The case of Han van Meegeren, the boldest modern forger of Old Masters (as far as we know), is a grand yarn of twisty deceit, involving prestigious dupes and scads of money, with a sensational trial at the finish. It even has a serious side. Van Meegeren, since his death, in 1947, has become a compulsive reference for philosophical discussions of fact and fraud in art—a subject bound to disquiet art lovers. He became the most original of fakers when, starting in 1936, he put aside mere canny simulations, mostly of the work of Johannes Vermeer, to create wildly implausible pictures which were presented as discoveries of a missing phase in the artist’s conveniently spotty, little-documented opus.

(Only thirty-five undisputed Vermeers exist today. As an added boon to forgers, a few aren’t very good.) Van Meegeren’s tour de force was a feat more of intellect than of skill. He knew whom he had to fool first: an eighty-three-year-old monster of vanity named Abraham Bredius, who had an earned, though moldering, track record as an authenticator of newfound Vermeers. In 1937, in the august British art-history journal The Burlington Magazine, Bredius declared “The Supper at Emmaus,” the first of van Meegeren’s late counterfeits, to be “the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft.” Other Dutch experts concurred, under pressure to keep a national treasure from being sold overseas. It took van Meegeren himself to reveal the truth, in 1945, when not to do so might have put his neck in a hangman’s noose.

Two new books re-spin the van Meegeren saga, one breezily, with entertaining digressions on secondary figures and the arcane of forgery, and the other in profoundly researched, focused, absorbing depth. “The Forger’s Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century”, by the science journalist Edward Dolnick, aggrandizes the story’s abundant hooks, such as the happenstance that van Meegeren’s victims included the art maven Hermann Göring, who, in 1943, swapped a hundred and thirty-seven paintings from his largely ill-gotten collection for a van Meegeren Vermeer. “The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren”, by the writer and artist Jonathan Lopez, brings hard light to van Meegeren’s machinations and (very bad) character. Lopez debunks the myths, savored by Dolnick, which cast the forger as a romantic avenger, and which sweeten the tale in other ways. It seems that Göring, while awaiting trial in Nuremberg, may not have learned that his cherished Vermeer was a phony, as nice as it is to think that he did. This small point is notable because, in time, the fact that van Meegeren had scammed Göring helped him not only to evade charges of collaboration but to become a folk hero. Lopez demonstrates how evidence of the painter’s coziness with the Occupation regime got buried by the single question of whether he had sold Göring a patrimonial cynosure (potentially a capital offense) or a worthless fake. Early in 1947, a newspaper poll found van Meegeren to be the second most popular man in the Netherlands, after the newly elected Prime Minister.

Van Meegeren was born in 1889, in the provincial city of Deventer, the third of five children in a middle-class Catholic family. In 1907, his father, a schoolmaster, sent him to Vermeer’s city, Delft, to study architecture. The feckless lad preferred to paint and draw. He worked as an assistant drawing instructor (the only steady job he ever held) until 1917, when he moved his household to “the city of beautiful nonsense,” as a contemporaneous guidebook characterized The Hague—the home of the royal family and an illustrious strutting ground for the idle rich. There he launched himself as an artist. With “his small, birdlike frame constantly aflutter and his irreverent sense of humor,” in Lopez’s description, van Meegeren beguiled the town. Lopez—who, unlike Dolnick, speaks Dutch and is steeped in the history of the period—records that van Meegeren became the favorite artist of the Liberal State Party of the Netherlands, a fading force of the patrician elite. Reproductions testify that he had a subtle sense of color and a firm gift for telling portraiture. Come to think of it, what are artistic forgeries but portraits of imaginary art works?

Van Meegeren’s first legitimate exhibition in The Hague, in 1917, of work in several genres, reaped positive reviews. His second, five years later, of Christian religious paintings, sold well but repelled critics with its treacly piety—van Meegeren, it turned out, was a student of scripture. (In the show, there was an earlywarning “Supper at Emmaus”—representing Jesus, who has appeared as a stranger to his disciples after his death, being recognized at the moment when he breaks bread for them.) Informed opinion consigned van Meegeren to the always populous ranks of the formerly promising.

