Time magazine's June 26 cover story is about India emerging as an economic superpower. Check out the cover image here.

My question is this – is India the new Japan? Having lived in Japan and seen how the bureaucracy there has befuddled its economy, I really wonder what sort of reformation the Indian bureaucracy will have to go through for the economy to really blossom. And by blossom, I mean for the common man and woman to feel the benefits of the economy; not just the top-tier wealthy.

Comments?

Haven't read it but I knew way back when that Mira Nair had the script and was working on the cinema adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake. Now thanks to Amit Gupta I caught the first glimpse of the movie – a trailer off of the Apple site. Check it out. Looks slick and very interesting. I am going to have to read the book now for sure.

I have been away on a few wedding photography shoots. Check out Bliss, my other blog for an update to my recent activities.

ESPN's Darren Rovell's latest article talks about how the ABC network will now host the Scripps National Spelling Bee contest. The contest has steadily moved from the shadows to the nation's limelight, often featuring desi kids. Among Rovell's top eight picks to win it all this year are three desis.

For an interesting perspective on all of this read Amar Shah's take on the contest called Keepers Of The Hive. To access it you will need a ESPN Insider account – sorry.

Want to know more about this cultural jamboree? Watch the movies Spellbound, Bee Season or Akeelah and the Bee. Or, read American Bee: The National Spelling Bee and the Culture of Word Nerds.

Tempted to give this a shot yourself? If you are an armchair word warrior, you may want to receive Anu Garg's excellent A Word A Day to start brushing up. ESPN's SportsNation has a fun [but good God, tough] spelling test. Take it and post your score here.

Space is indeed the final frontier. Disk space that is. Now that you have gone digital and may even have a blog like this one where you post your images you are going to be looking for storage space on either your desktop or an external drive.

TechCrunch reports that C-NET has a new service that can't be beat. It's called All You Can Upload. A tad bit wordy, but it gets the job done especially because the storage is free. You pay zilch. Not bad, eh?

The downside as the TechCrunch report suggests is that if you loose track of your images (AYCUL generates links that you use on your blogs, for instance) you are done for. So, either you save those links off in Notepad or some other text recording program or upload your images again.

Allan Herrell, one of the commenters on the TechCrunch post has dissected the “terms and conditions” of this “free” upload and storage opportunity. His is comment number 19. Please read it before using this service.

10 Ways, by Getty Images tries to answer what makes visual language powerful and where it can take us. This is a visual odyssey. Hold on to your seats folks. Yes, you will need to have Flash Player 8 installed on your machine.

Stylegala, a website that presents the best in web design and web standards looks at Dalit Freedom Network whose central theme is to abolish the caste system.

I have always believed that great presentation with solid content goes farther than pure eye candy. This site is beautifully designed, with pleasing earth tones and some great imagery. The writing is lucid and interesting, with fresh links to current news stories. The three-column layout is also easy on the eyes.

The site is a winner. I just wish more desi sites invested in good designers.

Via Quick Online Tips [again!]

The Six Minute Project is “a collaborative multimedia experiment in which people upload 24 hours of their life, six minutes at a time.”

Got 24 hours to try this out?

Via Quick Online Tips

“A group of Indian Bloggers living in different parts of the world. USA, UK and India got “United in Music” for a venture called BlogSwara to produce some music.”

The songs are here. The group's blog is here.

I am listening to the “album” now – a mix of Tamil, Malayalam and Hindi songs. It's clearly a very successful experiment. Looking forward to seeing future versions of it.

Please check out Prashant Panjiar's photo essay on TIME's website about a Florida man who travelled to New Delhi to have an expensive heart operation for fraction of the cost it would have cost him. This says a lot about how far medicine in India has come and how other organizations with exemplary track records can also help other desperate patients in the West.