Director Anand L Rai, whose 'Raanjhanaa' evoked good response at the box-office, is coming up with another romantic film and is currently working on its script. "I am working on a script right now. It's completely original. It's a romantic film but what plot line and story it is I cannot reveal now. I hope by Diwali, I would be in a position to talk about the project," said Rai.Raanjhanaa was a story of a Hindu Banarasi boy falling in love with a Muslim girl and giving away his life for her. "I feel one way of keeping the romance alive is through films. I think somewhere people have lost faith in love. It feels sad (to) see this as love is an integral part of our life," he said.Kolaveri Di-fame South star Dhanush, who made his Bollywood debut with Raanjhanaa, will be working together with Rai again for a film, tentatively from the same genre. "We are definitely working together. This will also be a romantic film. But I haven't started working on this film yet," Rai said.
Pawan Kalyan is hardly speaks at public functions. However, at the Attarintiki Daredi 'Thank You Function' the Power Star spoke for almost forty minutes. The actor went on to accuse "some hidden big hands" for conspiring to leak the pirated version of Attarintiki Daredi, a week before the film's theatrical release. ''I'm not going to let go of the issue just because the movie has turned out to be a hit. I will make you pay for your crime and will not relent until justice is done," Pawan fumed.As a pirated version of the movie (Attarintiki Daredi) hit the internet a week before its official theatrical release, the producer released the movie a week in advance to control the damage. An editing assistant who was responsible for the piracy was arrested by the Police. The big question on everybody's mind is who was Pawan Kalyan hinting at. The actor's speech has definitely become the talk of T-Town for now.
NEW DELHI: Inflation accelerated to a seven-month high in September driven by sharp spikes in onion and vegetable prices, official data released on Monday showed. This may prompt the Reserve Bank of India to persist with its tight monetary policy and add to the political pressures facing the UPA as it heads into crucial elections.The wholesale price index rose an annual 6.46% in September, higher than the previous month's 6.10%. The rate stood at 8.07% during the corresponding month of the previous year.Onion prices more than quadrupled, rising 323% year-on-year. Other vegetables did not quite reach these astronomical levels, but as a group their prices nearly doubled, up by 90% year-on-year in September.
Overall food inflation hovered around the 18% mark in September keeping up the pressure as supply pressures continued. Food inflation as measured by the consumer price index is also hovering around the double-digit mark, making it difficult for the RBI to ease interest rates. Food prices have remained high for the past three years, upsetting the budget of households across the country.The unease over high food prices is likely to be a key election issue in the upcoming state polls and the general elections in 2014. Some of the increase in vegetable prices could be attributed to seasonal fluctuations, but strained supplies have kept overall food supplies high. While the government has repeatedly said it is trying to shore up supplies, the situation on the price front remains grim.High inflation has also acted as a dampener on any moves by the RBI to slash interest rates to boost flagging economic growth, further adding to the potentially adverse political fallout of the economic situation on the ruling coalition.Separate data showed retail inflation quickened to 9.84% in September from the previous month's 9.52%. Food and beverages inflation, according to the consumer price index, rose 11.44% on an annual basis during the month. The corresponding provisional inflation rates for rural and urban areas for September 2013 were 9.71% and 9.93% respectively. Retail inflation has hovered around the double-digit mark for several months adding to the pressure of households in rural and urban areas.The government also revised upwards the data for July to 5.85% from the previously reported 5.79%. Some economists said the RBI may raise interest rates again in its upcoming policy review in the face of inflationary pressures confronting the economy."The pickup in inflation is testament to the lingering inflation risks and underscores the need for the RBI to keep its inflation guards up," said Leif Esekesen, chief economist India & Asean at HSBC."As for the RBI, today's numbers suggest that it has to continue to cater inflation risks. There is, consequently, a good chance that the RBI will deliver another repo rate hike at the October monetary policy meeting," Eskesen said.He said WPI inflation rose more than expected due to higher food and core inflation and added that food inflation should eventually ease as supply improves.Stubborn inflation has remained a policy challenge for the government and has made it difficult for the central bank to take measures to boost growth. Raghuram Rajan, who took over as the new RBI governor in September, surprised markets as he raised the repo rate to 7.5% to calm inflationary pressures. The central bank has consistently cautioned about the stubborn price pressures present in the economy and has resisted calls to ease rates to boost growth.Some economists, however, expect the RBI to hold rates in its monetary policy review later this month. "The elevated wholesale prices are expected to prompt RBI to most probably keep its key interest rates unchanged in its upcoming second quarter monetary policy review as it is expected that food price inflation, which is the major concern today, would move downwards from October onwards," said Madan Sabnavis, economist at Care Ratings.
