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Hundred days, miles to go Barack H. Obama's advisers may not think much of the 100 day metric but the American system is accustomed to passing an initial verdict on its chief executive based on the speed and course he sets for the ship of state at the outset of the presidential journey. On the domestic front, public and political attention has rightly been focussed on the economy and on the potential impact of the $787 billion of stimulus money President Obama has said he will pump into the system. Problems of oversight and accountability remain and many Americans are sceptical about who exactly is being bailed out for what. Although it is hard to understand how the Obama recovery plan differs from the Bush plan, presidential approval ratings seem to suggest Joe the Plumber has more confidence in the new administration doing the right thing by 'Main Street' even if Wall Street benefits in the process. As for other elements of the promised package such as health reform and education, the U.S. President has already introduced a $2,500 tax credit to help offset the costs of going to college. Judging from the clear-headed manner in which Mr. Obama has begun his tenancy of the White House, major and positive changes could well follow soon. Internationally, the Obama administration has made progress in some areas but got bogged down elsewhere. The President's visit to Turkey and his attempts to reach out to the Muslim world are a welcome departure from the tone and manner of his predecessor. But the true test of Mr. Obama's willingness to break new ground lies in his ability to make a new start with both Iran and Israel. His Nowruz address to the Iranian people was a good start but contradictory messages from his Secretary of State have not helped improve the bilateral atmospherics. Mr. Obama's Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, has been firm and correct in advising the Netanyahu government not to abandon the peace process based on a two-state solution. But Washington is still feeling its way around the region and does not appear ready yet to bell the cat of Zionist hubris. The new 'AfPak' policy was welcomed not so much for its content as for the priority accorded to the embattled region. But questions are now being raised about the level of financial support for the graduation of Afghanistan's own security institutions, as also the administration's ability to manage the creeping instability in Pakistan. On torture, Mr. Obama has done well to acknowledge the full extent of the problem and declassify incriminating White House memos. But his refusal to consider the prosecution of Bush-era officials responsible for serious violations of humanitarian law suggests excessive caution if not timidity. As he grows in confidence and experience, President Obama needs to do much more to fulfil the positive expectations his campaign evoked within America and the wider world. The interest rate disconnect The Reserve Bank of India's decision to set up a working group to review the benchmark prime lending rate (BPLR) system is overdue. There have been persistent but often futile attempts at making the determination of bank interest rates more transparent. Since 2005 the cost of credit is largely determined by the way banks calculate their BPLRs. As originally conceived, the BPLR was meant to be the rate levied by banks on loans to their most creditworthy borrowers, with the less creditworthy charged at a higher rate. It was expected to be a competitive, transparent system taking into account an individual bank's actual cost of funds, operating expenses, a minimum charge to cover regulatory expenses such as provisioning and profit margin. Over time, however, as the RBI points out, the system has lost its relevance as a meaningful reference rate because the bulk of the loans is advanced at rates below the BPLRs. Much more than anecdotal evidence suggests that strong borrowers have been able to arm-twist the banks into lending at sub-prime rates. Certain sectors such as agriculture and exports receive subsidised credit. Whatever the reason, since banks have simultaneously been able to maintain their interest margins, it is clear that the BPLR system cries for reform and greater transparency. Equally important, the BPLR system as it exists today has inhibited the transmission of monetary policy signals. The changes in the prime rates, which most banks effect in the wake of RBI announcements, do not fully reflect in the lending rates. Notably, the steep cuts in the policy rates - the repo and the reverse repo rates - since September 2008 have not resulted in a corresponding reduction in either the deposit or the lending rates of banks. There are, to be sure, structural rigidities: savings bank interest rates are administered and they act as a kind of floor for deposit rates; the bulk of the high interest bearing time deposits are for longer periods; and banks lend to priority sectors at rates below their prime lending rates. These and other factors such as the high transaction costs of the banking system do complicate the quest for a proper methodology for arriving at a benchmark reference rate by banks. However, for proper credit pricing and for enhancing the effectiveness of the largely monetary policy-driven stimulus package, it is absolutely necessary to reform the BPLR system.

