The Facebook page for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows saw an average of 5000 new likes each day in the preceding week of the release. Before that, the average was around 800 likes per day. Currently the page has 380,000 members and the admins insist that the number will reach 50,000 b the end of next week. No doubt devoted fans of the series will ensure that.

The official twitter account for Harry Potter Films also got a boost in the number of followers. It currently stands at just short of 350,000. However the number is lower than the fan following of @Lord_Voldemort7, an account that poses as the Dark Lord from Harry Potter and posts sarcastic and caustic tweets! His account has more than 1.3 million followers! Isn’t it strange that Warner Bros with all the money and power could not get those many followers on the official Harry Potter twitter account?In any case both accounts saw a surge in interaction and followers during the past fortnight!

Harry Potter Fans have also been buying a lot of  merchandise for the nostalgia as the curtains are drawn on the movie series. This post on the top 10 Harry Potter gifts is absolutely wonderful and gives fans some brilliant choices including the Deathly Hallows symbol locket, the marauder’s map and Dumbledore’s wand!

Thankfully, unlike what the final movie posters claim “It all ends here” it actually doesn’t. with J.K. Rowling’s announcement of Pottermore, we certainly have more to look forward to in the wonderful world of Harry Potter!

Meanwhile, the popular spoof twitter handle of Lord Voldemort @Lord_Voldemort7 tweeted this:

If you’re wondering about the analogy with the fictional Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter series, read on:

Similarities between Osama and Voldemort

1. Voldemort hated muggles and wanted them killed. Osama hated Kaafirs (non-believers) and wanted them forcefully converted or killed.
2. Killing was a fun pastime for both of them, particularly those who were either muggles/kaafirs or those who did not agree with them or refused to support them.
3. Both had quite a small number of dedicated followers and sympathisers, ready to die for their respective causes. While Voldemort rallied the death eaters for the cause of pure bloods, Osama Bin Laden rallied them around the concept of Wahabi Islam (the most intolerant version of the religion).
4. Voldemort and Osama used terror tactics to scare the majority and try and get them into submission to their respective agendas. Killings and disappearances were the hallmarks of their reign.
5. Both Osama and Voldemort were scared of death, though they wouldn’t mind their death eaters/followers dying to save them or even kill their own followers if it suited them.
6. Those who live by the gun (wand in Volemort’s case)  die by the gun. Both had a violent death proving this adage. Also both were killed on the same day – May 1 (as of the date in UK at the time of their deaths)!

However there were some crucial differences between the two.

Differences between Osama Bin Laden and Lord Voldemort

1. Osama glorified martyrdom and death to his followers, selling the USP that if they were killed while battling the kaafirs/doing jehad they would get 72 virgins in heaven. Voldemort never glorified or sold the virtues of death to his followers..heck they were called death eaters, they were supposed to kill and not get killed…unless Voldemort intended it of course.
2. Though Voldemort was narrow-minded towards muggles and mixed-bloods, he had no problem with mixing of the sexes and women were treated equally in his ranks. In fact Bellatrix Lestrange was his most powerful and closest to him among the death eaters. Osama on the other hand considered women to be inferior human beings and was intolerant towards their freedom.

There, you got six major similarities and two major differences between Osama Bin laden and Lord Voldemort. That makes the total to seven – the most powerful magical number! Oops, it actually makes them 8 points – I made the eighth point without realizing just like Voldemort made the eighth horcrux!

What do you think of this comparison between Osama Bin Laden and Voldemort? Feel free to add to the list of similarities and differences between the two global terrorists in the comments section.

Harry Potter might finally be getting around to entering the 21st century. The Scotsman newspaper reports that after years ignoring the format, JK Rowling is considering e-book versions of all seven installments of the series that made her name.

The newspaper quotes Liz Thomson, editor of publishing industry site BookBrunch, as suggesting that the rights may be worth £100m, going on to say that “Experts believe that move could revolutionize the world of electronic publishing, triggering rocket sales of e-book readers such as Kindle and the iPad.”

The same Scotsman story quotes another expert as likening the digital launch of Potter to the Beatles finally releasing their music on iTunes, and I think that’s a much more apt comparison, but not for the reasons intended: Sure, the Beatles’ digital music release brought lots of sales for the Beatles and a bump for iTunes, but it hardly revolutionized the industry, in part because the hardcore fans either already owned the material or had downloaded bootlegs.

Why should it be any different for Harry?

Oh God. So now what? What should I tell them? Tell me what should I tell them?” —BARKHA DUTT

What kind of story do you want? Because this will go as Counterpoint, so it will be like most-most read…” —VIR SANGHVI

Saw TV last week? Or read the papers? Did you hear or read of India’s latest scandal, as it unfolded with Outlook and Open Magazine’s brilliant expose. Amidst the parliament disruption and any number of scams (adarsh, CWG, 2G, BDA) this one never got an airing or a printing. But on the online space, it caused a huge Twitstorm. The scam that takes its name from its Twitter hashtag, #barkhagate.

