Priyanka Chopra Jonas: Superwoman

The actor holds her own in Heads of State as a seasoned spy

An action film, Heads of State, with two burly men, John Cena and Idris Elba, as US president and British prime minister, respectively, and the film’s opening credits feature only Priyanka Chopra Jonas. That’s the reputation she has built for herself since she hit the ground running as Alex Parrish in the ABC show, Quantico. That was 10 years ago, and since then Priyanka has been saving the world in various avatars, from a spy, Nadia Sinh, in the Amazon series Citadel to the forthcoming movie ‘Judgment Day’ with Zac Efron. She has milked it for all its worth, too, teaching Jimmy Fallon how to throw a punch movie style on his late-night show, and giving interviews declaring that she would like to be described as action hero rather than heroine. Priyanka’s Hollywood career has veered from parts in big action films to smaller rom coms but her celebritydom goes beyond box-office numbers. It assimilates her status as a red-carpet magnet for global luxury brands, as one half of a popular entertainment couple, and as a social media superstar with a following of 92.3 million, which puts her at number 44 globally, just below singer Shakira and above the NBA. Priyanka’s Noel Bisset doesn’t break sweat or accent in her role as an MI6 agent in Heads of State but that’s also because she has had practice with roles such as Roma aka Jungli Billi in Don 2 (2011) and as an IPS officer in Jai Gangaajal (2016). The long apprenticeship has paid off.
(By Kaveree Bamzai)

Noisemaker: Priyank Kharge
Giving Facts A Miss

Priyank Kharge, Karnataka’s minister for information technology and electronics, seems keen on reminding the public that his reputation for making ill-considered statements is well-deserved. The minister, whose father Mallikarjun Kharge is Congress president, was in the news again for suggesting that the RSS could be banned in future just as it was in the past. He said previous decisions by Congress governments to lift bans on RSS were a mistake. For one, the last ban on RSS imposed by a Congress government after the Babri Masjid demolition was struck down by a Central tribunal. BJP lost no time by asking Kharge to begin by banning RSS in Karnataka where Congress is in office, a suggestion to which the minister is yet to respond.

The Big Picture

Ideas
Ransomware

A survey of companies by the cybersecurity firm Sophos found that over half of the affected Indian respondents, 53 per cent, paid ransomware to hackers to get their data and information back. The median amount paid was US$481,636 or around `4 crore. The survey was done between January and March this year and asked about ransomware attacks that happened earlier. Even those who did pay had to spend almost $1 million in recovery costs, showing the scale of the problem.

The phenomenon of ransomware indicates how crucial data is to the operations of companies. In an earlier era, when criminals wanted to use ransom as a means of extortion, they would kidnap executives, banking on the company recognising itself as responsible for its employees’ safety. But the crime would not be a threat to the survival of the company. Ransomware brings in that possibility. Usually, data is accumulated over the lifetime of the company and if it did not have the foresight to have strong backups which criminals cannot get to, it would find itself handicapped in doing future business.

The easier option is to just pay up, which is why the survey showed such a high compliance rate for the demands. The other characteristic about digital ransoming is the criminal could be physically at any part of the globe, making apprehension near impossible without the coordination of multiple agencies. The solution to ransomware is to have strong security protocols and backups. The survey showed that awareness is increasing but it is not enough.

Money Mantra
The Tech Turnaround
Down for now, but history backs an Indian IT sector bounceback

INDIAN IT STOCKS are enduring one of their periodic crises of confidence. Slowing global discretionary spending, project delays, and the hype around generative AI has convinced many investors that the sector’s best days are behind it.

Yet, this is a familiar script. Every few years a fresh threat (the dot-com crash, the global financial meltdown, or the migration of workloads to cloud platforms) prompts predictions that India’s export-oriented service giants will be sidelined. And, time and again, they have responded with skill reinvention, new delivery models, and sharp execution, turning potential disruption into fresh avenues of growth.

The cloud episode offers a telling precedent. When hyperscalers be­gan courting Fortune 500 chief information officers a decade ago, scep­tics claimed on-demand infrastructure would bypass Indian vendors entirely. In reality, creating the architecture and managing those very cloud environments became a multi-billion-dollar revenue stream that accelerated expansion and strengthened client relationships.

Something similar is already happening on the AI front. Far from being displaced, top-tier firms are embedding large language models into legacy estates, curating domain-specific datasets, and building governance layers that global enterprises cannot deploy on their own.

Early project wins in code generation, predictive maintenance, and AI-augmented customer service suggest that the industry’s role as trusted systems integrator is widening, not shrinking.

More importantly, strong balance sheets give the sector abundant strategic optionality. They convert 90 per cent of earnings into free cash flow. Low capital intensity, negative working-capital cycles, and disciplined dividends mean investors are effectively paid to wait while demand resets. Managements are using this liquidity to seed generative-AI studios, accelerate training programmes, and widen their acquisition funnel for niche capabilities.

Valuation adds another layer to the thesis. A year of under-perfor­mance has pushed the Nifty IT index’s forward earnings multiple back towards its 10-year average, even as return on equity remains comfortably above 20 per cent. (By Ramesh Singh)

Viral
A Stolen Phone and Its Recovery

When Kanika Devrani, a travel vlogger with several followers on YouTube and Instagram woke up in her second AC compartment of the Brahmaputra Mail, she found her iPhone Pro Max phone that had been kept under the pillow on which her head had been rested stolen. She had been going to Assam from Delhi and realised the theft at West Bengal’s New Jalpaiguri station. She uploaded a video about how distraught she was and suspected that she had been drugged. The post started trending online. The Government Railway Police (GRP) stepped up efforts to investigate. On July 1, five days after the phone was stolen, she put up another post saying it had been recovered and there was also a shot of her receiving it in Siliguri. Comments on her post lauded the power of social media and how it had worked. But there were also snide asides. Like one follower remarking: “History created, for the first time police is able to hand over the stolen phone.

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