After several spy shots and lots of speculation, BMW took the wraps off the facelifted 7 Series some time in May this year. And with the time fast approaching that this car will head to Indian shores, we thought we&rsquo;d preview it for you. The update to the 7 Series is fairly thorough, touching on everything from the looks, interiors and chassis right down to the powertrain options as well.

Lucky Seven!

Business Standard

Tony Scott&rsquo;s films &mdash; Top Gun the best known of them &mdash; made a lot of money.

Pop touch

I want to buy a vehicle to go off-roading and am considering buying the Land Rover Freelander 2 HSE. I&rsquo;ve heard a lot about the car, but would like your opinion about it and its off-roading capabilities as well. Are there better cars that I must consider? My budget is between Rs 54 lakh and Rs 60 lakh.

Four by four

In the years after Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced his Valentine&rsquo;s Day fatwa, declaring that Salman Rushdie deserved death for writing the Satanic Verses, the author went into hiding. Asked to choose an alias by his security team, he picked Joseph Anton, honouring the writers Conrad and Chekhov. This long-awaited memoir is about the fatwa years, but it is also about writing as an act of survival, defiance and faith.

Picks of September

I am reading one now. The Vanishing Face of Gaia (Penguin, 2009) is by James Lovelock, the man behind the Gaia hypothesis.

Apocalypse when?

Violence and unrest refuge to die down in the Bodo heartland of Assam, which had erupted following the killing of two persons on July 19. Close to 80 people have since been killed in the conflict, and almost half a million are in relief camps. The air is rife with rumours. Communal frenzy is at its peak. Is the conflict a result of the xenophobia of the indigenous Bodo people (they have in the past clashed with Santhals, Adivasis and even Assamese settlers), the illegal migration of Muslims from Bangladesh, or the power struggle between two factions of the ruling Congress? It could be a mix of all three. The truth will probably never come out. What the killing fields of Assam have done is turn the spotlight once again on the issue of illegal immigration of Bangladeshis into Assam.

Borderline case

The reality of 21st-century life is that many of us are forced to travel frequently on business. This is likely to be true whether you are a software engineer, journalist, banker, airline pilot, sports star, Bollywood actor or a professor. Sometimes it is fun but often it is mundane and tiring: the jetlag, the long wait in the airport lounge, the search for taxis in an unfamiliar and wet city, the expensive but uniformly tasteless food. The hotel is then supposed to be a refuge, a home away from home.

Lip service Only

I am happiest in the kitchen,&rdquo; declares Aditya Bal, wiping beads of sweat from his forehead. As we talk, his attention keeps flitting towards the kitchen at Seven, the Pan Indian restaurant at The Suryaa in Delhi. Though he&rsquo;s been on his feet for over four hours, &ldquo;cooking up a storm&rdquo;, there&rsquo;s no trace of exhaustion as he prepares to host a cookout for some friends and family.

'Food was my saviour'

The Grand Slam season of 2012 in tennis comes to a close with the commencement of the US Open on August 27 at Flushing Meadows in New York. Grand Slam events attained world-wide popularity after they were thrown open to professionals in 1968. Till then only Wimbledon attracted attention in India with players from the country participating to a larger extent than in the other three majors, viz., the Australian, the French and the US.

Will FedEx be dispatched?

Every so often, when the world has a fortnight like the one just gone, I think about Douglas Adams&rsquo;s The Hitchhiker&rsquo;s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy of four books. If you haven&rsquo;t read them, please put down that copy of Fifty Shades of Grey and start immediately. It is the most useful guide to life ever, after the instruction manual that comes with the average phone, which today looks much more like a NASA console than any NASA console ever did.

Take me to Squornshellous Zeta

Big Banyan wines are unique as they source the grapes from the Nashik area, but produce and bottle the wines in Goa, while deriving their inspiration from an actual 400-year old Banyan tree 30 km from Bangalore, off the road to Mysore.

