The article titled "How to prime for your first pull-up" by Pulasta Dhar appears on pages 2 and 3 of the source and is reproduced below:
The pull-up is believed to be one of the toughest bodyweight exercises. It engages most of your upper body muscles but also depends on grip, core strength, and a little bravery to jump up and grab the bar. Beginners will surely need support, and not just from a gym-buddy. Most help will come from knowing how to use gym equipment and which specific workouts to follow as one progresses from step to step. This will involve using chairs, boxes and bands. Practising isometric holds and scapular dead hangs will catalyse the learning process. Pulasta Dhar explains how to learn the pull-up faster and more efficiently with some tips and tricks borrowed from those who have mastered the move.
The article titled "Gen Z and India Inc.’s effort recession" by Somak Ghoshal is found on page 2 of the sources and is reproduced below:
Over 60% of Indian organisations are finding their employees less willing to go beyond their core responsibilities, according to a recent report by organisational development consultant Great Place to Work, India. This trend is consistent across sectors. Significantly, the report found that 26% of the workforce now comprises Gen Z employees (the number has doubled from 13% in 2023) and unlike their senior colleagues the new generation isn’t interested in proving their allegiance to their company by burning the midnight oil in office, pulling extra shifts, covering for colleagues or taking on any and every task their manager delegates to them, writes Somak Ghoshal in his column Work Vibes.
The article titled "Oil drags markets to steepest weekly decline in 10 weeks" by Mayur Bhalerao and Abhinaba Saha is found on page 16 of the source and is reproduced below:
Indian equities posted their steepest weekly decline in ten weeks as escalating tensions in West Asia, rising crude oil prices, a weakening rupee and the uncertainty over corporate earnings prompted investors to cut risky positions. Benchmark Nifty 50 and the Sensex fell 0.4% each on Friday to close at 23,767.45 and 76,059.75, respectively. For the week, the Nifty lost 2.3%, while the Sensex fell 2.6%—the steepest fall since the week ended 15 May.
“Indian equities remained volatile amid global pressures and escalating Middle East tensions. Crude oil’s surge past $90 a barrel and the rupee’s decline to 96.96 against the dollar heightened concerns over India’s import bill and accelerated foreign investor selling,” said Mayank Jain, market analyst at Share.Market by PhonePe.
The correction could persist as the market is repricing earnings expectations rather than merely adjusting valuations, according to Harshal Dasani, business head at INVasset PMS. He noted that while domestic liquidity should cushion quality large-cap stocks, a sustained recovery will require softer crude prices and better earnings visibility.
Losses were broad-based:
- The BSE Realty index fell 4.0%, emerging as the worst performer.
- The Bankex declined by 3%.
- Information technology and oil and gas stocks each lost about 2%.
- Private banks were major drags due to high foreign ownership leaving them vulnerable to overseas selling.
In contrast, defensive pockets offered limited support: the BSE FMCG index gained 0.5%, and the auto index edged up 0.1%. Dasani suggested that power, metals, and pharma look best placed due to firm commodity prices and defensive buying.
India was among the weakest major equity markets during the week, outperforming only Vietnam (which fell 5.6%). Meanwhile, several Asian and emerging markets bucked the trend, with China rising 2.7% and Taiwan gaining 2.4%. Jain attributed India’s underperformance to expensive valuations and the rupee's depreciation, which reduces dollar-denominated returns for overseas investors.
Crude oil remains the biggest near-term risk, as India relies on imports for about 90% of its oil needs. Brent crude traded around $93 on Friday, nearly 24% above its pre-war level.
The article titled "Being vigilant citizens in the bystander age" by Sravasti Datta is found on page 10 of the source and is reproduced below:
A video filmed after the fatal stabbing of 22-year-old Mayank Lohar by Roshan Suvarna aboard a Mumbai local train in June went viral. The attack allegedly followed an argument over closing the coach door during heavy rains. The footage sparked widespread outrage—not only over the brutality of the violence, but also over the apparent failure of anyone to intervene. Around 30 passengers were reportedly present in the compartment at the time, yet there was no evidence of successful physical intervention.
