Charged with electoral malpractice in 1975, Indira Gandhi remarked that corruption was a global phenomenon. She was right, of course, but not the only one to have her say.

Sunil Sethi: Where corruption abounds...

Business Standard

Mahatma Gandhi became the Congress president in 1924. He ensured that Sarojini Naidu got elected the following year. In the India of 1925, it was a revolutionary step.

K Natwar Singh: It's a woman's world

Karnataka Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa was holidaying with his family in Mauritius when the report by Karnataka Lok Ayukta Santosh Hegde, indicting the chief minister for criminal conspiracy in illegal mining, came out.

Aditi Phadnis: The Karnataka conundrum

Statistical theory says if we randomly pick a small number of households and obtain a truthful set of responses from them, the aggregate of those responses will be representative of the whole population. P C Mahalanobis, who was as close to god as statisticians will ever come, designed a phenomenal system to help decision makers access information critical to good policy. To man this system he built institutions, the best in the world, that researched and taught statistics. The National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) started conducting surveys covering tens of thousands of respondents. India, however, needed more respondents than surveyed in most other countries since greater details were required on states, demographic segments, occupational groups and so on. As time went by, sample sizes increased, eventually crossing a hundred thousand households. Questionnaires also increased in size and spread.

Laveesh Bhandari: Wanted - New ways to figure facts

In a recent lecture, radical leftist Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek cited examples from Hollywood because, as he said, popular culture helps us gauge where we are. To illustrate the commoditisation of the individual by structures of liberal capitalism, Zizek demonstrated how sex has been on the wane in recent Hollywood films. The latest James Bond movie, for instance, does not end with a sex scene, he noted, a great departure from tradition.

No sex please!

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) recently judged the National Stock Exchange (NSE) to have anti-competitively tried to monopolise the nation&rsquo;s currency derivatives market. The CCI&rsquo;s ruling follows from a complaint by the Multi Commodity Exchange-Stock Exchange (MCX-SX) alleging that the NSE set its transaction prices below costs &ndash; at zero &ndash; to drive competitors out of business and deter market entry. The CCI ordered a Rs 55.55-crore ($12.7 million) penalty on the NSE, and to cease and desist its unlawful practices.

Charles M Seeger: Competition reaffirmed

Thankfully, the movie has been declared a hit. So the distributors of Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara should not really mind refunding my ticket money. However, the time that I wasted trying to catch this movie cannot be priced of course, so the distributors get lucky.

Keya Sarkar: Sound and light show

I&rsquo;m a shameless eavesdropper, from which I might have made a career &ndash; surely people will pay for information they would not be otherwise privy to &ndash; if it weren&rsquo;t for the little problem I have of matching conversations with faces, and faces with names. For it&rsquo;s extraordinary how CEOs who won&rsquo;t share information even with their executive directors will think nothing of talking carelessly into their mobile phones in very public spaces, bandying about their companies&rsquo; plans, or personal intimacies, amidst a chorus of confessions, accusations and updates.

Kishore Singh: Anonymous secrets

For me, it&rsquo;s a revelation that she&rsquo;s on the board of the Peabody Essex Museum &mdash; can you imagine an Indian museum, or gallery, that would offer Tina Ambani a similar position of responsibility without strings attached? &mdash; which is where the iconic F N Souza painting The Birth that she picked up on a whim for a rocking Rs 10.5 crore, is housed on a five-year loan from her. &ldquo;I suppose I will bring it here, but it&rsquo;s criminal to pay 15 per cent cess,&rdquo; she laments, a position also addressed by other bidders at international auctions who cavil at being taxed for bringing back to India works of Indian art.

Tina the collector

On President Barack Obama&rsquo;s 50th birthday, the markets handed him a stunning sting. A 500-point decline on the Dow, signalling there will be no celebrations for the President or indeed America. It&rsquo;s now clear that the party is a long way from starting for the world&rsquo;s biggest economy. Euro-zone is in a funk alongside. And until America fixes job creation and Europe its debt, which looks increasingly difficult, brace for a plunge.

