Latest news with #Saraswati
Web Release
12 hours ago
- Business
- Web Release
Truecaller Ads Strengthens Focus in Middle East and Africa with Appointment of Saraswati Agarwal as Regional Sales Head
Truecaller, the leading global communications platform, has announced the appointment of Saraswati Agarwal as Regional Sales Head for Ad Solutions for the important MEA region. This strategic move underscores Truecaller's commitment to strengthening its Ad Solutions portfolio, aiming to deliver innovative, seamless digital experiences to its rapidly growing user base. In her new role, Saraswati will play a pivotal part in helping brands differentiate themselves and effectively connect with potential customers through Truecaller's advanced advertising offerings. Saraswati has over 15 years of prior experience in the industry with companies such as Bloomberg, CNN, ITP Media group, driving revenue growth and market expansion across luxury, digital, and media sectors. She has a degree in Electronics and Telecommunications from the University of Mumbai. 'I'm pleased to welcome Saraswati to the Truecaller team,' said Hemant Arora, VP, Global Ad Sales Business, Truecaller. 'Truecaller has become a household name across key African markets like Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya; some of the most noteworthy and strategically important regions within MEA. Our strong market presence, combined with deep user engagement, has fueled the rapid growth of our advertising business. With over 34 strategic partners in the region, Truecaller Ads has built a solid foundation, and we're now entering an exciting new phase of expansion. 'With Saraswati's appointment, we're strengthening our sales footprint across these key markets to offer more tailored, locally-relevant support to our partners and growing advertiser base. She brings a proven track record in digital advertising and deep regional expertise—perfectly aligned with our ambition to deliver innovative digital solutions and the highest level of customer service.' 'I am thrilled to join Truecaller at such an exciting time of growth and innovation,' said Saraswati Agarwal, Regional Sales Head for the Middle East and Africa at Truecaller. 'With the launch of our new, high-impact ad formats, we are uniquely positioned to help brands connect more effectively with their audiences. I look forward to working closely with our partners to deliver smart, performance-driven advertising solutions that truly resonate across the region. 'Looking ahead, I am excited to contribute to Truecaller's mission and broaden our footprint in MEA by unlocking new opportunities and building long-term value for our customers.' The advertising market in the MEA region is experiencing significant growth, particularly in the digital realm with the Advertising Market projected to reach USD 44,827 million by 2032, growing at a CAGR of 23.9% from 2024-2032 as per recent reports, fueled by increasing internet and smartphone penetration. Brands are shifting focus to programmatic advertising, mobile video, and influencer marketing to target the region's young, tech-savvy population. Truecaller Ads solutions offer clients a powerful toolkit of video-first, interactive, and immersive ad formats that integrate seamlessly into the Truecaller app experience. This enables brands to create more engaging, high-recall brand moments during critical points of user attention.
Business Wire
15 hours ago
- Business
- Business Wire
Truecaller Ads Strengthens Focus in Middle East and Africa with Appointment of Saraswati Agarwal as Regional Sales Head
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Truecaller, the leading global communications platform, has announced the appointment of Saraswati Agarwal as Regional Sales Head for Ad Solutions for the important MEA region. This strategic move underscores Truecaller's commitment to strengthening its Ad Solutions portfolio, aiming to deliver innovative, seamless digital experiences to its rapidly growing user base. In her new role, Saraswati will play a pivotal part in helping brands differentiate themselves and effectively connect with potential customers through Truecaller's advanced advertising offerings. Saraswati has over 15 years of prior experience in the industry with companies such as Bloomberg, CNN, ITP Media group, driving revenue growth and market expansion across luxury, digital, and media sectors. She has a degree in Electronics and Telecommunications from the University of Mumbai. 'I'm pleased to welcome Saraswati to the Truecaller team, ' said Hemant Arora, VP, Global Ad Sales Business, Truecaller. ' Truecaller has become a household name across key African markets like Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya; some of the most noteworthy and strategically important regions within MEA. Our strong market presence, combined with deep user engagement, has fueled the rapid growth of our advertising business. With over 34 strategic partners in the region, Truecaller Ads has built a solid foundation, and we're now entering an exciting new phase of expansion. ' With Saraswati's appointment, we're strengthening our sales footprint across these key markets to offer more tailored, locally-relevant support to our partners and growing advertiser base. She brings a proven track record in digital advertising and deep regional expertise—perfectly aligned with our ambition to deliver innovative digital solutions and the highest level of customer service.' 'I am thrilled to join Truecaller at such an exciting time of growth and innovation,' said Saraswati Agarwal, Regional Sales Head for the Middle East and Africa at Truecaller. 'With the launch of our new, high-impact ad formats, we are uniquely positioned to help brands connect more effectively with their audiences. I look forward to working closely with our partners to deliver smart, performance-driven advertising solutions that truly resonate across the region. ' Looking ahead, I am excited to contribute to Truecaller's mission and broaden our footprint in MEA by unlocking new opportunities and building long-term value for our customers.' The advertising market in the MEA region is experiencing significant growth, particularly in the digital realm with the Advertising Market projected to reach USD 44,827 million by 2032, growing at a CAGR of 23.9% from 2024-2032 as per recent reports, fueled by increasing internet and smartphone penetration. Brands are shifting focus to programmatic advertising, mobile video, and influencer marketing to target the region's young, tech-savvy population. Truecaller Ads solutions offer clients a powerful toolkit of video-first, interactive, and immersive ad formats that integrate seamlessly into the Truecaller app experience. This enables brands to create more engaging, high-recall brand moments during critical points of user attention. About Truecaller and Truecaller Ads Truecaller is an essential part of everyday communication for over 450 million active users, with more than a billion downloads since launch and close to 56 billion unwanted calls identified and blocked in 2024 alone. The company has been headquartered in Stockholm since 2009 and has been publicly listed on Nasdaq Stockholm since October 2021. Advertising is the primary revenue stream for Truecaller. Truecaller Ads serves 5 billion impressions every day and is trusted by over 10,000 brands. Visit for more information.
