Jobs up, pay down in UK; Music's godfather Ravi Shankar no more; Only 10% of India MBAs 'employable'

1 Jobs up, pay down in UK (Stephanie Flanders on BBC) Jobs prospects for young people are starting to look a bit healthier - though the average pay packet is not. Those are two clear conclusions you can draw from the latest labour market statistics. The other parts of the story, whether it's joblessness or employment, are a bit murkier.

Take the murky stuff first: that 82,000 fall in the broader measure of unemployment certainly sounds good. But that headline change comes from comparing joblessness in the three months to October with the same figure for the three months to July. If you compare this latest three-month figure with the one published last month (i.e. the three months to September), the number out of work has barely changed at all - in fact it has fallen by just 4,000.

You can say something similar about employment. It's impressive, to say the least, that there are now half a million more people in work than a year ago, with the creation of 600,000 jobs in the private sector more than offsetting the jobs lost in government. The trend, though, is a little discouraging: the 40,000 rise in employment in the three months to October is the smallest since the start of the year.

Things seem to be getting better for young people looking for work who are not full-time students - or at least they are not getting worse. Alas, the same cannot be said for average earnings, which have actually now fallen even further behind inflation in October with average annual growth of just 1.3% - less than half the rate of inflation. Real earnings have now been falling since the summer of 2010. This was supposed to be the year when the squeeze would ease. But we're running out of time for that particular new year prediction to come true.

2 Music’s godfather Ravi Shankar no more (Reginald Massey in The Guardian) Ravi Shankar, who has died aged 92 after undergoing heart surgery, was the Indian maestro who put the sitar on the musical map. George Harrison called him "the godfather of world music” and it was Shankar's vision that brought the sounds of the raga into western consciousness. He was thus the first performer and composer to substantially bridge the musical gap between India and the west.

Ravindra Shankar – in Bengali, Robindro Shaunkar – Chowdhury was born in the holy city of Benares, now Varanasi. The youngest of five sons, he belonged to a family of Bengali Brahmins from Jessore, now in Bangladesh, who were much influenced by the reformist ideas of writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, one of the major figures of the Indian Renaissance.

At the age of 18, he was apprenticed to Allauddin Khan, a disciple of Wazir Khan, who was a direct descendent of the legendary Tansen, the chief musician of the Mughal emperor Akbar. Shankar gave his first concert in 1939, and the following year began giving recitals with Khan's son Ali Akbar Khan, the sarodist, on All India Radio. His first meeting with George Harrison and Paul McCartney of the Beatles came in 1966, at a friend's house in London. Harrison took up the sitar and later that year went to India for a period of intensive tuition. From this partnership came Shankar Family & Friends (1974).

Shankar also created a musical partnership with Yehudi Menuhin. They had met in 1951 when the violinist was visiting India, though Shankar vividly recalled having seen him at rehearsals when they were boys in Paris in the 30s. In 1967, they played for the UN general assembly at a human rights day event. Though Shankar had many friends and admirers, in India especially there were classical musicians who were envious of his international success and criticised his association with the popular music of the west. His technique was faultless, but his flair for showmanship was resented by some.

3 Only 10% of India MBAs ‘employable’ (Preetika Rana in The Wall Street Journal) India’s estimated 3,300 business schools churn out tens of thousands of management graduates each year. But only a small fraction of them are “employable,” or possess basic skills necessary to work in sectors ranging from marketing to finance, according to an unpublished study. The study by Aspiring Minds, a Gurgaon-based talent management firm, found that India’s B-schools don’t teach their students basic skills like communication, which are essential for getting management jobs.

Aspiring Minds based its conclusions on a so-called “employability test” it conducted on 32,000 MBA graduates from 220 business schools across India. The test, which quizzed graduates on topics ranging from grammar to quantitative analysis, found that only 10% of those tested had skills that recruiters typically look for while hiring management graduates. The study found that less than half of the students tested had some knowledge of key industry terms and concepts in their areas of specialty. For instance, a third of the surveyed students who had majored in finance, did not know what IPO – short for initial public offering – stood for.

Aspiring Minds’ Chief Executive Himanshu Aggarwal says that a large number of India’s business schools “underestimate” the importance of soft skills.Other studies also point to how difficult it is to employ MBA graduates in India.  Earlier this year, Bangalore-based education consultancy MeritTac conducted a study of 2,264 MBA students in the country and found that only 21% of them were considered fit for employment. Some industry experts say that these findings are evidence that India’s MBA curriculum is flawed because of its emphasis on rote learning rather than on hands-on experience.