Higher education in India is poised for an unprecedented expansion, marked by an explosion in student enrolment, a substantial growth in the number of institutions and a quantum leap in the level of investment in education. The challenge of providing equal opportunities for quality higher education, to an ever-growing number of students, is also a historic opportunity for correcting social imbalances, strengthening institutional framework sand surpassing international benchmarks of excellence. India, with half its population below the age of 25, is set to either reap the demographic dividend, or plunge to disaster depending on how the youth are educated. This is both a &lsquo;challenge and opportunity&rsquo; that all stakeholders need to address by charting out a path and, most importantly, implementing it with discipline.

KIT: Higher education in India

Business Standard

    One of the cartoon characters owned by Hanna Barbera is also a brand name for a range of children&rsquo;s multivitamins sold in the US. Name the cartoon characters and the company.

The Strategist Quiz (#266)

General Motors (GM), the third biggest advertiser across all media in the US after Procter and Gamble and AT&amp;T, stopped advertising on Facebook in May as it found paid ads on the site have little impact on car purchases. But Indian brands &ndash; both big and small &mdash; don&rsquo;t seem to be sharing that pessimism.

Facebook's growing ad footprint

Big Bazaar, the 164-strong hypermarket chain of the Future group, seems to be following its tagline &lsquo;Naye India Ka Bazaar&rsquo; (New India&rsquo;s bazaar) quite faithfully.

Makeover at Big Bazaar

Last month, policemen in Naxal-infested Gadchiroli carried out a dramatic exercise to show that they were serious about enforcing the Maharashtra government&rsquo;s ban on gutkha or flavoured tobacco. They seized gutkha sachets worth Rs 30,000 from the market, piled them up in the main square and set the lot on fire. States have declared war on gutkha.

Gutkha warriors

P Chidambaram begins his third round as finance minister with a change of guard. He has assembled about himself a crack squad of six economic executors and advisors. Much is expected of them, not least because the government finds itself under attack for its handling of the economy and deferral of reforms, and partly because the fiscal challenges are truly daunting.

The Six Samurai

Barf bags out, earplugs in. We are listening in to an august debate on a vital national issue as we write this.

Hot and sour politics

Around this time every year, the who&rsquo;s who of the world of heritage cars heads to California, specifically to Monterey Bay. It&rsquo;s a week-long celebration of classic and vintage cars, with the grand finale being the Concours d&rsquo;Elegance, held at the 18th fairway of the Pebble Beach Golf Links. The breathtaking location overlooking the Pacific Ocean will play host to around 200 of the rarest and the most beautiful pieces of automotive art in the world.

Hit the Beach!

The Second World War is one of the most assiduously studied events of world history, not just because its relatively recent vintage yields an abundance of material &mdash; official documents, newsreels, radio broadcasts, documentaries and reminiscences. That war also shaped global politics and personal lives in ways that still impact us. That is why the world may have witnessed longer wars since then &mdash; Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan &mdash; but the flood of books on the Second World War rarely abates. The opening up of Soviet and Iron Curtain archives after 1991 provoked a spurt of &ldquo;new&rdquo; histories, (such as Andrew Roberts&rsquo;s The Storm of War) though few have lived up to their promise.

Cause & effect

Before its public unveiling at the upcoming Paris Motor Show, Land Rover took the wraps off the next generation Range Rover this week. After the success of the radically different Evoque, Land Rover is filtering some of those styling cues to their flagship model as well. Fear not though, you won&rsquo;t mistake this car for anything else &mdash; it&rsquo;s still unmistakably a Rangie, just with some modern cues.

Cooking Rangie

Ever since he died exactly a month ago, there have been various attempts to explain the Rajesh Khanna phenomenon. His success, though short, was unprecedented and surpassed only by Amitabh Bachchan. A documentary made in the 1970s catches various facets of his persona, but does not explain his superstardom. Some analysts have said that viewers were fatigued with the triumvirate of Dev Anand, Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor. There was a gap, and Khanna walked right in. But that is forcing a connection between events to make a case. You could find some answers in The Best of Quest (a collection of stories, essays and poems that came out in the well-known magazine; the book was published by Tranquebar Press last year), in essays written by &ldquo;D&rdquo; &mdash; Dilip Chitre.