Straits Times
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
Book review: Gurnaik Johal's Saraswati a Cubist portrait of modern, global India
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox Saraswati by British-Indian author Gurnaik Johal tells of seven members of a Punjabi family spread across the globe during a time of Hindu fundamentalist resurgence in India. By Gurnaik Johal Fiction/Serpent's Tail/Paperback/374 pages/$32.95 There are shades of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2004) and Richard Powers' The Overstory (2018) in this panorama of interconnected tales – of seven members of a Punjabi family, distantly related, spread across the globe during a time of Hindu fundamentalist resurgence in India.
Mint
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Mint
Gurnaik Johal's 'Saraswati': A complex debut that misses the mark on majoritarian politics
British-Asian writer Gurnaik Johal's ambitious debut novel Saraswati begins with Satnam (a Punjabi Londoner), one of the novel's main characters, staring at a well he has just inherited from his dead grandmother at their ancestral Punjab village. Miraculously, the longdried well has suddenly spouted water, a development that the jetlagged Satnam momentarily perceives as 'a trick of the light", before acknowledging that he really was staring back at his own face. 'But here it was, water: a reflection. He looked down at himself looking up." By the time you finish the novel, you realise that among other things, this opening salvo is a nifty bit of foreshadowing. For Satnam's little family well soon becomes the conduit for a Hindu nationalist plot to resurrect the mythical river Saraswati. This water, conjured out of nothingness, functions as the novel's vanity mirror, used by Johal to reflect the motives and machinations of every single major character on display here. And there is no shortage of major characters, as Satnam discovers the existence of far-flung relatives across the globe, products of a 19th century inter-caste marriage between their ancestors, Sejal and Jugaad (whose story is fleshed out in short flashbacks separating the novel's longer 'real time" chapters, not unlike the 'Inset" flashback chapters in Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games). There's Nathu, the asexual Kenyan archaeology professor, Harsimran the Bollywood stunt double, Mussafir, connected to a guerrilla eco-terrorist group upset at the fact that existing rivers are being diverted to the newly anointed 'holy river" Saraswati. We also meet Katrina and Jay, a couple who meet on the island of Diego Garcia after a surprise donkey invasion of the runway their plane was supposed to land on. Also read: Why writer Yashpal's feminism provokes thought 50 years on These characters and the realms that they find themselves traversing, are representative of a very specific, trans-continental 21st century novel practised by the likes of David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas), Hari Kunzru (Transmission), Kim Stanley Robinson (The Ministry for the Future) et al. Saraswati, like the other novels of this subgenre, takes E.M. Forster's 'only connect!" exhortation from Howards End to its logical endpoint—in these novels, connections and collisions (economic, cultural, moral) are both form and content. Every single event in these novels, basically, is an echo of an earlier mistake, an earlier loss, an earlier era. Johal's novel emulates these in its narrative structure. Saraswati's ensemble cast of Sejal and Jugaad's descendants, too, are drawn to the mythical river in ways that spell out their semantic purpose in the plot—the archaeologist 'excavates" both his own and the river's past, the journalist connects the dots in Sejal's family tree only to forge meaningful connections of her own along the way, and so on. This is a structurally efficient way to construct a novel. Johal is clearly a gifted writer, and one of his obvious strengths is the clear-eyed exploration of 'old world" vs 'new world" economies. In the novel, after the prime minister, Narayan Indra, declares the Saraswati river to be the site of an ancient Hindu civilisation, a new and bustling market for dug-up 'Saraswatian" artefacts opens up, for example. 