It’s a day after Google launched Android One internationally, but the focus of the event was squarely in India. Android One is supposed to be a global initiative but at the moment it has an Indian tinge that shows Google is focussing on the Indian market more than ever, and possibly more than anyone else.

For all its various services and kooky projects, the past few years have seen tremendous focus on mobile from Google. It makes sense seeing as mobile connectivity is the fastest growing segment when it comes to Internet and Google is all about the Internet. So we saw Android growing with new hardware partners on board and features that made it more accessible. Android rules the smartphone market today, running on over 80 percent of devices shipped last year.

As smartphones grew around the world, India and China emerged as the two fastest growing markets. But China is a wasteland as far as Android is concerned as many vendors eschewed Google Play services to align themselves with third-party services along with an open source Android base. This left Google out of the revenue pie in China.

To not see the same fate in India, Android One is here. Android One is how Google wants us to use Android, a version where its services are front and centre, and softwareupdates will flow for up to two years. More crucially Google controls the experience to a great extent, meaning users should have few complaints about performance even though the price would suggest they would do.

With Android One, Google is focussing on India more than any other smartphone player. Despite making noises about India being an important market, Google’s rivals such as Apple and Samsung have preferred to not put a great deal of resources into the India effort.

Apple acknowledged that India was a key market for iPhone and iPad growth, but has done little outside the buyback schemes and exchange offers for Indian consumers. Samsung has been guilty of constantly churning out mediocre re-iterations of existing phones and has been shown to be completely devoid of any understanding of the Indian market, which is moving to better value smartphones in the mid-range segment. Samsung has also not been able make its mid-range portfolio attractive in the same way as Micromax, Motorola or even Xiaomi. If anything, Samsung is busy promoting its own ecosystem, which has direct rivals to some apps in the Google Play platform.

Meanwhile, Google recognised the strategy to make sure India remained in the favourable Android camp. It’s hoping to emulate iPhone-like performance with Android One at basement prices, but also striking against Samsung’s focus on its home-grown apps. It’sadded key features to sweep the Indian market such as free subscription in Google Play NewsStand; free data usage for app downloads, offline YouTube support in a video-crazy market and regional language support to bolster the search user base through vernacular languages.

In his interviews following the launch, Google VP Sundar Pichai maintained that India is a crucial market for Google as it represents a swathe of people who are not connected or at least not connected to the main stem of the Internet.

Android One is the first step and Pichai said we should expect more India-specific developments from the company. Google has not just talked about how India is an important market, it’s shown it in a very precise manner and the first wave of Android One devices is only the beginning. More partners and better hardware is coming. At the moment, the three phones are not meant to please everyone. But the specific audience Google is targeting (largely first-time buyers) will scarcely get a better smartphone experience elsewhere.

A Unicef study titled 'Hidden in Plain Sight', which looks at child abuse across the world, says the close to 42 percent of all girls in India have faced some sort of sexual violence before the age of 19.

According to a Times of India article, data from the study showed that 10 percent of Indian girls would have faced sexual violence when they are aged 10-14, and 30 percent in the 15-19 age group.

Additionally, the data shows that close to 77 percent of the girls in the age group of 15-19 faced sexual violence from their current partner or husband. In 6 percent of cases, the perpetrator was a relative, while 4 percent said it was friend or acquaintance who sexually assaulted them. Cases of stranger rape or sexual violence in India for the age group stood at mere 3 percent.

The numbers indicate that for most girls growing up in India, sexual violence is fairly common and that in most cases it is not strangers but rather husbands or partners that are committing such acts.

Where sexual violence is concerned, the only bit of good news is that India doesn't fare as badly as the African nations. According to the report, prevalence of partner violence is 70 percent or higher in Congo and Equatorial Guinea and approaches or exceeds 50 percent in Uganda, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Overall the report notes that globally, one in 10 girls around the world under 20 years old, (an estimated 120 million), have been forced into sex acts, and one in three married adolescent girls, about 84 million, have been victims of emotional, physical or sexual violence committed by their husbands or partners.

