Keep the love alive!

Love works in bizarre ways. Least expected can do wonders, while the tried and tested tricks can end up in dud! Here come some handy tips to tickle the love button...

Reach into his pocket for the keys
Well, more than just the keys. The lesson is: Never underestimate the power of an unexpected touch. Just by stimulating your partner’s nerve endings when they’re not prepared for it, you create a positive physical connection that leaves your lover wanting more.

Keep him out of the loop
Remember, the less you tell him, the more interested he’ll become in you. So to hook him in, when you’re chatting, give him the conclusion of the conversation first. For instance, “I got the job,” and then stop and wait. You’ve gotten his attention, now let them draw out the details.

Make small changes for big results
The trick to activate desire is to depart from your everyday look. Maybe take a break from your trousers routine and move around in an evening gown.

Compliment your lover the right way
There’s a trick to buttering up your lover right. Make the compliment obscure and exclusive and it will sound more genuine. He may dismiss your flattery with a wave of the hand, but deep down, he’ll be loving every second of it.

Give your lover a sensory flashback
Think about when you first fell for your partner. What reminds you both of that time. Figure it out and you’ve found the secret to conjuring up that new-love rush. Your lover will experience something that they associate with falling in love with you; those intense, sensual memories will trigger a positive physical reaction and generate instant longing.

Check out competition
Love works in bizarre ways. If you want to renew your partner’s passion for you, slyly capture the eye of someone attractive. It adds a bit of jealousy and a lot of attention.

To stoke your lover’s interest, trail someone with your gaze or flash a flirty smile at one of his friends when you know you’re being watched. And it never hurts to make an extra bit of effort with your looks when you know you’ll be in a situation where others will admire you. Just the possibility of others eyeing you all night will definitely make them appreciate that they’re lucky to have you.

Reliance refinery test runs by Sept - source

Reliance Industries plans to test-run its huge new refinery by September, a little later than expected, and has started filling its tanks with extra Saudi crude oil, a top company official told Reuters.

Oil traders are counting down the days to the commissioning of the 580,000 barrel-per-day (bpd) plant, which will soak up excess heavy Middle East crude supplies and export high-quality gasoline, diesel and jet fuel to markets around the world.

Industry sources said in April that Reliance had initially hoped to begin test runs in July, still months ahead of its official December target, but even a September start would show remarkable speed for a $6 billion project that will make its Jamnagar site the world’s biggest refining complex.

"Trial runs will begin in August-September as we started filling tankages this month only," the official, who did not want to be named, said on Wednesday.

He said the additional Saudi crude would feed the new plant, run by subsidiary Reliance Petroleum adjacent to an existing 660,000 bpd plant on the west Indian coast.

"We will continue to buy extra barrels from Saudi Arabia in August as the new refinery start-up is ready. We started filling in the tank and started filling the lines and storages," he said.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, pledged to boost production to 9.7 million bpd this month, the highest in more than 30 years and an increase of 550,000 bpd versus May.

Reliance Industries has said it had signed up to take 30 percent of any incremental Saudi supply, but most Asian refiners turned down offers of extra barrels in June and July amid weaker demand in Japan and loss-making margins in China.

Last week, Reliance Petroleum said the new unit was 94 percent complete and pre-commissioning activities were proceeding at a hectic pace, reiterating that the refinery was on course to be completed ahead of its initial target of December.

The refinery, in which Chevron Corp holds a 5 percent stake, will have the ability to process cheap, low-grade crude into gasoline and diesel that meet strict Western standards.

Like its existing refinery, which turned India from being Asia’s largest diesel importer to a net exporter nine years ago, the new plant is expected to make waves in the oil market.

"It will change the market structure for sure, both on the crude and products side," said an Asian trader.

Reliance has been more active on the Middle East crude market in the past two months, buying at least one cargo of heavy sour Qatari Al Shaheen crude for August loading, and some lighter Abu Dhabi Murban crude, which traders said may feed to the new plant.

