When someone like Bal Thackeray dies, spare a thought for the harried people at 24x7 news channels. Clearly, a flurry of calls were made to leaders cutting across party lines, and celebrities of all sorts for suitably sonorous and sombre reactions to Thackeray&rsquo;s death on Saturday. Every single news-channel editor needed a quick quote over the phone &ndash; or &ldquo;phono&rdquo;, as they&rsquo;re apparently known in the industry. In all the chaos, some wires can get crossed. One sufferer in consequence was Minister of State for Shipping and South Mumbai Member of Parliament Milind Deora, who was startled to receive a call asking what he, (the late union minister) Vilasrao Deshmukh, thought of Thackeray&rsquo;s death. A disgusted Mr Deora tweeted angrily: &ldquo;Just got a call from a news channel asking me for a phono. I was also asked if I&rsquo;m Vilasraoji. Pathetic! I obviously declined.

TV's crossed connections

Business Standard

Liquor baron Ponty Chadha who was killed during a shootout with his brother, Hardeep, is not the first Indian businessman who met with a violent end.

A few more businessmen who were killed...

The arrest of two women in Palghar (near Mumbai) for an innocuous Facebook status update is the latest indicator of an increasing intolerance of free speech, especially online. The state has also increased its surveillance. The focus on surveillance and censorship is evident not only in specific instances but also in the statistics. In February, the government said it taps 300 new phones on an average day. Google&rsquo;s latest Transparency Report says India also generates the second-largest number of requests for content takedowns and information about user accounts. Between January 2012 and June 2012, India made 2,319 requests for user data from 3,467 accounts and 273 requests for takedowns. Google complied with only 64 per cent of those requests, which means the rest did not meet legal standards, even under the provisions of Indian law. Many requests were for the removal of content &ldquo;defamatory &rdquo; to sundry politicians, and &ldquo;government criticism&rdquo;.

Absurd arrests

In an interview with the Press Trust of India on Sunday, Finance Minister P Chidambaram explained that there was no &ldquo;antagonism&rdquo; between his ministry and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Citing a recent trip that he took with RBI Governor D Subbarao to a G20 meeting in Mexico, he said that there he had &ldquo;spoken to several governors and several finance ministers&rdquo; and &ldquo;the relationship is exactly the same&rdquo;. The government &ldquo;argues the case for growth&rdquo;, presumably the central bank argues for taming inflation, and then a decision is made. It is welcome that Mr Chidambaram has taken a step towards clearing the air. Some recent public pronouncements had begun to worry observers. There is a thin line between arguing a case and appearing to put pressure on a monetary authority whose hard-won autonomy is, in historical terms, relatively recent.

Worrying disconnect

The government&rsquo;s move to set up a permanent tribunal for resolving inter-state water disputes makes little sense. Given the dismal record of tribunals, both present and past, in settling bitterly contested water rows and states&rsquo; minimal compliance with their awards, it would be futile to expect results from the proposed new tribunal. If the objective behind this plan is to expedite the dispute disposal process, as seems to be the case, it is unlikely to be served.

Water nonsense

Amid the furore of another controversial arrest &ndash; of a young woman in Mumbai &ndash; under the draconian provisions of the IT Act, many people are recalling an exchange at the recent India meeting of the World Economic Forum in Gurgaon. A panel dedicated to developments in the online world, especially in terms of freedom of speech, featured the presence of Information Technology and Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal, who has been the focus of many complaints about the increasingly oppressive nature of India&rsquo;s online policing. At some point, Ajit Gulabchand of Hindustan Construction Company told him sternly that whatever he may or may not actually feel about the subject, &ldquo;he was a different man once in the government&rdquo;. The reference, presumably, was to Mr Sibal&rsquo;s legal career outside the government, where he has famously defended several high-profile targets.

The charges of office?

Bal Thackeray and Indira Gandhi had a few similarities. Both were aggressive, undemocratic in their ways and with a mind of their own. Thackeray wore &lsquo;Marathism&rsquo; on his sleeves. He will be remembered as a man who took on one and all, if he had a different point of view. On his demise, his son Uddhav will no doubt try hold his flock together. But with Maharashtra politics already divided into four parties, it remains to be seen if Uddhav Thackeray can stay afloat.

