American war reporter Marie Colvin was killed early Wednesday as Syrian forces shelled the city of Homs. Her mother, Rosemarie Colvin, talks to James Barron about her gutsy daughter.

A fearless fighter

Business Standard

I wonder how much of Vijay Mallya&rsquo;s troubles have to do with his public image. Perceived hedonists make pretty soft targets when the chips are down. Don&rsquo;t believe me? Ask Dominique Strauss-Kahn who is a copybook case for the adage &ldquo;give a dog a bad name and hang it&rdquo;. Today, anything that is sleazy and of a sexually perverse nature can be attached to DSK&rsquo;s name by his political rivals &mdash; regardless of whether it&rsquo;s true or not.

What Mallya's PROs should have told him

I initially opened this book out of idle curiosity.

Divided loyalties

In this day and age, when we take for granted the fact that fossil fuels are the only means of powering our cars and bikes, it&rsquo;s easy to forget that during the dawn of motoring, over a hundred years ago, there was no certainty about how vehicles were going to be powered on a long-term basis. Ferdinand Porsche, bless his soul, gave the world some of the greatest fossil fuel powered cars of all time, but when the Beetle was but a twinkle in old Adolf&rsquo;s eye, Porsche built the world&rsquo;s first electric hybrid. If you visit the Ford museum in America, you will see cars there from the company&rsquo;s history that are powered by various sources, including electric vehicles. Gasoline, back when Karl Benz pioneered the gasoline powered car, could only be bought in small quantities at pharmacies, if you can believe it; clearly, the word was still out on the best way to power cars.

Octavia media

A racer, an innovative motorcycle engineer, a designer, a businessman running a motorcycle firm and a motorcyclist at heart, all rolled into one. In his early-20s, Erik Buell was a part-time road racer who worked as a mechanic by day and as an engineering student by night, after which he landed a job at Harley-Davidson (H-D). During this period, Buell started building and improving upon his own prototypes and that eventually led to the launch of the Buell RR1000 in the market, the first Buell streetbike. Buell&rsquo;s bikes were so innovative and impressive that H-D picked up a majority stake in the firm by 1998 and Buell Motorcycles went mainstream.

Buell run

Corbett National Park has for years captured the imagination of nature lovers and adventure seekers. The country&rsquo;s oldest national park, located in the Nainital and Pauri districts of Uttarakhand, is home to the Bengal tiger and the Asiatic elephant. Its wild residents include about 50 species of mammals, 600 kinds of bird and 25 types of reptiles. Armed with his camera and a passion for adventure, Sunil Samuel Pew gets up close and personal with them as he makes his way through the mosaic of habitats in Corbett&rsquo;s Sultan-Gairal-Dhikala area.

A walk on the wild side

With the award season in Hollywood coming to an end, the nominees are now gearing up for the biggest night &mdash; the 84th Annual Academy Awards which will be telecast in over 225 countries on February 26. While speculation is rife and predictions are already being splashed across news channels, the Academy is known to surprise many with its final decision.

Three actors and the Oscar

I want to buy a premium sedan with a budget of Rs 11 lakh. The options available are the Honda City, Hyundai Verna, Ford Fiesta, Fiat Linea, Mitsubishi Lancer and the Volkswagen Vento. I am looking for driving pleasure, looks, features and good after sales service.

Good City-zen

Omkar Das Manikpuri, the farmer of Peepli Live, has his hands full. He speaks to Veenu Sandhu about his films and dream role.

Natha has been found

Deposit your camera in the cloak room,&rdquo; says the elderly man behind the counter as he issues the entry pass at the Virasat-e-Khalsa in Anandpur Sahib, the magnificent, 250,000-square-feet monument, built at a cost of over Rs 250 crore, commemorating 500 years of Sikh history and 300 years of the Khalsa Panth. A crowd of at least 100, young, old, college and school groups, queues across the huge complex waiting to see what it holds for them.

A walk through history

Anyone who studies cinema &mdash; or reads film literature at a level beyond magazine gossip &mdash; must sooner or later stub his toes on the Auteur Theory. The debates around it are too many to properly discuss in this space, but here&rsquo;s a condensation: in the 1950s, a group of French critics &mdash; who championed popular American cinema and drew attention to the artistry in many genre films &mdash; proposed that some directors imposed a unified artistic vision on the movies they helmed, even while working within the constraints of the studio system or under the watchful eye of a money-minded producer. Thus, though filmmaking is a messy, collaborative process, certain movies could be seen as bearing the stamp of a single distinct personality. Cinema, even commercial cinema, could be a deeply personal art form.

The star as author

Why is there something, rather than nothing at all? It is, perhaps, the mystery of last resort. Scientists may theoretically be able to trace every galaxy back to a bump in the Big Bang, to complete the entire quantum roll call of particles and forces. But the question of why there was a Big Bang or any quantum particles at all was presumed to lie safely out of scientific bounds, in the realms of philosophy or religion.

Before the Big Bang

From bursting into tears to breaking racquets or turning abusive, tennis greats have been known to give in to emotional outbursts. A Seshan looks back at some such classic moments.

Tears and tantrums on the tennis court

The contours of the next two title cycles (until 2016) are becoming clear.

Chess (#991)

Last week I visited what surely is the best and biggest new winery in India in the last 10 years: Alpine Winery, situated about 120 km from Bangalore, off the road to Mysore.

In the Alpine winery

&ldquo;Ladies and gentlemen, try and imagine this area empty as far as you could see,&rdquo; says Sunil Raman to his small flock of about 20 sneakers-clad walkers. Around us is a swathe of churned-up, dusty land just beginning to show signs of paved paths and occasional sandstone markers. A few labourers tinker in the distance, the women wearing bright saris. To one side is a patch of kikar trees. Beyond the low walls is the intermittent racket of a road that leads out of a busy market.

A bureaucratic triumph

In most organizations, the decision-making freedoms of frontline employees are highly circumscribed. Sales reps, call center staff, office managers, and assembly line workers are usually trussed up in a strait-jacket of rules and procedures. I believe that&rsquo;s a problem, for it&rsquo;s impossible to unleash human capabilities without first expanding the scope of employee autonomy. To create an organization that&rsquo;s adaptable and innovative, people need the freedom to challenge precedent, to &ldquo;waste&rdquo; time, to go outside of channels, to experiment, to take risks, and to follow their passions.

Reversing the ratchet of control

A BCG report finds that women control almost two-thirds of the global consumer spending.

The consumer is the queen

Full-page ads scream &lsquo;Global&rsquo;, &lsquo;India&rsquo; and &lsquo;Adani&rsquo;, waking up the morning reader to a brand new group. The Rs 33,000-crore, Ahmedabad-based Adani conglomerate is in the throes of a makeover aimed at transforming it into an Indian multinational that has operations across the globe.

Will the Adani makeover work? 

With 50 per cent of the Volvo Buses&rsquo; business expected to come from Asia by the year 2015, the company is looking at India with renewed vigour. In conversation with Rajarshi Bhattacharjee, Akash Passey, senior vice-president, Business Region International, Volvo Bus Corporation, and chairman of the Board, Volvo Buses India, lays out the company&rsquo;s growth trajectory in the country.

A comprehensive bus transit system costs almost one-tenth of a metro system: Akash Passey

The television commercial opens on a group of mango vendors. It is the fag end of the mango season and the three vendors prepare to try their hand at a new trade. One becomes a dentist, another takes a shot at palmistry and the third wants to prove his mettle as a mechanic. Bad decision. They just don&rsquo;t seem to get their act right. As they loll under a tree thinking what next, a boy sitting on the tree springs a surprise.

Anytime, anywhere mango

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