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The Hindu : Fiat is gearing up to produce the Linea saloon at its Ranjangaon facility. The tools and assembly lines are being readied for the start of production, which will also include the Grande Punto hatchback in the coming months.Recently, Fiat’s Head of Group Style, Christopher Reitz, shed some light on the design and styling of the Linea and the Grande Punto.The Linea was designed to look contemporary, but also to appeal to buyers for a long time. Since the car will be sold in diverse markets, the styling also had to be acceptable to a broad range of tastes. An important factor was the choice of materials used, especially on the inside. The car had to feel rich, but the price of materials used had to be kept within limits.The new corporate logo, with a maroon background and stylised lettering, is intended to illustrate the turnaround in Fiat’s fortunes, which has seen its stock rise three hundred percent in the last three years.The Fiat brand’s reinvention extends beyond the new logo however, and a bold two-part grille with a slim rectangular mesh is seen on the Linea and Punto, as well as the new Bravo hatch, which, incidentally, will be sold in India as a Completely Built Unit (CBU).Fiat is targeting cumulative sales of 60,000 units with the Linea, Grande Punto and Palio Stile.The Linea will use a version of the 1.3-litre Multijet diesel, albeit in a more powerful 90bhp guise, as opposed to 75bhp in the Grande Punto and Palio Stile….More

The Hindu : Pizza Hut have launched “Ring O’ Garlic”, a range of pizzas with a smattering of garlic and parsley on the base and the piece-de-resistance is the crust which is a ring of butter and garlic along with another generous sprinkle of parsley. The Ring O’ Garlic fiesta was launched by irreverent, funny man Cyrus Broacha and Marketing Director, Anup Jain.Pizza Hut will also be introducing 11 creative and tasty topping combinations for this special range of pizzas. The range is available in medium and large size pizzas, priced at Rs. 125 for vegetarian and Rs. 180 for non-vegetarian for medium pizzas. The toppings include five vegetarian and six non-vegetarian toppings such as Grill O’ Delight, O’ Spicy Veggie, Peppy O’ Chicken and many other lip-smacking choices.Cyrus Broacha said, “I have always been a great fan of Pizza Hut and I’m sure that it’s more than obvious from my healthy girth that their pizzas are a mainstay of my diet. The garlic and herb topping on the crust is simply divine and I can vouch that people are going to be torn between which side of the pizza to begin eating from – the crust or the base. Simply put, garlic never tasted so good before.”The new Ring O Garlic range of pizzas will be available across all Pizza Hut outlets and can also be ordered at home for the next three months….More

The Hindu : Indiranagar Sangeetha Sabha’s fourth Annual Music and Dance Festival will take place between February 1 and 7. This festival is a tribute to the saints Purandara and Tyagaraja. The festival will have performances every evening at 6 p.m. at thePurandara Bhavana, 8th Main Road, HAL II Stage, Bangalore.The festival opens with a concert by the violin duo Mysore M. Nagaraj and Dr. M. Manjunath. On the mridanga is K. Sivaraman and ghatam will be played by U.N. Giridhar Udupa. On February 2, there will be a vocal recital by T.V. Sankaranarayanan. He will be accompanied by Nagai R. Sriram on the violin, Melakkaveri K. Balaji on the mridanga and V. Anirudh Athreya on the kanjira. On February 3, the austere Hyderabad Brothers, D. Raghavachari and D. Seshachari will present a vocal duet, with Akkarai Subhalakshmi on violin, Arjunkumar on mridangam and M.A. Krishnamurthy on ghatam. Roja Kannan and party will present bharatanatyam feature, Bhakti Manjari.The hero of mandolin, U. Shrinivas will perform along with Nagai R. Sriram on violin, B. Harikumar on mridangam, and Vaikom Gopalakrishnan on ghatam on February 5. Soumya will present Carnatic vocal recital on February6. She will be accompanied by Embar Kannan on violin, H.S. Sudhindra on mridanga, and Sukanya Ramgopal on the ghatam.This year’s Purandara Award will be presented to the leading saxophone player Kadri Gopalnath on February 7. After the award ceremony, he will perform. His accompanists are Kanyakumari on violin, Pathri Satish Kumar on mridangam, N. Amrith on kanjira, and B. Rajshekar on morsing.There are season passes as well as daily passes available. While the season pass for adults is Rs. 250, for children it is Rs. 125. Even the students (of music and dance) season pass comes at Rs. 125. The daily pass for adults is Rs. 49 and for students and children it is Rs. 25. Children below 10 years are not allowed. For details call…More

