Team India

 A dream start to India's innings. The Captain has decided to bat and to face the first ball himself. That the Opposition has a reduced bowling strength in no way detracts from his maiden appearance at the Delhi grounds.It was in the same pitch that the team BJP had been bowling less and hedging more,when UPA was batting.The bureaucracy has been dusted and he intends to put the best in the sitting room showcase.The invitation to SAARC leaders at his anointing is less of a show of BJP's solid presence in the LS and more of his instinct to break away from a decade of moribund foreign policy initiatives.One reason why the Pakistan PM has been induced to come on the same page ,that of keeping the passage for dialogue open The same with Colombo.The anxieties of the Dravidian parties across the aisles will matter when the nuts and bolts of vexatious bi-lateral issues come up for discussions.One would be happy to see him open with a partner who is capable of dealing with the spin of " inflation ', as the pitch has been highly conducive to this for three years now.With a good opening score,the batting line up thereafter must bring to the crease veterans and bright debutants to clinically deal with equally important matters of the state,internal security, growth ,fiscal excellence and others. With his known acumen to put together a monitoring team who would assiduously watch replays and advise timely corrections be it in methods or strategy,the new PM is today eminently the favorite. The Sensex score card will no doubt indicate a high run rate,but the captain would be more concerned with finally posting a winnable total than the number of sixes registered. 
Pub Fin Express  May 24
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/letters-to-the-editor/1253726/0

Inaction,the death knell of leaders

For a decade and more Shiela Dixit had the trappings of a Chief Minister of Delhi with no authority over its law and order machinery, nor the freedom to enact laws through her " Legislative assembly " without approval of Union Home Ministry. She was in fact a glorified mayor of the city whose municipal revenues were comparable to Mumbai Corporation  !.It took a dharna by Kejriwal on the Delhi streets in a shivering wintry night, to expose the hollowness of the CM's position. She nevertheless did little to elevate either herself or her chair through her entire tenure.She lost to Kejriwal in the polls.

          Dr Singh on the other hand  had no such constitutional restraints to function.And yet he has led UPA-II to  a dismal end .Had he quit a year and half earlier at the peak of the scams ,he would not only have saved his personal standing but in the process saved the the Congress too from  the ignominy of such a pitiable LS tally.In trying to save few remaining months of UPA-II ,Congress has perhaps  lost an entire decade  now.

Pub Mail Today May 19

http://epaper.mailtoday.in/epaperhome.aspx?issue=1952014

Baby thrown with bath water ?

The decisive mandate for the BJP in the 2014 LS polls is ample proof that the Indian electorate has come of age.This time around it  seems to have used the same diversity of political entities to  throw up a  cogent and cohesive formation at the Centre.The traditional caste cauldron of UP or even Bihar, did not come to boil this time and a clear potion has been served.The nation has been pleasantly informed this morning that amidst the more visible pursuit of economic reforms we have perhaps missed that a political upgrade of our polity from within ,was going on all the time ! .Now that fractious politics is given its requiem for five years and hopefully much longer ,a grand national fabric with the weft and warp of growth  and social equity can be woven. The greater worry for all including the BJP , must be the absence of a  progressive Opposition.Have we thrown the baby with the bath water ?The travails of the UPA-II on this score must stay  grimly in our memories in the months ahead. 

Churn and skim the dross

.Denied the PR  extravagance of others, did a fledgling AAP,  capture the imagination across a swathe of populace  to land  a  cache of 28 seats in Delhi and create a political flutter across the nation.Only  an emancipated electorate would  have thrown up such a result. To this extent the job of the EC stands well enabled .But then,the EC  is pitted against extraordinary influence of muscle and money power of parties. It has been able to largely rein in the former with enhanced security forces and polling in  multiple  phases. It has now to arm itself to tackle the latter, with  better and quicker  forensics to detect /  intercept exorbitant money flow into the elections.By filing FIRs on lesser infringements ,the EC may well have  asserted its  authority but needs to go  beyond  .A couple of speedy disqualifications of  candidates, high and low on the basis of proof obtained, should see an immediate and  drastic reduction of this evil. Having witnessed a electoral transformation of sorts with an AAP, the need is eminently for facilitating the entry of more of them and who better to ensure this,than  the EC as the Election Lokpal .These new entrants would  in different ways ,help upgrade  our polity.

 Pub Deccan Herald May 15

Companions in Hubris

 The Exit polls have made the political and stock markets beehives , frenetic.True interpretation of statistics lies  more in what it hides than reveals.Opinion / Exit polls may well have matured over time in improved projection of vote share from sample size to actuals. The problem  in a highly segmented electorate,lies  in deducing the seat share from the vote percentages. In endemic assembly polls where combination of pre-poll allies has closely associated regional factors and hence amenable to more rational analysis, the LS poll provides no such leverage to poll gurus. In the 2004 LS polls the AIADMK had a 30 % vote share with nil seats and in 2009 ,with 23 % had 9 seats!.Let us therefore take the 2014 exit poll predictions merely as another exercise in an attempt to improve the hit rate. May be the  vicious polarization of electorate this time round ,has helped sharpen the contours of perception to the advantage of  the poll pundits .Indian bourses are  known for their high speculative  bent and may be pleased  find an equally exuberant ally in the Exit polls.This is a heady combination and  May 16  will perhaps help educate both the pollster and the investor a little more in their unending travel to graduation.

