The editor of Hindu Business line’s brand supplement Cat-a-lyst, Prasad Sangameshwaran, came up with a novel idea of creating themed cryptic crosswords based on brand names.

I was intrigued by the concept and determined to execute it successfully, although still new to setting crosswords.

It was a win-win experience and between January 23rd 2014 and July 31st 2016, I successfully created 127 themed crosswords for the publication.

These were well received by solvers but had to be discontinued due to my time constraints, owing to other commitments.

Based on my request to the editor and his full backing, we were pushing for an interactive version of the crossword to be made available very early on in this publication. This was developed by HBL’s  IT team through proprietary software and rolled out in February 2014, starting from the 6th brand crossword.

A feather in our cap was that these were the first Indian crosswords that could be solved interactively on the web.

Here is a link to the puzzle page from the Businessline archives