The Hindu : It is all happening. First it was the many million coffee outlets with wifi and what not and now it is time for tea to take the front seat all over again. Tata Tea has forayed into the out-of-home beverage segment by unveiling their first outlet of ‘Chai Unchai’ at the IIM campus in the city.The new “adda” hangout is designed to be cool – neither a kiosk nor a parlour, and with an ambience that is warm, friendly, unpretentious and fun. The outlet offers both tea and non- tea beverages with a range of unique snack offerings especially designed for it.The menu of Chai Unchai will have a wide variety of tea to suit very mood, right from Darjeeling, masala and green tea in the hot tea ranges to mango, peach and mint in the cold tea offerings. The outlet will serve different flavours of coffee, other Indian beverages and light snack foods….More

The Hindu : Apart from the fact that the two musicians have unusual voice textures, they have many other things in common too. Both Bombay Jeyashree and Shubha Mudgal are women who have consciously steered away from the oft-beaten track; not as an act of defiance, but as an act of inclusion. The two maestros have sung and experimented with many other “lesser-known” forms, and even the popular forms that classical musicians would shun as low brow and inferior. This, however, doesn’t leave them as loud, flag bearers to a cause, but musicians of great poise and grace, who have time and again reinforced their stance with conviction and elegance, through their music.And so you have the earthy-voiced Jeyashree rendering some lovely film music compositions with deep involvement and Shubha Mudgal with her full-bodied voice belting out pop music with intense commitment. Whether it is Jeyashree’s lullabies or Bharatiyar’s poetry or Shubha’s Sufi renditions or her songs in “Man ke Manjeere”, they are reflective and sincere.When you two have such egalitarian musicians coming together on stage, expectations are high. Not in musical terms alone, but also in terms of exploring genres, fusing boundaries, blending the note and its idea, and celebrating the love of music. “It all started when an organisation called Banyan proposed this idea of us singing together,” says Jeyashree, who’s also co-authored the book (with T.M. Krishna) on music, “Voices Within”. Shubha shifts the conversation from real time to historical time putting their experiment as part of a continuing tradition. “There has been an interest and curiosity about other kinds of music and it is not new. People have been doing it for generations and this is an area that has been constantly explored. What we are doing now could perhaps be called a ‘newer exploring’.”For both of them a jugalbandi of this kind is a closer look at each other’s styles. For instance, when…More

The Hindu : Rocking with Phil CollinsRadio Indigo and Hard Rock Café in association with Prestige The Man store is presenting an exclusive Phil Collins special night. Phil Collins was part of the group Genesis with renowned guitarist Eric Clapton. As he celebrates his birthday on January 30, a special showcase event – “One more night” is scheduled today at Hard Rock Café, St. Mark’s road from 8 p.m. onwards. The evening will have some of the best drummers from the city perform Phil Collins tracks. Exclusive videos and live footage of the artist’s performance will be played. Phil Collins fans can look forward to winning some exclusive goodie bags by answering trivia about the artist….More

The Hindu : Hang a painting not on you wall, but on your neck. That’s the suggestion jewellery designer Falguni Mehta seems to be making. Bringing together original acrylic on canvas paintings with the timeless Rajasthani tradition of jadau jewelley is notexactly easy.And it was a first even for the 40-year-old Mumbai-based designer who hails from a family of traditional diamond jewellers. “I first framed the paintings in glass, gave them a gold frame and then embellished them with precious and semi-precious stones. Wearing it makes a statement,” offers Falguni, who was in Bangalore’s ffolio for a showing of the collection. Paresh Maity’s paintings from the Vistaar collection see new light in this series dubbed “Art meets style”.“I had fun doing the collection. But it was difficult to bring together Maity’s largely geometric patterns with my predominantly floral motifs,” says Falguni. She took anywhere between 15 days to a few months to do each piece. “Paresh’s paintings are so fabulous, you don’t need any other inspiration.”“I usually do jadau jewellery and give it a modern eclectic look. My forte is what is traditionally done in Bikaner. Each piece, say a pendant, has meenakari work on the back.”She makes her jewellery range to go with Indo-western wear, while traditionally jadau is seen as “heavy” jewellery fit for royal occasions.Falguni uses basra pearls – antique pearls taken out of old Moghul jewellery. “These pearls can’t be bought in the market at any price. They come from old jewellery pieces,” she explains. In addition she uses emeralds, uncut diamonds, rubies, in combination with different textures of 22 carat gold such as Mexican and Egyptian.“I don’t churn out 2,000 pieces in a large workshop. I have a small group of artists who are still willing to do traditional work. In fact the younger generation of artists understand today’s market demands better.” She also dismisses any myths about people wanting subtle and smaller…More

