Gandhi said the people of India always made the right choice.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said that with this verdict, the public had expressed confidence in the Congress and faith in Sonia and Rahul Gandhi. He also said that he would try to get Rahul in the Cabinet.

The Congress-led UPA is all set to retain power at the Centre putting up an impressive performance in states like Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu to overwhelm the BJP-led NDA.

The UPA alliance is ahead in 250 constituencies with Congress alone leading in 198 seats. The ruling Front is just short of a little over 20 seats for the magic figure of 272 in the 543-member Lok Sabha.

The NDA is leading in 157 seats with BJP ahead in 119 seats.

The Congress exulted over its victory saying it was a vindication of its policies while BJP spokespersons were still unwilling to concede defeat though they admitted that the UPA was ahead in early trends.

Manmohan Singh will be the first Prime Minister after Jawaharlal Nehru to return to power after a full five-year term with the Congress having nominated him as its candidate for the top post, first time it had done in its history.

The Congress performance was spectacular in Kerala where it routed the Left Front and dealt a severe blow to the Marxists in West Bengal with help from ally Trinamool Congress.

It also swept Delhi, did exceedingly well in Rajasthan, Haryana, Punjab, Uttarakhand and more than doubled its tally in UP leading in 20 of the 80 seats there.

Meanwhile, the Congress said Rahul Gandhi’s leadership of the campaign was one of the decisive factors behind the party’s good performance.

Pointers to emerging scenario:

NCP chief Sharad Pawar said a stable government was the need of the hour in these times of global recession and there should be no problem in formation of a stable government.

“People were confident that only UPA can provide a stable government and with the results and trends available so far, there should be no hindrance to formation of a stable government,” Pawar said.

He also said that his party would support Congress’s choice for PM.

BJP spokesperson Balbir Punj said the trends were “disappointing” and not on expected lines.

“Trends are not on expected lines. It is little disappointing. We concede UPA is ahead,” Punj said. He said the party’s parliamentary board would meet to analyse what went wrong.

Admitting that Congress “seems to have the upper hand”, another BJP leader Venkaiah Naidu said, “As of now UPA is leading. We are lagging behind.”

Asked what went wrong, Naidu said, “That has to be analysed. It is disappointing, I do agree”.

The CPI on the other hand ruled out supporting a Congress-led government, saying it would sit in opposition if the people’s mandate was not for forming a non-BJP, non-Congress government at the Centre.

“We are not with Congress party either at the end of the day or at beginning of the day…if the mandate is not for us to form a non-BJP non-Congress government, alright, then we will sit in the opposition,” D Raja said.

On the Left’s performance in Kerala, the CPI leader said there were certain “adverse factors” in the southern state and “we need to analyse in the coming days”.

“Facebook’s 200 million users have been targeted by hackers in the latest ‘phishing’ scam to hit the social networking website,” British daily The Telegraph has reported.

Quoting a Facebook spokesman, the report said that internet fraudsters stole the passwords of a number of members on Thursday in a successful attack.

“These brought up fake Facebook log-on pages which requested the visitors re-enter their user names and passwords. Anyone who did so effectively handed the conmen the keys to their profile,” the daily noted in a report published online on Saturday.

However, it is not clear how many accounts have been compromised.

Attributing to Facebook, the report said the social networking site was working to block those taken over by the hackers and minimize the fallout.

“All references to the fake domains — which include www.151.im, www.121.im and www.123.im - have been deleted from the website,” it added.

The Mountain View-based company blamed the trouble on a glitch that routed too much of its traffic through computers in Asia, overwhelming its system so badly that about 14 per cent of its users encountered problems with the Internet’s most popular search engine. The mistake also affected Google’s email and several other services.

The outages began about 10:48 am EDT and lasted for about an hour, according to Urs Hoelzle, Google’s senior vice president of operations.

Google’s problems rippled around the Web because other sites rely on its analytics service and also draw much of their traffic from searches done through Google.

Many Web sites took twice as long to load and were twice as likely to fail during Google’s disruption, according to Gomez Inc, which helps Internet companies manage their applications.

“We’ve been working hard to make our services ultra-fast and ‘always on,’ so it’s especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens,” Hoelzle wrote on Google’s blog. “We’re very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we’ll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won’t happen again.”

Before the repair, many people locked out from Google went elsewhere on the Internet to express their dismay and despair.

Multiple messages posted on Twitter, a popular information-sharing forum, indicated that people all over the world had trouble with the Google search engine and e-mail. But other Twitter users said their Google services have been running smoothly.

Because Google is used by hundreds of millions of people, even a breakdown affecting a small percentage of its audience can have a huge impact.
Google’s search engine, by far the most popular on the Internet, fields more than 9 billion monthly search requests in the United States alone.

As part of its effort to retain its current users and expand its market share so it can sell more Internet ads, Google has invested billions of dollars to create a vast network of computers to lessen the chances of breakdowns.

Although its search engine is renowned for its reliability, Google isn’t fail-safe. Its 5-year-old e-mail service, in particular, has been susceptible to periodic outages.

layoffs if the economic downturn dramatically worsens again.

“Presuming the economy hopefully stays as bad as it is and doesn’t get dramatically worse, we will finish our plan, but if it gets dramatically worse again, we will look at things again,” Microsoft Corporation CEO Steve Ballmer said.

The Redmond-based company had in January announced that it would axe 5,000 jobs globally amid the ongoing slowdown.

It yesterday announced slashing one per cent of its 5,500-strong Indian workforce, amounting to 55 layoffs, in a bid to realign its business in the country.

