This is to present a collection of vintage photographs form Covers of Filmfare.
I landed upon these through the Old Indian Photos, which featured the series from Inde, Bollywood & Cie
I have collected the photographs into a presentation file @ Film Stars on Vintage Covers
So, photographs can be enjoyed either on that presentation or more details can be pursued at the sites referred to above.
It takes 35 gallons of water to make one cup of coffee. Why? All the water used to cultivate the coffee beans. Similarly, it can take about 635 gallons to make one hamburger because of all the water required to grow feed for the cows.
The need for clean fresh water is increasing rapidly, too, as populations rise and standards of living improve around the world. In some places — such as central California, the North China Plains, and parts of India — the demand for water is already outstripping the local supply.
Because global water consumption is expected to increase by 40% over the next 20 years, water shortages may get more acute and more widespread, spurring more reliance on desalination technologies, water reuse, and conservation. The results could have massive economic, ecological, and geopolitical consequences, creating investing opportunities in places you may never have considered.
—- Courtesy: “Thinking Big – Put The Power of Our Insights to Work for You” on http://www.fidelity.com/thinking as posted on http://www.washingtonpost.com
This 20th Anniversary issue of Business Today is – both , in keeping with making the Anniversary Issue a Collectors’ item as well as presenting either a fresh view to the contemporarily relevant topic or presenting a new topic] a very pensive yet full- of –hopes forward-looking statement.
In presenting the design and the content, the Editorial Team has indeed lived up to their promise of not looking back.
The issue is essentially split in several sections, each section having an article or a story from the different fields of India.
For all practical purposes, the issue opens with ‘Companies That Changed India’ in the last 20 years. There may be some debate about a few of the models quoted here or left out from its roster,, but even while looking at the rear window, the eyesight has not wavered from the front-view.
‘Score Ahead’ charts the current scenario and future agenda for ‘a new India’ in terms of the aspirations and challenges in the fields of Democracy, Politics, Corruption, Media, Scientific Research, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Education, Banking, Global Standing, Personal Finance, Philanthropy, Women, NGOs, Healthcare, Public Transport, Infrastructure, Agriculture, Environment, entertainment, Advertising, Technology [Social Media].and Sports – the Index has inadvertently maintained the title of “Column’ here- with the help of quite passionate articles from the persons at the grass-roots in the respective field. The topics do cover most of the soft issue for the tomorrow of India, and to some extent that of Bharat as well.
The editorial preface to these articles notes deluge of opportunities. Partly the [so called] liberalization in the past 20 years, coupled with need of the European countries and USA to locate their manufacturing bases to a low-cost destination has provided such a booster dose to our economy, that some of the chinks left out in the process of development have not hurt the economy and the people.
The liberalization eased, to a greater extent, but only in certain selected areas only, the governmental controls on operation and maintenance of the business in India. As result, entry of private enterprise in the two basic sectors, heath care and education, did get great opportunities. At the end of 20 years, when the momentum of growth has mellowed down, the three typical systemic maladies – insufficiency, [only] profit orientation and degeneration of ‘people aspect’ – as captured by Dr. Abhay Bang [“Change the Medication” , page 96], seem to affect almost all the areas taken up for discussion in this section.
The Editorial Team needs to be especially complemented for presenting the stories of ‘common men’s spirit of entrepreneurship – the potential bulwark of engagement of the bulging young India in decades to come – in the section ‘The Enterprising India’. One may chuckle with a resignation of cynicism on this aspect, particularly if he /she has read a story, being circulated in some other publications, of Dr. Piramal sitting over a pile of disinvestment cash. Oh well, even though we have gained fairly good ‘project’ management expertise [“Blueprint for Excellence” – Shri K Venkatesh, page 110], as much of the work has been done in last 20 years is still required to be done in next 5 years.
‘Catalytic Converters’ has picked up a wide spectrum of potential game changers by way of Clean Drinking Water, Solar Energy, Low-cost tablets, Wireless Broadband, UID, Cloud Computing, Mobile-based Transactions, Commodity Trading,
The photo gallery and snippets of thoughts of “ambitious men and women who are deciding the future of India in the areas of Entrepreneurship, professional Executive, Fashion, Jurisprudence, Education to air their views on what would change in their areas of work in the next decade.’
The stories in the issue have presented the imbalances and the opportunities by maintaining the delicate balance with an undercurrent of positive optimism.
