There is one thing synonymous with being Indian that spans both urban and rural India, and transcends the rich-and-poor divide: The annual watch and wait for the monsoon. It begins every year without fail as heat intensifies and the monsoon advances. Farmers wait desperately because they need rain at the right time for their crops. Without rain water, they cannot sow seeds. City managers wait around because by the beginning of each monsoon season, water levels in reservoirs that feed cities go precariously low. They need the rain to replenish the reservoirs. All of us wait, in spite of air-conditioning systems, for the relief that the rain would bring to us as we swelter in the scorching heat and dust. This is perhaps the only time when the entire country is united in its desperation. It cannot exhale till it rains.

Sunita Narain: Understand the monsoon

Business Standard

The mainstream projections about India&rsquo;s economic trajectory talk of how the country&rsquo;s GDP will exceed that of Japan (whose economy today is more than thrice India&rsquo;s size) by 2020. A large part of this sustained growth, it is assumed, will come from what is called the demographic dividend. India&rsquo;s young and growing workforce, the standard argument goes, will ensure that the country&rsquo;s wage rates keep it competitive for a long time, even as the dependency ratio (the number of people depending on active workers) drops while it climbs in most other countries. The growing workforce will also ensure a steady source of demand and, therefore, underpin investment. According to the government&rsquo;s latest report, there will be enough employment for 570 million people in another five years, enough to absorb the 10-11 million people joining the workforce each year.

Wages of neglect

It&rsquo;s from a leopard,&rdquo; the guide said briefly. I stared at the inoffensive-looking mound of poop and weighed my options. We were surrounded by an oak forest too dense in parts to penetrate. The nearest habitation was barely two kilometres away. So near&hellip; yet so very far, I thought. We were on a mountain trail that locals rarely frequented. They preferred the bus &mdash; it was quicker, and as I stared at the poop again, probably safer.

Geetanjali Krishna: Who's the menace here?

In my mother&rsquo;s kitchen you&rsquo;re sure to find sachets of tomato ketchup, sugar, salt and pepper packets, and tiny jars of jam and marmalade, all with expiry dates that ran out several years ago, wrapped in plastic bags and stuffed into cookie jars. They aren&rsquo;t strictly for use, they&rsquo;re just the leftovers from airline meals and hotel breakfast trays that my father believes he has the right to help himself to as a paying passenger, though it&rsquo;s extremely difficult to eat with the cutlery he also regularly purloins &mdash; egg and toast are just about manageable, but eating rice with the twin-tyned forks pinched from Indian Airlines, now that requires some feat.

Kishore Singh: Paid parties put paid to fun

In Gaza under the Israeli blockade, there are echoes of an ancient medieval trade: the smuggling of rare, precious commodities. Just as prized as cement (banned by the Israelis for fear it might be used to make bombs), and just as contraband, Gaza has a thriving black market in herbs &mdash; coriander, aniseed, chamomile. And this week, as Israel allowed the entry of coriander seed, the much-tried inhabitants of Gaza celebrated this small victory.

A new leaf

These days, when the Deepwater Horizon fiasco has the Gulf of Mexico looking almost as oily as the officials from BP, Transocean and Halliburton, it&rsquo;s heartening to read about a Swiss gentleman by the name of Bertrand Piccard. Monsieur Piccard and his team of scientists and engineers spent six years building a solar-powered microlight plane, and last week this plane undertook its maiden all-night flight.

Here comes the sun

Societies usually emphasise one of two values: freedom or liberty (as in the United States, where they talk constantly of &ldquo;libedy&rdquo;) and equality (typically in the socialist states). The two are often posed as a choice; the more you have of one, the less you have of the other.

T N Ninan: Not a matter of choice

After Henry Ford, Jack Welch is perhaps the most influential CEO of all time. The rules he laid down for General Electric have become standard practice for most corporations now: get out of any business in which you are not among the top three, cut your costs by 10 per cent and have 10 per cent fewer employees on your rolls in a year. A CEO, Welch said, may not be the brightest person around; so long as he can get the right person for the right job, he has done his job well.