It added that it would continue to hire and create employment opportunities in line with the recovery and growth of the Indian economy. “We had said that we would lay-off about 5,000 people. We are still filling other jobs. We are mostly through that process globally and there is still some work to do,” Ballmer said.

“There are areas where we are continuing to add people. As I said, these are global additions, so it is a little hard to separate our work globally from our work in India,” he added.

Ballmer said Microsoft is the second largest foreign IT employer in India and that he doesn’t see a change in that. In the second round of job cuts effected on May 5, the software major announced it would lay off 3,000 employees. In January, Microsoft had laid off 1,350-1,400 people, largely in the US.

The Bill Gates-led firm said it would make strategic investments, which are best suited to the current economic environment.

Bachchans

I was taken aback but still couldn’t help giggling and was quite curious as to why the ink was applied to their middle finders instead of the index finger, right besides their photo, was a picture of Aamir Khan with his middle finger also inked.

I just got curious and performed a quick search only to find this article on TOI’s website

Voters will now show middle finger

That sounds absurd and watching the celebrities posing in such a fashion is tasteless indeed.

I was quite surprised, and much delighted, when I heard that I was on the list. I’m not sure I deserve to be there, but I guess my inclusion is Business Week‘s nod to the potential that blogs have for shaping public opinion, as also to the power of words in general—my columns for Mint, and otherwise, have been cited as a reason for my inclusion. I get quite cynical sometimes about the alleged power of words, and it’s nice to see that others are more optimistic. I hope they’re right.

This immense honour means that now I have to display gravitas and responsibility, and blog about serious matters that affect the nation. No more cows, no more WTFness, no more sex, no more imaginary dialogue. I’m going to be a full-on pundit now.

Ok, chill, I’m not.

*

In case you’re wondering why I come so far down the list, it’s because it is displayed by alphabetical order of last name. Heh.

*

And just take a look at Lalu’s magnificent ear hair. I don’t like his politics, but man, he is one stud machine, he is. No?

Mark Mobius, Managing Director of Templeton, also christened as emerging market guru, signaled it a few weeks back, in early March, when the world was collapsing or the world of equities was collapsing. That time he said he saw great value in emerging markets and many global equity markets may see a very good rebound.

In an exclusive interview with CNBC-TV18’s Udayan Mukherjee, Mark Mobius said that market is currently building a base for the next big bull rally, which can be clearly seen “If you look at the valuations, flows of funds, the amount of money being printed not only by the United States but also by the governments around the world. If you look at money supply — as soon as the velocity of that money increases then you will have a bull market in a big way,” Mobius said, adding that he sees a retest of the lows seen in October but those lows won’t be broken.

The worst for the markets is over, Mobius said. “The money supply is increasing in a fast pace, inflation is coming down and with that interest rates are coming down as well. All of these factors have a hand to play in pushing stock market prices up.”

Sounding upbeat on the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) universe, Mobius said China is growing at an incredible pace and hence in terms of opportunities, that country stands at Number 1. The Number 2 spot, of course, belong to India which is expected to record a growth of 4-5%. Since both these countries have a population of over a billion people, the growth will include rising per capita income as well as a surge in consumption pattern.

At 30, he understood the problem with Nehru’s economic model. At 59, he got the chance to set it right, and he did.

This is flat-out wrong. In the little I’ve read of his writings and speeches before 1991, Singh doesn’t say a word against against Nehru’s economic policies, and in fact seems to support the Fabian Socialist framework he built. I have the transcript of a seminar on price controls that was held in the early 80s, and Singh, in his speech, speaks just like a Nehruvian apparatchik. His reputation as a reformer came after 1991.

And the reforms of 1991 came about not because of the inner conviction of Singh or Narasimha Rao, but because there was simply no choice. We faced a severe balance-of-payments crisis, and the IMF loan we needed to save the country was conditional on reforms being carried out. And so they were, and worked wonderfully well. However, once that crisis passed, the pace of reforms slowed.

In his years as PM, Singh has carried out very few reforms. This is not entirely his fault: the government depended on the support of the Left for much of this time, and they blocked many of the reforms that we need. But he also supported schemes that Nehru and Indira would have been proud of, such as the NREGA—though one could argue that this was Sonia Gandhi’s baby, and he didn’t have an option. Regardless, nothing he has done in these last five years justifies his reputation as a reformer.

That said, I obviously support Singh over Advani as PM: the divisive politics of the BJP is a deal-breaker for me, though this is a matter of degree, as the nature of Indian politics dictates than any party that wishes to do well must be divisive. Such it is.

The Chavans aren’t expressing their inner feelings here—they’re showing us that they have voted. The election commission has mandated that in these elections, indelible ink is to be applied to the middle finger of every voter. So if your sleazy neighbourhood politician accosts you in the street and asks you if you voted for him, show him the finger.

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the pre-empting of any original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.

Actually, we lived in a world of fictions even before all the things Ballard mentions came about—for how we see the world and ourselves, and the narratives we construct to make sense of everything, are also fictions of a kind. But yes, many more subplots are formed and crystallized by the media around us—not that it helps us make better sense of things.

It’s all such a mess that if God existed and was a writer, and sent Her work to a publisher, She’d get a rejection straight away. Or Her publisher would send Her a note: “Manuscript accepted. Much editing needed. Editor on way.”

And then a man in a black hat and overcoat would step up and say, “Hey, we meet again. Remember me? Lucifer. We dated once. I’m your editor for this book. Let’s cut your work down to size, shall we? To begin with, we need to get rid of those 100 million blogs you’ve put in there. Major excess, Girl, pure self indulgence.”