Australian open 2009 Mixed Doubles champions

Mahesh Bhupathi and Sania Mirza created history, by winning the Australian Open Mixed Doubles title. While it was Bhupathi's 11th Grand Slam title, Sania won the Grand Slam title for the first time. Sania Mirza also became the first Indian woman to win a Grand Slam title at the senior level.

Bhupathi and Sania beat Natalie Dechy (France) and Andy Ram (Israel) in straight sets 6-3, 6-1. The Sania-Bhupathi duo had entered the finals at the Australian Open last year too, but they were beaten in the final.

Mahesh Bhupathi has won 7 Mixed Doubles Grand Slam titles and 4 Doubles Grand Slam titles so far. After winning the Australian Open Mixed Doubles title, Bhupathi thanked all countrymen for their support.

Sania Mirza and Mahesh Bhupathi of India pose with the championship trophy after winning their mixed doubles final .

Australian Open Tennis 2009 Mixed doubles Final champions Photos
N.Dechy / A.Ram 3 1
S.Mirza / M.Bhupathi 6 6
Nathalie Dechy of France and Andy Ram of Israel pose with their trophies after their mixed doubles final match against Sania Mirza and Mahesh Bhupathi of India.

Happy Republic Day

Top10 people created and perfected internet

Google, ICQ, YouTube, Facebook, e-gold, Wikipedia…. Everyone knows these words. Today Internet covers most spheres of our life. We can not imagine what our world would look like if there was not Internet… People created Internet and perfected it, who are they? Who are those heroes who have changed our world and our consciousness completely? Who will remain on the pages of the world history? Here are some facts regarding people whose significant work lets us use all the conveniences and achievements of the World Wide Web today.

The originator of the World Wide Web was Tim Berners-Lee, a famous British computer scientist. He implemented the first successful communication between an HTTP client and server through the Internet. He was the first in the world who invented a web-site. So he appeared to be a person who gave people from the whole world perfect way of communication. During he was working for CERN he created the first Web site that was first put online on August, 6, 1991. It provided an explanation about what the World Wide Web was how one could own a browser and how to set up a Web server. It was also the world's first Web directory, since Berners-Lee maintained a list of other Websites apart from his own. Now Berners-Lee is the head of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web's continued development, the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation. He was ranked Joint First alongside Albert Hofmann in The Telegraph's list of 100 greatest living geniuses.

Google. For most of the Internet users it sounds like a synonym to the Web, and it’s not a surprise that for a great number of them www.google.com has become a home page. This world wide search system was founded by Sergey Brin in co-operation with Larry Page during their study at Stanford University. Having combined their ideas, they filled their dormitory room with cheap computers and tested their new search engine designs on the web. Their project grew quickly enough and they implemented google.stanford.edu on the Stanford University website. And then in 1997 domain google.com was registered. These two guys were together ranked #1 of the “50 Most Important People on the Web” by PC World Magazine.

The Facebook, is a popular, free-access social networking website, where users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profile to notify friends about themselves. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 while he was a student at Harvard University. Website membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 150 million active users worldwide.

YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. Three ex- PayPal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, created YouTube in February 2005. In November 2006, YouTube, LLC was bought by Google Inc. for US$1.65 billion, and is now operated as a subsidiary of Google.

Many small businesses in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, now operate as "digital currency exchangers", doing nothing other than buying and selling digital gold currency for national currencies which are not backed by hard assets. In 1996 Dr. Douglas Jackson founded a completely new system of the electronic currency, which allowed the instant transfer of gold ownership between users e-gold. Now the number of e-gold accounts (as claimed by e-gold) grew from 1 million in November 2003 to 3 million in 2006. As of July 2008, the company reports more than 5 million accounts.

LiveJournal (often abbreviated LJ) is a virtual community where the Internet users can keep a blog, journal or diary. LiveJournal was started in March 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. In January 2005, blogging software company Six Apart has purchased Danga Interactive, the company that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick.

eBay Inc., an American Internet company, is an online auction and shopping website on which people and businesses buy and sell goods and services worldwide. It was founded as AuctionWeb in San Jose, California, on September 3, 1995, by French-born Iranian computer programmer Pierre Omidyar as part of a larger personal site that included, among other things, Omidyar's own tongue-in-cheek tribute to the Ebola virus.

Second Life (abbreviated as SL) is a virtual world developed by Linden Lab that launched on June 23, 2003 and is accessible through the Internet. A free client program called the Second Life Viewer enables its users, called Residents, to interact with each other through avatars. Linden Lab was founded in 1999 by Philip Rosedale. His initial focus was on the development of hardware that would enable computer users to be fully immersed in a three hundred and sixty degree virtual world experience.

Talking about Internet we cannot miss the most famous message system that connects people wherever they get Internet access ICQ. It was first established by five Israelis: Yair Goldfinger, Sefi Vigiser, Amnon Amir, Arik Vardi, and his father Yossi Vardi (the Israeli company Mirabilis, now owned by Time Warner's AOL subsidiary). They recognized that many people were online accessing the Internet through a non-UNIX operating system, and that there was no software that enabled an immediate connection between them. Today ICQ is used by over 31 million users worldwide.

