A year ago, the government and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) doubled the limit that foreign institutional investors (FIIs) could invest in government paper, to $10 billion. Now, if news reports are to be believed, it is proposed to double the limit again, to $20 billion. In itself, this is not a large enough sum to cause worry, but the context is important &mdash; at a time when the large interest rate differential between India and much of the world presents a temptation to overseas lenders. FIIs have put a total of Rs 90,000 crore (about $18 billion) into Indian debt paper in the last five years, with the bulk of that money coming in during 2010 and 2011. On top of this, external commercial borrowings by Indian companies have ballooned, and now top $100 billion &mdash; with about 20 per cent of it not even hedged to protect against currency movements.

Danger in soft options 

Business Standard

Without too much fanfare and without too many expectations, India&rsquo;s relations with all its South Asian neighbours seem to be gradually improving. And, while the Afghanistan-Pakistan border remains a tinder box, the situation in the region may be becoming more manageable as options shrink for Pakistan&rsquo;s troublemakers. Consider the facts. Despite all the provocations and ups and downs, the India-Pakistan relationship has been moving forward from one milestone to another and is on the verge of crossing a psychologically important milestone, namely Pakistan extending to India the &ldquo;most favoured nation&rdquo; (MFN) status. This may not mean much in material terms and certainly is no big deal given that Pakistan has been obliged to do so as part of its own commitment to the World Trade Organisation (WTO). But so far it has merrily flouted WTO discipline on the grounds of national security.

Better neighbourhood

There is often a conflict of interest between explicitly message-based &ldquo;propaganda&rdquo; films and dynamic, imaginative cinema. Movies made with the chief aim of educating or rousing an audience will understandably emphasise content at the expense of form. When the priority is to feed ideas to viewers (rather than create a nuanced work that is open to interpretation), a script can easily become clunky and over-expository and the camerawork might be no more than functional &mdash; there isn&rsquo;t much sense using techniques that might distract or be lost on viewers.

Artful propaganda

Is the stubbornly high rate of inflation (roughly 10 per cent annually for more than five years) a reflection of the government&rsquo;s failures, or successes? The general drift of opinion &ndash; of the ordinary consumer as well as the expert &ndash; is that it is a sign of failure. But it might be just as true that the high rate of inflation, led by food, is an index of the government&rsquo;s success. It depends on your frame of judgement.

T N Ninan: Take credit for inflation

Last month I revisited three post-imperial cities: Moscow, Berlin and Istanbul. They had a remarkable resurrection since I had first visited them, which is the subject of this column.

Deepak Lal: Post-imperial cities

Say what you like about the Colonel with the randomly-spelled name, he was one of a kind. Psychopathic lunatics are a dime a dozen. But nobody had the Colonel&rsquo;s dress sense and flamboyance. He also wrote at least one book that deserves bestseller status for entertainment value. Of course, it is easier to eulogise him from a distance. The people who suffered his murderous whims found him less than endearing.

Devangshu Datta: What lies ahead for Libya?

Bangalore is suddenly electrified. It is agog like a family that has a new car over which everyone dotes. It now has &ldquo;South India&rsquo;s first metro&rdquo;, one newspaper proclaims. Other headlines give an hour-by-hour description of mood and movement. Long queues of joy riders on the first day waiting to be let in are described as &ldquo;Waiting for the Ah! moment&rdquo;, and once it gets going, the slightly more prosaic, &ldquo;The dream metro rolls, Bangalore is ecstatic&rdquo;.

Subir Roy: Joy ride on Namma Metro

With apologies to an amiable and erudite Prime Minister, I sometimes wonder if economists shouldn&rsquo;t be bracketed with witch-doctors, numerologists and practitioners of other dubious trades. Indeed, I can understand a sceptical Singaporean&rsquo;s comment that Indians do so well in global finance because astrology is in our blood.

Sunanda K Datta-Ray: In search of the middle class

A rath yatra can make people dream of black money flowing back in millions and trillions to the country.

Noopur Tiwari: Cracking the secrecy code

There is great discontent in Western societies. The financial crisis exposed the deep damage caused by the unbridled pursuit of profit by Wall Street, which almost brought down the financial system. Just before the crisis the financial sector was making 40 per cent of corporate profits in America and the City of London made up a fair chunk of the United Kingdom GDP. A large part of these profits were illusory, created by financial engineering, using synthetic derivatives that supposedly dispersed and reduced risk. Regulators and governments played along, lauding such innovation. Risk was dispersed, except that it travelled round the world and came back to the neighbouring street in New York.

