Some things to Reconsider

Consider two small but telling news items that appeared last week on Prime Minister Modi’s Birthday, both slipping into what I like to call the “News Shadow Region.” That’s the part of the newspaper where editors quietly park stories that are true but awkward —“minimum disclosure, maximum gains.” First, Vantara —a massive animal rescue and rehabilitation centre in Gujarat spearheaded by Anant Ambani. Officially, it’s an act of compassion by the Reliance Foundation. Unofficially, it looks like a billionaire’s private zoo masquerading as Noah’s Ark. Tigers, cheetahs, giraffes, zebras, orangutans—even a mountain gorilla. They’ve got a better collection than most African reserves. Some of these animals were “rescued” from canned hunting farms. Wildlife enthusiasts will tell you a simple, grim fact: for every exotic animal that survives transport, two others die enroute. Conservation? More like shopping with casualties. The real miracle here isn’t the ark, though. It’s the judiciary....

  Some time ago, the residence of the Hero Group’s Munjal family was raided. The next morning, newspapers screamed that assets worth twenty-five crores had been confiscated. What assets? No one bothered to say. The press release was a haiku; the social-media choir turned it into an opera. The bhakts on social media cheered as if the government had unearthed a treasure chest in Gurgaon. To anyone with functioning spectacles, however, this was theatre, not triumph. Twenty-five crores in a billionaire’s home is what a village headman might call “a tidy sum”; for the Munjals, it is pocket change. To hail such a raid as a grand haul is like boasting of catching a whale when all you’ve netted is a sardine. This memory returns because of a recent article in Business Standard with the pompous title: Time to Stop Abusing India Inc. Its author, R. Jagannathan, sermonises at length—wagging his finger mainly at opposition politicians who allegedly malign Indian business houses, while spa...

  The transformation of the Indian state under Narendra Modi has often been narrated in terms of strong leadership, decisive governance, and an unrelenting emphasis on development. Development being a synonym for civil engineering projects, showcased in glossy WhatsApp forwards and jarring emotional endorsements by nobodies. Yet what has emerged over the past decade is less a model of sustainable development than what can be described as the “Contractor State”: a polity where monumental construction projects, executed with little public scrutiny, have replaced democratic debate as the primary mode of statecraft. In Modi’s vision, the nation’s destiny is equated with the building of imposing physical structures, even as institutional and ecological foundations are steadily weakened. The Central Vista redevelopment project and the construction of a new Parliament epitomize this logic. The official justification—that the old Parliament was structurally inadequate and technologica...

 https://www.business-standard.com/opinion/columns/fiis-vs-diis-reversing-roles-in-india-s-equity-market-after-25-years-125081402018_1.html https://www.business-standard.com/economy/news/net-fdi-falls-to-40-million-in-may-2025-on-higher-outflows-125072301466_1.html Let’s stitch together three reports and an opinion piece from Business Standard all recent—and read the tea leaves. In 1992, foreign institutional investors (FIIs) dipped their toes into Indian equity with a modest investment of ₹13 crore. Domestic players (DIIs) then sat fat with ₹45,000 crore. Fast forward to 2014: the equations flipped. FIIs had ballooned to ₹6.6 trillion, while DIIs were crawling at ₹42,000 crore. In 2025, they’ve switched again: FIIs at ₹10 trillion, DIIs overtaking them at ₹14 trillion. Janak Raj of the Centre for Social and Economic Progress hails this as resilience. But let’s not dress up this as a symbol of “Atmanirbhar Bharat”. Capital has no hews of colour. Now to the horror story: net FD...