Rupert Murdoch may best be remembered for closing down News of the World after it came to light that the newspaper had hacked into telephones and bribed investigators to get scoops and stay ahead of rivals. Murdoch accepted that his journalists had exceeded the brief, apologised and then brought the shutters down on the newspaper. He had to eat humble pie, in spite of friends in high places.

Friends in high places

Business Standard

My wife and I returned on August 8 at midnight to Gatwick in London from Sicily. Our taxi driver asked us what route he should take to our home in the north, as there were reports of rioting in South London. Taking the circular motorway route, we arrived home at 2 a m and turned on the television. The sight of London burning was something we might have expected in the Cosa Nostra&rsquo;s home in Sicily which we had just left, but not in the leafy suburbs of South London.

Deepak Lal: London burning

What better place to visit than the city of the Charminar in the holy month of Ramadan? The heart of the old city, radiating from the four-towered triumphal gateway built in 1591, is a spectacle of all-night shopping and feasting as the crowds pour out after breaking their dawn-to-dusk fasts. Dozens of eateries, large and small, run a roaring trade in purveying dishes of haleem, biryani and kebabs; the lanes are vibrant with traditional trades, such as the old street of bangle-sellers with its mirrored stalls glittering with fake crystals. And nearby, the splendidly restored 18th-century Chowmahalla Palace, where the once-powerful Nizams of Hyderabad were crowned, lived and entertained, draws more than 1,000 visitors a day. Swelling populations, unplanned growth and creaking infrastructure have taken a terrible toll on many cities, but Hyderabad, for all the depredations wrought by change, manages to retain its alluring attitude of the old and the new in colourful cohabitation.

Sunil Sethi: Hyderabad's new Nizams 

A novelist who gets a mediocre advance, a nondescript meal that costs a modest sum, a Plain Jane haircut, an anonyomous-looking hatchback, a white shirt sans frills &mdash; none of these makes news because headlines are reserved for things out of the ordinary. Art auctions have been the preserve of the mainstream media only when they command record prices for canvases, or lots sold or, at least, averaged. Anything else slips under the radar and fails to grip popular imagination.

Hope, no hype

Saffron, white and green dresses the celebration as the strains of the national anthem resound in the humid monsoon air. Yet another birthday arrives. Yet another year is added to the lifetime of India.

A McAloo Tikki, please!

That Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is not a leader is something we all knew. We did not, however, know until recently that he is also insensitive. He, along with several of his ministerial colleagues, seems to be living in a world of make-believe. They have misjudged the temper of the times, marching from one blunder to another. One minister with a permanent smirk had the chutzpah to ask, &ldquo;Who is funding these protests? How is Anna Hazare getting so much media coverage?&rdquo; This is crap. A bright young man had the gall to declare on television that Mr Hazare was corrupt from top to toe and his followers were &ldquo;armchair fascists, overground Maoists, closest anarchists ... funded by invisible donors&rdquo;. Comment is superfluous except to say that the prime minister did not have the courage to discipline these loudmouths.

K Natwar Singh: The U-turn syndrome

Rahul Gandhi may claim leadership has been thrust on him because of the Congress President&rsquo;s illness, but he&rsquo;s jumped straight in, making the usually risk-averse Congress leadership stagger and blink a little.

Aditi Phadnis: Rahul Gandhi's NGO trap

Stumped by the Anna Hazare phenomenon, the government last week hinted foreign parties were causing the problem. Perhaps, the government is speaking the truth, albeit in a twisted way. The mobilisation of support has its roots in a slew of American-origin tools ranging from mobile phones to social networking sites. The 24-hour non-stop coverage of events is a handout from CNNs war reporting days. So it&rsquo;s fairly clear then that had America not unleashed new media technology on the world, we would have had a different view of things. The government should look closely at using the same tools to canvass support, rather than ignore it.

A government out-tweeted

It seems to me that in this particular year &ndash; 2011 &ndash; your Foundation Day carries an added significance. First, because it marks 51 years since you moved to Bangalore in March 1960. 51 years is a good time to look forward and plan for the next 51 years. And secondly because today it is exactly one hundred years and a half years &ndash; to the very day &ndash; of the beginning of civil aviation in India. It was on 18th February, 1911 that the first civil aviation flight in India took off, carrying mail from Delhi to Nainital. Even at that time, this flight created a global first, because not only was it the first civil aviation flight in India &mdash; it was also the world&rsquo;s first air mail flight, carrying 6,400 letters. &hellip;.

Anand Mahindra: Aerospace can make India soar

As we watched the irony of the tables turning, with the government telling Anna Hazare that he was free to go and Hazare saying he did not want to leave jail, my husband commented wryly that it was blue ocean strategy &ndash; &ldquo;how to create uncontested market space by reconstructing market boundaries&rdquo; &ndash; being played out. Sections of India that rallied under the Hazare banner are devising their own blue ocean strategy too.

Rama Bijapurkar: The fuel that fires Anna-ism

Good afternoon. I am honoured to address all of you on the occasion of this Foundation Day. It seems to me that in this particular year&nbsp; 2011, your Foundation Day carries an added significance. Firstly because it marks 51 years since you moved to Bangalore in March 1960. Fifty-one years is a good time to look forward and plan for the next 51 years.

