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

Business Standard

Google Inc  unveiled a larger version of its Nexus-branded tablet computer on Monday, and updated its mobile gadget and online content offerings as competition with Apple Inc , Amazon.com Inc  and Microsoft Corp  heats up ahead of the holiday sales season.

Google unveils first 10-inch Nexus tablet

Reuters 

Bajaj Electricals CMD Shekhar Bajaj says there is a scope for an economy brand that would change the nature of the consumer electronics business in rural India.

Bajaj Electricals set to launch separate brand for rural India

Procter &amp; Gamble (P&amp;G) has launched an exclusive website for women in partnership with Yahoo! as part of its drive to engage with consumers online. India is the third market after the US and Indonesia where the website has been launched. In India, it is called Style Factor, while in the US, the website goes by the name The Thread.The site provides information on beauty, lifestyle and fashion.

P&G launches website for women in partnership with Yahoo!

ICICI Bank has rolled out a new ad campaign to launch its &lsquo;My Savings Rewards&rsquo; programme, taking its khayal aapka thought forward. The communication aims to convey the product proposition of unexpected rewards on savings account transactions. Abhijit Avasthi, national creative director, O&amp;M, said, &ldquo;Khayaal Aapka has been received well as a brand promise. And this particular programme allowed us to leverage it best through our communication.

ICICI Bank takes khayal aapka forward

The Chess Olympiad is underway in Istanbul with 158 teams in the open section and 126 teams in the women's section. This is the usual &ldquo;complicated&rdquo; Swiss format with 11 rounds. Team wins count for two points, and tie-breaks start with the sum of board points. The format introduces some randomness &mdash; a few &ldquo;good&rdquo; pairings towards the end can pull a team out of the pack and into the medal rankings.

Chess (#1016)

Gushing out of the earth through narrow pipelines, oil is fated also to travel to its consumers through narrow bottlenecks. The Strait of Hormuz, just 34 kilometres wide, is the Persian Gulf exit through which supertankers haul away some 17 million barrels of oil daily.

The great game in the Indian Ocean

I&rsquo;ve had this theory for ages &mdash; it&rsquo;s pretty simple, really. That people who are passionate about what they do and are lucky enough to do that for a living, end up being highly successful in their chosen fields. Especially if they have the courage to follow their dream doggedly, against all odds.

Dream-chasers

Among her many other talents, the graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi has shown a skill for moving fluidly from one medium to another. A few years ago Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud co-directed a film version of her most famous book Persepolis, an autobiographical story about her childhood in Iran under the shadow of the Islamic Revolution. I liked the film but I had one reservation: it was too often a straightforward cinematic presentation of the drawings Satrapi had done for the book. Though there were a few well-chosen moments of added animation &mdash; such as an Expressionist scene where little Marjane&rsquo;s features melt until she resembles the screamer in the famous Munch painting &mdash; the viewing experience was repetitive for a reader who was already very familiar with the book (as I was).

Bitter, sweet

In the lobby of UB Tower, the new headquarters of the UB group in the heart of Bangalore, the walls are hung with massive prints of the latest Kingfisher Calendar bikini shoots. Tear your eyes off them and you can flip through a book of warm tributes to Vijay Mallya, a gift to the chairman from his office on his 50th birthday. Prominent Bangaloreans, from SM Krishna to designer Manoviraj Khosla, are in here, but one name is unfamiliar: DK Audikesavulu Naidu.

Pinch-hitting for Mallya

Good business is all about making your company and its products likeable.

Likely theory

Foof! What a book. I read all night and finished it at 5 am. Even so I was much less dogged than the writer &mdash; a middle-aged Japanese mangaka (graphic book artist/author) who decided to go to India in 2002 to give this country its first ever manga. This is his story, told as a graphic book.

He manga more

Built at a cost of Rs 1,700 crore, The Leela Palace in New Delhi is the country&rsquo;s most expensive hotel. And The Qube, the all-day diner, is its showpiece restaurant.

The Rs 10,000 pizza

Every moment is my best moment at work. I focus completely in this moment passionately but the most memorable moment which was the first time I made a presentation to the Asia Pacific DuPont team on Jeju Island, Korea, on the Indian Industry Fluorochemicals business.

My Life My Style: Zeba Kohli

Let&rsquo;s get the pertinent point out of the way first &mdash; yes, the Renault Scala is a re-badged Nissan Sunny, in the same way as the Nissan Micra also goes under the name of the Renault Pulse. The Franco-Japanese combine, in India at least, is seeing varying degrees of activity &mdash; Nissan is doing things relatively quietly, whereas Renault is making much more of a concerted (and visible) effort to gain recall among the buying public.

French Sushi

Artist Paresh Maity is among the most disciplined people I know. Having observed him up and close, I can avow that he allows nothing to distract him from his early morning wake-up. He takes long, brisk walks and practices yoga vigorously. He might enjoy making a splash in his outr&eacute; costumes that he designs himself but you will rarely see him at parties &mdash; where, he won&rsquo;t join you for dinner, in any case, because he&rsquo;s probably already eaten his regulated meal. He&rsquo;s picky about his oats, he&rsquo;ll only have herbal tea with ginger through the day, his choice of high-fibre biscuits are not locally available, and freshly cut fruit and juices travel with him in his car every time he sets out on an errand. He doesn&rsquo;t drink much beyond the very occasional glass of red wine, and he doesn&rsquo;t smoke.

Smoke and mirrors

When former foreign secretary Shyam Saran retired from his post, the first thing he did was go to Bhutan for a trekking vacation. Saran, 66, served as India&rsquo;s ambassador to Nepal, Indonesia and Myanmar, and also helped negotiate the Indo-US nuclear agreement. He has been an avid trekker for almost two decades. &ldquo;I started trekking somewhere around 1990,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;and make it a point to do a trek at least once a year.

Hardcore hiker

Let&rsquo;s face it, India hasn&rsquo;t had the sort of single-seater race car series that can adequately prepare budding young drivers for an international racing career. Looks like MRF spotted this and decided to make amends. So while its international rallying team is flourishing, and while the F1600 single seater that ran for two seasons is on its way out, it has found more than an adequate replacement.

Revving up

There&rsquo;s something extraordinary about Christie&rsquo;s September 12 auction of 1 K.G. War, a Subodh Gupta sculpture, at its South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art sale in New York. The pre-auction price estimate for the work has been fixed at between $15,000 and $20,000 (Rs 8.35 lakh to Rs 11.14 lakh), which is rather low for a work by Gupta. But then 1 K.G.

Sculpted in gold

I want to purchase a diesel car, an SUV to be specific. The car should seat seven or eight people and also be comfortable, deliver decent mileage and have low maintenance costs. While I would like the car to look good, budget is not an issue.

Big wheels

When 13-year-old Pranay Sehgal&rsquo;s parents noticed that their son was spending more time with his laptop than with his friends, they began to worry a bit. But the alarm bells truly rang when they found him sitting in front of the laptop in their home in Gurgaon at 3.30 at night, furiously playing a game.

Turn it off

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