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After the euphoria, the harsh reality The much-trumpeted nuclear deal has failed to yield strategic benefits for India. Such is its burden that even as U.S. policy ignores vital Indian interests in the region, New Delhi stays mum. Brahma Chellaney The United States-India nuclear deal was promoted as a transformative initiative - one that would put the bilateral relationship on a much-higher pedestal. In his valedictory speech, President George W. Bush declared: "We opened a new historic and strategic partnership with India." By contrast, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has not made a single statement on the deal - not even to Parliament - ever since the vaunted deal came to fruition, other than to admit recently that he got his party to back the deal by threatening to resign. Dr. Singh's reticence has to do with the fact that the conditions and riders the U.S. Congress attached while ratifying the deal demolished the assurances he had made to Parliament. Consequently, Dr. Singh was unable to keep the promise he made to the Lok Sabha last July 22: "I will come to Parliament before operationalising the nuclear agreement." On several occasions before the deal was set in cement, Dr. Singh, however, had trumpeted its transformative character. Seven months after the deal's realisation, there is no sign of its transformative power. Rather, doubts have arisen over the supposed "global strategic partnership" with America. The policy frame in which Washington is viewing India is not the larger Asian geopolitical landscape, but the southern Asian context. But even on regional matters of vital interest to India, the U.S. has sought to ignore New Delhi or pursue antithetical policy approaches. To the chagrin of Indian neocons - who ingenuously marketed the nuclear deal as a U.S. move to build India as a world power and counterweight to China - Washington has declared that its "most important bilateral relationship in the world" is with Beijing. Those who rammed through the deal - even if it meant stunting India's nuclear-deterrent development - blame the new U.S. administration for downgrading India's importance and being unsympathetic to its security concerns. Actually, it is the deal-pushers who are to blame for allowing their wishful thinking to blind them to the strategic trends that were firmly set long before Barack Obama came to the White House. Take the China factor. America and the Soviet Union took three decades to achieve mutually assured destruction (MAD). During Mr. Bush's presidency, America and China became locked in MAD - not in military but in economic terms. The two now are so tied in a mutually dependent relationship for their economic wellbeing that attempts to snap those ties would amount to mutually assured destruction. Just as the beleaguered U.S. economy cannot do without continuing capital inflows from China, the American market is the lifeline of the Chinese export juggernaut. It was thus no surprise that Mr. Bush left the White House with a solid China-friendly legacy. Today, there is talk even of a U.S.-China diarchy - a G-2 - ruling the world. The navet of Indian neocons was astonishing. Take the Mumbai terrorist assaults. After Pakistan-based elements orchestrated those unparalleled attacks, two successive U.S. administrations leaned on India to refrain from imposing the mildest diplomatic sanctions against Islamabad. As Ms Clinton candidly admitted before a Congressional panel on April 23, "We worked very hard, as did the prior administration, to prevent India from reacting." That admission explains why Dr. Singh did not take the smallest of small steps against Pakistan - even as a symbolic expression of India's outrage despite saying in public that "some Pakistani official agencies must have supported" those attacks. Take another example. India got no tangible help from the Bush or Obama administration to bring the plotters of the Mumbai strikes to justice, despite providing extraordinary access to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to independently investigate those attacks and even allowing the CIA to serve as a conduit for intelligence exchange with Islamabad. Rather, Washington wants India now to rise above the Mumbai attacks and aid Mr. Obama's "Afpak" strategy by giving Pakistan a tranquil eastern border through troop redeployments. The U.S. message to India is to forget Mumbai and silently suffer Pakistan's war by terror - a message reinforced by Washington's identification of terrorist safe havens only along Pakistan's western border. Ms Clinton indeed suggested India endure more Mumbais stoically by telling Congress, "So, we do have a lot of work to do with the Indian government, to make sure that they continue to exercise the kind of restraint they showed after Mumbai, which was remarkable, especially given the fact that it was the political season."

