It is worth wondering how far the fulsome national coverage Jyoti Basu received this week was warranted, except on the basis of his record as India&rsquo;s longest-serving chief minister.

Kanika Datta: Labouring under illusions

Business Standard

One of the major trends in the asset management industry currently is the relentless rise of exchange-traded funds (ETFs). ETFs now account for over a trillion dollars in assets, up from only about $75 billion in the year 2000. ETFs have gained huge popularity over the last decade as they can be used to gain exposure to a number of asset classes including equity, fixed income, commodities and currencies. They can also be used to gain exposure on either side of a trade, i.e. long or short as well as on a leveraged basis. ETFs have several advantages over index funds: In the types of asset classes covered and ability to short as well as their ability to offer intra-day liquidity, being traded on the secondary markets.

Akash Prakash: The Rise of ETFs

Till about a couple of years ago, I had, like a lot of &ldquo;contemporary&rdquo; people in Indian business, bemoaned (and sometimes sneered at) the inefficiencies of the public sector. I was slowly educated out of the worst of this attitude by a fine gentleman who works with me who showed me how the public sector banks, at least, had performed yeoman service in terms of bringing development to the smallest outposts of the Indian economy.

Jamal Mecklai: The CAG handicap

There is no question who is to blame. It is the Ananda Bazar group of Kolkata, and I don&rsquo;t mean their matrimonial columns. It happened like this. For some time from the launch of the Telegraph, friend Shekhar and I spent most of our waking hours in the office and bemoaned the fact that we were men of good character due to no fault of our own. You see, there was no time to even chat up anybody, not to speak of getting into a relationship.

Subir Roy: Keep fighting right through

The Mumbai branch head of a navratna public sector company wanted to replace a 10-year-old wooden showcase with something that occupied lesser space.

Shyamal Majumdar: Have time, will waste

Climate change science is about as exact a science as economics. There are so many variables and imponderables involved in both disciplines that it is impossible to predict, with any degree of precision, what will result and when. For instance, despite all the dire warnings about global warming, the last 10 years have been cooler than the year that went before&mdash;mostly because 1998 was a particularly hot year. Such contrary facts encourage the use of caution when approaching firm predictions as to when exactly the earth will have warmed by 2 degrees Celsius. Even though this is a quite different issue from the bogus science that now stands exposed, on the issue of when the Himalayan glaciers will melt, it is worth keeping in mind that even bogus science becomes mainstream fact only when the prevailing climate of opinion permits. In that sense, the world may now be ready for a more careful debate that focuses on reliable probabilities than on dubious certainties.

Beyond global warming

So the Pakistani cricketers are insulted, and Pakistanis in general are outraged. In protest, the Pak kabaddi team has pulled out of an India tour, and parliamentarians have pulled out of a delegation coming to take part in the jubilee celebrations of the Election Commission.

T N Ninan: The biter bit

Just when it was safe to conclude that Home Minister P Chidambaram would go down in history as the best home minister India has had, along comes news that not one player from the champion T-20 team, Pakistan, has been chosen to play in the IPL tournament.

Surjit S Bhalla: Arrogance Unlimited

The neighbour wants to know why I have a bump on my head, so I explain to him that it came from colliding with a lamp post. &ldquo;What were you doing wrestling with a lamp post?&rdquo; he asks, no doubt thinking himself clever at his choice of phrase. &ldquo;I ran into it because I couldn&rsquo;t see it while walking in the fog,&rdquo; I explain. Since I&rsquo;m not known for exerting overmuch, I suppose he is right in wanting to know what I was doing loitering in the fog anyway. &ldquo;I was taking the dog for his constitutional,&rdquo; I explain the canine&rsquo;s insistence at being walked when it is still dark and the winter chill at its bitterest.

Kishore Singh: What will they do without me?

The fifth literature festival in the Pink City got off to a slow start but not through any particular fault of its own. Fog-bound in Delhi, several flights failed to take off, depriving opening day of some of several star guests including Girish Karnad, who was due to make the inaugural speech, dissident Nigerian novelist and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka and Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuk, the beguiling Queen Mother of Bhutan. Traffic snarls on the Delhi-Jaipur highway held up scores of others.

Sunil Sethi: Lit fest - A hook-up with books

You know those mothers who say, &ldquo;You look lovely in anything you wear. Please don&rsquo;t do a thing differently?&rdquo; My mother wasn&rsquo;t one of those. My mother&rsquo;s greatest regret is that her daughters never really got into the whole pretty frocks thing. I think she, who was a bit of a clotheshorse, would dearly have liked to have fashion-forward offspring; but very early on, I took my clothing into my own decidedly fashion-backward hands.

Wardrobe malfunction

Paris, and its contiguous Ile-de-France metropolitan area, has some of the most distinctive, radical structures built in the last 50 years or so. Think of the Pompidou Centre wrapped in exposed, colour-coded service pipes, which created a stir when it opened in 1977. Or the glass pyramid entrance to the Louvre and the spectacular Grand Arch that reinterprets the classical aesthetics of the Arc De Triomphe in a 20th century vocabulary of glass and steel. Le Corbusier, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, I M Pei, Renzo Piano &mdash; some of the most eminent architects of the last century left their mark on the city, which saw a lot of re-building activity in the post-war years and again, under Fran&ccedil;ois Mitterrand.

Building for keeps

Paris, Summer 1967&rdquo;, the section is titled, and in it the youthful Reem leaves to study in &ldquo;everybody&rsquo;s dream city&rdquo;, where she believes she will be free in a way that is impossible at home. No sooner does she arrive, however, than the 1967 Six-Day War breaks out between Israel and its Arab neighbours. &ldquo;It took a day in Paris,&rdquo; Reem recounts, &ldquo;for me to realise one never really leaves home.

Curfew humour

His predecessors have defined the job, there is no fixed format.

Aditi Phadnis: No templates for the NSA

India will be celebrating its 61st Republic Day next week. There is certainly much to rejoice. No other developing country, over the past 60 years, has achieved as much as India has in politics as well as economics.

Bimal Jalan: Where are we, and where are we going?-II

Century Communication is one of India&rsquo;s largest post-production companies, seller of airtime and now a serious broadcaster.

Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: Behind those pixels

Whilst wandering around in the narrow alleys of Jaipur&rsquo;s walled city, I chanced upon an interesting conversation. A bunch of tourists were engaged in a spirited dialogue with a shopkeeper selling local turban cloth. They seemed to have become quite enamoured with the couple of readymade turbans on display, but the shopkeeper was mystifyingly refusing to sell them any.

Geetanjali Krishna: Backpacks for the head

Looking at India as a high-beta subset of global equity markets.

The Chinese impact

Shutting down venues for live music robs a city of character.

End of the line for The Tote

Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and consequent climate change is perhaps the most contentious issue in the world today. At the centre of it all is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which collates the work of thousands of scientists, assessed through peer-review and approved by 192 governments.

Hard times for climate scientists

Even gods have their moments of doubt &mdash; of coming up against seemingly insurmountable odds. And it would seem that cricket, one of the subcontinent&rsquo;s most venerated gods, may have met such a match in the current India-Pakistan d&eacute;tente. Politicians in Pakistan and cricket lovers in India alike have decried the IPL auction that rejected every Pakistani player up for bids, disappointed that team owners were unable to overcome visa fears and security risks to transcend borders.

Suhasini Haidar: India and Pakistan: new over in the offing?

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