What is BarkhaGate?

Also known as the Radia tapes controversy, its the leaking of taped conversations of Nira Radia, lobbyist and friend of former Indian telecom minister A. Raja, with senior journalists like NDTV’s Barkha Dutt, Hindustan Times’s Vir Sanghvi by Open Magazine and Outlook. Radia’s clients include two leading telecom companies.

In the tapes, Barkha and Vir are heard promising help for her cause of getting A Raja the telecom portfolio again in the UPA 2 government by talking to their Congress contacts. In another tape, Sanghvi is heard asking Radia “What kind of story do you want?” in reference to a writing favourable column for Mukesh Ambani during the recent gas pricing dispute between the two brothers.

It is the much respected journalists of our time who are in the thick of the controversy today. Those who represented the voice of the people and seemed to set high standards for themselves and their contemporaries have let down not just their peers, but the entire civil society that looks up to them.

The feeble denials by NDTV and Hindustan Times on behalf of Barkha and Vir are less surprising than the collective silence of the Indian media when confronted with material to raise reasonable doubts about the integrity of two of its leading lights.

The conventional media’s stony silence (with rare exceptions) would have meant a complete blackout of one of the most sordid media scandals but for the New Media. Twitter, Facebook and blog space have been on fire. Barkha who has nearly 230,000 fans on Twitter took the brunt with thousands of hate tweets bombarding her. At least in cyber space nobody is buying Barkha and Vir’s feeble explanation.

Barkhagate just got a wikipedia entry, after being the top twitter trend in India for almost a week and going stronger. You can see that the new media is acting as supplementary cement for the crumbling fourth pillar of the largest democracy in the world.

You can listen to these tapes on YouTube; To keep up with developments in this ‘scandal’, you can follow all tweets with the hashtag #barkhagate.

Obama is perhaps the only world leader in history who uses a teleprompter to deliver speeches. Critics say that without a teleprompter Obama becomes incoherent and cannot even talk on policies he is supposedly passionate about.

In fact, during Obama’s forthcoming visit to India, a teleprompter will be installed in the Central Hall of the Indian Parliament so Obama can seamlessly deliver his speech.

Criticisms have not been muted. Will Spencer, a reputed member of the Digital Point Forums, says:

It’s a national embarrassment. The fool running the United States government is too stupid to be allowed to speak in public. His handlers have to tie him to a teleprompter to make sure he doesn’t say something from the vacuous recesses of his own mind.

As for as Obama’s India trip, the Indians do not have very high hopes, considering the populist measures Obama has taken to ostensibly save American jobs, but which have hurt Indian IT companies in the USA.

The Obama administration’s flowery words “India and America are natural allies”, “India and America are strategic partners” etc have been exposed to be hollow as actions have been speaking much louder than words in the opposite direction. The massive and mindless aid packages announced to Pakistan, a country whose intelligence agency has been proven to be covertly supporting the Taliban with money and weapons and playing a double game with the West, is a huge dampener. Much of this aid is also used to fund terror activities against the West in general and India in particular.

We will need to be really audacious to have any hopes from the current US President.

God bless the teleprompter.

The 10-year-old agency lost the Government’s multi-million-pound digital media account to Sir Martin Sorrell’s GroupM in February, which accounted for some £40m of billings, equalling 40% of the agency’s total turnover. i-level  had been handling this business for a decade.

i-Level’s clients included Orange and Samsung, and was founded in 1999 by Andrew Walmsley and Charlie Dobres. In spring 2008 they sold a 60 per cent stake to ECI, a private equity group, in a £45m ($68m) deal.

Your author, who is also into internet based affiliate marketing, got to know about this today when he received emails from LoveFilm and Comet – two prominent i-level clients – saying that i-level’s going into administration will not affect their earnings in any manner. The following is an extract from the email he received from Orange:

Hi Sarthak,

With the recent announcement about the incumbent agency i-level, Orange has agreed with i-level to transition the account to MEC as of immediate effect.

Orange would like to re-assure affiliates that promotion and payment of the Orange product offering will remain as normal.

The agency has about 140 employees, in disciplines including online display advertising, search marketing, social media and mobile marketing.

Latitude, another UK digital specialist, also went into administration in January after struggling with debts racked up during the boom years of the mid-2000s.

Sources: FT, Mediaweek

The goal scored with Shashi Tharoor’s resignation has been so powerful that it has rebounded upon the scorer himself. The self goal has meant that Modi stands suspended from the league he himself created, and faces a slew of corruption charges.

