A diaper commercial gets a thumbs up; while success fathers many claimants.


One father of this baby!

Business Standard

Sanjeev Kapoor and his dimples may have started the trend in India, but its clear that the men in white have a huge advantage over the rest of mankind. At least in the kitchen. 


Chemistry in the kitchen

If media reports are to be believed, an alliance of sorts between Jet Airways and Air Sahara is on the cards. Initial reports suggested that Jet Airways might take over the latter in a buy-out deal.

A K Bhattacharya: Who`s afraid of the Jet-Sahara deal?

The software industry is divided over the pros and cons of open-source versus proprietory closed-source. Closed-source advocates say that it offers more secure platforms, cleaner applications and

Devangshu Datta: Open season on day-zero

Alfred P Sloans book on his career at General Motors has inspired generations of managers in industrial enterprises all over the world. He took charge of a disparate group of floundering automobile

T Thomas: A Gulliver tied down

Newspaper headlines such as "India GDP growth falls to 4.5 per cent" or "S&P downgrades India's GDP growth", which frequently greet the Indian newspaper reader and cause palpitations in many an Indian heart, have become a feature of modern life in the country. The unstated assumption in all this is that pursuing a high GDP growth rate ought to be the single-minded goal of any government.With so much talk about GDP, it is easy to forget that the concept of GDP  and its use as a measure of a nation's strength and well-being  is a recent phenomenon. Earlier, a nation's might was measured in terms of the land area that it controlled  countries such as Britain, which were troubled but owned vast colonies, were looked up to with respect. Then came Simon Kuznets, who was born to a family of Jewish bankers and furriers in Pinsk (formerly in Russia, now in Belarus) and grew up in what is now Ukraine before immigrating to the United States.In the 1930s, Kuznets devised for the US a system of

Obsessing about GDP growth

Political rather than purely economic concerns govern negotiations with other countries and regions

India needs a better deal from trade pacts

Singapore's economic success is jolted with its old-age population rising and working citizens' falling, even as immigration continues

Getting old, staying young

Unless major structural changes are effected, India will miss an economic take-off for many years

Are India's glory days over?

But it's an extreme weapon, to be used judiciously

Enter compulsory licensing

Like it or not, Islam is the charged centrality in our daily news headlines.

V V: A world without Islam

I have been reading novels for forty years. I know there are many stances we can adopt toward the novel, many ways in which we commit our soul and mind to it, treating it lightly or seriously. And just in the same manner, I have learned by experience that there are many ways to read a novel.

V V: Orhan Pamuk - The art of the novel

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

V V: Marx - The prophet of capitalism?

Has the Arab world reached its &ldquo;tipping point&rdquo;, the moment when a trend flips into irreversible change because it lends the power of apparent inevitability to almost any argument? From the speed of events unfolding across the Crescent of North Africa and the Gulf, it seems we have reached the point of no return because it is impossible to damn an idea whose time has come.

V V: What's gone wrong in the Arab world?

The world's transition away from coal and oil depends crucially on national political structures

New lenses on the world's energy

The industry ignored measures that would have improved iron ore quality, but then, the mining ban has done considerable harm too
Sushim Banerjee 
Director General, INSDAG*
&ldquo;Iron ore shortage will hit the industry hard, but the steel industry did not pay attention to beneficiation or pelletisation, which could enable it to use fines or convert low-grade ore to high-grade ones&rdquo;
India is shortly going to add around 26 million tonnes of steel through brownfield expansion, and this

Is the government killing the steel industry?

The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a non-government organisation based here and promoting sustainable development, today exposed major inefficiencies in the performance of India&rsquo;s iron and steel sector.

CSE finds major inefficiencies in iron and steel sector performance

Consumers in Maharashtra can expect a 10 per cent reduction in fruit and vegetable prices and farmers can look forward to getting a similar increase in selling prices, following a notification from the Maharashtra government, say retailers and consultants. The notification allows farmers to directly sell fresh produce to consumers, rather than through agriculture produce marketing committees (APMCs).

Maharashtra move may bring down vegetable prices by 10%

Successful publishers have an immaculate sense of timing and generate literature with an eye on the calendar. It&rsquo;s no surprise then that the 10th anniversary of 9/11 has produced a spate of books on what went wrong and its aftermath the world over. But most of these books deal with Islam in some form or the other and are either too journalistic, written for the moment, or too scholarly, of little interest to the common reader; or they deal with the unending clash-of-civilisations debate. The latest issue of Granta 116, titled &ldquo;Ten Years Later&rdquo;, is an exception; it carries a number of stories that attempt to capture the complexity and sorrow of life since September 11, 2001 &mdash; stories from different parts of the world that were impacted by 9/11, as well as those that lay on the periphery of the violence it generated.

V V: Life after 9/11

Much before Abbottabad, literature on Pakistan, from western sources as well as Pakistani scholars, dealt with a single recurrent theme: can Pakistan survive or will it, like the Soviet Union, implode sooner rather than later, by 2020? A long-running multidimensional crisis, political and ethnic strife, an unprecedented economic crisis, and growing Islamic extremism, which plays host to Al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban and is now vying for influence in anticipation of an eventual western withdrawal, were enough pointers to the shape of things to come. Close observers of the Af-Pak scene had apparently seen the future and it didn&rsquo;t work.

V V: Re-imagining Pakistan

Extensive interviews have now become an integral element in publishers&rsquo; repertoire. Their great advantage is the manoeuvrability and range with which they accommodate a whole range of spoken and written varieties at both poles of the exchange &ndash; expository and narrative, argumentative rallies, and anecdotes &ndash; that fall somewhere between an autobiography and a memoir. This mix of recollection, statement and expectation often becomes the starting point for a full-fledged article or even a book.

V V: View from the Left

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