Party poopers all around

A few weeks ago, I heard the Yale Whiffenpoofs, the 102-year old acappella group, perform in New Delhi. If you&rsquo;ve heard collegiate male acappella groups before, you&rsquo;ll agree that there&rsquo;s something very endearing about fresh-faced, earnest-looking young men in black tuxedos and white gloves singing melodiously and in complete harmony in those wonderful baritone, bass and tenors. It can engender a warm, fuzzy feeling in the most indifferent heart.

Sing together

The Democrats have merely bought time, while the Republicans have settled for spending cuts as a quid pro quo for a higher public debt ceiling, instead of agreeing to higher taxes on the rich.

S Murlidharan: A compromise that fails to address the deficit

We know that competition law and policy are fundamental in improving consumer welfare and increasing economic efficiency. But it is time to ask the question whether that tells the whole story in a country like ours. The POSCO conflict over land acquisition in Orissa sharply highlights the competing interests of business and development in India. This is even more important now, as we are dealing with the post-financial crisis situation, when the world is moving towards reregulation.

Aditi Gopalakrishnan: Competition law is shaped by context

The publication of this book is timely and touches a matter of public interest. It brings into focus the inseparable bond of two critical requirements for human well &mdash; equality and dignity. This is eloquently noted by Justice V R Krishna Iyer in his Foreword.

Inseparable bond of equality and dignity

When Parsvnath builders recently gave their developed area in Seelampur metro station to Carrefour to set up India&rsquo;s first foreign retail store, it was not sold but given on lease.

Sreelatha Menon: Do bigha zameen for rent

From here, you could get 22 per cent returns if the Nifty reverts to 6300 plus levels.

Right time to get overweight

This newspaper wishes the chairperson of the United Progressive Alliance and president of the Indian National Congress Sonia Gandhi good health, long life and a speedy recovery from her illness and surgery. However, we reject the view of the spokesperson of the Congress Party that information pertaining to Ms Gandhi&rsquo;s health is a &ldquo;personal matter&rdquo; and that the people of India should &ldquo;respect&rdquo; her family&rsquo;s request for &ldquo;privacy&rdquo;.

Right to information

If the United States economy is in dire straits and has been paralysed by a fiscal crisis, what will happen to US power and influence? Economic and geopolitical analysts will recall in days to come the theory of &ldquo;imperial overstretch&rdquo; and the economic foundations of the decline of American power put forth over two decades ago by British historian Paul Kennedy (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, Random House, 1987).

Sanjaya Baru: The age of geoeconomics

Earlier articles in this column have discussed the chargeability of several telecommunication services under either the service tax law or the sales tax law or both. One such telecommunication service has been with regard to provision of SIM cards which are sold by telecommunication operators to their subscribers and which need to be activated by such operators (the service in question), in order for the mobile phones to become operational. The challenge of double taxation of the transactions relating to such SIM cards has been a longstanding one and had been earlier addressed by the Supreme Court in its decision in BSNL vs. UOI (2006) 3 SCC 1. Very recently, in a judgement rendered late last week, the Supreme Court has again addressed the issue of the chargeability of such transactions to the appropriate indirect tax, i.e, the service tax or sales tax/VAT.

Taxability of mobile SIM cards 

One of India&rsquo;s principal challenges in east Asia is that New Delhi&rsquo;s strategy can only be effective if it builds sustainable geoeconomic relationships with countries with whom it shares geopolitical interests.

Nitin Pai: Time to broaden strategic ties

The Government of India has entered into an agreement with the Government of Mauritius for avoidance of double taxation. It provides that income earned by resident of Mauritius by way of sale of shares of an Indian company shall be taxable in Mauritius only. To avail the benefit, the Mauritian Company has to prove that it is resident of Mauritius.

Further blow to Indo-Mauritius  tax treaty 

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