Ten Sports speaks. "Between overs ad" issue heatens up!

Ten Sports has replied to the show-cause notice issued against it for violating advertising laws. A briefing by Ten Sports lawyer Haridas revealed shocking insights into the root cause of ad-menace affecting millions of Indian cricket lovers. Excerpts of Mr. Haridas's briefing are presented below.

"ISI! Pakistan's ISI is responsible for diluting viewer's frame and congesting it with nonsensical ads. The ISI sends stealth planes across the border and above our stadiums. These planes come fitted with projectors, which project the static ads that one sees in the wicketkeepers end. These ads make a mockery out of Indian brands. Deliberately, the ISI chooses under-performing brands, screens it in prime overs, and influences Indian viewers' buying decisions. For example, a lot of people went ahead with choosing Tata DoCoMo after they saw DoCoMo ads appearing suddenly on either side of Dhoni's butt. But unfortunately, their networks don't seem to have coverage. By encouraging viewers to buy shit products, ISI forces other companies to manufacture similar shits, and thus is trying to make India a land of shit products and shit companies."

Indian skipper MS Dhoni, who was also present during the briefing, nodded furiously. "Well off course I dropped catches because of Sangeetha mobiles! I lost visibility of the ball due to overlapping colors. If the ISI wants to continue similar gimmicks, it must atleast make sure the ads don't have color shades that match the cricket ball's color."

Meanwhile, ISI had denied any sort of involvement in the matter. "Well their own people don't like to see Ashish Nehra or Ravindra Jadeja playing. So they try those Seagram on-the-pitch explosion type ads to try and kill their own cricketers. Must be the work of some expert hacker. Their CBI must try and find out who the hacker is from the Kill Ravindra Jadeja Facebook community."

Aakash Karat, a Communist party member said - "Technology of all sorts must be abolished. Its the people who matter. Broadcasters must stop showing the score, overs and batsmen-bowler details too. Nothing other than core cricket must be shown. This way, a lot of employment can be created by appointing freelance scorers for every home. The government must issue free blackboard and chalk pieces to these scorers so that they earn a decent living."

IIM-CAT's new quota from 2012

While the rest of the country is analyzing toppers and trends of CAT 2011, IIM has announced some major changes in its admissions policy, which will be implemented next year. A visibly excited IIM-A Director Samir Baruah spoke to media persons.

"The Cabinet has Kapil Sibal. Cricket has Ravindra Jadeja. Bollywood has Shahid Kapoor and India has Arindham Chaudri. Incompetency is everywhere. It is the very foundation on which Indian work culture lies. Every business unit has incompetency, and every organization has incompetent managers. To facilitate the smooth gelling of IIM graduates with incompetent peers, we have decided to bring in diversity into our classrooms by admitting incompetent students."

Mr. Baruah continued explaining to a shocked gathering. "From next year onwards, we will have a separate quota for those under 1 percentile. There will be separate GD and PI for these people, and those who manage not to talk inspite of heavy persuasions shall be admitted. The emphasis will be on sleeping and burping, two qualities that define an incompetent manager in boardroom meetings."

When we raised the issue about someone who would know all the answers but deliberately mark the wrong answers to get into the incompetent quota, Mr. Baruah smiled satisfactorily to himself. "Ahh... There's the IIM touch. We're not just looking at wrong answers, we're considering the wrong approach too. Students will have to type their methodology with which they derive answers. We're looking for candidates who can apply Pythagoras theorem on Profit & Loss problems to arrive at a choice."

Kumar, an incompetent aspirant spoke to us. "This is great news. I will play Minesweeper during next CAT. Or Pinball maybe. Prometric should ask applicants their choice of games while filling out the application!" Meanwhile, several corporates have shown interest in sending their managers for the Executive Incompetent degrees. The ideology behind this is to keep incompetent professionals away for sometime while devising ways to improve company performances.

Why Ravindra Jadeja was bought for $950000

Kochi IPL franchisee has defended its $950000 bid to buy Ravindra Jadeja. After an exciting auction, Vivek Venugopal, one of the owners of the consortium spoke to reporters from near the BCCI notice board. Asked about the odd location for an interview, Vivek said he checked the notice board every evening to see if his franchisee had been forwarded any show-cause by BCCI.

