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CHENNAI: Accusing Karnataka of not ensuring the flows in the Cauvery River as per the prescribed monthly pattern, Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa on Saturday urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to convene a meeting of the Cauvery River Authority to sort out the issue. She warned that the Tamil Nadu farmers would soon face a distress situation because of inadequate water flows into the state.

“Karnataka is not ensuring the flows in the Cauvery as per the monthly pattern prescribed in the interim order in force or as per the final order of the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal in the crucial months of June to September”, the chief minister said in a letter to the PM.

Jayalalithaa charged Karnataka with unjustly utilising the water for summer irrigation from February to May by depleting the storage in its four major reservoirs. The combined gross storage in the four reservoirs as on February, 1, 2012 was 58.50 tmcft. While on May 14, the combined storage was 28.176 tmcft, Karnataka has depleted 30.33 tmcft from February 1 to May 14, besides utilising the flows of about 11 tmcft”, she claimed. “Thus, the total utilisation from February 1 is 41 tmcft,” she said.

Due to depletion of storage during summer months, Karnataka impounds all the initial monsoon flows in its reservoirs and releases water only when they start to surplus, thus affecting the inflows into the Mettur Dam in Tamil Nadu, which consequently affects the crop seasons very badly and also delays the cultivation, Jayalalithaa said, justifying her call for a meeting of the Cauvery Authority, headed by the PM.

“As you are aware, the finalisation of the distress sharing formula evolved by the Central Water Commission is eluding a solution. This has ultimately deprived Tamil Nadu of adequate water which should have been released by Karnataka either as per the interim order of the Tribunal or by the formula evolved”, she said. The Cauvery Monitoring Committee in its 24th meeting had decided to refer the formula to the Cauvery River Authority for consideration when noticeable distress condition occurs in future.

“Such a distress situation may arise at any time”, she said. Moreover, the interim order by the Cauvery Water disputes Tribunal, which is in force, specifies that Karnataka shall not increase its area under irrigation beyond 11.20 lakh acres. But Karnataka was not furnishing year wise details of the area under irrigation, she said.

Jayalalithaa also reminded Singh that in an earlier letter to him in October last year, she had requested that he issue instructions to the Ministry of Water Resources to notify the Final Order of the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal, passed in February 2007, in the Gazette of India. “However, the Minister of Water Resources informed me it would be appropriate to consider notification of the order once the matter is disposed of by the Supreme Court.”

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KOLKATA: West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Friday lost her cool and stormed out of an interactive TV session here when members of audience asked her about the arrest of a professor for forwarding a cartoon lampooning her.

“It is not a cartoon. We love the cartoon. Cartoon is a different thing. He is a CPI-M man, He misused the e-mail of his society people without their consent. He forwarded it to 60 people,” Banerjee said angrily when a student from Jadavpur University asked her about the arrest of Prof Ambikesh Mahapatra.

Claiming that the professor was not an intellectual, but a “CPM agent”, she told the moderator that “after election CPM had sent thousands of CDs, if you are a woman and if you see them, you will feel ashamed. CPM and Maoists are working together.”

” … The message in the cartoon which contained the word ‘vanish’ is a murder conspiracy and a plot supported by CPM. What he has done is a cyber crime. It is not a cartoon, it is a political conspiracy to murder me,” Banerjee claimed.

Stating that her government believed in democracy, she said, “Otherwise, he (Ambikesh) should have been in custody. He has done a wrong thing. He misused the e-mail. I know that Maoist people and CPM are putting up these questions,” the chief minister told an interactive session organised by news channel CNN-IBN.

When a girl from Jadavpur University rose to ask a question, Banerjee asked “Why (students from) other universities are not here? There are so many universities. You tell me why, What about the others.

“Are you a Maoist?” Banerjee asked the girl. The student shot back, “I am not a Maoist.” When the moderator referred to crime against women in the state, Banerjee dismissively said, “no crime. No crime against women.”

Told by a questioner that she had supported the Maoists at the national level in an apparent reference to her statement that the killing of Cherukuri Rajkumar alias Azad was “not correct”, the chief minister replied, “we did not support the Maoists. This is wrong.”

