After his epochal Presidential victory over Mitt Romney, Barack Obama has been hailed across the US media. Broadsheets like New York Times had &ldquo;Obama&rsquo;s Night&rdquo; splashed on its front page, Washington Post had a simpler headline that said &ldquo;Obama Wins&rdquo;, Chicago Tribune kept it simpler with &ldquo;Re-elected&rdquo; as a headline, Los Angeles Times had &ldquo;Obama Again&rdquo; and Miami Herald had an emphatic &ldquo;It&rsquo;s Obama&rdquo;.

Web Exclusive: World media hails Obama's win

Business Standard

So, you wanted to know how the head of the world's most powerful nation is chosen, but didn't know who to ask? Here's a quick set of questions, along with answers, that will tell you exactly how.

A five-minute primer on the US elections

First things first: whoever curated the line-up of the Mumbai Film Festival (MFF) 2012 deserves a medal. One look at the 200 films that are being screened makes it quite clear that MFF aims to be less of a boutique, niche event and more a genuine melting-pot, hosting cutting-edge international films. All films are broadly good to excellent. A few might be the talk of the town.

J Jagannath: Festival feast

Biden vs Ryan: After Barack Obama&rsquo;s &ldquo;drubbing in Denver&rdquo;, the onus was on his running mate Joe Biden to redeem the Democratic pride at his debate with Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan. On 11 October at Danville, Kentucky, Biden was at home talking about foreign policy and Medicare and Ryan spoke about the government spending and what he proposes.

Biden edges past Ryan in VP-debate

Pakistani-Canadian writer Musharraf Ali Farooqi has always dabbled in the unconventional. Be it his debut novel about the inner despair of a Pakistani widow (The Story of a Widow) or the slough of despond into which wrestlers are pushed (Between Clay and Dust) or a deep thought into the footwear predilections of ants (The Cobbler&rsquo;s Holiday). His latest work, an illustrated book titled Rabbit Rap, takes Mr Farooqi&rsquo;s oeuvre.

Bugged bunnies

Every year we film journalists put the Mumbai Film Festival (MFF) through a sort of Rorschach Test. We attempt the half-futile task of splashing ink (truckloads of movies) on the bright page and try to see a pattern. This year, especially, it&rsquo;s an even tougher gig, considering how the darlings of every film festival across the globe have been cherry-picked for our perusal. This much diversity and quality has never before touched the MFF.

J Jagannath: Good, bad and lovely

President Obama and Republican Party&rsquo;s candidate Mitt Romney wrapped up a series of debates on October 23 at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida, with Obama having the last laugh. This debate was centred around the foreign policies that US has adopted in the last four years.

In foreign-policy debate Obama trumps Romney

If you don&rsquo;t think China is the biggest story of the 21st century, I&rsquo;ll have what you are having. My cheekiness stems from plain, cold facts: the rest of the world is retreating from economic expansion, but China is investing, building, acquiring as if there&rsquo;s no tomorrow. Some experts reckon it will overtake the US as the global superpower by the end of this decade. I am told that one glimpse at Shanghai skyline, and New York suddenly looks provincial. The Communist nation has the largest monetary reserves, cheap labour, cheap capital and voracious appetite for the world&rsquo;s resources. China&rsquo;s three big state-owned oil companies have become the largest investors in Africa, taking stakes in energy and infrastructure ventures. In his recent Newsweek column, historian Niall Ferguson said China should get proactive and seek an end to the bloodshed in Syria because it has more at stake than the US does.

Chinese check

Ever since his meteoric third novel Corrections, published in 2001, Jonathan Franzen carved an enviable niche for himself in modern Western literature. His brilliance reached its apotheosis when his fourth novel Freedom got him endorsement from Barack Obama and a cover story in Time magazine. It&rsquo;s hard to think of anyone else who mined his white middle-class irascibility into modern-day Dickensian sagas the way Franzen did.

