Nobel laureate Garcia Marquez dies at 87

1.    Nobel laureate Garcia Marquez dies at 87

i. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel laureate whose intoxicating novels and short stories exposed millions outside Latin America to its passions, superstition, violence and social inequality, has died at home in Mexico City. He was 87.

ii. Widely considered the most popular Spanish-language writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century, the Colombian-born Garcia Marquez achieved literary celebrity that spawned comparisons to Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. 

iii. His flamboyant and melancholy fictional works - among them "Chronicle of a Death Foretold", "Love in the Time of Cholera" and "Autumn of the Patriarch" - outsold everything published in Spanish except the Bible. 

iv. His stories made him literature's best-known practitioner of magical realism, the fictional blending of the everyday with fantastical elements such as a boy born with a pig's tail and a man trailed by a cloud of yellow butterflies. 

v. "The world has lost one of its greatest visionary writers - and one of my favorites from the time I was young," US President Barack Obama said. 

2.    Airtel names new CTO

i. Bharti Airtel has appointed Abhay Savargaonkar as its Chief Technology Officer for India operations. He will also be on the company's managing board.

ii. Abhay has been at Airtel for over a decade and is currently the Chief of Network Operations. He has held various senior leadership roles covering all network verticals, including leading the 3G planning and deployment, quality, network planning and being the CTO of mobile business when it was a standalone business.

iii. The new CTO comes in a time when telecom companies are looking at deploying multiple technologies to meet the challenges of offering data services.

3.    ICICI Prudential MF launches 'Dividend Yield Equity Fund'

i. ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund is planning to launch a new open-ended 'ICICI Prudential Dividend Yield Equity Fund'.

ii. The new fund offer will open for subscription on April 25 and close on May 9, 2014, a company release said.

iii. Companies with a good track record of paying high dividends yields are seen as better investment options. Investing in such companies is also one of value investing strategies," Nimesh Shah, Managing Director & CEO, ICICI Prudential MF, said.

iv. The fund house also said the scheme will invest mostly in those companies that have dividend yield greater than the dividend yield of CNX Nifty Index at the time of investment.

v. ICICI Prudential MF has an average assets under management of Rs 1.06 lakh crore by the end of last fiscal.