At the Mr Intercontinental contest in Germany, Goan fashion designer Savio Bruto de Costa, 25, used the power of pontification and his own designing skills to get him the 1st runners-up prize. In the costume round the model paraded an "emperor's outfit", a Costa original, and later gave a prolonged response to the sitter "What if you discovered that your ideal woman was married?" Here's an abbreviated version: "It would not be the end of the world ... all are brought to the world with a certain purpose ... in this long journey a lot of people might not fit in this category ... but some may even be better". The judges, taking a breather from pithy replies, were generous.

Commercial Star

Being a co-star in a commercial is a vaunted position in the glamour loop ... just a step away from being the lone star in a commercial. But Oriya girl Bhavna Pani, 19, who appears with Sourav Ganguly and Hrithik Roshan (and his alter ego, his thigh-size biceps) in an ad, has moved on, playing an actress-turned-rocker in Sanjay Gandhvi's Tere Liye. Says Pani, now on a south Indian film signing spree while doing a BA from Mithibai College: "I'm not a star son or daughter, so I have to struggle." Well, ask Abhishek Bachchan if he ever had it easy.

Winter Wedlock

"The bells in my head started ringing," says actor-writer Tara Deshpande, 26, about the time when she first saw Daniel Tennebaum, a student of Harvard Business School on a trip to India. The latter seemed to have heard the same conjugal sounds: the two were married in a Jewish ceremony in the US this April-he's a Jewish American-and will in January 2002 dress up for a traditional Maharashtrian wedding in Mumbai. But this isn't a goodbye: Deshpande has four films being released starting end-January (Danger, Prashnchinh, India Phir Bhi No. 1 and a Hindi-Tamil bilingual with a title she "can't pronounce"), her next book will be ready for release, and then there's theatre ... Oh yes, she'll be around.

All for a Match

The alliance of a sharp-featured international cricketer and a shapely national actress is the kind of stuff through which sensation hacks pay public homage to a private friendship. When Rahul Dravid walked in at a party thrown by Sourav Ganguly (his boss in more ways than one) with Raveena Tandon, incendiary rumours naturally followed them like a fielder after a ball. Apparently the two had been introduced to each other by Ajay Jadeja and later Dravid, in rare attacking mood, tracked Tandon down in Bangalore. The actress, however, having watched too much Dravid on TV, is on the defensive: "Can't I even meet a guy without the magazines going ballistic?" She knows the answer.

-Compiled by Methil Renuka