Force Motors may be well known for its Traveller LCVs, three-wheelers and Trax MUVs, but it now wants to be known as a &lsquo;force&rsquo; to reckon with in the SUV segment. Come April 2011 and it will launch a new SUV that will slot itself nicely between the Tata Safari and Ford Endeavour. Force Motors plans to introduce a seven-seat SUV in the Rs 12-15 lakh segment and for that it plans to set up a different distribution and service network.

Force one

Business Standard

We are using a Hyundai Santro and are happy with it. Now we want to buy a sedan. Which of these cars is a better choice &mdash; the Maruti Suzuki Swift Dzire, Toyota Etios or VW Vento? Should I consider any other sedan? We are looking at a car that is fuel efficient, has good power, is durable and comfortable. We may drive about 500 km per month and occasionally on highways. Our budget is Rs 6 to 6.5 lakh.

Sedan decision

Steeped in forbidding history, soaked in blood, but with arms wide open in the traditional Afghan welcome, Kabul is surely the world&rsquo;s most surreal capital city.

Kabul diaries

There&rsquo;s a quality of restraint about Ram Kumar.

In his own quiet world

Facebook&rsquo;s Mark Zuckerberg. You&rsquo;ll discover he is about &ldquo;openness, making things that help people connect and share what&rsquo;s important to them, revolutions, information and minimalism&rdquo;. He&rsquo;s also a top class wealth creator because the social networking site where we post trite comments on our moments big and small, holidays good and bad, aggravations and jubilations is suddenly worth $50 billion. At least, to Goldman Sachs that forked out $450 million for a sliver of it. It could be worth much more to the high-net-worth clients , who are next in line and desperate for a piece of Facebook. And even more, to others who are not part of the velvet club, but in the snaking queue.

Keeping it private

Like 9/11, 26/11 was an act of audacious imagination, so way out and macabre that it could have driven the plot of a bestselling thriller. But while it is easy to demonise the perpetrators of such destruction, it is difficult to imagine what could have motivated a group of young men, some scarcely older than boys, to go about shooting people, apparently at random. It is especially difficult for us, schooled as we are in Western rationalism and accustomed to looking askance at the spectre of the Islamic fundamentalists, to look for psychological or sociological explanations. No wonder the 9/11 Commission famously called the US intelligence agencies&rsquo; failure to foresee and prevent the attacks as a &ldquo;failure of imagination&rdquo;.

The ghost of 26/11 past

September 1998 was a good month. That month, Google first went live. Already by the end of the year it had been praised by PC magazine as having &ldquo;an uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results&rdquo;. Also in September 1998, the Arts &amp; Letters Daily website went live. ALDaily, too, was a near-instant hit.

Denis the blessing

Behind Delhi&rsquo;s glossy malls and smooth highways lies another world.

Walk with Me

Get into the Louvre without spending hours in long queues and get yourself photographed with La Joconde without sharing her enigmatic smile with anyone else in the frame; duck into a bistro and sip an espresso or vin chaud &mdash; if you want to be a tourist in Paris and savour the City of Light without being jostled by throngs of other tourists, then do as I did. Go now, during the &ldquo;off-season&rdquo;.

Postcard from Paris

One of the pleasures of eating out in Delhi is access to a lot of good regional food because of the large immigrant and expat population. Here&rsquo;s a look at three local examples.

The local edge

It is no coincidence that Ekta Kapoor is drawing up plans to start a rival school the very year Pune-based Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) celebrates its golden jubilee. Till date, Kapoor has shown sharp business instincts. Once it&rsquo;s off the ground next year, her school could chip away the brand equity of FTII. Has a street-smart entrepreneur once again identified a state-run institute as a soft target? The possibility cannot be ruled out.

Is FTII losing the plot?