Diets don't just reduce weight, they can reducemental capacity. In other words, dieting can make you dumber. Understanding why this is the case can illuminate a range of experiences, including something as far removed from voluntary calorie restriction as the ordeal of outright poverty. Imagine that you are attending a late-afternoon meeting. Someone brings in a plate of cookies and places them on the other side of the conference table. Ten minutes later you realize you've processed only half of what has been said.Why? Only half of your mind was in the meeting. The other half was with the cookies: "Should I have one? I worked out yesterday. I deserve it. No, I should be good." That cookie threatened to strain your waistline. It succeeded in straining your mind. This can happen even with no cookie in sight. Dieters conjure their own cookies: Psychologists find that dieters have spontaneous self-generated cravings at a much higher rate than non-dieters. And these cravings are not the dieters' only distraction. Diets force trade-offs: If you eat the cookie, should you skip the appetizer at dinner? But that restaurant looked so good! Many diets also require constant calculations to determine calorie counts. All this clogs up the brain. Psychologists measure the impact of this clogging on various tasks: logical and spatial reasoning, self-control, problem solving, and absorption and retention of new information. Together these tasks measure "bandwidth," the resource that underlies all higher-order mental activity. Inevitably, dieters do worse than non-dieters on all these tasks; they have less bandwidth.One particularly clever study went further. It tested how dieters and non-dieters reacted to eating a chocolate bar. Even though the bar provided calories, eating it widened the bandwidth gap between dieters and non-dieters. Non-dieters ate and moved on, but dieters started wondering how to make up for the calories they had just ingested or, even more fundamentally, pondered, "Why did I eat the bar?" In other words, diets do not just strain bandwidth because they leave us hungry. They have psychological, not just physiological, effects. The basic insight extends well beyond the experience of calorie counting. Something similar happens whenever we make do with less, as when we feel that we have too little time, or too little money. Just as the cookie tugs at the dieter, a looming deadline preoccupies a busy person, and the prospect of a painful rent payment shatters the peace of the poor. Just as dieters constantly track food, the hyper-busy track each minute and the poor track each dollar. As Professor Eldar Shafir at Princeton University and I argue in our new book, "Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much" (Times Books), a similar psychology of scarcity operates across these examples but with varying degrees of force. If a cookie can tax our mental resources, imagine how much more psychological impact other forms of scarcity can have. Take the case of poverty. In a paper published last month in Science, with Professors Anandi Mani at the University of Warwick and Jiaying Zhao at the University of British Columbia, Shafir and I waded into politically charged territory. Some people argue that the poor make terrible choices and do so because they are inherently less capable. But our analysis of scarcity suggests a different perspective: perhaps the poor are just as capable as everyone else. Perhaps the problem is not poor people but the mental strain that poverty imposes on anyone who must endure it. One of our studies focused on Indian sugar cane farmers, who typically feel themselves to be both poor and rich, depending on the season. They are paid once a year at harvest time. When the crop is sold, they are flush with cash. But the money runs out quickly, and by the time the next harvest arrives they are stretched thin: they are, for example, 20 times as likely to pawn an item before harvest as after it. Rather than compare poor and rich farmers, we compare each farmer to himself: when he is rich against when he is poor. This kind of comparison is important because it addresses valid concerns that differences in psychological tests merely reflect differences in culture or test familiarity. We measured farmers' mental function - on what psychologists call fluid intelligence and executive control - one month before and one month after harvest. And the effects were large: pre-harvest IQ, for example, was lower by about nine to 10 points, which in a common descriptive classification is the distance between "average" and "superior" intelligence. To put that in perspective, a full night without sleep has a similar effect on