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

Business Standard

Anjali Chawla&rsquo;s glasshouse by the pool is the perfect place to entertain in the evenings.

&#39;Floating&#39; deck

In today&rsquo;s times, when people are running from pillar to post, stress and fatigue have become a part of our daily lives. And since one hardly gets the time to visit a spa for a relaxing massage, the next best option is to pick up a handheld massager &mdash; convenient, and easy to use, it doesn&rsquo;t even take too long to ease up your knotted muscles. These handheld massagers are as good as your personal masseur.

Masseur masters

Trainer Mark Dvoretsky once noted that Mikhail Tal, who is no:1 on everyone else&rsquo;s list of insanely great tacticians, was actually an instinctive positional player. Dvoretsky said the Magician of Riga rarely made exact calculations &mdash; he trusted his judgement instead.

CHESS #598


The solar eclipse on July 22nd so captured everyone&rsquo;s imagination this past week that the news channels actually took a couple of minutes out from yelling about the diplomatic bloopers committed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh regarding Baluchistan, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regarding the Indo-US civilian nuclear deal, to yell about where one might best watch the eclipse (Taregana, Bihar), when (early in the morning), how (through pinhole glasses) and why (it would be the

Here comes the moon

Chicago has an idea to offer to Indian cities. It&rsquo;s what public art can become if it is creatively and bravely envisioned. Two landmark public sculptures bracket this idea. The first is Picasso&rsquo;s famous and unnamed corrosive tensile steel work, installed in 1967 in the Civic Centre Plaza, outside the Daley Centre building.

Lessons from Chicago

Filmmaker, translator of Sanskrit erotica, and India's famous &quot;shaved head&quot; Pritish Nandy is committed to making &quot;movies that rock&quot;.

Bald and beautiful!

Ali Sethi writes a coming of age saga but hopes for a revival of the region's progressive culture.

A Pakistani renaissance

There are several ugly faces of fashion: anorexic models who survive on cigarettes and coffee is just one such instance. But, by far the ugliest thing that has happened to Indian fashion is the ongoing fight between the various &ldquo;bodies&rdquo;. Two bodies &mdash; FFI and the government mandated FDPC &mdash; have triumphantly announced that they have now merged and will work for the betterment of fashion.

A patch up? Really?

Jayakanthan is a prolific, influential Tamil writer whose work spans half a century. Dissonance and other Stories (Katha, 2008) contains 10 stories from his early, highly political, writing days. The book was shortlisted for the latest Vodafone Crossword Book Award.

Sangam of Tamil and English

Wedding decor-stylist Swati Pandya-Sood tells Anoothi Vishal about Buddha Bar themes, the Asian look and bloomers you should avoid while planning a party.

&#39;It&#39;s stupid to cover a bar in flowers&#39;

Trapped by the Inca! For violating the sacred temple! Tied to stakes atop a pyre which will soon be lit by the rays of the sun, concentrated by a lens! But why does Tintin look so calm? Ah, it is because he knows something these colourfully dressed Incas don&rsquo;t: there is going to be a solar eclipse. Tintin calls out to the sun to hide his face, and lo and behold! the god obeys. Tintin and his friends are saved; nay, they are treated as demigods by the hapless Incas.

D.e.m. clones

All-in-one PCs are basically desktop computers that have their central processing unit (CPU) integrated in the monitor. Result: they look much sleeker and have a lot less wires dangling from them.

Computing goes sleeker

While searching for unique websites, we chanced upon www.tips4me.com, a portal best described as the web version of &lsquo;daadi ma ke nuske (grandma&rsquo;s tips)&rsquo;.

Online panacea

Microsoft&rsquo;s latest attempt in search engine, Bing has broken into the top-20 websites within a month of its launch. According to a web information company, Alexa, Google dominates the charts but Bing is already at 19th position with about 5 per cent of users from India accessing internet to visit Bing. ViziSense, another online traffic measurement and metric tool, tells us that since the launch of Bing in India, the traffic on Microsoft sites has gone up.

Bing-o! MS search engine among top-20

Air India dumped the Centaur logo three years after it was readjusted to point upwards; Indian Airlines changed its name to Indian just two years before its merger.

Brand A-I: One too many

The electrical goods firm has outspent its rivals in brand building.

The electrical goods firm has outspent its rivals in brand building

I remember lazy Sunday evenings years and years ago, waking up just in time to catch the weekly film courtesy Doordarshan, on a black and white TV set. There would be a spate of ads before the movie began. Amidst the haze of memories that include haan bhai haan, Surf ki kharidari mein hi samjdhari hai, and gale mein khich khich, what stands out sharply is the Nirma tune. Somewhere around 6pm &lsquo;washing powder Nirma&rsquo; would blare unapologetically across the country reminding us that Neema&hellip;Rekha&hellip;Jaya aur Sushma&hellip;sab ki pasand Nirma&hellip;So I was surprised (pleasantly) to note the soundtrack of the latest Nirma &lsquo;underwater&rsquo; ad&hellip; For one, it is different. More important, it suits the pace and flow of a film that has been shot beautifully under water. The track is almost operatic and very engaging. However, it does not attempt to do a new &lsquo;take&rsquo; on the cobwebs-old tune.

'Tuning up'

SNSs have proved to be a great medium for companies to engage users.

Social networking sites lead in redefining entertainment

Maruti Suzuki&rsquo;s portfolio has several small cars. That makes its task of differentiating each of these cars difficult. To bolster one of its most sturdy performers, the WagonR, which sold 135,000 last year, the country&rsquo;s largest carmaker has come out with a mascot named WizeR.

Maruti Suzuki: WagonR gets WizeR

Acquiring a company in India can throw up four human resource challenges.

The human factor

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Beachwear's big splash

'Floating' deck