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The essays in this collection focus primarily on six major business sectors in India: airlines, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, hospitality, food, and telecommunications. An essay on each sector describes the market structure, the current state of the sector, the main players, the key economic forces, and selected business strategies.

The authors describe how the sector might evolve during the next five to ten years, within the broad canvas of the deeper economic and demographic transitions that are taking place in India, and in turn, what this evolution implies for the challenges and opportunities that companies, both domestic and multinational, may face in India. Essays on the emergence of the Indian consumer, the effect of credit cards on India’s consumer culture, and entrepreneurship and India’s poor the emergence of the Indian Consumer round out this profile of India’s market.

In Winnowing, Suzanne Matson examines our personal, cultural, and environmental relationship with material objects. Matson alternates between reflective essays on the nature of ownership and her own “Winnowing Log,” a day-by-day account of her attempts to reduce the items in her home. Sorting through the emotional value of mementos, the gendered dimensions of housekeeping, and the environmental cost of both mass production and disposal, she physically, mentally, and spiritually lightens her life while reflecting on the tethers that make winnowing so hard. She compares ideas of material impermanence in Stoicism, Buddhism, and Christianity, acknowledging that total renunciation of things is beyond most people’s goals or abilities, but also that reducing what we own, carry, and tend can clear space for spiritual lightness, aesthetic pleasure, and freedom. Rather than a celebration or condemnation of material goods, Winnowing is a meditation on the personal and universal struggles and rewards of separating the chaff from the grain.