Austrian Felix Baumgartner faced a slew of dangers during his attempt to break the altitude record for a freefall jump, from the edge of space, on Sunday.

The dive of a lifetime

Business Standard

Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), the two big state-controlled telecom companies, have written to the government asking that it bear the entire cost of the additional spectrum assigned to the two giants. Under the recommendations that are before the Empowered Group of Ministers, or EGoM, all telecom companies with more than 4.4 gigahertz of spectrum are to pay a one-time fee for it.

Govt must exit telecom PSUs

It is not clear whether cricket spoilt them or they spoilt cricket. But the parents of most IPL teams are in trouble, financial and otherwise &ndash; some neck deep, others a tad lower.

It's not just Cricket

I am 32, working and want to buy an online life cover of Rs 50 lakh. My wife (30) is a homemaker and we have a two-year-old daughter.

Life Insurance: Deepak Sood

Investors continue to be wary of the stocks named by social activist-turned politician Arvind Kejriwal. Eight out of the nine stocks including DLF, GMR and Indiabulls Real Estate lost between 0.75 per cent to 3.27 per cent on Monday. These stocks have remained weak on expectations that Kejriwal may expose some damaging details of the companies' nexus with politicians. While the activist has come out with detailed notes on DLF's dealings with Robert Vadra, he is yet to make any statements on other firms.

The New K-factor 

A builder who has built properties in several states says he gauges corruption by the food that is served during meetings with ministers and the hospitality they display. While scouting for land for a project, he visited several states. On one such visit to Uttar Pradesh, he met a minister for dinner. The spread: 50 to 100 of the choicest delicacies. The minister tasted about half of them while the builder waited without being offered even a cup of tea. After two hours, he was told that the minister now knew about the proposed project and would get back. On another visit, this time to Gujarat, he met another minister for dinner. This spread was simpler: sabjee, dal, chaas and a couple of chapattis. The minister heard him out and promised him necessary action and even invited the builder to dinner. No guesses for where the builder is working now.

Food for thought

For most, a close friendship with a Bollywood mega-star is something worth advertising. Not for Rajiv Bajaj, managing director of Bajaj Auto, who counts Shah Rukh Khan among his buddies and regularly hosts him at his family home in Pune. The relationship was revealed only via the actor&rsquo;s avidly followed Twitter account. The tweet for the 14th read: &ldquo;shooting...meetings.... flew to rajiv dinner in pune, bak for zoya akthar birthday....shooting early morning, and kkr lost&gt; How was ur weekend?&rdquo; Those who know Bajaj say he chooses not to leverage this friendship and make Khan a brand ambassador for his company. One reason is that Bajaj firmly believes that the brand must have its own persona and should not depend on a celebrity. Also, he thinks Khan fits in the brand persona of a car, not a motorbike.

Star power

In the article &ldquo;A sense of independence&rdquo; (October 15), Parthasarathi Shome has listed many negatives about today&rsquo;s India along with a few positives worth celebrating.

Letters: Long haul to justice

The new IT secretary in Karnataka, I S N Prasad, is often at his wits&rsquo; end when he sees his children engrossed in their iPads, iPods and mobile phones. In earlier postings, he often managed to convince them to stay away from the gadgets at least when he was home, but the present posting gives him less leverage on this account. That&rsquo;s because they have an un-arguable counter: &ldquo;You are now the IT secretary and you should be encouraging rather than discouraging the use of these gadgets.

IT angst

This refers to the article &ldquo;Twenty-year setback to regulatory policy&rdquo; (October 15).

Letters: 'Socialist' agenda

This refers to the article &ldquo;We are all Dhritarashtra&rdquo; (October 14). Though businessmen do put their children in the same company, their concern for profitability and corporate survival ensures that they do not commit the kind of blunder Dhritarashtra did. It is in politics that the Dhritarashtra-syndrome casts its disastrous spell. There are no prerequisites, and when reluctant and ill-prepared sons like Rajiv Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi are pitchforked into prominence, the consequences go beyond the family. But just as Krishna prevented Dhritarashtra from killing the righteous Yudhishthira, Indian voters defeat the ill-deserving offspring of politicians in elections.

Letters: Dhritarashtras in politics 

Very few people are accorded this honour. Robert Vadra is one of them. A reader reports that he travelled J-class to Dubai. Seated in the front in the same aircraft was Vadra. Everyone got off the plane to proceed for immigration checks. But a car came on to the tarmac, Vadra got into it and disappeared. He was unaccompanied.

