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Business Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Business Times
Wifredo Lam's surreal creatures haunt STPI
[SINGAPORE] At Singapore's first solo show of Wifredo Lam (1902–1982), the walls are alive with shape-shifting spirits. His hybrid creatures defy classification – they are part animal, part machine, part voodoo hallucination. Lam, a Cuban-Chinese-African artist, spent his life dismantling Western modernism from the inside out. Drawing on Afro-Caribbean religions such as Santeria and Palo Monte, as well as the hallucinatory energy of Surrealism, he created a visual language that was both rebellious and deeply spiritual. His prints are populated by beings with frog fingers, taloned feet and goat heads fused with torpedoes. In one striking work (Apostroph' Apocalypse Plate VIII, 1966), a skeletal winged horse appears locked in a cryptic embrace with a vampiric ox. Are they dancing? Mating? Fighting? Lam offers riddles, not answers. Wifredo Lam's Apostroph' Apocalypse Plate VIII (1966) depicts strange creatures mating or fighting. PHOTO: WILFREDO LAM ESTATE, PARIS Titled Outside In, this year's STPI Annual Special Exhibition may be its most unsettling yet. It challenges viewers to reconsider modernism – not as a clean narrative from Paris or New York, but as a tangled, many-headed force shaped by migration and myth. Echoing the ethos of the National Gallery Singapore's recent exhibitions, which have reframed modernism as a global movement born of cultural exchange, Outside In places Lam not on the periphery, but at the very centre of this complex story. The exhibition's more than 60 works on paper give a rare glimpse into the artist's late-career printmaking practice, developed in close collaboration with renowned Italian master printer Giorgio Upiglio between 1963 and 1982. Many were created alongside avant-garde poets such as Aime Cesaire and Gherasim Luca, reflecting Lam's belief that words – like images – could tap into the unconscious and conjure bizarre, new worlds. Wifredo Lam's Untitled (1980) limited-edition print is on sale for 4,000 euros at STPI. PHOTO: WILFREDO LAM ESTATE, PARIS Outside In opens ahead of Wifredo Lam: When I Don't Sleep, I Dream, the major retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art in November. There, the audiences will encounter the full sweep of Lam's spectral imagination. But here in Singapore, this quieter, more intimate exhibition offers a wonderful entry point into a lesser-known chapter of his practice. Wilfredo Lam: Outside In runs from now till Jul 13 at STPI
Time of India
24-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
ET Digital UP Conclave: UP is becoming data centre hub of North India, says Nandi
1 2 Lucknow: UP is fast transforming into the data centre hub of North India, said minister for industrial development Nand Gopal Gupta Nandi. Citing the example of the Hiranandani Group's data centre in Noida, he said the state has laid a strong digital infrastructure that is attracting big investments in the IT and tech sectors. "Over the past few years, we have not only attracted data centre giants but also created a favourable ecosystem for their growth. During the Covid-19 pandemic, we used drone technology to digitally map land records and issued registries within days, showing the speed and efficiency of our digital transformation," he said. Nandi highlighted that UP's robust digital push helped the state achieve software exports and create direct and indirect jobs, reflecting the vision and commitment of the CM. Emphasising the state's rise as an IT powerhouse, the minister said that the state now has over 400 STPI (Software Technology Park of India)-registered IT and ITES companies. "The IT sector was once limited to Noida and NCR regions, but today global giants like IBM, Deloitte, Genpact, and HCL are operating from Lucknow too," he said. He announced that India's first AI Centre for Excellence is being set up in Lucknow, which will boost innovation and high-end research in emerging technologies. To build a future-ready workforce, the state launched the "AI Pragya Yojana," under which over 10 lakh youth are being trained in artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analysis, and cybersecurity. About ease of doing business, Nandi said govt has created a single-window portal to resolve investor issues quickly and transparently. "UP is no longer a state of fear for investors. Today, we guarantee security, transparency, and rapid support," he asserted. Nandi said UP is moving steadily towards becoming a trillion-dollar economy. Get the latest lifestyle updates on Times of India, along with Brother's Day wishes , messages and quotes !
