Wake up INDIA!

Wake Up INDIA!, say celebs

The death of the Delhi gang-rape victim in Singapore shocked Bollywood, with Shabana Azmi urging the country to "wake up" and combat violence against women.

The film fraternity took to Twitter to express its indignation over the gang-rape and her death after 13 days of struggle.

Amitabh Bachchan: 'Amanat', 'Damini' just a name now... her body has passed away, but her soul shall shall forever stir our hearts.

Shabana Azmi: And SHE PASSES AWAY in Singapore. RIP. Our impotence stares us in the face. May SHE become the wake-up call our country needs. We must soul search. Female foeticide; inequal access to nutrition, education, health; no decision making powers; dowry demands; rapes rampant. INDIA WAKE UP.

Shekhar Kapur: Her greatest betrayal is that we will forget. Political systems' greatest hope is we will forget. Our only redemption is if we do not forget.

Mahesh Bhatt: Shut all temples where you pretend to worship the female form. Cry India! Your hands are drenched with the blood of your own daughters.

Shekhar Kapur: On 31st December, I will stand in silence in her memory. Will you, or will u party on?

Karan Johar: RIP to a brave girl who fought in a weak and paralysed country.. Shame on all of us.

Madhur Bhandarkar: RIP Damini, today is a dark day in our democracy. We should pledge not to let dust settle on this fight till the end.

Salman Khan...a key to 100 crores' box

Salman Khan to enter the 200 crore club with Dabangg 2?

Fearless cop Chulbul Pandey is back in action with more moves, more romance, more style and more laws (read jaws) to break in Arbaaz Khan production Dabangg 2. Salman Khan will once again be seen romancing Sonakshi Sinha in the sequel.

When almost every contemporary of his is trying to consolidate his place in the 100 crore club, Salman Khan is in a different zone altogether. While leading the pack in the century club with as many as four films already there, he is eyeing the much coveted 200 crore club with Dabangg 2.
"100 crore is passe now, not just for him but every superstar worth his salt. Akshay Kumar, Shah Rukh Khan, Ajay Devgan and now even Ranbir Kapoor has cracked it. Aamir anyway started it all. So for how long can one continue to bask in the glory of something which is fast becoming a trend and is almost a rule than being an exception. The new 'mantra' is 200 crore. Only Aamir is sitting pretty there after 3 Idiots. Now Salman is the one who can take a possible shot at that mark", comments an insider. 

To Salman's credit, he did come precariously close to achieving that with Ek Tha Tiger. However his film fell a few crores short of that mark and though it is the second highest money spinning film ever after 3 Idiots, the fact remains that Salman missed the chance with a whisker. 



"He is not saying it yet but deep within everyone associated with Dabangg 2 is not just hopeful, but also confident that this is one film which would cross the milestone", the insider comments.

"After all, on its release Dabangg had crossed the 140 crore mark and two years down the line, the buzz as well as the market has increased manifold. Moreover this is a true blue sequel. The hype is unprecedented and there is no reason why 200 crore won't be a possibility," he adds.

Add to this the fact that the film has no competition whatsoever for three weeks straight till the arrival of Imran Khan's 'Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola' and Salman could well be sitting on a jackpot this Christmas.

A tata by Ratan Tata

End of an era: Ratan Tata to retire today, Cyrus Mistry to succeed him

Ratan Tata's successor Cyrus Mistry is riding a generational transformation in the Rs.4,00,000-crore Tata Group. While Mistry's global experience and outlook will help him manage the transnational ambitions of the group, in many ways, his ascension is a mirror image of the time Ratan Tata stepped up to the plate after JRD Tata.

Then Ratan Tata had to assimilate a homogenous loose confederation of 80 odd disparate companies with high profile no-nonsense chairmen. For the architectural grad from Cornell, the confederacy was a culture shock. Disparate businesses headed by powerful satraps rooted in the old Tata work ethic. From Darbari Seth to Ajit Baburao Kerkar to Russi Mody, the empire was littered with tell tale signs of the past.

File photo: Ratan Tata with JRD Tata.

Ratan Naval Tata won his spurs in the Tatas by systematically demolishing the old guard with smart pincer moves, brooking no interference.

Tough and yet decisive, Tata always appeared in complete control. With one eye on profitability and the other on regeneration of value, RNT, as he is known in Bombay House, chose to walk the path alone.

By making astute and yet tough strategic choices, he has grown the group 13 times in the last 21 years. Pertinently, his career as the helmsman of the Tata Group has run parallel to the Indian reforms story. Shedding dogmas, satraps, inhibitions and by pursuing growth imperatives, he has made a huge success of the group by financially reengineering it. Leveraging the intrinsic strength and value of TCS, Tata Steel and Tata Motors and divesting Tata Oil Mills and Lakme, he has sallied forth.