T V Mohandas Pai: Capitalism without compassion

Imagine what it must be like to live in a 700-year-old neighbourhood, the custodian of 700 years of a living cultural heritage. Imagine living amid graves and monuments built by people that built our history. What would it be like? Such questions were uppermost in my mind when I met 22-year-old Aamir Ahmed, resident of Nizamuddin Basti and conductor of heritage walks in his neighbourhood. &ldquo;Actually, before I started to work on the Nizamuddin Revival Project, I used to see all these monuments here &mdash; but never truly noticed them,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;children played cricket, elders sat there to get the sun and hawkers plied their trade there.&rdquo; While the graves and monuments were part of the everyday lives of the Basti residents, what was missing was a sense of pride in them, a sense of their worth.

Geetanjali Krishna: Where history makes the future

I&rsquo;m not coming back home,&rdquo; said my wife, sulking long-distance in Pune, &ldquo;unless you can arrange for me to be at the biggest parties in New Delhi.&rdquo; It wasn&rsquo;t revelries in Pune that had taken her away from the capital, but her mother&rsquo;s ill-health, though that might have been a ploy for my mother-in-law to settle old scores with me.

Kishore Singh: All dressed up for F1 

I have done two long interviews with Shah Rukh Khan. The first was at his home Mannat where Mr Soundbyte Specialist said wonderfully inscrutable things like &ldquo;even in bed I&rsquo;m on stage&rdquo;, and the second was on a full moon night on a terrace in Goa where the Badshah was surrounded by his hosts &mdash; a luxury watch maker &mdash; giving back-to-back interviews to grateful journalists, while outside the heaving press of fans and onlookers strained at their leash.

Real life super hero

Anyone who travels within India would know that retail prices of alcoholic beverages vary widely, as does the availability of brands. For example, you cannot find anything except a limited number of Indian spirit and beer brands in retail shops in Chennai (which resemble prison cells &mdash; what with extremely dingy setups and iron barred windows), whereas there&rsquo;s a world of beverages on display and for sale in cities like Bangalore or Mumbai.

Selling wines in India

Keep investing to average out costs, as low valuations won&rsquo;t last.

Get ready for PE levels of below 15

If government officials and political leaders wish to act, the law &mdash; as it stands &mdash; is more than adequate to empower police and officials to prevent and control communal violence. No riot can continue for more than a few hours without the active will of the political leadership of governments that violence should persist and indeed spread; and the active abetment of police and civil officials to prolong the slaughter and arson.

'Public accountability is at the heart of the NAC draft Bill'

Deepavali, or Diwali, is a festival of lights. In congested urban India it has increasingly become a festival of noise. Hence, any campaign against noisy crackers and in favour of the more colourful and less polluting ones should be encouraged. School-going children across the country in many liberal institutions of education resolve every year not to contribute to noise and air pollution. Awareness regarding the adverse health effects of both air and noise pollution is growing as the problem grows. However, Deepavali is not the only festival that contributes to the problem of noise pollution, nor is the problem merely an annual feature. Consider the growing use of sound amplifiers at religious gatherings and around places of worship &mdash; be they temples or mosques or temporary gatherings around events like Bhagwati Jagrans and public discourses.

All sound, no fury

The Lokpal could end up as just another bureaucracy, unless it is carefully designed, has sound processes, and is run by officials who share its vision and work hard for its success.

Hardayal Singh: The hard work on lokpal still lies ahead

Critics of India&rsquo;s aid-only policy in Afghanistan have been silenced with the unveiling of the Agreement on Strategic Partnership (ASP) between New Delhi and Kabul on 4 October. Far from being a routine friendship agreement, the formalisation of the ASP is an affirmation of the maturing of India&rsquo;s foreign policy. It had tremendous impact in terms of strategic communications in the region and outside.

Shanthie Mariet D'souza: New Delhi-Kabul pact- A ground-level view

The human development report does not say anything new. It only sums up the outcome of policies being followed in this country. It does not, for instance, highlight the seeds that have manifested themselves in hunger and poverty. One of the seeds is the helpless labour enforcement machinery, which is unable to deal with the mammoth reality of contract labour system.

Sreelatha Menon: Wages of industrial sin

When you give a gun to a soldier and then send him into battle to fight an identified enemy, he&rsquo;s bound to shoot. So those who blame the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for shooting by increasing interest rates in its declared battle against inflation are of course being unfair. Monetary policy is the only credible weapon in the central bank&rsquo;s armoury and it is bound to deploy it.

Pause, please

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