It means you can, in my case, leave behind an office full of tired journalists hunched over ever more depressing data, and ignore TV screens showing grimfaced politicians and weepy traders.

Out there somewhere, someone has the cash to buy the ‘New Continental Flying Spur Speed’ Bentley - even if that somebody isn’t you.

The car - which costs a cool Rs2.5crore (over half a million USD) - was on display at one of the capital’s high-end hotels on Friday.

Boasting a stylish black finish and a retro-style front grille, the car’s specs are, in the current climate, almost satirical.

To get to 100kmh needs just 4.8 seconds of pedal pressing; while your top speed - if you were ever tempted to try it out - is 322kmh.

Every car is also custom-made to fit the whims of those who can still afford to be whimsical; and is built with a decadent slowness that means that the cover for the steering wheel, for example, takes 5 1/2 hours to stitch together.

It makes for entertaining reading on the same day that the carmaker’s country of origin, the UK, is revving up to sue Iceland over withheld bank deposits - not an event many of us saw coming.

And as Bentley’s MD for India says, ‘there is always somebody making money’. While things are starting to look really bad in India, Bentley and many companies like it still see the country as a ‘key market’, and aren’t going anywhere.

The overnight Dow crash hit Asia hard - the Sensex is down at least 9 percent and looks like it’s headed for a holiday south of 10,000, the rupee has hit an all time low and in Japan the Nikkei tumbled another 10 percent. Looks like that decision to let Lehman go bust set off the mother of all chain reactions…and Indian markets may be headed back to 2006 levels.

Here’s our resident technical analyst Phil Smith:

…As the chart shows the SENSEX has broken through some very strong and very important support points in the past couple of weeks. These are clearly showed on the chart with the support at 11,900 to 12,500 being broken effortlessly. The next major support levels for this market now stand at around 9,700 as marked and coincides with the old support levels reached back in 2006 when the market staged its dramatic correction then. Currently all the technical indicators are bearish as they have been since the middle of September

Once again, all eyes are on Washington, where on Saturday President Bush (remember him?) will meet finance ministers from the world’s wealthiest countries. The IMF will be there too with emergency funds available.

But is this the time for traditional remedies? A coordinated rate cut by central banks on Monday feels like ancient history. So what’s next? The U.S. government is talking about taking large stakes in banks to ensure liquidity (meaning free marketeer President Bush may preside over the largest nationalisation of banks in history!)

And that’s what it may take, because every other kind of faith seems to have been tossed aside - banks are simply refusing to lend. Here in India, Chidambaram is still calling for calm - insisting the fundamentals are strong.

But can you expect Indian investors to lie in Shavasan while the rest of the world takes billions out of the markets? Your views are welcome, and please, try to have a good weekend.

As a non-F1 enthusiast it was only when I was at the race that I learned how much the team matters in a sport that seems like a one-man show. It is the mechanics, the analysts and the managers that make or break the race for the team driver. A case in point is top qualifier Felipe Massa who lost his lead in the race because he was given an incorrect green signal while he was in the pit refueling and drove off with the fuel pipe in his car only to drive back and lose those precious seconds.

Hysteria apart, the Grand Prix showed the tiny city-country of Singapore’s unbelievable capability to host 300,000 people over three days with impeccable organization, top security and an entertainment appeal… It had some like me pledging to come back for more!

The attention to detail was immaculate. An otherwise dull and plastic city infested with bankers and professionals, managed to come of its own displaying a festive spirit for one of their biggest weekends to date.

What impressed me about the event was undoubtedly the organizational skill of the Singaporeans. There were plenty of English speaking staff directing you with a wide smile on their faces, young locals cheering you on as you left the venue, well demarcated gates and public transport to take you to your gate, a Singapore Sling bar to give you a local experience and most importantly - punctuality.

Monaco which also has a street circuit is considered the glitz and glamor capital of the world and a tall order for our Asian brothers to match up to. But I have to say, Singapore managed to reach the bar and set it higher for the rest of the countries organizing F1 races in the near future!

Singapore has undeniably set an example that needs to be matched and improved upon… Now the million dollar question is- will India be able to pull it off in 2011?

After experiencing Japan’s bubble economy through the 80s as a near starving student, I watched how loans based on overinflated property values, led to the slow motion destruction of banks considered to be the bedrock of the Japanese economic miracle.

