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1 week ago | 
livemint.com | Rahul Jacob
His voice, as he approaches his 95th birthday on 30 August, sounded croaky.
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1 week ago | 
htsyndication.com | Rahul Jacob
Posted On: 2025-05-08 Posted By: Rahul Jacob Business & Finance Health & Lifestyle Cities Sports MINT New Delhi, May 8 -- Asked a question about Berkshire Hathaway's earnings power over the past financial year by a London-based economics professor at the company's annual gathering of shareholders on 3 May, Warren Buffett conjured a soliloquy worthy of a Shakespearean comedy. His voice, as he approaches his 95th birthday on 30 August, sounded croaky. But he replied with a quick reference to...
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1 week ago | 
sundaytimes.lk | Rahul Jacob
A fashion show all too often involves people wearing clothes too impractical to wear even to a party. Models tend to be of body types ranging from the skinny to skeletal or absurdly gym toned. Barefoot’s first fashion show in almost a decade was a role model of a different kind, however. Sixty years young, Barefoot continues to make its own rules.
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2 weeks ago | 
sundaytimes.lk | Rahul Jacob
Malinee Jayasinghe-Peris’s solo recital at the Women’s International Club in Colombo as a 12-year-old may well have had the blessings of the gods. Her piano teacher, Alice Cockburn, insisted the stage be adorned with coconut flowers and altar lamps “to keep away evil spirits and the thoughts of jealous music teachers,” Malinee recalls with a laugh. Lionel Wendt asked that she wear a bottle green dress and photographed her for the occasion. She performed works by Mozart, Beethoven and CPE Bach.
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3 weeks ago | 
livemint.com | Rahul Jacob
More than a decade ago, writing about its October edition, when buyers from the West throng its halls hoping to stock up ahead of Christmas, I likened it to chancing upon an army of Santa Claus’s helpers and discovering they were nearly all Chinese. This year, though, set against the backdrop of Trump tariffs, all is change. Business deals for Chinese suppliers are expected to plummet.
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1 month ago | 
livemint.com | Rahul Jacob
In 1914, John Maynard Keynes wrote an almost triumphalist ode to globalization, just before that vision was dismantled by World War I and the subsequent Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in the US.
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1 month ago | 
livemint.com | Rahul Jacob
Less emphasis on the PLI scheme ought to create room for a new industrial policy. Let’s call it ‘NIP’ as a marker of the speed needed in rethinking our approach on several issues that bedevil the economy. These include India’s overvalued exchange rate, which should be routinely measured against a basket of our export competitors’ currencies, and concluding key bilateral trade treaties over which negotiations have dragged on for years.
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2 months ago | 
htsyndication.com | Rahul Jacob
Posted On: 2025-03-07 Posted By: Rahul Jacob Business & Finance Health & Lifestyle Technology Cities International MINT New Delhi, March 7 -- Imagine a literary festival not as encounters with favourite authors or listening to fascinating debates but instead as embarrassing onstage debacles, serialised episodes of misadventures that metamorphose in the mind into a very public pillorying. With this season's calendar of lit fests, in locations as diverse as Jaipur and Thimphu, coming to an end,...
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2 months ago | 
livemint.com | Rahul Jacob
The next morning, the discussion was as chaotic as anything I have witnessed. Noticing that the Life of Pi author Yann Martel was in the audience, I opened the Q-and-A early to use him as an additional panellist. He argued in favour of believing in religion, a counterpoint to Nasrin’s denunciation of organised religion as responsible for patriarchy and many of society’s ills. At the end, an American woman attendee pulled me aside.
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2 months ago | 
livemint.com | Rahul Jacob
The contrast between the Pope’s candour and the mostly muted response from European leaders to US Vice-President J.D. Vance’s provocative 14 February speech in Munich could not have been clearer. Vance said, somewhat incredibly, that he worried more about the state of European democracies than he did about possible threats to Europe from China and Russia.
