ZACH Multimedia

Congratulations to RAKBANK on marking 25 years of the rebranding.

The silver milestone of the new avatar.

It is as if time is flying on steroids, just cannot believe it has been 25 years since the landmark transformation.

Proud to have been the Marketing Manager who was instrumental in that landmark relaunch from The National Bank Of Ras Al Khaimah.

Thrilled to have played a significant part in that transition.

While heading sales and marketing for ANZ Grindlays Bank, UAE between late 1997 - 2000, Standard Chartered devoured the bank and while looking out for opportunities, had two options - to join an established ABN Amro Bank as Head Of Sales or join a relatively unknown bank as Marketing Manager.

Decided to take the path less travelled and joined the then 'The National Bank of Ras Al Khaimah' as Marketing Manager in September 2000 and was pivotal in re-branding it as RAKBANK by February 2001.

There were a lot of early objections, but with The Audacity Of Conviction hung on, tenaciously persisted, and finally got the go-ahead.

RAKBANK was formally launched on 17 February 2001.

In October 2002 was given the additional responsibility of bolstering RAKBANK's nascent sales force. Built it from scratch - zilch to around 200 - by first quarter 2003.

Great, fun times at the workplace and off it.

Oh, those times. Still proud and thrilled as I drive past the advertising hoardings and branch signage.

Best wishes to RAKBANK.

(Photo taken at the launch of credit cards, weeks after the rebranding)

China hopes for a bumper lunar new year as world’s biggest migration begins

Year of the horse signals optimism and opportunity, with authorities keen that the extra day of holiday this year provides an economic boost

Chinese officials are hoping that this year’s extra long lunar new year holiday will provide a boost to the country’s economy, where increasing domestic spending has been identified as a key priority for the year ahead.

The government expects a record 9.5 billion passenger trips to be made across China during the 40-day spring festival period, up from 9 billion trips last year. Hundreds of millions of people will be crisscrossing the country to make what is often their only trip home to see their families for the Chinese new year celebrations.

Although China is no longer the world’s most populous country, losing that title to India in 2023, China’s annual chunyun, or “spring transportation” is still the world’s largest mass migration of people. ... ...

China hopes for a bumper lunar new year as world’s biggest migration begins Year of the horse signals optimism and opportunity, with authorities keen that the extra day of holiday this year provides an economic boost

India’s Dream to Build a Thousand Ships

The southern state has edged out Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh in Modi’s industrial ambitions.

[Image - A ship under construction at a Hyundai Mipo Dockyard shipyard in Ulsan, South Korea.Photographer: SeongJoon Cho / Bloomberg]

By Menaka Doshi, Bloomberg, 12 February 2026

The New Ulsan

A bona fide Korean meal and a trip to a Korean supermarket may have helped clinch India’s biggest commercial shipyard deal ever.

On a visit to the port town of Thoothukudi (Tuticorin) in March last year, executives of South Korean shipping major HD Hyundai stopped for lunch. Their hosts, Tamil Nadu state government officials, had picked a Korean restaurant owned and staffed by expats.

“They were really surprised to find Korean food four hours outside Chennai,” Darez Ahamed, CEO of the state’s investment promotion agency Guidance, told me.

Earlier in the trip the group visited a Korean supermarket that supplies some 5,000 expats working at the over 110 South Korean companies invested in the south Indian state, including Hyundai’s large automobile manufacturing factory.

This soft diplomacy, backed by an optimal location, a strong industrialization record and significant land and capital subsidies, put Tamil Nadu ahead of Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh in India’s race to build a fleet of over 1,000 flag carriers in the next 10 years.

“The Hyundai team’s first response after seeing Thootukudi was that it reminded them of Ulsan from 30 years ago,” Ahamed said. Ulsan is where HD Hyundai began shipbuilding in the early 1970s; last year it delivered its 5,000th vessel.

[The HD Hyundai shipyard in Ulsan, South Korea, is the world’s largest. Photographer: SeongJoon Cho / Bloomberg]

China has displaced South Korea as the world’s largest shipmaker, raising national security concerns for countries like India and the US.

India owns just over 1,500 ships, about 1.2% of the global shipping fleet. It spends an estimated $90 billion a year on freight, moved mostly by foreign vessels, according to a report from credit rating agency ICRA. To cut that reliance and dollar outflow, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has reworked policies and earmarked close to 700 billion rupees ($7.71 billion) in shipbuilding incentives over the next decade.

