Only the most <I>khoosat </I>(cussed, in English) will deny that the two Munnabhai films are very good indeed. The first one came out two years ago and the second two weeks ago. The script is tight,

Films as an industry

Business Standard

After a spectacular five-year run up the charts, commodity prices have dipped all of a sudden. Led by trend-influencers like oil and gold, they have experienced perceptible price erosion over the past

Change of trend

Finally, the public sector banking industry seems to have found a way to blunt the political opposition to consolidation. The Mangalore-based Corporation Bank has informed the stock exchanges that the

A smart gang of three

The Index of Industrial Production (IIP) for July 2006 indicates a sharp surge for the sector as a whole. Industrial output grew by 12.4 per cent over the corresponding period of the previous year,

Hidden reserves

It is easy to be sympathetic to the arguments made by telecom firms which have stated that they cannot possibly be asked to physically verify the addresses of all their subscribers (the Tata telecom

Restating numbers

The widespread illegal mining of iron ore in Bellary district of Karnataka has snowballed into a controversy which has the potential to threaten the future of the current Janata Dal(S)-BJP government.

Lessons from Bellary

This newspaper has opposed the governments policy on special economic zones (SEZs) on primarily two counts. One, the projected tax loss of Rs 175,000 crore during 2005-10 is going to be a huge drain

Killing SEZs

If 99 per cent of wisdom consists of good judgment, Pope Benedict XVI can be said to have failed an important test, one which moreover will sit like a dark cloud on his papacy. While giving a speech

Pope or dope?

Whatever the country expected from Havana, it was not mohabbat zindabad. Manmohan Singhs latest move on Pakistan is either a bold experiment that could lead to path-breaking steps further down the

Mushy with Musharraf

The conventional thinking used to be that ownership and management in enterprises are best divorceduntil research began to throw up evidence that family-managed businesses were consistently doing

The promoter returns

Just how brazen politicians can get is demonstrated by Urban Development Minister S Jaipal Reddys statement, in the wake of demonstrations against the sealing of illegal buildings in the Capital

We are the law

The election of Shinzo Abe as the new leader of Japans Liberal Democratic Party (and therefore as the next Prime Minister) was a foregone conclusion. Although he has held only one political office,

Muscular Japan

With the pioneer among low-cost carriers (LCC) wiping out half its net worth in a short 15 months, it is time to take a long hard look at an aviation sector that seems to have got caught in very rough

Hello, flight control...

The deliberations at the Nainital conclave of Congress chief ministers centred on widespread distress on the farms, and understandably so in the wake of continuing reports of farmer suicides in the

Think it through

A policemans lot, wrote Gilbert and Sullivan in one of their operettas, is an unappy one. In India it is worse than unappy, it is hellish. This is because every politician agrees with Louis XIV of

Freeing the police

The 10-month flip-flop on policy details after taking the decision to increase foreign investment limits in telecom to 74 per cent was bad enough, but worse now seems round the corner as the

Cancel the call

The key message from the ACNielsen Consumer Confidence and Opinions Survey for the first half of 2006, published in this newspaper yesterday, is that India continues to score in sunny optimism. The

Sunny mood

Industrial growth is at a 10-year high, albeit because of a statistical aberration that saw last years growth numbers fall dramatically following the Mumbai floods, and export growth in the first

Capital news

Apart from providing much-needed spectrum for the industry, the best thing about the Telecom Regulatory Authority of Indias (TRAIs) recommendations on 3G spectrum is that it makes a clean break with

Third generation solutions

Soon after General Pervez Musharraf seized power in Pakistan through a coup in October 1999, a former Indian intelligence official wrote a personality profile of the new man in power. One sentence

Read it, forget it

Given its vast resources, both intellectual as well as financial, its not surprising that the World Banks latest Development Policy Review has fascinating insights as far as Indias growth prospects

Pulling its punches

Incisive columns and editorial comment by top opinion leaders

Page 288 - Editorial Comment