The Weekend team goes hunting for the best plum cakes this Christmas.

Plum Parade

Business Standard

When Finance Minister P Chidambaram said he would contain the fiscal deficit at 5.3 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP) this year and would not borrow more from the markets, few analysts and economists bought the argument &mdash; not least because the plan looks short on details. Leave aside independent experts, even the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) takes it with a pinch of salt.

Vrishti Beniwal: FM's balancing act on a thorny path

Desi at heart

Nivi Mukherjee is eagerly awaiting the results of the Kenyan primary school examinations. Mukherjee is neither a student nor the anxious parent of one. But she has something even bigger at stake.

Is helping revamp education in Kenya

Maddur, a nondescript town on the Bangalore-Mysore highway, has the biggest organised market for tender coconuts.

Coconut country

Pandit Ravi Shankar&rsquo;s death last week gave me a pretext to dust off a DVD of an old film he had scored &mdash; Hrishikesh Mukherjee&rsquo;s National Award-winner Anuradha, about a woman who sacrifices her singing career to move to the village with her dedicated doctor husband. This is a lovely film, one of our cinema&rsquo;s best depictions of threatened individuality and a marriage under pressure, highlighted by fine pacing, a subtly plaintive score, and excellent performances: the luminous Leela Naidu shows sensitivity beyond her years in the title role (she was barely 20 at the time) and Balraj Sahni brings dignified understatement to the part of Anuradha&rsquo;s well-meaning but neglectful husband Dr Nirmal. In conjunction, their performances make this film an emotionally complex experience, because it is difficult for the viewer to &ldquo;take sides&rdquo; between the two characters and their circumstances.

A not-so-simple past

Dakar is the most gruelling and arduous motorsport event on the planet. Don&rsquo;t believe us? Well, songs have been written about it, people have lost lives, gotten lost and what not. All because winning it means there are no more challenges left to conquer in the world of motorsport. And with a history that spans over three-and-a-half decades (with the next edition just weeks away), one manufacturer has left a very strong impression with a single product. An impression so strong that the product has sold simply on the basis of this connection. The product in discussion is the Mitsubishi Pajero.

Learning to fly, again

Pawan Ahluwalia, managing director of KJS Cements, was tired of watching films in the rundown cinema halls in Satna, the town in eastern Madhya Pradesh where he lives. The seats were uncomfortable, the picture quality was bad, the sound system jarred and the rowdy crowds didn&rsquo;t help. And so the movie buff decided to build himself a film theatre right inside his house.

Your own theatre

Fitness training today is scientific, specialised and extremely goal-oriented. Reji John speaks to celebrity personal trainers about what it takes.

The people behind the beautiful bods

Swanky trunks in vibrant colours, different shapes and sizes are scattered across a well-lit, 1,500 sqft room in Jaipur&rsquo;s Kartarpura industrial area. Standing tall and apart from the others is the gleaming &ldquo;Bar Trunk&rdquo;, made of luxuriant Italian leather and lined with suede shelves in cheerful orange. When closed, the &ldquo;trunk&rdquo; looks more like a small cupboard. It opens to reveal numerous shelves and compartments lit by LED lights, glistening with long-stemmed crystal wine and champagne glasses, trendy shot glasses and decorative ones for whiskey connoisseurs. A tray holds around 24 bottles of expensive spirits (presumably for display, not sale) with adjustable spacing; another tray is lined with accessories like chillers and shakers to spruce up the perfect martini. The trunk has wheels at the bottom along with a down connection, easy to plug in any corner of your home or office, and the extendable corian top can be used as a bar table.

Trunk shows

At around 1 am on Tuesday, workers quietly began to dismantle the memorial that had come up on one corner of Shivaji Park at Dadar in Mumbai for Bal Thackeray, the Shiv Sena founder who died on November 17. The Congress-Nationalist Congress Party government had wanted it removed from the city&rsquo;s best-known public space, while Sainiks, as Shiv Sena workers call themselves, were adamant that the memorial would stay there. Till midnight, bhajans were being sung at the memorial.

Family politics

If you are still around reading this review, then Rajinikanth (along with minor help from assorted Marvel Comics sidekicks) was the demolisher of the prophesied Mayan apocalypse. If you choose to believe, then you would be surprised at the size of the legion of fellow believers. But beyond the cult, who is this Rajinikanth? Wildly popular though he is, the reclusive actor has proven very difficult to pin, or rather pen, down. There have been a few half-hearted attempts over the years to track his story and, finally, here is one that has made a fair effort. Rajinikanth &mdash; The Definitive Biography is by Naman Ramachandran, a film critic who has also been active as a producer and screenwriter in television and film, both in India and abroad.

The dark knight of Chennai

A Selvaraj, 31, runs a printing press near Madurai railway station where he employs five people. In the past, January and September have been good months for him, business-wise. That&rsquo;s because in January, DMK workers in the city celebrate the birthday of MP and Union Fertilizer Minister M K Alagiri, and in September that of his son, Durai Dayanidhi Alagiri.

Mining trouble

The police were hot on my heels. Smashing through a five-car roadblock, I ducked below the freeway and made a U-turn, and headed downtown, but there was no getting rid of the wailing cars tailing me.

Burn some rubber in Fairhaven City

The Rockstand app lets you annotate text, as well as flip pages, just like in a book. It also remembers page numbers, just like other eBook readers.

Bibliophiles ahoy! Library in the virtual world

Even before Google or Facebook came up with their free SMS applications, there have been several others. Of course, the advantage of using a Facebook chat application (app) is that it is synchronised with your social site page and contacts. In case of Google, your gmail contacts and Google+ members are factored in.

Simplifying the buzz around chattering apps

Google's SMS chat application is fairly simple. From within Gtalk, one can send text messages to contacts, provided their numbers are added to the address book.

Get your address book in order

A deep dive into the investment strategies and financial habits of the online Indian consumer has revealed some interesting facts. A study by Nielsen shows the online Indian consumer is a smarter and more independent investor in comparison to the average Indian consumer, as they have a higher level of financial awareness.

What the online consumer wants

The Indian cricket team may have taken quite a few hard knocks of late, but all that is forgotten &mdash; at least by advertisers. The reason: when India is playing Pakistan, it&rsquo;s not just a game.

Indo-Pak series bowls over advertisers

So the consumer loves being spoilt for choice, right? Say she walks into a store to buy tea and is faced with 20 different flavour options. Does this array of choice really please her? Or simply muddles her to the point where she&rsquo;d choose to just stick to one basic flavour rather than experiment with another, more exotic one? This delicate balance between offering too much and too little is a constant in every product&rsquo;s life and also a starting point of stock keeping unit (SKU) and variant rationalisation.

Limiting consumer choice

The world&rsquo;s most admired companies excelled at driving accountability right down through their organizations, while the rest of the sample were significantly less good at holding people accountable. The other companies tended to hold people accountable for metrics, instead of the strategy, and did not follow through, letting executives &lsquo;off the hook&rsquo; (see Figure 1). The most admired companies reinforced accountabilities by monitoring and managing performance. The best organizations reinforce accountabilities through a very strong focus on managing poor performance, through the use of forced distributions and through standardized global processes.

Driving accountability

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