To an another question, Banerjee said, “we don’t support the Maoists. There are so many things and other issues to ask. What is this nonsense going on? Maoists people are here. They are Maoist students. I cannot answer the Maoists’ questions and CPM questions.

“They are the CPM cadres. I am not going to reply. I will give reply to questions from common people. I am sorry to say you belong to CPM. You are SFI cadres. We know all of you,” a furious Banerjee told the audience.

“You did not tell me before,” she told the moderator before making her exit.

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NEW YORK: After all the hype, Facebook’s first day as a public company ended where it began. Its stock closed at $38.23, up 23 cents, after pricing Thursday night at $38 per share.

After an anxiety-filled half-hour delay, its stock began trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market for the first time as investors were finally able to put a dollar value on the company that turned online social networking into a global cultural phenomenon.

The stock opened at 11:32 a.m. at $42.05, but soon dipped to $38.01. By noon, it was up again at $40.40, a 6 percent increase. It fluttered throughout the afternoon, but it never hit the double-digit jump that many Facebook-watchers had expected. By the end of the day, more than 500 million shares had changed hands

The closing price means Facebook is worth about $105 billion, more than Amazon.com, McDonalds and storied Silicon Valley icons Hewlett-Packard and Cisco.

But as many people looked for a big first-day pop in Facebook’s share price, the single-digit increase was somewhat of a letdown.

“It wasn’t quite as exciting as it could have been,”said Nick Einhorn, an analyst with IPO advisory firm Renaissance Capital. “But I don’t think we should view it as a failure.”

Indeed, the small jump in price could be seen as an indication that Facebook and the investment banks that arranged the initial public offering priced the stock in an appropriate range. It’s also a supply and demand issue. Facebook offered nearly 20 percent of its available stock in the IPO, so there was enough to meet demand. In comparison, Google offered just 7.2 percent of its stock when it went public in 2004 and rose 18 percent on day one.

To IPO desktop’s Francis Gaskins, it means mom-and-pop investors are becoming “much more educated and careful”about not buying into hype. And he said that the banks taking Facebook public have learned from the 10 IPOs of social media companies in the past year and are better able to gauge how much stock to make available in an initial offering.

It might not have been possible for the social network to live up to the hype that led up to its IPO. It’s Facebook, after all, a place where people are emotionally invested in endless online diversions and rekindled friendships, an endless depository of baby photos, favorite songs and fleeting memories.

“It’s probably one of the first times there has been an IPO where everyone sort of has a stake in the outcome,”said Gartner analyst Brian Blau. While most Facebook users won’t see a penny from the offering, they are all intimately familiar with the company.

Earlier Friday, the company’s 28-year-old CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, smiled as he rang the opening bell from Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California Surrounded by cheering Facebook employees and wearing his signature hoodie, he pushed the button that signals the opening of the stock market in New York. The morning’s events followed an all-night “hackathon”at the company, where engineers stayed up coding software and conjuring up new ideas for Facebook and its 900 million users.

“Right now this all seems like a big deal. Going public is an important milestone in our history. But here’s the thing, our mission isn’t to be a public company. Our mission is to make the world more open and connected,”Zuckerberg said. “In the past eight years, all of you out there have built the largest community in the history of the world. You’ve done amazing things that we never would have dreamed of and I can’t wait to see what you guys all do going forward.”

Afterward, employees tried to get back to business as usual, building the company under immense new pressure to meet shareholders’ expectations. To remind everyone not to get caught up in the hoopla, Facebook’s employees were given t-shirts that read “Stay focused keep hacking.”

On Thursday, Facebook and the investment bankers settled on a price of $38 per share. The company and its early investors raised $16 billion in the offering, which valued Facebook at $104 billion. That makes Facebook the most valuable U.S. company to ever go public.

Now, the stock market will begin assigning a dollar value to Facebook that will rise and fall with investor whims. It will be subject to broad economic forces and held accountable for profit it earns, or loses, from one quarter to the next.

