| INDIA TODAY | CURRENT ISSUE MAY 15, 2006 | | | | EYECATCHERS |  | | | Master Marathon He is India's Forrest Gump. Four-year-old Budhia Singh has made it to the 2007 Limca Book of Records by running the 65-km distance from Puri to Bhubaneswar in seven hours and two minutes. And to think this young boy was nearly sold to a hawker for Rs 800 by his poor mother! Now he will head to London to take part in a marathon, with a French TV unit already working on a documentary on him. Run in a million, don't you agree? | | | | Moving Picture Mumbai girl Sheetal S. Agarwal's documentary Ordinary Lives, based on a 10-member family living in a 180-sq ft shack in a Mumbai slum, has won the prestigious Michael Moore Award for Best Documentary Film at the 44th Ann Arbor Film Festival. Having studied filmmaking at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, she is intrigued by the growing space crunch in both Mumbai and Hong Kong. The award, named after Academy award-winning director Moore, of Fahrenheit 9/11 fame, only adds to Agarwal's already overflowing box of honours. | | | | HONOUR ROLLS Aishwarya Rai has been nudged out of Time's 100 Most Influential People in the World list by none other than Infosys President Nandan Nilekani, who has been called "the Indian at the centre of the global economy" and New York-based entrepreneur Vikram Akula, who has been recognised for "finding novel ways of supporting India's poor". With George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Angelina Jolie and Pervez Musharraf for company, we say they are in the right business. | | | | PLAYBACK PILLAI Video jockey, actor and now singer-Suchitra Pillai has added one more feather to her cap. The trained Carnatic singer will sing a song for the Salman Khan starrer Marigold, in which she plays Khan's best buddy. "I wrote the song Yaara for my husband and played it at our wedding. It was also the first song I recorded for my music album, which I'm working on with Mahesh Tinaikar and Ashish Painoli," says Pillai, who has, in the past, sung for Talvin Singh, French artiste Rachid Taha and the band Kula Shaker. Now she has something else to sing about. -Compiled by Kimi Dangor Index | | |