The simple lesson that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh should learn from his occasional interactions with the media is that he should do this more often. Of course, at a time and place of his choosing, focusing attention on issues he considers important (so that he can guide public thinking and political discourse) and addressing doubts uppermost in the public mind.

A safe pair of hands

Business Standard

By staying the state government&rsquo;s hand on the return of the land acquired by the Tatas for their automobile project in Singur, the Supreme Court has injected some sense into the handling of the matter. The Mamata Banerjee government created an avoidable mess with its hasty decision to find a legislative way out of a difficult political situation.

Prudence vs populism

Many years ago when a premium brand decided to run a money-off promotion, the agency fought for weeks telling the client that this would hurt the brand. After much to and fro, the marketing director took me aside and said, &ldquo;I appreciate the agency&rsquo;s passion for the brand; however, remember we also care for our brand. We have decided to run the promotion so I request we just go ahead and do the campaign rather than give ourselves last-minute ulcers.

Madhukar Sabnavis: The missing P-word

Fifteen or so years ago, when it first took shape, the Indian rupee non-deliverable forward (NDF) market traded barely a few hundred thousand dollars a week. By four or five years ago, the volume had risen to $2 billion to $3 billion a day, and the terms &ldquo;NDF arbitrage&rdquo; and &ldquo;buying in NDF&rdquo; became more and more common in dealing rooms.

Jamal Mecklai: Has RBI lost control of the rupee?

To date, India, with one of the largest railway networks in the world, doesn&rsquo;t have a single kilometre of railway that can be called high-speed, dedicated to trains running at 200 km or more an hour. To date, China has 8,358 km of such tracks laid out and in service and 17,000 km more under construction.

Barun Roy: A tortoise named Duranto

There are some movies that have been so thoroughly analysed &mdash; in books, academic literature and mainstream media &mdash; that you feel almost silly writing about them. What more can a cineaste of my generation possibly say about Sholay, for example? As the clich&eacute; has it, any true movie-lover has seen it at least 30 times. Most fans know every line by heart. (One of the first audio-cassettes I owned was the two-tape set of the dialogues.) We&rsquo;ve deified the film and in some cases, as our cinematic horizons have broadened, we&rsquo;ve deconstructed and undervalued it. Responses run across a continuum ranging from blind adoration to &ldquo;Huh! Seven Samurai was better.

Sholay: The beginning

In the current discourse about black money, let us not lose sight of the honest taxpayer in India, whose good intentions are severely tested every year by procedural obstacles. Among the worst is getting certification for taxes already paid through deduction at source.

Indira Rajaraman: Tedious TDS

Cheap domestic labour is high on my list of reasons for preferring to live in India. I dislike cleaning loos and washing clothes, and I would rather not cook. In a First World country, I would spend at least 20 hours a week on these chores.

Devangshu Datta: Getting the 'three Rs' right

You have to navigate carefully if you want to avoid stepping on human teeth at the Killing Fields, Choeung Ek, in Cambodia. Thirty years later, they still lie scattered along the area of the mass graves, where a memorial now stands, bizarre reminders of how low human nature can sink. The skulls at the memorial, hundreds of them piled one on top of the other, look out sightlessly at the people walking solemnly past. I don&rsquo;t see many children around, but some teens brought by brave parents look on, arrested expressions on their faces, jaws slack in mid-chew, iPods on pause.

Holiday in the Killing Fields

If development means the influx of plainsmen and bureaucratic controls, it won&rsquo;t meet the young Manipuri student&rsquo;s grumble that India is leapfrogging the north-east to reach south-east Asia. But direct participation in the Look East policy might mitigate the region&rsquo;s feeling of neglect. Even if Assam, say, can&rsquo;t establish a trade office in Bangkok, like Western Australia in Mumbai, it can have a role in India&rsquo;s south-east Asian diplomacy.

