A heavily-pregnant Vijetha and I exchange notes about baby names, marriage (or its ultimate futility) and Delhi&rsquo;s unrelenting winters. It would be no more than everyday banter if not for the fact that it is 10 pm on February 28, the very last day of Census 2011, and Vijetha and her family &mdash; among the many homeless in the capital city &mdash; have still not been counted.

They don't count

Business Standard

Has the time come to admit that Indian socialism is an elitist construct? This week in Mumbai at the release of the book on Fabindia (The Fabric of Our Lives, Penguin) written by Radhika Singh, some of India&rsquo;s leading hand-made people were asking themselves this question.

Absolutely Fabindia!

It&rsquo;s not possible to show India in just one portrait, says Sunanda K Datta-Ray, but Patrick French&rsquo;s new book treats us to a gallery of portraits.

Details and brushwork

Sometimes books create wrinkles in space-time. (I take that to mean that for some reason involving bodies with massive gravity, space-time bends so that a &ldquo;now&rdquo; and a &ldquo;then&rdquo; or a &ldquo;here&rdquo; and a &ldquo;there&rdquo; rub up unexpectedly against each other. It&rsquo;s the stuff of basic science fiction.) That happened recently when news broke of the death of Anant Pai, the &ldquo;Uncle Pai&rdquo; whose name adorned the hundreds of Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) titles of the average English-speaking 1980s Indian childhood.

Now and then

Gargi Gupta and Anamika Mukharji visit two homes that house experimental works of art.

At home with art

Priyanka Joshi finds out how online dating sites are catching the fancy of today&rsquo;s youth.

e-Cupid strikes

Many think he is too flamboyant to be taken seriously. But nobody can doubt Vijay Mallya&rsquo;s ability to spot a trend ahead of others. When he bought the Spyker Formula One team in 2007 for &euro;88 million and renamed it Force India, he built an instant association with a lifestyle sport that was catching up in India. Less than four years later, motorsport in India is ready to take wings.

Full throttle

No girl power

At a time when television and cinema are doing their best to steal the show, Marathi theatre is determined not to let the curtain come down on it. The vibrant medium, which was once bubbling with ideas and did not shy from experimentation, might not be as popular as it was in the not-too-distant past. But it is not about to let the spotlight fade away.

The show must go on

Mummy, Daddy, I want a louwe marriage,&rdquo; he sings, while alternating between a bright yellow-and-black auto rickshaw and dancing enthusiastically in an open field with a bunch of middle-aged Tamilian women who at times double over with laughter.

Simple Superstar

Days before the Delhi Commonwealth Games, swimmer Richa Mishra hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons. She, along with two other swimmers, had tested positive for methylhexaneamine &mdash; a banned substance. Though she had cleared the test of the World Anti-doping Agency a month earlier, this put paid to any hope she had to win a medal at the Games.

Out of stormy waters

It&rsquo;s a fallow period for top-level men&rsquo;s chess and all eyes are on the last (sixth) stage of the Women&rsquo;s Grand Prix in Doha. The overall GP winner will challenge Hou Yifan for the title. Koneru Humpy and Nana Dzagnidze both have a shot at this. The Georgian GM has an edge. She won their individual encounter at Doha. Humpy needs clear first and must also hope Dzagnidze doesn&rsquo;t manage clear second.

Chess #669

Move over Rajnikant. India has a new super-hero, a champion of right &mdash; the Supreme Court.

A new superhero

Sharing your location in real time via GPS-based devices on social networking sites can leave you vulnerable to cyber stalking.

Watch out...you are being watched

Last December was hardly a holiday season for Debu Bhattacharya, managing director of Hindalco, his key lieutenant CFO Sunirmal Talukdar and their core corporate strategy and finance teams. Even though Christmas was round the corner, Hindalco, the Aditya Birla Group flagship, was in the middle of reaching a crucial milestone to financially integrate Novelis with Hindalco and make cash fungible between the two. This exercise in turn would give Hindalco the much needed extra legroom and cash to accelerate its ambitious growth plans in India.

All the right reasons

The dual-SIM handsets market in India is set to grow at a steady pace despite Mobile Number Portability (MNP), say industry experts.

MNP not a game changer for dual-SIM mobiles

From health tips to free books, Google is set to woo its users with new apps.

Get ready for Android apps mania

Guerrilla marketing in its purest form is about achieving conventional goals using unconventional means. There are a lot of people using social media as a marketing tool, but many are still approaching it as if it were a conventional marketing media. There are spending a lot of time, energy and resources blasting out content, pitches, and generic slogans and offers.

Go guerrilla on social media

Companies expanding their footprint in other countries must first ask themselves why they are successful in their original businesses, says Harvard Business School Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor and Harvard University South Asia Initiative Director Tarun Khanna. When not spearheading courses on strategy, corporate governance and international business for MBA students and senior executives at Harvard, he serves on the boards of global companies from different sectors. Khanna also mentors startups in Asia. In conversation with Sayantani Kar, Khanna says few companies introspect on their core strengths before seeking growth in new markets. Khanna&rsquo;s experience with companies and investors in emerging markets worldwide has seeded his two books, Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India are Reshaping Their Futures and Yours (2008) and Winning in Emerging Markets: A Roadmap for Strategy and Execution (co-authored in 2010).

Q&A: Tarun Khanna, Professor

The world&rsquo;s largest truck maker Daimler recently unveiled BharatBenz, a brand, as the name suggests, tailormade for the Indian market. This will be the auto behemoth&rsquo;s fifth brand in the global truck portfolio which includes Mercedes-Benz, Mitsubishi Fuso (Japan), Freightliner and WesternStar (United States). In India, Daimler also handles the sales and after-sales of Mercedes-Benz Actros, a premium range of trucks targeted at the mining segment.

Daimler: Stepping on the gas

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