Time of India
19-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
IndusInd Bank signs pact to support early-stage startups
IndusInd Bank on Monday said it has signed a pact with AIC STPINEXT to provide early-stage startups and MSMEs essential financial solutions and structural support. AIC STPINEXT is a special purpose vehicle of Software Technology Parks of India (STPI) under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). "Under this collaboration, IndusInd Bank will deliver a range of tailored banking solutions to support early-stage startups associated with STPI/STPINEXT. "The Bank will offer a specialized Current Account product with no quarterly average balance requirement, making it easier for startups to manage their finances," IndusInd Bank said in a regulatory filing. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Play War Thunder now for free War Thunder Play Now Undo Additionally, the Bank will offer support such as expert guidance, and conduct workshops around financial management including banking basics, equity infusion, Employee Stock Ownership Plan (Esops), segment-based funding etc. To further support operational efficiency, the bank will offer payroll and attendance management services to early-stage startups at no cost. Live Events Discover the stories of your interest Blockchain 5 Stories Cyber-safety 7 Stories Fintech 9 Stories E-comm 9 Stories ML 8 Stories Edtech 6 Stories Shares of IndusInd Bank were trading at Rs 782.70, up 0.05 per cent over previous close on BSE.
Indian Express
30-04-2025
- Business
- Indian Express
Opinion India's start-ups are not lacking innovation but imagination
When Minister Piyush Goyal recently lamented Indian start-ups' lack of 'real innovation,' he triggered a familiar debate on bureaucratic red tape, R&D funding, and brain drain. Earlier in 2021, he had invoked 'Einstein's discovery of gravity' to argue that innovation transcends structured formulas and past knowledge. The government's Startup India and the Atal Innovation Mission were meant to accelerate such entrepreneurial innovation at the national scale. India now boasts of 1,60,000+ registered start-ups, 1000+ incubators, an ever-expanding Digital Public Infrastructure (DPIs) that connects Aadhaar with everything, and 800 million internet users. Why are we still failing to imagine new progressive techno-futures? We suspect the problem is not simply about policy or entrepreneurship, but a deeper failure of collective imagination. To put it bluntly, India lacks democratic horizons of techno-futurity. India's elites have reduced innovation to the latest mobile app or AI wrappers, equating innovation with Silicon Valley mimicry. It seems India has instrumentalised start-ups as mere props for national pride. For example, NITI Aayog's recent seven-page 'R&D Vision 2035' calls to urgently emulate China's 'DeepTech' frontiers. This vision reveals a mindset of catch-up, not confidence in charting an independent path to imagining techno-futures for the collective good. Let us consider UPI, the oft-cited proof of India's innovation potential. India has been pitching DPIs to the world as revolutionary alternatives to Western Big Tech. However, the global response has been underwhelming. Beyond the hype, there are still questions about UPI's sustainability in the absence of government support. FinTech scams ruining the lives of Indians add to the worry. The vision of public-private partnerships behind DPIs offers hope, but the abuse of 'open source' and opacity in industry partnerships through 'volunteers' hardly inspires confidence. Why, despite being the fastest-growing major economy, is India unable to convert its tech potential into global competitiveness? Beyond the goal of linking everything to Aadhaar, is there a shared, long-term technological vision of Startup India, Digital India, or the recently retired Smart Cities mission? Such vision-agnostic digitalisation is symptomatic of a narrow social imagination that privileges a small minority of elites to dictate the rest of India's techno-futures. Outsourcing the work of imagining transformative techno-futures to this small group not only leaves behind most Indians in terms of representation but also impoverishes India's collective capacity to imagine techno-futures differently from American and Chinese paradigms. It is tempting to credit start-ups alone with breakthroughs, but history disagrees. India's IT services boom emerged not from lone entrepreneurs but from decades of government support for English and engineering education, STPI's satellite internet links, tax exemptions, and economic liberalisation. OpenAI became possible because of the Canadian government's sustained funding for Geoffery Hinton's AI research. But current debates in India obfuscate such facts. The Silicon Valley model demands start-ups chasing rapid scalability and quick exits, seldom supporting the long term exploratory research needed for paradigm-shifting discoveries. As a result, India's ecosystem produces countless copies chasing