Mind set: Heart of forgiveness

There is a lot of darkness , disharmony and suffering in our world today, a lot of injustice, and violence. And what we must realise is that we are the reason behind all this. Indeed , the state of much of our outer world is created by the fact that many of us live very split and disconbobulated inner lives; many of us are stuck in very unhealthy conflicts, fixated in great sadness, despair and anger, all of which is continually seeping out of us and contaminating our society. I therefore believe that if we wish to move forward and create a better world, we need a lot of healing of our past.

And here, a very integral part of this process of letting go of the past, lies in our ability to forgive. Indeed, we must never underestimate just how many conflicts and how much suffering still persists, because so many of us are so rigid and unyielding and not only have very little idea about how to forgive but also wholly fail to recognise the importance of it.

Evidence of the importance of forgiveness lies in the fact that all spiritual traditions give it a central place. One of the main reasons why it is not easy to is because deep wounding can bind us in a perverse way to the source of our pain, resulting in our remaining very fixated in and therefore attached to, our suffering. And essentially , what forgiveness asks of us, is that we learn to let go. Let us imagine that something terrible will have happened to us, say, that we will have been betrayed, abused or tortured in some way, or that those we love are stolen from us. What we will tend to feel is great outrage, the sense that something very precious and sacred to us and that gives our lives meaning, will have been stolen from us. And here the outrage, together with all the suffering accompanying it, can become the new meaning to fill our void! Forgetting that we turn into what we hate, the sense of having been wronged can create in us the illusion of our own purity.

In our minds, we become all good, and those whom we feel will have hurt or betrayed us, all bad. Thus we may feel justified in giving vent to our destructive tendencies we are now allowed, in return, to rape , pillage, torture, abuse and try to destroy those we perceive as our destroyers . To forgive them would deny us this luxury! Such scenarios can be further exacerbated by the fact that many of us can carry deep wounds that seem unconnected with anything that would appear to have happened to us personally. Many report carrying deep cellular memories of ancestral, racial or religious violence relating to incidents they have no personal knowledge of. And many of these old enmities are surfacing powerfully at this moment because we are living at a very special time i believe a new culture of love is currently wanting to emerge and is doing its very best to break through into our awareness.

Put another way, we are all living at a time of great spiritual awakening, where much spiritual light is now emerging on our planet. And one of the effects of spiritual light is to expose or illumine for us, the dark and cobwebby areas that obscure it, not only inside each of us personally, but also within humanity collectively and within our world globally. So, given these many challenges, how then, do we forgive? Here, the first thing to bear in mind is that situations requiring forgiveness always involve conflict and that conflict can never be solved at the level that it exists at. It can only be solved at a higher level of consciousness, at a level where oppositions begin to converge as opposed to fight.

To forgive, then, whether it be ourselves, another person, another race or a nation, or whatever, what is essential is that we be in a place of being able to raise our awareness to a level higher than that in which the original perceived wounding occurred. So long as we still remain caught in our old dramas, no resolution is possible. The bigger our egos, the harder it is to forgive and the less we will be motivated to want to do so! I maintain, then, that in order to forgive, we have to be able to open our hearts, for it is essentially only with our hearts that we can experience our true self worth. I believe that the more open our hearts are, the more we are able to access the kind of wisdom that enables us to understand what lies behind why certain painful things will have taken place.

It is only inside our hearts that we discover the wherewithal to let bygones be bygones, the humility to give up our self righteousness, the compassion and the generosity of spirit to love those who have hurt us, together with the spiritual intelligence to understand how forgiveness brings freedom. When our hearts begin to open, we only want justice and truth; everyone increasingly becomes our brother and sister and less and less is there the space to have enemies , for we are no longer interested in exacting revenge.