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Take yet another case. The re-hyphenation of India with Pakistan today is complete. India now figures in U.S. calculations principally in relation to Pakistan and Mr. Obama's new Afpak strategy. This poorly conceived strategy is doomed to fail. And its means and ends are sure to engender more terrorist attacks against India, already bearing the brunt of the blowback from past failed U.S. policies. The re-hyphenation, however, flows not from a policy decision in Washington but from the disappearance of an optical illusion called "de-hyphenation." As American scholars Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph have written, "For roughly 50 years, the U.S. destabilized the South Asia region by acting as an offshore balancer. Its actions allowed Pakistan to realize its goal of 'parity' with its much-bigger neighbour and to try to best that neighbour in several wars." But with Pakistan's descent into chaos and India's economic rise, the U.S. had no choice in this decade but to advance ties with India, to quote Ms Clinton again, "as part of a wide-ranging diplomatic agenda to meet today's daunting challenges topped by the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan." Under Mr. Bush, U.S. policy simply went from hyphenation to parallelism. That involved building strategic partnerships with and selling arms to both India and Pakistan. No sooner had Mr. Bush initiated the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership (NSSP) with India in early 2004 than he caught New Delhi unawares by designating Pakistan a Major Non-NATO Ally (MNNA). His push to sell weapons to India coincided with the U.S. sale of F16s, P-3C Orions, C-130s, TOW missiles, Aerostat surveillance radars, 155mm self-propelled howitzers and Phalanx systems to Pakistan to help maintain "military balance on the subcontinent." This decade brought U.S. success in building parallel intelligence-sharing and defence-cooperation arrangements with India and Pakistan, while supposedly pursuing "de-hyphenation." On Pakistan - a pawn too valuable for any U.S. administration to stop using for regional objectives - American policy has displayed continuity for long. The fact that Mr. Obama, in his first 100 days, has helped put together $15.7 billion in international aid for Islamabad shows the U.S. resolve not to allow Pakistan to fail - a country where, he admits, "we have huge strategic interests." But it was Mr. Bush who let Pakistan rake in a terrorist windfall, as he plied it with sophisticated weapons and more than $12.3 billion in funds, notwithstanding the escalating Pakistani-scripted terror attacks in India after 9/11. Both under Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama, the Taliban's top Afghan leadership (living in Quetta) has received protection not just from the Pakistani intelligence, but also from the CIA, which has not carried out a single drone attack in or around Quetta so that the U.S. retains the option to cut a political deal over Afghanistan. It is no wonder that even as the Taliban's sway in Pakistan spreads, Robert Gates, Mr. Bush's and now Mr. Obama's Defence Secretary, has said the U.S. "would be very open" to a Swat Valley-style agreement in Afghanistan with the Taliban. For years, the U.S. has played to India's ego and to Pakistan's craving for funds and weapons. Mr. Bush kept India happy with a grand partnership vision while he pandered to Pakistan's needs. The very day Mr. Bush announced his decision to sell F-16s to Pakistan - a public slap for India - Washington patronisingly offered to "help India become a major world power in the 21st century." This was lapped up by Indian neocons as a "tectonic shift" in U.S. policy. Similarly, Mr. Obama massaged India's ego by declaring that Richard Holbrooke's mission would stay restricted to the Afpak belt, only to quietly include Kashmir and India in his envoy's agenda. Now, Centcom chief Gen. David Petraeus has undiplomatically blurted out the truth to Congress that Mr. Holbrooke's "portfolio very much includes India," and Mr. Holbrooke and he are in "constant touch" with Indian officials. Deal-peddlers in India overlooked a basic fact: In the U.S., stout institutional processes of policymaking inhibit abrupt shifts, and a deal over a single issue was unlikely to yield a fundamental policy change across the board. Even a change of administration, historically, has not meant a dramatic shift in U.S. foreign policy. That is why Mr. Obama, elected on the slogan of change, has thus far not delivered substantive change in foreign policy. By employing softer, more conciliatory language, Mr. Obama, however, has sought to package his talk as change by itself. Today, while India gropes for strategic benefits from the nuclear deal, the U.S. is set to reap non-proliferation and economic benefits once international inspections begin and contracts are signed. It is unfortunate that intense partisan rancour was kicked up in India over an oversold deal, which was pushed through with no public scrutiny, although it thrusts an uneconomical energy choice and carries long-term implications.