He evoked the setback poignantly in his public confession, in 1945: “Driven into a state of anxiety and depression due to the all-too-meager appreciation of my work, I decided, one fateful day, to revenge myself on the art critics and experts by doing something the likes of which the world had never seen before.” That’s rubbish, if only because the “something” to which van Meegeren referred—his invention of a new Vermeer style—was just the latest chapter in a then still unknown, long-running criminal enterprise. Lopez affirms that van Meegeren was dirty before his artistic reputation collapsed. He speculates—reasonably, to my mind—that faking ruined the artist’s creativity. “Slowly but surely, the imitative logic of forgery condemned Van Meegeren to a state of arrested development,” Lopez writes. The state of being oneself dies when set aside.

Lopez dates van Meegeren’s initiation into The Hague’s underworld of art swindlers to 1920, at the latest. He was mentored by a dealer and painter, Theo van Wijngaarden, who had apprenticed in chicanery with a titan: Leo Nardus. Nardus stuck American millionaires with innumerable old copies, fresh fakes, and fanciful misattributions of famous artists until 1908, when a panel of invited experts, including Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry, convened at the home of the Philadelphia streetcar magnate P. A. B. Widener and concluded that his collection was worth about five per cent of what Nardus had charged him for it. The hardly less resourceful van Wijngaarden, on his own, perfected a paint medium, gelatin glue, to finesse a standard test for the age of oil paint: rubbing with alcohol, which dissolves oils that have had less than decades to dry. (The glue weathers alcohol but, as was later discovered—too late for a generation of marks—softens on contact with another chemical compound: water.) Van Wijngaarden maintained a network of well-placed accomplices, extending to London and Berlin, who could pilot fakes into the mainstream of respectable commerce. He lacked only top-drawer product. He himself painted well, but not well enough. He wanted an adept protégé, and he found him in van Meegeren, who was ready.

Marxist literary theories tend to focus on the representation of class conflict as well as the reinforcement of class distinctions through the medium of literature. Marxist theorists use traditional techniques of literary analysis but subordinate aesthetic concerns to the final social and political meanings of literature. Marxist theorists often champion authors sympathetic to the working classes and authors whose work challenges economic equalities found in capitalist societies. In keeping with the totalizing spirit of Marxism, literary theories arising from the Marxist paradigm have not only sought new ways of understanding the relationship between economic production and literature, but all cultural production as well. Marxist analyses of society and history have had a profound effect on literary theory and practical criticism, most notably in the development of “New Historicism” and “Cultural Materialism.”

The Hungarian theorist Georg Lukacs contributed to an understanding of the relationship between historical materialism and literary form, in particular with realism and the historical novel. Walter Benjamin broke new ground in his work in his study of aesthetics and the reproduction of the work of art. The Frankfurt School of philosophers, including most notably Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse—after their emigration to the United States—played a key role in introducing Marxist assessments of culture into the mainstream of American academic life. These thinkers became associated with what is known as “Critical theory,” one of the constituent components of which was a critique of the instrumental use of reason in advanced capitalist culture. “Critical theory” held to a distinction between the high cultural heritage of Europe and the mass culture produced by capitalist societies as an instrument of domination. “Critical theory” sees in the structure of mass cultural forms—jazz, Hollywood film, advertising—a replication of the structure of the factory and the workplace. Creativity and cultural production in advanced capitalist societies were always already co-opted by the entertainment needs of an economic system that requires sensory stimulation and recognizable cliché and suppressed the tendency for sustained deliberation.

The major Marxist influences on literary theory since the Frankfurt School have been Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton in Great Britain and Frank Lentricchia and Fredric Jameson in the United States. Williams is associated with the New Left political movement in Great Britain and the development of “Cultural Materialism” and the Cultural Studies Movement, originating in the 1960s at Birmingham University’s Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Eagleton is known both as a Marxist theorist and as a popularizer of theory by means of his widely read overview, Literary Theory. Lentricchia likewise became influential through his account of trends in theory, After the New Criticism. Jameson’s work on consumer culture, architecture, film, literature and other areas, typifies the collapse of disciplinary boundaries taking place in the realm of Marxist and postmodern cultural theory. Jameson’s work investigates the way the structural features of late capitalism—particularly the transformation of all culture into commodity form—are now deeply embedded in all of our ways of communicating.

