The three-day SMILE Film Festival came to an eventful end on April 26 with an aim of taking some new steps for the development of the youth in the near future. The audience and former members of the SMILE organisation formed a Smile Movie Club at the end of the festival. The Smile Movie Club will be screening various documentary films by conducting youth related events in Northeast to generate social awareness. Students Mobilization Initiative for Learning through Exposure (SMILE) is a youth programme under the aegis of the Indo Global Social Service Society (IGSSS). The film festival was...

Cellphones had always fascinated me as a teenager. So I wanted one the day I finished with my Class XII board exams. My father took me to a Nokia Priority Dealer and asked me to choose a handset. But there was none of my choice and therefore I decided to opt for a Samsung mobile. And I landed up buying a stylish sliding Samsung mobile (D840). My father was not very happy with my choice for he prefers only Nokia phones, as though others are not very trendy. A month after I got my cell I left for Delhi with my parents on a vacation. One fine day while we were on our way to Haridwar I found that...

We have seen two, virtually spontaneous, bandhs in the Northeast in the days just gone by. One was a relatively-short 12-hour Assam bandh called in protest against the letting off of the accused in the botched-up Parag Das murder case. The other was a much more gruelling 48-hour bandh called in Manipur over the cold-blooded, fake encounter of a former militant. Bandhs have been so rampant in the Northeast in the last 20 or so years that people have become inured to them. And bandhs, more often than not, are a success without the advocates of the bandhs having to drum up much support for them...