Aerospace can help India soar

The other day in Bangalore, after I&rsquo;d eaten a gigantic meal of Chettinad sea food, I had an interesting conversation about food with a young alumnus of Shikstantar in Udaipur, Manoj Prajapat. Co-founder of a catering service that supplies healthy food and a food awareness programme since 2007, Jaso Ann Vaso Mann, he was of the belief that if we desire a healthy life in a clean, peaceful environment, then we need to pay more attention to what we eat. &ldquo;We believe that we are what we eat, so that&rsquo;s what our name means,&rdquo; he said. Prajapat, along with fellow Shikhantar graduate Sunny Gandharwa, promotes not only healthy foods and cooking practices, but their catering service also gives people a chance to see how tasty such food can be. Although based in Udaipur, they operate what they call a &ldquo;Travelling Caf&eacute;&rdquo; &ndash; going from city to city to cook and spread the word about healthy food.

Geetanjali Krishna: Adding taste to health food

When the office was planning a three-day retreat &ndash; a junket without any structure &ndash; being older and therefore more cynical, I threw a wet blanket over the proceedings. &ldquo;We see each other every working day,&rdquo; I said in the preparatory meeting, &ldquo;surely we don&rsquo;t want to spend any more leisure time than necessary in each other&rsquo;s company&rdquo; &mdash; which any analyst would have pointed out was against the team spirit that the office was hoping to foster. Instead of a heritage resort that everyone seemed to think desirable, I pointed them in the direction of a hotel in Agra, which considerably dampened everyone&rsquo;s enthusiasm. A corporate trainer was sneaked into the programme and though the information was meant to be kept secret, it leaked out, diminishing interest some more.

Kishore Singh: The battle of the junkets

The government deserves every bit of the stick it has been getting on the corruption issue. First it allowed ministers and others to run amok and swindle thousands of crores of rupees, then it refused to take action until its hand was forced, tried to shoot those holding up a candle to the misdeeds (the Comptroller and Auditor General or CAG, the media, judges, and of course Anna Hazare), suggested dark conspiracies against the country, and served up a Lok Pal Bill that did not measure up.

T N Ninan: The bigger problem

China and India have struggled to leverage FDI to their own benefit. Both have a lot to offer the foreign investor, but India must ensure that the benefits also flow the other way around.

Rajeev Anantaram: Making FDI work for the host country

For the health of your portfolio, apply measures like targets and stop-loss.

Trade like a good batsman

The Planning Commission has finally set a growth target of nine per cent per annum for the 12th Five-Year Plan (2012-17). When the same target was set for the 11th Plan (2007-12), not only was there great optimism that the target would be attained, but it was also felt that India would be poised by the end of the 11th Plan for a double-digit growth target in the 12th Plan. The optimism of 2007 was based on the impressive nine per cent growth performance during the period 2003-07 and a sanguine view of the global environment. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had then said famously, &ldquo;The world wants India to do well, our challenges are mainly at home.

Nine is necessary

Members of the Upper House of Parliament, the Rajya Sabha, stood tall last week as they held a member of the judiciary accountable for his actions. Opposition leaders Arun Jaitley and Sitaram Yechury spoke well &mdash; and so did the judge in the dock and ministers of the government. Though the impeachment of Justice Soumitra Sen of the Calcutta High Court will have to await the vote in the Lok Sabha, the impressive parliamentary proceedings do raise the question whether the country has to be subjected to such elaborate proceedings before a judge can be expected to step down after being found guilty of wrongdoing by a panel of eminent jurists. The long gap between Justice Sen&rsquo;s acts of commission that warranted this action and the final impeachment does point to the need for speedier procedure in the dismissal of judges as well as their appointment.

Judge and jury

India, that is Bharat, is a Union of states. It goes without saying that in an essentially market-based economy like India&rsquo;s, where the share of the state sector has been declining, where the fiscal capability of the Centre has been circumscribed and its political authority has waned, the growth rate of the economy is increasingly a sum of its parts. This is a sobering thought on the eve of the launch of India&rsquo;s 12th Five-Year Plan (2012-17).

Sanjaya Baru: Centre plans, states perform

In a recent judgement rendered last week, in Commissioner of Customs Vs. Living Media (India) Ltd., the Supreme Court had occasion to deal with the issue of the appropriate valuation of imported goods in a situation where royalties were paid by the importer to the overseas supplier of such goods. The issue before the Supreme Court was whether such royalties were includible in the transaction value of the imported goods, in the light of the Customs Valuation (Determination of Value of Imported Goods) Rules, 2007 (hereinafter referred to as &ldquo;the Rules&rdquo;) issued under Section 14 of the Customs Tariff Act, 1975, pertaining to such valuation.

Valuation of goods under customs law 

The provisions relating to Authority for Advance Rulings (AAR) were introduced by the Finance Act 1993. The intent was to create an independent adjudicatory body and to ensure further that the procedure is simple, inexpensive, expeditious and authoritative. The main advantage of seeking the ruling of AAR was that the non-resident investor can be sure of its liability towards income-tax even before the start of investment in India.

Overruling of earlier decisions by Authority for Advance Rulings  

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