Some Arab tour agencies tout &ldquo;Mumbai Monsoon&rdquo; packages as adventure tourism, which is a fair description. For someone who has never seen rain, a standard-issue Mumbai downpour is a life-changing experience. Factoring in the epic Mumbai commutes, spending time in the western metro could indeed be considered the 21st century&rsquo;s equivalent of the legendary Victorian expeditions into Darkest Africa.

Devangshu Datta: City development via devolution

Business Standard

When my father retired at the age of 58 four decades ago, he did so fully, in mind and body, and stepped onto a new life thereafter. The sedentary life of a judge, coming abruptly after a youth spent in good part on the cricket field and tennis court, had taken its toll. Diabetes and high blood pressure had arrived too.

Subir Roy: A generation got left out

I sympathise with Mary Jane. It wasn&rsquo;t the rice pudding that got to the child, but the monotony of it. And at this moment in urban India&rsquo;s culinary history, there are a few things sneaked on to restaurant menus a few years ago that need to be eradicated for the greater common good.

Drop it like it's hot

I was taken aback by David Cameron&rsquo;s claim that Indian businesses employ 90,000 people in Britain. It seemed an exaggeration. But, then, I began counting, and the figure soon appeared to be a gross underestimate.

Sunanda K Datta-Ray: Reverse East India Company

The world being what it is, we cynics get little respite. Once in a while, though, something makes your heart soar. I felt that in April, when I saw a YouTube video called Collateral Murder. Now I&rsquo;d like to find Julian Assange and give him a big hug and a kiss. And maybe a sandwich and a clean t-shirt. And maybe donate my life savings to his website WikiLeaks.org, which this week was to Rolling Stone&rsquo;s general-slaying report what a nuclear bomb is to a firecracker.

A good man is hard to find

It is an old debate, but tensions within the euro area have revived it: can a monetary union survive without some form of fiscal federalism? This issue is of persistent concern for investors worldwide. Holders of European government bonds believed that they knew what they had bought. Sure, there was no such thing as a eurozone sovereign security. But German, French, Spanish, and even Greek bonds all carried roughly the same interest rate, so they were deemed equivalent.

Jean Pisani-Ferry: Making Europe work

Diego Maradona should have focused on the team and not on himself.

More antics than tactics

Ruth Rendell knows so many ways to tell a story you might count her as three or four writers. Her Inspector Wexford stories are probably her most popular works, especially after a long-running television series based on them. Her other mysteries are a bit more complicated, in that they usually have no fatherly detective to make it all better, and certainly no guarantee that a criminal will be identified or caught. You may get poetic justice, or you may not get even that.

Murder and more

The atmosphere was tense. While this was no India-Pakistan cricket match, the Inter-Basti 20:20 championship trophy was to be one of the most important T20 cricket matches ever played. The trophy? A mixer-grinder. Given the intensity of rivalry between the two teams, the Man of the Match trophy should have been a Mercedes. It was, in fact, a bicycle &mdash; far more useful to a slum kid than a fancy imported car could ever be.

Geetanjali Krishna: The story of adui Pankh

Women, I suspect, are more cynical than men. &ldquo;Can I get you something?&rdquo; I asked a guest at a party recently where, truth be told, I wasn&rsquo;t the host but was driven by instinctive good manners to play the role. &ldquo;Yes, you can,&rdquo; she confirmed, &ldquo;I&rsquo;d like, please, a new husband.&rdquo; And turning to my son, a student of law, added for good measure, &ldquo;You should forget all this corporate, civil, criminal stuff, son, and specialise in divorce law.&rdquo; &ldquo;Yes ma&rsquo;am,&rdquo; said the young lawyer-in-the-making, embarrassed at being caught in the middle of some crossfire he was still too naive to understand, &ldquo;Would you like me to file for a divorce for you?&rdquo; &ldquo;What a nasty little boy you are, filling my head with such wicked thoughts,&rdquo; she retorted, &ldquo;but a new husband &hellip; now that would be nice.

Kishore Singh: It's a woman's world

A sports extravaganza is supposed to be a &ldquo;coming out&rdquo; party for the host country.

T N Ninan: 1951 redux

At a relatively impressive 7.4 per cent, India&rsquo;s national income growth for 2009-10 indicates that the economy has bounced back from the post-Great Recession low of 6.7 per cent in 2008-09. This revival of fortunes was partly on account of manufacturing output growing at a spectacular 16.3 per cent in the last quarter, taking the sectoral growth rate for the year to a healthy 10.8 per cent.