The more open our hearts are, therefore, the stronger we are and therefore, the greater are our possibilities for forgiveness. Indeed, inside our inner hearts exists a veritable alchemical laboratory whose fire not only allows us to transmute and burn up our grief, but also empowers us recognize the deeper purpose behind why certain things happen as they do, even if those things are painful and terrible. I believe all these perspectives are necessary if genuine forgiveness is to take place. One might say at this stage: “It is all very well saying all this. but how can our hearts open in such circumstances?” Surely, the effect of our wounding is to keep them crushed and closed. Surely, to experience courage and strength and self esteem in such instances, is not possible! While I agree that this can sometimes be the case, it is not always so with everyone.

We remember that in the act of forgiving those who may have hurt us, we not only help re-humanise them, but we also do the same for ourselves. To forgive, then, is an important part of our own transformational process. It is also a significant form of service. And one powerful way of helping activate this space is to make a daily practice of seeking to behave in a loving and generous-spirited way towards everyone we encounter. I have met people who were so practiced at this, that one could say of them that their very presence radiated the spirit of forgiveness. However, please remember that the cultivation of such presence cannot and does not, happen overnight and we must be patient and learn to live gradually into our forgiveness. While we will begin our journey calling out to it, searching for it, we may end it by the spirit of forgiveness drawing us ever closer into its own heart.

Tax returns: Some don't need to panic

If you have deposited all your tax, or your due taxes have been deducted by your employer or you are not claiming a major amount as refund, you need not rush to the income tax office. In fact, if you have no losses to be carried forward too, you need not worry about meeting the July 31 deadline.

You have the option to file your returns by March 31, 2009, without any penalty. Many aren’t aware of this. Software engineer Sidharth Masaldaan’s company had already deducted his taxes, but he didn’t know he could file his returns by March 31, 2009.

"It was only a day before I filed my returns that I saw a blog posting that talks about this. I feel our companies should create more awareness about filing returns," says Masaldaan. "They just distribute our Form 16 and sometimes, hold a session with a financial consultant. But one can’t always make the time."

However, if the return is filed by July 31, 2008, then the assessee can revise the return by March 31, 2010. "Such revision is not possible if you file after July 31," says Sanjay Dhariwal, director of tax firm DNS Consulting.

Divya Chatterjee (26), a media professional, had to cough up nearly Rs 40,000 besides the normal tax deduction from her salary.

"I joined a new company mid year and the new company did not take into account my income for the first six months. Companies should realise that when employees join them in the middle of the year, they have to show income from other sources in the Form 16," says Chatterjee.

Prenatal mobile exposure dangerous

Children whose mothers used cellphones frequently during pregnancy and who are themselves cellphone users are more likely to have behavior problems, new research shows.

The finding “certainly shouldn’t be over interpreted, but nevertheless points in a direction where further research is needed,” Leeka Kheifets of the UCLA School of Public Health, who helped conduct the study, said.

Kheifets and her team looked at a group of 13,159 children whose mothers had been recruited to participate in the Danish National Birth Cohort study. When the kids reached age 7, mothers were asked to complete a questionnaire about their children’s behavior and health, as well as the mother’s own mobile use in pregnancy and the child’s use of mobiles.

After the researchers adjusted for factors that could influence the results, such as a mother’s psychiatric problems and socioeconomic factors, children with both prenatal and postnatal cell phone exposure were 80% more likely to have abnormal or borderline scores on tests evaluating emotional problems, conduct problems, hyperactivity, or problems with peers.

Risks were higher for children exposed prenatally only, compared with those exposed only postnatally, but were lower than for children exposed at both time points.

Kheifets and her colleagues note that a foetus’s exposure to radiofrequency fields by a mother’s cellphone use is likely very small. However, they add, research has shown that children using cell phones are exposed to more radiofrequency energy than adults, because their ears and brains are smaller.

India fund firms face post-boom profit crunch

India’s fund management industry, in boom mode for the better part of the decade, is facing a major slump in profitability as investment flows shrink, competition mounts and operating costs stay stubbornly high.The downturn, triggered by a near one-third plunge in Indian stocks this year, will be particularly painful for smaller firms which have already been suffering losses and global fund houses who recently paid top dollar to enter what was viewed as a high growth market.