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NATO-Russia: in which direction will we hobble now? The NRC ministerial meeting, scheduled for May 19, is expected to become an arena where the big thaw can take place. Andrei Fedyashin NATO-Russia relations, surface-frozen after last August's conflict in the Caucasus, were put into a microwave on April 28 when the NATO-Russia Council (NRC) held in Brussels a meeting at ambassadorial level for the first time since the war in South Ossetia. The ambassadors are working on the agenda of the NRC ministerial meeting, scheduled for May 19. This meeting is expected to become an arena where the big thaw can take place. At least, both sides are talking about it. However, the question is how they are going to melt the ice, or what are they hoping will thaw? Before the April 28 meeting, our envoy to NATO Dmitry Rogozin promised to give the alliance a hard time for the planned military exercises in Georgia - and he duly kept his promise. By and large, these exercises are harmless, but NATO plays dirty by conducting them with the aggressor, thereby encouraging Tbilisi to new hideous acts and consolidating its shaky reputation. In general, all that is melting (or prepares to melt) in Brussels is a very odd substance. A closer look at it makes it incomprehensible whether this substance is "frozen," "dried up," or "ossified." The NRC was set up on May 28, 2002 at the NATO-Russia summit in Rome. Its official website reads, in part: "In accordance with the Rome declaration, NATO member states and Russia work as equal partners in areas of common interest in the framework of the NRC, which provides a mechanism for consultation consensus building, cooperation, joint decision and joint action on a wide spectrum of security issues in the Euro-Atlantic region." This seems to be a serious statement. However, the problem is that since its establishment, the NRC has not made any serious contribution to destroying Cold War stereotypes. It has not made a single general assessment of threats and ways of countering them. Assessments of terrorism by the NRC are out of place here - the council is not required to do this. Cooperation was scanty even before the conflict in the Caucasus. Its freezing after last August did not change anything. They say that NATO needs Russia more than the other way round. Did Russia ever need NATO? NATO needs Russia as a road to Afghanistan, but we have already agreed, regardless of NATO, to let the United States and its allies use our territory as a corridor for the delivery of non-lethal cargoes to Afghanistan. The NRC has done absolutely nothing in line with its official designation either before or after the war in South Ossetia. The role of the mediators was played by the European Union (EU), and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. I'd like not to get personal but I cannot help it. The more I analyse such meetings and our bold demarches at them, the less I understand. Sometimes, I become totally confused. It is very difficult to understand how we can criticize NATO for being an anachronism (which is in fact correct), for exaggerating its powers (the Kosovo mission), or for trying to misappropriate part of the functions of the U.N. and the OSCE, and at the same time talk about the need to consolidate and upgrade cooperation with it. As popular film character Stirlitz used to say "This story does not hand together." Either NATO is not an anachronism, that is, we secretly believe in it, or our cooperation is false. Everything is confusing, even statements by our Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, a man whom I deeply respect. I fail to understand what he meant in Luxembourg on April 27 when after the meeting of the EU-Russia Permanent Partnership Council, he said that at the forthcoming NRC ministerial meeting he was hoping to convince the alliance that each of its members should present ITS OWN POSITION RATHER THAN NATO'S POSITION IN GENERAL: "The principles underlying the performance of the NRC are more progressive than our dialogue with the EU, as the NRC has agreed in writing that each member [of NATO] represents its own country rather than NATO as an alliance... We will discuss this as well when, I hope, the NRC will resume its work at foreign minister level in May."