But the India numbers gain more significance in the backdrop of another report published by UNICEFwhich states that after Bangladesh, India has the second highest rate of child marriage in South Asia.

The percentage of women who were married before the age of 18 in Bangladesh stood at 65 percent, while in India it stood at 43 percent. The study also noted that almost half of all girls in South Asia marry before the age of 18 and that overall one in five girls in the region ends up getting married before 15. The report noted that girls with no education are 5.5 times more likely to marry or enter into union as those with at least 10 years of education.

When one looks at the two reports together, it makes sense as to why 42 percent of girls have faced violence. As the UNICEF report on sexual violence shows that in India girls between the age of 15-19 are most likely to be abused either by their husband or partner or a relative and not strangers. Given that nearly 43 percent are married off before the age of 18, the stats on sexual violence are not all surprising.

Laishram Sarita Devi looks winded. She sits in a corner of the boxing ring at the Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium in Delhi and drinks in big gulps of air. She has been sparring for roughly ten minutes, alternating two minute bouts with one minute of rest. The sweat streams off her face as she jumps up and prepares to do battle again.

Outside the ring roughly 40 other girls were shadow boxing but Sarita is one of three women - Mary Kom and Pooja Rani are the others - who will be competing in the 2014 Asian Games in Incheon, South Korea. That’s why she is in the ring. With the tournament a week away, she needs to hone her ring craft until she is a tightly controlled spring, full of tensile strength and kinetic energy.

After she is done sparring, a coach gets in the ring with Sarita wearing punching pads. They work on combinations for a while but it is clear Sarita is tiring. Her punches still come in a flurry, but the thump they make no longer echoes around the room. She stops and the physiotherapist then spends several minutes carefully stretching her out in the corner of the ring. One leg is pushed back over her head as she lies on her back, then the other. Her shoulders are rubbed, then her neck.

The 29-year-old Sarita has spent most of her career fighting at 52 kg, but has also fought at 60 kg, 57 kg and 51 kg in the past. She won a world title at 52 kg in 2006 and also boasts of five Asian Boxing Championships and a World Championship bronze. In South Korea, she will be boxing at 60 kilos, the highest weight at which she has fought professionally.

The Asian Games has only three weight categories and so Sarita has had to move up to 60 kg from 52 kg to allow Kom to fight at 51 kg (Kom has spent most of her career boxing at 46 kg).

While Sarita is no stranger to putting on or losing weight, this time the challenge was exponentially harder. She is coming off a two-year break during which she gave birth to a son.

“I had cesarean surgery and recovering from that is very tough,” she told Firstpost after changing out of her boxing gear and into a t-shirt and shorts. “My weight went up to 85 kilos and to bring it down to 60 required a lot of work and was a big challenge.”

A closer look at Sarita's physique reveals toned arms with clearly defined biceps and legs that are lean and springy but there is still a small bulge around her waist.

“Sarita’s fitness is not what it could be”, admits head women’s coach Anoop Kumar. But he believes she has the experience to compensate for what she lacks in fitness.

That belief is backed up by the silver Sarita won at the Commonwealth Games earlier this year. It was her first competitive tournament in two years and came following the ban on India’s boxing federation.

“We didn’t receive much support during the ban and I got quite demoralised. It was a very tough time. I was not fully confident after the baby. I wondered how would I perform?

“It felt very good to come back after a two-year break and reach the finals,” she says with a shy smile.

Sarita believed she would have won the final too had the team had its own physiotherapist.

“After delivery, your body changes and it is very important for us to have a physio with the team. I had to do the recovery myself but you can’t do it properly that way.”

Sarita draws inspiration from Kom, with whom she shares both a state and a birthday. Kom won a world championship and an Olympic bronze after giving birth to twins and is now targeting an Asian Games gold medal following the birth of her third child. With quiet confidence, Sarita says she wants to help prove that becoming a mother doesn’t mean giving up your career.

