Friday, October 13, 2006

Indian search engine launched

India’s first local Internet search engine, http://www.guruji.com/ was launched yesterday, 12th October 2006 in Bangalore.

Guruji.com is the first crawler based search engine for India and India related content. Two young entrepreneurs, Anurag Dod and Gaurav Mishra, ex-IIT Delhi alumni with significant Internet and search experience have started guruji.com, after Sequoia Capital India provided seed funding to the venture.

Anurag Dod, co-founder and CEO, guruji.com said, "guruji.com is the result of the feeling that there is a need for an Indian search engine which can help our people and people who visit our country find what they are looking for. The search is more specific here. What sets us apart is our focus on the Indian market and the Indian consumer. We have worked very hard to build the best local search product in the market."

Gaurav Mishra, co-founder and coo, guruji.com explains, "90% of Internet search queries are local in nature, and guruji.com will deliver better search results than anyother search engine in these instances. For example, if a user types a search "Pizzain Koramangala, Bangalore " or "Chinese restaurant Juhu, Mumbai" the user will beable to see local business listings as well as articles, reviews, blogs, or any other web references."

Guruji currently has the data for the following cities: Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Indore, Noida, Mysore, Ludhiana, Mangalore, Vadodara.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Shantaram

"I was a revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime, and a poet who lost his soul in a maximum-security prison," says Lin, in this fictionalised account of the author, Gregory David Robert's life.

The narrator, Lin, is an escaped convict from an Australian jail. He arrives in Bombay, India with a fake New Zealand passport. He immediately meets a taxi driver named Prabaker who gives him tours of the city and a hut in the local slum. Lin starts a free clinic for the people in the slum, and to provide for his own income sells drugs to tourists. This gets him the attention of the local mafia, and he's increasingly pulled into their world of crime- from counterfeiting to gun running to passport schemes. And as a gunrunner he resupplied a unit of mujaheddin guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan.

The story of "Shantaram" is the story of Roberts's own life. He really did break out of a maximum-security prison in Australia, travel the world, become fluent in several Indian dialects, get captured and returned to jail, only to be victimized by sadistic prison guards who twice destroyed the first 300 pages of his manuscript.

I like this novel because of the originality in Robert's writing and some of his philisophies he propound in his book.

The rights of the film has been sold to Johny Depp and he is set to star in the film which will be released in 2008.