Hi,
I find ndtv.com to be a decent news website. They cover various fields like current affairs, art, sport, and entertainment. News items are updated quite frequently. The ndtv.com message board is one of the very active message boards you can find. The photo features section of the site is also very good.
But I have few cribs about the site. The national news section I feel is biased towards north india. I wont say that there is a huge bias, but there certainly is some sort of bias towards north india. Another technical problem is the rolling headlines on top of the page. It works properly only on internet explorer and netscape. Other browsers like opera (the best as per my opinion) do not get the rolling news.
On the whole, id definitely recommend ndtv.com for a newcomer to the net community.