The VIP treatment

India&rsquo;s extremely poor score in successive years in the global hunger index (GHI) should remind policy makers of the unfinished agenda of liberalisation. In 2012, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), which constructs the index, ranked India 65th out of 79 countries. In its South Asia report, India is clubbed with Nepal and Bangladesh in the category of &ldquo;alarming&rdquo; (just one rank better than &ldquo;extremely alarming&rdquo;); Pakistan and Sri Lanka come in at a higher rank of &ldquo;serious&rdquo; (below &ldquo;moderate&rdquo; and &ldquo;low&rdquo;). South Asia itself comes in at the bottom of the league, rubbing shoulders with sub-Saharan Africa. India cannot quite think of itself as being one of the most promising of emerging economies, an engine of future global economic growth, while these numbers remain true.

Still hungry

The real estate sector, much in the news recently because of discussion of deals between DLF and Robert Vadra, has a problem that&rsquo;s summarised in Table 1. While an index of unsold inventory has multiplied over the past four years, the price index has increased steadily, too. As Table 2 shows, high-end residential prices per square foot in suburban areas have increased &ndash; while commercial space, more demand-driven, has become cheaper.

StatsGuru-15-October-12

This refers to the report &ldquo;Who to believe: Vadra&rsquo;s bank or balance sheet?&rdquo; (October 12). To any accountant, the explanation for the overdraft is pretty straightforward. The clue lies in the phrase &ldquo;book OD&rdquo; reflected against the Corporation Bank entry.

Letters: Book ODs vs bank ODs

This refers to &ldquo;Double trouble in single windows&rdquo; (Swot, October 11). The proposed National Investment Board (NIB) is a new political and physical animal that will prowl over the central secretariat with its own secretariat to fast-track mega-projects. Some genuine apprehensions arise: What are individual ministers, cabinet committees, EGoMs, GoMs and the Planning Commission for? The cabinet system of governance is given the go-by, and friction between ministers and civil servants and this new omnipresent, omnipotent body will arise. Jayanthi Natarajan has raised valid points opposing the NIB. A 2003 European study of mega-projects observes: &ldquo;Project promoters avoid and violate established practices of good governance, transparency and participation in political and administrative decision making&hellip;&rdquo;.

Letters: Who wants NIB?

With a leader who has always favoured overboard state-sponsored celebrations (recall KKR&rsquo;s IPL victory bash at Eden Gardens), no wonder gifts are pouring in ahead of Durga Puja in Writers&rsquo; Building. Anyone who found a place in West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee&rsquo;s good books in the last one and half years has been a recipient of gifts &mdash; IAS officers, Group D employees or even journalists covering the state secretariat. Many employees in state transport department may not get their salaries and Puja bonus this time, but Banerjee&rsquo;s gifts reached her chosen ones well in time. They are cotton kurta-pyjamas for men and saris for women. And, the chosen brand? Fabindia.

Mamata's gifted elite

It wasn&rsquo;t just the supporters of India Against Corruption activist Arvind Kejriwal who tried to stop the bus carrying their leader and his aides to jail by dramatically lying down in front of it. A more mundane reason also slowed Kejriwal&rsquo;s journey to Bawana: a flat tyre. And, in keeping with the almost Keystone Cops nature of the drama, the policemen accompanying the bus tried to push it along instead of doing the obvious thing and getting the flat fixed.

Flat line 

Kejriwal, of course, is battling the corruption of politicians but he would not be far off the mark if he took up the issue of the corrupt private citizen as well. An investment banker who had bought a flat in Ahmedabad was shocked to receive an electricity bill of Rs 12,000, though he had not stayed in the flat for even a day. Worse still, his apartment did not even have any electrical equipment, except one bulb. When the watchman was cornered, it was discovered that two other flat owners had entered his flat and attached their own wires to his electricity meter. Both these culprits, incidentally, were professionals &mdash; one in an infrastructure firm and the other in an IT company.

The educated corrupt

The long-standing dispute between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu over the sharing of the waters of the Cauvery river is back on the boil after a gap of several years &mdash; thanks mainly to the poor monsoon. Karnataka is facing its worst drought in decades, and flows into the Cauvery river basin have been 41 per cent less than normal. As a result, it has tried to deny water to Tamil Nadu, the lower riparian state. When the Cauvery River Authority asked Karnataka to release 9,000 cusecs of water daily till October 15, as per the interim award of the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal, Karnataka protested and asked for a review of the situation on the ground by a central team.

Cauvery isn't about rivalry

On Friday, the ministry of statistics and programme implementation released its first estimates of industrial production for the month of August. Given that the index of industrial production (IIP) was 2.7 per cent higher than it was for the corresponding month in 2011, some were tempted into declaring that the worst was over, and that the long bottoming-out of the Indian manufacturing sector was finally over. However, such claims are considerably premature. Similar statements were made after a positive blip in the index earlier this year &ndash; the figure for May 2012, for example, stands at 2.5 per cent growth year-on-year &ndash; which eventually proved to be an illusory trend. It would be very dangerous for the government and the central bank to assume that these most recent data are in any way different.

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