Suits, stainless steel, aluminium, coloured water, and motors, assembled to perfection, were the materials used in Sudarshan Shetty&rsquo;s installation at the Gallery Krinzinger booth at the India Art Fair. Through business hours over the four-day-long fair, three motorised set-ups, each holding a suit, persisted in their designated task; placing each suit in a tub of water, symbolically immersing them, and then raising them up for a few seconds on display before submerging them briefly all over again. A corporate equivalent of T S Eliot&rsquo;s phrase &ldquo;life measured in coffee spoons&rdquo;, Shetty&rsquo;s installation was an apt metaphor for the commercial, corporate persona of the fourth edition of the fair, previously known as the India Art Summit.

Roselyn D'Mello: Just collectors' items?

Business Standard

Although the first phase of polling in Uttar Pradesh is due next week, reports from the field suggest the Assembly election is all but wrapped up.

Aditi Phadnis: Samajwadi Party's soft spot

Given the rather less than sanguine economic conditions, an investor who would like to make an informed guess at various options can look at what happened in 2011 before taking a decision. Conventionally, investment options lie between deposits or government securities (G-Secs) at one end and the more volatile stock market at the other. Also there is a risk-reward trade-off that reflects the investor&rsquo;s appetite.

Madan Sabnavis: 2012 - The year for commodities?

Let&rsquo;s say news breaks of a decision that you think helps the wrong people, or seems obviously unjust. Even if that decision also violates principles you value, nobody believes you if you try at that point to insist that it&rsquo;s the principles you&rsquo;re worried about. Ergo it&rsquo;s when you think a decision is right &ndash; but may still be based on problematic principles &ndash; that you should sound the warning.

Mihir Sharma: Judgement calls

In winter, I often walk in Delhi&rsquo;s Nehru Park during lunch time. Every time I go there, I see a little girl in school uniform playing with her father. They eat oranges, loll lazily in the sun, looking as if they have all the time in the world. How does the man find time in the middle of the day to play in the sunny park with his daughter? I wonder about this, as he certainly doesn&rsquo;t look unemployed.

Geetanjali Krishna: The dad who dropped out...

Coming back from a family dinner, I found my car filled with chattering aunts and other strange relatives, and so chose to ride home with a cousin who, I hesitate to say this for the light it sheds on the family&rsquo;s mating habits, is still of a tender age and in college. The car, given to him by fond parents, was his refuge away from his home &mdash; though it had precious little space left over after a giant cabinet of what appeared to be music equipment took over a chunk of the rear passenger cabin. Squeezing myself between more speakers than I&rsquo;ve seen next to a DJ&rsquo;s console, I found myself having to adjust into whatever space was left over after I&rsquo;d moved aside packets, cans and piles of stuff.

Kishore Singh: Garbage on wheels

A recent article in The Guardian about the top five regrets of dying people has attracted a lot of notice, especially on Facebook and other social networking sites. The subject is the findings of an Australian nurse, Bronnie Ware, who having spent most of her working life at the bedsides of the terminally ill, found herself in a pretty good position to author a book about what she learnt.

Things that count in life

At one of the writing courses I took at Stanford some years ago, I found myself sandwiched between a white-haired Holocaust survivor, whose short story glowed with a gentle luminescence and whose breadth of experience I could never hope to replicate, and a heavily made-up young girl in full Goth regalia who wrote with a brittle, glittering cynicism that belied her youth. Workshopping the stories of that writing group was an unexpected exercise in literary gluttony, as we sifted through fictional gems, mined from such an eclectic spectrum of experience.

The culture vultures

The Supreme Court judgment on the telecom scam raises many questions; so this is by no means the last word on the subject. Here are four sets of possibilities. First, the international telecom companies that have paid top dollar to get into the Indian market could sue the government, which may not find it easy to disown its own telecom minister&rsquo;s actions.

T N Ninan: Not end of story

In the past 30 years, management theories have been rewritten, established models torn up and new approaches to management developed because of two important reasons. First, services have overtaken manufacturing to become the prime engine for economic growth, including in India where it accounts for over 50 per cent of GDP. Second, management and delivery of services is as different from management and distribution of products as the latter was different from farming.

V S Mahesh: Silence from the front lines

In the past week, the international business community has had only two talking points: Davos, the laddered annual elite jamboree in the snow-soaked peaks of Switzerland, and Facebook, the unstructured networking platform which connects anyone, anytime. Ironically, the theme at Davos &ldquo;The Great Transformation: Shaping New Models&rdquo; rings far more true for social media icon Facebook, than it ever will for the World Economic Forum. What&rsquo;s worse, in the new world order, WEF trapped in its old ways, will need some of the Facebook philosophy to stay relevant.

Who controls the future?

Change is creeping upon the quiet and wooded traditional village in north Goa where I have been coming for several years. Mercifully, it is still gradual. The kiosk across the street that stocks everyday provisions is often left unattended. But further up the road a new two-storey structure &ndash; all swanky plate-glass and glowing neon &ndash; houses a clothing boutique, a fancy tea room and an art gallery.

