Zimbabwe shock Australia by 5 wickets

Reigning One-Day world champions Australia were shocked in their lung opener as Zimbabwe scripted a thrilling victory by five wickets in their Group B encounter at Newlands in Cape Town on Wednesday

Australia put up a below par performance as their batsmen only managed 138 runs after electing to bat, and were unable to defend their modest total as Zimbabwe got there with one ball to spare.

The Zimbabwean outfit put up a sterling bowling display coupled with terrific fielding as the Australians never got going on a damp Newlands wicket. Opener Brendan Taylor then notched up an unbeaten 60 from 45 balls to see his side home.

At four wickets down for 74 in the twelfth over, Zimbabwe were well on course to chase down the 'modest' Australian target, but an impromptu rain delay meant the Zimbabweans were still behind by two runs on Duckworth-Lewis.

Play resumed as Taylor and Hamilton Masakadza put together 53 runs for the fifth wicket to take Zimbabwe closer to their target, only to witness high drama as Brett Lee dismissed Masakadza in the penultimate over for a crucial 27.

Needing 12 runs from the final over off Nathan Bracken, Taylor dispatched the first delivery for a boundary. And with four runs to get from the last two balls, Bracken’s penultimate delivery was sent for yet another boundary to spark off wild celebrations in the Zimbabwean camp.

Wipro to launch supercomputer

Wipro Infotech, the India, Middle East and Asia Pacific IT business unit of Wipro Ltd, on Wednesday announced the launch of Wipro Supernova, a range of supercomputers and superstorage in India.

Wipro is building Supernova grounds up in India in exclusive partnership with Z RESEARCH, Inc, a California-based organisation specialised in commoditising supercomputers and superstorage.

Supernova includes a complete range of supercomputers with an entry level configuration delivering one trillion mathematical calculations per second going up to hundred thousand trillions of calculations per second and superstorage scaling to multiple hundred petabytes, company officials said.

Vice-President of Wipro Personal Computing, Ashutosh Vaidya, said the trend of leveraging India's skills in engineering and industrial design working along with expertise in animation design, simulation and modeling and bioinformatics is gaining tremendous momentum.

Wipro Chairman, Azim Premji is world's richest Muslim entrepreneur

India's software czar Azim Premji now has a new nomenclature - the world's richest Muslim entrepreneur - as he holds more wealth than any other Muslim outside the Persian Gulf royalty, a US media report said.

Financial daily 'Wall Street Journal' has written a front-page profile on chairman of India's third largest IT exporter Wipro, saying Premji defies all the conventional wisdom about Islamic tycoons - he does not hail from the Persian Gulf, did not make his money in petroleum, and does not wear his faith on his sleeve.

"Azim Premji has tapped India's abundant engineering talent to transform a family vegetable-oil firm, Wipro Ltd, into a technology and outsourcing giant. By serving Western manufacturers, airlines and utilities, the company has brought Premji a fortune of some $17 billion," the report said.

Premji is ahead of Russia's metal and real estate baron Suleman Kerimov ($14 billion), Kuwait's Nasser Kharafi ($11 billion), Saudi Arabia's Mohammad Amoudi ($8 billion), UAE's Abdulaziz Ghurair ($8 billion), Russia's Iskander Mahmudov ($8 billion), Saudi's Maan Sanea ($7.5 billion) and Saudi's Suleiman Rajhi ($7.5 billion) among the richest Muslim entrepreneurs in the world.

The daily quoted Premji in the report titled "How a Muslim Billionaire Thrives in Hindu India" as saying that such success shows globalization is turning into "two-way traffic" that can bring tangible benefits to developing countries.

"We have always seen ourselves as Indian. We've never seen ourselves as Hindus, or Muslims, or Christians or Buddhists," Premji told WSJ in an interview.

CAT & GRE words

brook       :   tolerate , endure

frantic      :   wild; distraught as from fear or worry;

indite       :   write; compose

prodigious :   enormous; marvelous;

remonstrate :   protest; objection