“If you want to do something after having a baby, there is nothing to stop you. My aim is to win the gold. That is why I am sweating it out so much in training.

“Mary is playing Asian Games after three babies so the young girls should be getting a lot of motivation from watching us.”

There are other, bigger, dreams that are also driving her to keep boxing.

“I have never played in the Olympic Games and that remains my aim. At the Commonwealth Games I won a medal. Then if I get one in the Asian Games, only the Olympics is left to complete my collection.”

Even as Deepika Padukone is talking about her new film Finding Fanny, the Times of India has “found” Deepika Padukone’s cleavage.

The “cleavage show” headline turned into a storm in a D-cup when Deepika hit back hard.

“Yes! I am a woman. I have breasts and a cleavage! You got a problem!!??” she shot back.

TOI tried damage control. Sort of.

"It's a compliment! You look so great that we want to make sure everyone knew! :)"

But sometimes a (presumably shame-faced) smiley isn’t enough. The non-apology just stirred the pot further. TOI pulled the story as more celebrities jumped into the Twitter fray.

Karan Johar was “appalled…shocked and disgusted.” Homi Adjania, her Finding Fannydirector called it “regressive shit”. Arjun Kapoor called it “ a new low”.

Not such a “new low” really.TOI had not that long ago already done a “nip slip” on the same Deepika Padukone.

Of course, it’s a little rich for Bollywood’s celeb brigade to put on an indignant #IStandWithDeepika act. It’s a path-leader when it comes to treating women as peek-a-boo commodities. If wrapping them in white sarees and dousing them in waterfalls and monsoon showers or hypersexualized item numbers were not enough, it has even turned rape into titillation and created stars who have built entire careers as filmi rapists. The rape counter might be lower in films these days than those old bachao bachao heaving bosom rape scenes but speaking of cleavage the film Grand Masti had strings of dialogues about darshan of "doodh factories” and erections setting off burglar alarms.

But that does not excuse the media either.

Our media wants to have it both ways. There are high-pedestal uplifting values of empowerment and fighting misogyny reserved for our front pages and op-ed pages. And even the film review page which will wag its fingers at movies for catering to the lowest common denominator. But the entertainment pages come with a wholly different standard – a booby trap.

Women empowerment and sensitivity are virtues we have discovered especially after the spurt of gang rapes and we emblazon them all over the front pages. We take politicians and khap panchayats to task for sexist comments and rightly so. It’s the media who piously gave the December gang rape victim the name Nirbhaya. All that is grist for front-page outrage. But in the entertainment pages we are still leering as we wonder choli ke peechhey kiya hai.

Deepika’s cleavage is just the latest example. And hardly the exception. The entertainment pages remain a bastion for almost everything retrograde.

A few days ago there was a photo slide show about Mix and Match celebrities entirely premised on fairer stars in relationships with darker stars which proved that “love is blind”. Clearly! Otherwise why would Shah Rukh Khan marry a dusky Gauri? These are the poster children of colour crusaders – “the most well-known and powerful duos who have sealed their relation despite the difference in colour.”

While the media comes down on Shah Rukh Khan for endorsing Fair and Handsome and wrings its hands about India’s never-ending love affair with skin whiteners, it sees no problems with creating a slide show about the complexion differences between Ajay Devgn and Kajol, Dhanush and Aishwarya, Shah Rukh Khan and Gauri. Even more egregious, it throws interracial foreign couples like Naomi Campbell and her ex Vladimir Doronin into the mix as if a relationship across race lines (something that was taboo and even legally forbidden in the United States till Loving vs Virginia in 1967) is the same as a relationship across complexion tones.

Now that complete slide show seems blacked out – inadvertently adding a whole another layer of race baggage and colour blindspots to the entire sorry project.

Perhaps the much maligned British tabloids that splashed scantily-clad women and salacious sexy stories all over their front pages were more honest and upfront in a way. They made no pretence of virtue.

