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Articles in December, 2005 issue of Business Today

• London Cheerleader
  by Sahad P.V., Venkatesha Babu, Ananda Banerjee, Kushan Mitra and Amanpreet Singh
• "India Has Bwecome, In Many Ways, The Driver"
• Five Years After Their market shares may be just about respectable, but India's private sector insurance firms have changed the industry's complexion in a mere five years.
  by Anand Adhikari
• India's Only Real VCs WestBridge Capital Partners' Sumir Chadha and K.P. Balaraj are the only India-focussed venture investors to be still betting big money to start-ups. So, what do the know that others don't?
  by Sahad P.V.
• The Promise Of Protection Actually, with unit-linked insurance plans all the rage, it is more the love of lucre that calls the shots in the life insurance business.
  by Anand Adhikari
• Wall Street And America Don't mistake Wall Street for just a stock market. It's where, says a new book, America lives and dies every day.
  by R. Sridharan
• List of companies in BT 500 and the other 500
• Insuring The Insurers Who needs reinsurance? As 7/26 proved, everyone does.
  by Anand Adhikari
• The Call Centre Muse India's best-known success story has also emerged a source of ideas for filmmakers and writers.
  by Amanpreet Singh
• Retail Jobs, Help, Taru!, Jobs For Teachers & Animators, Money, Growth And Satisfaction
  by Amanpret Singh, Tarun Sheth, Shailesh Dobhal
• The Temple Builders Of New India L&T and IVRCL have ridden the boom in the construction sector to scale greater heights. They have also taken steps to protect their margins and profitability. And they are both bullish about the road ahead.
  by Mahesh Nayak and E. Kumar Sharma
• Traditional Sector, Engineering Jobs, Help, Tarun!, As Real As You Hear, Procurement Jobs For Engineers...
  by Archna Shukla, Tarun Sheth, Amanpreet Singh, Kumarkaushalam
• Childhood Lost Over 500 children were recently rescued from the zari factories of East Delhi. Kumarkaushalam spent a day trying to understand their world.
  by Kumarkaushalam
• Weather & Weddings Too The general insurance industry is slowly rolling out innovative products, but unless the business is deregulated, companies can't be too creative with their offerings.
  by Anand Adhikari
• Birthday Parting
  by Amanpreet Singh, Rahul Sachitanand, Sahad P.V. and Krishna Gopalan
• India Connecting Partners Vodafone paying $1.5 billion (Rs 6,750 crore) for 10 per cent of Bharti Tele-Ventures is big, but the interest of several European telecom majors in the world's fastest growing wireless market indicates there's plenty of action w
  by Krishna Gopalan
• BT 500: The Other 500, Companies 501-1000
• For A Winning Hand Winning is about "knowin' what to throw away, knowin' what to keep", sang Kenny Rogers. This is true for your portfolio too.
  by Mahesh Nayak, Anand Adhikari, Krishna Gopalan, Nitya Varadarajan, Sahad P.V., Ritwik Mukherjee
• Fast Moving, Once Again The Rs 48,000-crore FMCG sector is finally getting over its two-year- old sales slump. Is it just a buoyant economy thing?
  by Kumarkaushalam
• Business News
• Ragnarok Redux In which Kushan Mitra and his alter ego Grey Drako get acquainted first-hand with India's first Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game.
  by Kushan Mitra
• India's Famous IT Brigade Add wealthy to that descriptor. TCS, Infosys and Wipro haven't just separated themselves from the pack, they are breathing down the neck of global heavyweights Accenture, IBM and EDS.
  by Priya Srinivasan and Venkatesha Babu
• Power Play Having engineered a turnaround, CESC now has big-ticket expansion plans that go beyond the boundaries of Bengal.
  by Ritwik Mukherjee
• Globalisation's Underbelly Globalisation of markets has also promoted the growth of illicit trade, contends a new book on the subject.