It will take much more such support as India produces less than 1% of the world’s commercial ships. The few shipyards in the country are largely government-owned and build mostly naval vessels, orders for which have spiked in recent years. The challenge is to develop a commercial ship building industry at competitive scale in the face of overcapacity in China and US revival efforts.

[China-Made Ships Account for More Than a Third of the Global Fleet]

[Three Asian nations have built the vast majority of ships that are currently on the water]

[Source: Clarksons Research]

[Note: Data as of the end of June. Calculated based on deadweight tonnage of ships currently on water.]

In Kattupalli in Tamil Nadu, things are finally looking up. The shipyard run by Larsen & Toubro, a private sector engineering and construction giant, began operations in 2013 with the intent of building commercial vessels, but has supplied mostly to the Navy and Coast Guard.

Production costs in India are up to 20% higher than in east Asia due to imported steel, marine engines and other equipment. Productivity is lower and build times are twice as long, Arun Ramchandani, senior vice president and head of L&T Precision Engineering & Systems, tells me. The ancillary ecosystem is fragmented and underdeveloped, and cheap, patient financing is scarce. There are also a multitude of tax, insurance and other hurdles. “These factors make Indian yards uncompetitive, but a turnaround is increasingly visible,” he said.

Alongside efforts to subsidize the cost gap and augment supply, the government is also stepping up demand. Earlier this month, several public sector companies signed an agreement to establish the Bharat Container Shipping Line. It will receive funding to buy ships from a new 100 billion rupee scheme announced in this month’s federal budget.

I must emphasize these supply and demand plans are yet in early stages.

“The direction of travel is positive; what’s needed now is scale, predictability of demand and a deeper supply chain for an industry-wide step change,” Ramchandani said.

In Thoothukudi, the federal and state governments (run by opposing political parties) are working in tandem to make that happen. A joint venture between them will build breakwaters, dry docks and other supporting facilities so that Hyundai can focus on setting up the yard speedily. Two federally owned shipbuilders, Cochin Shipyard and Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders, are also exploring new yards in the state. Component makers and other ancillary manufacturers are planning expansions.

For every job created inside a shipyard, more than six jobs are created outside, Guidance CEO Darez said. “This high a multiplier effect is rare in any other industry. No country has become great without a strong shipbuilding presence.”

India’s Dream to Build a Thousand Ships The southern state has edged out Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh in Modi’s industrial ambitions.

Mustafa Suleyman plots AI ‘self-sufficiency’ as Microsoft loosens OpenAI ties

Big Tech group’s AI chief predicts white-collar work could be automated within 18 months

[Image - Mustafa Suleyman: ‘We have to develop our own foundation models, which are at the absolute frontier’ © Stephen Brashear / Getty Images]

By Melissa Heikkilä in London, Financial Times, 12 Feb 2026

Mustafa Suleyman sets out Microsoft AI's goal of 'humanist superintelligence'

Microsoft is pursuing “true self-sufficiency” in AI by building its own powerful models and reducing its reliance on OpenAI, according to the company’s AI chief.

Mustafa Suleyman told the FT that the strategic shift follows a restructuring of its relationship with the ChatGPT maker in October. That has prompted the $3tn company to build its most advanced technology independently, rather than rely on an external partner.

“We have to develop our own foundation models, which are at the absolute frontier, with gigawatt-scale compute and some of the very best AI training teams in the world,” said the Google DeepMind co-founder who joined Microsoft in 2024.

The software giant is investing heavily in assembling and organising the vast datasets needed to train advanced systems. “That’s our true self-sufficiency mission,” he added.

Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s biggest and earliest investors, has relied on OpenAI’s models to power its own AI tools such as its Copilot software assistant.

Last year, it agreed to allow the start-up to complete a corporate restructuring, retaining a $135bn stake in the ChatGPT maker and keeping access to the group’s most advanced models until 2032.

But the deal also provides OpenAI greater freedom to seek new investors and infrastructure partners, potentially turning it into a more direct competitor.

Microsoft has spread its bets further, investing in other model makers such as Anthropic and Mistral. But the company has also accelerated the development of its own in-house models, which Suleyman said would launch “sometime this year”.

In particular, Suleyman said Microsoft’s goal is to capture more of the enterprise market by working on “professional grade AGI” [artificial general intelligence], meaning powerful AI tools that can complete daily tasks for knowledge workers.