Sumitomo, Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Fuji, Daichi Kangyo - and Long Term Credit Bank of Japan (bought by a US hedge fund post collapse and now reincarnated as Shinsei Bank) - these were the banks who helped build Japan from the ruins of WW2… So, when things went too far and collapsed early the 90s, American economists told the Japanese to get rid of “non performing loans” and restructure.

Well, it took ten years , but they kinda did. Fast forward to 2008, and what do you know - it’s American banks who have made loans to people who can’t really pay, on the basis of you guessed it… inflated property values! Even better they managed to hawk off packaged versions to companies not even in the banking industry… think AIG.

Now the tables have turned: this week Japanese investment bank Nomura picked up Lehman Brothers Asia business and Mitsubishi UFJ is set to grab stake in Morgan Stanley. And, it’s not over yet.

Maybe my memory is too long, but it does make you wonder: Will these guys ever learn? or more cynically, is this just a way to earn a few bucks? After all, no one who earned a bit of cash selling mortgage backed securities has to pay anything back - that’s left to the American taxpayer - 700 billion USD or just 2000 bucks a head!

So let’s turn to India - the outsourcing boom, liberalisation and subsequent domestic growth have led to the creation of many jobs, but demand based on rising incomes could never justify real estate prices appreciating as they did in the past two years, yet it’s pretty clear all kinds of deals were done on the basis of these inflated assets . There’s no way of knowing exactly how far this led to some unwise banking decisions (loans!) , but in the short term things look like they didn’t quite get out of hand.

Meanwhile Indian land prices appear to have softened significantly - so could the US collapse now be a small blessing in disguise? Perhaps India has been spared a much larger crisis or, is this a boon and bust cycle India is destined to follow? What do you think?

I was to meet a friend at five in the evening on the day of the serial bombings in New Delhi. But the meeting got delayed — she could not leave office on time and my office elevator kept me waiting for twenty minutes.

We were chatting about good times together in college, how classmates have done well by themselves and making plans to catch up with other friends at the café inside a popular bookshop when the bomb at Barakhamba Road went off.

I had only read reports of how bombs exploded near cafes as people sat there sipping coffee discussing mundane things in life or shopped for household goods or just walked by. Never had I imagined that one day I would find myself in such a situation.

Within moments of the explosion, I saw people crowding the area, police men trying to control the situation and cameras furiously clicking away. The window panes of the cafe were shattered by the impact of the explosion and given that it was a low intensity bomb all of us in the place were safe.

I guess it was sheer luck that saved both of us — I take an auto rickshaw every day from the spot where the bomb exploded. Had we met a little early, or a little late, we might have been caught up too.

I assured family and friends about my safety and headed back to the office. It was the call of duty.

I chose the back alley while the sirens wailed and people jostled at the blast site. As a journalist I helped put out the story on the blast, which is fast becoming the norm in the country — scenes of destruction, loss of lives, grieving relatives and sense of helplessness.

I have been thinking ever since — as a human being and as a journalist — what should have been my priority. To help people who were injured or to report about the blood and pain?

I discussed my dilemma with my mother-in-law and she said I should have lent a hand. It could have been a friend or a family lying on the road crying for help. But I chose otherwise.

I put into practice the training I had received as a reporter — to tell the world about how the series of bombs went off in quick succession killing, maiming and scarring innocent people for life.

Ever since I have been asking myself — what if a friend was involved? What if someone even remotely known to me had been looking out for help that day?

One of the blast happened right across the street on which the Reuters office is located.

Colleagues who were working on September 13 told me the impact of the blast at Barakhamba Road shook the building and unsettled flocks of pigeons nesting on rooftops of adjoining high rises.

The sirens of police cars, ambulances and fire brigade vehicles soon shattered the tense silence of the otherwise bustling commercial district, as people rushed to help the injured.

As I walked into the office a day later, I expected to see chaos, panic, and a heavy police presence all around. What unnerved me was the resilience of people who owned small shops, ran taxi services and sold goods on the sidewalk at the blast site.

Men were busy sorting out wares, erecting makeshift shelters against the sun and sprinkling the usual vile coloured water on tropical fruits to give them a fresh look.

Other than being probed with a metal detector, there was little or no disturbance in my daily routine.

Is this what Mayor Arti Mehra was referring to as the “spirit of Delhi”? The determination of Delhi’ites to smile and go about their usual chores to defeat the very purpose of extremists - that of creating panic and disruption in their daily lives?

