It's been a year since I've relocated from India to work in China. I've an old habit of mentally tracking business groups and their bosses, and figuring who's the tallest of them all.
The Olympics-induced buzz about cupping and other forms of Chinese healing could have been a new impetus to the occupation.
According to property data base numbeo.com, Beijing rates as one of the most unaffordable cities to buy in the world with a price to rent ratio of 39.88, on par with white-hot London. It can keep going up, of course, but the room for future major increases seems more limited, and corrections possible.
Like many mobile phone users, I have only one cellphone, but keep three chargers handy. I put them in my home, my car and my office to ensure that my iPhone 6 Plus doesn't run out of power anytime, anywhere. If I go out for a meeting or an interview, a portable battery charger is a must-take item, more crucial than a notebook, a pen or a recorder.
I used to cringe at the sight of people pulling apart crayfish, a popular summer dish for Chinese urban residents.
Reports on love-filled, business-boosting celebrations of Qixi, the Chinese Valentine's Day, last Tuesday, gladdened my heart.
"Will home prices in Beijing still go up in the second half year? Shall I buy an apartment right now?"
During my vacation in May in Europe, I had my first experience of peer-to-peer accommodation, an important component of the now trendy sharing economy, and found it pretty cozy.
In Beijing, changes take place fast, either for better or for worse. So overnight, a bustling section for businesses of all kinds has been shut down and turned into a messy construction site.
The rate of Chinese companies making overseas investments has more than doubled since last year. They often have a business model designed to bring technology and foreign business practices to the huge domestic Chinese market－a much better-defined plan than the Japanese, who were mostly purely financial investors, ever did. But, still I worry that they are paying too much.
Generally, Indian and Chinese film industries equate overseas expansion with a presence in the United States and Europe, and finding audiences among sizeable diasporas there. Kabali and Baahubali could prove potential game changers.
China's new infrastructure will also be a game changer, promoting businesses and ideas in ways that are impossible to predict.
The elderly care sector may still be at a rudimentary stage. But I am sure it has a promising future, given the sheer size of China's elderly population.
A weekend visit earlier this month to a duty-free shop near my apartment in Beijing rekindled my bitter-sweet memories of the store about two decades ago and showed how fast the shopping behavior of the Chinese has changed since then.
A news snippet about a con caught my eye last week. A Hangzhou court handed a life term to Cai Jincong for conning 1,200 investors.
The International Federation of Robotics estimated the supply of industrial robots in China increased 40 percent a year on aver-age between 2010 and 2014 and said this rapid development is unique in the history of robotics.
Recent reports that a new plaza offering a 24-hour shopping experience is enjoying brisk business in an eastern city has led me to expect that more such bricks-and-mortar outlets will spring up in other cities.
Two years ago, I visited Bicester Village, the shopping mecca near Oxford that from morning until late evening every day, was besieged by bus-loads of Chinese tourists who left laden with shopping bags.
The coffee shops, internet cafes and startup incubators in the Zhongguancun area of northwestern Beijing are packed with young and aspiring entrepreneurs.
Sad, shocked and terrified. That's how I woke up to the news that the United Kingdom had voted to leave the European Union.
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