Sunil Sethi: Goa's escalating land wars

What are the policy directions in which India&rsquo;s political parties are taking its citizens? Studying the manifestos released before the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections helps answer that. Three of the four major competing parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Congress, and the Samajwadi Party, have released manifestos. The fourth, the incumbent Bahujan Samaj Party, has always taken a stand against manifestos &mdash; one that reveals its leadership&rsquo;s traditional belief that control over administration and the transfer of the levers of power to the disadvantaged is more important than specific policy proposals.

Everybody gets a cow

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has taken serious exception to the Union government&rsquo;s inability to accede to her request for a one-time special financial package to enable the state to tide over its precarious financial condition. Her more explicit reason for seeking this special favour is that the previous Left Front government has bequeathed a critical financial situation. The less explicit reason is that the Trinamool Congress&rsquo; support is crucial for the survival of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, and this should come at a price. The inability to get what she wants partially explains the manner in which, at critical junctures, Ms Banerjee has refused to stand by the prime minister, forcing him to retreat with loss of face.

Downhill with Trinamool

A recent move by the RBI to reduce branch audits of banks has received significant attention of the media. As per media reports, banks have written to the RBI suggesting reduction in branch audit to reduce non-value added costs.It is argued that with concepts like core banking system and centralised record keeping, the relevance of the audit of branches of public sector banks (PSBs) has significantly declined. RBI will definitely decide the issue considering the pros and cons of reducing audit of branches of PSU banks. However, the move signals that companies have started evaluating audit in terms of the value it creates for them. They do not want to take it as an &lsquo;unavoidable burden&rsquo; any longer. It also signifies that with rapid technological innovations, the scope and techniques of audit are changing fast. This is not unique to the auditing profession. Every profession evolves on a continuous basis to keep itself relevant to the society.

Is audit losing its relevance?

An earlier article in this column had discussed the service taxability of cost/revenue sharing arrangements which were increasingly being resorted to in the modern business world. A view was expressed that in either of these arrangements, there was typically no intent to provide services and hence the service tax ought not to be applicable. Specific to revenue sharing arrangements, the CBEC Circular No. 109/03/2009-ST dated 23/2/2009, which was issued in regard to service tax on screening of films by theatre owners, was discussed in detail. This Circular had clarified that in a revenue sharing model wherein the theatre owners and the distributors of films shared the revenues earned from sale of cinema tickets, the contracting parties were acting on principal to principal basis and did not provide services to each other. The Circular hence stated that no service tax ought to apply on such arrangements. Recently, the CBEC has issued Circular No.

Service taxation of revenue sharing arrangements

The term &lsquo;fees for technical services&rsquo; is defined in Explanation 2 to section 9(1)(vii) of the Income Tax Act. The said term is also defined in various Double Taxation Avoidance Agreements (DTAA) .The normal definition of &lsquo;fees for technical services&rsquo; is more or less along similar lines in the Act, as well as in tax treaties. But certain tax treaties (e.g. treaty with UK &amp; USA) clearly depart from the normal definition. The key difference is that as against reference to &lsquo;rendering of&rsquo; technical services, the stress is on &lsquo;make available&rsquo; technical knowledge, experience, skill, know-how or process etc.

'Make available' in technical services

On 30th August 2011, the Bombay High Court, in response to a writ petition filed by HDFC, ordered the Maharashtra government to in turn order Collectors and District Magistrates to take the mandate of section 14 of the Securitization Act, 2002 seriously, and not allow influence peddlers to scuttle the attempts by secured creditors in taking over the mortgage assets in the face of the inability or unwillingness of the borrower to pay off their dues.

Mischief potentials of alternative credit default redressal regimes

The Supreme Court last week ruled that cases of bounced cheque are independent of the revival bid of a sick company. Proceedings in bounced cheque cases under the Negotiable Instruments Act will continue even if there is a scheme to revive the sick company. The revival attempt under the Companies Act will not affect prosecution of charges under Section 138 of the Act. The charges cannot be compounded as in other cases under the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), the court stated in a large batch of appeals titled JIK Industries Ltd vs Amarlal. The Supreme Court dismissed appeals of the companies against the Bombay high court judgment which rejected their argument. The charges cannot be compounded as provided under Section 320 of the CrPC without the consent of the secured and unsecured creditors. Though Section 147 of the Negotiable Instruments Act provides for compounding, it does not provide for a special procedure. In its absence, the procedure under the CrPC should be followed.

Dud cheques in revival mode

Recent rankings of global think tanks by University of Pennsylvania have prompted much handwringing. How can only one Indian research organisation be ranked in the top 50? That is a silly question; almost like asking why so few Bharatnatyam dancers are found in Japan. The concept of a think tank was born and nurtured in the US and, not surprisingly, American think tanks lead the list.

Sonalde Desai: Indian think tanks - time to look within

For years, economists did not know how to think about services. The tertiary sector of the economy was an afterthought for many early economists, and that caused a bias in economic theory and policy that lasts to this day. India&rsquo;s high economic growth rates of the past few years have come on the back of sustained service sector growth. But this should not be seen as a completely new phenomenon. In fact, the productivity gap between developed countries and India in services has been consistently smaller than in other sectors for almost a century. Today, services contribute the majority of national income, but only a tiny fraction &ndash; 8.7 per cent &ndash; of central taxes. This is not a state of affairs that can be allowed to continue. The goods and services tax, or GST, has long been planned to rationalise and simplify the tax system. Yet its introduction continues to be stalled, largely for political reasons.

Negative list, positive news

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