New Hyundai i10---A Compact Car

Hyundai Motor India Ltd introduced on last Wednesday, 31st/October/2007, its new compact car, 'i10' priced between Rs 3,39,000 lacs and Rs 3,98,000 lacs.The new small car, formerly known only by its 'PA' codename.

This is the first car from Hyundai which makes its world debut in India.The 'i10' will be the first manufactured car that will only be manufactured in Hyundai's Indian plant and exported to over 70 countries.

The new i10 is powered by a 1.1-litre, iRDE gasoline engine that develops 69hp (70kW). The standard transmission is a five-speed manual gearbox, while all versions also come with electric power steering. An automatic gearbox will be available as an option.

In the Indian market, all i10 variants will offer seating for five as well as standard air conditioning, split/folding rear seats, two-tone beige upholstery, rear seat belts and an electronic trip and odometer. A panoramic sun-roof (a first for this class of cars in the local market, the company claims), rear spoiler, leather wrapped steering wheel and gear knob, keyless entry and a 2-DIN audio system are available on higher-spec variants. The bumpers are body-coloured with detachable inserts while there is an integrated air dam at the front.

The suspension consists of Macpherson struts at the front with a coil spring and torsion bar arrangement at the rear.

Hyundai has released only one exterior dimension, stating that the 2,380mm wheelbase is the longest for any vehicle in this class in the Indian market.

The i10 is also available with ABS, seat belts with pretensioners, dual airbags, doors which automatically unlock on sensing an impact and a high-mounted rear stop lamp.

Versions for export markets, as well as a diesel derivative are expected to be launched in 2008. The UK importer said that the new car will go on sale locally in March priced from £6,500 (US$13,504).

It looks Hyundai Motor India is poised to play a very important role not only in India but also in HMC's global plans.

Hyundai expects i10 to be as popular as its Santro and the car will compete with Maruti’s Wagon R, Zen Estilo, and Indica Xeta from Tata.

Compiled By: Saurav Chakraborty
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SET added more bollywood films to its movie library.....

Sony Entertainment Television (SET) Asia has recently bought the rights of five more movies from India’s leading production house Yash Raj Films.

It’s already common knowledge that Sony TV holds the rights of all movies from the Yash Raj movie library.Now it has been confirmed the channel will also be broadcasting the recently released movies ‘Tara Rum Pum’ ,‘Jhoom Barabar Jhoom’, ‘Chak De India’ and ‘Laga Chunri Mein Daag’. Further good news for Madhuri Dixit fans, the channel has picked up exclusive telecast rights of her comeback movie ‘Aaja Nachle’, which will release at cinemas later this month.


Earlier this year only SET has acquired a batch of 16 new films from Eros International for a reported Rs 850 million (Rs 85 crores).

The acquisition included films like ‘Salaam-E-Ishq’,last year’s mammoth hit ‘Lage Raho Munnabhai’,‘Namastey London’, ‘Eklavya - The Royal Guard’, ‘Partner’, ‘No Smoking’, ‘Cheeni Kum’, ‘Gandhi- My Father’, ‘Provoked’ (Hindi version), ‘Nanhe Jaisalmer’, ‘Buddha Mar Gaya’, ‘Chess - A Game Plan’, ‘Friends Forever’, ‘Mr Black Mr White’, ‘Mr Hot Mr Kool’ and ‘Aur Pappu Paas Ho Gaya’.

Sony will enjoy exclusive global satellite broadcasting rights to the original version of these titles for a period of five years.

Even last year Sony has acquired satellite rights of many blockbusters of that year which includes the exclusive satellite rights of Fanaa, Dhoom:2 and Kabul Express(taken from Yash Raj Films for around 25 to 30 crores),Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna (Rs 14 Crores),Golmaal,Omkara,Jaan-E-Maan,36 China Town, Shaadi Se Pehle, Humko Deewana Kar Gaye, Kalyug, Tom, Dick & Harry, Ahista Ahista, Woh Lamhe, Anthony Kaun Hai?, Jai Santoshi Maa, The Killer, 15 Park Avenue, Being Cyrus, Naksha and Shaadi Karke Phas Gaya Yaar.

So after seeing such big deals from SET its look like Sony has totally decided to keep its 1st position undisturbed for its movie channel SET Max, from its rivals and tough competitors Zee Cinema and Star Gold.

In November(this month only) catch the World TV Premiere of "Good Boy Bad Boy" starring Emhraan Hashmi and Tusshar Kapoor on SET Max,its also one of the new acquisation of SET that has been taken from Mukta Arts this year only.

This year only SET Max has picked up first position in Hindi Movie channel segment leaving behind Zee Cinema at second position .Whereas Star Gold is still in third position, even after acquisition and exclusive world tv premieres of movies like Krrish,Don,Bhagam Bhaag and Rang De Basanti.However Sahara's FILMY is at fourth place with very lower viewership.

Lets see what is going to happen in this segment with upcoming new hindi movie channels from NDTV, UTV, Reliance and INX media group.It looks that competition will be going too much severe in the future for the exclusive satellite rights of bollywood movies...