But Facebook is one a rare companies whose IPO transcends Wall Street’s money lust. It is a cultural touchstone for the way technology reshapes our lives. Since its start as a scrappy network for college students, Facebook has come to define social networking by getting people around the world to share everything from photos of their pets to their deepest thoughts.

It has done so while becoming one of the few profitable Internet companies to go public recently. It had net income of $205 million in the first three months of 2012, on revenue of $1.06 billion. In all of 2011, it earned $1 billion, up from $606 million a year earlier. That’s a far cry from 2007, when it posted a net loss of $138 million and revenue of $153 million. The company makes most of its money from advertising. It also takes a cut from the money people spend on virtual items in Facebook games such as “FarmVille.”

Facebook’s public debut marks a new milestone in the history of the Internet. In 1995, Netscape Communications’ IPO gave people their first chance to invest in a company whose graphical Web browser made the Internet more engaging and easier to navigate. Its hotly anticipated IPO lit the fuse that ignited the dot-com boom. That explosion of entrepreneurial activity and investment culminated five years later in a devastating bust that obliterated the notion that the Internet had hatched a “new economy”.

It took Google’s IPO in 2004 to prove that an Internet company with a disruptive idea could be profitable. In the process, the Internet search leader is forcing other industries to adapt to a new order where people have come to expect to be able to find just about anything they want by entering a few words into a box on any device with an Internet connection.

Facebook’s IPO heralds a new phase of the Internet’s evolution. This social era makes connections among people as important as Google’s massive index of Web links. Still, the IPO will raise new pressures for Facebook to generate more revenue, perhaps by digging further into the trove of revealing information that people share on the network to sell even more targeted ads.

The IPO almost certainly will enrich other up-and-coming entrepreneurs as Zuckerberg uses the company’s cash and stock to buy other startups in an effort to being in other talented engineers and promising technology. That’s what has been doing for years. Since it went public in 2004, Google has spent $10.2 billion buying nearly 200 other companies. Those figures don’t include Google’s still-pending $12.5 billion acquisition of cellphone maker Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc., which is still awaiting regulatory approval in China.

Zuckerberg’s biggest deal so far came when he agreed to buy Instagram, a maker of a popular mobile app for photos, for $1 billion. Because most of the deal is being paid for in stock, Instagram is already getting richer. Based on the $38 price for Facebook’s stock, Instagram is in line to receive nearly $1.2 billion.

Though Zuckerberg rang the Nasdaq opening bell from California, people outside the stock market in Times Square snapped photos of a big blue Facebook sign that lit up the building. Some of them used their smart phones to check in to the Nasdaq on Facebook. Frederick Nolde, who was visiting from Richmond, Virginia, said he bought 100 shares through the online brokerage eTrade.

He thinks the company is worth $100 billion. “I think Google is a good comparison and it’s worth $200 to 300 billion. The real question is how they do in mobile. If they can figure that out they’ll do well.”

In Menlo Park, some mourned the one that got away. Venture capitalist Mark Siegel visited Facebook’s headquarters to ponder. Like many of his fellow tech startup investors with offices a short drive from Facebook on Silicon Valley’s famed Sand Hill Road, Siegel said he had chances to back Facebook early on but didn’t.

He said at the time, when competing social networks like Friendster and MySpace still had clout, it wasn’t clear that Facebook would come out on top.

“In hindsight, any price would have been a good price to pay,”said Siegel, a managing director at Menlo Ventures.

There’s still time. Bruno del Ama, the CEO of asset management firm Global X Funds, is waiting until Thursday, to get in on Facebook.

“On the first day you see a tremendous amount of volatility,”he said. In three days, short-sellers will be able to sell the stock, he added, so by day five, investors should see more stability. Global X has a fund focused on social media stocks, and del Ama expects “significant growth”in the sector in the coming decade. Facebook, right now, is the crown jewel of the space. And it’s likely here to stay, by virtue of its position.

“Once companies have built a network, it’s really difficult to displace them,”del Ama said, adding that while massive companies such as Google are trying to compete with Facebook, and may have better technology, “we care about where our friends are.”