Letters: Balasaheb and Indira

Everyone&rsquo;s trying to take advantage of the festive season, it seems. Even, apparently, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), which splashily launched gift packs of soaps and other beauty products during Diwali. The special VHP twist? The products &ndash; all organic, of course &ndash; feature various products of the cow. The GouBrands Organic Products Company has named its soaps Maharani, Maharaja, Rajkumari and Rajkumar. Some of them have jasmine, lavender and chocolate (&ldquo;Rajkumar soap expresses the naughty and sharp Rajkumar with a rich chocolate flavour&rdquo;), but VHP assures its customers that all the antiseptic properties of cow urine (&ldquo;arka&rdquo;) are fully retained in the soaps. The soaps are being sold in &ldquo;limited edition&rdquo; boxes during Diwali and Pongal till the New Year. And, of course, you could buy them for Christmas gifts, too.

Antiseptic season

This refers to Sreelatha Menon&rsquo;s column &ldquo;A joke called NREGS&rdquo; (Ear to the Ground, November 18). In his book Swaraj, Arvind Kejriwal notes that siphoning off Central funds by government officials can be tackled by devolving untied funds upon villagers directly. In this context, uninformed and often scheming gram panchayats, usually pulling in different sectarian directions, are already struggling to effectively utilise untied funds available to them. A sudden inflow of large funds under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) will worsen the situation. If only political and administrative will could be mobilised to ensure near-full implementation of NREGS in a responsive manner, this one scheme could change the lives of a vast number of currently disempowered people of India in a short span of time.

Letters: Hopes from NREGS 

Apropos the editorial &ldquo;Bal Thackeray&rsquo;s true legacy&rdquo; (November 19), there is a need to know the reason for Thackeray&rsquo;s huge popularity among unemployed Maharashtrian youth. An impartial examination would perhaps reveal that the cosmopolitan Bombay of the 1960s and 1970s was arrogantly and rabidly anti-Marathi speakers. Second, opportunities in the job market then were denied to Marathi-speaking youth in an unfair manner. That led to Thackeray&rsquo;s early successes. Moreover, it is noteworthy that a national party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, gave respectability to Shiv Sena&rsquo;s politics by forming an alliance.

Letters: Rabidly anti-Marathi?

This refers to the editorial &ldquo;Defend your choices&rdquo; (November 19). It seems the key personnel in the UPA government and the Congress party carry a personal vendetta against the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) for exposing the mega scam through his statutory audits. The CAG had given three estimates of presumptive losses relating to the 2G spectrum auction of 2008. They were based on data provided by the government. And it was the Opposition and the media that hyped the Rs 1.76 lakh loss, not the CAG.

Letters: Blaming the CAG

The government&rsquo;s concerted attack on the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) is more than worrying: it misses the point. And it reveals a clear lack of understanding of what serves India in terms of policy. The peg, of course, is the recently concluded, Supreme Court-ordered 2G auction to replace the licences handed out by the telecom ministry under A Raja in 2008. The low incomes from the auction have led Union ministers to question the CAG&rsquo;s computation of presumptive losses in the earlier spectrum sale. They have called the 2G scam figure of Rs 1.76 lakh crore a myth and said that such calculations sensationalised the issue, in addition to restricting the space in which the government could operate. Certainly, the CAG came up with figures for presumptive losses that many believed to be an overestimation. But it presented three scenarios depending on which the amount could have been between Rs 57,000 crore and Rs 1.76 lakh crore.

Defend your choices

It is encouraging to see a lot of Indian companies across industries engaging customers in the digital landscape. While some have successfully created high volumes of conversation across various channels including blogs, forums, and social media sites, others are reportedly engaging customers through contests, humorous videos and events on social media.

Connecting the digital way

    The town is referred to as the &ldquo;first filling station in the world&rdquo;. It is part of the Bertha Benz Memorial route. In August 1888, Benz drove in one of Benz&rsquo;s newly-constructed&nbsp;patent Motorwagen&nbsp;No. 3 automobiles from Mannheim to Pforzheim, becoming the first person to drive an automobile over more than a very short distance (about 104&nbsp;km). On the way, she had to find&nbsp;Ligroin, a&nbsp;solvent&nbsp;available only at&nbsp;dispensing chemists&rsquo; shops, to use as fuel. Thus, the still existing Stadt-Apotheke in&nbsp;Wiesloch became the world&rsquo;s first&nbsp;filling station.

