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OCTOBER 2009
 		Did you know?

India’s very own Google Earth

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has introduced a desi version of Google Earth that allows users to explore a virtual world for free in a 3D environment. Bhuvan displays pictures taken by ISRO’s seven remote sensing satellites and is capable of capturing pictures of objects as small as a car on a road. The 3D web tool provides images with 10 meter resolution based on degree of popularity. Users can view cities and towns at different angles with different perspectives, and find information related to major towns and cities of India.

The world’s tallest tower (818 m), Burj Dubai, which is still under construction, is one of the most expensive addresses in Dubai; a two-bedroom apartment on the 57th floor is available for 1 million pounds.

Flickr, the popular photo-sharing portal, tops TIME magazine’s list of the Top 50 Websites of 2009.


Bindeshwar Pathak, Indian sanitation expert and the founder of the Sulabh Sanitation Movement, was recently awarded the Stockholm Water Prize, the most prestigious environmental recognition akin to a Nobel Prize for environmental issues. For four decades, the Movement has equipped more than 1.2 million households with eco-friendly toilets and installed 7,500 public lavatories across India. Pathak developed a twin-pit, pour-flush toilet known as the ‘Sulabh’, that uses a pair of tanks to store waste matter with no smell or soil pollution, pending recycling as fertilizer. It has been exported to Afghanistan and Bhutan, and there are also plans to ship some to 15 other countries, most of them in Africa.

Most Powerful Indian Women

Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo, Congress party president Sonia Gandhi, Chanda Kochhar, CEO of ICICI Bank India and Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Chairman, Biocon India are the only Indians in Forbes annual list of the 100 most powerful women. Nooyi is listed as the third most powerful woman in the world, while Sonia Gandhi, Kochhar and Shaw are ranked 13, 20 and 91 respectively. In assembling the list, Forbes looked for women who run countries, big companies or influential non-profits. Their rankings are a combination of two scores: visibility by press mentions and the size of the organization or country these women lead.
Queen Rania of Jordan is perhaps the most listened-to woman in the Middle East; her Twitter feed has 600,000 followers.


Arjan Singh, 82, is the first and only Five Star rank officer of the Indian Air Force, holding the rank of Marshall of the Air Force. He won accolades for his handling of the IAF in the 1965 Indo-Pak war, giving India the crucial air supremacy in striking Pakistani targets. In a rare distinction for an Indian pilot, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross before India gained independence. On August 15, 1947, he led the fly-past of over a hundred IAF aircraft over the Red Fort.

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