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MUMBAI: Each year boys max out seats at the Indian Institutes of Technology. But the count of girls who secured JEE ranks has doubled to 2,886 since the last edition of the exam. Yet, the tech schools will on another front continue to be an unequal world: students from the IIT-Bombay zone (home to Kota) dominate the list of selected candidates. But the southern zone has bagged the credit for having eight of the top 20 rankers, most from Andhra Pradesh.

B-town boys have bagged the top ranks: Faridabad’s Arpit Agrawal topped the JEE with a score of 385 (out of 401); he is followed by Chandigarh’s Bijoy Singh Kochar and Bhilai’s Nishanth Koushik.

Priya Inala–all-India rank (AIR) 21–from AP is the girls’ topper. Science is this Asian Physics Olympiad gold medallist’s first love. She is joined by two other girls in the top 100. This year, 1.5 lakh girls took the JEE free of cost. Clearly, the plan to not charge them worked: the headcount of successful girls is exactly double of last year’s 1,443.

Three boys tied at the score of 369: Jaipur’s Nishit Agrawal (AIR 6; Bombay zone topper), Anant Gupta (AIR 7; Roorkee zone) and Kandivli’s Manik Dhar (AIR 8; Maharashtra topper). Competition was compounded by the fact that JEE 2012 was tougher than its predecessor. “The cut-off has dropped to 172. Last time, it was 229. The difficulty level has indeed gone up,” said Avinash Mahajan, IIT-Bombay’s JEE chairman.

An analysis of the top 100 students shows that 31 hail from the western zone and 38 from the Madras zone. The Bombay zone also has the highest number of candidates in the top 1,000–294. Of all the seven zones (prepared on the basis of the old IITs), the western region saw the largest pool of students who qualified–4,239. Of these, 491 are girls. As many as 73,351 candidates took the test from this zone.

The Madras zone, from where 71,981 candidates sat for the JEE, will send 3,666 candidates to the 15 tech schools.

Closer home, only 599 of the 4,696 students who sat for JEE from Mumbai qualified; of the 22,331 who appeared for the exam from Maharashtra, 1,796 made it.

Out of 33,057 candidates from Jaipur, many of whom prepared from coaching centres in Kota, 2,677 made the cut. A total of 4.8 lakh candidates appeared for JEE. Of them, 17,462 have been short-listed for the counselling process for admission to the IITs. But 24,112 have secured ranks and can join other colleges that accept JEE scores.

JEE chairman G D Reddy said that across India, the report card of reserved category students had improved. “There will not be any preparatory programme for SC/ST students this year. Only 124 students from the physically challenged category have been short-listed for the preparatory programme.”

Of the 4,805 OBC candidates who qualified, 1,625 made it to the common merit list. Of the 3,464 SC and 654 ST students who qualified, about 300 made it without the handicap of score relaxation.

Nishanth Rumandla (AIR 4) is the OBC topper; Zubin Arya (AIR 94) came first on the SC merit list; and Vikas Meena (AIR 642) topped the ST merit list.

In all, the 15 IITs, IT-BHU and ISM, Dhanbad, have 9,647 seats, apportioned as: 4,722 for the general category, 2,101 for OBCs, 434 for minority OBCs, 1,403 for SCs, 708 for STs and 279 for physically challenged students.

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MUMBAI: Bookie Sonu Yogendra Jalan alias Malad has told the crime branch that he paid Rs 10 crore to a Sri Lankan cricket player for fixing a match. He also mentioned that some Indian cricketers were also involved in match fixing, sources said.

He along with Devendra Kothari alias Bhaiyyaji, were arrested by the city crime branch on Thursday. They are believed to be a part of a bigger international cricket betting racket, crime branch officials said.

The property cell of Mumbai crime branch on Thursday raided a building at Lokhandwala in Kandivli and busted a major cricket betting racket. Police arrested Kothari, Jalan and two others and seized two laptops, voice recorders, computers, 25 mobile phones and cash of Rs 5.18 lakh. All the accused were booked under prevention of gambling act and were remanded to police custody.