Destined to die, again and again

Indian Landscapes: The Changing Horizons&rdquo;, which opened yesterday at Delhi Art Gallery, is a big show. Not just in numbers, which at 220 works is formidable, but also in its ambition and execution. It documents the evolution of the genre of landscape art in India over three centuries, from the late 18th century to contemporary times. As Ashish Anand, DAG&rsquo;s director, says proudly, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s something that no one has ever attempted before.

Lie of the land

I presently own a 2007 model Tata Indica Xeta. I would like to buy a new sedan within a budget of Rs 5 to Rs 6 lakh. I need the vehicle to be fuel efficient, have good seating and space and be low on maintenance costs too. I have shortlisted three vehicles &mdash; the Maruti Suzuki Swift Dzire, the Ford Classic and the Toyota Etios.

Space ace

Nominated for the Turner prize in 2007, a participant at Documenta in Kassel in 2002, Uganda-born, London-educated and highly-awarded Zarina Bhimji&rsquo;s is not a name many Indians are familiar with. Yet, the artist &mdash; or, actually, photographer &mdash; isn&rsquo;t without distinction. I chanced upon her name in a column in FT&rsquo;s How To Spend It that quoted the Whitechapel Gallery&rsquo;s Iwona Blazwick as saying that she hoped to pick up an edition of a work by &ldquo;a photographer who is a bit under the radar&rdquo;. &ldquo;Indian&rdquo; photographers don&rsquo;t often merit attention in the UK press, far less among discriminating collectors or curators, so Bhimji &mdash; who won the New York International Center for Photography&rsquo;s Infinity Prize in 2003 &mdash; must have registered her presence forcefully among the cognoscenti. Not that she&rsquo;s a star &mdash; yet.

Under the radar

The waters of Alappuzha&rsquo;s Punnamada Lake are cleaved apart by one magnificent snake boat after another, as crews of over a 100 each row for their lives.

God's own oarsmen

The Toronto International Film Festival will showcase its largest Indian presence in 37 years.

Bollywood's biggest fan

The Walther rifle was lying ice-cold in the safe. Scores of pellet boxes were kept unopened. Abhinav Bindra was feigning sleep when the five a.m. alarm rang for practice. It was an anomalous situation. For 14 years, Bindra had been waking up at three a.m. to practice at his home range if an idea suddenly dawned on him. Now, the shooting range was locked up, indefinitely. When I met him three months after his Beijing triumph, Bindra was sporting a cheerless look on his face. I had thought it was a simple case of motivational problem. I was way off the mark. It was a not-so-simple case of Post-Olympic Depression Syndrome (PODS), as he would later confess in A Shot at History: My Obsessive Journey to Olympic Gold. The struggle to become a champion doesn&rsquo;t end in 9.67 seconds. The struggle invariably begins the day after.

Now what?

Julian Assange is hogging the headlines yet again. In what promises to be a well played out drama in the media, Britain and Ecuador are set for a face-off, after Ecuador granted the Wikileaks founder asylum, and the UK swore to smoke him out of the Ecuador embassy in London and extradite him to Sweden. The fear is that an eventual arrest of Assange for sexual misconduct in Sweden will be used to hand him over to the US for embarrassing the Obama administration. In all of this, governments may be foolish in assuming that punishing Assange will help clamp down on the Wikileaks brand of open information. In the new age of web warriors, they may be setting the ground for a losing battle.

Hero or villain?

It&rsquo;s a widely acknowledged fact that after flying our kites into the rain-laden skies of Independence Day, insisting our children watch the proverbial film on Gandhi, singing our national anthem with unusual patriotic fervour, and then donning fashion statements that compete with the tricolour, we will go back to our disjointed daily mundane. Disconnected from north to south and east to west.

The notion of a nation

One of the most colourful characters in chess, the Yugoslav (later Serbian) GM Svetozar Gligoric (1923-2012) died recently in Belgrade. &ldquo;Gliga&rdquo; came to international chess late. A committed follower of Marshal Tito, he spent WWII playing a deadly game of catch-as-catch-can with the Wehrmacht.

Chess (#1014)

Rekindling the old romance or seducing a new love, whatever the reason, Godrej Consumer Products Limited (GCPL) is back to flirting with the air care category after a gap of two years. The company has launched its air freshner brand, &lsquo;Aer&rsquo;, setting its sights on the air care market for the home as well as car segment simultaneously.

Fresh 'Aer' in air care market

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

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