9 September 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Sept 9, Reuter – The Philippine cabinet resigned on Wednesday, giving President Corazon Aquino a free hand to reorganise her government as she faces the worst domestic crisis of her 18-month rule. The mass resignation by 26 government ministers mirrored an identical move last…
10 September 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Sept 10 – Philippine President Corazon Aquino has been given a final chance to cobble together a cohesive government thanks to the resignation of all 26 of her cabinet ministers, bankers, businessmen and stockbrokers said. They said the turmoil of the past two weeks,…
16 September 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Sept 16 – A veteran development banker and the former head of one of the Philippines’ five biggest commercial banks are tipped to occupy the country’s two top economic posts, bankers and officials polled by Reuters said. They said Public Works and Highways Secretary…
17 September 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Sept 17, Reuter – Philippine President Corazon Aquino, under pressure from a disgruntled military, dropped two of her closest friends and advisers on Thursday as she continued to rebuild her battered government. Fighting to contain the after effects of a coup attempt three weeks…
18 September 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Sept 18, Reuter – President Corazon Aquino’s shake-up of top posts in her government will restore waning investor confidence in the Philippines, Trade and Industry Secretary Jose Concepcion said on Friday. “The new team will be a rallying force. It will bring investments in,” Concepcion…
22 September 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Sept 22 – Philippine food and beverage giant San Miguel is doing “magnificently well” despite de facto governmental control, executive Vice-President Ramon del Rosario told Reuters In an interview. “We will have a banner year — there is no question of that,” del Rosario…
From the Editor When I stepped into this role in mid-2010, it seemed India was unstoppable. Gross Domestic Product growth had averaged 8.5 per cent since 2004, when the United Progressive Alliance won power. The financial markets in the United States and Europe were in disarray after the US sub-prime crisis laid down a napalm…
From the Managing Editor An early breakfast is something that most journalists don’t care for. Most of my tribe skip it and among those who don’t, very few sip their coffee before 10 am. Like Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, we finish our days late and start them late, you see. It was, therefore, unusual for…
From the Editor Raghuram Govind Rajan is a lucky man. Two weeks into his new job as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India his friend Ben Bernanke, who he calls “cautious and nuanced” in his book Fault Lines, handed him a big gift- a delay in the “taper” in the US Federal Reserve’s quantitative…
24 September 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Sept 24 – Any ceiling on debt repayments imposed by the Philippines would cut off trade credits, drive up inflation and halve the exchange rate of the peso, an independent Manila research organization said. Sergio Andal, a forecaster at the Center for Research and…
From the Editor Once every year, we pay obeisance to the best and strongest companies in India. It is not grudging admiration. Our corporate icons deserve every bit of their applause. No management school, or case study, or how-to hardback that you pick up at an airport bookstore can teach you how to plot a…
28 September 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Sept 28 – The Philippines is poised for a risky showdown with its creditors that could take the global debt crisis into new territory, bankers and economic analysts polled by Reuters said. Over the past week, a combative Congress has made a series…
25 September 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Sept 25 – The Philippines’ recent debt restructuring hangs in the balance after a Senate panel ruled that an executive order issued by President Aquino in July should be repealed. That order allowed the government to take over a loan made to a private…
At Business Today we write about companies all the time. Often, it is a top-down view. We meet the Chief Executive Officer, the senior members of the management team, the stock-market analysts whose job it is to keep a gimlet eye on their wards, the suppliers, the competitors, the regulators. But it is very important,…
30 September 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Sept 30, Reuter – Charges of widespread human rights violations in Asia met silence or official denials on Wednesday but a Reuter poll showed personal liberty is still a prized possession across much of the sprawling continent. The charges were made by the London-based…
1 October 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Oct 1, Reuter – The Philippine Congress on Thursday pushed forward an ambitious program to break up estates and give the land to peasants, filing two bills ahead of a presidential deadline. The legislature also proposing setting up a panel to shape a new…
Exactly two years ago we ran a cover story on India’s skills crisis. This was just after Subramanian Ramadorai was named Adviser to the Prime Minister in the National Council on Skill Development. How quickly have we moved down the skilling highway? Glacially slow, and frighteningly so. For a nation where tens of millions of…
