Seems that our esteemed Health Minister, one Ramadoss now wants to stop surrogate advertising in which companies advertise mineral water or music CDs bearing te same name as alcoholic drinks. In four years he has has run a vilification campaign against Venugopal, the Director of All India Institute of Medical Sciences, AIIMS the only world class medical institute in India. He has tried to ban smoking in films and tried to force tobacco companies to print pictures of cancer on packets of cigarettes. In Chandigarh smoking is banned on public roads and anyone caught will be fined. There may be some logic in banning smoking in closed spaces such trains and aircrafts to prevent secondary smoking in non smokers but there is absolutely no logic in banning it in an apen place. Also roads belong to the public and not slimy politicians. If they are so concerned about our health they should ban tobacco but they will not do so for fear of missing out on the billions they collect in taxes. Anything that is taxed must be legal and hence it is immoral to punish users. After all do they tax cocaine or heroin? The hypocrisy is unbearable. While the Minister is engaged in rubbish people are unable to afford routine healthcare because of poverty. Drug companies are pushing useless drugs or dangerous combinations for profit. Children are not receiving available vaccines. Nero was not the only one who fiddled while people died.

For the last couple of years or so we are constantly being reminded that India is growing in excess of 9% and how the economy is booming. Even at Davos India received a lot of attention, not as much as China perhaps, but enough to make headlines in news reports here. Easy credit and economic growth all over the world have been factors in our growth which is good but a large part has been due to a mind boggling rise in property prices. This has sparked a building boom of unprecedented proportions. Every rich man and his uncle is getting into the construction business and poorer people, from vegetable vendors to maid servants, have turned into property dealers. This has had a knock on effect on industries such as cement, steel, plumbing and electric goods industries. Labourers have been in great demand and have prospered relatively. Unfortunately half of the property business is conducted cash or black money which cannot be taxed or controlled. Consequently inflation is going up. To be sure rise in commodity prices such as oil is contributing to inflationary pressures but these factors can be accounted for. The black economy cannot be calculated and hence cannot be controlled. The Reserve Bank is holding on to higher interest rates, inspite of pressures from politicians, and has allowed the rupee to appreciate in an effort to control inflation and the government has kept petrol prices on hold inspite of rising crude prices. Is this a replay of the East Asian crisis of some ten years ago or will we have a soft landing is not known. Fear is that this house of cards is going to come crashing down.

A news item on the 19th of February said that the UN World Food Programme, UNFP has said that India has the largest number of undernourished people in the world. On the same day Gian Pietro Bordignon, country director and India representative for the World Food Programme, WFP said that malnutrition among tribal children in India is 44% compared to 25% for subsaharan Africa. Another news item on the previous day said that the Comptroller and Accountant General of India, CAG has found that only 3.2% of households surveyed in 513 panchayats in 68 districts across 28 states received full 100 days of employment under the National Rural Employment Scheme which was started by this government to ease unemployment and poverty among the rural poor. Clearly money is being siphoned off in a massive way. In the last four years food prices have risen by at least 50% and while this affects everyone the poor are affected most because a large part of their budget goes in food purchase. While sedentary people like us need less than 1500 calories per day manual labourers need in excess of 3000 calories per day and growing children need calories as well as essential vitamins and minerals for development. The Congress is in a panic with elections coming up and may decide to increase allocation to this and similar schemes with more loss of taxpayers money. So much for the aam aadmi.

In the eighties it the Sensex reached above 5000 points during the Harshad Mehta scam. The index kept on rising until retail investors started flocking to the market in large numbers and dubious IPOs raised many billions of rupees. When the market crashed many people were left bankrupt. In the nineties it was the turn of Ketan Parekh and the index reached above 6000 points. The same scenario was played out with the same results. When the Congress came to power some four years back the Sensex was just above 5000. Since then it reached 23000 before volatility set in. It finished last week around 18300 level. We are constantly being told by politicians and kleptocrats that our fundamentals are very strong but these people are liars anyway and speak through their fundament all the time. Fund managers and economists who come on as guests on news shows also say the same thing which makes it difficult to know whether this is indeed a rally based on strong economic progress or the mother of all scams. Since no other market in the world has risen so fast so far except the Shanghai Composite, which the Chinese government is doing its best to cool down, I am tempted to think that it is a huge scam. Is it going to crash? We do not know the answer to that one yet. Pointers may be found in the coming budget. Watch for giveaways and an early election.