Alok Chandra: High on Indian wines

Watching Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jason Statham in one film on the big screen seemed to be a great nostalgic trip down the action-packed memory lane. And The Expendables 2 promised &mdash; at least its promos did &mdash; exactly that. But the 90-minute film is a letdown. There&rsquo;s no story, the plot&rsquo;s weak, but then when have we ever expected a great story in a film which stars Stallone or Schwarzenegger? We go looking for action, and to his credit, director Simon West provides some decent action sequences. Beyond that there&rsquo;s nothing. Literally nothing.

All that muscle

Garry Kasparov was a high-profile visitor to the Pussy Riot trial, where three women were jailed for singing an anti-Putin song in church. While talking to media, Kasparov was arrested and manhandled in public. He faces a charge of having bitten a police officer&rsquo;s hand. Video evidence (including clips aired on BBC) suggests the officer was undamaged &mdash; both his hands are visible. The former world champion, who is a bitter and outspoken critic of Putin, says he will counter-sue.

Chess (#1015)

In the tiny village of Raneri almost 400 miles southwest of New Delhi, where women wash dishes in the sand to conserve water, and electricity is scarce, Lakha Khan sat on the floor of a stone hut, legs crossed and white turban in place. There he coaxed a bright, high-pitched, dizzyingly fast melody from his violinlike sarangi.

Song of the Desert

Most intelligent people I know agree that high-quality criticism &mdash; whether it&rsquo;s positive or negative &mdash; involves a considered perspective, backed with knowledge and expressed with clarity (and perhaps some flair too). The reviewer should be honest about his own responses to the work in question and not become unduly influenced by the stated intentions of its creator; D H Lawrence&rsquo;s dictum &ldquo;trust the tale&rdquo; is still as useful as it ever was.

The arm's length critic

&quot;Hey chinky, why are you wandering around?&rdquo; Regina, a 24-year-old from Manipur, has been living in Bangalore for the past five years, but this was the first time she had been accosted in this manner near her house. The one-room apartment she shares with her brother is in Austin Town near Neelasandra, identified as a trouble spot by the police. Three people from the Northeast had been attacked by two locals in the area last Friday.

Three days that shook Bangalore

S P Shukla, Mahindra Group&rsquo;s strategy and chief brand officer, fondly remembers the celebrations that followed Mahindra Racing&rsquo;s first ever victory at the Italian Mugello Circuit earlier this year.

Mahindra's brand play

The brand, born as part of William Hollins &amp; Co in 1744 in Nottingham, England, was mainly known as a hosiery maker to begin with, and later turned its attention to menswear.

Heritage brand's new look

At the Auto Expo held in January 2012, one of the highlights at the Hero MotoCorp pavilion was a rather unusual two-wheeler concept, targeted primarily at women. Called the Leap, it was an electric scooter which used a small petrol engine as a range extender and to charge the battery. Hardly anyone knew that the scooter concept was conceived and developed in just 10 weeks by a little-known American company which specialises in performance-oriented motorcycles.

Hero bikes to get aggressive edge

Friends came to its rescue when the pug, the Zoozoos and sirji&rsquo;s &lsquo;what an idea&rsquo; began to eclipse its visibility. Friends, each of whom is unique, and went viral to give Airtel the much needed leg-up, are back this year with a new story. While last year the attempt was to show how one could stay connected with all the friends one couldn&rsquo;t do without, the idea this year is to focus on sharing. Which means from an accent on mobile connectivity last year, the focus has shifted to the internet as the delivery platform in 2012. And the earlier youthful rendition of &ldquo;Har friend zaroori hai&rdquo; has evolved to &ldquo;Jo mera hai woh tera hai&rdquo;.

A friend in need

Remember the little boy, enticed to return home with the lure of &lsquo;jalebee&rsquo; on TV? Behind the ad was Dhara, the edible oil brand, which brought in a lot of firsts to the Indian market. The first to sell branded packed edible oil and in tamper-proof pouches by Tetra Pak, Dhara had come up with many other memorable campaigns. However, of late it had not been on the airwaves.

Dhara: A new mantra of marketing

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