Citing the bottom line, Reuters is increasing its staff in the Southern Indian city of Bangalore from 350 to almost 1,500. They aren't all positions that journalists can fill, however. If you are a bean-counter, you may just be the ticket. But be aware that they are being flooded by qualified applicants. So, the competition is pretty fierce.

“But this is payback time for centuries of colonisation. Britain occupied India, imposed the English language and left the country significantly poorer, so that 200 years later it is cheaper to get Indians to compile our crosswords and review the new Dido album.”

Read the rest of John O'Farrell's tongue-in-cheek column in The Guardian.

Via Payvand

Kaveh Golestan Annual Photojournalism Award announced. The actual site isn't quite complete, but I am intrigued that the Iranian community would so openly celebrate photography. The surprise is in that photography is deemed as an act that objectifies the human body and thus runs contrary to the tenets of the Quran. Contrary thoughts on this welcome.

Via Mediabistro.com

“He knew that every portrait was a performance but that the performance could be a passage to something true.”

Read Time magazine's remembrance of Richard Avedon. Or, Adam Gopnik's touching tribute to Richard Avedon in the New Yorker. Slate magazine has its own version.

How many of you have had this happen to you – you receive an email from someone who in all their exuberance to share their images with you will send you raw files that are 3 megabytes in size each and dimensionally beyond the confines of your monitor?

I get that a lot. I politely resize the images and send them back in the hope that they haven't already subjected other people (with, gasp, dial-up modems) to the same torture. I sure feel like I have saved the day; no cape required.

If you own a Macintosh (God bless you), there is a free program called ImageWell by XtraLean Software that you should consider downloading. ImageWell allows you to resize images, making it even possible for some of us geeks to upload them directly to a FTP server. Preset your choices, drop your large image into the top window and that's all there is to it. If you have a .Mac account, your image can be uploaded to the PICTURES folder on that server. The other cool thing about ImageWell is that you can watermark your images with a copyright symbol, your name or whatever else you want. Purists beware, ImageWell also comes with features that allow you to add funky borders to your images.

I recommend this powerful little program. And I did say it is free so what are you waiting for? For PC users, there are a ton of choices (but not as elegant as ImageWell, I am afraid). Write to me and perhaps I'll eek out a short list for those of you on the dark side.

The door bell rang a few minutes back. UPS had a package for me. The kind folks at Alfred A. Knopf had sent me a review copy of Suketu Mehta‘s new book – Maximum City. I can't wait to get into it.

Coincidentally, a few weeks ago, Penguin Books India, mailed me a copy of Bombay, meri jaan, writings on Mumbai. Edited by Jerry Pinto and Naresh Fernandes, the book contains short articles by the usual suspects: Pico Iyer, Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux and Khuswant Singh. But it has a few surprises in Sunil Gavaskar and Duke Ellington.

I'll have a review of both books here as soon [Warning: I am one heckuva slow reader!]