Similar instances of bystander inaction have been documented earlier. In 2022, a young man was stabbed to death in Delhi’s Sunder Nagri neighbourhood; in 2023, a 16-year-old girl was fatally attacked in Shahbad Dairy, Delhi. Yet blaming bystander inaction alone is insufficient to capture the full picture. In June, a 30-year-old woman was fatally stabbed by a former colleague inside an office in Mohali, Punjab. Her colleagues did try to intervene, but according to news reports, the accused threatened them with a knife.
“Let me be clear: No one should be expected to become a hero at the cost of their own life,” says K. Jaishankar, principal director and professor of criminology and justice sciences, International Institute of Justice & Police Sciences (IIJPS), Bengaluru. “The responsibility for public safety rests primarily with the state and its institutions. Citizens cannot and should not be expected to physically intervene in a knife attack.” But he stresses that helping does not always mean fighting. “The public must shift its understanding of ‘help’ to include safer, more practical actions—immediately calling emergency services or the police, shouting to attract attention and deter the assailant, safely recording the incident for evidence without putting oneself in harm’s way, and providing first aid or comfort to the victim after the assailant has fled.”
Jaishankar identifies the “bystander effect”—first described by social psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané in the late 1960s—as the primary psychological framework for understanding such inaction. “The presence of others diffuses personal responsibility. An individual is less likely to act if they believe someone else will.” In the chaos of a violent incident, he adds, this can be compounded by “pluralistic ignorance”—where people look to others for cues on how to react, and if everyone else is frozen in inaction, they interpret the situation as less urgent. In the Indian context, systemic fears often paralyse people. “There is a profound, rational fear for personal safety... Many Indians fear that stepping in will lead to police harassment, being entangled in legal procedures as a witness, and a loss of valuable time and mental peace.”
Sonam Chandwani, managing partner at KS Legal & Associates, Mumbai, says that the law does not impose a general legal duty upon citizens to physically intervene, but it generally protects bystanders who voluntarily act to prevent imminent harm, provided their response is lawful and proportionate. “The right of private defence under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, is not confined to protecting one’s own person or property—it also extends to defending the body of another against unlawful aggression.” The law, however, draws a clear distinction between preventing violence and becoming an active participant in it. Any intervention must remain limited to preventing imminent harm and should stop once the threat has been neutralised or public authorities assume control.
For those who choose not to intervene physically, the safest and most legally defensible course is often to keep a safe distance, alert the police, and attempt to de-escalate the situation verbally. While India’s Good Samaritan Law—Section 134A of the Motor Vehicles Act—specifically protects those who help road crash victims, courts are generally inclined to view any bona-fide assistance favourably where a person’s conduct is directed towards preserving life.
Smartphones have added another angle. Recording on mobile phones, according to Jaishankar, has become a form of “distanced participation”, allowing the bystander to be involved without physical risk. While these videos can prove instrumental for police investigations, Jaishankar warns that they normalise a culture of passive observation. “The priority should always be to call emergency services (112) or alert authorities immediately, rather than reaching for the record button.”
For sustainable change, Jaishankar suggests four institutional reforms:
- Police reforms to establish clear protocols for rapid response and robust witness protection.
- Public awareness to train citizens in "active bystandership."
- A streamlined emergency response system with a single, well-publicised number (112).
- Better infrastructure in public transport, including intercoms, emergency alarms, and visible CCTV.
Jaishankar stresses that "we cannot arrest our way out of this problem." The solution lies in collective response and building systems that do not place the entire burden on a single individual.
The article titled "West Asia flare-up jolts retail, HNIs’ F&O bets" by Ram Sahgal is found on pages 18 and 14 of the source and is reproduced below:
Retail investors, including high-net-worth individuals, have suffered significant losses this week as the benchmark Nifty 50 slipped below the 24,000 level, which had served as a strong support for weeks. Having correctly anticipated the initial correction, they turned bullish again just as renewed tensions in West Asia sparked a broader sell-off, leaving their index call bets deep in the red.
