Air Sahara would have been a perfect birthday gift for a man who already owns one airline and everything else. But for the time being, liquor baron and UB group chief Vijay Mallya will have to be content with the coffee table biography of his brought out by UB to commemorate his turning 50 on December 18. The book, edited by UB's chief of corporate communication Sunita Budhiraja, is a pictorial chronicle of Mallya through the ages, and has an assortment of his relatives, colleagues and friends-including Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and S.M. Krishna-reflecting on their association with him. "If there's one common plot," says the book, "that runs through the many different stories...it is the celebration of VJM as a kind and generous human being". On his part, Mallya feels so moved by the gesture that he is believed to have told his people that "This book is one of the best gifts I have received".

Netting It Big

After spending six years at an internet company that doesn't seem to be going anywhere, Sify's George Zacharias has got the break he may have been looking for. Starting the end of this month, the 46-year-old Zacharias will join Yahoo India as Managing Director, and operate out of Bangalore alongside Venkat Panchapakesan, head of Yahoo's global software development centre. Zacharias, who'll have country manager Neville Taraporewalla reporting to him, will draw on the centre's resources to "build a stronger India-focussed product organisation". "I want to make Yahoo India the most used and best loved internet portal in India," says Zacharias. We'll be watching.

Canada's Nut King

Last fortnight, a Quebec premier visited India for the first time ever. And, no, Jean Charest did not fall for a spiel from the Indian government. Rather, the credit for bringing him to India goes to a man called Baljit Singh Chadha. More than 30 years ago, Chadha landed up in Canada for an MBA, got trading in agri-commodities on the side, and today runs a C$100 million (Rs 380 crore) trading firm, which has earned him the sobriquet of Canada's (cashew) "Nut King". A Canadian citizen but still an ardent Sikh, Chadha is also a member of the Security Intelligence Review Committee and a philanthropist. A few years ago, he and his wife Roshi donated C$2,50,000 to his alma mater Concordia University in Quebec, besides funding courses in Sikh studies. "It's high time India and Canada pushed up trade," quips the big-built sardar.

Mr. Supercomputer

As the man in charge of all of IBM's research in Deep Computing, Tilak Agerwala should have enough reason to feel chuffed about the supercomputers his division builds. For instance, their newest baby, Blue Gene, hailed as the world's fastest computer, can perform 360 trillion operations per second. Yet, for Agerwala, computing power in itself is meaningless. "It is Blue Gene's application in complex areas like mapping the human brain, nuclear science, and in understanding the origin of the universe that makes it exciting," says Agerwala, who was in Delhi recently. A fellow of America's prestigious IEEE, Agerwala went to IIT Kanpur and then to Johns Hopkins for his PhD, before joining IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center. His next goal: Push computing power to one quadrillion operations per second. That's one followed by 15 zeroes.

Corner-room Moves

Everyone knew that Malvinder Mohan Singh would take over as the CEO of Ranbaxy Laboratories one day, and that day was more likely to be in 2007 when Brian Tempest's term was expected to end. Last fortnight, though, India's largest pharma company hurried the 33-year-old's appointment to the corner-room, and kicked up Tempest to the (fashionable) title of Chief Mentor and Executive Vice Chairman. Singh, who joined as a management trainee in 1994 and cut his teeth in various roles, will now be responsible for taking Ranbaxy to $5 billion (Rs 22,500 crore) in sales by 2012. Price pressures in the us has put Ranbaxy in the doghouse. So Singh had better get started.

Keeping Tradition

Like her father, and his father before that, Venu Srinivasan's 23-year-old daughter Lakshmi starts her career in group company TVS Motor the hard way: as a management trainee. A doctorate from The University of Warwick (her father also received an honorary doctorate from the university in July 2004), Lakshmi will be put through the grind and asked to prove herself before she's given any job of importance. "TVS Motor is a professional company where competence counts over everything else," Srinivasan told BT recently. He wouldn't let BT speak with his newest management trainee, saying that it wasn't required at this stage. So, we already know what papa's first word of advice to his daughter is: Keep your head down and just do your job.

-Contributed by Venkatesha Babu, Kushan Mitra, R. Sridharan, Kumarkaushalam and Sahad P.V.