the growing disposable income of the top 5 per cent of Indians. India's deep systemic inequalities, sub-continental scale, and federal architecture necessitate greater (not lesser) government intervention to prevent innovation from becoming a billionaire-driven agenda like in the USA. This requires reimagining the government's role at the federal and state levels to open more democratic horizons for imagining new techno-futures. We need forums where farmers, gig workers, artisans, ASHAs, Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups, as well as scientists and engineers, can dialogue. Such experiments may not yield short-term results, but our current approach is bound to fail in the long term. Innovation thrives in democratised knowledge ecosystems — libraries, labs, mentorship networks, and societies' orientation to the public good. India's knowledge infrastructure is starved, with academics having little say in running institutions. Approximately 40 per cent of faculty positions at premier institutes remain vacant, and public libraries receive a mere Rs 0.07 per capita annually. Indian high-net-worth individuals rarely support existing universities. This leaves the majority of our education and research vulnerable to stagnation from the mediocrity of the few who get to have an outsized influence. Without mentors or community learning spaces, aspiring innovators of Bharat who do not have caste capital lack environments to experiment, fail, and iterate, thereby severely constricting our collective potential and possibilities. Instead of democratising, India has centralised innovation by implementing Startup India's programmes in hundreds of small cities in a top-down fashion. Over 90 per cent of venture funding flows to Bengaluru, Delhi NCR, and Mumbai. The government is the biggest facilitator of the start-up ecosystem in tier-2 and -3 cities. However, they have handed over the work of running incubators to consultants who have little expertise in non-managerial forms of innovation. In our research, we have interviewed scores of entrepreneurs complaining about the lack of a 'culture of entrepreneurship' in small cities as the primary reason behind their failure. Cultural dimensions of innovation and entrepreneurship cannot be downloaded from Bengaluru. They require long-term investments in education, health, and social infrastructure. Compounding India's spatial inequality, caste, and gender inequalities exclude the majority of citizens from even participating in technological future-making. Recently, Apple 's investment under the Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme highlighted the inadequate human capital to 'Make in India'. Indian manufacturing underperforms because industrial policy debates rarely reckon with the realities of human capital availability. More than 35 per cent of children are stunted, over 50 per cent of women are anaemic, and 25 per cent of high-school graduates struggle to read. Alarmingly, critical socio-economic indicators seem to be declining even after tangible improvements in welfare goods in recent decades. Despite India Stack, the absence of the 2021 census makes data-driven innovation in governance practically impossible. India's existing welfare architecture has the potential to include the India that is Bharat in improving innovation outcomes for the world. But for that, policy areas such as welfare programs, taxation, and MSME, among others, must be enmeshed in R&D visions, industrial policy, and start-up ecosystem. We are not promoting a Maslovian hierarchy of needs where only after redistribution should India do start-ups. We are suggesting a rethinking of how India imagines its futures, its place in the world, and which Indians get to imagine it. Bharat is not involved in these conversations today. The Indus Valley annual report, published by Blume Ventures, which vertically classified the country into India 1, 2, and 3, sees India 2 and 3 as passive recipients of India 1's offerings. It does not question India 1's capacity to imagine transformative futures. The next disruptive innovation — whether climate resilient crops, energy independence, or the discovery of new materials — is unlikely to spring from an exclusive club of elite entrepreneurs. It is especially unlikely to come from blindly following or even customising the American or the Chinese model to the Indian context. It will need a democratically generated social compact beyond the performativity of MyGov comment requests, that reimagines innovation first as a social and democratic process. Only by weaving start-ups into a broader social and federal tapestry can India reimagine its techno futures beyond a mimicry of the USA's Elon Musk model or China's state-controlled economy. We need more than 'DeepTech'; we need a deep democracy of innovation, responsive to domestic realities and global challenges, that involves every Indian — from an Adivasi girl in Hasdeo forest to an entrepreneur in a government start-up incubator in Jaipur — to shape our shared futures.
