The increasing support for Anna Hazare is telling. Even those who are critical of his methods support his cause. I am pretty sure that this feeling about corruption has little to do with whether one is party to it. Most people I know who pay bribes claim they do so to avoid harassment by one official or another. They look forward to the day when they can carry on with their daily grind, receiving from the government whatever they are entitled to and have voted for, without having to grease anyone&rsquo;s palms. This is understandable &mdash; very few people who do illegal things do so because they love doing illegal things. People are corrupt in India because the material life resulting from corruption &ndash; an illegal act &ndash; is better than a corruption-free existence. There is a problem with not accepting this position, for then we are claiming that there is something rotten in the Indian gene.

Shubhashis Gangopadhyay: Cure for corruption

Business Standard

The Anna Hazare show is India&rsquo;s JFK moment. There&rsquo;s not much that is common to John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Kisan Baburao Hazare. But JFK was the first politician to realise that voters in key US states were more influenced by an effective small-screen presence than by impressive public speeches. In the 1960 presidential campaign, JFK destroyed Nixon in studio debates.

Devangshu Datta: Crafted for new media 

It was the second time in a couple of months that this had happened. The IndiGo flight had arrived before time. What made it worse was that the new Bangalore airport delivered the checked baggage within what seemed like minutes since the time we stood there waiting for it. So we were out of the airport almost 20 minutes before what we had calculated.

Subir Roy: King of good times for how long?

Reports of the 25 paise coin&rsquo;s demise and the expected birth of two-rupee, hundred-rupee and even thousand-rupee coins don&rsquo;t trouble self-styled Gandhians crusading for financial rectitude in a blaze of publicity. But people who have to worry about the spiralling cost of everything, including Gandhi caps and an unending supply of freshly-laundered crisp white dhotis and kurtas, cannot ignore these warnings of bleak times ahead with money rapidly losing all value.

Sunanda K Datta-Ray: Paper money and plastic protests

Steve Jobs wrote the finest tribute to Anna Hazare. Don't believe me? Here it is: &ldquo;Here&rsquo;s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They&rsquo;re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify and vilify them. About the only thing you can&rsquo;t do is ignore them because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as crazy, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

The mavericks

Imagine getting fresh produce at your table that has been locally and sustainably grown in hygienic, disease-free conditions. Now add to that the knowledge that while you&rsquo;re eating, you are involuntarily conserving resources, reducing your carbon footprint and participating in ecological farming, perhaps even providing landless women and marginalised farmers with jobs.

Jyoti Pande Lavakare: Eye on agriculture

At Dastkar Nature Bazaar in Bangalore, I noticed most visitors carrying paper totes instead of plastic bags. Vendors were selling goods wrapped in newspaper. Cloth bags were everywhere.

Geetanjali Krishna: Choking fish or felling trees?

Did you know that going digital can make an industry more conservative? Not that any &ldquo;content&rdquo;-related industry really has a choice. Film, music, porn, computer gaming, newspapers, photography, telecom, TV all have felt the dread squeeze of the digital world.

Click to pay


The tourist season having begun, it was a matter of time before some American visitors I&rsquo;d joined for a drink asked, &ldquo;So, who is this Anna babe?&rdquo; Sipping their JDs with Coke, they pronounced the name like Hannah with the H silent, so I had to point out that he &ndash; not she &ndash; was the dude who&rsquo;d got the government in a lock-jam with an anti-corruption movement that was revolutionary in its sentiment, but had other intellectuals&rsquo; knickers in a twist for

Kishore Singh: Food before thought

Imagine this: you had invested in two cases of top-flight Bordeaux (say Chateau Lafite Rothschild 2000) some years ago at $500 per bottle through a wine advisory. In 2011 you instruct them to sell one case, you realise $1,000 per bottle and take delivery of the other which you drink.

Dollars in your goblet

It doesn&rsquo;t have to be a case of trial and error. The constantly-evolving institution of marriage can be approached with more consideration.

Marriage: A work in progress

Three weeks ago, The Economist noted a key transition in the global economy. It pointed out that the emerging markets now account for a greater share of world gross domestic product (GDP) than the developed economies. The magazine also pointed out that while the rich world&rsquo;s output was still below 2007 levels, the emerging economies had grown by 20 per cent since then.

T N Ninan: Son of Brics

Commit smaller amounts and set stop-loss targets to minimise loss.

Trend following in bear markets

Alarm bells are ringing in oceans around the globe. Recent studies show a sharper decline in marine biodiversity than earlier forecasts. A good part of precious sea and ocean life may be on the verge of extinction. What is worse, these studies indicate that the potential extinction of species, from tiny corals to large fish, could be comparable to the five great mass extinctions in antiquity during which much of life perished from this planet.

Ocean life adrift

Distinguished visiting professor, 
National INstitute of Public Finance and Policy

The country&rsquo;s policymakers cannot complacently assume that India will remain on a high growth path; with the global economy wobbling again, they need to continuously pursue vital reforms.

Ajay Chhibber: Is India exiting the Golden Turnpike of Growth?

The secrecy surrounding the ongoing deliberations on the yet-to-be-inked US-Afghan Strategic Partnership deal is causing considerable disquiet both within and outside Afghanistan. At the same time, the deal meant to be a &lsquo;security guarantee&rsquo; for the Afghans seems to be mired in the emerging differences on the conditionalities and nature of the partnership between the US and Afghanistan.

Shanthie Mariet D'Souza: Anatomy of a deal still in the making 

I, as finance minister, inherited an economy with bankrupt treasury, with foreign exchange reserves totally exhausted, with the nation&rsquo;s creditworthiness in doubt. We turned around that economy. The bankrupt economy that we inherited has now become one of the fastest growing economies of the world.

'I firmly repudiate the charges against me'

Congress General Secretary Rahul Gandhi derided the movement of social activist Anna Hazare as a danger to democracy and Parliament. On the other hand, actor Om Puri, a supporter of the movement, created a controversy by saying half the members of Parliament were illiterate village boors. But then, half the country&rsquo;s youth and children &mdash; Anna Hazare included &mdash; are Class VII dropouts.

Sreelatha Menon: Being Anna

Why introduce a Competition Policy, when the Act is in place, having undergone a prolonged complex gestation? What purpose can the Policy serve when the CCI is operational? A policy is usually introduced with certain objectives and goals in mind, culminating in the introduction of a law. These and other queries are being raised in the context of the Competition Policy Draft being posted on the MCA site last month.

Old wine in new bottle - 2011 Competition Policy

India&rsquo;s biggest lesson to the world has been, and remains, the view that a negotiated compromise is always better than one&rsquo;s victory and another&rsquo;s defeat. Once again the elected representatives of the people in Parliament and a social activist who succeeded in galvanising a sizeable segment of civil society, with help from sections of the media, have ended a political impasse through a negotiated compromise that enables all concerned to declare victory.

Victory for all

It is one of the rare occasions when a negative policy of the Government has been more welcome than the positive policy. Negative policy here refers to the policy about the Negative List for service tax. Positive Policy refers to the policy of having Positive List of services as we are having now. It is the time to assess the virtue of negative list since the Government has hinted about such a possibility.

Negative lists for Service Tax and Goods Tax

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