Former Miss India Neha Dhupia, who has as many as five films lined up this year, says winning a beauty  pageant is no guarantee of striking gold in Bollywood and that it’s only hard work that finally counts.

“It’s not easy to create a place for yourself in Bollywood even if you have a pageant behind you. No one in the industry was holding special carpets  for me because I had won the Miss India contest. You have to work hard if you want to prove something. It’s taken me a long time to carve a niche for myself, but I’m glad that finally I have done it,” Neha told IANS on phone from Goa.

The actress is set to appear in five movies this year – Paying Guest with Mukta Arts, Pappu Can’t Dance Saala and Raat Gayi Baat Gayi by actor-director Saurabh Shukla, Raftaar co-starring Emraan Hashmi and Priyadarshan’s De Dhana Dan.

In Pappu Can’t Dance Saala, her first release this year, Neha is acting along with funny man Vinay Pathak.

“In this comedy film I’m doing with Vinay Pathak, I play the role of a Maharashtrian back-up dancer. It was something very different for me because I’m not a Maharashtrian. I had to learn the mannerisms of the character, who is a complete brat and a bully, but Saurabh (Shukla) helped me a lot,” she explained.

Neha maintains that she has become more careful while choosing projects as she doesn’t want to get typecast in a certain role.

“I’m holding myself back now and doing only interesting projects.”

After winning the Miss India crown in 2002, Neha stepped into Bollywood with 2003 Qayamat: City Under Threat, which starred Ajay Devgan. She got noticed when she did the bold Julie in 2004, but got typecast in a glamorous image.

She went on to do films like Kyaa Kool Hai Hum and Shootout At Lokhandwala, but she tried to break her glam image with Chup Chup Ke, Mithya, Maharathi and Dasvidaniya.

“I feel in our industry you get typecast instantly. When I started off I was offered other roles as well, but I chose the ones I did and got stuck with one image, which was hard to break. That was a mistake and I’ve learnt from that. There was no guiding force for me when I entered Bollywood,” Neha said.

Like many others in Bollywood, Neha too admits she would love to work with Shah Rukh Khan and Mani Ratnam, but adds that she doesn’t consider anyone her competition in the industry.

“I don’t consider anyone my competition. Everyone is great and so talented. Why compete? I would rather be a collective part of the industry,” the actress said.

Amrita’s best friend and co-actor Kareena Kapoor became the Bridesmaid at the wedding.

Katrina Kaif at the wedding.

Perfect: Shahid Kapur was seen with his Kismat Konnection co-star Vidya Balan at the grand finale of a reality show.

Njoy!!: Shahid was seen enjoying every bit of the show.

The vehicle list is impressive, boasting a broad menu of 55 cars that includes a large number of relatively attainable desirables like the Audi TT or Mitsubishi Evo X as well as exotics like the Audi R8 and the Bugatti Veyron. The general feel and handling is exactly what we’ve come to expect from Need for Speed over the past few years; while based on realistic principles that allow the cars to lean and grip like the real thing, the game’s tuned for gameplay rather than realism. If you’re familiar with the franchise, you’ll be pleased to learn that its “point and squirt” approach is fully intact. Point the car where you want it to go and squeeze the throttle, and all you really need to do to make course adjustments is ease off the throttle briefly. When you get the feel for it, you’ll hardly ever do anything more than feather the brakes to get around particularly aggressive turns.

Click the image above to check out all the Need for Speed: Undercover screens.

Structurally, the game has the most in common with Most Wanted. While the city of Palm Harbor offers you freedom to cruise around hunting for events, you can instantly hop from race to race without having to waste any time cruising around if you don’t want to. All of the events are in keeping with The Fast and the Furious vibe that Black Box’s clearly trying to cultivate, with circuit and sprint events supplemented with 1-on-1 races that have you weaving through traffic to impress the bad guys, cop-chase missions that borrow Most Wanted’s “cost to the city” mechanic, and a Test Drive-like car delivery mode.

New to the franchise is a fully transparent “leveling” system that borrows heavily from role-playing games and evenWorld of WarCraft. Successful completion of “missions” boosts stats, and stats in turn allow you to level up your driving skills. The higher your level, the more cars you can drive, and the more upgrades you can access. Even if you have enough in-game cash to buy that Nissan GT-R, if you’re not sufficiently leveled up, you can’t buy it yet. Unless, of course, you want to buy it with real money. See? Not only is this a Need for Speed with something that’s essentially grinding, but it also has microtransactions for “cheating,” too.