About three days back a young man died, crushed by a crowd of about 25000 men. The reason so manywere gathered in one place was because CISF or Central Industrial Security Force had advertised for about 450 vacancies for constables. I had not heard about this particular police force before so it came as a surprise. There is the beat police. Each state has its own controlled by the politicians. Thus as you land at Delhi Airport you are greeted by a long immigration queue managed by Delhi Police. India is perhaps the only country in the world where its own citizens have to undergo the humiliation of immigration check. State Police is also incharge of granting driving licences. Then there is the CID or Criminal Investigation Department, CBI or Criminal Bureau of Investigation, EB or Enforcement Bureau, CRPF or Central Reserve Police Force, BSF or Border Security Force, ITBP or Indo Tibetan Border Police, RPF or Railway Police Force and NSG, commonly called the Bladk Cats, responsible for guarding or revered criminal politicians. I may have missed a few but we Indians are surely lucky to have so many police and one of the highest corruption rates in the world.

The Democrats are doing their best to lose the Presidential election later this year. Had Hillary Clinton been confirmed as candidate she would probably hve beaten anyone the Republicans put up. She would draw the traditional Democratic base of the unions, blacks and hispanics and with more women voting for her she had a very good chance. But Barak Hussein Obama is making sure that this does not happen. As a black muslim he has no hope of defeating the Republicans. His candidacy will unite all the Republican voters behind whoever their candidate is and draw conservatives away from the Democrats. Karl Rove may be invisible but has not disappeared and will devise any sort of dirt that he can conjure up. Remember the Swift Boat Veterans and what they did to John Kerry? Obama is said to be popular with blacks and young people and is raising an awful lot of money. I would not be surprised if, unknown to him, the Republicans are contributing to his campaign to see off the real danger, Clinton. On the Republican side John McCain seems to have the momentum. He is old and a Vietnam war veteran. Mike Huckaby is winning the Bible belt and iis popular with Christian fanatics. He believes in Creationism wherein God created all creatures at the same time and Adam used to play with a grass eating T. Rex. We might even get a dream ticket of McCain and Huckaby, an aged warrior and a fruitcake. Even if Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic nomination after a long and bruising battle she may be so wounded and exhausted that she is unable to take on the Republicans. Seems to me that Republicans will win the November elections and we will be in for an interesting four years. At least it will be fun to watch.

For the last few days newspapers in India are full of stories about a doctor who was buying kidneys of poor people for small sums of money and selling them to foreigners for vast sums of money. He is supposed to have carried out some 500 such transplants and netted hundreds of millions of rupees. It is not clear whether this fellow and his friends are actual doctors or some ayurvedic quacks. In India anyone can call himself a doctor and prescribe drugs without any control and the illiterate poor are unable to distinguish between genuine degrees and fake ones. He was investigated once before and the anaesthetist involved was arrested about eight years ago but things seemed to have been hushed up. It is obvious that vast sums of money changed hands and police and kleptocrats bribed. We will never know the full extent of the villainy but certainly this has been going on for at least a decade. Apparently the police in one state arrested a few of the accomplices which allowed the king pin, a Dr. Amit Kumar to escape the country. Strange how all the top villains get visas so easily while innocent people like us have to queue up hours and are humiliated before our passports are stamped. The government has issued Red Corner notices to the Interpol to apprehend this Dr. Kumar. In time he will be arrested somewhere and court proceedings started in that country to have him transferred to India. Our police and CBI officials will frequently travel abroad at tax payers expense to present evidence. Inevitably the evidence will be incomplete and shoddy and the trial will drag on. He may be freed by one court only to be arrested in another country and the tamasha will start again. Remember Quatrocchi? Meanwhile a good time will be had by all. At tax payers expense of course. What fun.

A rogue trader at Societe Generale Bank in France runs up positions worth fifty billion dollars which is more than the net worth of the bank. The bank unwinds in panic in a falling market excerbating the falls and taking losses over seven billion dollars in the process. The French authorities have no idea about what is going on and neither has the Fed. Even though experts keep saying that the Stock Markets do not dictate policy and Wall Street is closed for the day the Fed reduces interest rates by seventy five basis points following up with another reduction of fifty basis points nine days later. Bank of England follows suit. Only the ECB keeps European rates unchanged. We are told that households in the US and UK are heavily into debt and falling house prices will result in bankruptcies. By reducing interest rates central banks want to encourage people to borrow even more so that increased spending can stave off recession. Do the bankers expect house prices to keep on increasing infinitely and people to keep on borrowing on top of all their debt? At what point will houses become too expensive for anyone to buy and people become so indebted that all their income goes into financing interest on their debts? Meanwhile in India we are repeatedly told that fundamentals are strong and that the market will keep going north. Last year there were headlines in newspapers saying that Azim Premji of Wipro had become richer than Bill Gates because of the value of his holdings in Wipro. While Wipro makes profits of some 300 million dollars Microsoft earns in billions. Seems to me that all our experts are happy on LSD. People have been led to believe that in 'Incredible India' the Sensex will reach infinity. Truly we are incredible. Are we incredibly gullible?