Stars are public figures and to some extent have to play a cat-and-mouse game with the media when it comes to their private affairs. They wear outfits at galas to draw attention and the media has every right to comment on it, diss it if they think it deserves dissing. Paparazzi went to town recently with pictures of what looked like an exceptionally well-endowed Idris Elba. They went utterly viral. Elba clarified the bulge was a mic wire not natural but joked “"Calvin Klein called my mobile, they want me in their next campaign.”

But there’s a difference between commenting and leering. What its “OMG! Cleavage show” headline actually revealed was that while the entertainment pages try to act very adult and mature, they are stuck in some kind of hormonal tee-hee-teenager mindset where cleavage becomes worthy of a headline simply because it’s cleavage and OMG it can be seen. It actually reveals more about our inherent prudishness than anything about our alleged permissiveness.

Media richly deserves to be called out on this especially because it spends so much energy calling others out on exactly this kind of sexist rubbish. Sometimes it needs to look into the mirror as well.

But then Humshakals where dwarves chomp on genitals, women are squeezed into absurdly short tight dresses and Riteish Deshmukh pretends he is a dog and dry humps an actor’s leg made Rs 40 crore in its opening weekend.

So the question for the rest of us is do we get the Grand Masti entertainment media we deserve?

JAMMU : This was not first time that Mohammed Riaz and 30 other families of Jammu's Gujjar Basti have turned homeless. Back in 1999, during the Kargil war, all these families had been uprooted from their homes in RS Pura. They had rebuilt their lives on the banks of the Tawi river. Now, they have lost everything all over again.

On September 6, when Tawi flooded its banks, these people just had to rush out of their homes to save their lives. There was no time to carry even the most basic items. A change of clothes. Or food.

Now, they are at the army's makeshift camp, depending on the free food. But even that stopped this morning when the langer was dismantled. Even by evening, they hadn't had a morsel. 

Later a three-ton army truck came in, carrying rice, dal, chapati and vegetables - fulfilling army jawans' pledge to "help as long as they can". But there's not much they can do.

The army cannot be engaged in relief and rehabilitation for too long, since all training activities get suspended, which in turn, can hamper operational preparedness. After the first crush of a crisis is over, they hand over the operations to the state government. 

For the camp inmates, uncertainty looms large. "Government officials came and took down our details, but they never came back," said Riyaz's wife Yasmin Akhtar. 

But neither Riaz nor his family expect or want help from anyone -- least of all the state government. 

"Had I been able to move, I could have worked as a labourer. Just pray that I get better and can work again," said Riaz, for whom the floods had come as a double calamity. A welder by profession, he had been rendered immobile by an accident three months ago

Then, there was Farooq Malik -- a portly man with a trimmed beard who used to run a diary. Most of his cattle have gone. So has his house. Today, he has another identity - "Chachu", a sobriquet bestowed by the 15-odd kids hanging onto his shirt-tails. 

Chachu's concern showed: "Over the last 15 years we had built our houses. Now we have nothing again. But it is not about us or our homes alone. What about their education? Back in 1999, most of us did not have kids."

Newdelhi: Former India captain Rahul Dravid on Saturday said of the three formats of the game, ODI cricket at present was largely irrelevant and struggling to survive and consequently there should be more tournaments like Champions Trophy or World Cup to give it a proper context.

"I think one-day cricket is seriously struggling. One-day cricket, without a context, is struggling. One-day cricket, if you look at it from the point of view of Champions Trophy or the World Cup, is relevant," he said at an interactive session after delivering the 6th Dilip Sardesai Memorial Lecture here.

"I think all the other one-day cricket should actually be driven towards playing Champions Trophy and World Cup. I think there are meaningless one-day games and too many one day games can actually be a problem.

"So, that is something that can be cut off and people can play less one-day (bilateral) cricket and more ODI tournaments," Dravid said.

"When you have three formats of the game and playing 10 months a year and playing different tournaments, it is going to be harder and harder on players to manage the workload," the 41-year-old cricketer said.

