?Achanak... 37 saal baad? the weekly late night supernatural thriller on Sony is all set to conclude the first cycle with a ‘major revelation‘ this Friday.

Series writer Sridhar Raghavan says this week‘s episode will reveal the person responsible for the strange goings-on at Gahota, which have fuelled and propelled the story thus far. This would turn the plot inside out, as the protagonist is a person who has been a main figure throughout the story.

Raghavan says the show, that kicked off on 22 March is divided into four cycles, with the first one concluding with the unmasking of the villain. ? CID was rational, Aahat was irrational, bordering on the extreme. Achanak... lies somewhere in between, with small, strong occurrences occurring in conjunction making people question their lives and sanity,? he says.

?Cycles exist as structural levels we can play with. The show should

Sudden shocks...A still from Achanak 37 Saal Baad

ideally bewilder rather than confuse audience members. It won?t drag? he promises. Another unique aspect of the serial is that a couple of heroes have already been killed in the storyline, so ordinary people realise their potential by having to deal with extraordinary circumstances.

Talking about the future of the serial, Raghavan says the second cycle starts with people in Gahota not remembering any of the strange occurrences that have taken place over the past three months. Amnesia descends like blanket on the town and the minds of people are full of false memories. There will be fewer characters in this cycle as a few people have died in the first cycle, says Raghavan.

Anything it does, it does with ishtyle.
Even a task as mundane as recruiting new veejays for its shows has been turned into a glitzy campaign by music channel MTV. The 14 finalists of its third MTV Hunt, launched over two months ago, will now appear on the channel in a special half hour reality show ‘Wannabe VJs Do Goa‘, a la Baywatch. Till the selection whittles down to the final few, the finalists will also appear on the channel‘s popular shows right through the ‘Wannabe VJs do MTV‘ week that commences 24 June.

The finalists, says the channel, were chosen on the basis of their personality, passion for music, presence of mind, WQ (wackiness quotient) and sense of fashion and style from over 10,000 entries received over 10 weeks.

In conjunction with the initiative, the channel is also running a contest called ‘Viewer‘ Voice‘, in which viewers have to vote for the candidate they feel is most likely to be recruited as VJ. One lucky voter could get a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be a VJ for a day on MTV.

Commercial launch services provider Arianespace has signed a launch contract for two SES Americom satellites, AMC-13 and AMC-15.
AMC-13 and AMC-15, new-generation satellites weighing over 4,000 kilograms at liftoff, will be launched by an Ariane 5 booster from the European Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana in 2003 and 2004 respectively. Built by Alcatel Space on the Spacebus 4000 platform, the AMC-13 C-band satellite will be positioned at 172 degrees East. It will deliver superior trans-Pacific and regional services as well as connections to the Americas, Australia and Asia-Pacific networks and is expected to be launched in the second half of 2003.
AMC-15, North America‘s first Ku-Ka hybrid satellite is based on the A2100 model and is being built by Lockheed Martin. AMC-15 will feature North America‘s first operating Ka-band payload along with 24 Ku-band transponders. It will be positioned at 105 degrees west, and will play an essential role in SES AMERICOM‘s new direct-to-home service, AMERICOM2Home, in the United States, according to Arianespace. The launch of AMC-15 is scheduled for the second half of 2004.

Including the AMC-13 and AMC-15 contracts, Arianespace‘s backlog now stands at 38 satellites to be launched, plus nine ATV missions for the International Space Station. This year, the company claims to have bagged eight of the 11 contracts open to competition.