Broad-based growth

The decision by the Mainis to exit Reva, India&rsquo;s pioneering high profile electric car venture, coming close on the heels of the sale of the domestic formulations business of the Piramals to Abbott, indicates something new may be brewing on the Indian technology front. Even two swallows, not to speak of one, do not make a summer and the present deals may simply be the result of very high prices being offered.

Innovation ecosystem

Enactment of the new Direct Taxes Code and implementation of GST are two most important reforms that are expected to significantly minimise economic distortions and reduce the compliance cost. As regards the former, the Ministry of Finance is revising the draft of the Code based on the comments received from various stakeholders and is expected to place it in the monsoon session of Parliament. One can reasonably expect that the Code will come into force from April 2011 as scheduled.

M Govinda Rao: GST - Hiccups in the 'grand bargain'

For the last seven months, an Italian company, Selex Sistemi Integrati, had blocked a crucial aspect of India&rsquo;s defence readiness in Indian courts, until an irate Supreme Court threw out a Selex petition on May 24. Since November 2009, the upgrading of 30 operationally vital military airfields had been effectively suspended by India&rsquo;s Ministry of Defence (MoD) after Selex filed a writ petition in the Delhi High Court challenging the MoD&rsquo;s award of that contract to a consortium

Ajai Shukla: Fundamentally defensive

The fantasy of any Indian reader who&rsquo;s travelled to countries with bigger and better bookstores is simple: we want to be able to buy the books we love when they come out.

Nilanjana S Roy: Copyright, copywrong

Why is the production of pulses stagnant while that of other food crops is growing, even if at a slow pace? The reasons are several, though the blame is most often put on lack of new technology to enhance productivity of pulse crops. The truth is that the cultivation of pulses has gradually been pushed to non-irrigated, marginal lands that are not ideally suited for growing other relatively more lucrative crops.

Surinder Sud: Offsetting the pulse deficit

Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia&rsquo;s comment that serving/retiring secretaries should not become the heads of regulatory bodies pertaining to their ministries has set the cat among the pigeons, given how this appears more the norm than the exception. For good or bad, successive governments have opted for retired or retiring civil servants, mostly from the Indian Administrative Service, to head various regulatory bodies. There have been few honourable exceptions like S L Rao, who has served as an electricity regulator in the past. Of course, Mr Ahluwalia has raised several substantial issues in inviting comments on the draft regulatory reform Bill, going beyond the issue of the professional qualification of a regulator. The most dramatic change suggested is giving the power to issue licences to the regulator instead of retaining it with the ministry concerned.

Regulating regulators

It may well be that more committees, commissions, advisory groups and groups of ministers (GoMs) have been constituted by the government of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in the past six years than all previous governments put together. The time has come for a department of committees, commissions and advisory councils to be created to keep track of who is saying what to whom and what is being done about it. At last count, over a hundred GoMs have been estimated to have been created in the past six years. An interesting innovation of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been to create subject-specific committees comprising ministers, other officials (including Planning Commission members) and non-government experts. Thus, there was the Trade and Economic Relations Committee (TERC), the National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council (NMCC), the agricultural and energy coordination committees (ACC &amp; ECC), the National Council on Climate Change, and such like.

Advice and dissent

For the past few months, I have found myself in a tiny minority of commentators who have made a case for a measured approach to monetary policy rather than a full-on assault on inflation. Dismissed as a bunch of misguided cranks, we have been accused of defending a central bank that has fallen hopelessly behind the curve in its interest rate stance. Our critics have argued that since the only reason for a soft monetary regime could be to support the hefty government borrowing programme, we were de facto endorsing fiscal dominance in policy-setting, thus setting the clock back on the RBI&rsquo;s independence from the finance ministry by a couple of decades.

Abheek Barua: The contrarian case redux

Few management experts will disagree with the view that stability and continuity at the top add to the strength of an organisation. Many companies in India and even multinational giants ensure that their chief executive officers get a clear tenure of five or ten years. Apart from providing stability and continuity at the top, such a system also allows the chief executive officer sufficient time to prepare a plan of action and execute it to ensure growth for the company.

A K Bhattacharya: When stability becomes a liability

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