While these may sound like what could be Undercover’s greatest crimes against fun, the real offenders are yet to come. Anyone that worked their way to the end of the “Blacklist” in Most Wanted will recall that the cop chases got a little aggressive toward the end. In Undercover, the difficulty ramps in even more obnoxious ways. Though things start off very easy, by the time you’ve become just a level 5 driver, both the opponent and cop A.I. is so obnoxiously aggressive that it borders on absurd. Drivers will ram you off the road, while cops will somehow find ways to squeeze past you and pull right across your front bumper while you’re hurtling along at 120 mph.

Click the image above to check out all the Need for Speed: Undercover screens.

And then there’s the story. While arguably an improvement over previous attempts to bring “real” actors into the franchise, the script and the performances here are laughable at best. The desperately earnest street racers that chide, threaten, and try to intimidate you throughout make Lucas Black’s performance in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift look almost Oscar-worthy.

As a mashup of Need for Speed: Carbon and Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Undercover is ultimately fairly successful. For many, though, in a post-Burnout: Paradise world, the question has to be raised: “What does this give me that Paradise doesn’t?” The answer to that is “cops and robbers,” a mechanic that has worked well in single-player since the days of Hot Pursuit, and works even better online when played in teams of 4-on-4 in Undercover.

This year is all about face-offs. FIFA 09 versus PES 2009. Rock Band versus Guitar Hero World Tour. Need for Speed Undercover versus Midnight Club Los Angeles. EA has the honour, in our opinion, of coming up trumps in the first two stoushes. The third however? Well, you can’t win ’em all.

Need for Speed: Undercover is clearly an attempt to cash in on the success of 2005’s Most Wanted after ProStreet flopped with critics and fans. The game itself is as straightforward as you’d expect; race, come first, win cash, buy new cars. The underlying story is you’re an undercover cop working for Maggie Q, the crazy kung-fu bird from Die Hard 4.0. It’s pretty weak. The Fast and the Furious-lite.

Everything seems to work as it should – the racing is fast and frenetic; the sense of speed is swell and the cars look mostly rad. It ticks most of the boxes it ought to in order to get by.

The biggest problem with Undercover, and it’s a fundamental one, is that it’s lazy.

The new Heroic Driving Engine isn’t too shabby – we like the way it feels and we love being able to pull off incredible 360s at 200km/h on the freeway. The cars seem suitably weighted and handle well. We’re also suckers for good presentation, and Undercover also performs swimmingly in that department. The stylish opening sequence, for instance, smacks heavily of Michael Bay – you know you’re not about to have your intellect tested but you do begin to expect action a-plenty (presumably of the high-octane variety, with two or three exclamation points for good measure!!!).

No, the problem is that most improvements that have occurred in Undercover will either be difficult for your average gamer to notice or fail to add anything noteworthy to the experience. What we’re left with is a lazy game we have the sinking suspicion we’ve played before.

Undercover features a great range of cars, but it’s a simple cut-and-paste job from ProStreet and the DLC cars that followed its release. There just isn’t enough new here, and you’ll likely have driven nearly every ride on offer here in a previous iteration of the series. Unsurprisingly, there’s no local content either – no W427, no F6, not even a Pontiac G8. Pick up a phone guys, we make cars down here. Boo.

The cops make a return from Most Wanted, one of the better NFS games since Hot Pursuit 2, and while we still feel they’re remarkably tenacious and remain impressed with the tactics they employ to try and stop you (boxing you in, attempting to PIT you) there’s no getting around the fact they’ve more or less been clicked and dragged from the three-year-old Most Wanted. Even the bulk of the radio chatter remains identical – and if it isn’t, it sounds identical.

The best part of Undercover by longshot are the freeway races. If there’s one thing that this game does exceptionally well it’s translating the real danger of speeding down the freeway at more than twice the legal limit where one tiny slip-up means the last thing you’ll see will be the contents of your glovebox and the last thing to pass through your mind will be the steering rack. Via the use of sound and force-feedback the freeway races nail not only the speed, but also the claustrophobia of careening down a packed freeway at speed. The traffic isn’t so sparse when you’re encountering it at 250km/h.

