Alumni in News, July 14

Just now at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Bharat Balasubramanian -- generally addressed as "Dr. Bharat," left -- an engineering executive from Daimler AG in Germany, made an off-hand observation of what globalization and tech innovation will mean for the US economy. Bonus "it's a big world" note: Dr. Bharat is originally from Madras/Chennai and is an alum of the storied Indian Institute of Technology/Bombay. But he went to work for Daimler as a very young man and (as he jokingly pointed out himself) now speaks English with a richJawohl!-style German accent rather than Indian English. This is a more charming combination than you might think. ...more

Vasant M. Prabhu, Vice-Chairman and Chief Financial Officer for Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc is on a whirlwind trip of the country. In Chennai to look at some of its upcoming properties such as a spanking new Aloft hotel coming up on Chennai's IT highway, Prabhu says Starwood has big plans for India which include opening 18 more hotels in the next few years.

Prabhu, an IIT Bombay graduate who went on to do his MBA in marketing and finance from the University of Chicago, joined Starwood in December 2003 as Chief Financial Officer responsible for the accounting, tax, treasury, strategic planning, corporate development and risk management functions of the corporation. Recently, in recognition of his contributions to the company during the toughest year the hotel industry has endured since the Great Depression, Starwood named Prabhu Vice-Chairman....more

 New Delhi:  Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh on Tuesday countered his ministerial colleague Praful Patel's charge of the Navi Mumbai airport project being delayed for want of clearance, saying it has "serious' ecological issues that needs to be addressed.New Delhi:  Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh on Tuesday countered his ministerial colleague Praful Patel's charge of the Navi Mumbai airport project being delayed for want of clearance, saying it has "serious' ecological issues that needs to be addressed....more

The last place you’d expect to bump into an IITian is Bollywood. But that precisely is where Biju D, the visual effects director of more than a 100 films including Ghulam, Lage Raho Munnabhai, Bhootnath and the more recent 3 Idiots, has been making it big.He comes across as an ordinary man before you join him on a walk down memory lane to his college days when he was the Kalaprathibha of the Kerala University (1987-88), life at the TKM college of engineering, Kollam, and later at the IIT, Mumbai. 

“I’ve always wanted to be part of films,” says the Alappuzha-born who did his product design course in the IIT even as his heart lay in visual communication.Biju “took and got advantage” of interacting with the bright minds at IIT. “That’s where I imbibed the concept of education beyond classrooms and understood the importance of inter-disciplinary exposure. I realised that it was indeed education that was happening in the discussions I had with my friends in the Pune Film Institute under the ‘wisdom tree’ on their campus.”...more

New Delhi: If, as a corporate, you that think employing a physically challenged person is just philanthropy, think again. It may actually benefit your business if you harness the talent in the right way. The idea of bringing corporates and the physically challenged closer for mutual gain is part of an NGOs initiative aimed at creating over 100,000 jobs for the disabled. A special training programme aimed at connecting the corporate and the physically challenged was recently launched by the Wadhwani Foundation, a non-profit organisation working towards business innovations."The aim is to train over one lakh physically challenged people who have done their Class 12," said Ajay Kela, the Foundation's president and CEO. Kela, an alumnus of IIT Mumbai, said making employment for the physically challenged profitable for corporates is the only way to get sustainable employment for them....more