'A large market had emerged around the buying and selling of ancient artefacts, and it was his team's job to date and register each find, determining its authenticity and, where possible, its providence, before it was sold on. The work meant that our apartment building was supplied with extra security: many traders would stand to lose a lot of money if your father's team deemed their finds inauthentic. Others were angry that the team was authenticating too many items, driving the market price down." There's so much going on in the passage above—the surveillance state, mercantile mischief, the economic opportunism that inevitably follows chest-thumping political speeches. Johal deserves credit for stringing together these hefty, idea-dense passages that tackle everything from the auditory landscape of the Punjabi language to the vagaries of the caste system to the growing anti-immigration movement spreading across much of the Western world. Johal is also very good at depicting contemporary online registers—the voice note that Satnam uses to break up with his London girlfriend is pitch-perfect, for example. However, this gleeful ventriloquist's act becomes a weakness when it comes to the character of Indra and his cohorts. They come off as repetitive and somewhat cartoonish in their speech patterns. Also read: Frederick Forsyth's 'Jackal' is back in 2025 Part of the problem is that we only ever engage with Indra when one of the other characters is watching a speech on TV. And the speeches are utterly consumed by the idea of the Saraswati and by extension, the glorious Hindu civilisation of the past. In Johal's rendering, Indra is high on his own supply, so to speak. 'The earth is not so solid as it looks; we feel you rushing, we feel you with each unstable step. Come before us, great mother, mother of all rivers, and let us flow with thee. Praise Bharati! Praise Mahavidya! Praise Mahavani! Arya, Brahmi. Praise Bijagarbha, Veenapani! Oh, Sarada, Vageshwari. Sing for Gayatri, for Satarupa, she who has seven forms." Don't get me wrong, the passage cited above works at a superficial comedic level. But the problem with Saraswati's Hindutva depiction is that we seldom see beyond the satire and the symbolism. When we're with any of Satnam's ensemble cast of relatives, we're shown motivations, provocations, vulnerabilities; the stuff of inner lives. But with Indra or any of his very vocal followers, Johal restricts himself to PR-speak—campaign speeches, news channel debates, etc. The novel's concluding act of violence aside, there is hardly any depiction of the ravages of majoritarian politics. When Charlie Chaplin's Hitler analogue Adenoid Hynkel bounces a comically large globe off his backside in The Great Dictator (1940), folks laughed because physical comedy does not require footnotes. But as Chaplin himself noted in his memoir decades later, had he known of the full scale of the Holocaust's devastation back in 1940, he would have either abandoned the scene or made it very differently. Because of these discordant notes, Saraswati is neither an unqualified success nor a bad novel per se. The novel's depiction of majoritarian politics is what I would call a 'noble failure"—it mistakes the warm-up act for the concert itself and there's no shame in that, especially for a novelist not yet 30 years of age. I am quite sure that Gurnaik Johal will write a transcendentally good novel someday. Saraswati, however, doesn't quite have the substance to back up its stylistic brilliance. Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based writer. Also read: When Bill Clinton praised India's cultural diversity
NDTV
01-07-2025
- Business
- NDTV
Floodwater Enters Asia's Largest Sugar Mill In Haryana, Causes Rs 50 Crore Loss
New Delhi: Heavy overnight rain in Haryana caused flooding inside the Saraswati sugar mill in Yamunagar - Asia's largest compound, damaging sugar worth Rs 50 to 60 crore. According to officials, the total loss of sugar is believed to be around 40 per cent. The Yamunagar warehouse stored 2,20,000 quintals of sugar, estimated to be around Rs 97 crore. Officials of the warehouse said that rainwater, along with the overflow from a nearby drain, caused the flooding. The general manager of the Saraswati sugar mill, Rajiv Mishra, said the municipal corporation drain passes from right behind the warehouse. However, the drain was blocked due to an encroachment, causing the floodwater to enter the sugar mill. "It rained extremely heavy last night. Our security staff alerted us around midnight about water entering the premises. Due to the encroachment, the drain's level rose. Sugar, being highly hygroscopic in nature, was highly affected. We have lost around Rs 50 to 60 crore worth of sugar. But we can estimate the exact loss once we scan the entire warehouse," Mr Mishra said. According to Mr Mishra, this is the first time ever that the mill was flooded. "We have never dealt with something like this before," he said. Officials are now engaged in clearing the water at the mill using a crane. While the Saraswati sugar mill has been hit with a huge financial loss, it may not affect the local markets at large, Mr Mishra said. Experts, on the other hand, believe that if such kind of negligence by top officials continues, then it can become a big challenge not only financially but also at the level of food scarcity.