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Why do we need the NRC if we can deal with each NRC member independently? Are NATO members aware of this? I'm just beginning to see the light when looking at Rogozin and NATO's collective portrait. Maybe this is a secret manifestation of our real attitude to the alliance and cooperation with it? Personally, I don't have anything against Mr. Rogozin. I even like him for his open and straightforward attitude, although sometimes he goes too far. But when I listen to his statements, I cannot help getting rid of one politically harmful idea, notably that he was sent to NATO based on the principle: "Let's send Dima. Let him teach them what's what. He can do that." I'm even curious if I'm the only one in the wrong or do many people think the same way? Outwardly, the NRC looks quite decent - talks are going on, and cooperation on something somewhere continues. But a closer look at it reveals some odd things. I again went on the NRC website to convince myself that I'm wrong, and then I got totally upset. How can one understand this? Important issues of military cooperation, which were discussed by the NRC before, include the following subjects: NRC Ad Hoc Working Group on Logistics Workshop on "POL Interoperability"; "The Nexus between Organised Crime and Terrorism"; NRC Working Group on Defence Reform and Cooperation Seminar on "Procurement, Contracting and Financial Planning"; "Overseas Hostage Taking by Terrorist Groups" and "Development of SMEs by former military." Is this what the NRC was required for? Has it discussed all these issues? Will it address these matters again? RIA Novosti WHO warns of pandemic With the new swine flu showing robust human-to-human transmission, the risk of catching the disease does not come from pigs or pork consumption. N. Gopal Raj Late on Wednesday night, the World Health Organisation raised its pandemic alert to Phase 5, a warning that the new swine flu virus was demonstrating a level of infectivity in humans that could take it rapidly to every country across the globe. The new H1N1 strain of swine flu that first sickened people in Mexico and killed several of them has now appeared in a number of other countries. WHO's Phase 5 is just one step short of a full pandemic alert. "This change to a higher alert is a signal to governments, to ministries of health and other ministries, to the pharmaceutical industry and the business community that certain actions now should be undertaken with increased urgency and at an accelerated pace," said Margaret Chan, the WHO's Director-General, at a press briefing late on Wednesday night. Phases 5 and 6 "represent periods of time when the virus is beginning to spread from country to country" and becoming established, said Keiji Fukuda, the WHO's Assistant Director-General, at the press conference. "[Phase] 5 can be interpreted to mean that we are earlier in that process. Phase 6 can be interpreted to mean that [the virus] is establishing itself in more regions and more countries." Explaining the decision to move to Phase 5, Dr. Chan said that the swine flu virus had shown in Mexico and the U.S. that it was capable of sustained human-to-human transmission and of spreading within communities. Countries should make sure that their pandemic alert plans are up to date and they had the necessary capacity to carry out those plans, remarked Dr. Fukuda. They needed to increase their surveillance and watchfulness for this disease. Communications to provide people with accurate information was very important. Efforts to prevent infections from spreading within institutions like hospitals were essential. The press conference also revealed how limited are WHO's current stocks of a key anti-viral drug against the flu virus. According to Dr. Chan, the global health body had about 3.5 million doses of Tamiflu remaining in its possession from a donation provided by Roche, the drug's manufacturer. "But that is clearly not enough," she

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admitted. "That is why we need to speak to the [drug] companies and hope that we can get donations and also get donor support to procure Tamiflu to support countries in great need," she added. The Director-General of the WHO also said she had reached out to companies manufacturing anti-viral drugs to assess capacity and options for ramping up production. Would the pandemic be mild or severe? "It is possible that the full clinical spectrum of this disease goes from mild illness to severe" conditions, Dr. Chan told reporters. From past experience, it was known that influenza could cause mild disease in affluent societies but more severe disease with higher levels of sickness and death in developing countries. Many countries are reporting relatively mild cases, with the swine flu infection producing symptoms like headaches, fever, cough and so on that are very similar to seasonal influenza, according to Dr. Fukuda. At the other end of the spectrum, the severe cases seen in Mexico include complications like pneumonia. "New diseases, by definition, are poorly understood," warned Dr. Chan. "Influenza viruses are notorious for their rapid mutation and unpredictable behaviour." Even if the pandemic started out mild, there was no guarantee it would stay that way, said Dr. Fukuda. The worst pandemic of the last century that occurred in 1918 "started off mild in the spring time, it was fairly quiet in the summer and then in the autumn when it really exploded ... it was a much more severe form. So we just don't know what the future is going to hold." Pigs have long been feared as a mixing-pot for flu viruses. Apart from harbouring porcine flu viruses, pigs can also be infected by both human and bird flu strains. The genetic material of the flu virus is in eight segments. So if two or more strains of flu infect a cell, their progeny can receive a mix of those genetic segments. The result, as in the case of the new H1N1 strain of swine flu, can be a potent virus that humans have not encountered before and against which their immune systems are defenceless. Analysing the genetic make-up of the new swine flu, scientists have found it to be a mix of genetic material from pig, human and bird flu viruses. The WHO officials emphasised, however, that with the new swine flu showing robust human-to-human