Franzen's angst and obsessions

With his furrowed brow and energised prose, Martin Amis ensured that every novel of his became the most anticipated literary event of the year. This has been going on for almost four decades. His latest novel, Lionel Asbo, has been awaited even more, considering its subtitle: &ldquo;State of England&rdquo;. The past 18 months have been tumultuous for Britain: a phone-hacking scandal, riots, an uncertain economic future, an underachieving coalition government, the recent floods in London, the Barclays scandal and so on. The roaring success notwithstanding, the Olympics might push the country into a deeper financial hole.

Amis' goodbye to all that

Ever since the edifice of the global finance industry started crumbling in 2008, readers revelled in the following terms to berate the cogs of this giant machine: vampire squids, one per cent, fat cats. In his new book, Finance and the Good Society, Yale professor Robert J Shiller says we are getting it all wrong. His passionate defence of the financial industry&rsquo;s panjandrums should elicit a huge collective gasp, last seen in 1965 when Bob Dylan chose to play electric instruments.

More power to power suits

First-time director Karan Gour would have been drummed out of a Bollywood mogul&rsquo;s office within minutes of pitching the plot for Kshay (Hindi for &ldquo;corrode&rdquo;): &ldquo;It&rsquo;s about a young woman&rsquo;s all-consuming obsession with the statue of Goddess Lakshmi, and how this leads to her slow-burning descent.&rdquo; So Gour makes a DIY film that is absolutely low on production (unknown actors, handheld camera) but extremely rich in plot.

J Jagannath: D-I-Y filmmaking

&ldquo;Unlike Vegas, what happens in Facebook doesn&rsquo;t stay in Facebook.&rdquo; That&rsquo;s how Lori Andrews gets the ball rolling in her latest book, I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did. The subtitle makes clear the book&rsquo;s slant: &ldquo;Social Networks and the Death of Privacy&rdquo;.

Oh Well, Orwell

When Paul O&rsquo;Neill took over the reins of the aluminum company Alcoa, it was in bad shape. To turn it around he adopted a different tack: O&rsquo;Neill realised that the company used to lose at least one man-day every month to accidents.

Habito ergo sum

In his indefatigably charming fifteenth novel, Other People&rsquo;s Money, Justin Cartwright&rsquo;s ecstatic loon of a playwright, Artair MacCleod, evokes Irish author Flann O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s manifesto for future writers: &ldquo;Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required.

Too proud to fail

Jeffrey Eugenides took the literary world by storm in 2002 with his novel Middlesex. While talking about the life of a hermaphrodite, Eugenides, who is of Greek descent, narrated a post-modern tale of the three generations of a Greek family. He tackled themes as varied as incest and gender identity, which earned him a Pulitzer for fiction. Almost a decade later, Eugenides&rsquo; new book, The Marriage Plot, is out.

Stockholm syndrome

Wrecked paradises and displaced lives have leavened all the four novels of Sri Lankan writer Romesh Gunesekera. Starting with his Booker-nominated first novel Reef, Gunesekera regularly mined ore from Sri Lanka&rsquo;s fractious past with a headlamp focused on individuals forced to relocate. His fifth novel, The Prisoner of Paradise, is quite different from this corpus. Set in Mauritius of 1825, it is a classical love story in which the characters don&rsquo;t introspect as much as they are prone to in The Match or The Sandglass.

Another paradise lost 

Within hours of his death, the Apple Inc co-founder Steve Jobs was mourned even more emphatically than Michael Jackson, John Lennon and Martin Luther King. Flowers, candles and deckloads of messages were to be seen at every Apple store across the world turning each one into a shrine. The social media websites were unable to handle such a huge torrent of grief.

Stevie wonder

The little spark that the Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi ignited in December 2010 to torch himself in retaliation against corruption has engulfed the Arab region ever since. It brought the power back into people&rsquo;s hands and the jitters were felt by the tyrants in Yemen, Syria, Egypt, Libya and, to an extent, Bahrain (apart from Tunisia, of course). That begs the question: would all this have been possible without the World Wide Web? Yes it was the dispossessed and disenchanted who first raised their arms against the totalitarianism, but it&rsquo;s a stretch to deny the blogs played their part by sowing the seeds of discontent.

J Jagannath