The Hindu : Often, when I pass through Indiranagar, I see the house of the man who didn’t take a holiday for 13 years. It was the early Nineties, way before 12-hour workdays became the norm, and this man had deep-dived into a gruelling schedule without once coming up for air. I had dropped in on him with friends of his on New Year’s Eve. He told us he was on a long, forced vacation, and one look at his face told us why. He had turned several shades darker because his entire body had broken out in a skin rash. It was the first case of stress-related allergy I had seen.Today such ailments and worse have become commonplace. Men in their twenties have soaring blood pressure or drop dead in their tracks from heart attacks. I saw a lad being helped towards his neighbour’s car one morning. He swayed groggily at the door. Since he looked the right age to have been partying too hard the night before, I wondered idly whether it had been booze or pills. Neither. He had diabetes and his sugar level had plummeted.Oh, this is bad. This is terrible. Without further delay I must deliver a lecture on The Youth of Today, Part II. Part I you must be quite familiar with, for it is a tedious complaint that old people have been droning on for generations: how self-centred youngsters are and how they never respect their elders and how deplorably their moral values have dipped. Part II, however, says the opposite. Lighten up. Don’t work so hard. Don’t take your bank balance so seriously. Give your body a break. Have a real holiday.You may not agree with what I’m about to propose for it calls for a change in mindset. I suggest that your holiday home not be the kind you see in a brochure, with swimming pools and spas and…More

The Hindu : The art exhibition “Magyar Masala”, organised in collaboration with the Hungarian Information & Cultural Centre, New Delhi concluded recently at Gallery Sumukha. The event generated interest since Hungarian art is not something Bangaloreans are very familiar with. It featured three dozen works, mainly paintings with a few photographs and sculpture pieces, and a video film, created by thirteen artists. All the artists belonged to Pécs, the sub-Mediterranean city in South Hungary which is going to become the cultural capital of Europe in 2010.Among the works on display was a large ink drawing on paper by Ferenc Varga titled Hawthorn 2006. Exhibited in the form of three scrolls, the work attracted the viewer’s attention not only by its expansive size and structure but also by the intricate and intimate rendering. 40-year old Varga, a trained sculptor, was also represented by ‘Stone Contact Lenses’ chiselled from a riverbank pebble.A series of nudes by senior artist Erno Tolvaly (b.1947), a geometrical abstract by Ferenc Lantos (b. 1929), and a couple of autobiographical diptychs (Shephard I and II) by Sandor Pinchze were also part of the show.Two artists who came up with striking images were Istvan Losonczy and Karoly Hopp-Halasz. While the former’s intriguingly rendered Forest’ paintings tried to combine elements of reality with fantasy, Karoly’s works used stark colours and recurring prints on canvas in his ‘Identities and Diversities’ series to make a forceful visual statement. Rita Varga (b.1973) the curator of the show also came with a curious assemblage of 40 sections (oil on canvas) in her work titled Ophelia Stills.While the exhibition did present some interesting works, it was also clear that the whole effort did not rise up to its promise. One expected a much larger cross section of Hungarian artists to have been included in the show.GIRIDHAR KHASNIS…More

The Hindu : He is called the Pied Piper of Astronomy and ‘one of history’s greatest popularisers of science’. Night after night, decade after decade, John Dobson has taken his user-friendly telescopes to the people on the street, quite literally. Thanks to the impact of his unorthodox initiatives, on any given night, thousands of people around the world peer into deep space. “The reason these people are connected with me is because I stand for something, for some information about this universe,” says the 90-plus and pony-tailed thinker, teacher, philosopher, and astronomer whose enthusiasm is astounding and infectious. Dobson was born in China in 1915; his grandfather was the founder of Peking University. His family moved to America in 1927. The vision of the universe changed for ever when he heard a Vedantic scholar’s lecture. He became a monk in the Ramakrishna Order and continued in it for twenty-three years (1944-67). In 1968, after he was made to leave the Order he and two of his students set up the Sidewalk Astronomers. “When you let people to look through a telescope, they at least have a way of seeing something from a standpoint which they have not had before,” he says.Today, Dobson retains his high regard for the Vedantic philosophy. “Vedantans are basically interested in information,” he explains. “Swamy Vivekananda wanted sadhus, holy men to go from village to village with magic lanterns to educate the villagers in science.” That is exactly what Dobson has been doing for decades, in his own special way.“A Sidewalk Astronomer: a film about astronomy, cosmology and John Dobson” is a fascinating documentary photographed, produced and directed by Jeffrey Fox Jacobs. It follows the maverick astronomer on the sidewalks to colleges, universities, astronomy clubs, and a convention of telescope makers. Illustrated with actual footage and photos of space shot from satellites and spacecraft as well as animation courtesy of NASA, the Jet Propulsion…More