I&rsquo;m really annoyed with my little brother.

Bieber blues

Business Standard

Over the years, it had become something even our neighbours looked forward to during the festive season, the strange sounding but fabulous tasting combination of a hut made of dark chocolate which would open up to reveal a generous portion of dry sevaiyan inside. It was a nod to India&rsquo;s syncretic culture and a celebration of both Diwali and Eid, and it came with the season&rsquo;s best wishes from Habib Rehman, who had turned it into something of a legacy for ITC Hotels. In the long span of his association with the group, its experimentation and representation of regional cuisines and menus reached a high point, and is something of a culinary benchmark that he has left behind for his colleagues to measure themselves against.

Kishore Singh: Get a dog's life, at least

Reading article after article online at breakneck speed to complete this column, I was almost set to laughing by the irony: here I was, trying to summarise what people are saying about the effect of Internet and the asteroid-field of small doses of information with which we are surrounded, not to say bombarded, and I was scarcely getting the time to assimilate what I was seeing. How could I write about the danger to &lsquo;deep reading&rsquo; without having the time to do &lsquo;deep thinking&rsquo;? Amusement turned to worry as opinion, in the articles I was (let&rsquo;s be truthful) skim-reading, turned to fact &mdash; courtesy an essay by Nicholas Carr in the June issue of Wired.com magazine.

It's the Net, stupid

You may not know this, but today is Income Tax Day. Before you start doing cartwheels, let me clarify that they are not going to announce a special rebate for all those who file their taxes honestly and in time; instead, they are going to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the income tax in India. The coming year will be marked by the release of commemorative stamps and coins, and all future July 24ths will also be Income Tax Days &mdash; or so an unsolicited e-mail informs me.

T N Ninan: 'Cause I'm the taxman

The Food and Agriculture Minister, Sharad Pawar, gets appointed to be head of the International Cricket Council. He boastfully announces that the UPA coalition has given him too much work and, therefore, it should give him more junior ministers to do his daily hard work. Meanwhile, food prices have erupted all over the country, now for more than 15 months or so. It has been raining double-digit inflation in food, and for some articles, the inflation is above 15 to 20 per cent each year for three successive years. In the first year, the government said that it was helpless because world prices of wheat, rice and peanuts had all exploded because of the nasty shenanigans on Wall Street. True. There was a world crisis and oil had shot up to $147 a barrel. We couldn&rsquo;t and the people didn&rsquo;t blame the government.

Surjit S Bhalla: BJP - losing, losing, lost?

Delhi, the national Capital, was always a double-faced place but in the run up to the Commonwealth Games, it is acquiring a schizophrenic persona. Poised to scale new heights as a world-class metropolis, it also appears to be falling apart. Soaring stadia with lights ablaze, swank villages for 8,000 athletes with private ice cream parlours, a metro burrowing its way to far corners and the T3, touted as the eighth largest terminal in the world. Ok, we got the message.

Sunil Sethi: Delhi, the two-faced Capital

The country&rsquo;s external affairs minister publicly disagreeing with the Union&rsquo;s home minister, or at least his ministry? There is nothing new about it. From the days of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru the Union cabinet has seen robust internal debate and public expression of difference of opinion by members of the Union council of ministers. The differences between Pandit Nehru and the then Union home minister, the greatest home minister of India, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, are legendary and the stuff of many books. Sardar Patel was highly skeptical of Pandit Nehru&rsquo;s view of China and made bold to pen down his views. The differences between today&rsquo;s home ministry and external affairs ministry are not as serious. Forget the clash of the titans. Even lesser mortals have had public spats on policy issues. Sharp ideological differences have of course been part of the Indian National Congress tradition.

Limits to ministerial dissonance

Within three months of becoming Britain&rsquo;s prime minister, David Cameron will be undertaking his first official visit to India next week. To his credit, he has personally ensured that his Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government seeks a &ldquo;new special relationship&rdquo; with India, following the relative neglect of bilateral relations during the previous Labour government.

