The Union minister of state for environment and forests (not to forget, independent charge), Jairam Ramesh, made a curious remark while signing off on the Posco project in Orissa. While declaring correctly that &ldquo;faith and trust in what the state government says is an essential pillar of cooperative federalism&rdquo;, and gratuitously conceding that &ldquo;beyond a point, the bona fides of a democratically elected state government cannot always be questioned by the Centre&rdquo;, Mr Ramesh still proceeded to do precisely that. While not clarifying what that &ldquo;point&rdquo; is in a case such as this, and how the point on which the Centre can question a state government&rsquo;s &ldquo;bona fides&rdquo; is constitutionally defined, and, indeed, who defines what is bona fide and what is not, Mr Ramesh went ahead to enunciate a bizarre new principle of Centre-state relations.

Ministerial discomfort

Business Standard

The annual Global Information Technology Report plots the status of countries in terms of their ability to use information and communication technology (ICT) to drive their overall competitiveness and improve the well-being of their citizens. In the process, it captures the duality of India, which has the wherewithal to deliver global IT services but is poor when it comes to delivering the same to its own citizens.

Home truths about ICT 

April 2, 2011 was a high point in India&rsquo;s life. The cricket World Cup returned to the country after 28 years on the back of wins against Australia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka in consecutive matches. There was much to be proud of. Captain M S Dhoni was dubbed India&rsquo;s &ldquo;best captain ever&rdquo;.

Madhukar Sabnavis: An over-the-top approach

Even as we bask in the glory of yet another Indian winning the Pulitzer prize for a brilliant &ldquo;biography&rdquo; of the &ldquo;emperor of all maladies&rdquo; &ndash; cancer &ndash; there is an urgent need to focus on the many cancers that have already gained entry into the Indian health care system.

Arvind Singhal: The bane of India's health care

No one should cavil at the new repo rate of 7.25 per cent (up from 6.75 per cent earlier), since inflation is at 9 per cent.

T N Ninan: The wrong war?

The eldest of my cats, a dignified nine-year-old tom called Tiggy, has two ways of showing displeasure. One is by relieving himself somewhere inconvenient &mdash; he is usually fastidious and perfectly toilet-trained. His other method is to ostentatiously upset his food bowl and refuse to eat, until he has been coaxed and cuddled out of the sulks.

Devangshu Datta: Hunger-striking a hard bargain

Obama displayed unimaginable amounts of savoir-faire during the run-up to the Osama killing. Consider this: not only did he appear relaxed at the White House dinner a day before Operation Geronimo, but his demolition of &ldquo;The Donald&rdquo; with wit and humour had the audience in splits.

As cool as Obama

It was a false alarm. The chest pain that kept the wife &ndash; and me &ndash; awake through the night was caused by her chronic gastric problem, not heart trouble. We must visit Tirupati immediately, she said after the doctor declared her fit the following day, in a tone that implied that the previous night&rsquo;s travail was a mild reproof from Sri Venkateswara for not paying our respects despite having been in Bangalore for almost ten years now.

Subir Roy: A day trip to heavenly peace

Kolkata had the Marwari traders, Mumbai the Parsi businessmen; what about Delhi? For a long time now, it has been said that Delhi never had a strong business community. Indeed, the first factory came up only in 1886 &mdash; Delhi Cloth &amp; General Mills. In spite of being the seat of power for centuries together, Delhi did not develop a strong mercantile community, it is argued, because it was landlocked, unlike Kolkata and Mumbai.

Rise and fall in 1857

As Indian television went overboard last week over Britain&rsquo;s royal wedding, I was reminded of a possession I haven&rsquo;t thought of for years but which may well be the only one of its kind in this country. It&rsquo;s the chair I sat on at the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales in the 13th century Caernarvon Castle on July 1, 1969. Guests were invited to buy the chairs to help out with expenses, though the event can&rsquo;t possibly have cost anything remotely like the $32 million said to have been spent last Friday. Buyers were solemnly assured no one would be palmed off with a chair on which his or her posterior hadn&rsquo;t actually rested.

Sunanda K Datta-Ray: A seat of royalty

On May 3, a charged atmosphere greeted the members of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee as they met to discuss the endgame in Afghanistan. Although the meeting, the first in the series of six, had been scheduled ahead of the May 2 killing of Osama bin Laden, the new ground situations weighed heavily on the minds of the Congressmen. Contrary to what appears in the media and part of the chatter that the US is now once again ready to abandon the region, the meeting took serious note of the new challenges in Af-Pak and the unaccomplished counter-terrorism efforts that must be completed before a total pull-out is effected. Osama&rsquo;s killing has indeed renewed a vigorous debate in the US on the role and policy objectives in post-Osama Afghanistan.

