1.Chess: India’s Gukesh, 17, is youngest ever Candidates winner

India’s Gukesh Dommaraju became, at 17, the youngest ever Candidates winner and world championship challenger on Sunday night after a marathon six-hour final round in Toronto. Gukesh will now meet the holder, China’s Ding Liren, in a 14-game series for the world crown later this year. The world No1, Norway’s Magnus Carlsen, abdicated his title in 2023 after a 10-year reign.

The Chennai teenager started the 14th and final round half a point ahead of his three rivals, and had the better of a draw with the USA’s world No 3 Hikaru Nakamura.The USA’s world No2, Fabiano Caruana, had the chance to force a tie and a speed play-off, but failed to convert his winning position against Russia’s Ian Nepomniachtchi. Their game lasted 109 moves and six hours before Caruana abandoned his attempts to make progress in what was by then a dead drawn ending.

Gukesh’s victory is a historic achievement. Only Bobby Fischer in 1959 and Carlsen in 2006, both then 16, have been younger Candidates, and both were also-rans. Ding Liren’s poor form since becoming champion means that Gukesh will be the favourite in the world title match, implying that another age record, Garry Kasparov’s as the youngest world champion at 22, is also in danger. 

Gukesh’s career has been marked by consistent rapid advance since 2019, when he became a grandmaster at 12 years 7 months, the second youngest in history after Abhimanyu Mishra of the US. It was then that his family decided to support him as a professional player, despite the financial risks involved. Later, he was the youngest ever to achieve a 2750 rating, and he won the individual top board gold medal at the 2022 Olympiad. He qualified for the Candidates by finishing top of the Fide Circuit, a league table of major tournaments.

2.Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi suggested that the main opposition party wanted to redistribute the nation’s wealth to Muslims, appearing to confirm fears that his party-BJP, would increase inter-communal tensions if it is re-elected as expected reported Indian Express.

The remarks at a weekend rally in northwest India underlined concerns over the prospects for India’s minorities under a third Modi government: One of the country’s most prominent historians Ram Guha characterised this year’s general election as its most important since 1977,  Indians voted out Indira Gandhi after she curtailed freedoms. “Authoritarianism crushes the spirit; majoritarianism poisons the mind and heart,” Ramachandra Guha wrote. “That is why its rise must be checked, by such democratic means as are still available to us.”

3.Mumbai-Pune Expressway’s Missing Link project to shave 6 km but more importantly save 25 minutes

The length of existing Mumbai Pune Expressway section from Khopoli exit to Sinhgad Institute is presently 19 kms.  This distance will be reduced to 13.3 kms after construction of this new missing link.  So, the total length of Expressway from Mumbai to Pune will be decreased by 6kms.  Travel time will be reduced by about 25 mins. Officials in the MSRDC anticipate completion of the project within the next 3-4 months/

4.Macquarie launches $1.5 bn EV fleet electrification platform in India

Australia’s Macquarie Group on Monday launched its electric vehicle (EV) financing and end-to-end solutions platform Vertelo in India, which will invest $1.5 billion in electrifying fleets of buses and cars. The platform will offer financing, fleet management, and charging infrastructure solutions.

Speaking to reporters, Abhishek Poddar, India Country Head, Macquarie Group said that around 5 per cent of this investment would go towards creating charging infrastructure and other requirements. Most of the investment will be for acquiring the vehicles. Poddar added that they planned to apply to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for a non-banking financial company (NBFC) licence. The NBFC would engage in lending for EV financing.

The new platform has received anchor investment from the Green Climate Fund which has committed to invest up to $200 million. Overall, Vertelo plans to invest $1.5 billion over 10 years with the aim of achieving a potential greenhouse gas emissions reduction of 9.5 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent (MtCO2e).

Vertelo has signed a long-term lease agreement with Chalo Mobility Pvt Ltd, a transport technology company, to supply 44 electric buses manufactured by JBM, to operate in Mumbai. Chalo and BEST have partnered to run a luxury bus service for daily commutes.

5.Relief in Ukraine on deal on aid package
The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, a bipartisan show of support for Washington’s allies after months of stalled talks.

The Senate is set to vote on, and likely pass, the bills as soon as Tuesday, with approval from President Joe Biden following soon after. Most of the money, about $60 billion, is for Kyiv, which had warned that American hesitation only emboldened Russia.

Within Ukraine, news of the House’s approval was met with a “collective sigh of relief and an outpouring of gratitude,” The New York Times wrote. The impact “will be nearly immediate,” replenishing Kyiv’s dwindling stockpile of arms and ammunition, according to The Economist.