1 October 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Oct 1 – Members of the Philippine Congress want to set up a commission to shape a new national debt policy. Six senators, all members of the ruling coalition, have introduced a bill saying economic growth should dictate debt repayments. “Growth, equity and social…
In 1908, when Henry Ford began making his revolutionary Model Ts on an assembly line in Detroit, there were 241 carmakers in the United States. (In comparison, India has 20 carmakers in 2013). “I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the…
Sometimes India’s economy resembles a rambunctious teenager brought up short by a finger-wagging headmaster. Our finance minister can now recite with his eyes closed a string of figures that seek to prove that India has not done badly at all in comparison with the rest of the developing- and indeed the developed- world. P. Chidambaram…
2 October 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Oct 2, Reuter – The number of strikes in the Philippines is down this year, but analysts say rising labour militancy promises a confrontation that could hobble economic recovery and scare off badly-needed investments. In the eye of the storm is the aggressive left-wing…
8 October 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Oct 8 – The Philippine peso plunged to a record low of 20.850 against the dollar on Thursday from 20.697 on Wednesday in its biggest single-day fall in President Corazon Aquino’s 19-month rule. A Bankers’ Association of the Philippines spokesman said only one million dollars…
From the Editor Business Today’s team of reporters was putting finishing touches to the BT-YES Bank Best CFO Survey starting on page 57. The 14 men and one woman who have won this year’s awards, chosen by a stellar jury after a rigorous nationwide search, bring to life the satisfaction of making those numbers on…
12 October 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Oct 12 – Short-term speculators have switched their attention from Manila’s once bullish stock markets to a suddenly booming illegal trade in dollars, brokers and analysts said. They said the black market rate of the U.S. currency has risen alongside a progressive fall in…
13 October 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Oct 13, Reuter – The Philippine peso has been battered over the past month as speculators moved from once- bullish Manila stock markets to a booming illegal trade in dollars, analysts said on Tuesday. They said the black market rate of the U.S. currency has…
14 October 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Oct 14, Reuter – The Philippine government is considering setting up a special police force to enforce return-to-work orders at strike-hit companies, Secretary of Labour Franklin Drilon said. Labour unrest had declined this year but was still simmering because workers were testing their new-found…
From the Editor I remember sticking an aluminium one-yen coin and a copper one-US-cent coin to my computer screen in Tokyo around the mid-1990s and watching in fascination Las they became equal in value, with the yen appreciating to 100 to the dollar. It was nice for frequent travellers like me- when I paid my…
14 October 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Oct 14 – The Manila International Futures Exchange Inc (MIFE) hopes to start trading coconut oil, copra and coffee contracts later this month to enhance its sugar and soybean trading base, the president of the company which manages the exchange, Uisdein McInnes, said in an…
From the Editor Looking down at my bowl of gazpacho at dinner one recent night. I realised that I do not own a single moustache spoon, with guards, so that guests with resplendent whiskers could eat soup and not leave any trace behind- the kind made for Maharaja Ganga Singh of Bikaner around 1900. Nor…
19 October 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Oct 19, Reuter – Philippine President Corazon Aquino can expect a volley of anxious questions about her government’s economic direction when she faces members of 13 major business groups on Tuesday, analysts said. It will be her first economic speech since she came close…
From the Editor We need to place the AgustaWestland helicopter “kerfuffle”- as a former defence minister put it- in context. The 12 AW101s were headed for the Indian Air Force’s Communication Squadron, which flies VVIPs around. to replace its ageing Mi-8 fleet. The new helicopters are strictly not combat craft-they are personnel carriers and can…
22 October 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Oct 22 – The Philippine Central Bank and creditors of a private fertiliser firm are racing to finalise a new compromise over a 56.5 million dollar debt that is holding up the country’s recent debt rescheduling agreement, sources close to the talks said. A…
22 October 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Oct 22 – The Philippine government has made major changes in its debt-to-equity conversion program to take into account a sharp drop in value in the country’s debt paper, Central Bank Senior Deputy Governor Gabriel Singson said. He told reporters at a news conference…