Answers to last week's quiz (#279)

Some of the most vocal opposition to the cap on LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) cylinders has come from within the government. Food and Civil Supplies Minister K V Thomas, in particular, has written to the prime minister seeking a review on the cap, as it would hurt the Congress electorally. It &ldquo;will not go well&rdquo; with voters, especially the middle class, he said. Mr Thomas&rsquo; opposition, caused one senior Congress Cabinet minister to apparently ask what it was about Congressmen from Kerala that made them as left as the Left &ndash; referring also to Defence Minister A K Antony&rsquo;s well-documented concerns about free trade arrangements and foreign investments. Mr Antony has spoken out in Cabinet about the former, and held up foreign direct investment into the defence sector after it was cleared by the commerce ministry.

As left as the Left?

Even as Mumbai shut down in paralysed anticipation of possible violence surrounding Shiv Sena chief Balasaheb Thackeray&rsquo;s death on Saturday, other parts of Maharashtra were wracked with violence over sugar cane prices. As one Delhi wag put it: &ldquo;They say Delhi is the city of dynasties. But it&rsquo;s Mumbai where royal family dynamics play out on the street.&rdquo; The reference was to the widely-believed &ldquo;secret story&rdquo; behind the disputes over sugar cane prices &mdash; the open differences between Nationalist Congress Party supremo Sharad Pawar and his assertive nephew, Ajit Pawar. The younger Mr Pawar has been feeling sidelined of late; and it is generally assumed that the farmers protesting a lower-than-acceptable price for their sugar cane harvest from refining mills are part of an attempt to pressure his uncle, and remind everyone of the power he wields.

All in the families

The continuing collapse of the India story is generally supposed to have taken its toll of foreign investors&rsquo; optimism. Yet not all foreign corporations are the same. Asked about subdued growth and other issues on the sidelines of an event in Mumbai recently, a senior official with a storied foreign bank commented that the &ldquo;media might not believe in the country, but we believe India has great potential&rdquo;. His company&rsquo;s belief and optimism were unchanged, he added. On being asked why, he pointed out that, perhaps, his corporation had the benefit of perspective, and an institutional memory of times that were much more difficult: &ldquo;We have been here for the last 150 years. We will be here for the next 150 years at least.

Foreigners and foreigners

The tape-recorded interview of the minister of state in the Prime Minister&rsquo;s Office, V Narayanasamy, leaves no doubt about the government&rsquo;s intention to make the Comptroller &amp; Auditor General (CAG) a multi-member body. The CAG has reported a number of mega scams of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government.

Letters: Weakening the CAG?

In the column &ldquo;Mumbai state of mind&rdquo; (Worm&rsquo;s Eye View, November 17), the writer laments his two-hour travel time from the city to Vashi for a lecture once every week. Imagine the plight of millions of commuters, who live in several new habitations from Panvel to Vashi &mdash; spending more than two hours each way daily to reach their offices in the city, using the rickety and strained Harbour Line via Kurla. Earlier, a proposal was made to build a road-cum-rail bridge connecting Nhava Sheva with Sewri. That would have vastly reduced their travel time. But, two years back, the state government arbitrarily announced that it was dropping the rail portion of the plan, without giving any reasons. The newspapers also did not comment &mdash; many did not even notice. Later, even the road bridge did not take off.

Letters: Disconnected lines

Sangeeta resides with her 2 children in their self-owned flat in Thane. Just a year back, her husband died due to cancer. Being the sole earning member, Sangeeta juggles between her job as a teacher in a private school and giving private tuitions at home in the evening to supplement her income.

Case study

Industries like agrochemicals, seeds and fertilisers have corrected considerably. The valuations seem appealing at current levels. Similarly, engineering businesses, too, have underperformed due to a sluggish business environment and high interest rates. India cannot do without infrastructure and fresh asset creation, if it has to grow at seven per cent plus. Hence, sooner than later, the business environment for these companies will start turning around. However, investors would need adequate patience, to get returns out of stocks in these sectors.

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