Meru Cabs, launched in 2006, has everything going for it: A credible brand, loyal customers and a transparent pricing mechanism and technology. But, the only thing missing is profits. Meru wants to change that now. Says Meru CEO Siddhartha Pawha: FY13 will be focused towards achieving the last target.

Meru in search of profit track

Business Standard

Remember the series of recent Maruti Suzuki ads? In one of them, a NASA scientist is giving a brief description of a spacecraft to a group of Indian tourists, who look pretty much impassive even as the scientist divulges some high-end details about the spacecraft.

Kitna deti hai? is the slogan for car buyers

Pamuk&rsquo;s second novel has as many devotees in Turkey as My Name Is Red or Snow, but this is the first translation of Silent House into English. The widow Fatma, ill and bedridden, lives in a mansion in the fishing village of Cennethisar. She is looked after by Recep, a dwarf, her husband&rsquo;s illegitimate son. The amiable companionship between the dwarf and the widow is interrupted by the arrival of Fatma&rsquo;s grandchildren.

Picks of October

In its recent analysis on luxury homes in Bangalore, real estate consultant Jones Lang La Salle estimated that there are 1,100 homes in the city that fall in the &ldquo;super luxury&rdquo; segment &mdash; those with a price tag of Rs 5 crore and more. The cream of these are the apartments in and around the city centre, known as the Central Business District (CBD), akin to Colaba in Mumbai or Connaught Place, Delhi.

View from the top

Fresh water angling is normally considered an enjoyable and peaceful sport. That it is. But battling your foe from the ragged shores of treacherous rivers, where a slip can mean a watery grave, is practised by very few. Sadly, it&rsquo;s preffered more by foreigners than by Indians, for many Indians that I have spent time with on the river weigh the price they are paying against the comforts, not against the pure thrill of adventure sport.

The hunt for big fish

With J K Rowling&rsquo;s new novel, The Casual Vacancy, we are firmly in Muggle-land &mdash; about as far from the enchanted world of Harry Potter as we can get. There is no magic in this book &mdash; in terms of wizarding or in terms of narrative sorcery.

No magic, only muggles

Two years ago, Rajeev Kumar had to think twice before getting up from his chair or even climbing a flight of stairs. The action would leave him breathless and cause intense pain in his joints.

A smaller stomach

M Mahendran, 32, earned Rs 5,000 a month working in a government-run alcohol shop in Kanaivakadu, a village of about 100 houses in southern Tamil Nadu. On this salary, he supported his daughter and wife, who was expecting their second child.

Easy prey

You know the Logan already, don&rsquo;t you? This one is just a whole lot better thanks to an elaborate makeover from the Logan&rsquo;s Romanian parents, Dacia. And it has finally sprouted some design flair. The new Logan looks aggressive, what with the Duster-esque flared wheel arches and profile and also that butch grille and impressive overall front-end treatment.

Show Boating

I plan on buying a car within a budget of Rs 5 lakh to 7 lakh. I primarily require the car for weekend commuting and occasional trips to my native place too, which is at a distance of 200 kms from Delhi. I will also sometimes commute to my office, which is 20 kms away from my home. I have already booked a Maruti Suzuki Swift Dzire LDi, however, people have been recommending that I opt for the petrol variant instead. Please help me decide.

Pet stop

Goopy, a yokel who loves to sing but can&rsquo;t hold a tune to save his life, and Bagha, who plays the drum but has no sense of rhythm, are banished from their village for oppressing villagers with their atrocious music. But they manage to please Bhuter Raja, or the king of ghosts, who grants them three boons &mdash; they only have to clap each other&rsquo;s hands to eat whatever they please, travel wherever they wish and render listeners awe-struck with their music.

The return of Goopy-Bagha

Two Woody Allen moments, more than 35 years apart. In the new film To Rome With Love, an old man &mdash; a shuffling, white-haired version of one of modern cinema&rsquo;s most recognisable profiles &mdash; delivers a quasi-philosophical monologue in a familiar, nervous-tic-ridden style, ending with a little shrug and the remark that, of course, death probably won&rsquo;t come to him for another 40 or 50 years at least! The line invites a laugh, but the chuckles stick in one&rsquo;s throat.

Ageing supernovas

So, oh dear, &ldquo;What do you make of it?&rdquo; is what appears to concern anyone headed for the United Art Fair in New Delhi.

Johnny-come-lately

The women&rsquo;s grand Prix at Ankara is heading for a tight finish. Two rounds to go; Anna Muzychuk leads with 7 points from 9 games. She&rsquo;s ahead of Koneru Humpy (6.5) after winning their personal encounter. These two have the best shot at coming second in the overall GP and thus, winning a chance to challenge Hou Yifan for the title. Essentially if either wins at Ankara, they clinch it. Muzychuk is obviously favourite but Humpy has an easier draw for the the last two games and hence, chances of catching up.

Chess (#1020)

Finance ministry officials say that they were close -- like chacha and bhatija.

The battle for IFCI

The store shelves are packed with &lsquo;Daisy&rsquo; dish wash bars and &lsquo;All About Men&rsquo; shaving products &ndash; all private labels of Tesco. The store issues Clubcard loyalty card, a popular loyalty scheme of the UK-based retailer. The colour combination, signage, space between aisles, the layout &mdash; almost everything looks the same as that of a Tesco store.

Tesco's imprint in Star Bazaar grows

Travellers at the Mumbai airport were in for a surprise recently. They were greeted by Volkswagen&rsquo;s flagship product Beetle. Not the original one, but a car made from scrap, which was a &ldquo;tailor-made&rdquo; out of home (OOH) advertisement designed by DDB MudraMax.

OOH: Hoping against hope

The Supreme Court&rsquo;s &ldquo;ban&rdquo; on tourism in &ldquo;core&rdquo; areas of tiger reserves has set the cat among the pigeons! Ironically, tourism was not the focus of the court order which was essentially pulling up nine state governments which had not notified core and buffer areas. It is only in the last sentence of the order that says that until final directions in the case &ldquo;core zone or the core areas in the Tiger Reserved Areas will not be used for tourism&rdquo;.

Too close for comfort

Prodosh Das Gupta was a leading light of the Calcutta Group of artists-with-a-conscience, from the fraught 1940s. Now, at long last, a retrospective of his works.

Man enthroned

India has sent its largest ever contingent to the London Games. But not every region is equally represented.

India at the Olympics

This isn&rsquo;t a hypothetical question. A proposal to organically clean-up and transform the city&rsquo;s 350 km of storm water drains &mdash; or nullahs &mdash; into a network of arterial water routes and landscaped passages for Delhi&rsquo;s pedestrians and cyclists has been floating around since 2007, when it was first created by architecture and design company Morphogenesis.

A city without a CEO

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