From the Editor Within the space of a week, I met N.R. Narayana Murthy for a long and friendly conversation at his airy venture-capital office in Bangalore’s Jayanagar suburb and then conducted telephone interviews with the company’s Chairman, K.V. Kamath, who was in Mumbai and its CEO, S.D. Shibulal, who was attending the World Economic…
28 October 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Oct 28, Reuter – Gunmen shot dead three Americans, including two airmen, and a Filipino near an U.S. air base on Wednesday and authorities immediately urged tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen and dependents in the Philippines to stay indoors. The four were killed…
28 October 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Oct 28, Reuter – The recall of a U.S. military diplomat from the Philippines underlines the love-hate ties between the two countries but also points to a new direction in Manila’s foreign policy, analysts said on Wednesday. The U.S. Embassy’s announcement that Assistant Army…
From the Editor Most of us are lucky if we get fifteen minutes of fame. You can be famous, but not rich. Fame is fleeting, and unless you are V.S. Naipaul, your best shot at fame is when you are young or Amitabh Bachchan, in good health, good to look at, and very good at…
28 October 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Oct 28, Reuter – The United States said on Wednesday it was withdrawing a military attache from the Philippines following accusations that he interfered in a failed coup attempt in August. A U.S. embassy statement said assistant army attache Lieutenant-Colonel Victor Raphael would depart…
29 October 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Oct 29, Reuter – Philippine Communist guerrillas appear to have launched a major offensive with the killings of 14 people in two days, political analysts said on Thursday. For the first time in the 18-year-old Communist insurgency, the victims included U.S. servicemen, two serving…
From the Editor Many, many moons ago, I used to visit a cousin pursuing his B.Tech. programme at IIT Madras. The campus was beautiful; of an early Sunday morning you saw deer darting past drowsy students who had lolled around the amphitheatre the night before watching a movie after consuming a special dinner in the…
30 October 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Oct 30 – The Philippine government and creditors of a private fertiliser firm have reached agreement on a 56.5 million dollar debt that has held up the country’s recent debt rescheduling agreement, bankers and officials said. A senior foreign banker told Reuters that lawyers…
4 November 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Nov 4, Reuter – The new customs chief of the Philippines says he frowns on blatant graft but has told his poorly-paid officers they can accept “tokens of appreciation” because they are a part of Filipino culture. “I am looking at this in a…
5 November 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Nov 5 – The heads of national oil companies of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) said firm world crude prices make the oil outlook for the near future optimistic, but they warned that regional cooperation must improve in order to meet a…
From the Editor The US Congress stepped back just in time from the fiscal cliff, but Indian sensibilities about the Delhi gang rape and killing fell off another cliff days before we went to press. P.N. Vasanti of the CMS Media Lab told me that coverage of the rape aftermath (and by that I mean mostly…
9 November 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Nov 9 – Any fall in commodity prices resulting from the crash in world stock markets could badly affect the Philippines, Central Bank governor Jose Fernandez said. “Probably far more important than exchange rates and interest rates are commodity prices,” he told reporters. ‘Because then…
Chaitanya Kalbag, Reuters MANILA, Nov 11 – Near the end of her second year in office, Philippine President Corazon Aquino remains at the controls of an economy that continues to lumber down the runway but refuses to take off. Aquino said in a fighting speech last month that her reforms had ended a three-year recession,…
Chaitanya Kalbag, Reuters MANILA, Nov 19 – National Statistics Office (NSO) figures show the Philippines’ trade deficit stood at 674 million dollars in the January-September period, up from 168 million dollars in the same 1986 period, and wider than the 574 million dollar deficit reported by Central Bank Governor Jose Fernandez last week. The NSO said…
Chaitanya Kalbag, Reuters MANILA, Nov 20 – The Philippines’ restructuring of 13.2 billion dollars of foreign debt has again been plunged into uncertainty following calls from a leading senator for the abrogation of a July agreement with the country’s creditor banks. Senator Alberto Romulo, Chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Banking, Currency and Financial Institutions,…
From the Editor We are waiting to exhale. Food prices fell in the last fortnight of December, for the first time in six years, and headline inflation is expected to drop sharply to about 7.5 per cent in December. The rupee has risen two weeks in a row. Industrial production rose 5.9 per cent in…
Chaitanya Kalbag, Reuters MANILA, Nov 20 – The Philippines will borrow between 30,000 and 100,000 tonnes of raw sugar from Thailand to meet a sudden increase in demand after a shortfall caused by a severe drought, a government official said. Sugar Regulatory Administration (SRA) chairman Arsenio Yulo told Reuters the transaction, called a time swap,…
