It was like a scene from Bollywood or Hollywood, the great reunion of lost friends or brothers, as they were seen hugging time and again. This was none other than US president Donald Trump and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in their first meeting.
This had the international media and social media go gaga. Encashing on the scene, London’s Daily Telegraph ran a story with the headline “Modi’s Trump card: Indian PM eschews handshake with President in favour of a hug.” And so was Washington’s Wall Street Journal in its page one photograph with this pun: “Trump and India’s Modi grapple with divisions, embrace ties.” It was hugs and hugs, as though they were meeting after a long period, but it was the first time they met and this was the untold story. Trump furiously patted Modi on the back and then took a moment to look at him closely. And as they went back to their respective places, Modi held on to Trump’s hand for an extra second. Commenting on this hugging episode, social commentator Santosh Desai describes that handshakes indicate reserve and distance in a relationship, while hugs show familiarity, signalling peer status. He goes on to say, “Hugs were a compensatory mechanism, a way of bridging anxieties during Modi’s early days as PM. They were silent yet visible declarations: I belong to the world stage.” Hugging is a very basic way of showing warmth. Modi’s greetings are nothing new, these being common occurrences ever since he took over as PM in the year 2014. Former US President Barack Obama, Japanese PM Shinzo Abe, former Australian PM Tony Abbott, Malaysia’s PM Najib Razak, UAE’s Crown Prince Sheikh Md bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, —he’s enveloped them all in embraces. Some of them have been described as awkward (with former French President Francois Hollande, 2016). The latest embrace was with Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel. Kingshuk Nag, author of a biography of Modi believes the PM “wants to show the world he is pally with global leaders, like Nehru was.”
Oxford of the East and the IT hub, Pune is one of the most liked cities in the country. Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has urged all concerned to make this city the most sought after by making it the Startup Capital of India, with its own Startup Policy. Fadnavis said this policy will bring in more investment. Many sops are being included in the policy, which is being drafted to attract entrepreneurs.
The features in the Startup Policy will be on the lines of the central government’s policy, including state government concessions to start ups. The state-run Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) and the state government have set up a RS. 200-crore venture capital fund to provide easy financing options to micro, small and medium entrepreneurs. A 2% reservation of space in IT parks for incubator firms is in the pipeline.Though Mumbai is the commercial capital of the country, its startup ecosystem is ranked third by Nasscom in its latest report, ‘Startup India: The Momentous Rise of the Indian Startup Ecosystem’.
While Bengaluru tops the Nasscom index, the National Capital Region (NCR) takes second position.
Among the emerging cities, Chennai is first, while Pune is behind the leader.
IDFC Bank has elevated its CFO Sunil Kakar as the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer. The bank also announced that the board has approved Vikram Limaye’s resignation as MD and CEO. He is to join NSE as MD and CEO. The board of directors have approved the appointment of Sunil Kakar as the MD and CEO three years, IDFC Ltd said in a regulatory filing. Kakar joined IDFC as the Group Chief Financial Officer and was responsible for finance and accounts, business planning and budgeting and investor relations, among others. Earlier, Kakar was CFO of Max New York Life Insurance Company since 2001. He also had a 18 year long stint with Bank of America in various roles.