“Sreesanth has been the longest serving Kerala cricketer. Our brand value would be greatly increased with Sreesanth as our captain. Having said that, we needed someone miserable on the field to make Sreesanth look like Wisden Cricketer of the Year. The obvious choice was Ravindra Jadeja, and we went all out to buy him.” Mr. Venugopal’s lips tweaked at odd angles every time he mentioned Jadeja’s name.

“The rest of the auction room obviously didn’t know of our strategy, and we were met with hostility after winning Jadeja. The waiters in the hotel stopped replacing our water bottles. The auctioneer stood paralyzed, and we had to inject steroids on him to hit the hammer one final time to confirm Jadeja’s bid. We even received condolence messages from Kochi and other parts of Kerala like Dubai and Bahrain.”

Ravindra Jadeja, buoyed by his auction prices, has reportedly negotiated a deal with Manchester United. Sources have confirmed that IPL new boss Chirayu Amin has already slapped a show-cause notice to Manchester United, and is considering extending Jadeja’s IPL ban to one more year.

Meanwhile, corporates and general public who searched for IPL Kochi’s website on Google were met with dismay. Said Omanakuttan from Allepey – “This is atrocious! First, Sashi Tharoor disappears from Twitter. Next, we find no website for our IPL team. This must be a collaborative work of Lalit Modi and Pakistani hackers!” Others, who managed to find sites kochiipl.com and kochiteam.com were confused which was the official site, though they maintained that both sites looked equally awful and comparable to bcci.tv.

Moving on to other related news, Sony Max has confirmed that it has got premium sponsors for the Pune vs Kochi match tosses. With Smith’s name being on the rounds for Pune IPL captaincy, and Sreesanth almost having been confirmed as Kochi captain, the match tosses should be more interesting than the matches themselves. Sreesanth is expected to invite Graeme Smith’s family for the toss.

Mark Zuckerberg's "Facebook - Vision 2011"

Facebook has begun 2011 with a boardroom discussion on breathtaking innovations that could change the way netizens socialize. While the rest of the world was busy boozing, biking and bursting crackers on new year eve, Mark Zuckerberg called all his employees for an urgent meeting to discuss Facebook's innovations. The irritated employees are rumoured to have reported abuse against Zuckerberg on his Facebook account. The following are excerpts from the high-level innovation brainstorming.

With several internet users choosing to Tweet, advertisers have also started migrating to Twitter. Zuckerberg proposed a novel strategy to retain users and get them closer to Facebook - further reduce font size. He suggested an apt font size of 8, which would ensure that a user literally kissed his monitor to be able to read clearly. "Nothing can come in between Facebook and its user!", declared Zuckerberg, filmy style.

Keeping in view the changing relationships and dynamic emotions between people, apart from the Poke button, several add-on features like Pinch, Punch, Kick, Slap and Strangle The Neck are to be introduced. Thus, a variety of hellos, starting from a 'simple' hello to 'I know you aren't busy why the hell haven't you been in touch' hello would be covered.

Apart from the Friends Suggestion option ( which, Zuckerberg conceded was paranoid, since Fb once suggested Sashi Tharoor under 'Friends you may know' ), there will be an 'Urgently Unfriend' option. People who update weather details, digestive system details, stolen love quotes and crap that they themselves wouldn't have understood would be suggested for unfriending. Facebook also seemed to have solved its smiley problem, wherein users have had to click external links to view smileys. ('I've added smileys to this status update. Wanna see them?? Visit....) From now on, all smileys would be delivered separately to email accounts as attachments, thus reducing spam risks.

Several long term Facebook users quit in recent months, when people 'liked' their "I'm down with fever", "Paul the Octopus is dead" updates. To stop people from randomly liking updates that would infuriate the poster, "I DON'T UNDERSTAND" button has been added for the mentally challenged users. In another first, Predictive Analytics would be used to automatically generate 'like' to all posts and photos from women. The rationale behind this is to save time and energy for men, whose sole purpose of existance on Facebook is to 'like' all abstract updates from women.

Mr. Zuckerberg promised there would be more interesting and captivating innovations. With Facebook reportedly having the 3rd largest population after China and India, he said he would definitely demand a place for it in the United Nations Security Council. Before calling off the meeting, Zuckerberg created separate pages for 'Happy','New','Year' and '2011' and urged his employees to like and share all pages.