From the Editor Three economists are gazing at a glass half full of water. The optimist sees a glass half full. The pessimist sees a glass half empty. The realist picks up the glass and drinks the water. I’m sure you’ve heard that joke, but we are hard put to find some levity as we…
Chaitanya Kalbag, Reuters MANILA, Nov 24 – The Philippines has moved to defend its foreign exchange reserves by curbing U.S. dollar trading between banks, easing bank deposit rules for overseas workers and cutting purchases of debt paper with foreign exchange. The new rules were announced as the peso stumbled to a 20-month low of 20.938…
Chaitanya Kalbag MANILA, Nov 24, Reuter – Private groups in Australia and West Europe are supplying Philippine communist guerrillas with aid, a military intelligence report said on Tuesday. The report said 14 private groups in Australia, Ireland, Switzerland, West Germany and Belgium were sending aid to the 23,000-strong communist New People’s Army. “The governments of…
From the Editor Companies and human beings are surprisingly similar. Over a long period of time we build an intricate geodesic dome of habits, rules. principles, emotions, likes and dislikes. Changing ourselves is very. very difficult, even when we know that our future well-being, prosperity and happiness depend on how we change and adapt. Similarly,…
Chaitanya Kalbag, Reuters MANILA, Nov 25 – The Philippines has been warned that the United States is planning to slash its 1988 sugar import quota but is not very worried, Sugar Regulatory Administration (SRA) chairman Arsenio Yulo told Reuters in an interview. “The signal given to us is that they (the U.S.) will reduce the…
Chaitanya Kalbag MANILA, Nov 25, Reuter – The communist rebel killings of three Americans near a U.S. military base in the Philippines last month will strengthen ties between the two countries and speed up aid from Washington, a U.S. official said on Wednesday. “These killings will have the opposite effect from that which the terrorists…
From the Editor It was a bracing week: I started and ended it with conversations with honest men whose cleanliness shone through. Both had had something to do with ‘national resources’ up in the stratosphere or deep down beneath the seabed. There is much financial skullduggery afoot, but we have not run out of sentinels,…
Chaitanya Kalbag MANILA, Nov 27, Reuter – Rescue workers battled through floods in the central Philippines on Friday after Typhoon Nina killed at least 361 people, 275 of them in a coastal town smashed by giant tidal waves. President Corazon Aquino declared 11 provinces in the south of Luzon island calamity zones and ordered emergency rehabilitation…
Chaitanya Kalbag, Reuters MANILA, Dec 1 – Short-term interest rates have shot up in the Philippines as the peso has come under increasing pressure and the central bank has been forced to intervene heavily to defend the local currency, bankers said. Bankers’ Association of the Philippines (BAP) figures show the central bank was a net seller…
Chaitanya Kalbag MANILA, Dec 7, Reuter – Former Philippine finance minister Jaime Ongpin was found with a bullet wound in the head in his Manila office on Monday in what his son and police said looked like suicide. Police investigator Romeo Urbana said a guard at the building housing Ongpin’s office found the former minister slumped…
11 December 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Dec 11 – The Philippine government intends to boost tax collection, reorder its expenditures, and rationalise state-owned corporations to remedy Its dismal fiscal situation, Finance Secretary Vicente Jayme said He told a meeting of the Philippine Economic Society that the country’s tax revenues as…
From the Editor One speaks the glory of the British queen, And one describes a charming Indian screen; A third interprets motions, looks, and eyes; At ev’ry word a reputation dies. Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock: Canto 3 At every word of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, Manmohan Singh’s reputation has…
Chaitanya Kalbag, Reuters MANILA, Dec 13 – South-east Asian leaders gather in Manila this week to try to refurbish an organisation that has rarely moved from rhetoric to reality on its main goal of economic cooperation, analysts said. The threat of a recession in the United States, a slowdown in the world economy and rising…
14 December 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Dec 14, Reuter – Spurred by shrinking markets and the spectre of global recession, the leaders of South-East Asia were poised on Monday to end two decades of sluggish economic growth with a ringing resolve to boost collective action. In a draft communique dominated…
From the Editor I remember a composite satellite photograph of the world taken at night time. One country stood out like a black blotch on a map that was mostly shining—North Korea, the ‘Hermit Kingdom’. This fortnight I felt very much like I live in my own hermit kingdom. Perhaps an ascetic life in a…
14 December 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Dec 14 – The Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) criticised rising protectionism, called for new commodity agreements and urged creditors to ease the burden of foreign debt in a draft communique to be signed by leaders of the regional bloc. ASEAN officials…
