What does the world's largest collection of information gatherers have to do with Business Today's 10th anniversary issue? Everything. The world's largest collection of information gatherers is, arguably, the team of independent experts-call them freelancers if you will-who work for a magazine called Whole Earth. The organisation behind this publication is a San Francisco based not-for-profit venture called The Point Foundation. The magazine itself, first published in 1974 under the title Co-evolution Monthly, is the spiritual successor to The Whole Earth Catalog, which was founded by Stewart Brand-then a beatnik and now a management consultant to some Fortune 500 corporations-in 1968.

The magazine, to quote from its mission statement, ''has broken ground-thinking long and hard about the design of market systems and ecosystems, spirituality, scientific and poetic discovery, social change, and upending technologies.'' The Catalog itself won a National Book Award, and, in the 1970s, served as the holy book of the counter-culture. Point Foundation published several updates of the Catalog, the most recent being the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog.

Business Today's tenth anniversary issue is inspired by the Whole Earth Catalog. It offers, in this age of capsuled-nirvana, easy-to-ingest packets of information on anything and everything to do with business in India-in the past, in the present, and in the future. And in keeping with the Catalog's presentation philosophy, none of the articles you will find in this issue are long-the longest takes up all of a page-and the headlines are distinctly encyclopaedic in nature. That means, just this once, we'll let you in on what lies in store in a piece through the headline. Thus, timelines are called, well, timelines; an item on the Sensex is headlined just that, 'The Sensex'; and graphics are used to simplify data, not obfuscate it. The irony of it all is that the Catalog was meant to present a 'non mass-media' and 'non big-business' history of ideas, and the theme of this issue-business in all its capitalist glory-could be construed by Brand & Co. as an insult. Sorry.

You can read this C-clone section by section; there are 12 of them to choose from-Economy, Governance, The Stockmarkets, Banking, Economic Revolutions, Entrepreneurs, Business Families, Organisation, The Consumer, Media and Communications, Society, and Cities. Or you can jump sections mid-way, hopping from a piece on stockmarket scams to one on commercial capitals of the past. That will be akin to zapping channels. And unlike television, where there's usually nothing good to watch on any channel, you are sure to find nuggets that captivate you in this publication. Last word: no item will take you more than five minutes to read. That's a promise.