Shanthie Mariet D'Souza & Bibhu Prasad Routray: Redefining the Af-Pak endgame

I haven&rsquo;t eaten at either Noma or El Celler de Can Roca, named the top two restaurants in the world in Restaurant magazine&rsquo;s highly influential list of the world&rsquo;s 50 best restaurants. Eating out at the Michelin-starred restaurants has become something of a blood sport, the foodie equivalent of climbing the world&rsquo;s highest peaks, with each prized menu from the Fat Duck or Alinea carried back reverentially as a trophy. But friends tell me that these two, like Thomas Keller&rsquo;s French Laundry before them, are truly temples of gastronomy.

Playing with our food

The present turmoil in Air India has thrown up many alternatives including privatisation. Memories are short. Recalling the past may be relevant.

G V Ramakrishna: Air India - A stitch in time lost in time

Among some of the many communities that live on the banks of the river Ganges, people tell a curious story. Once upon a time, a long time ago, a princess was bathing in the Ganges. Frisking in the water, suddenly she saw that her father-in-law was also taking his morning constitutional along the river. Mortified at the idea of being seen in her state of undress by her father-in-law, the beautiful princess ducked under water. She never emerged. The waves magically transformed her into a river dolphin, so she could hide beneath them for eternity. &ldquo;That is why these creatures are so elusive,&rdquo; a boatman in Benares once told me, &ldquo;they shrink away from the gaze of men like their ancestor once did.&rdquo; His story came back to me when I read about the deaths of three Ganges river dolphins in Bihar last month &mdash; poached even though it&rsquo;s been well-publicised that this creature may not survive this decade if we don&rsquo;t protect its dwindling numbers.

Geetanjali Krishna: Dolphins in distress

A hundred years after Queen Mary and King George found themselves being served at the longest dining table in the world, my wife edged their ghosts off the chair to add her name to those who had famously sat down for dinner and a lesson in patience in the dining hall. This was where Hyderabad&rsquo;s prime minister and his wife probably conspired to sell off the palace they had built because eating at a table separated by 99 chairs wasn&rsquo;t a lot of fun.

Kishore Singh: Dining out on history

Three small-time lawbreakers have a bomb in their possession (it was in a bag they stole) and want to blow it up in an isolated setting, just for fun. But where and how? &ldquo;Mumbai mein ek bhi jagah nahin jahaan bomb ko shanti se uda saken,&rdquo; (&ldquo;There isn&rsquo;t a single place in Mumbai where you can go to peacefully explode a bomb&rdquo;) goes one of the funniest lines in the excellent new film Shor in the City. The story is set during the chaotic Ganesh Chaturthi festival: roads are jammed, people dance wildly along the streets. &ldquo;So much shor &mdash; how is a man even supposed to hear himself think?&rdquo; a character wonders.

Of sound and silence

I&rsquo;m sitting in a room in the tiny rural hamlet of Vardenhalli near Bangalore, listening to a mild-mannered young man explain the origin of life through a squiggly chalk-drawn &ldquo;Tree of Life&rdquo; to roughly dozen children between the ages of 9 and 11. He is barefoot, as are the rest of us on the redoxide floor and in that 90-minute class peppered with words like &ldquo;protis&rdquo;, &ldquo;algae&rdquo; and &ldquo;arthropods&rdquo;, the young faces turned inquiringly towards him never once look bored.

Class action

Every long-term market trend incorporates corrections; periods when prices move in the opposite direction. In a bull market, profit booking leads to price falls. In a bear market, short-covering triggers price rises. This interplay of impulse and correction occurs across all timeframes.

Proactive ways to tackle market

In the past week, in the wake of Osama bin Laden&rsquo;s death, a text message on Pakistan&rsquo;s various cell networks is said to have gone viral. The message reads: For sale! Obsolete Army radar, can&rsquo;t detect copters, but can receive signals of Star Plus.

Jyoti Malhotra: Their general and ours: Failing and flailing states

While FDI inflows are not the sole indicator of a growing economy, the fact remains that India, projected as the second most attractive destination for foreign investments, and FDI in particular, has witnessed a downtrend in the last year. While this cannot be attributed entirely to the global meltdown and its aftermath, one also does not have to look very far to identify the reasons for the decline.

Resurrecting the FDI inflow

&ldquo;I feel ashamed to call myself a lawyer,&rdquo; a senior lawyer with over 30 years in practice wrote to me. Since he is not a person given tohistrionics, I sat up to read his mail. He was referring to the DoingBusiness 2011: Making a Difference for Entrepreneurs, a report jointly authored by the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation.

India cuts a sorry figure with contracts

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