IQ. Bandwidth scarcity has far-reaching consequences, whether we are talking about poor farmers or affluent dieters. We all use bandwidth to make decisions at work, to resist the urge to yell at our children when they annoy us, or even to focus on a conversation during dinner or in a meeting. The diversity of these behaviours - combined with the size of the measurable effects - suggests a very different way to interpret the choices and behaviours of the poor. Just picture how distracting that cookie was, and multiply that experience by a factor of 10. For dieters, bandwidth scarcity has one particularly important consequence, illustrated in one study that gave people a choice between fruit salad and cake. Before choosing, half of the subjects had their bandwidth taxed: they were asked to remember a seven-digit number. The other half had a mentally less-demanding task: they were asked to remember a two-digit number. Those with less available bandwidth ate more cake: They were 50 percent more likely to choose cake than the others. There is a paradox here: diets create mental conditions that make it hard to diet. This may sound defeatist. But there are positive lessons for how to manage the different kinds of scarcity. The U.S. government, laudably, offers financial aid for low-income students to attend college. Qualifying for it, though, requires completing a densely packed 10-page booklet, mentally taxing for anyone. A one-page version would not only be simpler but it would also recognize that the poor are short on bandwidth as well as cash. The same tactic - economizing on bandwidth - can be used in dieting. Take the Atkins diet, which effectively bans many foods, including bread and a lot of desserts. A ban is less complex than the trade-offs and calorie accounting required by many other diets. While all diets require self-control, Atkins requires less thinking. This might explain its popularity, and even its effectiveness: A recent study shows that people persist longer with diets that require less thought. The same study had another interesting finding: It was the perceived complexity of a diet - not its actual complexity - that determined persistence. So keep this in mind the next time you're picking a diet to shed a few pounds. Try one that won't also shed a few IQ points.
Less than a fortnight after the Mumbai Crime Branch booked a Hyderabad-based chartered accountancy student for hacking Income Tax returns account of industrialist Anil Ambani, a case has been filed against another CA student, this time from Noida, for breaking into I-T accounts of Bollywood bigwigs Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan and cricket stars SachinTendulkar and Mahendra Singh Dhoni.The cops stumbled upon the second breach while investigating the Hyderabad case because the Noida student - identified as Sanchit K, 22 - too had accessed Ambani's account. "We found out that the account was accessed from two places - Hyderabad and Noida. Our investigation led us to the girl from Chikkadpally.When we asked her,she denied she had accessed the account from Noida, or for that matter knew anybody there. We, therefore, realised that one more person had hacked the account," Senior Inspector Mukund Pawar, incharge of the Cyber Crime Cell, told TOI on Wednesday.Sanchit,son of a small trader,has told investigators that he hacked the accounts out of curiosity. Unlike the Hyderabad-based CA student,who had downloaded Ambani's I-T returns, he merely skimmed through Shah Rukh, Salman, Sachin and Dhoni's accounts. Joint Commissioner of Police(crime) Himanshu Roy said the two cases have highlighted the fragility of the I-T portal.Sanchit was booked by the Cyber Crime Cell after his computer and hard disks were seized from Vishal Kaushal Company, an accountancy firm in Noida, where he was doing his articleship. Sanchit was not arrested.The Hyderabad-based girl too was doing her articleship with an accountancy firm -- Manoj Daga & Company. The Cyber Crime Cell found on her computer details of the returns filed by Ambani over the past few years. Sanchit accessed Ambani's I-T details on June 22 and June 26 after requesting that a new password be sent on his email account. He accessed Shah Rukh and Salman's accounts on June 22, Dhoni's on June 24 and 28, and Sachin's account on July 4. His modus operandi was identical on each occasion. In all five cases, the Cyber Crime Cell has now recorded statements of people responsible for handling the accounts.Meanwhile, the Crime Branch has summoned Income Tax department officers responsible for the portal's upkeep to record their statements and also to impress upon them the importance of beefing up the web site's security.
