the Times on April 20, a paper's blog said Thursday.

"It's hard to remember the last genuinely serious, well-written work of fiction - particularly a book of stories - that leapt straight to No. 1; it's a powerful demonstration of Lahiri's newfound commercial clout," the blog Paper Cut said.

Lahiri's first collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. But she is better known for her novel, The Namesake, which was turned into a movie last year by Mira Nair, starring Tabu and Irfan Khan.

Major US papers have promptly reviewed Unaccustomed Earth, a collection of eight stories. The New York Times Book Review featured the book on the cover Sunday.

USA Today wrote about the book: "Immigrants may be the stories' protagonists, but their doubts, insecurities, losses and heartbreaks belong to all of us. Never before has Lahiri mined so perfectly the secrets of the human heart."

The gushing review continued, "In part, Lahiri's gift to the reader is gorgeous prose that bestows greatness on life's mundane events and activities. But it is her exploration of lost love and lost loved ones that gives her stories an emotional exactitude few writers could ever hope to match."

Publishers Weekly said, "Lahiri's stories of exile, identity, disappointment and maturation evince a spare and subtle mastery that has few contemporary equals."

Interestingly, Lahiri, of Bengali descent, who is on a month long US tour to promote her book, has hardly looked at the reviews for her new book.

"I feel like I should be more hardened at this point, but in a way I feel more vulnerable. With this book I decided not to look at anything at all. Perhaps in the future I'll ask my editor or someone to show me a few reviews that she thinks could really benefit me somehow," she told The Atlantic

India is empowered by its human values: Kalam

Former president A P J Abdul Kalam wishes he were a soldier in the 1857 war of independence and could fight for the country's independence.
Overwhelmed while paying tributes to martyrs at the Shaheed Smarak during his visit to Meerut on Tuesday, the 'missile man' mentioned how he wished to be a part of the nation's struggle for freedom.
"The youth of India realise as to how India attained the independence, how daring it was, and what kind of leadership was required, all the problems facing the nation will be solved," he said.
Kalam also visited an exhibition of photographs on the role of beggars and saints in the freedom struggle.
Later talking to reporters, Kalam said India's human values can help it tide over all the crisis.
"India's struggle for independence was based on humanity. China can never be an obstacle to us since its atomic power can never overcome our human values," he said.
During a function held at the Meerut Institute of Engineering and Technology, the former president met several school students who amused him with posers on how he started his career as a scientist and what India lacks to be an "advanced" nation.
Advising the teachers to hone the talents of children, Kalam said, "Whatever I have achieved in life is the result of my teachers' hard labour."

World Wide Telescope (www.worldwidetelescope.com)

Possibly the best piece of software that Microsoft has published in ages, WorldWide Telescope lets users explore the universe with impressive content from the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, and other famed ground- and space-based telescopes. Colorful nebulae, distant galaxies, black holes, and radiation clouds are all accessible from your desktop with a few clicks.

What is WWT? The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a Web 2.0 visualization software environment that enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe.

Choose from a growing number of guided tours of the sky by astronomers and educators from some of the most famous observatories and planetariums in the country. Feel free at any time to pause the tour, explore on your own (with multiple information sources for objects at your fingertips), and rejoin the tour where you left off. Join Harvard Astronomer Alyssa Goodman on a journey showing how dust in the Milky Way Galaxy condenses into stars and planets. Take a tour with University of Chicago Cosmologist Mike Gladders two billion years into the past to see a gravitational lens bending the light from galaxies allowing you to see billions more years into the past.

WorldWide Telescope is created with the Microsoft® high performance Visual Experience Engine™ and allows seamless panning and zooming around the night sky, planets, and image environments. View the sky from multiple wavelengths: See the x-ray view of the sky and zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then crossfade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago. Switch to the Hydrogen Alpha view to see the distribution and illumination of massive primordial hydrogen cloud structures lit up by the high energy radiation coming from nearby stars in the Milky Way. These are just two of many different ways to reveal the hidden structures in the universe with the WorldWide Telescope. Seamlessly pan and zoom from aerial views of the Moon and selected planets, as well as see their precise positions in the sky from any location on Earth and any time in the past or future with the Microsoft Visual Experience Engine.

WWT is a single rich application portal that blends terabytes of images, information, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a seamless, immersive, rich media experience. Kids of all ages will feel empowered to explore and understand the universe with its simple and powerful user interface.

Microsoft Research is dedicating WorldWide Telescope to the memory of Jim Gray and is releasing WWT as a free resource to the astronomy and education communities with the hope that it will inspire and empower people to explore and understand the universe like never before.

How do you start exploring? Click the top of the Guided Tours tab and then click the Welcome thumbnail to watch a guided tour showing you how to navigate in WWT. Or click a link to read more: WWT in Depth