These investors, who tend to be net buyers of Nifty 50 and Nifty Bank call options and net sellers of puts, apart from being bullish on stocks, actually played a negative card for this Tuesday's weekly Nifty expiry. After remaining net long until last Thursday, retail investors turned net sellers of index calls on Friday and Monday, expecting the Nifty to correct. It did, allowing them to pocket gains.
However, they have turned net bullish on index options again since Tuesday, expecting the 24,000 support level to hold despite the resumption of fighting in West Asia, weeks after a fragile ceasefire signed by the US and Iran on 17 June came apart. But the fall in the markets, with the 24,000 call expiring on 28 July (coming Tuesday), since they again became buyers, has burnt their fingers.
The 24,000 call has fallen almost 80% to ₹75 per share—65 shares make one contract—on Thursday, down from ₹343 on Monday. The cohorts turned long index calls on by 146,775 contracts on Tuesday, showed data from the National Stock Exchange. This after turning net short index calls by 211,750 contracts on Friday and 104,565 on Monday. The sellers on index calls tend to be foreign portfolio investors, according to NSE data.
“The steep fall in calls has trapped the buyers, thanks to a surge in geopolitical tensions,” said Kruti Shah, quant analyst at Equirus Securities.
The tensions, which began building since 10 July, saw Brent crude surge 31% to $100.69 a barrel since that date through Thursday, according to investing.com. For India, the world’s third-largest importer of crude, the rise in oil prices since the start of the war at the end of February threatens its macroeconomic outlook by impacting the balance of payments, making equities more vulnerable.
A continuation of hostilities could further disrupt global oil supplies, with Iran-backed Houthis expanding the conflict into the Red Sea and threatening Saudi oil shipments. Already 10% of the daily global oil supply of 104 million barrels has been disrupted due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, according to S.K. Joshi, director at Khambatta Securities.
“Resumption of hostilities will impact our markets, which have held up pretty well around 24,000 so far,” said Ketan Marwadi, managing director, Marwadi Shares and Finance Ltd. The benchmark Nifty 50 fell nearly 2% from 24,334.3.
The article titled "Oil keeps flowing from Red Sea as Hormuz bypass stays open despite Houthi threats", credited to Bloomberg, is found on page 15 of the source and is reproduced below:
Millions of barrels of Saudi Arabian crude are still being shipped from the nation’s Red Sea coast to the global market, despite threats and attacks by Yemen’s Houthi militants against the kingdom’s shipping that have the potential to further destabilize the global oil trade. Days after the Iran-backed group declared a blockade of Saudi Arabia, Western shipowners appear to be making plans to avoid Bab el-Mandeb strait, at the southern end of the sea, or to sail through it with their transponders turned off. Meanwhile, vessels owned by Iran-affiliated nations like China are still crossing it while hauling Riyadh’s oil.
Oil tanker owners and traders are on high alert for disruption in the area after Monday’s blockade warning and a subsequent attack on at least one Saudi ships. The Red Sea port of Yanbu is one of the oil-market’s most important workarounds while Iran tries to stop oil from flowing through the Strait of Hormuz. The most recent satellite images from the European Union, taken two days after the blockade was announced, show that there were tankers berthed at four of the kingdom’s seven crude export berths.
A Greek tanker carrying Saudi crude sailed out of the Red Sea with its transponder off when it crossed the Bab el-Mandeb strait, the narrow southern exit route. The Merbabu emerged in the Arabian Sea late Thursday after previously broadcasting its position in the Red Sea, according to ship-tracking data. Lists of vessel charters show it’s heading to India. Separately, the New Explorer, a Hong Kong-owned supertanker carrying Saudi crude, was sailing toward Bab el-Mandeb after idling since Tuesday. Two Chinese tankers earlier exited via the same route. Non-Saudi oil traffic in the waterway appeared brisk, with several ships ferrying Russian barrels to India and beyond.