Managing Director and investment bank head of Deutsche Bank AG, Ravi Shankar, has found greener pastures as he joins JP Morgan India’s investment banking team as Managing Director. Ravi Shankar put in his papers after a two-year stint with the bank. He has over a decade of experience in financial services, specialised in investment banking. Shankar will report to Kaustubh Kulkarni, head of India investment banking. Shankar joined Deutsche Bank in 2015 from the Avista Advisory Group, also an investment banking firm with operations across India and South-East Asia, where he was MD (investment banking). At Avista, Shankar was involved with deals such as Foreign Currency Convertible Bond (FCCB) restructuring of Jaiprakash Power Ventures Ltd and Suzlon Energy Ltd. Prior to joining Avista, he had a nine-year stint with UBS Investment Bank. At Deutsche Bank, he earned many laurels for strengthening the capital markets business, which saw the bank win several equity and debt financing mandates. He was involved in the ICICI Prudential Life initial public offering and the Federal Bank Ltd qualified institutional placement. Shankar, who has seen many summers in this field was a part of several debt transactions such as $300 million worth of bonds of Motherson Sumi Systems Ltd, refinancing of $350 million worth debt of engineering services firm GlobalLogic, refinancing term loans and bonds of Novelis Inc. worth $3 billion, and $400 million worth debt refinance of data analytics firm Mu Sigma. He has also worked on helping Yatra list in the US through a special purpose acquisition company merger. Among others at JP Morgan India’s investment banking, he will be working alongside Nitin Maheshwari, head of India M&A, and Vinay Menon, head-equities capital market.
Sanjay Bahl has been appointed as the Managing Director & CEO of Centum Learning. Sanjay will be driving a scalable business strategy leveraging the strengths of the company besides evolving skilling ecosystem. Sanjay brings in over 30 years of rich experience in different sectors, especially in education and skilling space. His contribution to key Skills Forums like CII, ASSOCHAM, SSCs, NSDC etc is widely acknowledged by the industry. He was associated with CII-National Committee on Skills Development, 2016. Earlier in 2013, he had presented a paper at ISB Hyderabad on ‘Innovative Solutions towards Market Awareness and Technology for a Sustainable Retail (student pay) model for Skills programme’. Sanjay was the President and Director of NIIT’s Skills Initiative JV and the National Channel Head of their Skills and Career group before joining Centum. He has also been associated with Crompton Greaves, CASIO, and MTS. He was with Bharti Airtel for over 10 years.
Protectionism in the Western markets has done no good, is what Tata Consultancy Services Chairman N Chandrasekaran of the country’s largest software exporter feels. It has not changed anything for TCS. “On the ground, nothing has changed. We continue to operate successfully; we continue to recruit people in every market,” Chandrasekaran, who got elevated as the Tata Sons Chairman earlier this year, told TCS shareholders at an annual general meet (AGM). He said TCS adheres to local laws in every country it operates in and is among the “top recruiters” in each of those markets, including the US. TCS had drastically reduced the number of visa applications to the US to a third of the normal, much before Donald Trump came to occupy the White House. It had also said it would be hiring 10,000 in the US, the largest revenue contributing geography. New Chief Executive Rajesh Gopinathan said, TCS had hired 79,000 globally last fiscal year, including 11,500 in foreign markets. Chandrasekaran, who was the CEO of TCS before being elevated as Tata Sons Chairman in February, said the global business environment is increasingly adopting digital technology and the world is transforming fast. With business leaders speaking of data as the new oil, the head of the saltto- software conglomerate said data excellence will be the most important theme in the future and will hold true for all sectors beyond IT as well.
Paramjit Singh Gill is now CEO of Allied Blenders & Distillers (ABD), the Kishore Chhabria-controlled company. He recently quit United Spirits as CEO where he was leading Sales and Operations as the President. The country’s largest spirits company USL has named Prathmesh Mishra, who joined from French rival Pernod Ricard two years ago, as its new President, Sales and Operations. USL is engaged in an intense battle for leadership in the domestic premium whisky market where Pernod Ricard has had a lead for over a decade.
Making films from novels is nothing new, but there have been a few who have made it in a big way, and Twinkle Khanna, actress-turned-interior designer and author, could well be joining the elite club. This one is expected to give the movie a strong plot, likely to be coming from `The Legend Of Lakshmi Prasad’, a collection of four short stories by Twinkle’s second book, which came after the success of Mrs Funny bones. The film will be produced under the Mrs Funny bones Movies banner, but Twinkle was ambiguous on the details. “Well, I do not expect anything. I will decide if and when it will happen. I live in the present, and do not plan my future,” she said when queried if she is open to the idea of writing a script of her story for any Bollywood adaption. On asked if a filmmaker can do justice to a story when adapting it from a book to celluloid, she said, “How is that possible? When you read a book, you are creating a world in your head. How can somebody just replicate that? For instance, I might just talk about a non-descriptive face in my book. When you are watching that on screen, you are getting a visual reference, and then it is limiting the imagination.”