Life in the land of the Pashtuns is anything but easy. Less so for the women. Yet there are those who dare to break the mould and challenge the oppressive diktats, despite threats to their life. Monireh Hashemi is one such woman. Through the medium of theatre &mdash; an art form which lies suppressed in a country where guns have replaced the sound of music &mdash; Hashemi is struggling to draw attention to the hopeless condition of women in Afghanistan. This time too, the plight of the women of her land, their notions of liberty and their definitions of happiness and sorrow, will be the focus of her play, Stones and Mirrors, that will be performed at the annual Bharat Rang Mahotsav.

The stage is set

The world stepped out to welcome the New Year last week while I sought refuge in my quilt, nursing a miserable cold over a glass of rasam. Even television &mdash; a friend on most occasions &mdash; let me down. Brittle hype was lined up on channel after channel, attempts at humour on one, spectacle on the other. It was so unsatisfactory I turned it off without waiting for the countdown to midnight and, perversely, went to sleep.

Those happy old New Years

Pumping iron at home

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, goes the saying. But the stakes are very high, and it&rsquo;s hard work pleasing youngsters.

Fun 'n' games converge with movies, devices

Tracking of consumers has helped shape many moves of Shoppers Stop &mdash; from merchandising and increasing the ticket size of purchases to opening of new stores The slowdown that came fast and furious in 2008 drove home the virtues of thrift to the country&rsquo;s retailers. Most renegotiated rents, squeezed the last paisa out of the vendor, shut down stores that were no longer viable and pruned the workforce.

Consumers lead the way

Addressing internal audit and risk management are top-of-mind issues for today's executives. Protiviti Inc, one of the world&rsquo;s largest independent business and risk consulting firms, specialises in internal audit, estimated to be a Rs 1,35,000-crore business globally. The firm competes with the big four &mdash; PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte, Ernst &amp; Young and KPMG.

Q&A: Gary Peterson, Protiviti Inc

Companies with a continuous product development pipeline have been able to deliver sustained profitability and growth.

Innovate or perish

On June 29 last year, while addressing shareholders at TTK Prestige&rsquo;s 54th annual general meeting in Hosur, Chairman TT Jagannathan made an interesting detour. Not so long, he told the shareholders, the company was in the grips of a crisis. The combination of high excise and sales taxes had punched a hole in its pocket, and exports had taken a hit after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. The low point was reached in 2002-03: Sales had slumped to Rs 113 crore, there was an operating loss of Rs 17 crore on the company&rsquo;s books, and the debt burden had mounted to Rs 80 crore. With quiet pride, Jagannathan then read out the numbers for 2009-10: Turnover of Rs 516 crore, operating income of Rs 76 crore and free cash balances of Rs 30 crore, in spite of capital expenditure of Rs 40 crore.

Recipe for growth

In an effort to bring a new set of consumers on board, luxury car maker BMW recently launched its least expensive name-plate &mdash; the BMW X1. The sports utility vehicle (SUV), available in both diesel and petrol variants, will retail in the price range of Rs 22 to Rs 29.9 lakh. With its portfolio of over 10 sedans and SUVs, the company has established a stronghold in the Indian passenger car market. Pinc Research auto analyst Vineet Hetamasaria says: &ldquo;BMW&rsquo;s overall sale has recorded 50 per cent growth in the last year, with premium and luxury car segment witnessing 74 per cent growth&rdquo;.

Affordable luxury

Sustainable healthcare. That&rsquo;s the crux of GE&rsquo;s healthymagination strategy, launched in 2009 globally. Slated to run through 2015, the idea is to enable better healthcare focusing on cost, access and quality and help level the playing field in healthcare. GE Healthcare South Asia President &amp; CEO V Raja says: &ldquo;We believe GE&rsquo;s healthymagination is a script written specifically for India. India faces three challenges in its healthcare system. While 73 per cent of the Indian population lives in small towns or rural areas without access to quality healthcare, over 70 per cent of healthcare professionals live in urban areas, catering to the 27 per cent of urban Indians. The distribution is unfair. We need newer and innovative solutions that are designed specifically for India if we are to enable better healthcare for more people.

Healthcare solutions

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