14 December 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Dec 14, Reuter – South-East Asia’s non-communist countries must gird to meet challenges posed by uncertain political and economic conditions, Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Mahathir Mohamad said on Monday. He told the opening meeting of the third Association of South East Asian Nations…
15 December 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Dec 15 – Japan’s trade and overseas investment with South-East Asia, which accounts for nearly a third of Japanese bilateral aid, has been steadily declining, figures from the Japanese Foreign Ministry show. Japanese Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita announced a two billion dollar ASEAN-Japan Development…
From the Editor I have a confession to make. Many moons ago, I studied to be an accountant and despite one of the world’s toughest entry barriers with single-digit-pass rates in the chartered accountancy examinations-dreamt of crunching numbers while boning up on ‘double-entry bookkeeping’ and the mysteries of profit and loss. But the world of…
Chaitanya Kalbag MANILA, Dec 15 – Japanese Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita marked his first foreign trip by vowing to improve access to Japan for imports from South-East Asia and by formally announcing a two billion dollar package aimed at boosting the private sector and economic cooperation in the region. “With a view to contributing to…
Chaitanya Kalbag MANILA, Dec 15, Reuter- South-East Asia’s leaders cemented their alliance on Tuesday, ending a summit meeting with a declaration short on political contention and long on the urgency of forging economic unity. Political analysts said the smooth passage of the two-day Manila summit of the Association of South East Asian Nations had also served…
From the Editor The word “flurry” is used to describe a sudden blast or gust, or a sudden commotion, and it. has been used frequently to label the announcements from the government’s blunderbuss over the past three weeks. My dictionary also tells me flurry is the “death-agony of the whale”, but we don’t want that,…
Chaitanya Kalbag, Reuters MANILA, Dec 16 – A 23 pct cut in the 1988 U.S. sugar import quota for the Philippines is deeper than expected, but Manila is banking on a U.S. proposal to import extra sugar under a re-export plan, Sugar Regulatory Administration (SRA) Chairman Arsenio Yulo told Reuters in an interview. The U.S. Agriculture…
Competition is fierce and kicking in India, not least between business magazines. Which is why we love being flies on the wall as we watch the 800-pound gorillas slug it out with the upstarts in their pens. The stories are always riveting. They tell us why long-time incumbents drowse at the top of the tree;…
The day before this issue of Business Today hits news stands, America will vote for a new president. The day after you invest less than 80 US cents in our quality journalism (in the event that you paid its full cover price), the Chinese Communist Party will meet to anoint a new leadership. Both transitions…
16 December 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Dec 16 – Japanese Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita promised President Corazon Aquino he would speed up assistance to the Philippines and soften terms for bilateral aid, a Japanese government spokesman told reporters. Takeshita and Aquino signed an agreement on an 80.2 billion yen loan…
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s dramatic announcement on January 18 that the Emergency in India is being relaxed and that elections to the Lok Sabha will be held in March, has created ripples of amazement the world over. All detained Opposition leaders have been released, and press censorship has been lifted. What do these developments portend?…
From the Editor Turkmenistan’s “President for Life” Saparmurat Niyazov erected a 50-ft gold-plated statue of himself in the centre of the capital Ashgabat, eight years before he gave immortality the slip in 2006. The statue rotated through the day, always pointing to the sun. We have not got to the gold-plating stage yet, but we…
A laughter club in Mumbai is forced to “zip it” because a humourless neighbour is disturbed, not long after a 63-year-old cartoon unleashes a cleansing of school textbooks that would warm a tin-pot dictator’s heart. In the same “cosmopolitan” city, a woman is arrested for possessing liquor that she was using to make chocolates, and…
From the Editor The deeper we sail into the economic doldrums, the greater is the wonderment that there is so much locked-up promise in India that we cussedly ignore. Politics oozes from every pore of ours; we expect the economy to take care of itself. Over the past few months I have talked in great…
From the Editor There are times when we at Business Today chafe at being a fortnightly. There is so much happening in business and the economy that we story tellers are fit to burst. It is not just what you see in the printed magazine our website www.businesstoday.in is up to nearly a million page-views.…
Speaking about the 1971 elections to a Newsweek correspondent, Mrs Indira Gandhi had said: “I am the real issue in this election.” In 1977, too, it is she who is the real issue. Her challengers’ election manifestos say hardly anything new, except that they vow to ‘wipe out’ the ‘scourges’ of the Emergency. 320 million…