The Facebook recently crossed the 2 billion Monthly Active User (MAU) mark. Celebrating this, Mark Zuckerberg said in his post, “As of this morning, the Facebook community is now officially 2 billion people! We’re making progress connecting the world, and now let’s bring the world closer together. It’s an honour to be on this journey with you.” Facebook now leads the number of logged in users as compared to YouTube’s 1.5 billion and Twitter’s 328 million. Launched in 2004, Facebook had reached 500 million users by 2010. It crossed the one billion and one and a half billion mark by 2013 and 2016, respectively. The rising number of affordable smartphones, continuous optimisation of the app for these smartphones and increasing penetration of internet has helped the social media giant to write its success story. In 2011, Facebook acquired Snaptu, an Israeli startup and launched Facebook Lite, which does not require high speed internet for less smarter phones. It helped Facebook reach 200 million users in countries like Nigeria, Vietnam and Bangladesh. It has also come out with Messenger Lite and new Instagram offline modes. Recently, Facebook launched a mission “Bring the world closer” to bring the platform closer to people.
Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan who steered the Indian space programme as Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) between 1994 and 2003, will lead the nine-member human resource development committee on the National Education Policy (NEP), as its Chairman. The other members of the committee apart from Kasturirangan, in this Prakash Javadekar-led HRD ministry include educationist Vasudha Kamat, Vice Chancellor of SNDT University, Mumbai, retired bureaucrat K J Alphonse, Manjul Bhargava, Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University, Ram Shankar Kureel, Vice Chancellor of Baba Saheb Ambedkar University of Social Sciences, Mhow, T V Kattamani, Vice Chancellor of Indira Gandhi National Tribal University, Amarkantak, K M Tripathy, Chairperson of Uttar Pradesh High School and Intermediate Examination Board, Mazhar Asif, Professor of Persian, Guwahati University and M K Shridhar, Member, Central Advisory Board of Education and Member Secretary of the Karnataka Innovation Council and Karnataka Knowledge Commission. According to the statement issued by the ministry, “In an exhaustive exercise carried out over the last 30 months, the HRD ministry has received thousands of suggestions from educationists, teachers, experts, students and other stakeholders from across the country. This panel has been appointed keeping in mind that the members bring expertise related to the diverse areas of education. Significantly, the panel also reflects the diversity of the country as the members belong to different sections as well as regions.” A couple of years ago, the HRD ministry had formed a panel under former cabinet secretary TSR Subramanian on the New Education Policy, and the inputs from this panel would be used. Kasturirangan has been conferred the Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushan. He has also honoured with the Award of ‘Officer of the Legion d’honneur’ by the President of the French Republic.
Ranjan Sarkar, the former VP, HR at CEAT Tyres, is now with Exide Industries as its EVP, HR and CHRO. He joins the battery manufacturer with more than 18 years of cross-industry experience, in industries such as automobile, consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, BFSI and media and communications.
He also has had diverse experience in change management in people practices, strategic partnership to business, championing M&A, building HR roadmaps for south Asian countries and building HR organisations in greenfield assignments. Before Exide Industries, Sarkar worked with CEAT Tyres as GM, HR, where he has been since 2008. In his new role, Sarkar will be based in Kolkata at the headquarters of Exide. The company, founded in 1947, has plants across India and Sri Lanka. Sarkar, an MBA in HR from Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, began his career in 1999 with Shaw Wallace as a management trainee and later moved up the corporate ladder. He has been with Kotak Life Insurance, GlaxoSmithKline and Zee Entertainment among the other big corporates.
By Joe Williams