And almost everyone knows the web encyclopedia where people from all the countries, speaking different languages are able to find all the kinds of information they are interested in. That is Wikipedia launched by Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales an American Internet entrepreneur in 2001. Nowadays it contains 12 million articles and 2.7 million of them are in English). Jimmy Wales’ work with Wikipedia, which has become the world's largest encyclopedia, prompted Time magazine to name him in its 2006 list of the world's most influential people.

Those are the people who made the major contribution in the creation and development of the Internet. That’s why they undoubtedly pretend to be named the ‘heroes' of the World Wide Space. They let people from the whole world connect with each other easily, find all the sorts of information quickly, even sell and purchase, exchange currency, transfer money from one country to another just in seconds! Well, we can endlessly enumerate all the privileges we got owing to the Internet, which has appeared and developed only thanks to these guys. Together and separately they have changed our world completely as well as our consciousness. Moreover involving more and more gifted people in this process, they still continue development and improvement of World Wide Web for the shake of science and people all over. And today Internet, an unlimited source of information, connecting people from different parts of the world, and we can not imagine our life without it. Moreover its significance is still growing, every day, every hour…

Slum dog Composer.

The soaring "Slumdog Millionaire" soundtrack's three Oscar nominations and Golden Globe award marked many Americans' first exposure to the music of A.R. Rahman. But in his native India, the composer has been a national treasure for years.

The 43-year-old composer has been winning awards since he burst on the Bollywood music scene in the early '90s - blending styles rarely seen in mainstream Indian cinema.

Rahman has composed music for more than 130 Indian films, incorporating jazz, rock, Indian pop and Western classical music.

"He changed the entire concept of Indian film music," said Subir Malik, another well-known Indian musician who described Rahman as "a very, very experimental guy."

"He does crazy things and they still sound good. He manages to fit in the most unusual chord structures into mainstream Bollywood songs," Malik said.

Rahman, who has a degree in Western classical music from the Trinity College of Music in London, experimented with reggae in his debut film, "Roja."

His first taste of international recognition came in 2001 when British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber invited Rahman to compose the score for "Bombay Dreams." Rahman also composed music for the stage adaptation of "Lord Of The Rings" that premiered in Canada in 2006 and London in 2007, but he remained relatively unknown in the United States.

That changed when he won the Golden Globe this month for best original soundtrack for Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire." Then last week he was nominated for three Oscars - best original score and two in the best original song section.

The film tells the story of Jamal Malik, a poor youth who becomes the champion of India's "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" television program as he searches for his lost love. Rahman's catchy music seems to mirror the unyielding spirit of the Mumbai slums where the film is set.

The two Oscar-nominated songs follow his tradition of mixing globe-spanning styles. "Jai Ho" blends classic Indian pop with electronica and Brazilian-inspired drums. "O Saya" features eclectic British sensation M.I.A., who co-wrote the song with Rahman.

Rahman did not attend the Mumbai premiere of "Slumdog Millionaire." He was already busy working on his next movie in his hometown, the southern Indian city of Chennai.

The composer, who is known to be somewhat withdrawn, posted a note on his Web site thanking fans for their "unconditional love, good wishes, support and for believing in me throughout."

"It is an amazing moment," he told The Hindu newspaper after the Oscar nominations were announced Thursday.

Only two Indians have won at the Oscars so far - costume designer Bhanu Athaiya won for "Gandhi" in 1982 and noted filmmaker Satyajit Ray was honored with a lifetime achievement award in 1992.

Born into a Hindu family in 1966, Rahman was named Dileep Kumar, but as a 21-year-old he converted to Sufism, a mystical form of Islam. He changed his name to Allah Rakha Rahman, according to a recent article in Tehelka, an English language news magazine.

He told the magazine his conversion "was a long process. I was really intrigued by the Sufi thing and had gone very deeply into it, putting aside three hours every day to learn Arabic. I was drawn to Sufism because they have no regulation, no rules, no distinction between Hindu and Muslim."

As a musician, Rahman started as a keyboard player with several music composers before coming into his own, composing ad jingles and scores for television shows.

In 1991, he was offered "Roja," a film by one of India's best known directors, Mani Ratnam.

Rahman has gone on to sell more than 100 million albums. Indian films are almost entirely musicals, and he has composed for films in a slew of languages.

The Oscar nomination, his fans in India believe, will carry his sound to the rest of the world.

"We've always known that he's world class," said Supratik Sen, a Mumbai-based filmmaker. "Now the world is going to know as well."

As a result of the world's Obama-mania, the president and his family have graced many a celebrity magazine cover since the election. From what Michelle wears to what gadgets Sasha and Malia are spotted with, at times it's verged on as much coverage as gossip staples like Lindsay or Britney. Now that the inauguration is over, things just might calm down as they settle into a routine and the president gets to work. Do you like still like seeing the Obamas on magazine covers?