Pachaiyappa&rsquo;s College, the alma mater of the mathematician Ramanujan and several other famous personalities, now lies in a state of neglect and decay. T E Narasimhan on the downfall of the 170-year-old trust.

Breach of trust

Business Standard

Shashi Tharoor&rsquo;s Pax Indica, Jim Stengel&rsquo;s Grow and Guy Kawasaki&rsquo;s Enchantment, all on my iPad Kindle app.

My Life My Style: Roopak Saluja

On the fringes of Dehradun, the capital of Uttarakhand, are located two adjacent tea gardens, Arcadia and Harbanswala, spread over 1,127 acres. This is the end of the plucking season that begins in March. In a couple of weeks, there will be no tender leaves left to pick. A couple of women are at work on the tea bushes. Inside the estate, there&rsquo;s a dilapidated processing factory, though the machinery is fairly new. Over a dozen men and women are going through the paces: boiling, crushing, drying and packing (in unbranded gunny bags) the tea. The produce will be shipped to Amritsar, and then to Kashmir and even Pakistan. It is sold as organic tea, free of chemical fertilisers and pesticides.

Unsuited to a tea

Is laughter a kind of exercise? That offbeat question is at the heart of a new study of laughing and pain that emphasises how unexpectedly entwined our bodies and emotions can be. For the study, which was published this year in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers at Oxford University recruited a large group of undergraduate men and women.

'Laugh until it hurts'

When, some months ago, a work &ldquo;in pastel&rdquo;, as some in India would disparagingly call it, sold for a heart-stopping &mdash; or adrenalin-inducing, take your pick &mdash; Rs 600 crore, most of us couldn&rsquo;t stop marvelling that Edvard Munch&rsquo;s The Scream commanded a price approximately half the value of the entire Indian art market.

Enter the collector - again

Formula 1 is at the top of the pecking order of motor races. Cars race at speeds of up to 350 km/h (220 mph). The second edition of the Airtel Indian F-1 Grand Prix will commence on October 27 with practice and qualifying sessions on the first two days reaching the climax on the 28th instant when the drivers on the podium will be decided at the Buddh International Circuit in Greater Noida. Sahara Force India, the Indian team, has two foreign drivers &mdash; Paul di Resta and Nico Hulkenberg, while Narain Karthikeyan is a member of the Hispania Racing Team.

Can Vettel perform the hat trick?

Delhi Art Gallery&rsquo;s current show, &ldquo;The Printed Picture: Four Centuries of Indian Printmaking&rdquo;, is an exhibition layered with many levels of irony. The irony is not in the show itself, which is a straightforward exposition of the history of the genre in India, but in how it serves to lay bare the inherent paradox in print-making as a form of fine art.

The fine print

Abbas Khan stands tall. His turban and achkan are sequin-studded and glisten in the light. The cuffs of his kurta are also richly embellished. But for the tray in his hand and his bare feet, he could pass off as someone of royal lineage.

That nameless workforce

It took a few hours of procrastination and a cup of strong coffee, and my finger may have trembled as I clicked the &ldquo;play&rdquo; button, but I did finally watch the trailer of the forthcoming film Hitchcock, about Alfred Hitchcock and the making of Psycho in 1959-60. It was nearly as unsettling as I had imagined &mdash; and not just because Psycho is a film enormously dear to my heart. On the tiny YouTube screen was one of the most honourable actors of the past few decades &mdash; not hamming it up exactly, but imitating away.

Imitations of life

Indulekha Aravind finds out what is driving the change.

Chennai swank

New York-based designer-turned-entrepreneur Rachel Roy was in Delhi to unveil her diamond jewellery piece for Forevermark. Priya Kumari Rana caught up with the 38-year-old designer whose latest collection will soon be available in India.

Designing women

Sport is an asset and should not be considered something we do just for recreation,&rdquo; says Hakimuddin Habibulla, who has played a key role in drafting the right to play bill, 2012 which will soon be introduced in the Haryana assembly. Habibulla, a national level swimming champion who represented India in the 2000 Sydney Olympics, is well placed to make such a demand. The founder and principal consultant at Bangalore-based Winning Matters Consulting, a management advisory that helps organizations engage with Indian sport, first met Haryana government officials last year at a sports conference. Habibulla, who believes that sport is integral to the socio-economic development of a society, pushed ideas to propagate sports on a larger scale.

Wants the right to play

Vaishali Dinakaran tells the story of how, when and where the greatest motorsport event made its headway into our country.

The race to race

It is said that the genius of marketing lies not in highlighting the solution, but in hyping the problem enough to make the solution indispensable. Not surprising then that Eureka Forbes, the makers of water purifier brand Aquaguard chose Aamir Khan&rsquo;s television show Satyamev Jayate that highlighted issues such as water shortage and impurity in one of its episodes, to launch their new brand positioning.

The water-plus effect

Your book is also about &lsquo;Strategies for Disrupting Markets&rsquo;.

Build a culture of innovation: Amitava Chattopadhyay

Let me start with a bet. With you, dear reader. There are 523 words in this article. I&rsquo;m willing to wager that before you hit the 100th word, you would have been distracted by a call, text, email, tweet, Facebook or LinkedIn update, link on an adjacent tab in your browser, or even (gasp!) an old-fashioned face-to-face conversation with someone in your immediate physical proximity. And that distraction won&rsquo;t be the last before you finish reading through to the end.

New digital divide

Conventional wisdom suggests that functions like sales and marketing that are often make-or-break decision for companies, should not be outsourced. Given this, analysts argue that Nissan Motor India&rsquo;s decision to outsource sales and marketing in the country &mdash; India is the only market where Nissan follows this model &mdash; may be a reason why, despite having a competent product portfolio, its sales have been slow to pick up. Here&rsquo;s what our panel of experts have to say.

Outsourcing: from periphery to core

Companies are realising the value of investing in R&amp;D innovations in Asian markets.

Innovating to excel

There&rsquo;s absolutely no reason why a company needs to conduct annual reviews. The annual review exists largely to serve the need of the compensation department. Conducting shorter reviews more frequently allows a better opportunity for course correction. It&rsquo;s also less of a burden on both the manager and the employee.

'The self-review is one of the worst ideas in performance management'

Losses due to retail frauds in India showed a decline in 2011. However, at 2.38% , it is still the highest in the world, according to the Global Retail Theft Barometer (Click on graphic)

Retail frauds

What&rsquo;s that one key event in your professional life that many of you are still doing just once in a full year? No rewards for guessing &mdash; it&rsquo;s the whole exercise of filling up the annual performance review form. For some reason, there&rsquo;s a shared discomfort among managers and subordinates the moment that important mail with the subject tag &lsquo;annual performance review&rsquo; flashes on the top of their inbox.

Review 365

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