May be because of such strong under-current of déjà vu that Shri Chaitanya Kalbag’s editorial post script – which I have translated in Gujarati] throws up the gauntlet of getting back to the work of unfinished agenda of providing decent education, health care, nutrition and shelter to the poorest child in the remotest village of India [Bharat] with the’ collective semi-conscious’ energy to stand up, dust off and carry on. He has unambiguously emphasized the intent of the Editor-In-Chief to set the tone for the future on the 20th Anniversary of Business Today.
On the whole, the issue has been well-designed and its content carefully chosen and presented to render the Anniversary issue a must-read and ponder upon.
I feel satisfied to remain an avid reader of this business journal from its inception and justified in maintaining the relationship of a subscriber for almost 15 years.
Ashok Vaishnav, Ahmedabad,
We visited Sattvik2011, 9th Traditional Food Festival, organized by SRISTI – Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions – at I I M, Ahmedabad campus.
Apart from well-managed food show, the samples of ‘small’ innovations on display at NIF pavilion were simply unimaginable. It was heartening to not that NIF, under the stewardship of Prof. Anil Gupta, I I M A , have undertaken a mammoth task of discovering such innovations, promoting them for full-scale commercialization and documenting the whole process.
In a country like India, such initiatives themselves require huge scale up to be more visible to all stakeholders. This should be of great help in tackling the major potential problem of providing livelihood opportunities to burgeoning youth constituency of future India.
In fact, the model of capital-intensive, rather than labor intensive ,automation has come up with major structural flaws, as succinctly analyzed in the article
When Your Replacement’s Name Is HAL on http://thedx.druckerinstitute.com/.
Prof. Anil Gupta and his team deserve tonnes of congratulations for their work, which best can be done by done by helping out, directly or indirectly, to the best of each of the professional citizens of India to the best of their capabilities.
The only important question in the West right now is how to restart stalled economic growth.
So it is easy to be dazzled by India, where a 7% rise in gross domestic product is the nightmare scenario, and optimists are shooting for 9%. But Indians themselves are starting to worry about how that growth is being achieved – and who is benefiting.
The headline complaint is corruption. That is nothing new here, of course. But the country now has a middle class self-confident enough to feel humiliated by paying quotidian bribes and resentful of the rise of baksheesh billionaires. Anna Hazare’s hunger strike became a national political event because it tapped into this anger of the urban bourgeoisie.
“India has been overwhelmed by corruption scams,” Kiran Bedi, the first Indian woman officer and one of Hazare’s chief lieutenants, told me in one of a series of interviews in Mumbai. “While it has been apparent that India is shining, India has also been declining in many ways as there has been rampant exposure of corruption.”
“Corruption is endemic,” said Rajiv Lall, chief executive of Infrastructure Development Finance Co, a partly state-owned financial institution. “I don’t think anybody here is pretending that there’s no corruption in India.
And corruption can take on a new dimension, especially in time of great transformation.”
Graft is just part of the story. One of the reasons to celebrate India’s astonishing economic rise is that the subcontinent desperately needed to get richer. In 1991, when Manmohan Singh, then the finance minister and now the prime minister, began the liberalization program that underpins the country’s transformation, India’s 854 mn citizens had an average annual per capita income of only $1,300. The problem, said Arun Maira, a former industrialist – member of the country’s influential planning commission, is that India’s economic rise has had the least impact on people who need it most.
“My thesis is that most people are not feeling included in the growth,” Maira said.
“This has become a very loud voice which is saying ‘Come on guys, the economy is growing very fast now. You’re celebrating this 8, 9, 10% growth, but what about us?”
As Maira points out, one of the most powerful advantages of the wealthiest 1% is “access to people in power.” But there is a more subtle reason the game is most effectively played by those who are already winning it. S. Gopalakrishnan of Infosys, said that “The tendency is that people who have access to power and access to governments, etc., tend to get a better deal. “The policies, the roots, are framed because they are people who give inputs to those policies,” he said.
This is the Indian version of what Willem Buiter, the former London School of Economics professor who is now chief economist at Citigroup, calls “cognitive capture,” and which he blames in part for the regulatory and legislative lapses that created the 2008 crisis.
Ashutosh Varshney, a professor of international studies at Brown University, likens India’s thriving and dirty capitalism to the United States’ Gilded Age. That apt comparison suggests that India watchers should be on the lookout for a Hindu version of the Roosevelts – a Teddy to break the grip of the robber barons and an FDR to offer the 99% a New Deal.
There is, however, one important difference. India’s robber barons have emerged in the age of globalisation and at a time when the US, still the world’s dominant economy, is experiencing its own second Gilded Age. The wealthiest 1% is a global class, and cognitive capture is an international phenomenon. The world may need its own global Roosevelts, too.
Courtesy: SmartInvestor.in 18-11-2011
The world is too small? or Is it? 