It's About Politics
The limits on Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha's budget this year are political. He has the prescription to put the economy on a high growth track, but hampered by vested interests, vote-bank politics and stubborn opposition parties, he is unlikely to deliver.

The Rot in Farming
Falling prices, stagnating production and diminishing returns are brewing an unparalleled crisis in farmlands across India. Ironically, the alarming situation has arisen despite an unprecedented 12 consecutive normal monsoons.

Creeping Paralysis
Doubts over Keshubhai Patel's fitness to rule are growing after his government failed to provide basic relief like tents to those affected by the earthquake. Despite having speedily restored electricity and water, which earned praise from some international agencies, criticism over Patel's poor marshalling of resources continues.

Artless Artistry
The festival tried to exhibit the widest selection rather than the best, making it a disappointing show.

Stillness of Change
The legendary bamboo curtain is lifting to reveal that Myanmar isn't quite the "fascist Disneyland" it is made out to be. The winds of change have brought back English as the medium of instruction and Aung San Suu Kyi is talking to the military. After prolonged isolation, Yangon wants to face the world, but on its own terms.

Making It Happen
John Buchanan gives an exclusive insight into what it takes to coach the world's most successful team. He also enumerates what
he feels will be the Indian strengths that the Aussies
will have to watch out for.

Strategic Partners
As emphasis shifts from relief to rehabilitation, Care Today is selecting regions to focus on and NGOs to help it channelise aid. The involvement of victims is integral to the plan so that their dignity remains intact.

METROSCAPE

The Other Space

News at 10," screamed the screen as a pearl-clad Clytemnestra is interviewed about her family. Then come mutilated bodies, weary faces and neat lines of army helmets-remnants of years of battle. This sense of impending doom in Aeschylus' classic Agamemnon was given a contemporary twist by interweaving traditional elements like the chorus with live Hindustani music and projected visuals.

In the thick of a tragedy: The Industrial Theatre Company does Agamemnon

The performance, at Sakshi Art Gallery in Mumbai last weekend by Industrial Theatre Company, was the first by a newly formed four-member group committed to popularising alternative spaces for theatre. "There is something dead about the usual theatre experience," says director Rehaan Engineer, who favoured the stark walls and the rough, industrial look of the gallery to the tedious backdrop of an auditorium. The group has within it a cinematographer, an ex-dotcommer, a first year literature student and drama school graduate and plan four self-sustaining projects a year. So not hiring a theatre makes sense.

-Himanshi Dhawan

Image Breaker

	Banaras buff: Kumar in his studio; Varanasi

Incessant image-breaker Ram Kumar, now 77 with over 40 solo shows, just keeps going back to Banaras. This time, at his show in Delhi's Vadehra Art Gallery, the holy city's famed riverfront is again brought into abstracted focus, much like Kumar has been doing since his pleasurable discovery of non-figuration in the late 1950s. (Before that, as a student in post-war Paris under Fernand Leger, Kumar became a stickler for the chunky iconography of quasi-cubism.) Through the last four decades he has recorded Banaras' every topographical possibility-with boats, without boats, map-like aerial views, lozenge-shaped temples stuck together like matchsticks, arches, stairs and steps running over each like organic relics. And in almost all the colours-ochres, steel greys, peanut browns, dusty blues. Well, isn't he a bit tired of the place?

Actually, there's no reason why he should be. Was Picasso ever sick of doing the still life with the skull and the candle stand? Or Van Gogh of his sunflowers? For Kumar, Banaras not only initiated abstraction, it also, as he says, became a pathway to inner awakening. So while you watch his latest take on the city (along with some leftover New Zealand landscapes), remember that they'll be more to come.

-Anshul Avijit

MetroScape
Charitable Mood
In the backdrop of murky allegations about underworld connections, philanthropy by the Bollywood badshahs comes a little more easily.
more...

Looking Glass

Delhi: Lifestyle Store

Delhi: Film Festival

Mumbai: Restaurant

The Indian Navy's International Fleet Review was a fine effort at naval diplomacy which the Government would do well to build on, writes INDIA TODAY's Principal Correspondent Sandeep Unnithan
in Despatches.

"The only obvious competition is in bhangra," say the Pakistani duo of the music group, Strings, in an exclusive interview with INDIA TODAY's Sonia Faleiro.
Interviews.