Sources said that Kothari and Sonu Jalan’s betting network, whose turn over is around Rs 500 crore a month, is controlled by a Pakistan-based gang belonging to Chhota Shakeel. Sonu Jalan was arrested last year from Andheri in another case of gambling by the Social Service branch. Kothari was also an accused in that case and was not traceable.

In the fresh case, Kothari and Jalan had clients and punters in Afghanistan, Pakistan, South Africa and Saudi Arabia. In India, the gang has their associates in Delhi, Kolkata, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Haryana.

“We had information that the gang was accepting bets on the IPL matches. Based on the information, we have arrested them. The gang is well-organised with having all the betting assessment software with them which helps them in managing their betting business” said Deven Bharti, additional commissioner of police.

The gang also asked their member or associates to open an account with the official UK betting site Betfair and passed on the passwords to Sonu and Kothari, who accessed it, found out the rates and accepted the bets accordingly. One cannot place on line bets on Betfair in India as betting on sport is illegal here.

Sonu, while in custody, had earlier told the police that he had paid around Rs 1 crore to an IPS officer for not arresting him. But he was arrested. He had threatened to lodge a complaint with the state anti-corruption bureau, but went on the backfoot after another senior IPS officer intervened.

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NEW DELHI: Stung by a spot-fixing TV expose on Monday and left red-faced by the Shah Rukh Khan spat on Wednesday, IPL’s week of ignominy was complete when Team Bangalore’s Aussie recruit Luke Pomersbach was arrested in Delhi on Friday for allegedly molesting an American woman and beating up her Indian fiance after a late-night party at the team hotel to celebrate the team’s victory against Delhi the previous evening.

The 28-year-old American had reportedly come to Delhi with her Mumbai-based fiance Sahil Peerzada for the match. She alleged that Pomersbach, 27, who had been spending time with the couple at the party, came to their room and molested her in Peerzada’s presence.

In her FIR, she said, “During the party, he (Luke) was trying to come close to me. Later, he befriended with my fiance (Sahil) and came in our room for having drinks,”

The victim alleged that around 5.30am, when she was going to the bedroom leaving the men in the drawing room, Pomersbach grabbed her hand, pressed her body and tried to kiss her. “When Sahil tried to stop him, he gave many fist blows on his face,” the complaint said.

Peerzada, 32, a businessman from Juhu, had injuries in face and underwent a minor ear corrective surgery for his left ear in the afternoon. He was admitted in an Intensive Care Unit of the private hospital and police have not been able to record his statement.

The woman called up the police at 6.23am. A police officer said the cops found Luke with “a champagne bottle in his hand and two woman by his side”. A medical examination conducted around 7.30am showed he was drunk. The left-handed Western Australian batsman, who hasn’t played any match in IPL-5, was booked under harsh IPC charges – section 354 (assault on woman with intent to outrage her modesty), 323 (voluntarily causing hurt), 452 (house trespass after preparation of hurt) and 511 (punishment for attempting to commit offences punishable with life imprisonment or other terms).

Pomersbach was produced in the Patiala House court where felt uneasy and almost fainted. He was given interim bail till 2pm on Saturday.

The woman also alleged that members of Team Bangalore were threatening her to withdraw the case. “They threatened me three-four hours ago. When I went back to the hotel to take my belongings, I was given threats apparently by the coach of the team,” she told the metropolitan magistrate.

Meanwhile, Pomersbach has rubbished the allegations, telling an Australian newspaper that he was “shocked and disappointed” by the developments. “(I am) shocked to be in this position. I can’t believe this is happening and I’m really disappointed when people make things up,” Pomersbach was quoted as saying by The Weekend newspaper.

According to media reports, Pomersbach has had previous brushes with the law. He made his international debut when he was called into Australia’s Twenty20 side in Perth in December 2007. In 2009, after two hit-and-run incidents, he was arrested and charged by police for driving with a blood alcohol level in excess of permissible limits, failing to stop and accompany police and escaping legal custody.

He had pleaded guilty and was fined and had his driver’s license cancelled. The Western Australian Cricket Association suspended him indefinitely. He returned from his ban in January 2010.

