Meet bartending maverick Arjit Bose; An overdose of filmy drama

Hello,

Did you know, fewer than one in three startups that secure seed-stage funding manage to raise a follow-on Series A funding round? 

Per a report by Venture Intelligence: “Out of the over 2,500 startups that had raised seed funding between 2015-2022, only 29% (i.e., 734 companies) managed to raise a Series A round (typically the first round of institutional venture capital funding).”

The study, titled 'Series A Landscape Report', also said that once a startup attracts a Series A round, its success ratio in raising subsequent rounds improves significantly. 

Meanwhile, Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google, is leading a $36 million funding round for Bengaluru-based Pixxel, a satellite-image startup, in the first major investment in the Indian space sector since the government launched its privatisation policy in April.

Google said it had made the investment in Pixxel through its India Digitalisation Fund, which focuses on investment in India-based startups.

In other news, Tata Group signed an outline deal on building a lithium-ion cell factory, based on an investment of about $1.58 billion, as part of the nation's efforts to create its own electric vehicle supply chain.

Tata Group’s Agratas Energy Storage Solutions said work on the plant, to be based in Sanand, Gujarat, was expected to start in less than three years.

ICYMI: Here’s what AI doomsday would look like.

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• Meet bartending maverick Arjit Bose
• An overdose of filmy drama
• The hard truth of news and crime

Here’s your trivia for today: Which is the rarest colour in M&M candies?

Food and Wine

Meet bartending maverick Arjit Bose

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, bartending veterans and founders of Countertop India—Arjit Bose and Pankaj Balachandran—moved to Goa to open a neighbourhood bar, Tesouro. “We were on a high,” Bose tells YS Life at the garden of Countertop India’s new lab—a typical Goan-Portuguese villa in Merces, Goa.

Cocktail life:

• The non-commercial unit, Countertop India’s new lab, serves as the laboratory for budding mixologists to run experiments and master the art of making world-class cocktails. 
• Bose has run Delhi’s popular bar PCO, founded bar consultancy company Bar Back Collective and Countertop India, and is also the India brand ambassador for Monkey 47. 
• Based out of Goa now, he is focusing on training his 10-member team at the Countertop Lab.

YS Reviews

An overdose of filmy drama

In one of his early films, Love Per Square Foot (2018), Vicky Kaushal tackled the subject of the crisis of owning a home in Mumbai. In Zara Hatke Zara Bachke, his latest drama to hit theatres, this struggle morphs into deliberate fraud by a lovestruck married couple—Kaushal and Sara Ali Khan—who want to find an affordable home of their own.

Storyline:

• A love-struck couple’s decision to go beyond legal means to buy a home of their own makes for a relevant middle-class struggle, but Zara Hatke Zara Bachke could have benefitted from less melodrama.
• It uses the standard set-up of a cantankerous family, where everyone mouths a random opinion, thereby complicating the lives of a young couple.
• Kaushal does a brilliant job of playing the husband desperately in love but also aware of his financial limits. Khan has cut down on the glamour quotient; in fact, she has tried a little too hard at some points. 

YS Reviews

The hard truth of news and crime

With stellar performances from a well-cast ensemble, Scoop brings to the fore the insensitive nature of the news business and the opacity of the Mumbai police investigation into the murder of a journalist, which leads to the arrest of another journalist—inspired by a real-life case.

What to expect:

• Scoop—which deals with the complex and unresolved nexus of the police, the media, and the legal system—is a taut six-episode watch about the hard truth of Indian journalism. 
• Written by Mrunmayee Lagoo Waikul and Hansal Mehta, Scoop is about an ambitious crime reporter Jagruti Pathak (Karishma Tanna), chasing front-page stories from the city’s top cops and outstationed gangsters.  
• The series keeps one hooked with a pacy plot that unfolds like real incidents, highlighting the inherent sensationalism in present-day Indian journalism. Dramatic writing brings out the wheeling and dealing of the powerful in an effective manner.

News & updates

• Retro van: Volkswagen will start selling battery-powered versions of its VW bus in North America from 2024, marking the reintroduction of the iconic model after a two-decade hiatus. The fully electric ID. Buzz will also include an extra-long version that can seat up to seven passengers.
• Tobacco rules: Streaming giants Netflix, Amazon, and Disney privately discussed a possible legal challenge and other ways to stall the new tobacco warning rules in India, amid fears they will need to edit millions of hours of existing web content. 
• WWDC 2023: Apple is widely expected to introduce a “mixed reality” headset at its annual developer event on Monday that offers both VR and AR capabilities. The highly anticipated release of an AR/VR headset would be Apple’s biggest hardware product launch since the debut of the Apple Watch in 2015.

Which is the rarest colour in M&M candies?

Answer: Brown

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