“White-collar work, where you’re sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person — most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months,” Suleyman said.

These AI agents will be able to co-ordinate better within the workflows of large institutions in the next two to three years, he added. The AI tools will also be able to learn and improve over time, taking more autonomous actions.

“Creating a new model is going to be like creating a podcast or writing a blog,” he said. “It is going to be possible to design an AI that suits your requirements for every institutional organisation and person on the planet.”

However, Microsoft faces stiff competition in the enterprise market. Anthropic has gained a strong lead in AI-powered coding tools, while OpenAI and Google are also investing heavily in securing lucrative corporate AI deals.

Microsoft has forecast it will spend $140bn in capital expenditure in its fiscal year, which ends in June, as it increases spending on the infrastructure needed to build AI.

Investor fears that such spending is inflating an AI “bubble” have hammered Big Tech stocks, with Microsoft’s shares down more than 13 per cent over the past month.

“There’s no question these are unprecedented times, and I think markets are trying to wrap their head around how this plays out over the next five years,” said Suleyman. But he added: “We all have no doubt that these returns do compound to revenue and to bottom line.”

Suleyman said another focus for Microsoft was applying AI to healthcare in an effort to build “medical superintelligence”, where AI programs can help solve staffing crises and long waiting times for overstretched health systems. Last year, the company unveiled an AI diagnostic tool, which it claims can outperform doctors on some tasks.

He added Microsoft’s goal was to build “humanist superintelligence”, meaning AI technologies that remain under human control, addressing growing concerns that rival AI labs were rushing to build powerful technologies that resist the oversight of their creators.

“We have to reset that and make the assumption that we should only bring a system like that into the world, that we are sure we can control and operates in a subordinate way to us,” he said.

“These tools, like any other past technology, are designed to enhance human wellbeing and serve humanity, not exceed humanity.”

Mustafa Suleyman plots AI ‘self-sufficiency’ as Microsoft loosens OpenAI ties Big Tech group’s AI chief predicts white-collar work could be automated within 18 months

[‘Andrzej Wajda: Portraits of History and Humanity’, screens as part of the Kinoteka Film Festival at BFI Southbank, ICA and Cine Lumiere, London, to March 26, bfi.org.uk]

How filmmaker Andrzej Wajda captured Polish history — and helped shape it

Despite a career spanning seven decades and several masterworks, the director is under-appreciated. A London season aims to put that right

[Image - Director Andrzej Wajda photographed during the shoot of ‘The Possessed’ (1987) © Getty Images]

By Daniel Marc Janes, Financial Times, 10 Feb 2026

When Andrzej Wajda began his career in the early 1950s, Poland was producing five to seven films a year. By 1981, he recalls in his memoir, it was producing 40 for the big screen and another 40 for television. It was his luck to be there at the beginning — and his country’s good fortune that he was able to chronicle and dramatise many key moments of its history.

To call Wajda (1926-2016) Poland’s national filmmaker doesn’t quite do him justice. He was closer to a national conscience. Writer Michael Brooke, a specialist in eastern European cinema, compares him to Giuseppe Verdi in the way he embodied Poland’s struggles. Like Verdi, Wajda had a stint in parliament, serving as a Solidarity senator from 1989-91.

The rest of the world was quick to embrace him. Kanal (1957), the second of his debut War Trilogy, won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes; the third, Ashes and Diamonds (1958), won a prize at Venice. By the end of his 60-year, 40-film career, his accolades included the Palme d’Or (for 1981’s Man of Iron) and, in 2000, an honorary Academy Award (he was also nominated four times for Best Foreign Film). And yet Wajda’s films have been under-appreciated, many of them never released in the UK.

[Image - A still from Wajda’s second world war drama ‘Kanal’ (1957) © BFI National Archive

This neglect stems from his essential Polishness. In contrast to his protégés Roman Polanski and Agnieszka Holland, Wajda was never drawn to Hollywood; he dealt in Polish subjects and spent his life in his native land, save for a forced international foray to France and Germany following the 1981 imposition of martial law. A new BFI season, honouring both the centenary of Wajda’s birth and the 10th anniversary of his death, reaffirms his place as a giant of world cinema. The season, says curator Aga Baranowska, celebrates Wajda as a custodian of Polish history and as one of the great humanists of the medium. His films, she says, are “not only about big History with a capital H, but about individual people and how they find themselves in those moments”.