NEW DELHI: Sent a message to someone onGtalk and it got delivered to someone else? Wondering what happened? Hold, you are not the only one experiencing this bug. Many other users of Google's free instant messaging serviceGoogle Talk too have reported that messages are being delivered to unintended recipients on Gtalk.In some cases the unintended recipients are multiple. Also, some Gtalk users have also complained of messages being delivered to people outside their contact lists.Acknowledging the issue, Google said, "Our team is continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by 9/26/13 4:30pm with more information about this problem. Thank you for your patience. At this time Google Talk is not functioning correctly and we are continuing to work to restore full functionality."Microblogging site Twitter is flooded with user comments on the same, says ?@SamreenSamad, "My Gtalk is randomly sending messages to multiple contacts. Can someone help please? I've changed my password and all that.""Avoid gtalk. There's something wrong with it today. Seriously," reads another tweet from @devgoswami. Some tweets, like this one from @Monelle_b, also have an interesting warning, "Google's GTalk is sending chat messages to the wrong recipients. So be careful with office gossip."So far, there seems no pattern to whom the message is wrongly getting delivered to. Also, it is not clear how many users have been affected affected by the bug.Google is currently looking into the glitch. "Our team is continuing to investigate this issue. The issue has been resolved and all services are gradually returning to normal. We will update when full service is restored," reads the update on Google App dashboard.Earlier this week, Google's Gmail service apologized to users who were affected by email delivery delays on September 23. Wrote Sabrina Farmer, senior site reliability engineering manager for Gmail, in post on the Google Gmail Blog," On September 23rd, many Gmail users received an unwelcome surprise: some of their messages were arriving slowly, and some of their attachments were unavailable. We'd like to start by apologizing—we realize that our users rely on Gmail to be always available and always fast, and for several hours we didn't deliver."Regarding the reason for delay, Sabrina added, "The message delivery delays were triggered by a dual network failure. This is a very rare event in which two separate, redundant network paths both stop working at the same time."
MUMBAI: India's hottest young cricketer Virat Kohli is setting the world of brand endorsements alight. The Indian captain-in-the-making, whose exploits on the field, combined with his youth, good looks and never-say-die attitude, makes him a winner off the field too, has inked a Rs 10-crore per annum deal with German sports goods giant Adidas.The three-year contract, perhaps the most lucrative to be signed by an Indian sports star, will see the swashbuckling right-hand batsman endorsing the brand's apparel and shoes.The Delhi lad has also struck a Rs 6.5 crore a year deal with a tyre brand that had master batsmen Sachin Tendulkar and Steve Waugh as its ambassadors, a person familiar with the development revealed.The two deals will see Kohli topping the likes of Indian skipperMahendra Singh Dhoni and Tendulkar in terms of annual earnings per brand endorsement.Kohli, who turns 25 later this year, pocketed around Rs 40 crore from endorsements last year, but that sum may swell up substantially with these two deals in his kit bag. Currently, he lends his face to as many as 13 brands, including Pepsi, Toyota and Cinthol deodorants.When contacted by TOI, an Adidas spokesperson declined to comment on the development. Tendulkar, who is Adidas' current brand ambassador, is perhaps at the fag end of his illustrious career.And Kohli fits the bill perfectly as he is being groomed to take over the top job from Dhoni after the 2015 ICC World Cup, an executive from a sports management firm, who did not want to be named, said.Bunty Sajdeh-led Cornerstone Sport and Entertainment manages the Indian vice-captain's endorsement contracts. Sajdeh was unavailable for comment.Kohli's annual endorsement fee has seen a meteoric rise over the past year, rivalling the likes of Bollywood heartthrob Ranbir Kapoor, the hottest brand ambassador in the film industry. Till last year, the cricket star used to command Rs 3 crore per brand annually, which went up to Rs 6 crore.The Rs 10-crore a year deal with Adidas propels him to a different league altogether. "For the past few years, Dhoni has been ruling the endorsement space, but Kohli is catching up very fast. While Dhoni connected well with the masses, Kohli has a more urban appeal which a lot of brands want to cash in on," said Indranil Das Blah, COO of celebrity management firm CAA Kwan.The price escalation in Kohli's endorsement contracts has meant that a lot of brands which had signed him early on must shell out much more to renew their deals or simply end their association with him."We are willing to pay a premium, depending on what that number is. He has been a great fit for our brand which targets youngsters, and he has grown with us," said J Suresh, MD and CEO, Arvind Lifestyle and Brands which has had the cricketer on board for three years as Flying Machine's brand ambassador.The jeans-wear brand signed Kohli before the World Cup at a moderate price and its contract is up for renewal. With Rs 10 crore becoming the new benchmark, many brands will find it hard to match up to Brand Kohli's price tag.Until recently, Kohli and Nike were in a five-year contract inked in 2008. However, things turned sour between the two sides when the US sports goods major went to court claiming Kohli had breached the contract by disagreeing to continue as its brand ambassador till 2014. But the Karnataka high court ruled in favour of the cricketer, allowing him to sign endorsement deals with other sports brands.