From the Editor When I find myself in times of trouble Mother Mary comes to me speaking words of wisdom, let it be …
From the Editor Caprice and cowardice were both on display last fortnight. Ten days after a bunch of state election results delivered a hard punchi in the Congress party’s solar plexus, Pranab Mukherjee delivered a Budget for 2012/13 that was simultaneously retrograde and revanchist. Reformist it was not, and neither was it bold, despite many…
From the Editor Our Prime Minister can seem like an accidental politician. Speaking publicly, he comes across as earnestly wooden, and when he addressed the nation on September 21, the eve of the autumnal equinox, you often felt the tele-prompter was scrolling up faster than Manmohan Singh could enunciate, But speak he did, and many…
From the Editor Seven and a half minutes into the movie Paan Singh Tomar a journalist asks the eponymous hero, played by Irrfan Khan, why he became a dacoit. “In the ravines (of Chambal) you will find rebels. The dacoits are in Parliament,” the actor growls. It is probably coincidental that the movie was made…
From the Editor What a fortnight it has been. We have plumbed new depths in animus and acrimony. Not a day goes by without a shrieking melee, either at a press conference or on the streets. The “Reform Spring” has very quickly faded into a fruit-salad autumn, with mangoes and bananas flying around in a…
From the Editor “I am a tiny speck in a sea of brands, buffeted by colour, geometry and neon, a homo brandus furiously rowing his flimsy coracle as it is carried inexorably towards the lethal rapids of consumerism. “Brand” has interesting etymology. We say something “brands itself on our consciousness” or that our latest purchase…
There had been many signs of the anti-Congress wind in the final days of the 1977 election campaign, but its magnitude amazed the canniest political forecaster. In a hurricane sweep, it snuffed out thirty years of uninterrupted Congress rule in independent India, and sent Premier Indira Gandhi, and her feared lieutenants, into sudden oblivion. The…
From the Editor Why did god create stock-market analysts? To make weather forecasters look good, runs the rather puerile joke. But seriously, company analysis is an earnest business-in much of the world, that is, except India. I remember in my wire-service days we used to have lively debates on how to report stock price movements…
From the Editor Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5 If you have ever had the misfortune of falling…
The economy is whirling around in a populist spiral Pranab Mukherjee is starting to look worryingly like a feckless heir squandering his generous inheritance while his fretful guardian in the person of Duvvuri Subbarao tries to board up the door and keep the wolves at bay with a nail here and a nail there. The…
Atal Bihari Vajpayee on the struggle within “We are all like a family and there is bound to be dissent in a democratic party.” The trouble with Atal Bihari Vajpayee, 55, is he is too transparent. A rotund, dhoti-cad orator given to over- heated rhetoric, his misfortune is that he heads a party consisting in…
From the Editor By the time this issue of Business Today hits the news stands, voting for new governments in three Indian states will be completed. The seven-phase Uttar Pradesh election will stretch through February. Tiny Goa follows in early March. When the votes are counted on March 6, one in five Indians will have…
From the Editor “There is always time to add a word, never to withdraw one,” said Baltasar Gracian, a 17th Century Spanish Jesuit monk. More of us could benefit by learning to speak little and be heard when we do speak characteristics of Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi and Kumar Mangalam Birla. Both were born with…
From the Editor Pity the modern banker, who is described in one of the stories in this issue as “pin-striped”. In India, of course, some of the most powerful bankers sport bandhinis, ikats and kanthas. But you have to feel sorry for our bankers. We don’t have anarchists waving their fists at bank CEOS’ pay…
If you look down from a helicopter at any of India’s teeming cities you will see millions of people scurrying around using every known form of locomotion as they move between structures, many of them once described as skyscrapers when we were more down to earth, all busily engaged in every imaginable type of commerce,…
From the Editor India’s Parliament House does not resemble a ziggurat, but it does remind me of the Tower of Babel and how God descended to earth to check things out. He was so alarmed by what seemed achievable by all humans speaking one language, we are told, that he decided to scatter them and…
From the Editor I had never handled a tool in my life; and yet, in time, by labour, application, and contrivance, I found at last that I wanted nothing but I could have made it, especially if I had had tools. However, I made abundance of things, even without tools; and some with no more…
From the Editor In Greek mythology, the Minotaur was a creature with a bull’s head and a man’s body who dwelt at the centre of the Cretan maze or labyrinth. Theseus killed the monster, but forgot to put up a white sail to signal his victory when he returned to Athens, and his distraught father…