transmission, the risk of catching the disease did not come from pigs or pork consumption. Rather the virus was spreading through people who had become infected. This is not just aporkalyptic nonsense Britain's baffled media are desperate for me to decry the swine flu coverage as hype. But a risk is a risk. Ben Goldacre First it was the emails, and the tweets. This is all nonsense about the aporkalypse, surely? Just like with Sars, and bird flu, and MMR, is this all hype? The answer is no, but more interesting is this: for so many people, their very first assumption on the story is that the media are lying. It is the story of the boy who cried wolf. We are poorly equipped to think around the issues involving risk, and the epidemiology of infectious diseases is a very tricky business: the error margins on the models are wide -and it is extremely difficult to make clear predictions. Here's an example. In Glasgow, Scotland, in the 1980s, less than 5 per cent of injecting drug users were HIV positive. In Edinburgh at the same time, it was almost 50 per cent, even though these two places are only an hour apart by train. Lots of people have got theories about why there should have been such a huge difference in the numbers of people infected, and there is no doubt that it is fun to try and come up with a plausible post hoc rationale. However, you certainly wouldn't have predicted it. Maybe, on a whim, some bloke with HIV got off the train at Edinburgh station instead of Glasgow, some fateful day in the early 1980s. Maybe there was a different culture among heroin users, or services. Nobody really knows. We face the same problem with swine flu. All that people have done is to raise the possibility of things really kicking off, and they are right to do so, but we don't have brilliantly accurate information. Someone has said that up to 40 per cent of the world could be infected. Is that scaremongering? Well it's high, and I'm sure it's a bit of a guess, but maybe up to 40 per cent could be infected. Annoying, isn't it, not to know.

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Someone has said 120 million could die. Well I suppose they could: I'm sure this calculation was done on the back of an envelope, by guessing how many would be infected, and what proportion would die; but I don't think anyone's pretending otherwise. You could no more predict what will happen than you could have predicted the enormous disparity in HIV prevalence between Glasgow and Edinburgh. Everyone is just saying: we don't know, it could be bad - and that's what the newspapers are reporting. Sure, there's a bit of vaudeville in the headlines, but they are not saying things that are wrong; and do you really know actual, real people, normally pretty solid, who are suddenly now panicking? By Tuesday, pundit-seekers from the British media were suddenly contacting me, a massive nobody, to say that swine flu is all nonsense and hype, like some kind of blind, automated naysaying device. "Will you come and talk about the media overhyping swine flu?" asked the Case Notes programme on BBC Radio 4. No. "We need someone to say it's all been overhyped," said BBC Wales. I assumed they were adhering, robotically, to the "balance" template, but no: he kept at it, even when I protested and explained. "Yeah, but you know, it could be like Sars and bird flu, they didn't materialise, they were hype." Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins suggested the same thing yesterday. It's not true, I said. They were risks, risks that didn't materialise, but they were still risks. That's what a risk is. I've never been hit by a car, but it's not idiotic to think about it. Simon Jenkins won't be right if nobody dies, he'll be lucky, like the rest of us. Do people think this flappily in casinos? The terrible truth is yes. In the time that I have been writing this piece - no embellishment - I've had similar calls from This Week at the BBC ("Is the coverage misleading?"), Al-Jazeera English ("We wanted to talk to someone on the other side, you know, challenging the fear factor"), the Richard Bacon Show on Five Live radio ("Is it another media scare like Sars and bird flu?") and many more. I'm not showing off. I know I'm a D-list public intellectual, but I just think it's interesting: because not only have the public lost all faith in the media; not only do so many people assume, now, that they are being misled; but more than that, the media themselves have lost all confidence in their own ability to give us the facts. - Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2009 (Ben Goldacre is a medical doctor and writes the Bad Science column in the Guardian.) India Focus: the hype and after "The whole 'India Focus' thing is turning into a bit of a bandwagon. Everyone seems to be jumping on it. This is the third European book fair in three years to fly the flag for India." Hasan Suroor "Listen, it's all a huge gimmick. Why doesn't the media write about it?" an agitated woman publisher from Delhi asked me at the London Book Fair last week. Her fury was directed at the organisers of the fair's IndiaMarket Focus which, she said, was being spun as a "favour" to Indian publishers. "They're marketing it as an 'opportunity' for Indian publishers to connect with global players and create 'international partnerships, etc but actually it is all about promoting big British publishers who are taking over the Indian market," she said. The same evening, I ran into an independent British publisher with close links to India. Asked what he thought of the focus, he was equally scathing. "Don't mention my name but this whole 'India Focus' thing is turning into a bit of a bandwagon. Everyone seems to be jumping on it. This is the third European book fair in three years to fly the flag for India and everywhere you see the same faces," he said. After the hype that preceded the fair, this was withering stuff and my first instinct was to dismiss it as a cynical view. But soon I discovered that it was more widespread with few Indian publishers willing to say anything positive about the India-Focus. When asked if it had benefited them in any way, their reactions ranged from a resounding "no" to sceptical smiles and read-my-lips. Most said that while the music mood this year was certainly more friendly, there were no concrete benefits.