Pomersbach was staying in room number 2708 at Maurya. Police said that after the win, the team returned to the hotel and the party started around 12.30am on Friday. The American girl and her fiance were at the party. It was around 5.30am when Pomersbach went with the couple to their room, 1640, to have more drinks.

Half-hour after the incident, the cricketer reportedly went to their room again and tried to force open the door, but was stopped by a security guard, Vikas Yadav.

The hotel was refused to comment. “We are verifying everything minutely, as to what exactly happened. Only after we verify, can we take a stand and comment on her allegations,” Anand Rao, general manager, Maurya, told TOI.

US embassy officials met the victim, noted her complaint and have reportedly assured her of all possible assistance. Cops have recovered the CCTV footage of the gallery in which Luke is seen going to their room twice and using elevators.

While allegedly hitting Peerzada, Pomersbach injured his right hand injured and had a plaster on it. After questioning him for almost three hours, Delhi Police put the Australian under arrest around 10am. Clad in a white T-shirt, jeans and white slippers, Pomersbach was brought to the Chanakyapuri police station where he was questioned for few hours again.

“He claims that he is innocent and was invited by them to their room,” said a Delhi Police source. Australian embassy officials visited him and have offered him all legal assistance.

During an inspection of room number 1640, cops found bloodstains. While seeking relief for Pomersbach, his lawyer Neeraj Chaudhari told court that “Luke was invited by them (girl and her fiance) to their room and then beaten up”. Luke, who was feeling uneasy in court, was held by two police officers held him and made to sit on a bench. Granting him interim bail till Saturday afternoon, the court asked for the medical reports of Sahil and Pomersbach, apart from CCTV footage.

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SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook Inc shares rose less than expected on their first day of trade on Friday and huge order volume caused technical problems that marred the coming out party of the No. 1 online social network.

Its shares were up 8 percent in early afternoon trading on the Nasdaq, after opening 11 percent higher and then rapidly heading south to touch their initial public offering price of $38. The gains were below market forecasts of as much as a 50 percent jump.

“We have got some unhappy guys out there,” said Wayne Kaufman, chief market strategist at John Thomas Financial, a retail broker on Wall Street. “They were hoping for Facebook to be considerably better. I bet there are a lot of disappointed people in the market.”

Facebook, which has about 900 million users globally, priced its IPO at the top end of its target range, becoming the first U.S. company to go public with a valuation greater than $100 billion. If a greenshoe option to underwriters is exercised, Facebook will raise as much as $18.4 billion by selling an 18 percent stake, the second-biggest IPO in U.S. history after the one by Visa Inc.

Analysts blamed the poorer-than-expected first-day showing on the vast number of shares floated and market weakness. General Motors’ decision to pull paid-advertising from the social network, announced this week, also hurt.

After a delay in the opening print that drove up anxiety levels among traders and onlookers outside the Nasdaq, the closely watched stock began trading at $42.05, rose to as high as $45 and then rapidly retreated. The Nasdaq exchange said it was investigating an issue with execution of trades.

Facebook’s IPO had been heavily oversubscribed, particularly by retail investors, despite concerns about slowing growth in the last quarter, whether the company can make money from mobile advertising, and the immense control Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has over on the company.

Others warned that the IPO price, equivalent to over 100 times historical earnings versus Apple Inc’s 14 times and Google Inc’s 19 times, makes Facebook a risky bet.

EARLY FANFARE

For Facebook, Friday began with much fanfare. To rapturous applause from employees, Mark Zuckerberg — flanked by Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Nasdaq Chief Executive Robert Greifeld — rang the bell to kick off trading at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time.

The 28-year-old billionaire founder, wearing his trademark black hoodie, hugged and high-fived Sandberg and other employees in celebration after he pressed the remote button.

The area outside Facebook’s offices was packed with throngs of photographers, more than a dozen television trucks, and a TV news helicopter hovering overhead as the excitement reached fever pitch.

The fizzling of Facebook’s early gains put pressure on other social media stocks. Zynga, which depends on Facebook for much of its revenue, dived 13 percent before it was halted. LinkedIn Corp was off 3 percent at midday.