Compiled and written by: Saurav Chakraborty
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Angkor Wat: City that lived and died by the environment

KATE CHAILLAT
The famous temple site of Angkor Wat was once much more than that. A new map shows that the magnificent temples were part of a huge urban sprawl, with an extensive rural hinterland. People here created an elaborate system of reservoirs and canals—for irrigation, trade and travel—that began to silt up as the population grew, and perhaps saw failures that resulted in flooding and water shortages. But at its peak, the agglomeration was the largest of its kind in the pre-industrial world, according to a team of archaeologists working at this ancient Cambodian site.

The Greater Angkor Project (gap), led by a team of Australian, Cambodian and French archaeologists, has used remote sensing satellite imagery by NASA to uncover what lay hidden under vegetation at Angkor Wat. By detecting slight variations in vegetation and ground moisture due to underlying ruins, the satellite images reveal Angkor’s urban sprawl in unprecedented detail. The archaeologist say the map “displays the ancient Cambodian site as an inhabited space: not a scattered collection of discrete temples, but an integrated, interdependent rural and urban residential network, larger than anything discovered in the ancient world so far.” The findings were published in the August 14th issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

After Mouhot
Angkor was the capital of the Khmer Empire, which held sway over modern Cambodia between the 9th and 14th centuries. In 1866, French explorer Henri Mouhot alerted the Western world to the ruins of a temple complex in Angkor. The place had been visited by Europeans before but Mouhot’s posthumously published Travels in Siam, Cambodia and Laos is believed to have been influential in arousing European interest in the site. Scholars following in the Frenchman’s footsteps were so overwhelmed by the artworks and architecture, that they ignored the archaeology. Angkor was believed to be around 40 sq km.

But gap archaeologists say the city state was actually “stretched for at least 1,000 sq km”. They say that the closest pre-modern equivalent to the Cambodian city state was the Mayan city of Tikal in Guatemala, at its peak around 150 sq km.

“There is not a single square kilometre in Angkor that wasn’t intensively modified and engineered,” says Damian Evans, a gap archaeologist. Besides reservoirs and residential clusters, the map reveals 74 new temples and an elaborate grid of walled field systems.

Evans says there has been an ongoing debate about whether the water network of Angkor could have supported intensive rice cultivation. “The elaborate inlets and outlets on all the major reservoirs coupled with distributor canals connected to every single water source in the region suggest water was intensively exploited at Angkor and could well have been used for rice agriculture. The canals were either made of stone or compacted earth and there was a series of very sophisticated water control devices such as spillways—sometimes massive structures built in stone—which have the capacity to provide irrigation for rice,” he writes.

Old theory
gap findings confirm a theory, first put forward in 1955 by Bernard-Philippe Groslier. The French archaeologist had argued that the ancient irrigation network, which had been ignored by researchers who followed in Mouhot’s footsteps, “was both built and used for irrigation, specifically, to ameliorate variations in agricultural output caused by an unpredictable annual monsoon and to support a huge population of greater than a million people in a constellation of suburbs”.

Evans, however, is not so sure of Angkor’s population. “The gap study doesn’t provide any direct evidence of an extremely large urban population. Our study is more revealing about the spatial extent of the settlement than about its population,” he says.

Environmental demise?
Population figures aside, the expansion of Angkor is impressive and bears witness to the extent the Khmers were able to alter their environment, ultimately engineering Angkor Wat’s demise. It was earlier believed that the city state was deserted after Thai armies ransacked it.

But the gap research has a given a different perspective to the city’s fall. Evans explains that the “massive infrastructural network of roads and canals was built to give coherence to the extended settlement area and to provide a means of communication and of transporting vast amounts of people, stone, and other goods across the landscape”. However the system might have been difficult to maintain especially with potential competing interests for water control (temples, domestic an agricultural use).

Groslier had already suggested that over-intensive irrigation and land-use led to the city’s decline. “Excavations conducted during the mapping did reveal a series of ad hoc adaptations, breaches, modifications to the irrigation system suggesting systemic problems in the network could indeed have caused the downfall of the Angkorian state,” Evans notes.

Furthermore, water-intensive rice agriculture required forest clearing and walled fields, which increased risks of runoffs, sedimentation and caused erratic water flows. In fact remote sensing and ground observations have revealed that “the Siem Reap river is now incised 5-8 metres into the Angkorian floodplain, and a major canal in the south of Angkor that postdates the 14th century ad (when the city was abandoned) is entirely filled with cross-bedded sands, indicating rapid movement of large quantities of sediment-laden water.”

But what led to Angkor’s collapse in the 14th century? Evans admits, “We don’t know that at this stage. There is too little data on both population and on climatic variation in this area”.

What the gap archaeologists do know though is that expansion of the settlement created increasing difficulties for the movement of people, information and goods around the landscape.

gap’s current goal is to ascertain if Angkorians were able to deal with the environmental consequences of their settlement if their failure to factor in ecological changes lead to their downfall. Evans says that the increased sedimentation in canals due to deforestation caused by rice cultivation cannot be ruled out.

The archaeologist notes that Angkor’s demise is a lot similar to the collapse of many pre-industrial civilisations. “It’s something to bear in mind, considering that many of our contemporary cities are expansive, low-density urban sprawls as Angkor appears to have been,” he says. Controlling the environment helped Angkor become the great political centre it was but also led to it losing that place.

Source:Down To Earth
Compiled By: Saurav Chakraborty

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