"There probably are firms thinking this was a bloody big mistake. We thought this was going to make us money. We had no idea this was going to be a drain on our resources’," said Shiv Taneja, managing director with Cerulli Associates in Singapore.

Some foreign fund houses have longtime roots in India. Prudential Plc’s ICICI Prudential Asset Management venture with ICICI Bank is second in size only Reliance Capital Ltd’s fund arm. Franklin Resources Inc, which set up its India office in 1996, is the country’s No. 6 fund house.

But more recent arrivals include Pioneer Global, the fund arm of Italy’s bank UniCredit, insurer American International Group Inc, U.S. investment bank JPMorgan and South Korea’s Mirae Asset.

Mesmerised by a five-year bull run in which stocks rose 500 percent, Indian investors poured into equity funds. The industry grew more than four-fold over the period to manage 5.5 trillion Indian rupees ($129.8 billion) by the end of 2007.

Assets have shrunk about 5 percent since then. But fund executives said the underlying situation is much worse than that suggests because of the drop in assets invested in stocks.

Equity funds, which typically carry fees of about 1 percent, are the industry’s most profitable products. Many bond and cash funds, by comparison, charge from 5 to 25 basis points.

Industry data showed equity assets have shrunk by nearly a third on back of the stock market decline.

More ominously for future growth, equity fund inflows fell to their lowest in June since August, 2006 and new stock funds have collected just 18.3 billion rupees so far in fiscal 2009, compared to 63.35 billion rupees in the year-earlier period.

RENTS AND SALARIES UP

Naveen Tahilyani, a partner with consultancy McKinsey & Company, estimated the profitability of large and medium-sized players in India was about 23 basis points (bps) of assets under management last year.

Factoring in the shift to lower-margin products, he said profitability for the industry could drop to below 15 bps this year. This means a firm managing $100 million in assets would earn a profit of just $150,000 on that money.

By comparison, the industry’s operating profit as a percentage of average assets was 12 bps in the UK and 18 bps in the United States, McKinsey said in a report early this year.

"It is going to be tough, for sure ... if people have spent a lot of money in building their business and they were looking for a payback this year, they are not going to get it," said Sanjay Prakash, who recently stepped down as CEO of HSBC’s India fund unit to take another role with the bank.

India’s fund industry has also found operating margins squeezed by spiralling real estate and staff costs.

"You’re essentially talking about an emerging market with first world prices, in some cases even more than first world prices," said Cerulli’s Taneja.

Nearly all of India’s 34 fund houses operate out of Mumbai, which is one of the five most expensive office markets in the world, according to consultancy firm CB Richard Ellis Group Inc.

And salary costs have remained high as firms compete to hire and retain the fast growing industry’s limited talent pool. Industry sources said paycheques for some star managers have topped $1 million, moving toward levels seen in London and Tokyo.

The bear market has only moderated the pace of pay increases.

"Earlier, anybody would have expected that if you are jumping from one (fund manager) to the another you have to double your salary. At least now there must be a modicum of sanity," said Sanjay Santhanam, a director with Canara Robeco Asset Management.

Salaries look unlikely to fall because the number of fund houses is still on the rise, with some 20 firms said to be looking to break into the industry.

MASSIVE POTENTAL LURES

A market rebound could turn the situation around. But a resumption in the bull run seems far from certain given the hawkish stance of India’s central bank, which recently hiked interest rates to curb high inflation, and ongoing worries about the global economic slowdown and credit crunch.

Still, with one in every six human beings on earth, a 32-percent-plus savings rate and economic growth of more than 8 percent, India’s long-term prospects present a powerful lure. Many global fund houses view the near-certainty of short-term losses as the price of admission to tap that massive potential.

Cerulli forecast in May that assets of Indian mutual funds will more than double to $302 billion) by 2012, powered by strong economic growth and better distribution.

But Cerulli’s Taneja said fund houses must be prepared for the prospect that profits could be some time off.

"If you don’t have the stomach for the long fight, then markets like India are not the ones you should be looking at