For western-run vessels handling Saudi oil, however, shipowners are facing tough decisions on whether to risk exiting via Bab el-Mandeb, or take a pricier and longer voyage around the African continent to Asian destinations. That diversion takes them north through the Suez Canal and almost doubles some voyage times.
With the situation in the Red Sea remaining tense, a Denmark-owned products tanker, Torm Innovation, u-turned in the waterway toward the northern route through the Suez after loading at Yanbu, according to tracking data. The vessel is supposed to be heading for Japan, according to fixtures. Should Torm Innovation exit via the Suez, that would follow a move by Asia-bound liquefied natural gas carrier Gas King, which opted for the diversion two days earlier. The tanker has begun transiting the canal.
The uncertainty in the Red Sea appears to be prompting some Asian oil buyers to consider picking up Saudi cargoes outside of the Red Sea. Some are in talks with Saudi Aramco to potentially reroute flows around Africa. At least one very large crude carrier has been provisionally arranged to pick up a cargo from Egypt’s northern coast for delivery to South Korea via the Cape of Good Hope, according to reports of the booking seen by Bloomberg, making it the first such charter in years.
Separately, the Greek-owned very large crude carrier Olympic Luck is also heading north from Yanbu. Its automated data suggest it’s half full, which would allow it to pass through the Suez Canal without offloading any of its cargo. Fixture data show its destination to be east of Saudi Arabia.
The Houthi attacks open a new front in the Middle East conflict, which already curtailed shipping activity in the Strait of Hormuz coming sharply. On Friday, observable vessel tracking showed that waterway was nearly deserted, with the supertanker Noble appearing to have entered the Persian Gulf with its transponders off. In recent days, three supertankers exited the gulf dark. The European Union’s naval force has advised merchant ships to turn their transponders off if they called at ports in the kingdom.
Loading activity at Yanbu, Saudi Arabia’s key Red Sea export installation, doesn’t appear to have slowed notably, but it has become more opaque. Tankers are switching off their signals as they approach the loading jetties. Satellite images from the European Union’s Sentinel 2 orbiter from on Wednesday show tankers moored at four of the seven crude berths across the two Yanbu terminals. Only two of those ships were visible on automated tracking systems.
The article titled "Between the shadow and substance of being a refugee" by Somak Ghoshal is found on page 12 of the source and is reproduced below:
Tabish Khair’s new novel derives its title from a statement made by its unnamed narrator to a fellow writer at a literary festival on the island of St Martin in France. On a boozy evening, he gets talking to this Anglophone author, much more famous than him and exalted for his liberal views. The conversation soon turns to the ongoing refugee crisis, when the narrator spits out the phrase, “Drown all the refugees,” leaving his interlocutor aghast. What he means, though, isn’t as flippant as it sounds. So, for the rest of the novel, the narrator makes it his project to unfurl the layers of his statement, to explain his motives as much to the outraged writer as to himself.
Like his last two novels, Night of Happiness (2018) and Jihadi Jane (2016), what distinguishes Drown All the Refugees from its predecessors is its propensity to draw on the supernatural and occult to make an artfully political as well as poetic point—that even as refugees around the world are forced to flee their homes, they leave a trace of themselves, their “shadow”, behind while they carry the “substance” of their mortal existence into new realms.
For the narrator, this realisation hits home through encounters with two people he was close to. First is his late lover Abdul, a Palestinian scholar who sought refuge in India. Although Abdul grew up in Afghanistan, where his family had fled to escape Israeli persecution, his life had been a series of rejections. Abdul, as the narrator puts it, had been condemned by his homosexuality to becoming a “sexual refugee,” while his humanity and learning had left him as an “intellectual refugee”.
The narrator’s second reckoning with the tragedy comes through Pedro, his childhood friend and son of Maria, the long-term housekeeper. Maria, with the help of a shaman-like character, brings back what turns out to be the mere “shadow” of her beloved son. The narrator is called in to intervene as Pedro becomes increasingly elusive and obdurate about his ways, which brings the reader to the crux of the novel: the clash between hard-nosed realism and old wives’ tales.
