Auto analysts say Hero Honda's success formula combines Honda's engineering muscle with the Munjals' market savvy, including a knack for reaching customers in the countryside--which in India, as in China, is proving to be a source of growth in the current slowdown.
Of course there are downsides to living in the countryside - with seclusion and space come inevitably higher transport costs, poor mobile phone coverage and slower internet speeds - but the stats defy any notion that the English rural scene is threatened.
In 1975 he founded the artistic movement the Brotherhood of Ruralists - artists who had left the city to live in the countryside - with then-wife Annie Ovenden, as well as fellow artists Jann Haworth, Graham Arnold, David Inshaw, and pop artist Sir Peter Blake.
That was the emphatic, and damning, conclusion reached by Professor John Bourne, the man charged with assessing the biggest and most comprehensive scientific experiment ever conducted in the British countryside - the Randomised Badger Culling Trial, or RBCT, in June 2007.
The issue has never been tested in the courts - something the Countryside Alliance hopes to change when it applies for a judicial review on Friday.
Add to that the extraordinary talent in the kitchens of Dublin's Michelin-starred restaurants as well as in hole-in-the-wall cafes in the countryside, and you have nothing less than a culinary rebirth, a phoenix rising from the coal ash, deliciously.
In 2003 the government introduced a new medical-insurance scheme in the countryside.
As soon as you've confirmed your arrival to this stone manor in the tree-dotted countryside, lend your ears to sounds that don't require a plug-in.
Last August, Samuel Bail and Abel Samet, the 26-year-old former bankers behind leather accessories brand Troubadour Goods, sat in a roadside cafe in the Tuscan countryside, cold-calling manufacturers.
In cities, daughters are much less likely to move in with parents-in-law than in the countryside.
Liberalisation has had a similar, if less trumpeted, effect in the countryside, where three-quarters of Indians still live.
Women traipse in from the countryside with hand-knotted nets strapped to their foreheads, stuffed with cabbages, piglets and sometimes their babies.
At one end of a field in the mist-shrouded countryside near Thimpu, Karma Dhendup is lining up a distant target, 140 metres away.
Meanwhile, members of the local Countryside Access Group in the Borders have decided that - with some exceptions - visitors should now be formally welcomed back.
It took me three days and apart from when I was traversing two areas that had been government-mandated as "areas of outstanding natural beauty" - the Ashdown Forest and the South Downs - I saw a mere handful of people in the countryside.
In addition, he said, Big Robot turned to Kickstarter because the game, a "tweedpunk" horror title in which players are hunted by well-dressed robots in the British countryside, would be unlikely to win over a mainstream publisher.
During the programme, Charles - who set up the Prince's Countryside Fund in 2010 to raise cash to support countryside communities - is shown visiting some of his rural initiatives as well as a south London school which has seen improved exam results after helping pupils to grow their own vegetables.
They were promised preferential treatment after three years in the countryside when applying for civil-service jobs or for places in graduate school.
Now the theory is that delays to building fast-track rail lines through countryside or new runways in residential areas of the south east would shrink - creating jobs in the short term and improving productive infrastructure in the medium term.
Since its launch in November 2008 the Coke bus has been crisscrossing the countryside, targeting kirana stores in second- and third-tier cities, mostly in northern and western India.
French kids with an entire national tradition of great cinema are instead obsessed with "South Park" (Eric Cartman's face is more ubiquitous in the French countryside than bitter, entitled-feeling farmers).
Even in India, where some four-fifths of the population still live in the countryside and where Gandhian suspicion of consumerism runs high, the rising tide is improving lives.
The epidemic started in February this year and turned large swath of the countryside into no-go areas.
It needs the export sector to continue booming, in order to absorb surplus labour from the countryside and moribund state-owned companies.
The opposition also recognises the need for voter-education programmes to assure people, especially in the countryside, that the vote is secret.
The initial idea for Heyri was developed in 1995 by a Seoul-based arts collective that wanted a place in the countryside where its 380 members could reside and create art as a refuge from the big city.
The government is right to say that however wretched foot-and-mouth has made the mood in the countryside, nobody is in serious danger of being disenfranchised by it.
De Soto argues that the "surprise revolution"--the movement of millions from the countryside to cities--has been choked in its potential for uplift not because slum dwellers lack talent or energy but because the legal systems in their new locales don't allow them to be secure in ownership and accumulate wealth.
But while the effect of this new legislation will be felt in the towns and countryside, it is at Westminster where the decisions will be taken - and some MPs are saying that the Planning Bill is becoming as contentious an issue as the 42-day terror legislation.
During his first government, between 1998 and 2002, Orban's Fidesz party designated an annual Holocaust memorial day and after returning to power in 2010 banned uniformed groups like the Jobbik-affiliated Hungarian Guard, whose marches in Budapest and countryside villages were meant to intimidate Jews and Hungary's large Roma minority.
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