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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 DELHI: Italy’s recall of its envoy from New Delhi is aimed at signalling its “strong displeasure” with the Indian government’s handling of a case involving two Italian sailors charged with murder, a top Italian official said on Saturday.

The ambassador’s recall on Friday escalated an increasingly tense diplomatic spat between Italy and India. The two naval guards, members of a military security team protecting a merchant vessel, were formally charged hours earlier in connection with the shooting of two Indian fishermen in February.

The sailors, who have been held in the southern Indian state of Kerala, are due to appear in court on Saturday for a bail hearing.

Italy’s deputy foreign minister, Staffan de Mistura, on his third mission to India to push for the sailors to be released into Italian custody, said the decision to recall the ambassador followed a flurry of failed diplomatic efforts.

It came after three telephone calls by Italian prime minister Mario Monti to his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh, a visit by Italy’s defence minister and his own missions to India, he told Reuters from Kerala.

It also followed the “absurd accusation of premeditated murder”, De Mistura said.

“It is a signal of profound displeasure,” he said. Italy argues that jurisdiction over the naval guards should lie with Rome because the incident occurred in international waters, but the Indian government maintains that it is a matter for the courts and that it does not have the authority to intervene.

Asked whether the case had damaged Italian-Indian ties, De Mistura said: “We are sending a strong signal to avoid damaging our relationship.”

India’s foreign ministry played down the recall, saying it did not indicate relations had soured.

The two sailors were stationed on a merchant ship off the southern Indian coast tasked with protecting it from pirate attacks. They fired warning shots at a fishing boat on Feb. 15, believing it to be a pirate vessel, they said.

The naval guards were charged with murder shortly after the incident in February. Under Indian law, initial charges are formalized by police after investigation and before a trial can begin. A hearing to select a date for the trial is scheduled for May 25, Kerala’s deputy public prosecutor said on Friday.

One of the murder charges carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment, but another can be punished by death, though the central government would have to approve that. India has not used the death penalty for several years.

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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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Bollywood actor Vidya Balan who’s on a two-day visit to Ernakulum is slated to shoot for an ad campaign for a yet-to-be-launched Kerala-based apparel brand. According to our sources, the shoot will be held at Malayatoor, on the outskirts of Kochi.

Vidya has been a part of many commercial campaigns before, but this could be her first as a brand ambassador. However, the measly 30 lakh that she is rumoured to be getting for this does not match up with the kind of success she’s achieved onscreen.

Says a source, “The endorsement is for a new venture in apparel by a big jewellery brand. Even though Vidya has not really lived in Kerala, she is a Malayali, and that brings in the local connect. She may have also agreed for the same reason. Of course, Vidya is a big name now, and she really deserves more.”

Attempts to elicit a response/comment from the actor were in vain as Vidya is, apparently, on a contract that prevents her from talking to the media till June.

Even in Bollywood there seems to be no logic on how endorsement deals are made. Actors’ remunerations are, mostly, not commensurate with their talent. For example, Katrina Kaif and Deepika Padukone get paid far more than Vidya Balan. Even more frustrating is the fact is if you were to go by the reasoning that an actor’s remuneration should match up to their box office status, Vidya has been shortchanged for all these years.

Take just two recent examples: The Dirty Picture and Kahaani. Both films doubled their investment at the box office, got very decent satellite right prices and even got good revenues from overseas markets. Yet, today, Vidya, called a hero by both her filmmakers, Milan Luthria and Sujoy Ghosh, is still to break into the 2 crore price bracket. Whereas Katrina and Deepika are offered 2.5-3 cr without any negotiation.

Honestly, guys, don’t you think she deserves more?

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The whole idea to the conflict in the sequel is a woman, therefore we have two men and only one woman,” says director Milan Luthria, while putting to rest all rumours with respect to a parallel female lead in the much awaited and anticipated sequel to “Once Upon A Time In Mumbai”.

He says, “This franchise (OUATIM) is a very entertaining franchise – we don’t have the usual blood and gore that is associated with the underworld – our world is larger than life and we focus on the underworld that existed during 70s and 80s, and with the sequel, we want to bring back the romantic triangle set in the Mumbai underworld,” adding, “The story connects to the point in the 80s where the underworld was fascinated with the women in Bollywood and the starlets in B-Town too were attracted to smugglers and dons. So we have Akshay Kumar and Imran Khan as the gangsters and Sonakshi Sinha as the starlet.”

So does Sonakshi really plays Mandakini’s role or her character is a take off from the starlet’s life? “There is a lot of fact-meets-fiction in the sequel. In fact there is more of fiction than facts in the second part, but yes, Sonakshi plays the moll,” says Milan. But why Sonakshi? “Because Sonakshi has a very Indian sex appeal. I had met her before “Dabangg” released. I had gone to Salman’s house for dinner and the whole team of “Dabangg” was there – it was at Salman’s place where I saw Sonakshi and was awestruck by her simplicity and grace. A lot of my casting is instinctive and when I saw Sonakshi, I felt she would be well-suited the role of a demure girl, who comes to the city of dreams to make a name for herself,” says the director.

But more than Sona, it is Imran Khan and his role in the sequel that has Milan super excited. “You wait and watch for Imran. I have a feeling that our sequel will do to Imran, what “The Dirty Picture” did to Vidya Balan,” gushes Milan, as he goes on to explain why he thinks Imran fits the bill. “We chose Imran because of his mass appeal. He is extremely popular among young girls and the college going crowd, but with the sequel, he will be seen in an entirely different form. This is exactly what we did with Vidya – we gave her a different colour that was out of her comfort zone.

Imran too will be seen in something that’s in stark contrast to his image. His character has humour, action, witty one-liners and flamboyance, but he plays a typical sadak chhaap gangster with a heart of gold,” shares Milan.

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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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