Pub Fin Exp May 15
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/letters-to-the-editor/1250894
Pub Bus Std May 15
http://epaper.business-standard.com/bsepaper/svww_zoomart.php?Artname=20140515aT010101006&ileft=243&itop=1324&zoomRatio=184&AN=20140515aT010101006

When speculation is King !

 It is a sign of the lack of depth in Indian stocks, some even blue-chips, that the Sensex is so markedly sensitive to transient and endemic political inclemency. Speculation often overrides fundamentals. The US sub-prime crisis of 2008 affecting global finance or a serious Middle East conflict threatening oil supplies upset the economy of developing countries. But it is a pity that our economy with its strong fundamentals should wait with trepidation the electoral outcome on May 16. That swings will be wilder on that day than say an Israeli-Palestinian flare up or even a revised QE taper in the US is a given. Weak fault lines continue to exist, be it in the narrow band of retail speculative stock transactions, the dated 30-component Sensex, as perhaps in other sectors too the Sensex seems to be largely serving as a day-to-day ATM for investors, which is fine except that swings tend to become hugely separated from the core value strength of the respective stock(s). Speculation and short haul political developments are content to feed on each other and small investors invariably get hurt. It is time that our stock indices get reworked and that fundamentals start prevailing over exuberant speculation.
Pub Financial Express May 13
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/letters-to-the-editor/1250070

Technology,then apocalypse !

For ages  the industry as it is known today had been wrestling with land,labour and finance.Technology shrunk acres into mere garage size and labour from thousands to less than a handful. Whatsapp then upended the need for capital Money can  now be grown in the billions in pots ,not even tress.Man today needs brains ,not brawn.Physiology followed suit  and now he had a huge head and little else. With bio-repair,re-celling and cloning ,sex was lost to the dictionary . Romance being a dodo, emotion and fine arts became archival.Travel  for work or pleasure being no more necessary and conveyance by air,sea or land went defunct and with that an entire base of mechanical engineering just vanished and so did the power requirements. The world was restored to its primordial pristine state ,sans pollution. Man's world had by now become a huge beehive ,perhaps with one queen bee,humming endlessly with one mission of making honey with none left to savour it or even understand its taste.In one fell swoop mankind  had been destroyed by technology !. Give me any day my bowl of bitter -sweet potion of Indian elections or even an Iraq war.but for heaven's sake do not inveigle  me into self destruct  through technology that  surreptitiously invades the childhood first,with riotous video games .

PM or Pracharak ?

It is either extreme diffidence or height of hubris that Modi has had to make hundreds of speeches in a span of three months .These are getting increasingly seat specific and hence self contradictory.He had first started off on his Gujarat model of development .As time elapsed both the message and direction are lost and the nation is no longer privy to a PM's road map post elections.Modi has clearly abdicated the rostrum to the speech writers and perhaps reduced to the level of a chief Pracharak !. His needless barb against the EC is the outcome of this..Modi and the BJP are sadly,lost in the by lanes of punch lines and rhetoric. Men and women in high office must possess the ability to weigh and reflect on the advice given by their party men ,but nevertheless plough a lonely furrow of personal tenets. Any electoral malpractice invites action of the EC which is empowered to act on its wisdom.Modi now and Indira Gandhi earlier ,would need to be faulted on this score.Mrs Gandhi caught up in the aftermath of her disqualification by the HC on electoral misdemeanour went on to impose Emergency. The consequences of which were far reaching for her personally besides the damage done to the nation in very many ways. Modi has a great opportunity however to act towards restoring his personal image as an eminent leader and that of the institution of the EC.Respect for constitutional edifices only elevates the standing of political leaders bringing greater moral authority to their governance.

SOS-Save the May Day

  Ist of May  adopted as the  May Day   represents the universal resolve to protect the interests of workers across the globe. It also is the synonym for the distress call  - SOS .Post industrial revolution the workers needed to be  protected and May Day remained relevant At the peak of powerful unionism the industrialists wished they had appropriated the slogan first. . Now post global liberalism ,workers are in greater need for the  slogan ,but sadly have lost both in strength and voice. Powerful unions in the US are history and in India the union movement is moribund . Automation and high end Technology got rid of workers and  innovative IT got rid of both traditional business AND workers ! Whatsapp had 55 employees when it was sold for $19 blln- close to the Market value of Hindustan Unilever !! .Every nation that adds millions of job seeking young men each year needs to join  hands in a global push to reinvent the May Day all over again. Else  its significance will be rendered historical and without work,  even the term " workers " consigned to the erstwhile dictionary or to the browser ,if you will.  
Pub Fin Express May 8
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/letters-to-the-editor-clear-distortion/1248259