So much information has been leaked from various ‘sources’ with each passing day that the average cricket viewer’s attention has been forced to move away from the games being played on the field, to those off the field. It is indeed a sad state of affairs that a tournament which gave India immense international recognition, and brought on India’s domestic talent to the forefront, has been so tainted with corruption.

Adding fuel to the fire are the match fixing allegations. If they turn out to be true, there will be immense public anger, and the BCCI can then bank upon the fact that TRPs for any future editions of the IPL will never be the same again.

In spite of the information overload, there are many things we do not know; and though Modi had threatened to reveal the dirt in the game once the tournament concludes, he is yet to open the promised Pandora’s Box.

It is ironical that at the beginning of this year’s tournament, Lalit Modi made the team captains sign the MCC ‘spirit of cricket’ pledge.

The spirit has been murdered.

In a country where the rich and the powerful almost always escape the clutches of the law, will the spirit ever get justice? Even if Lalit Modi is convicted and prosecuted, there are bigger pawns (read politicians) on this chessboard, who may yet again subvert the system to save their skin. And the common man‘s faith in democracy will be further diminished.

Apparently,  Emma Watson has ended her two-year relationship with financier Jay Barrymore.

Ex-couple Emma and Jay

And if her mates are to be believed, the 19-year-old has been spending time with Spanish musician and fellow student

Rafael Cebrian since the split. Do not forget that Emma is currently studying her college at Brown University in the USA. According  to the Daily Mail, the pair became close friends last November while Emma was still in a relationship with Jay, and since the split she has been heavily leaning on Rafael.

In related news, Emma Watson will be performing in a student-directed production of Anton Chehkov’s Three Sisters at Brown University, where she is a freshman. The event, which was announced on Facebook, has since been removed.

The play is being produced by the school’s Production Workshop, a non-profit student theater founded in 1960. Watson, with an ensemble cast of 13 other students, will perform six shows from March 11-15.

Unlike her other projects, this one won’t be bringing a sizable payday for Watson: Admission to the play is free.

Pop, Reggae and Bollywood enthralled a packed house at the home ground of Deccan Chargers team (Hyderabad having been replaced due to violent protests there).

Meanwhile the first match of the tournament saw a big upset when a seemingly victorius Deccan Chargers were defeated by Kolkatta Knight Ridersby 11 runs. Batting first, KKR lost two wickets in the first over and two more by the start of the sixth. Chaminda Vaas struck with the first and third balls of the match to remove Manoj Tiwary and Sourav Ganguly. Cheteshwar Pujara and Brad Hodge departed to leave the Knight Riders wobbling on 31 for four after 5.1 overs.

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However, England batsman Owais Shah and Sri Lanka all-rounder Angelo Mathews united in an unbeaten fifth-wicket stand of 130, the second highest recorded in professional Twenty20 matches, to take Kolkata to an above-par total of 161.

Although Deccan started at a gallop, with Adam Gilchrist and V.V.S. Laxman putting on 61 for the first wicket in less than six overs, they lost their way after both departed and finished the match scratching around for singles and overthrows. Pace bowlers Ishant Sharma and Charl Langeveldt exploited the damp conditions as Kolkata won by 11 runs.

IPL also created history by being the first major sports tournament to be telecast live on YouTube. All matches of IPL 3 will be broadcast with a 5 minute delay on the popular video sharing site. However, all did not go as planned because YouTube was ‘experiencing technical difficulties’ during the first half hour of the match. Hopefully things will be more streamlined as the tournament progresses.

Sadly, IPL fixtures this year have been set in a bad calendar with most of the international teams busy playing one another. Therefore we shall be seeing a lot more retired and not so great players play bat and ball this season. Already the Indian Premier League resembles a retirement destination of Aussie cricketers. Need I say more?

India’s batting legend Sachin Tendulkar smashed a world record 200 not out against South Africa at Gwalior in the second ODI of the three match series.

It is the highest ever score by an individual in a one day international, the previous record being 194 runs by Charles Coventry of Zimbabwe. Tendulkar reached the milestone in the 50th over of India’s innings, as the Proteas tried their best to keep him off strike. The pitch was described as a batting paradise by its curator and turns out he was true to his word; for all but one of India’s batsmen contributed magnificently in India’s massive 401/3.

The crowd at Gwalior’s Roop Singh stadium turned ballistic as the Indian batsmen reigned supreme with a stupendous display of fireworks from their bats. Skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni scored 68 off 35 balls hitting 7 fours and 4 sixes.

Earlier Dinesh Kartik and Yusuf Pathan hit 79 and 36 respectively. Only Virender Sehwag failed to contribute, scoring a paltry 9. We can expect a good fightback from the Proteas with excellent batsmen in their line up on this great batting wicket. Hamish Amla in particular is a dangerous player and South Africa do have the potential to chase a 400 plus score. Lets hope for further entertainment!