    The payment industry is witnessing a new revolution where mobile readers that plug into a cell phone&rsquo;s head set jack are replacing traditional Electronic Data Capture (EDC) machines and the manual card imprinters.

Answers to last week's The Strategist Quiz (#250)

Business Standard

    Who said this and when &ldquo;We don&rsquo;t think that televisions and personal computers are going to merge.

The Strategist Quiz (#251)

Nokia India started the year 2012 on the backfoot. While it stays firmly ensconced in the No 1 slot in the mobile handsets market in India with a little over 38 per cent share in 2011, its dominance was under pressure.

Nokia's hopes ride on Asha

Facebook&rsquo;s hundreds of millions of users could soon be faced with a lot more advertising &mdash; in their newsfeed, on their mobile devices and even when they log off.

Substantial growth in ads is on the way to Facebook

Still at a nascent stage, music therapy for autistic children is slowly gaining ground in India.

Notes for change

There was a time when foreign correspondents wrote for readers in their home country. The very word evoked images of remote, faraway lands, exotic cultures and strange and unusual customs. These correspondents were authentic witnesses to world events and cultures and chronicled them, filtered through the lens of their own perspectives and personal experiences. Their narratives followed the standards of journalism as defined by their newspapers &mdash; but they were expected to add context to their copy, and often mined their own lives for the stories they wrote.

Digital avatars

Equipment helps athletes hit harder, swim faster, etc. Even more than physical sports, chess has been revolutionised by technology. Engines can routinely beat world champions and the best sell in large volumes though most are free, or low-cost. Chess programming is highly competitive with both academic credibility and money involved. Programmers sweat to develop search, evaluation and pruning functions that work better.

Chess (#992)

Ask a subaltern historian about the Mainstream Weekly and he begins thus: &ldquo;Ah, Nikhil Chakravartty&rsquo;s wife was also associated with the Communist movement, she was a CPI [the then-undivided Communist Party of India] MP. Renuka Chakravartty was very respected.

The marginal & the Mainstream

Cambodia has asked the United States government for help in recovering a thousand-year-old statue of a mythic warrior that sits in limbo at Sotheby&rsquo;s in New York and that some experts believe was looted amid the convulsions of the Vietnam War and the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge. The statue, a sandstone masterwork with a catalogue estimate of $2 million to $3 million, was pulled from auction at the last minute last March after the Cambodian government complained it had been &ldquo;illegally removed&rdquo; from the country.

The warrior of Koh Ker

Pankaj Munjal is the world&rsquo;s largest maker of cycles and supplies gearboxes for BMW bikes. Bhupesh Bhandari &amp; Sharmistha Mukherjee meet the lesser known Munjal.

The cycle king

The family vehicle, business solution, call it what you may, but the Toyota Innova is deeply entrenched, not just in the market but in the Indian psyche as well. As we&rsquo;ve realised in its over seven-year existence, it&rsquo;s also been our solution for many Which Car? questions that feature at the bottom of this page.

People's choice

It&rsquo;s the manufacturer&rsquo;s new Le Mans prototype, the one that it will be fielding in the 2012 6 Hours of Spa and then the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the most gruelling motorsport endurance event in the world. And it&rsquo;s also the first hybrid system to ever be used at Le Mans.

Quattro on track

I currently drive a Maruti Suzuki Swift Dzire VDi and have a monthly commute of approximately 2,000 to 2,500 km. I would like to purchase a diesel car that will be self driven, and am considering the Skoda Superb, Skoda Laura AT, Toyota Corolla Altis, Chevrolet Cruze and the Volkswagen Jetta. Comfort, mileage and low maintenance costs are my priorities.

Cruze control

Sitting inside the office of Alliance Merchandising in Okhla, one can&rsquo;t help but notice the works of art scattered across the swanky two-storey building. Sunil Sethi, the managing director and founder, gives me a guided tour of his office, &ldquo;a source of pride and joy&rdquo;. At the entrance is a colourful auto-rickshaw designed by Nitin Bal Chauhan, bearing the names of Indian designers such as Manish Arora, Raghavendra Rathore, Tarun Tahiliani and Rohit Bal. &ldquo;This is FDCI di gaddi (car),&rdquo; says Sethi. The conversation steers to his more high-profile role as president of the Fashion and Design Council of India, a not-for-profit organisation that serves as the apex body of fashion and design in the country, with over 350 members.

The Showman

Nadia Samdani, an art collector from Bangladesh, created a stir at this year&rsquo;s India Art Fair when she picked up an artwork by Rashid Rana even before the fair&rsquo;s official opening.

Collector's corner

I f the long arm of the state has begun to investigate NGOs, browbeat Internet websites, cancel the rights of television companies to record parliamentary proceedings, harass activists like the members of Team Anna and coerce the press, dissent in India will have only one option &mdash; it will take to the streets.

Importance of dissent

Re-creating the life of someone with as many talents as Devi Prasad &mdash; studio potter, artist trained in the tradition of Nandalal Bose, photographer and expert do-it-yourself (DIY) man &mdash; is surely an exciting task. More so when the curator of the 2010 exhibition of the same name happens to be the overall author of a visually sumptuous, well-researched book that skillfully uses stunning images interpolated with essays by experts on Devi Prasad&rsquo;s corpus of work spanning 65 years.

Free spirit

Here&rsquo;s a quick tip to stave off unfavourable reviews: in the preface, offer a number of reasons to justify the missing links in the book. Need an exemplar? Pick up journalist Rajendar Menen&rsquo;s new book, Karma Sutra.

Streetside stories 

It is indeed a Megu (&ldquo;blessing&rdquo; in Japanese) for lovers of Japanese cuisine in India. They have never had it so good with Japanese food, exquisite cutlery, finest sakes and wines backed by great service.

Plateful of Japan

The last decade saw contemporary artists scale up the size of their works thanks to prosperity that allowed them access to huge studios &mdash; whether Subodh Gupta&rsquo;s Very Hungry God, or Rashid Rana&rsquo;s digital collages, or Jitish Kallat&rsquo;s wall of fibreglass bones forming Mahatma Gandhi&rsquo;s speech at Charles Saatchi&rsquo;s gallery in London, or even Surendran Nair with his tongue-tripping names for his canvases.

Bigger is better

My Life My Style: Alok Kejriwal

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