Arthur J Pais interviews 18-year-old American student William J Oppenheim III, who, along with a few friends, has established the Omprakash Foundation, which links for-free volunteer teachers with more than 100 grassroots educational projects in 26 countries.
Columbia University professor of medicine Gaurav Shah and his wife Falu are emerging as a high-profile singing couple. Arthur J Pais reports.
Over 100 people, including 20 senior consultants and at least six VPs, have quit Infosys in 6 months.
'The whole world was with New Yorkers. But in the case of Mumbai, it was a different scene,' feels actor-jeweller Waris Ahluwalia.
Anurag Kashyap, now firmly installed in the A-list of Bollywood directors, discusses his craft.
Vocalist and composer Falu is living proof that classical music and rock can blend.
Ashutosh Gowariker's What's Your Raashee? got a solid welcome at the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday despite some groans that the 192 minute-long film is too unfocussed. Minutes before the red carpet ceremony for the movie, the director told rediff.com that he will be hugely busy with two very different projects in the next couple of years.
The actress looked ravishing in a gown as she promotes her movie, Dil Bole Hadippa at the event.
Farhan Akhtar spills the beans on Don 2.
The director's close friendship with model/actress' former husband, writer Salman Rushdie may be just the reason.
Tarun Mansukhani had to put aside his plans for other projects including a story about the process of death, and a urban thriller aside and start working on the sequel to Dostana.
Experts believe it will take another three to five years for Indian IT firms to move to a non-linear business model.
Reader Sumeeth Pai sent us this photograph from Bangalore.
The new-look, $10 million Minneapolis Hindu Temple is a labour of love and faith, discovers Arthur J Pais
Poor rainfall in rain-dependent central and southern India in the next three weeks could affect agricultural GDP growth in the coming season, a report by broking firm Motilal Oswal has said.
Infosys Technologies on Friday said it would bid for multi-crore rupee projects under the Unique Identification Database Authority, which would be headed by the company's former co-chairman Nandan Nilekani, as it sees no conflict of interest.
For the Bharatiya Janata Party, the first 100 days would see its government initiating measures to bring back Indian money stashed away in secret tax havens. LK Advani, the party's prime ministerial candidate, has promised to appoint an expert committee to pursue and track the Indian money in those tax havens.
Chrysler and General Motors each annually outsource $200-300 million (around Rs 10-15 billion) worth of projects to different vendors, which may be hit by 20-25 per cent, says Avinash Vashistha, chairman and CEO, Tholons, a research and advisory firm. While Chrysler has filed for bankruptcy, there is talk that GM may follow suit.
"Performance management tools have been always used by companies to reward good performers and weed out the bad ones. However, due to the significant growth over the last few years, they were not enforced. With the industry facing the economic downturn, it is using this tool fairly effectively. And it is being done all over the world," explained Som Mittal, president of software body Nasscom.
"Employees who have been consistently demonstrating poor performance were counselled out. Less than 1 per cent of our 11,250 employees in Chennai and 11,496 employees in Hyderabad have been impacted. As for the Thiruvananthapuram centre, less than 1 per cent of the 1,800 employees were impacted," said Mohandas Pai, member of the board, director, human resources, Infosys Technologies.
Infosys is recruiting 18,000 people in 2009-10 compared with 28,231 a year ago and will freeze wages to rein in costs. Of the 18,000 new recruits, about 2,000 will be lateral hires, with the rest being freshers. "Our offer letters have gone out over two-and-a-half months ago and we expect most of the new employees to join soon. The conversion rate will be 80 per cent," said HR Director TVM Pai. He ruled out any revision of the salary offers to freshers.
Author Minal Hajratwala tells Arthur J Pais about her tryst with family history
Prasoon Joshi, who was in New York recently for the world premiere of Delhi 6, admits that writing lyrics isn't the only challenge he loves while working on movies. He loves to collaborate on the scripts too, as he did with Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's new film, and Rang De Basanti.
Oscar nominated documentary film-maker Megan Mylan speaks to rediff.com's Arthur J Pais about her latest documentary -- Smile Pinki.
India's second-largest IT services provider Infosys Technologies has hired recruitment services provider MaFoi to help its employees who fail to pass the final test to gain employment elsewhere.
'The rickshaw is undoubtedly the ultimate long-distance, off-road machine, says Dr Mark Cunningham-Hill, who will take part in a two-week rickshaw race to raise $15,000 for clean water in India.
In an hour-long chat on rediff.com on Monday, Ganesh Natarajan, chairman of National Association of Software and Service Companies, replied to many queries on the Satyam scam.
Amidst the outrage among certain Satyam employees to Infosys Co-Chairman and Chief Mentor N R Narayana Murthy's statement last week that Infosys would not recruit employees from the disgraced IT firm based in Hyderabad, top Infosys executives on Tuesday stood by their stand. They also couched their views on the Satyam scam in decidedly softer terms. Infosys said that the accounting scandal at Satyam did not call into question the competence of its (Satyam) employees.
How should you prepare yourself for group discussions and personal interviews now that the CAT results are out of the bag.
The industry, which is also passing through one of its lows in the wake of the ongoing global financial downturn, expects that clients will now be more cautious, despite Satyam's case being an isolated one.
Professor Ray Umashankar, won a prestigious Purpose Prize in the US, for his work to rehabilitate the children of sex workers in India.
The IT job market, which saw one of the tough phases, especially in the second half of 2008, is likely to witness the worst in the coming year.
The Indian arm of the Union for Information & Technology Enabled Services is planning to file a public interest litigation against the alleged 'arbitrary policy' of many Indian and multinational IT/ITeS firms in India who have, for the past two months, reportedly been enforcing longer working hours that violate the daily eight-hour working mandate of the Indian Factories Act, 1948.
Pakitan academic Hasan-Askari Rizvi on the possibility of making the Line of Control between India and Pakistan irrelevant.
Muslim comedian Azhar Usman describes his act to Arthur J Pais.
Deeksha Gaur, executive producer of the off-Broadway show Ugo's Last Dance currently underway in New York (show ends on October 4), is among the few theatrical producers of Indian origin. She is a recipient of the Foundry's Producer's Chair Award for this production created by God Machine, a new theatre company, which she says was started explicitly to produce what the typical theater community would consider "unstageable."
Infosys, the country's third largest software firm, on Thursday said it was undecided on going ahead with investment plans in West Bengal, where socio-political opposition has thrown Tata Motors' Nano project into uncertainty.
Training a person for 16 weeks (4 months) in the US costs something like $50,000 (around Rs 21.25 lakh). However, the education system is much better in the US. So we provide short-term training courses of about 15 days for new recruits there
Indian IT firms have started mining smaller clients with more fervour given that the revenue accruring from their top clients has been declining due to the US slowdown and the sub-prime crisis. Consider this. Revenue accruing from the top clients of the five leading IT firms by revenue - Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys Technologies, Wipro Technologies, Satyam Computer Services and HCL Technologies - dropped by anywhere between 0.2 per cent and 4 per cent
Even as several SEZs are struggling to get off the ground, the Mahindras have managed to kick off their second SEZ at Jaipur, after their first one in Chennai.
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