Learn from the leaders

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is the only Leninist party (along with its Vietnamese and North Korean cousins) to have survived the turmoil of 1991, despite the Tiananmen wobble in 1989. It has also been the most successful in bringing the mass prosperity promised by the Marxist scriptures through its embrace of capitalism, albeit with Chinese characteristics. It is this implicit contract with its people, suppressing political liberty in exchange for prosperity, which continues to provide it with its legitimacy. The future of the CCP and its likely future geostrategic stance is thus of immense importance, not least for India. This is the subject of this column.

Deepak Lal: The Chinese Puzzle-II - polity

The sacrifices Shoaib Malik has to make for marital bliss.

Caught and bowled

In 1626, Peter Minuit, the Dutch Governor of the New Netherlands, bought Manhattan off a tribe for $24-equivalent &mdash; about half a cent per acre ($0.005). By 2000, assessed land value on the island core of New York was $830,000 per acre.

Devangshu Datta: The compounding paradox

When I went out to the front gate at quarter-to-seven and found that the morning papers had not arrived, I was only mildly irritated, muttering to myself silently: when will they learn to be on time? This is how the last informal leg &mdash; the thin two of the delivery boy to be precise &mdash; of a very organised process let the whole endeavour down, I ruminated with a journalist&rsquo;s slight sense of superiority. Then, as the minutes ticked by, irritation gave way to annoyance and eventually concern.

Subir Roy: What makes the day begin

Ironically, it took the ruling Left Front&rsquo;s industries minister, Nirupam Sen, a tough Marxist with a beguilingly pleasing manner, to remind us that West Bengal is poised uneasily on the cusp of change. What he didn&rsquo;t say in the Assembly on Wednesday was that the Trinamool Congress rule might mean jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Or it could be more of the same.

Sunanda K Datta-Ray: The more things change...

Belgium does not make many headlines globally. Other than hazy images of beer and chocolate, the tiny, 10-million-strong country most often evokes a sense of genteel boredom. But beneath its waffle-scented serenity, Belgium seethes with communal tensions that raise persistent questions regarding the continued viability of the country, which, in turn, create doubts about the broader European project.

Pallavi Aiyar: Belgian lessons for the EU

The discussion on financial inclusion ought to focus a lot more on building an economically viable and consumer acceptable business model, with a specially designed regulatory ecosystem appropriate for that model. Evangelism or moral pressure to force banks to serve those not so far served by them cannot help square a circle.

Rama Bijapurkar: The business of financial inclusion

You are aware that CPI (Maoist) is the principal Left-wing extremist organisation. As long as CPI (Maoist) was not challenged effectively, it expanded its area of activity, recruited more cadres, kidnapped more persons, extorted more money, acquired or looted more weapons, asserted its dominance in more areas, and targeted the security forces as well as civilians.

'CPI (Maoist) can't be judge, jury and executioner'

Some residents of Hyderabad have initiated a campaign to assert their &lsquo;right to walk&rsquo;. The campaign is led by a middle-aged lady who finds it offensive to have to walk past patches where men relieve themselves &mdash; and these in turn will point to the extreme scarcity of public conveniences. The point is that when public money is spent to improve public thoroughfares, no thought is given to the right of citizens to walk comfortably and safely along those roads. All too often, carriageways are widened by eating into pavements, placing the needs and demands of those using motorised transport over those of walkers. A similar public protest movement has gained momentum in Bangalore, in which the affected residents of particular areas and prominent citizens who empathise with them have banded together to protest against counter-productive road-widening work.

Bottom-up urban planning

A galaxy of well-known economists is pondering the vexed question of the preferred policy option in the context of world economic recovery &mdash; fiscal consolidation or not, and if not now, then when? The recent G-20 meet has agreed on &lsquo;growth friendly&rsquo; fiscal consolidation plans for the advanced economies, going forward.

Sumati Mehta: Beyond Keynes - expand or consolidate?

A standard response to low agricultural production is to increase the support price offered to farmers. Against the background of a low kharif harvest last year, the government has recently increased the MSP (Minimum Support Price) once again for the kharif crops. The question here is a broader one regarding our approach to agriculture in terms of pricing, procurement and stocking, which has created distortions in other areas.

Madan Sabnavis: It's time to mend our farm-related polices

Does a man running a grocery shop need to also run a primary school in his locality or run a mobile van for free dental checkups? Yes, if he wants to be seen as fulfilling his corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Sreelatha Menon: CSR vs fair business vs entitlements

You need to be more cautious because of the quirks of the industrial production index.

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