Rahul Roy-Chaudhury: India and UK - Challenge for David Cameron

When Indian External Affairs Minister S M Krishna underscored the folly of making a distinction &ldquo;between good Taliban and bad Taliban&rdquo; at the Afghanistan Conference in London earlier this year, he was completely out of sync with the larger mood at the conference. As a result, Indian diplomacy faced a major setback when Indian concerns were summarily ignored.

Harsh V Pant: Tale of a floundering foreign policy

Both Udaan and The Godfather Part II track father-son relationships.

Two 'family' films

Question: Madam Secretary, a very quick question. You know you talked of supporting democracy in Pakistan, but the reality on the ground, it&rsquo;s an open secret that it&rsquo;s actually the military that led the civilian government to prepare for the Strategic Dialogue. Now, there is a fear in Pakistan that eventually the US will tilt back towards the military in order to let its policies through or see its policies through.

'We listen to all voices in Pakistan'

The Right to Food Act, when it is implemented, may not ensure that people get a proper meal every day. For even if it manages to provide subsidised grain, dairy farmers would still find it hard to keep themselves and their cattle alive. A milch animal is often the only source of income in a family, sustaining five to six people. Also, cattle is often the only possession of millions of landless labourers.

Sreelatha Menon: And a Right to Fodder?

Both Bradman and Buffett failed 50 per cent of the time. Yet, they were highly successful.

It's not about consistency

The monsoon should bring joy to Indian cities, not pain.

Storm in a raindrop

Public finance experts will understandably find many flaws in the three-year plan that Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee unveiled last week for moving to a single-rate goods and services tax (GST) regime of 16 per cent for the Centre as well as the states. The proposed rate at the end of three years is much higher than the 12 per cent recommended by the 13th Finance Commission as a feasible and revenue-neutral rate under the new taxation regime.

Crossing the GST hurdle

Regulatory issues kept on the boil for a long time usually turn into frustrations which then tend to boil over and overwhelmingly influence the regulatory architecture, and may even pull it down. The Sebi-Irda dispute on the Ulip matter resulting in the issuance of an ordinance by the government is a classic example. The recent court case between the MCX and Sebi is another. The third one, which is still on the boil, is the contradictory and contumacious stand taken by Sebi and the mutual funds on the load structure.

Frustrations boil over

This column, now continuing for more than 30 years, has often been critical of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in relation to its exchange rate policy, regulation of derivatives in particular and banks in general, and, sometimes, its monetary policy. It is time perhaps to balance the books in a longer term perspective.

A V Rajwade: Autonomy of regulators

On July 17, 2010, a section of the press has quoted Salman Khurshid, the Minister for Corporate Affairs&rsquo; saying &ldquo;Convergence gives you the flexibility to stop where you want to stop, adjust where you want to adjust and make an exception where you want to make an exception.&rdquo; He further said, &ldquo;...There will be areas where &lsquo;fair value' will apply, there will be areas where it need not apply,&rdquo; Mr Khurshid was answering questions in the context that large Indian companies will transit to a new set of accounting standards to be issued by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs from April 1, 2011. The new set of accounting standards will be fully convergent with IFRS.

IFRS: Convergence gives Flexibility to adjust

if the ruling has been obtained by the applicant by fraud or by misrepresentation.

Decision of 'authority of advance rulings' is binding

Several earlier articles in this column have discussed the GST, from the state of preparedness of the administration to the design elements of the GST.

GST: The countdown begins

The Supreme Court has stated that the Arbitration and Conciliation Act would apply to all civil disputes, and not merely to commercial disputes. It set aside the view of the Karnataka high court in the case, H Srinivas Pai vs H V Pai, in which the high court remarked that the law will apply only to &ldquo;commercial agreement matters and international commercial matters.&rdquo; In that case, the dispute was over partition of property, a civil dispute. Contradicting the high court view, the Supreme Court ruled that the &ldquo;applicability of the Act does not depend upon the dispute being a commercial dispute. Reference to arbitration and arbitrability depends upon the existence of an arbitration agreement, and not upon the question whether it is a civil dispute or commercial dispute. There can be arbitration agreements in non-commercial civil disputes also.

Arbitration Act applies to non-commercial disputes also

Business Standard brings you expert opinions on various issues

Page 769 - Opinion Specials