This strategy of using the paranormal to capture the truth of the time is one that Amitav Ghosh also used in Gun Island (2019) and Ghost-Eye (2025). However, unlike Ghosh, who weaves the surreal into the texture of reality, Khair’s two strands—one grounded in ancient rituals and the other in modern geopolitics—do not come together as a coherent whole.
In the beginning, the reader willingly shares the narrator’s scepticism about the mysterious “Midwife”, whom he visits on Maria’s urging. By the end, however, a series of unforeseen events erode his scientific defences as he finds himself playing a key role in the reality of this world. Ultimately, the novel's characters feel hollow, perhaps because the bulk of the reader’s attention is claimed by the narrator’s self-reflexive energy. While the machinations of the Midwife and her minion Compson are entertaining, the novel begins with an arresting idea but loses its way in a mire of supernatural and occult by the time it ends.
Drown All the Refugees: By Tabish Khair, HarperCollins India, 240 pages, ₹599.
The article titled "A Dash for Infosys: the insider chosen to lead in the AI era" by Jas Bardia is found on page 18 of the source and is reproduced below:
With no boardroom battles or scrambles, Infosys Ltd on Thursday named Ashiss Kumar Dash its next chief executive, eight months before he begins his term, making this the first smooth succession at the firm in over a decade. A company veteran of over three decades, Dash currently heads Infosys’s energy, utilities, resources, and services segment, which makes up a little more than a tenth of the company’s business.
Among others in contention for the CEO role were Dennis Gada, who heads banking and financial services, and manufacturing head Jasmeet Singh. A fourth of Infosys’s revenue comes from banking and financial services, and 15% from manufacturing firms.
In an internal letter to employees on 23 July, accessed by Mint, Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani said the need to find an internal chief executive officer (CEO) was important to preserve the company’s values. “Our industry is entering a period of considerable change. The Board and I were clear that our next CEO needed to combine the ability to drive bold transformation with the judgment to preserve our culture, our values, and the enduring customer trust,” Nilekani said in his letter.
Dash will take over from Salil Parekh as the CEO of India’s second-largest information technology services firm on 1 April 2027. Dash’s elevation comes at a time when the rise of automation tools is raising questions about the relevance of IT services companies including Infosys, whose growth has been slowing since FY23 on the back of low demand.
During the company’s Investor AI day on 17 February, Dash threw light on the importance of artificial intelligence in his segment. “Energy decides the physical scalability of AI, utilities decide the reliability and sustainability of AI, resources decide the material availability of AI because of the materials they supply, and services continue to be the big consumers of AI when it comes to inferences because of primarily the B2C (business-to-consumer) nature of their business,” Dash said at the event.
According to an executive familiar with developments at Infosys, Dash has been instrumental in securing several strategic global clients, including British Petroleum, Shell, Global Foundries, and Valmet. The deal with BP was a contract valued at $1.5 billion. “He would always lend an ear to hear out executives no matter how caught up he was, and had a calming presence across the room,” said a second executive. “Of late, he’d keep probing teammates on where AI could be better used.” Both the executives declined to be identified.
When Dash takes charge as CEO next year, it will mark the first time that four of India’s largest tech services firms have internal chief executives, as the rise of automation tools prompts companies to focus on hiring internal leaders. Tata Consultancy Services Ltd’s K. Krithivasan, HCL Technology Services Ltd’s C. Vijayakumar, Wipro Ltd’s Srinivas Pallia, and now Dash, each have spent over three decades in their company.
Investors and analysts are divided on Infosys’ decision. “His appointment signals continuity rather than a strategic reset,” said Phil Fersht, chief executive of HFS Research. “The board clearly believes Infosys is operationally strong and doesn’t require a turnaround. Instead, it has chosen an insider who understands the firm’s culture, clients and delivery engine.”
“Elevating Infosys veteran Mr. Ashiss Dash to the CEO role ensures a smooth transition in the current uncertain and challenging demand environment; however, we note that the transition period is one year,” ICICI Securities analysts wrote in a note dated 24 July. In a 23 July note, Nomura analysts said attrition will be a key monitorable for Dash.
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