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"We got invited to many more parties this year, if that means anything!" was the acerbic comment of one publisher. And did that help? "Well, we exchanged lots of business cards and promised to stay in touch but no, no deals if that's you mean," he said. Shobit Arya of Wisdom Tree, publishers of educational books, said he had been coming to the fair for many years and there was nothing this year that made him feel "special." "Obviously, Indian publishers were a bit more visible but in terms of business it made no difference whatsoever. Neither we had institutional help of any kind. It was all down to our own individual effort. We did make a few requests for certain things but nothing came out of them. Of course, they were very nice and friendly. Lots of tea and sympathy, if you like, but that's it," he said. But it was not all doom and gloom. I did manage to find at least one positive voice in the form of Rupa and Company's A.K. Singh who sounded quite pleased. He said he was deluged with inquiries for translation rights of their titles - something that he attributed to the awareness that he thought the India-Focus had created. "Even normally we do well with translation rights but this year we had many more inquiries and there was much more interest. I think it was because the Bookseller (the U.K. book trade's bible) had published an article on translations and printed a list of Indian publishers who were offering translation rights," he said. I am sure there must have been others who, like Mr. Singh, went home with happy memories but I struggled to find them. Meanwhile, Indian publishers were keen to clarify that contrary to the impression in some quarters they were not subsidised by the fair authorities. "We paid the same market rent for our stalls as anybody else. The only subsidy we got was from CAPEXIL (Chemicals and Allied Products Export Promotion Council) but then we get it whenever we attend any such international event. The British Council brought some people, mostly writers, for their own programmes but we all paid our own money to come here," said Mr. Arya. Some accused the British Council of "hijacking" the fair with its own parallel programme of literary seminars and workshops that they saw as a distraction from the trade focus of the fair. But Monika Mohta, Director of Nehru Centre which collaborated with the British Council and the London Book Fair on cultural events, strongly contested such assertions. She said that far from being a distraction, the cultural programmes actually added to the buzz around the fair. "We had 10 events at Nehru Centre and on most days we had a full house. Our programmes generated a huge buzz and helped create greater awareness about Indian writing particularly in regional languages. A workshop we did on translations got an overwhelming response and this interest, we hope, would lead to more regional literature getting translated into other languages," she said. While not directly commenting on publishers' reaction, Ms Mohta described the India-Focus as a huge success in providing exposure to Indian publishing. "One of the achievements of the London Book Fair was that it would go down as a landmark event in focusing on the sheer richness and diversity of India's regional literature," she said. This was the first time that the Nehru Centre was involved with the London Book Fair, having ignored it for years despite its emergence as a major international book event with growing links with Indian publishers. Ms Mohta says the "vision" of the Centre is expanding and she would like to build "partnerships" with more cultural institutions including the London Book Fair. Meanwhile, the "India bandwagon" rolls on, propelled by promise of cheap labour costs, a lucrative market and a middle class in thrall of the West.