When I started working during the late 1960s and early ‘70s I was the proud owner of a slide rule. I was a low-mileage model, as I only knew how to work out percentages on it, but even that was better than struggling with long multiplication or logarithms to do the same work as some of my colleagues were wont to do.

The point is that this was only three decades ago, and the pocket calculator had still not been invented.

I remember, in the early 1970s, sitting in a meeting in the viewing room of the advertising agency I worked for, taking part in a discussion with out client, Proctor and Gamble on whether the commercial which had just been approved should be shot in black-and-white, or colour. The discussion, as with most discussions with that client, was long and carefully articulated on both sides. The agency, of course, looked to the future, and argued strongly for colour. We were finally overruled, on the grounds that there were still too few colour TV sets in existence for it to be worth the extra investment in colour film.

At the same period, I recall the excitement of the company’s first computer being delivered. The account’s office window was temporarily removed, while the computer was swung into place by a crane especially hired for the purpose. The computer power was probably less than a Personal Organizer.

Not only was colour television a rarity, and the personal computer still some way off, other everyday objects had stiletto be invented, like the digital watch or the camcorder. How we existed without such basic everyday tools I now find hard to imagine.

The truth is that we and our parents and grandparents before us-and their forebears before them stretching back over the past two centuries - have seen and accommodated huge technical advances and social changes. Many of these change have not only been big they’ve been fast.

Pick up a glossy magazine or newspaper supplement and there will almost certainly be at least one double page spread that looks like a regular editorial page but is headed up either ‘promotion’ or ‘advertisement’. These hybrids – unattractively but aptly called advertorials – are being used with increasing frequency by a growing number of companies. Traditionally the preserve of high-technology clients with a complicated message to get across to potential customers, the use of this technique has now spread to sectors like financial services, alcohol and automobiles.

One major reason why marketing departments are becoming more receptive to ideas for advertorials is that publishers are pursuing them more aggressively at a time of shrinking ad budgets, while they are being treated far more professionally in a bid to persuade clients that this is a creative opportunity to spread their message to their target audiences. Pouring more imagination into them allied with raising production standards has also been a means whereby the commercial executives of magazines and newspapers can try to convince skeptical editors who strongly disapprove of blurring the advertising / editorial line of their worth.

What advertorials are about is control – controlling the message in an editorial format. Positive editorial coverage of a company and / or its products in credible publications is the best publicity any company can hope for, but often proves elusive. A successful advertorial can pinpoint the way the company delivers its message to the heart of its target audience.

High technology was one of the main sources of early advertorials – unsurprisingly, the products are complex and need to be explained with some technical detail to get the story across. That is not so easy with traditional advertising.

Advertorials can also to some degree circumvent journalistic indifference to what a company is doing because editorial coverage has already been so extensive. For example, in the case of a company like Compaq, whose swift growth in the computer market attracted many inches of editorial space, that very success can lead to journalists wondering how they can write something different about Compaq. There

As a memory researcher, I have long been intrigued by the phenomenon of memory failures. What are the different ways that memory can get us into trouble? Bringing together everything I knew of memory’s imperfections, lapses, mistakes and distortions, I hit on a way of thinking that helped to make things fall in place. I propose that memory’s malfunctions can be divided into seven fundamental transgressions or “sins”, which I call transience, absentmindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. Just like the ancient seven deadly sins, the memory sins occur frequently in everyday life and can have serious consequences for all of us.

Transience, absent-mindedness and blocking are sins of omission: we fail to bring to mind a desired fact, event or idea. Transience refers to a weakening or loss of memory over time. It is probably not difficult for you to remember now what you have been doing for the past several hours. But if I ask you about the same activities six weeks, six months, or six years from now, chances are you will remember less and less. Transience is a basic feature of memory, and the culprit in many memory problems.

Absent- mindedness involves a breakdown at the interface between attention and memory. Absent-minded memory errors – misplacing keys or eye-glasses, or forgetting a lunch appointment – typically occur because we are preoccupied with distracting issues or concerns, and do not focus attention on what we need to remember. The desired information is not lost over time; it is either never registered in memory to begin with, or not sought after at the moment it is needed, because attention is focused elsewhere.

The third sin, blocking, entails a thwarted search for information we may be desperately trying to retrieve. We have all failed to produce a name to accompany a familiar face. This frustrating experience happens even though we are attending carefully to the task at hand, and even though the desired name has not faded from our minds – as we become acutely aware when we unexpectedly retrieve the blocked name hours or days later.