“When you see what’s happening with other social media stocks today, which are significantly down, as well as looking at Facebook trading flat, we think it has traded obviously at the high end,” said Destination Wealth Management CEO Michael Yoshikami.

“It’s a rich valuation, particularly given the advertising pressure they’re under now. Advertising revenue has grown significantly slower over the past few years, and that’s punctuated by GM’s decision to stop advertising on Facebook.”

“We’re not buyers at $38, particularly considering that most of their business is in mobile and they haven’t figured out how to make money yet.”

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NEW DELHI/KOLKATA: Bollywood and West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee have come out in support of superstar Shah Rukh Khan after he was banned from the Wankhede Stadium for five years following a scuffle with MCA officials.

The 46-year-old actor and co-owner of IPL team Kolkata Knight Riders ( KKR) said that he lost his cool when he saw MCA officials manhandling his daughter and other children.

B-town was all praises for the actor and took to Twitter to say that his action was justified.

Director and friend Karan Johar said, “SRK is one of the best fathers I know and protective about every child. He was being just that, a protective parent!!! Why blame a man who was just reacting as a father… who wouldn’t have done the same in his place?”

Actress and new mother Celina Jaitley said, “Speaking even as a new mother of twins, when it comes to one’s children a parent will go to any length to protect them, SRK is a good dad. When it comes to my children I would go to any lengths to protect them, he was being a dad at that moment… are stars not human?”

“Kahaani” director Sujoy Ghosh also voiced his support for SRK, saying, “Read about the SRK incident. I think @iamsrk was very decent about the whole thing. I’d have ripped their heads off if it was my daughter (sic).”

Director Anurag Basu said, “SRK’s behaviour is completely justified, I’d have smashed their heads if it was my daughter.”

Music composer-singer Vishal Dadlani tweeted, “Straight up. Touch my family, I destroy you. No question. SRK was right.”

“I’ve got first hand reports of the fracas with @iamsrk. His daughter was touched and shoved. He protected. Well done Dad!! At Wankhede, SRK was a father, not just an actor… Please don’t expect a father to apologise for protecting his baby.. Satyamev Jayate (sic),” TV actor Ronit Roy tweeted.

Mamata calls for reconsideration of ban on SRK

West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Friday called for reconsideration of the decision to ban Shah Rukh Khan, who is the co-owner of Kolkata Knight Riders and brand ambassador of West Bengal, from entering the Wankhede Stadium for five years.

“I will appeal please reconsider the decision,” Mamata said when reporters sought her reaction on the decision of the Mumbai Cricket Association.

“We love Maharashtra, capital of India’s business. We love Shah Rukh, Sachin, everybody. Shah Rukh is our brand ambassador and that is why you are asking me the question.”

“I do not know whether it will be proper for me to comment anything about the incident. I do not want to interfere about other states’ business.”

“I request you not to distort my saying – whatever I am saying. It is a sensitive issue,” Banerjee said.

IPL should be closed: Lalu

With the Indian Premier League hit by controversies, RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav on Friday demanded that the tournament should be closed down.

“IPL should be closed,” he told reporters outside Parliament House when asked to react on the spat between Shah Rukh Khan and Mumbai Cricket Association (MCA) officials and other controversies surrounding the game.

On the Shah Rukh Khan episode, he alleged that the policemen, who were present when the scuffle broke out between the Bollywood star and MCA officials, were working at the behest of certain political parties.

“All this was done in hatred,” Yadav alleged.

Wankhede episode sad but not right for govt to interfere: Salman Khurshid

Law minister Salman Khurshid on Friday said the Wankhede brawl involving actor Shah Rukh Khan was “sad” but it is not right for the government to interfere in every matter.

“These are very sad developments in our society. Clashes between citizens and authorities are always very sad things,” he told reporters outside Parliament.

On whether government should interfere in the matter, Khurshid said, “It is not right that government should interfere on every matter. I cannot comment on Shah Rukh incident because the authorities concerned should do something about it. The matter is not before us when it will come we will definitely take it seriously.”

Khurshid, however, supported the media role in the whole episode saying media has the right to show this to public as “part of democracy”.

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