Bajirao I

Bajirao I (18 August 1700 – 28 April 1740) was a general of the Maratha Empire in India. He served as Peshwa (Prime Minister) to the fourth Maratha Chhatrapati (king) Shahu from 1720 until Bajirao's death. He is also known by the names Bajirao Ballal and Thorale (Marathi for Elder) Bajirao.

Bajirao is credited with expanding the Maratha Empire, especially in the north, which contributed to its reaching a zenith during his son's reign twenty years after his death. Bajirao is generally regarded as the most influential of the nine Peshwas from the Bhat family.

Early life

Bajirao was born into the Bhat family of Marathi Chitpavan Brahmin lineage. His father Balaji Vishwanath was the first Peshwa of Chhatrapati Shahu; his mother was Radhabai. Bajirao had a younger brother Chimaji Appa.

Bajirao would often accompany his father on military campaigns. He was with his father when the latter was imprisoned by Damaji Thorat before being released for a ransom. When Vishwanath died in 1720, Shahu appointed the 20-year old Bajirao as the Peshwa. He is said to have preached the ideal of Hindu Pad Padshahi (Hindu Empire), but there are doubts over his or his successors' sincerity on this matter.

Balaji Vishwanath

Balaji Vishwanath (Bhat) (1662–1720), better known as Peshwa Balaji Vishwanath, was the first of a series of hereditary Peshwas (Marathi for Prime Minister) hailing from the Marathi Chitpavan Brahmin family who gained effective control of the Maratha Empire during the 18th century. Balaji Vishwanath assisted a young Maratha Emperor Shahu to consolidate his grip on a kingdom that had been racked by civil war and persistent attack by the Mughals under Aurangzeb. He was called "the second founder of the Maratha State."

Early life and Career

Balaji Vishwanath (Bhat) was born into a Marathi Chitpavan Brahmin family. The family hailed from the coastal Konkan region of present-day Maharashtra and were the hereditary Deshmukh for Shrivardhan under the Siddi of Janjira. He was named "Balaji," which is a form of the given name Ballal. Balaji's first job was as a petty clerk at salt works at Chiplun, owned by the Siddi, while his elder brother Tanoji performed herediatary functions of Deshmukh at Shrivardhan. Having been persecuted by Siddi, he went out in search of employment to the upper regions of western ghats and worked as a mercenary trooper under various Maratha generals. According to Kincaid & Parasnis, Balaji Vishwanath entered the Maratha administration during the reign of Chhatrapati Sambhaji or the regency of his brother, Rajaram. One of his jobs in the Maratha Administration was as a revenue official or writer under Ramchandra Pant Amatya. Later he served as an accountant for the Maratha general, Dhanaji Jadhav, at Janjira. Between 1699 and 1702, he served as the Sar-subhedar or head-administrator at Pune and from 1704 to 1707 as Sarsubedar of Daulatabad. By the time Dhanaji died, Balaji had proven himself as an honest and able officer. The newly releasedMaratha ruler Chhatrapati Shahu, took note of his abilities and appointed Balaji as his assistant (c.1708).

Peshwa

A Peshwa (Marathi: पेशवे) was the equivalent of a modern Prime Minister in the Maratha Empire. Originally, the Peshwas served as a subordinate to the Chatrapati (the Maratha king), but later, they became they de facto leaders of the Marathas, and the Chatrapati was reduced a nominal ruler. During the last years of the Maratha Empire, the Peshwas themselves were reduced to titular leaders, and remained under the authority of the Maratha nobles and the British East India Company.

The first Peshwa was Moropant Pingle, who was appointed as the head of the Ashta Pradhan (council of eight ministers) by Chatrapati Shivaji, the founder of the Maratha Empire. The initial Peshwas were all ministers who served as the chief executives to the king. The later Peshwas held the highest administrative office and also controlled the Maratha confederacy. Under the Chitpavan Brahmin Bhat family, the Peshwas became the de facto hereditary administrators of the Confederacy. The Peshwa's office was most powerful under Baji Rao I (r. 1720-1740). Under Peshwa administration and with the support of several key generals and diplomats, the Maratha Empire reached its zenith, ruling most of the Indian subcontinent. However, after the Peshwa Raghunathrao allied with the British, the Peshwa's power declined substantially. The subsequent Peshwas were titular leaders controlled either by the Maratha nobles such as Daulat Rao Scindia, or by the East India Company. During this period, the Maratha confederacy came to its end through its formal annexation into the British Empire in 1818.

Google Play

Google Play or Google Play Store, and originally the Android Market, is a digital distribution platform operated by Google. It serves as the official app store for the Android operating system, allowing users to browse and download applications developed with the Android SDK and published through Google. Google Play also serves as a digital media store, offering music, magazines, books, movies, and television programs. It previously offered Google hardware devices for purchase until the introduction of a separate online hardware retailer, Google Store, on March 11, 2015.

Applications are available through Google Play either free of charge or at a cost. They can be downloaded directly to an Android or Google TV device through the Play Store mobile app, or by deploying the application to a device from the Google Play website. Many applications can be targeted to specific users based on a particular hardware attribute of their device, such as a motion sensor (for motion-dependent games) or a front-facing camera (for online video calling).

Mystery meat navigation

Mystery meat navigation (also known as MMN) is a disparaging term coined in 1998 by Vincent Flanders, author and designer of the website Web Pages That Suck, to describe a web page where the destination of the link is not visible until the user points their cursor at it. Such interfaces lack a user-centered design, emphasizing aesthetic appearance, white space, and the concealment of relevant information over basic practicality and functionality.

The epithet "mystery meat" refers to the meat products often served in American public school cafeterias whose forms have been so thoroughly reprocessed that their exact types can no longer be identified by their appearances: like them, the methods of MMN are clear to the producer but baffling to the consumer.

Flanders originally and temporarily described the phenomenon as Saturnic navigation in reference to the Saturn Corporation, whose company website epitomized this phenomenon. Flanders writes, "The typical form of MMN is represented by menus composed of unrevealing icons that are replaced with explicative text only when the mouse cursor hovers over them".