Fall in Canada is splendid. Around September to early October, for a couple of weeks every year, the changing leaf colours attract thousands of visitors. Two years ago, Dow India chairman Vipul Shah and his wife decided to take a trip to see the sight. There is this one train that goes to this place in Ontario, where the colours are at their best. It leaves early in the morning...
11:55:37 PM May 06, 2013
In My Years with Boss at Gemini Studios, Ashokamitran recounts a poet's visit. "He was a tall man, very English, very serious and of course very unknown to all of us. Battling with half a dozen pedestal fans on the shooting stage, The Boss [film producer and publisher SS Vasan] read out a long speech. It was obvious he knew little about the poet." "Then the poet spoke. He couldn't...
11:29:13 PM May 06, 2013
The usual dusty small-town India greets us as a small group of people associated with the NGO Caring Friends travel over two-and-a-half days through Aurangabad and Jalna to understand the problems in the region and what help could be given. On the face of it, people seem to be going about their normal life. Where are the signs of distress that we had read in the media? Don't girls and...
11:08:25 PM May 06, 2013
The milieu at Shantivan, a garden in Mumbai's tony Malabar Hill area, on February 17 was like a hangover from Valentine's Day. Placards displaying messages like 'Love is all we need' were tied to tree branches and hearts were chalked with bounty throughout the green sprawl. Except that it wasn't an ode to Cupid. The occasion was the second monthly lunch hosted by Seva Caf. Omnipresent at the venue was...
03:45:26 PM Apr 15, 2013
Over the past five years, the clamour about electric vehicles (EVs) becoming a feasible transport option has become loud. "It has all come together", is the refrain. ...
11:41:48 AM Mar 18, 2013
High-fliers are picky. Bone china in business class travel is so last decade. And large carriers are working very hard to woo the first and business class traveller into ever newer, even more exclusive experiences. Millions of dollars are being spent in the effort to lure the big spenders away from the siren songs of corporate jets. ...
04:17:07 PM Mar 14, 2013
John Flannery tells Forbes India the environment for some of GE India's businesses has deteriorated, and government statements is yet to translate into activity. ...
04:05:30 PM Mar 14, 2013
These days, any conversation on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) tends to evoke a very strong response. That's because there is a large section of business leaders who believe that the government's move to force companies of a certain size to spend at least 2 per cent of their profits on CSR is completely out of line. ...
04:45:46 PM Mar 13, 2013
We've all heard tragic stories about someone dying of cardiac arrest on the football field or during a board meeting. What we've heard next are related stories about what a stressful, over-leveraged lifestyle brings along with it. The fact is there are certain genetic mutations, highly prevalent in the Indian subcontinent, that increase the risk of chronic heart failures in individuals. But, what if there was a genetic test that...
05:50:52 PM Mar 07, 2013
A reading chair reclines at a comfortable angle. Spectacles lie within arm's reach. Old teak consoles with black marble tops line the room, which is dominated by book-crammed cupboards. Old frescoes of Hindu gods accentuate the sacred emotion of reading and growing with each book. An old hookah and an ebony-and-ivory chess board add to the personal sense of the space. Thakur Amar Singh could have just left his library...
05:45:38 PM Mar 07, 2013
Devendra Raj Mehta was a career bureaucrat who rose to the top, advising prime ministers as the deputy governor of RBI and taking on big corporate names during his stint as the Sebi chairman. But as one sits in his 'office' of over a decade, at the Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti (BMVSS) in Jaipur, the absence of any trappings of power from that 40-year career is striking. Mehta himself...
05:13:22 PM Mar 05, 2013
In January 2009, in what is widely referred to as 'India's Enron', 300,000 shareholders of Satyam Computer Services (now Mahindra Satyam) came together and sued the company. Satyam's founder Ramalinga Raju had confessed to misstating accounts, and the company stock plummeted. The shareholders claimed damages worth Rs 5,000 crore. ...
02:55:07 PM Mar 01, 2013
The origin of the name 'Oscar' is uncertain. While one biography of Bette Davis claims she named the statuette after husband Harmon Oscar Nelson, another story claims the Academy's executive secretary remarked that the statue looked like her "Uncle Oscar". The award was formally called by the name in 1939, a decade after its establishment. ...
06:25:06 PM Feb 26, 2013
How will we change the way we interact with smartphones? As Apple popularised touchscreens in 2007, the mobile world has harmonised around a circa 4-inch mobile phone with few buttons. Before the iPhone and the first few years after it, designers in the industry were discussing hidden buttons, haptics [sense of touch], keyboards, add-on keyboards to improve the input functionality. But nothing really happened. Instead, Apple revolutionised the phone by...
05:50:40 PM Feb 22, 2013
Wearable, augmented-reality Glasses: One of the most radical of all new designs, the Google Glass is a spectacle-like wearable computer that you control with your eyes and voice. ...
05:40:10 PM Feb 22, 2013
