Laid up with flu &mdash; but not swine flu &mdash;this week, my attention was caught by the plight of a child, who, luckily, had not come in contact with any virus, unless you can call a set of battling parents that! The child in question was at the centre of a custody battle between a mother who wanted to raise him in Australia and a startlingly regressive father, who wanted the court to intervene because he was worried not about the influence of parental separation but the evil influence of

Deconstructing Indianness

Business Standard

I am in the market for a car in the Rs 10-12 lakh segment. Five people need to travel in comfort and we need all the safety features like airbags and ABS.

Playing safe

Lowe India chairman and Cheeni Kum director Balki strayed into advertising, hoping to meet Ramesh Sippy. Now, many years and accolades later, he has discovered the mantra to success.

Luck by chance

The market for high-end lingerie is notoriously tough.

Outing innerwear in India...

From research to trivia, everything you wanted to know, and see, about the making of India&rsquo;s capital By Kishore Singh
In a coruscating letter written on July 4, 1922, Sir Edwin L Lutyens, chief architect of the city of New Delhi, accused his colleague and co-architect on the project, Herbert Baker, of &ldquo;a colossal artistic blunder&rdquo; &mdash; that of locating what is now Rashtrapati Bhawan atop Raisina Hall &mdash; on &ldquo;levels upon which you have insisted and which render

The building of New Delhi

THE KO WORLD championships &ldquo;proved&rdquo; something many commentators had been asserting for years. Namely, the difference between the playing strength of somebody in the Top 10 and somebody in the Top 100 was tiny.

CHESS #600

No matter how much our cities have changed in the last two decades, we haven&rsquo;t yet had more than the faintest foretaste of the revolution to come. I don&rsquo;t mean mass social unrest; rather, a significant reshaping of our view of the urban environment.

Urban legends

Is art design? Is design art? At a time when the definition of art has been substantially increased to include anything the artist deems a valid medium and a valid exploration of an idea, the very genesis of these questions is void. And building on this synergy is Peter Nagy&rsquo;s curated show at Kala Ghoda in Mumbai. Vistaar II, by Delhi&rsquo;s Seven Art Limited with, and at, Art &amp; Soul in Mumbai, presents &ldquo;increasingly dematerialised&rdquo; art that is &ldquo;more about image and idea than object&rdquo;.

The validity of art

A pottery studio in the heart of Gurgaon is a treasure trove of design ideas.

Potter's tales

Last weekend, a full year after it had started, Video Wednesdays at Delhi&rsquo;s Gallery Espace came to an end. It was a simple idea &mdash; to devote a single Wednesday, every month, to video art. By the time it ended, it had managed to show the works of several artists without necessarily having an entire video show for them.

Video as a medium

If you are a Nintendo Wii fan like President Barack Obama, who bought one for his daughters as a Christmas gift, then buying Wii add-ons has to be your civic duty. No kidding. It is not only a fantastic gaming platform for both children and parents, but its motion-sensitive controls can never stop amazing you.

'Add on' some thrills to Wii'ing

To attract Indian women, companies are coming up with games specially designed for them.

Woman power: Gaming no longer a boys' bastion

One fine morning in 2006, Dhiraj Kacker received a phone call that changed his life as an employee with a successful start-up in the Silicon Valley. At the other end was his buddy Peeyush Rai coaxing him to come back to India to start their own business. And, Kacker didn&rsquo;t think twice.

Giving the photo call

Realising that raising money for charity will only get tougher in the present economic environment, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (Iskcon) has decided to harness the ever-increasing mobile users in India. For Iskcon, this will help them sustain the inflow of donations for its mid-day meals programme.

Now, fund-raising for charity goes mobile

&lsquo;Walk, When you Talk&rsquo; has prompted many viewers to approach the Indian Customer Complaints Forum on the ground that walking while talking can lead to accidents, but Idea Cellular isn&rsquo;t complaining. The country&rsquo;s fifth largest telecom services operator is busy enjoying all the attention the campaign has drawn.

Idea walks the talk

TECHNOLOGY!!! DIGITAL!!! MOBILE!!! CHANGE!!! The hysteria is out there and growing. Sometimes it does a body some good to sit down and have a little think. Sift the grains of truth from the chaff of hype. Bill Bernbach, the founding father on creativity in advertising and the most influential figure the biz has ever seen, said this a few decades back.

Digital thinking from the 1950s

His career spans 18 years in online advertising and his work includes campaigns for brands like Nike, Apple, Volvo, BMW, Land Rover and Oakleys, to name a few. He has worked for creative power houses like Wieden + Kennedy in Portland, StrawberryFrog in New York, Initiative+ in Los Angeles, Euro RSCG in Irvine (California), and Energy BBDO in Chicago. Max Hegerman, president of Tribal DDB India, Mudra&rsquo;s interactive and new media unit, talks to Sapna Agarwal on his latest assignment.

'The opportunity is mobile'

If the red carpet rolled out by Indian companies for rural consumers is getting longer by the day, the reason is simple: estimates show Bharat will account for 60 per cent of the consumption of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) in the country in the next three years.

Off the beaten track

Consumers who had deferred purchases or preferred to stretch their money at discount retailers look all set to splurge again. The latest round of the Nielsen Global Consumer Confidence Survey reveals a sharp increase in confidence levels, Indians being the second most optimistic.

Holding back no more

Britannia is bringing one of its oldest biscuit brands to the fore with an eye on the youth. After its new package colours and size, Britannia Bourbon has come out with a new tongue-in-cheek ad that, shorn of its product shots, would have made it hard to guess it is for a biscuit.

Britannia Industries: Tempting the youth

Rediff.com, the general interest website, has succumbed to the 13-year itch. In place of the earlier cluttered and busy website is now minimalistic material which acts like a gateway to access the site&rsquo;s content. There is a search bar and eight icons which represent news, movies, cricket, money, shopping and online services. Additionally, there are links to articles on the right side.

Rediff.com: Minimalist appeal

- Find Specials News, Features, Analysis and more at Business Standard. Full coverage of Goafest 2014

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