Brands
From pandals to pages Sunrise takes Durga Puja stories to lit fest
MUMBAI: When the drums fade and the lights dim, the stories linger and this year, they found a literary home. ITC Sunrise Spices took Bengal’s biggest festival beyond the pandal and onto the page at the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival 2026, showcasing its landmark grassroots initiative Sunrise Pujor Saatkahon. The project, launched during Durga Puja 2025, captured the festival not as spectacle alone, but as a living archive of emotion, artistry and community memory.
At the heart of the initiative are 250 unique Durga Puja stories, documented from across West Bengal far beyond Kolkata reflecting neighbourhood traditions, local creativity and the diverse regional voices that define the state’s Puja culture. In bringing Pujor Saatkahon to one of India’s most respected literary platforms, Sunrise positioned Durga Puja as a narrative tradition worthy of preservation and discussion.
A key highlight of the festival was a panel discussion titled “Pujo Special: Celebrating the Durga Pujos of Bengal”, held on 11 January 2026 at the Alipore Museum. The session explored how Durga Puja has evolved into a powerful cultural narrative shaped by para-level participation, visual artistry, social themes and collective memory drawing extensively from stories featured in the Sunrise Pujor Saatkahon coffee-table book.
The panel brought together voices from Bengal’s cultural and creative landscape, including Sayantan Maitra, Ushoshi Sengupta, Moon Moon Sen and Tonmoy Roychoudhury. The discussion acknowledged Sunrise Pujor Saatkahon as one of the most expansive grassroots cultural movements around Durga Puja in recent years, notable for documenting the festival beyond visual grandeur and capturing its people-led storytelling core.
The initiative itself involved over 1,500 Durga Puja committees, spanning multiple phases of community participation, voting, on-ground audits and celebrations. These efforts culminated in the release of the Sunrise Pujor Saatkahon book, a lasting tribute to 250 Puja narratives, designed to preserve the festival’s cultural significance long after the idols return home.
Alongside the panel, Sunrise hosted a dedicated stall at the festival, where visitors accessed both physical and digital editions of the book, extending the life of the stories beyond the festive season.
By taking Puja from streets to sentences, Sunrise demonstrated how brands can participate in culture not by amplifying noise, but by archiving meaning turning Bengal’s most beloved celebration into a story that continues to be read, discussed and remembered.
Brands
Tessolve lands a semiconductor veteran to drive its next big push
Ravi Kumar Chirugudu, who started his career at ISRO and has spent 35 years building chips and companies, joins the Bengaluru-based firm as president and chief operating officer
BENGALURU: Tessolve has never been shy about its ambitions. The Bengaluru-based engineering services firm already counts 18 of the world’s top 20 semiconductor companies among its clients, employs more than 3,500 engineers across 12 countries, and last year pocketed a $150m investment from TPG. Now it has hired the executive it believes can turn those assets into something bigger. Ravi Kumar Chirugudu, a 35-year semiconductor veteran who once built satellite payloads for ISRO and has since scaled engineering organisations across three continents, joins as president and chief operating officer, effective immediately.
THE MAN AND THE MANDATE
The appointment is, by any measure, a serious hire. Ravi Kumar Chirugudu comes to Tessolve after senior leadership stints at HCL Technologies, Altran and Wipro, where he managed large profit-and-loss portfolios and oversaw cross-regional teams. Over the course of his career, he has been instrumental in bringing more than 1,000 new products to market across the high-tech, energy and manufacturing verticals. Before the private sector claimed him, he began his working life as a scientist at the Indian Space Research Organisation, contributing to research and development in charge-coupled device technology and satellite payloads, a foundation that shaped everything that followed.
In his new role, he will lead Tessolve’s global growth strategy: expanding its engineering capabilities, deepening customer relationships and accelerating innovation across semiconductor and high-performance computing domains. The brief is broad, but the context is specific. Tessolve operates in the $550 billion global semiconductor market, and its recent moves, the acquisition of Germany’s Dream Chip Technologies and the TPG funding round, have sharpened both its reach and its expectations.
Srini Chinamilli, co-founder and chief executive of Tessolve, is characteristically direct about why Ravi Kumar Chirugudu was the choice:
“As we scale our global semiconductor and system engineering capabilities, Ravi’s appointment marks an important step forward. As global semiconductor demand continues to accelerate across industries, it is creating significant opportunities across the semiconductor lifecycle, from design, packaging, validation and systems integration. Ravi’s deep knowledge and leadership in this ecosystem brings the right mix of industry expertise, customer connect and execution capability, which will play a key role in strengthening our position as a trusted global engineering partner and reinforcing our market leadership.”
THE NEW ARRIVAL SPEAKS
Ravi Kumar Chirugudu, for his part, frames the move in terms of timing and culture, two factors that veteran executives tend to weigh as heavily as title or compensation:
“I am happy to join Tessolve at a time when the industry is rapidly evolving towards more complex, AI-driven systems. What stands out to me is its strong people-first culture and its commitment to bringing value to its customers. The strength of its global team, combined with its deep expertise in semiconductor innovation and next-generation product engineering, creates a solid foundation to build differentiated, scalable solutions. I look forward to working closely with the team to drive strategic growth and strengthen its role in shaping the global semiconductor ecosystem.”
The reference to AI-driven systems is not incidental. The semiconductor industry is in the midst of a structural reshaping, driven by the insatiable compute demands of artificial intelligence. For engineering services firms like Tessolve, which offers end-to-end capabilities from silicon design to packaged parts and invests in high-performance computing, high-speed interfaces, photonics and 5G, the moment is both an opportunity and a test. The company says it is well positioned to capture the next wave of industry growth. Ravi Kumar Chirugudu is now the person who has to prove it.
He came in from outer space, literally, and spent three decades learning how the semiconductor industry works from the inside out. Now Tessolve is betting that accumulated knowledge can help it cross the next frontier. In the $550 billion global chip market, the gap between ambition and execution is measured in engineering hours and leadership quality. Tessolve has just gone shopping for both.
