I am trying to decide between the Toyota Corolla Altis and Volkswagen Jetta. Performance, rear-seat passenger comfort and overall cost of ownership are concerns. Diesel or petrol is another dilemma. I will drive about 40,000 kilometres annually spread across both city and highway driving. I will be upgrading from a Honda City. Please advise.

Long distance runner

Business Standard

Restaurant magazine&rsquo;s list of the world&rsquo;s 50 best restaurants comes as close to being the definitive listing as you could get, with a panel of judges drawn from all sections of the industry.

Absent: Indian cuisine

Bhupesh Bhandari on how to read the undisputed master of Urdu poetry and writer of remarkable letters.

Unravelling Ghalib

Five years after the first report linking the high incidence of cancer in Punjab to excess use of pesticide came out, the cancer train is still running full.

Punjab's killing fields

Harsh Mayyar, the child star of award-winning film I Am Kalam, tells Aabhas Sharma he is confident hard work will help him achieve his dreams.

An ignited mind

The past month has seen the deaths of many film performers, most famously Elizabeth Taylor, who was everyone&rsquo;s idea of what a Movie Star should be: someone who is the natural centre of every frame she appears in. Stories about Taylor's screen presence &mdash; right from the time she was a little girl, in films like National Velvet &mdash; are the stuff of legend, and her most high-profile film as an adult, the bloated, forever-in-the-making Cleopatra, seemed to be more about the actress than the Egyptian queen.

They also served

India&rsquo;s eternal quest to find a genuinely quick bowler continues.

Need for speed?

Importing and marketing wine in India is quite a challenge (if one does it legally) &mdash; the intrepid importer has not only to comply with multifarious requirements and demands of central customs and state excise departments, he also has to convince the somewhat jaded hotel managements and retailers to stock and sell their wares.

One hurdle after another

The Euro Championships ended with a controversy regarding the tie-breaker system, with Peter Heine Nielsen pointing out how it&rsquo;s illogical. That has sparked a massive debate about alternatives.

Chess (#676)

India is the new battleground for the world&rsquo;s largest hotel brands as they scout for growth outside the saturated Western markets. Europe&rsquo;s largest hotelier Accor Hotels, which has invested $250 million (Rs 1,125 crore) in India already, is also on an expansion spree. After a first few failed partnerships in the 1990s, the company&rsquo;s partnership with InterGlobe (for Ibis) and third party management contracts (for Novotel and Mercure) have been fairly successful, claim sector experts. Riding on a strong domestic demand, the brand is now eyeing the luxury segment. It will launch luxury brand Sofitel (Mumbai) and upscale brand Pullman (Gurgaon) sometime this year. The company also sees opportunity in the budget segment and will bring its Formule 1 brand to India this year. In conversation with Preeti Khicha, Accor Hotels Chairman and CEO Denis Hennequin outlines the group&rsquo;s ambitious plans for the Indian market.

Q&A: Denis Hennequin, Chairman & CEO, Accor Hotels

They certainly move markets! Whether they are tablet computers that are such a rage, smart phones and their apps, social networking, compressed digital formats (such as MP3) replacing CD players, e-books nudging paper books aside, or extreme skiing, rap music, boutique hotels, reality television, our interest in nutrition (organic/bio becoming increasingly preferred) &mdash; you name it, they&rsquo;re all about ideas. These new ideas are displacing old ones. Someone gets a new idea, it catches on and the world is changed. Not as easy, of course, as it sounds; but, in truth, that&rsquo;s the way it works.

The hunt for new ideas

To leverage the equity of the Fem brand, Dabur India has launched a hand sanitiser under the Rs 100-crore brand. Fem Safe Handz will add to the current roster of face bleach and hand wash available under the Fem umbrella. Like most players in this segment, Dabur&rsquo;s entry is a natural extension of its hand wash product, say analysts.

Dabur India: Safe, not sorry

Sanitaryware brand Hindware has unveiled a new brand identity to connect with the youth. The new logo, set in red (earlier it was black), looks to position it as a young, global, vibrant and dynamic brand, which symbolises &lsquo;change, positivity and passion&rsquo;. It unveiled the new logo among 400 of its distributors recently in Agra.

Hindware: Hindware turns red

CONNECT THE DOTS
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The top 10 business bestsellers

Assisted reproductive therapy helps infertile couples in conception and pregnancy. It encompasses various procedures, ranging from the relatively simple intra-uterine insemination (IUI) to variants of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), commonly known as the test-tube technology.

KIT: Assisted reproductive therapy in India

    This breath mint brand, established in Europe in 1927, is in many ways responsible for the birth of a $9 billion online company. Name both of them.

The Strategist Quiz (#198)

    Which brand plans to release a game in which the players will move a ball through an obstacle course using only the power of their minds? Opponents at play must use headsets that pick up brainwaves to levitate and move the ball to opposite ends of the board.

Answers to last week's quiz (#197)

With an increase in the availability of licensed music, an overwhelming number of music lovers in India are opting to download music to their devices (computer, mobile phones and music players, among other gadgets) instead of buying music CDs.

Users dump CDs, move to digital music

One may argue that group-buying sites are here to stay, with the established global players like eBay India and Groupon making a bid for the same.

E-commerce sites battle it out with group-buying sites 

Yahoo India grew twice as fast as the market last year. The reach (measured as the number of unique users visiting Yahoo in India as a percentage of total internet users in India) increased from an average of 65 per cent to 81.4 per cent during the period, according to latest comScore data.

Yahoo clicks after reboot

Tata Motors and Ashok Leyland have been locked in a battle for leadership in the bus segment for quite some time now, with each having around 43 per cent market share.

Volvo, Merc buses speed up in India

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

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