Star India’s Uday Shankar, already top dog in general entertainment, wants to prove his mettle again in sports TV There is a new spring in Uday Shankar’s step. The entertainment channels of Star India, the Indian unit of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp empire and the company that Shankar leads as chief executive, are back firmly…
Ajit Gulabchand was delighted that his second grandson was born on his own 64th birthday. He had just come away from a meeting with a minister and other CEOs who were in the business of building highways. He has spent close to three decades at the helm of the HCC Group, which builds roads, bridges,…
The text message from the finance ministry went out close to midnight on Sunday. October 28, hardly a time when the ministry is expected to be working, the message informed its journalist recipients that Finance Minister P. Chidambaram would address the media less than 12 hours later. The subject of the interaction was not disclosed. With that began a sequence of…
Says the self-opinionated master. But he is also first-rate. I’m a very well known painter. I don’t care for those stultified art critics. It’s you ‘unknowledgeables’ – who can reach out on our behalf.” The ego behind that ‘well known painter’ remark is evident as is Biren De’s scorn for things conventional, and his voluminous…
Fourteen years younger than VS Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul was born in 1945 in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and was educated in Trinidad and Oxford. He began writing in college, and his short stories were accepted for Penguin Modern Stories 4. His first novel, Fireflies, was published at the end of 1971. and his second, The Chip-Chip Gatherers,…
It took me eight months to discover that I was living next door to a film person. And that too, because the chap appeared in a “daring, all-clothes-barred” gatefold In a girlie mag. Yes. My neighbour was there in B & W. in all his hairy, slightly paunchy evidence. Undressed. In disabille. There was a…
You may have heard of East African Indian fleeing to Mother England, and Dr. Hastings Banda pelling 40 Malawi Asians Ever heard of an Indian settled in Tanzania who came back to India and turned out to be a much talked-about Hindi film director in Bombay? He is Chandra Barot, a young man in his early…
An American who acts in Hindi movies? And who’s Indian except for his fair skin and blond hair? “I don’t believe it” was the reaction of most people who met Tom Alter at the recent screening of diploma films arranged by Mr. Girish Karnad, the Director of the Film and Television of India, at Bombay.…
In his first media interaction since The Walt Disney Company took over UTV, RONNIE SCREWVALA, now turned employee, tells CHAITANYA KALBAG and AJITA SHASHIDHAR how he intends to take the company to greater heights. How difficult was it to transition from a successful entrepreneur-driven company to being a part of a large global company? UTV…