This has been quite a decade for global corporate leaders, volatile not only in terms of their actual fortunes, but even more so with respect to the shifting perceptions of society. When the decade began, large corporations and those at their helm were at the peak of their power, flush with riches delivered by the dotcom boom in the US economy as well as the vast opportunities created by easier...

Well-known PR firms, professional designers, and ad agencies served the richer parties and candidates. They made up “news” items in the standard fonts and sizes of the desired newspapers and even “customised” the items to make them seem exclusive in different publications.  So you thought you’d had enough of Page 3? Newspapers in Maharashtra think otherwise. Some of them had more than one, on several days during the recent state...

Interview with Joan Mencher, an anthropologist who has worked in India for long on issues such as agriculture, ecology and caste.   JOAN P. MENCHER is a Professor emerita of Anthropology from the City University of New York’s Graduate Centre and Lehman College of the City University of New York. She is the chair of an embryonic not-for-profit organisation, The Second Chance Foundation, which works to support rural grass-roots organisations...

In the Indian reform story, policies on land have been the least reformed one, said Ratan Tata on Monday. The Chairman of the Tata Group, whose company Tata Motors had to shift the production base for its Nano car from Singur in West Bengal to Sanand in Gujarat following continuous protests over land acquisition for the project, said political leaders should be able to strike the right balance in deciding...

The new joke on Dalal street is that gold prices are soaring, not because of increased demand in the US, India and China, but because Shilpa Shetty has bought half the gold in India for her wedding dress! Jokes apart, the yellow metal has hit headlines recently because of its spectacular rise. Prices have spiked as investors now prefer gold to the weakening US dollar. The US economy has lurched...