Speaking about the proliferation of illegal bowling actions with highly successful Pakistan off-spinner Saaed Ajmal having recently banned for it, Dravid said 'chucking' was not a crime but a technical fault that can be corrected.

"The ICC has a rule in place. When they reviewed a lot of old film footage they actually found that having that elbow bent at 15 degrees was actually pretty normal. That is what everyone was doing. Glenn McGrath had a slight bend in his elbow but up to 15 degrees, so he was not chucking. They have a system in place.

"What I am really glad about is that they are enforcing it strictly and they are reviewing it. I give them the benefit of doubt. The ICC is being more vigilant and they are not saying that once you have cleared in 2009, you can't be checked again. So they have got to keep monitoring it and watching it closely and if bowlers develop different kinds of deliveries, then why not have them checked?"

Kolkata: A 40-year-old woman, who was allegedly raped inside a moving car in 2012, on Sunday said she was denied entry to a restaurant for being a 'rape victim'.

The Anglo-Indian woman alleged that the management of Ginger, a restaurant-cum-bar in south Kolkata's Kalighat area turned her out.

"The management said they can't allow me because I was the Park Street rape victim. They said they have orders not to allow me inside. If I was raped, is it my fault? Why can't I try to live a normal life," the woman said.

The restaurant management, however, denied the charge and claimed the woman was turned out for being "troublesome".

"She was not barred for being a rape victim. Rather she had earlier created trouble. We have video footage to show how she had created trouble after getting drunk, and so we barred her," said eatery owner Dipten Banerjee.

The mother of two was allegedly raped at gun-point inside a moving car and later thrown out in February 2012.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had courted controversy after she dubbed the incident "fabricated".

While five people were charged by the court, only three are behind bars. Two, including the prime suspect, are still untraced.

Excise Circle Inspector B. Suresh who led the team said that 19-year-old Mahinshah, from Keralapuram on the outskirts of Kollam city, regularly travelled to Irumbanam in Ernakulam to get the kick from snake venom.

Mahinshah turned a drug addict during his early teens and went for snake venom whenever he felt that cannabis was not providing him the required high.

For each bite he paid amounts ranging from Rs. 1,000 to Rs. 2,500.

He told the Excise officers that it was a small snake that remained comfortably coiled in a 200 ml bottle.

The snake bites when it is softly pressed. The bite was administered under the tongue. He said its effects lasted for five to six days.

Mr. Suresh said that the owner of the snake has been identified and would be arrested soon.

The species of the snake used has not identified. But given its description it is suspected to be from the drysdalia species of the elapid family of venomous snakes. Mr. Suresh said the disclosure by Mahinshah showed that many who had been abusing narcotic substances for years could be moving over to snake venom to get a high. Since long there have been reports that a section of snake-catchers are trading in snake venom.

The reports also say that the venom which is ‘milked’ from snakes could reach the drug cartels that dilute it and sell as narcotic substances for the addicts.

Mahinshah allegedly confessed that he got in touch with the snake owner after searching the Internet for ways to get new highs. He will be produced in a magistrate court here on Monday.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: UDF led Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy is going to face a host of political and administrative problems during this post-Onam period.

One of the biggest problem that his government is facing is the financial crunch, which is all set to develop into a full-blown crisis as a result of a steep fall in revenues owing to the changes in the liquor policy.

Mr. Chandy and Finance Minister K.M. Mani have stated the government would tide over the crunch created by a heavy outflow of payments during the Onam season.

The major impact of the fund crunch will be the 676 Mission of the government, formulated by Mr. Chandy to give a new direction to his rule in the remaining two years of his term.

It has almost become certain that the State would witness a sizable cut in the Annual Plan.

The Finance Minister has already gone in for compressing spending to avoid mounting a huge revenue deficit. With inflation yet to be bridled, additional subsidy amounts will have to be provided to keep the prices of essential commodities down. Tourism industry, a major player in employment generation, will be severely hit. The construction industry which had been a major source for employment and income generation will also be seriously affected.