The Rs 300-crore Reliance Broadcast Network (RBNL) forayed into television about two years ago. Its five channels include Spark, a Punjabi channel mostly showing dubbed CBS shows; Big Magic, a general entertainment channel for the Hindi heartland; and Big CBS Prime and Big CBS Love in English. It will launch another Hindi action channel, Big RTL, soon.

The potpourri network

Business Standard

Back in February, a Japanese scientist made a forecast which should have had India worried right away. Toshio Yamagata, head of the Application Laboratory of Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, warned that the Indian sub-continent will experience a weaker monsoon this year. Around the same time, World Weather Inc. in the US cautioned that India should brace up for a relatively dry spell in August and September.

Consistently inconsistent

Even if you play the most offbeat openings, it is mathematically guaranteed that you will play some positions with both colours. Popular systems like the Spanish, the Queens Gambit and the Sicilian regularly see this switcheroo. There have many world title matches where the same positions have been handled repeatedly by both players with colours transposed.

Chess (#1010)

Perhaps the time has come to acknowledge that as journalists we will never be able to tell the whole story unless we carry a documentary camera in our hands.

Hagiography not needed

We live in a paradoxical moment. In the rapidly transforming motion of India is a place of pause. A moment of repose. Where time lingers for tide. A waiting place, that seems to epitomise the great Indian mindset, forever in a static state of wait. Waiting for leaders to lead, waiting for rules to be followed. Waiting for the train to arrive, waiting for the poverty to depart. Waiting for electricity to come, waiting for roads to go on. Waiting for a message to beep or for opportunity to knock. Waiting for a better job or waiting to retire. Waiting for a queue to begin, waiting for corruption to end. Waiting for incomes to rise and waiting for rains to fall, waiting for the corrupt to fail and for a prime minister to achieve&hellip;.we wait and wait and wait, making a virtue of patience and tolerance bordering on the point of meditative coma.

The endless wait

Sandel is a well-known professor of Harvard University and the author of the iconic book Justice. He is also known for making his course of the same name available freely, both online and on television. His latest book continues his argument that the world has become more marketised and financialised but maybe, at some point, we should stop arguing that the markets know best.

What money ought not to buy

Faith and Hope

Anurag Kashyap&rsquo;s Gangs of Wasseypur has won universal acclaim as a realistic film on the coal mafia of Dhanbad. Amitabh Bachchan described it in his blog as &ldquo;Indian cinema at its best; honest, stark and as painfully real as possible.&rdquo; The film is based on the rivalry between the Pathans and Quraishis, which starts before Independence when a Pathan begins to impersonate Sultana, a Quraishi dacoit, and loot trains. Here the facts begin to get a little mixed up. Sultana was active not in Dhanbad but in the terai region of present-day Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh. And Sultana was a Hindu, not a Quraishi.

The real Sultana Daku

The Batman. Yes, he&rsquo;s not Batman but The Batman. The definitive article has been one of the many consistent elements of Christopher Nolan&rsquo;s Batman trilogy that may have gone unnoticed. And with The Dark Knight Rises (TDKR), Nolan proves yet again that with a powerful cast, gritty dialogues and stellar performances, you can make a viewer feel sorry for a billionaire with the fastest cars in town.

Knight of all realms

When Facebook founder and billionaire Mark Zuckerberg surprise-wed girlfriend Priscilla Chan, celebrity-watchers were agog to know whether the two had signed a prenuptial agreement, or pre-nup. A few days before the wedding, much-married fellow-billionaire Donald Trump had advised him to do so on CNBC, while a celebrity divorce lawyer was quoted as saying that if Zuckerberg hadn&rsquo;t, he should consult a psychiatrist.

Legally bound

Oprah was here in January, and the footage is now on her talk show.

O for India

Five landmark films &mdash; banned, censored or frowned upon &mdash; come to Osian&rsquo;s-Cinefan.

Lights, camera, censorship

A brilliant column by Alex Williams in The New York Times has been the talk of social networks.

Pajama party at 40

Bangladeshi couple Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani are enjoying their status as Serious Art Buyers, the rush that comes when prices rise and fall on the basis of their patronage. Art consumers get an adrenaline rush from their shopping lists because they wield a power that doesn&rsquo;t occur when you splurge, for instance, on a luxury car, or a watch. But spend on art and you can expect to be feted with champagne, and can ask for and probably get caviar served up for your morning face-pack. The Samdanis are recent entrants to this privileged set, invited to power lunches and dinners hosted by auction houses in London and New York where they might discuss their experience at Basel among the cognoscenti, or share their bewilderment about Documenta in Kassel.

Knights of the art

Four exciting but affordable motorcycles are on sale right now.

Fantastic four

I am looking to buy a new petrol car for my short commutes in Kolkata. The car will mainly be chauffeur driven. I have been considering the Tata Indigo petrol and also Maruti Suzuki Swift Dzire. My primary concern is fuel efficiency, however, I am not looking at the diesel versions of these cars.

Petrol preference

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh may be taciturn but is always politically correct. Every word is carefully weighed before it is uttered. It is impossible to make him say anything even remotely controversial. Recently, after taking over the finance portfolio, he said in an interview that strategic investors were still bullish on India and &ldquo;the pessimism in the media and the markets is far more than reality&rdquo;.

Hooked on India

Rrishi Raote tracks how world press opinion on Manmohan Singh has changed between 1991 and 2012, from &ldquo;Singh is King&rdquo; to &ldquo;poodle&rdquo;.

Politician by accident

You know, I had a humble beginning and my life was not as luxurious as it is now.&rdquo; So says Raj Kundra, descending the staircase in his Rs 24 crore beach apartment in Juhu, sensing my awkwardness in the presence of riches.

Man of the match

Barring the odd soundbyte around the official launch a few weeks ago, Spanish beverage major Aje, the owner of Big Cola, a brand strong in Latin America, has opted to maintain a low profile in the Indian marketplace - the fourth Asian country it has stepped into after Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia in the last few years.

Can Big Cola live up to its name?

Back in the 1990s, when Reebok launched its (then) highly successful range of Pump sneakers in the US, a couple of interesting things happened. Despite being almost 150 per cent more expensive than a comparable pair of sneakers, the Pump was selling really well, even more so in urban centers, and among the key opinion-influencer set of urban African-American youth. Two side effects of this were (a) youth taking to robbery and mugging to either steal the shoes or obtain the means to buy the shoes (b) fakes on the street, being lapped up by those who couldn't obtain the real deal, by hook or crook. Marketing legend has it that Reebok did nothing to discourage either of these two effects, and, in fact, went on to encourage the latter.

Is your brand a fake yet?

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

Page 1282 - Supplements