Sunanda K Datta-Ray: East by north-east

PhDs and learned papers dwell on how timely decision-making at different points of our economic history have spurred growth. Examples relate to the Rajiv Gandhi era of the late eighties that saw market-friendly stances, or the famous early-nineties Narasimha Rao-Manmohan Singh &ldquo;delicensing&rdquo; era, or turn-of-the-century Atalji&rsquo;s bharat-joro National Highways Development Programme.

Vinayak Chatterjee: India's 'DPLS' syndrome

Algorithmic Trading is defined generically as any type of computer-assisted quantitative model-based trading activity that handles the timing, submission and management of trades and orders in the securities markets without human intervention. It is synonymous with &ldquo;program trading&rdquo;, &ldquo;auto-trading&rdquo;, &ldquo;black-box trading&rdquo;, &ldquo;high-frequency trading&rdquo; and so on. It is attracting increasing attention among market players in India ever since the regulator, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi), permitted its use on exchanges.

Gangadhar Darbha: Between the cutting edge and the cut

I can&rsquo;t even remember how long back it was when I last used a 25 paisa coin. Yet, when I heard that the humble chavanni was going to be demonetarised from June 30, it felt like the end of an era that had long gone anyway. Like most Indians over 40, I had fond memories of a 25 paisa coin being enough for an orange bar, a plate of chaat and more. In fact, until 10 years ago, these coins were still in use in small towns. I remember collecting quite a few when I lived in Mirzapur 10 years ago, where seasonal vegetables often cost a rupee or two. Very often, the person who ironed our clothes gave us change in 10 and 25 paisa coins. And thanks to a longstanding coin collection habit, we soon found ourselves with a piggy bank full of coins of small denominations.

Geetanjali Krishna: Ode to the chavanni

University admissions this year have taken their toll on our neighbours and friends vying for the best courses and colleges for their children. In all the excitement about Delhi University&rsquo;s 100 per cent marks and high cut-offs, the newspapers seem to have missed the real story about how Indian middle-class education budgets are keeping the economies afloat in the Western hemisphere. Obama doesn&rsquo;t need to fear being Bangalored any more because Bangalore and Gurgaon and small town Bihar have taken over both Ivy League as well as nondescript colleges with a population that seems intent on doing the bhangra at their prom parties.

Kishore Singh: Call of the West

Has the time come to recognise that Manmohan Singh is a tragic hero cast in the same mould as the protagonists of some of Shakespeare&rsquo;s great dramas such as Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth? From his recent interaction with the five editors it would seem so.

Tragic hero

The first two books of the Ibis trilogy, Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke, will perhaps be remembered best for the dexterous way Amitav Ghosh has used English. What was spoken among Anglo-Indians in Calcutta was different from Parsees in Mumbai, the Chinese in Canton and the pidgin spoken by lascars or sailors in ships. Nobody has ever brought out this vividness in such detail as Ghosh. The point that readers may miss is that it is built around one of the bloodiest trade disputes of all time &mdash; opium.

Drugged by profit

You could say Floyd Cardoz won this year&rsquo;s Top Chef Masters challenge for his rendang, which is probably the truth. Or you could say that Floyd Cardoz won for his upma, which makes a much better story. Either way, that would be missing the point.

Upma-nship

The late C K Prahalad&rsquo;s theory on companies developing core competences has frequently been interpreted to mean that companies must keep a tight business focus, and stick to a single product or family of products. The purist reading of the theory says that companies that have core competences should be able to use them profitably across product categories.

T N Ninan: Focus, or de-focus?

Let me place before you four propositions, or more correctly, truisms: One: organisational lethargy begets structural blind spots; Two: the lessons of history will remain lessons of history if not properly learnt and understood; Three: reform or step aside; Four: denial is not a governance response.

'How relevant is the United Nations today?'

Aarti was barely seven when a distant relative, who used to be friendly with her family, offered to take her to see Delhi. The little girl was delighted and her impoverished parents happy that she would learn some work in the city.

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