  by Sanjoy Narayan
• The Long-Term Rx If Indian pharma's frontline leaders are not looking good, consider it as a short-term bottomline blip. With smart partnerships, strong product pipelines and a tight control on costs, the future is definitely not bleak.
  by Sahad P.V. and E. Kumar Sharma
• A Pioneer's Progress
  by E. Kumar Sharma
• Big Just Became A Lot Bigger ONGC is leveraging its core competence to enter a host of other fields. The mission: straddle the entire oil value chain and extract every paise worth of value in it.
  by Ashish Gupta
• The Kind of Good Times (and Bad)
  by Venkatesha Babu
• Start-up Troubles
• "We Have Made The Highest Returns From Internet Investments"
  by Sahad P.V.
• Promise And Performance
• India's Most Valuable Public Sector Companies
• Business News
• Whose Fault Is It Anyway? IPOs will make you rich overnight. Really? See these graphs? They are price charts of companies that made IPOs recently. An inside view of IPO valuations, spin masters and what lies beneath.
  by Mahesh Nayak and Krishna Gopalan
• The Deming Champions India Inc.'s quest for global quality throws up another three winners- Krishna Maruti, Rane Engine Valves and Rane TRW Steering Systems-of Japan's prestigious Deming Prize. What makes these companies quality champs?
  by Alokesh Bhattacharyya (Box by Nitya Varadarajan)
• Ready To Fire Engineering and construction giant Larsen & Toubro has ambitious plans of working jointly with the public sector in crucial, big- ticket areas like defence, avionics and shipbuilding. The PSUs, though, don't appear so enthusiastic.
  by Brian Carvalho additional reporting by Venkatesha Babu and E. Kumar Sharma
• Slowing Dragon, Rising Tiger? The impending slowdown in China will boost India's economy. But we'll still take years to catch up with our northern neighbour.
  by Ashish Gupta
• Makings Of A Duopoly Move over P&G, Nirma and Colgate Palmolive. Hindustan Lever is up against a big, driven and deep-pocketed new competitor, ITC. The market braces for action as the two consumer market Goliaths prepare to lock horns.
  by Shailesh Dobhal and Ritwik Mukherjee
• Marked To Market Use index funds to soup up your portfolio without taking on more risk.
  by Mahesh Nayak, Vaishna Roy, Anand Adhikari, Sahad P.V., Krishna Gopalan
• SAFTA: A Trade Bloc For Us? Opening up regional trade is a great idea, but for it to work, our neighbours-especially Pakistan and Bangladesh-will need to overcome their fear of India.
  by Ashish Gupta
• The Birth Of A Listing 13 years after its creation, the higher echelons of the BT 500 now feature companies from sectors as varied as steel, automotive, banks, organised retail, biotech, pharmaceuticals, software, consumer products, media and entertainmen
• "We Want To Dominate Both Rural And Urban Markets"
  by Anand Adhikari
• Treadmill, Mind Your Memory, Printed Circuit
  by Muscles Mani, Roopali Joshi, Kushan Mitra
• BT 500 India's Most Valuable Private Sector Companies
• Is There A Deal In The Making At Sony? It has no shows in the top 50, no news-to-movies bouquet like its rivals, or even a long-term strategy for distribution. So what is Sony Entertainment Television waiting for?
  by Archna Shukla
• Treadmill, All About Blackberry Thumb, Printed Circuit
  by Muscles Mani, Manu Kaushik, Kushan Mitra
• Fast At Fifty on NH 8 Enfield's Bullet turns 50 this year. A one-time Bullet-rider rides a new-age Bullet and realises that nothing has really changed.
  by SN
• Where Value Creation Is A State Of Mind Demergers of some crucial businesses may wreck Mukesh Ambani's integration plans in the short run, but the RIL Chairman is back doing what he knows best: Blueprinting, and executing, projects with size, scale and a
  by Krishna Gopalan
• Can The Maharaja Get His Chin Up?
  by Kushan Mitra
• "Rural, Social And Health Sectors Need Attention"
  by Anand Adhikari