Wajda was interested in history because he lived so much of it. He was 14 when his father, a cavalry officer, became one of more than 20,000 Polish prisoners of war killed in the 1940 Katyn massacre on the orders of Stalin — a crime that, until 1990, the Soviet Union officially denied. When Wajda was 16, he joined Poland’s anti-Nazi resistance; the greater part of his adulthood, from the ages of 19 to 63, was spent in a dance with the censors of Poland’s Soviet-aligned communist regime. It was only in 2007, with Katyń, that the 81-year-old Wajda brought himself to confront his teenage wounds.

[Image - Robert Wieckiewicz in the title role of Wajda’s ‘Walesa: Man of Hope’, a 2013 biopic of the Solidarity leader and Polish prime minister L**h Wałęsa]

By then, he was a master of the historical opus. He had interpreted Poland’s role in the Napoleonic wars (The Ashes), in the Holocaust (Samson, Landscape after the Battle, Holy Week, Korczak) and in the second world war (the War Trilogy, Lotna). Other films grappled with, even shaped, the present. His seminal diptych, Man of Marble (1977) and Man of Iron (1981), anticipated, then incorporated, the Solidarity movement; the latter film has the urgency of a field report, blending fictional characters with real archival footage of the Gdańsk shipyard strike. L**h Wałęsa, Solidarity leader and later president of Poland, appears as himself.

For many critics, Wajda’s War Trilogy forms the pinnacle of his achievement. Among these is David Thomson, author of the New Biographical Dictionary of Film. “Some artists have their moment,” he tells me. “For Andrzej Wajda it came in the late ’50s, with his trilogy — A Generation, Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds.” A Generation is a neorealist coming-of-age shot in the ruins of Warsaw; Kanal, about resistance fighters escaping the N***s via the city’s sewers, was the first film to portray the Warsaw uprising; Ashes and Diamonds depicts Poland’s bittersweet liberation, freed from the N***s only to be dominated by the Soviets. These are films, Wajda writes in his memoir, with “the truth of an eyewitness account”. Like Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City and René Clément’s The Battle of the Rails, movies he praises, they are “filmed right on the scene of the crime”.

[Image - Ewa Krzyżewska and Zbigniew Cybulski in ‘Ashes and Diamonds’ (1958) © BFI Stills Posters & Designs]

Ashes and Diamonds, a baroque, elegiac noir, is the jewel of Wajda’s filmography. It follows the doomed Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski), a resistance fighter and an existentialist icon if there ever was one. In his sunglasses, jeans and US military jacket, he is, as Thomson puts it, “a hero to set beside Brando and Dean”.

Maciek, ordered to assassinate a communist official, instead falls in love and develops a crisis of conscience. With its Wellesian deep focus, Christian iconography and touches of German expressionism, it contains some of the most magnificent images committed to film. It is no wonder that its champions include Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, who modelled Harvey Keitel’s sunglasses in Mean Streets after Cybulski’s. Scorsese also showed the film to Leonardo DiCaprio as a reference for his moral conflict in The Departed.

[Image - Maja Ostaszewska in ‘Katyń’, Wajda’s 2007 drama about the 1940 Katyn massacre © BFI National Archive]

Wajda, who trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, was a born image-maker; the eyewitness needs an eye. It is this role, that of contemporary chronicler, that gives his cinema its enduring moral power. In Katyń and Man of Marble, relentless truth-seekers are stonewalled by the state; Wajda and his fictional surrogates reconstruct history in the face of those who would deny it. To Mauro Javier Cárdenas, a US-based Ecuadorean writer who has been researching the filmmaker for a forthcoming novel, this is at the core of Wajda’s art. “In a time when the horrors we’ve been witnessing are cynically denied or are in the process of being expunged from our virtual memories, the art as testimony of Andrzej Wajda is more relevant than ever,” he says. With this expansive London film season, a new generation can witness the witness.

[‘Andrzej Wajda: Portraits of History and Humanity’, screens as part of the Kinoteka Film Festival at BFI Southbank, ICA and Cine Lumiere, London, to March 26, bfi.org.uk]

https://www.ft.com/content/b44b1b82-5633-4613-8839-de4c0ebde14c

How filmmaker Andrzej Wajda captured Polish history — and helped shape it Despite a career spanning seven decades and several masterworks, the director is under-appreciated. A London season aims to put that right