Indian Express
27-04-2025
- Business
- Indian Express
From school buses to a scooter: the stories behind Mohali's food trucks
At half past one, the lunch rush begins in the industrial area of Mohali Sector 8-B. Crowds of hungry office-goers gather for food, not in cafeterias or established dhabas, but around food trucks—a relatively new phenomenon in the city. Promising prompt service and meals straight from the home kitchen, these food trucks serve more than just food; they offer stories of survival and the ambition to thrive. Take Inderbeer Singh, the man behind Punjabi Dhaba. Located on a stretch of road near the Software Technology Parks of India (STPI) office, his food truck has built a loyal following among office workers within just a year. 'I used to run AC school buses. But the expenses were high, and the number of students was low. So I started to look for another job to supplement my income,' he says. Noticing the mobility of roadside rehdis (pushcarts) and recalling the importance of food as a symbol of bonding, love and relationships in the Tricity culture, he decided to operate a food truck. From his truck, Singh serves comfort meals like makki di roti with sarson da saag, kadhi chawal and rajma chawal, with lassi made fresh at home. 'Everything I serve here is prepared the way I eat at home. It's simple, delicious and has no frills,' he says. While he operates from noon to 3 am, Singh's customers—largely from the STPI office—often wait patiently if he is delayed. 'I have fewer customers, but they come every day. It's a special bond. They not only give me company but also keep me afloat by giving me some profit,' he says. Just a few steps away, Heavenly Food, a bright green double-decker food truck, catches the eye. It is owned by Kulwant Kaur along with her daughter Khushpreet and son Shivam, who earlier ran a hotel in Ambala with the same name. Heavenly Food, a bright green double-decker food truck, owned by Kulwant Kaur along with her daughter Khushpreet and son Shivam. (Express Photo) 'We were bullied by bigger hotels to shut down,' says Kaur. 'But food is something that always has a market,' adds Shivam. Launched just two months ago, they operate during the midday to early morning hours, with peak business between 12 am and 4–5 am. They sell a special vegetarian thali and aloo-pyaaz parathas to the midnight office crowd. They have been awaiting a food vendor licence for two months. 'It can be a real pain to get the licence. And since we still don't have it, the authorities end up harassing us. Sometimes, they take our tables and chairs. But what can we do, we have no other source of income,' says Khushpreet. 'Our business is suffering. It is so difficult to get clients during the day and we don't know what to do,' sighs Kulwant. A five-minute walk down the road leads to a cheerful white box truck run by Ranjit Singh, owner of Sardar Ji Ka Dhaba. Stirring a steel drum of kadhi, Singh recalls how it all began with two steel drums perched across an Activa scooter. 'I used to work in a milk factory for months without pay. I had to take things into my own hands,' he says. They have been awaiting a food vendor licence for two months. (Express Photo) What started as a humble effort has now grown into a reliable food truck known for its fresh, homemade meals. 'Clean, unadulterated and delicious,' he smiles, offering a glass of salted lassi flavoured with dhaniya powder, kala namak and jeera powder—a perfect beat-the-heat drink. His rajma and kadhi rice, kala and chitte chole have built him a loyal customer base. His truck opens at 11 am and usually stays open till 4–5 pm, or whenever the food finishes, with 1–2 pm being the prime business hour. 'I don't use masala bases or gravies made from yesterday, unlike a lot of food trucks and rehdis here. It's all fresh, every day,' he says proudly. Singh advises newcomers to start small, with fewer portions, to avoid wastage. 'Business will be slow in the first six months, which can be discouraging, but you have to keep putting in effort and trying. I remember selling only 10 plates in the beginning, but with love and determination, the number slowly climbed up,' he says. Ranjit Singh, owner of Sardar Ji Ka Dhaba. (Express Photo) He cautions against investing all one's money into the venture, citing the food business's unpredictability. 'Parmatma di kripa (by God's grace), I managed to open a business I enjoy and that keeps me afloat,' he says, adding that selling over 80 plates a day ensures a good profit. Half an hour away, tucked into a quieter stretch, lies Jai Shankar Vaishno Dhaba, where the owner's car trunk doubles as storage for cooking supplies. Manned by Surinder Kumar, a driver and dhaba owner by profession and a sevak at heart, the dhaba is a labour of love. Surinder moved from Himachal Pradesh to Chandigarh for diabetes treatment but continued to pursue his passion for feeding people. Jai Shankar Vaishno Dhaba, where the owner's car trunk doubles as storage for cooking supplies. (Express Photo) 'I see these young people working in these big offices and how hungry they look during the lunch hour. I just want to feed them and see them energised,' he says. For just Rs 60, customers can enjoy a full meal with rice, roti and two sabzis. Interestingly, Surinder finds weather to be his biggest challenge, rather than legal hurdles. 'Too much heat drives customers away. A sudden rain has the same effect,' he says. He advises aspiring food truck owners to maintain discipline and work hard. 'It is a gamble, really. While it soothes my soul, the profit comes on some days and deserts you on others,' he adds.
