It's an elite but closed group. Bhupesh Bhandari analyses the list of India's richest people

Kuber's hundred

Business Standard

Carlsen's rating peak has focused attention on calculation methodology. Ratings have inflated since the launch in 1970.

Chess (#1034)

I have been using a Fiat Palio 1.2 since 2002 and now plan on replacing it with another hatchback with a budget of around Rs 5 lakh.

Ritzy business

Here's the ultimate automotive bucket list if money's not an issue

State of luxe

Godmen and spiritual societies are part of the lives of India's super rich

A matter of faith

If you are fond of rasogolla (known as rasgulla everywhere except Bengal), here is your chance to check out Chocogolla. Taking a fresh leap in the Indian chocolate market, Cadbury Dairy Milk is now for the first time tasting the sweetmeat sector which was dominated by unorganised local players till now.

Kuch mishti ho jaye

Around a thousand people had gathered at Shibpur, south of Kolkata, on an October morning to take part in the Shri Mahaluxmi Mahayajna being conducted by Swami Prakharji Maharaj of Haridwar. He was assisted by at least another hundred pandits, while 500 men, drawn from 15 states, chanted sacred hymns. Those in attendance were praying for industry to return to West Bengal.

Fear factor

I am a software engineer planning to buy my first car. I will be driving between 20-30 km per day, with an occasional drive to Mumbai or Nashik once in two months. I was wondering whether I ought to buy a 1.0-litre or 1.2-litre engined car, considering the price of petrol. I don&rsquo;t want to buy a diesel car. I want a car that is not too expensive to own or maintain, fuel efficiency included, and has decent leg room.

Training wheels

One thing that you can&rsquo;t accuse Sandeep Goyal of not having is ambition. And well, add to it a tendency to shoot straight, unmindful whether it&rsquo;s politically correct or not. For even after striking gold in the agency business &mdash; he sold his 26 per cent stake in ad agency Dentsu India back to its Japanese parent last year for a whopping, and yet unconfirmed, Rs 200 crore &mdash; Goyal apparently has no love lost for the industry he has often derided as shallow and petty.

Adman Turned Ad Entrepreneur

If you were hoping to see an Indian driver in F1 again, you&rsquo;ve got plenty of reasons to be happy. NARAIN KARTHIKEYAN is back in Formula 1, driving for the HRT team. The Indian had stiff competition for the race seat too, with Vitaly Petrov and Vitantonio Liuzzi also vying for the same spot.

Watch out for them!

The leading men played overtime in Rod Laver Arena in the homestretch of the Australian Open this year, and often exchanged pleasantries with Laver. Rafael Nadal expressed his gratitude that Laver, 73, one of the greatest to play the game, was courtside for their matches. Roger Federer, who has an affinity with Australian tennis, sat next to Laver in a television studio and compared notes with him on rivalries and eras. Novak Djokovic called him &ldquo;Mr Laver&rdquo; after meeting him for the first time and then apologised because nobody serves and volleys anymore. &ldquo;We are running around the baseline,&rdquo; Djokovic said. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m sorry about that.

Djoko Slam

Don&rsquo;t worry, it&rsquo;s all under control, just keep going slowly and don&rsquo;t steer too much.&rdquo; These were the words of wisdom that came from my jovial driving instructor, and on the face of it, the advice seemed perfectly straightforward and logical. The problem was, I was in the driver&rsquo;s seat, at a seemingly impossible angle, with my door almost touching the side of an embankment; had it not been for my seat belt, I would have slid quietly out of the window, sideways.

Touareg de force

A recent article in The Guardian about the top five regrets of dying people has attracted a lot of notice, especially on Facebook and other social networking sites. The subject is the findings of an Australian nurse, Bronnie Ware, who having spent most of her working life at the bedsides of the terminally ill, found herself in a pretty good position to author a book about what she learnt.

Things that count in life

One hundred years ago, the city of Delhi had a population of 233,000. There were less than a dozen motor cars and the telephone exchange had just 30 subscribers. To get a sense of what Delhi looked like then, it would be useful to place these numbers in context. Today, Delhi&rsquo;s population is close to 17 million, the number of registered vehicles is about six million and mobile phone connections alone are over 41 million.

Imperial vision

On Tuesday, the day after Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) issued a release announcing that it had asked for two reports on the Antrix-Devas deal central to the current storm engulfing the space agency to be made public, the chairman, K Radhakrishnan, finally broke his studied silence. In an interview to a Chennai-headquartered daily, he said, &ldquo;The truth is there... There is an Isro culture and there is a vision which is shared among all. There is a lot of openness in the system.

Troubled space

Here comes Amazon.com at last, sidling into India with Junglee.com. It is a suspiciously low-key entry, like a sneaky gambit in chess where a pawn footles forward only to clear the way for his queen. Whiff of brimstone but no heat of hellfire.

Law of the Junglee

Levon Aronyan won his third Tata Steel with a 2891 performance and healthy one-point lead. His rating climbs to 2824, within shouting distance of Magnus Carlsen who should be around 2834. Aronyan scored 9 from 13 (+7,=4,-2). Carlsen shared second-fourth with Radjabov and Caruana (all 8). Radjabov was the only undefeated player. In Group B, Harikrishna scored 9 (+6,-1,=6) to hold first place and win a promotion to the 2013 A Group with a 2738 performance.

Chess (#989)

It is only natural that the owner of a showpiece house should want to do it up with works of art as best he can. So it is with Delhi International Airport Ltd, and T3, the very large, state-of-the-art integrated passenger terminal at New Delhi&rsquo;s Indira Gandhi International Airport that the company unveiled in July 2010 to a lot of oohs and aahs.

Terminal art

A gown made of pleated organza held together with silver wire and semi-precious stones.

My Life My Style: Rudhra Kapur

At one of the writing courses I took at Stanford some years ago, I found myself sandwiched between a white-haired Holocaust survivor, whose short story glowed with a gentle luminescence and whose breadth of experience I could never hope to replicate, and a heavily made-up young girl in full Goth regalia who wrote with a brittle, glittering cynicism that belied her youth. Workshopping the stories of that writing group was an unexpected exercise in literary gluttony, as we sifted through fictional gems, mined from such an eclectic spectrum of experience.

The culture vultures

I took visitors frequently to the Other Criteria pavilion at the India Art Fair because it gave me a chance to pore over Damien Hirst&rsquo;s edition pieces. Not too many gave the beautifully foiled skull lithographs, or his pharmacy cabinets, a second glance, but his butterflies arranged symmetrically enough to please fastidious Indian aesthetics drew crowds through the day with their fields of &ldquo;diamond dust&rdquo;. By the last day, I&rsquo;d taken my wife&rsquo;s permission to sign up for one of the works at Rs 2.3 lakh, and so was both relieved but also dismayed to learn that all six pieces had been snapped up by a single buyer.

It's the season for buying art

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