Vengamamba --- The Devotee

Tarigonda Vengamamba  set her  foot on the globe in the year  1730. She was a poetess who wrote numerous poems,songs   and she was an ardent devotee of Lord Venkateswara.

Vengamamba was born into a family of Nandavareeks a clan of brhamins. She was born to father Krishnayamatya and  Mangamamba her mother.


Married at a very early age , her husband Venkatachalapathi  passed away and she became a child-widow. However, she refused to accept anyone but the Lord as her husband and continued to dress as a married woman.

She studied yoga sciences under Acharya (professor) Subrahmnayudu and became a yogini. As a result, she faced resentment of the local priest in Tarikonda, and shifted to Tirumala. She was welcomed by the priest and descendants of Annamayya, all who had heard of her devotion prior to her move.

Moved by her devotion, it is told that Lord Venkateswara allowed her to enter the temple after temple hours to hear her poems and songs. Venkamamba recited poems and took 'harati' of the Lord each night and paid pearls as fee to the Lord. Observing pearls over a period of time, the priests investigation led to Venkamamba. Their punishment was to exile her to a cave in Tumburakona, a distance of 15 miles from Tirumala.

The legend goes on that He created a secret passage from the cave to the temple which was used by Venkamamba to continue her devotional service. The practice of penance and night harati continued for 6 years. Eventually, the priests realized their folly and recognized Venkamamba's devotion and dedication, and requested her to return. Upon return, she was allowed to participate in Ekanta seva and take the final harati of the Lord.

The area around her samadhi was later converted into a school with the samadhi still open for pilgrims' worship in the school playground.

Africa --- Investors Destination

The internet is only now arriving, and -- with a billion people on the continent still mostly offline -- there exists a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build the next Zyngas, eBays and Groupons  for a huge untapped local market. The broadband fibreoptic cables currently being laid on both east and west coasts of Africa ,will help us understand how quickly and ambitiously an entire continent is being connected.
 David Cameron the Prime Minister of UK , recently took a high-level delegation of corporate CEOs to Nigeria and South Africa to highlight "one of the greatest economic opportunities on the planet". The trip -- featuring the bosses of firms such as Barclays and Bombardier, Vodafone and Virgin Atlantic -- was hailed by Downing Street as "a historic visit to a continent with a trillion dollar economy and the potential, according to the IMF, to grow faster than Brazil over the next five years". Much of that growth will come from startups that bring the mobile internet to businesses and consumers who have until now been offline. That's why Cameron's team invited along the British founders of red-hot mobile-money business Monitise, a clever text-messaging system called FrontlineSMS.
McKinsey and Ernst & Young are forecasting that $150 billion will flow into Africa by 2015, and that consumer spending will reach $1.4 trillion by 2020. No wonder Helios Investment Partners could recently raise a $900 million fund specifically targeting the continent.
 A few obvious markets primed for explosive growth:
Mobile money
Who needs banks if you can use your mobile to send and receive cash? More than a quarter of Kenya's GDP now passes through a phone-to-phone network called M-Pesa, and in Uganda MTN MobileMoney has almost two million users. As Cameron put it in a speech to Lagos Business School, "Today, mobile banking systems mean we can cut out middlemen and make a direct impact on the lives of small farmers who can produce more food, feed their families, sell more food at the market and in turn buy more seed."
E-commerce
You don't need a smartphone, let alone a PC, to shop online. The American startup SlimTrader runs a service called MoBiashara, which lets African consumers shop by mobile on basic cellphones. And there are half a billion of those in Africa.
Health
Not only do mobile phones turn into blood-pressure monitors and ultrasound devices that can connect rural communities. They can also detect counterfeit medicines: the startup mPedigree works with pharmaceutical companies to let patients text codes on packs of antimalarials to receive confirmation that they're genuine.
Leapfrog tech
If a tiny fraction of, say, Zimbabweans have access to the "big" internet, then why not make the internet accessible via SMS on their 2G phones? That's what Econet Wireless Zimbabwe is offering its five million mobile phone subscribers, turning their handsets into virtual smartphones with tech from ForgetMeNot Africa that turns emails and chats into text messages.
Now insert your own big idea here, and book your air ticket. Sure, Africa still faces huge hurdles -- in South Africa, 11 million people live below the poverty line, and almost 6 million have HIV; in Nigeria, 110 million out of a population of 158 million live on less than £1 a day. But when one telco alone, Bharti Airtel, recently announced $13 billion in African revenue last year, you know it's time to abandon our traditional assumptions.