The cities (there are three of them) are big, criss-crossed with wide, powerslide-friendly streets – but they lack personality and they all begin to look the same. We’re really, really starting to yearn for the varied environments of the old NFS titles – desert, forest, alpine, city… that kind of stuff. The open-world facilitates slightly more interesting cop chases, but if Black Box is going to stick to rigid, pre-determined tracks anyway we might as well return to the days of Hot Pursuit 2.

In fact, we’d love to return to those days. These cities are just boring. Midnight Club’s LA, for instance, is a far more vivid, sexy and dynamic metropolis. Undercover is pure vanilla. We didn’t notice any time-of-day or weather effects either, and the game would occasionally drop frames and suffer music stutters whenever things got really hectic.

We’ve also got some huge issues with a few decisions relating to track design. The street circuits are all bordered with physical barriers, but although these make better visual sense than an invisible wall covered in glowing green chevrons they don’t make a lot of sense in the world itself. The street racing doesn’t feel very illegal when you’re racing on what’s essentially a closed, purpose-built circuit – and it feels a bit dopey when you start to wonder how civilian cars are making it through these impenetrable wall and onto your race track. Why does this happen?

Intel’s Core 2 Quad Q9650 processors are now priced at US$316, a 40 percent drop from December. Other Core 2 Quad chip prices were cut between 16 percent and 20 percent. The quad-core chips are used in high-end desktops like gaming systems.

Intel’s move could be a response to increasing price pressure exerted by rival Advanced Micro Devices, which recently announced the Phenom II quad-core chips for high-end desktops. AMD has priced its Phenom II quad-core chips between $235 and $275.

Intel also cut prices of its Xeon chips for servers and Celeron processors for mobile devices by up to 48 percent. The quad-core Xeon 3370 is now priced at $316, a 40 percent drop from December, while the Celeron 570 chip was cut by 48 percent from $134 to $70.

Amid the price drops, Intel also introduced three power-efficient quad-core chips with the “s” moniker. The Core 2 Quad Q9550s processor includes 12MB of L2 cache, runs at 2.83GHz and draws 65 watts of power. The chips are priced at $369. The chip is power-efficient version of the Core 2 Quad Q9550 chip, which draws 95 watts of power.

Intel also introduced the Core 2 Quad Q9400s processor, which runs at 2.66GHz, and the Core 2 Quad Q8200s, which runs at 2.33GHz. This chips are priced at $320 and $245 respectively.

Apple executives offered no new information about the health of CEO Steve Jobs during the company’s first-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, which came as a report surfaced that U.S. regulators are reviewing Apple’s public statements about his medical issues.

Jobs said last week that he would take a leave of absence until the end of June for medical reasons. He said his condition is “more complex” than he thought when he revealed on Jan. 5 that his recent weight loss was the result of a hormone imbalance. Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook is managing Apple’s day-to-day operations in Jobs’s absence.

“Steve is CEO of Apple and plans to remain involved in major strategic decisions, and Tim will be responsible for day-to-day” operations, Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO, said during Wednesday’s conference call, essentially repeating what the company said last week.

Asked whether he would take over permanently should Jobs become unable to do his job, Cook said a strong company culture at Apple means it could do well under many of the current executives.

“The values of our company are extremely well-entrenched. We believe we’re on the face of this earth to make great products, and that’s not changing,” he said. “Regardless of who is in what job, those values are so embedded in this company that Apple will do extremely well.”

Jobs had surgery in 2004 for pancreatic cancer. Last year, his gaunt appearance spurred rumors that the charismatic CEO might have had a recurrence of ill health. The intense speculation has generated debate over how much detail public companies should disclose about their leaders’ medical issues to shareholders.

According to a Bloomberg report Wednesday, the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission is examining Apple’s public statements about Jobs’ health to determine whether the company misled investors. The report, which cited an unnamed source “familiar with the matter,” said the review does not mean the SEC has seen evidence of wrongdoing. The SEC declined to comment on the report.

It is unclear how much detail others in the company know about Jobs’s condition, but he sought to reassure employees and shareholders that the board is behind him. “As CEO, I plan to remain involved in major strategic decisions while I am out,” he wrote in last week’s letter to employees. “Our board of directors fully supports this plan.”