Below the line

IST by any other name

The recent Make in India week in Mumbai had all the ingredients of a Bollywood flick. There was a fire at the cultural event organised on the occasion, an auto strike making commuting difficult for people visiting the expo, and, last but not least, late arrivals by almost all the politicians rather in the manner of movie stars. This inevitably led to the seminar schedule going haywire. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley turned up almost 45 minutes late at the CNN Asia Business Forum. This led to CNN anchor Richard Quest taking a dig saying IST also means Indian Stretchable Time. Time to change all that.

The Subbarao connection

Is there a link between D Subbarao assuming charge as RBI governor and the 2008 global financial crisis? In Mangaluru, Subbarao said some of the major events then took place within 11 days of his taking charge. He said many people used to ask him when the crisis would end; some even predicted that it would when his term ended. As it turned out, he recalled, the crisis blew over a week after he stepped down from the RBI in 2013. “So there is a correlation between my tenure as governor and the financial crisis,” he joked.

Read and write

No wonder they say Indians have entrepreneurship in their blood. Nine-year-old Atharv Patil from Mumbai has launched a portal for students to read unique books and share reviews. About 340 students have already registered and written 384 book reviews. What next? Funding, of course.

Home alone?

The BJP in Kerala is desperate for partners. It knows pretty well that without a strong partner it cannot open its account in the Kerala Assembly. It had high hopes about Vellappally Natesan, the minority-bashing Ezhava general secretary of the prestigious socio-religious organisation Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam. The Sangh Parivar egged him to float a political party of Ezhavas and when the Bharatiya Dharma Jana Sena was born two months ago, it was considered a natural ally of the BJP in the Assembly election. But Vellappally is now playing truant and comes out with contradictory statements about alliance each day. He now says the BDJS believes in “opportunity politics” and that his party is open to allying with the Congress, the CPI(M) or the BJP! That has dashed the BJP’s hopes of tapping into the Ezhava vote-bank. It is now sounding out the Christian-majority Kerala Congress (Mani) party, but there is one small problem: until a couple of months back, the BJP had clamoured for the resignation of that party’s leader, KM Mani.

Blinkered

The CEO of a foreign airline seems to be in denial. He refuses to accept the fact that the head of his JV airline in India has decided not to renew his contract, which comes up for extension in April. What is more important for him is to fix the issues hurting the Indian venture and stem the long line of top managers leaving the company.

Strange bedfellows

The increasingly cosy relationship between once-bitter rivals, the CPI(M) and the Congress, was reflected in the formation of a citizens’ forum in Kolkata to protest the police action at JNU. Senior leaders of both parties, once at each other’s throats, walked side by side to demand an apology from the Centre. Politics makes strange bedfellows!

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