One of my early defining experiences was a night in Delhi back in 1975 or &rsquo;76 when an enormous monsoon storm blew the door to the terrace plumb off its hinges, with the sort of demonic roar and attendant terror you&rsquo;d expect if your airplane suddenly developed a hole in the fuselage midflight.

The perfect storm

Business Standard

Tarun Katial of Big FM, when not launching private FM radio stations at breakneck speed, is a follower of Vipassana and, as Shuchi Bansal discovers, against animal killing - even if that means saying no to leather shoes.

Radio's zen boy

For several months, construction work for the Saket metro station has been going on just outside the block of flats we live in, and the sight of a giant crane hovering over the tops of neighbouring houses makes for a grand view, especially after dark. In every other respect our enclosed colony park is quiet as a village green, but here&rsquo;s an enormous, brightly lit mechanical pulley moving back and forth in a portion of the sky. It makes us feel like characters in John Wyndham novels set in quiet British towns where nothing much was ever expected to happen.

A crane in the neck

Nick India&rsquo;s website saw close to 600,000 page views in May this year. Arnab Desai, an 11-year-old Mumbai resident, was one of the visitors. Arnab, who is allowed to surf the internet for 1 hour every day, makes it a point to visit www.nickindia.com and play games based on his favourite cartoon characters like SpongeBob SquarePants and Ninja Hattori.

Child's play

When Mukesh Bansal came back to India three years ago, he was bursting with business ideas he could start with. Eventually, it was the lack of a one-stop shop in the personalisation space that caught his fancy, and money. This is how www.myntra.com came into being.

Taking print beyond paper

What do you need to be a productive home-worker bee? And no, we are not talking about investing a lot of money in fancy gadgets like video-conferencing tools or a pricey MacBook Air to get you working from home. Just imagine gadgets that can give you the chance to get up late in the day, avoid the rush-hour traffic jams and be close to your family.

Home is where the 'office' is...

Trent is trying hard to make up for lost time. Consider this: In the last 10 years, the retail arm of the Tata Group set up only 68 stores with around one million sq ft of space.

Trent changes gear

Wider choice of products, pack sizes and better chilling infrastructure are fuelling the sales growth of Coke and Pepsi.

The fizz is back

A recent ad for Burger King produced a storm. It was, fortunately, restricted to the metaphorical teacup. The ad, released locally in Spain, featured Goddess Lakshmi sitting atop a burger. The Spanish headline translates as &lsquo;Sacred Snack&rsquo;.

Burger ad: Storm in a teacup

The heady days of 2007-08 are still a distant memory, but the outlook for the advertisement industry seems to be getting brighter. Media planners have started revising their rather gloomy forecast made at the beginning of this financial year.

Ad industry back on track

The Nano and Indian Premier League, both game-changers in their market, are in a dead heat in the Brand Derby to decide the best brand launches of 2008. Eighty-seven per cent respondents, senior marketers in top metros, rated IPL as very successful, as against 76 per cent for the Nano. But when asked to rank the very successful brand launches, 27 per cent put their faith on the Nano and 24 per cent on IPL.

Double triumph

Small wonder

The football-style, franchise-based Indian Premier League (IPL) almost overnight became a multi-billion dollar brand. Modelled on the lines of the English Premier League by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), it was positioned somewhat like a reality show &mdash; more entertainment than cricket complete with cheer girls, dugouts and on-field interviews.

What a hit!

It is not every day that Maruti Suzuki stops producing a model to replace it with a new car. After all, the good old Omni and Maruti 800 are still being built and sold in reasonable numbers. So the decision to pull the plug on the quintessential Indian sedan, the Esteem, and replace it with what is essentially a booted version of the Swift came as a big surprise.

Swift business

Singh is Kinng, produced by Vipul Shah for Rs 50 crore, was panned by reviewers. &ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t a great movie. There are too many sloppy action sequences, the humour too broad, the storytelling lacklustre,&rdquo; wrote The New York Times.

Brand Bollywood

Public sector lenders lead the pack in this low-risk business.

Banks eye bigger slice of education loan pie

One hallmark of some of the world&rsquo;s path-breaking projects has been the choice of impressively lofty names. The first atomic bomb was built under Project Manhattan. Project Apollo put the first man on the moon. But for some reason, perhaps simply native modesty, one of India&rsquo;s most challenging technological developments &mdash; its first nuclear-powered submarine &mdash; has been cloaked in blandness. When tomorrow morning, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh&rsquo;s wife, Gursharan Kaur, breaks a coconut on the hull of what is referred to as the ATV or the Advanced Technology Vessel, to christen it INS Arihant, it will launch a new era for the navy.

Securing the seas

Jaguar-Land Rover cars are now officially here.

Range finder!

Given the restrictions on using conventional marketing tools (print, radio, TV advertising) for building brand awareness for wines (indeed, for all alcoholic beverages), wine producers fall back on wine fairs to foster producer-buyer interactions and to drive business.

Local wine fairs

I am 60 years old and live in Hyderabad. I own a 1997 Maruti 800 which I plan to replace. My budget is Rs 3 to 5 lakh and I travel around 500 km a month. I am considering a small car because of the ease of parking as well as driving in heavy traffic.

Take it easy

Swimwear in India is undergoing a huge makeover. It's not about boring blacks or bold bikinis. Instead, the new trend, says Abhilasha Ojha, includes tankinis, skirtinis and branded apparel suited to local needs.

Beachwear&#39;s big splash

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