Dr Abdul Kalam entering Cinema

Dr Abdul Kalam is busy with a new kind of work for the last few days. Guess .. what kind of job he might indulge himself in ?? Writing? Reciting? Meditation?? No… he is going to be seen in film. Amazing!! Yes... It’s really an amazing news that our ex President Dr Abdul Kalam is going to show his acting skill in film. Dr APJ Abdul Kalam is making the great crossover and entering cinema with a film called Mein Kalam Hoon.

Dr Kalam, an aeronautical engineer and scientist whose work on ballistic missiles and space rocket technology earned him the name ‘Missile Man of India’, has done thisHindi film with children that’s been directed by Madhav Pandeya and produced by the SMILE Foundation. The former Prez, who has always been fond of children, agreed to do the film because it gave him the opportunity to work with kids.

Its storyline is quite similar to Dr Kalam’s belief, “Everyone is free to dream, so dream big.” Bollywood baddie Gulshan Grover, who has more irons in Hollywood’s roaring fires than anybody in Bollywood, also acts in Mein Kalam Hoon with a French actress called Sophie Brosstel. And, Gulshan said, “Abdul Kalam plays himself. The story, set in Rajasthan, is about a boy who is inspired by the former President and dares to dream big.”

Browse for ebook fair

Does not it seem a good idea browsing hours for favorite books? You may be sitting with a laptop in your apartment, surfing the net in a London library, or just browsing in a Cape Town cybercafe. Yes.. you have full access to all the books there and choose from them the right one for download. – A virtual book fair offers you to visit their collections and download as many ebooks you want. You don’t need any permission. Anyone anywhere can attend this book fair. Of course, you can't run your finger over their spines or quickly scan the synopses on their back covers - these books have neither.

But a few mouse clicks is all you need to access them. For a month starting Saturday, over 2.5 million books will be available for free download at a virtual book fair - the fourth eBook Fair sponsored by a number of e-libraries including Project Gutenberg, The World Public Library and Internet Archive. The links to the collections will be worldebookfair.com.

According to Roberto Gorrieri of the World Public Library, the first three 'fairs' averaged one million downloads per day and a sizable section of the traffic was from India. ''My guess would be about 1/4 of all downloads were done from there. The most popular titles were technology related titles,'' he told TOI in an email interview. No surprise as technical books, especially the imported ones, cost a bomb.

But it is not just the techies or casual readers who download. Even humanities students have become intimately familiar with the world of e-texts. Recently, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger revealed a plan to do away with text books altogether and push for the use of ebooks in schools. For graduate students in India, there are more texts - some of them notoriously difficult to find in stores - and less time to procure them.

Sappho's poetry, prescribed in MA English course is one example; Kesari Mohan Ganguly's translation of Karnaparva, is another. Alberti's On Painting was found and circulated online. ''Etexts are much easier to access and are far cleaner than photocopies,'' says Sakshi Chopra who completed her MA in 2008. Later, for BEd, she used etexts of John Dewey's Democracy and Education and Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Nandita Dubey, a final year history student, used etexts for her dissertation on Shahjahanabad.

Gandhi documents come to Auction

An auction House in London has decided to put many documents of Mahatma Gandhi and Jowharlal Neheru to Auction. They have a lot of signed and autographed letters by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru and some documents and postcards.

A khadi cloth signed by Gandhi and said to have been woven by him will go under the hammer at an estimated price of 2,000-2,500 pounds (Rs 1.59-1.99 lakh).

The cloth was a gift from Gandhi to South African-born actress Moira Lister, who was a friend of Maharani of Jaipur Gayatri Devi.

Two autograph postcards (1,500-2,000 pounds or Rs 1.19-1.59 lakh) signed by Gandhi to Urdu poet Hamid Ullah Afsar also figure in the auction of 153 lots under the category of English Literature, History, Children's Books and Illustrations.