6.Jung’s Five Pillars of a Good Life

In the world of popular psychology, the work of one giant figure is hard to avoid: Carl Jung, the onetime associate of Sigmund Freud who died more than 60 years ago.

When it comes to happiness, though, Jung can seem a bit of a downer. “‘Happiness,’” he wrote, “is such a remarkable reality that there is nobody who does not long for it.” So far, so good. But he does not leave it there: “And yet there is not a single objective criterion which would prove beyond all doubt that this condition necessarily exists.”

Clearly, this observation should not discourage any serious student of happiness. On the contrary, Jung is stating the manifest truth that we cannot lay hold of any blissful end state of pure happiness, because every human life is bound to involve negative emotions, which in fact arose to alert us to threats and keep us safe. Rather, the objective should be progress—or, in the words of Oprah Winfrey, my co-author on our recent book, Build the Life You Want, “happierness.”

If Jung was a happiness skeptic in some sense, however, he was by no means a denialist. In 1960, as he neared the end of his long life, Jung shared his own strategy for realising that goal of progress. Refined with the aid of modern social science, Jung’s precepts might be just what you’re looking for in your life.

Jung believed that making progress toward happiness was built on five pillars. Read on

7.Remote workers are about to get a rude awakening 

Aki Ito reports in Business Insider that in the aftermath of the pandemic, those in urban conglomerations who moved to smaller cities are beginning to regret their decisions. With Thanks to superb Founding Fuel Publishing.

“We've heard a lot about how the mass migration has been bad for major cities, sending them into a "doom loop" of empty offices and shuttered storefronts. But a new paper coauthored by Enrico Moretti, one of the best thinkers on the geography of jobs, highlights the dangers the migration poses for the very professionals who are ditching big cities. Moving away from a major city, Moretti found, can be terrible for your career.

Moretti, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, followed workers whose companies shut down between 2010 and 2017. How people fared after that depended on where they lived. Those who lived in small labour markets were less likely to find a new job within a year than those in large labour markets. To get back on their feet professionally, those in small markets were more likely to be forced to relocate for employment. They were also more likely to settle for a role that was misaligned with their college degree, or in an entirely different industry.

“The big takeaway is that market size matters,” Moretti says. “It's clear that larger markets improve the quality of the match.”

That's precisely why workers and the companies that employ them tend to cluster in the same cities. Economists call it agglomeration. Let's say you're a coder specialising in AI. You're far more likely to find a job in San Francisco than you are pretty much anywhere else in the world, because there are a lot of AI-related companies there. And it's because AI specialists flock to San Francisco that AI businesses set up shop there in the first place. That's how cities become hubs for particular industries, like finance in New York and fashion in Paris. And that's why people put up with all the downsides of cities — because it increases their odds of growing their careers. Moretti's new paper confirms that when it comes to jobs, geography is destiny.”

8.Consulting firms step up efforts to push out their low performers

Two years on from the Great Resignation, when a roaring jobs market and the effects of the pandemic encouraged swaths of the workforce to switch employers, the situation could not be more different.

In the professional services, the numbers leaving firms of their own accord have swung to historic lows, as tech groups, investment banks and other destinations have gone from hiring mode to firing mode. Bosses of consulting and accounting firms have been desperate to increase what they call attrition.

At McKinsey, in recent weeks, this has taken a variety of forms. Mid-level staff have been offered financial incentives to leave: nine months pay while they look for another job. Others have simply been laid off: up to 400 jobs were axed this month in specialist areas such as data and software engineering.

One person said the percentage of McKinsey consultants who leave in a typical year is about 20 per cent, but in 2023 it slid to 15 per cent. A return to normal cannot come soon enough for senior partners whose profits have been held back by the cost of all these unwanted salaries.

The sharp decline in attrition is a phenomenon across professional services firms and around the world, compounding the effect of a slowdown from the post-pandemic boom in advisory work on digital services and mergers and acquisitions.

Deloitte publishes a staff turnover figure in its annual report, which last year showed departures at their lowest level in a decade both globally and in the Americas. KPMG noted capacity issues created by ongoing and historically low attrition when it cut jobs in its US audit business in March.

Bain also cited lower attrition when offering some consultants in London redundancy with six months pay, partly paid temporary leave, or an option to relocate to one of the firm’s offices abroad.

Most accounting and consulting firms have conducted lay-offs, pushed greater numbers out through the performance review process, or created voluntary schemes to encourage people to leave and usually a combination of all three.