In contrast to these three sins of omission, the next four sins of misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence are all sins of commission: some form of memory is present, but it is either incorrect or unwanted. The sin of misattribution involves assigning a memory to the wrong source: mistaking fantasy for reality, or incorrectly remembering that a friend told you a bit of trivia that you actually read about in a newspaper. Misattribution is far more common than people realize, and has potentially profound implications in legal settings. The related sin of suggestibility refers to memories that are implanted as a result of leading questions, comments, or suggestions when a person is trying to call up a past experience. Like misattribution, suggestibility is especially relevant to – and can sometimes create havoc within – the legal system.

The sin of bias reflects the powerful influences of our current knowledge and beliefs on how we remember our pasts. We often unknowingly or unconsciously edit or rewrite our previous experiences in light of what we now know or believe. The result can be a skewed rendering of a specific incident, or even an extended period of our lives, which says more about how we feel now than about what happened then.

The seventh sin – persistence – entails repeated recall of disturbing information or events that we would prefer to banish from our minds altogether: remembering what we cannot forget, even though we wish that we could. Everyone is familiar with persistence to some degree: recall the last time that you suddenly awoke at 3:00 AM, unable to keep out of your mind a painful blunder on the job or a disappointing result on an important exam. In more extreme cases of serious depression or traumatic experience, persistence can be disabling and even life-threatening.

Line: From the every beginning TCL (Tata Chemicals Ltd.) has successfully grown by meeting consumer requirements in a mutually beneficial way. To determine its benchmark, it uses its own ‘Customer Requirements Determination Process (CRDP)’ where unit explores present and future customer requirements to enable them to

(5) incorporate those in their business offering. This process starts with listening to end-users by exploring various customer listening information sources. This information captures various expectations of customers. Next step starts with identification of segments and matching of segment wise expectations. Outcome of this exercise gives enough guidelines about new business scopes and grey areas of current

(10) business practices, After validation of customer expectations through cross checking, TCL matches its internal resources and skill sets with external opportunities and threats to address attractive business avenues. Launch of Tata Kisan Sansar was an outcome to that to offer all sort of end-to end agree solutions of farmers.
Agriculture today contribute a lot of the development of Indian economy with

(15) an employment share of around 69 percent of the work force and with a contribution of near about 24 percent of the GDP of the country. Indian agriculture sector has its importance in economic growth but value addition in this sector in terms of earning capacity is decreasing because of greater income streams form industry and services sectors. The continuous expanding of the gap in per

(20) capita income between the agriculture and non-agriculture sectors has huge economic ad social implications and it is almost necessary to empower the farmers financially by enriching the source of income. In this backdrop, one of the motivations for TCL to start ‘Tata Kisan Sansar (TKS)’ was to ensure business by empowering agri-product producers. again TCL felt that due to its business nature of

(25) manufacturing and marketing commodities, it developed an image of a purely product centrie organization. TCL’s internal research substantiated its feeling and it recognized a paradigm shift towards a customer centric organization.
TCL first started ‘Tata Kisan Kendra’ in 1988, executive franchised retail outlets of ‘Tata with the objective of proving ‘one-stop agri input shop’ to the farmers. With the

(30) marketing function being transferred from Rallis to tata chemicals, TCL used the Tata Kisan Kendras (TKKS) more extensively to market their products. It was understood by the company that the range of offering under the TKKS offered an attractive basket of benefits to the farmers. The business model of the TKKs was base on offering a complete set of inputs to the farmer. Along with this, it also offered

(35) extension services and technology inputs to help farmers plan their crops. At that time it dealt more with offering fertilizers and other inputs form those centers. Over the time it realized the job is half done because requirement of a farmer is multi-layered. To offer more holistic services it changed “Tata Kisan Kendra” as ‘Tata mulit-layered. To offer a more holistic services it changed “Tata Kisan Kendra’ as ‘Tata Kisan Sansar’ and repositioned it as ‘one-stop farmers solution shop’ by offering entire

(40) range of agri services including quality agri input products. Objective was to empower farmers by providing them information about better agronomic practices, facilitating farm credit and providing quality agri inputs from a single source.