Here’s a message written by Nitin Shenoy, one of my fellow-volunteers on “Hasiru Usiru”:

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Please cast your vote tomorrow.

To look for your name in the voter list:

click here

Put your name (check the spelling- they are way off mark) and the pin code and it works.

In case the link doesnt work.. go to this link and search name under BBMP area.

To find your polling booth:

click here

“Instead of searching for the polling booths on the day of exercising their franchise in a hurry, he said that the voters could contact the helpline. This facility is available to all voters through out the State on a common number 155212.

For Bangalore Urban and Bangalore Rural Districts, in order to make a clear distinction, owing to the same STD code, a suffix (1) for Bangalore Urban and (2) for Bangalore Rural is attached to 155212, i.e.1552121 for Bangalore Urban and 1552122 for Bangalore Rural district.”

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It *is* we who can make a difference to the governance of this city, this State, and ultimately, our country…so do vote!

The review in two words? …the two words are…..excellent production.

Now for some more words….

At Ranga Shankara, I was in the minority on two counts: one, I was probably the only one not to have seen this production earlier at Chowdiah Memorial Hall…and more importantly, I was, very probably, the only one not to have read the book, “Five Point Someone”, earlier.

I had missed out on reading this book earlier (a slight aversion to “IIT lit”!) and took a considered decision not to read the book before seeing the play, and I think it was a good decision for me. The plot, the characters, the denouement, were all fresh and new to me.

Whatever the genre of the play, Evam produces a well-wrapped package. Sunil Vishnu came up on stage and talked about the play, mentioning that Evam had been around for four years, 14 plays, and this was the 200th performance by them. He stressed that the 50th, 150th, and now the 200th performance were all at their favourite theatre space, Ranga Shankara.

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The First City Theatre Foundation, a Delhi-based group, is staging “Mouse” and “Positions #2″ at Ranga Shankara today and tomorrow, the 5th of April, 2008, at 7.30pm.

(Publicity Design, Yashas Chandra)

Today’s show made it immediately apparent that we had a director, playwright (Neel Chaudhuri) and cast which are a force to reckon with.

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Vaishali Bisht, and her Theatre Workshop from Hyderabad, came to Ranga Shankara last week. to put up a small series of skits followed by a play of 50 minutes. Read more

Here are a few recommendations based on my interests & knowledge that according to me give the perfect Bangalore flavor. Give in yours, and add to this list. Anything & everything that you think someone from outside Bangalore or even a resident Bangalorean should see/visit/experience here. I am sure there is a lot more.
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To make your life more convenient and simple, here’s one more service that’s been launched in Bangalore city. To know more about this voice-based service, here are a few lines from the folks who have developed this technology and service.

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“Few months back a few of us got together to form Ubona with the mission to create killer application which can be used by the people of our country. This drive has prompted us to envision a new medium which will be able to comprehend human speech and trigger the action or services based on the same. We knew understanding human speech is a complex subject but the team have taken up the challenge as we wanted to follow the path where we create substantial intellectual properties as well as provide value to the humanity.

Although there are a few speech activated, limited vocabulary applications in India, the dimension of our problem is completely different, as the need is to address a very large vocabulary to comprehensively address the names of the businesses, products etc spoken by millions of people with different accents and pronunciation. With our technology developed by team Ubona, we are more or less there and we will perfect that with more and more users using our system.

The restaurant service currently launched at Bangalore is the first expression of our medium of bringing value by using the state of art, indigenous and world-class technologies. We are committed to bring more and more useful and innovative application. Finally if it works (which we are confident it will,) at some time in future people of India will just speak over his phone to get things done.

To use our first service launched for Bangaloreans on this new medium please call Ubona at (+91 80 4070 0000) and say the name of the wine and dine place you are looking for.”

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Life made simpler? You decide! Do give this new service a try and get back to the folks at Ubona with your feedback!

The picture here shows one segment of a traffic build-up from Pottery Road in Frazer Town, right up to Davis Road. That’s a long stretch, and sheer rotten to be stuck here at 10 am.

I have been living around Richards Town for the last twenty years or more, so I guess I’m qualified to provide a flash-back perspective. Looking back, what was traffic like around Richards Town / Cooke Town / Da Costa Square ?

For one thing, there was nothing like a “rush hour” in the morning. No clogging whatsoever at the “tunnel” near the police station. Going over the Mosque Road overbridge was a breeze. And the level crossing near ITC didn’t get your pressure to hit the stack. Your kids were safe on the road, old ladies didn’t need help to cross the road and auto drivers didn’t by and large miss you by a whisker if they suddenly wanted to go in another direction.
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If you’re a foodie who like to cook international cuisines, living in Bangalore can be a bit of a challenge. Finding purveyors for ingredients, spices, condiments, cooking tools, or cooking equipment can be tough. I’ve found a few resources for cooking “continental” especially Italian, “asian” including Chinese and Thai, and “american” style meat and potatoes. Details after the jump.
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Well, there are city search engines and more city search engines. Every city worth its name has one or has folks with entrepreneurial spirit unleash one.

Why the barrage of them, you ask? Well, the ‘biggie’ search engine guys have found that search engine data show many users - roughly between 5% to 30% - searching for local or geography based queries which, in turn, lead them to a buying / availing a service decision. As there is money or potential money to be made catering to these folks searching, well, you get the idea. Of course, moving onto a revenue model at the outset is tricky so things do take time.

Bangalore is no exception to these online services. There are many local search engines here - a simple type on google with “Bangalore, local, city search engines” will give you a number of them and more. Here at MB, we’ve even profiled one of them. If you’ve gotten over that one, here’s one more for you.

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