Ratan Tata has metamorphosed his group by adopting a radical acquisitive strategy, one of rapid brown field expansion which has allowed the group to acquire size, scale and more than anything else, mass. A flurry of acquisitions has meant that a company with a pre-dominantly Indian soul has transformed into a transnational giant. The vagaries of global slowdowns and meltdown may have impaired its recent performance levels, but the sheer size of the behemoth is unmistakable.

While Ratan Tata leaves the management of these vicissitudes to his chosen heir Cyrus Mistry, his own legacy is one that will catapult him into the pantheon of business and industry titans.

Ratan Tata's new office is housed on the second floor of Elphinstone Building in Mumbai. Photo by Bhaskar Paul

While Ratan Tata has gone on to change the look, feel, image and perception of the Tata Group at all levels, he has also ushered in a spanking new paradigm as far as the generational change is concerned.

Twenty years ago, one couldn't imagine that the age profile of Tata bosses will be what it is now. Sample this: Cyrus himself is 44; N. Chandrasekaran, handpicked by RNT himself to head TCS - is 49; R. Mukundan, who heads Tata Chemicals, is 46; Mukund Rajan, formerly executive assistant to RNT, is head of Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra) in his mid-forties; N. Srinath, another former EA to RNT, helms Tata Communications at 49; Brotin Banerjee became CEO of Tata Housing at 35.

Ratan Tata's new residence in Colaba. Photo by Bhaskar Paul

The understated Mistry, a thinker who believes in deep detailing, is very balanced in his approach while being unemotional and very focused. He takes over at a time when 66 per cent of all Tata revenues are from international operations.

Strangely, in a company that people reckon is run by geriatrics, the last three chairmen - JRD Tata was 34 when he took over from Nowroji Saklatwala, Ratan Tata himself was 54 and now Mistry is 44.

Jamshed Irani, Tata Steel head in the past and Tata Sons board member, feels that there are many similarities between RNT and Mistry.

He says: "When Mr Tata took over, global revenues were only 10 per cent. Tatas have scaled up under Mr Tata's outward looking strategy. Ratan Tata came at the very end of the last vestiges of the licence permit raj, but he slowly reinvented the group by embedding his own thought processes with the group's core values. He would always tell us - think big, take bold decisions and plan for profits. See where the group is now."

Competence and continuity have been the guiding lights of this transition, just as they were when RNT took over from Jeh.

Thirty one listed companies dot the topography of this salt to automobile conglomerate. Geographies never bothered RNT.

Nor was there any absence of vision and ambition.

In an interview to this writer, he first explained how he would like to build a mode of transport for all those families of four who he saw precariously poised on two wheelers.

That became the Nano. Inspirational leadership was the kernel of Ratan Tata's being. Growing exponentially, part of his DNA.

Age is on Mistry's side. The Imperial College London and London Business School alumnus has the extremely large shoes of Ratan Naval Tata to fill from today.

Ramanujan's Theory....proved right!

Indian maths genius Ramanujan's theory finally proved right!

Mathematicians from a US university have finally solved a cryptic puzzle renowned Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan claimed came to him in his dreams while he was on his deathbed. While on his death-bed in 1920, Ramanujan wrote a letter to his mentor, British mathematician GH Hardy, outlining several new mathematical functions never before heard of, along with a hunch about how they worked, the Daily Mail reported. Now, researchers say they have proved Ramanujan was right, and that the formula could explain the behaviour of black holes. "We've solved the problems from his last mysterious letters," Ken Ono, a mathematician from Emory University in Georgia, US, was quoted as saying. "For people who work in this area of math, the problem has been open for 90 years," he said. Ono said Ramanujan, a self-taught mathematician born in a village in southern India, spent so much time thinking about math that he flunked out of college in India twice. Ramanujan's letter to Hardy described several new functions that behaved differently from known theta functions, or modular forms, and yet closely mimicked them. Ramanujan, a devout Hindu, thought these patterns were revealed to him by the goddess Namagiri. However, no one at the time understood what he was talking about. "It wasn't until 2002, through the work of Sander Zwegers, that we had a description of the functions that Ramanujan was writing about in 1920," Ono told the daily. Ono and his colleagues drew on modern mathematical tools that had not been developed before Ramanujan's death to prove that his theory was correct. "We proved that Ramanujan was right. We found the formula explaining one of the visions that he believed came from his goddess," Ono said. "No one was talking about black holes back in the 1920s when Ramanujan first came up with mock modular forms, and yet, his work may unlock secrets about them," he said. The findings were presented in November at a Ramanujan conference held at the University of Florida, ahead of the 125th anniversary of the mathematician's birth Dec 22.