Of course there were the visuals of youngsters jostling to be seen on national TV, crying out “we will rise above terrorism, Indians are united and nothing can break our spirit”. Like an eerie scene-come-alive from the film “Rang De Basanti”.

There were also shots of local heroes - the passersby who ferried the wounded to hospitals and rag pickers who found unexploded bombs and helped the police defuse them.

Some of them appeared distinctly bemused at the sudden media attention on what I think were their unselfish and exceptionally courageous acts.

As for the “spirit of Delhi”, it was a 70-year-old Muslim shopkeeper at Barakhamba Road who put meaning to those words better than I ever could, with an enviable nonchalance.

“So what do you expect me to do? Shut my shop for a week fearing more blasts? This is the festival season and I have already lost a day’s earnings by being forced to close on a Sunday. Blasts keep happening these days, can’t lose customers over them.” (Translated from Hindi)

Take the case of 38-year-old Jamyang Tsering, who was critically injured in the blast at Central Park in Connaught Place, possibly the first ever Tibetan victim of a terror attack in India, according to his brother Thupting.

Jamyang is at the Intensive Care Unit of the Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital, where most of the blast victims have been admitted.

The owner of a small eatery at the Tibetan Colony in north Delhi, Jamyang still has shrapnel from the bomb embedded in his body and faces at least two more surgeries on his painful road to recovery.

“For three days and nights I was at the hospital. I came home only today when the doctor said he was stable,” Thupting said. “Actually no one understands our Hindi at the hospital. We Tibetans don’t speak good Hindi… language problem. It is very difficult to convey to doctors or nurses what we want,” he said.

I feel almost ashamed to ask him how he is coping, now that things are gradually returning to normal.
“Not for us… Jamyang is still in pain.”   
“But still…he is at least alive,” he says, and almost as an afterthought adds, “yes, yes, I see it’s almost normal now.”

Since 2003, over 10 major terror attacks have left India shaken. Till September this year over 120 people have died in terror strikes, some within months of each other.

What in reality is the “spirit of people” then? Are we heading slowly to the same general state of numb indifference to death and destruction that is now a part of everyday life in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Here is how I see it. For the section of society that watched the weekend tragedy unfold on their TV screens, safe from the pungent smell of smoke and blood, the spirit is there, in true honesty, not to get cowered by acts of terror.

But for the daily wagers, labourers and small business owners for whom losing customers and work is as fatal as an explosive device, it is just shrugging off tragedy and moving on.

In a control room somewhere on the French-Swiss border, scientists of CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, waited for the first signals to come in from a $9 billion particle collider as they embarked on an experiment to unlock secrets of the universe.
 
In a town somewhere in Madhya Pradesh, farmer Biharilal’s daughter Chayya sat glued to the TV screen, taking in the graphics and amateur video game imagery put together by vernacular news channels who said the experiment would bring about the end of the world.
 
The fact that I’m sitting here writing this is proof enough the world did not end. But Chayya, who killed herself fearing what doomsday prophets said would be the experiment’s cataclysmic effects, is not around to see that.
 
Sensationalism in 24×7 news coverage is relatively new to India — a concept borrowed from the larger and more prolific western media. In India, every road accident, murder and rape makes delightful copy for news channels vying for the attention of elusive viewers with serious commitment issues.
 
In a country where a sudden media boom led by rapid economic growth and freeing of entertainment and media markets has resulted in a plethora of channels all “bringing news first”, viewers switch loyalties before you can utter the word ‘TRP’.
 
The viewers have seen it all, they control the remote control and unless you hold them down with the right concoction of sensation, sleaze and news, they just won’t stay.
 
Which meant that the fear psychosis created by vernacular channels on the biggest scientific experiment of our time spread like wildfire across the country. The rationalists logged on to the internet to know more about the Big Bang project while the religious held prayer sessions.
 
What shocked me was how ill-informed and factually incorrect some of these channels were on scientific trivia. A channel repeatedly referred to this “big dark hole” in the universe in the same hushed tone little Red Riding Hood’s mother would use to caution her against the big bad wolf.

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued an advisory under the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act 1995 to two Indian TV channels asking them to show restraint in the coverage of the Big Bang  experiment.

The Big Bang episode brings back flashes from the Aarushi murder case and the murders in Nithari. The media hijacked both of these cases in its tearing hurry to break sensational and gory news.
 
Doctors say youngsters came in to report nightmares soon after the murder of 14-year-old Aarushi Talwar when news media pointed an accusatory finger at the girl’s parents.
 
Psychiatrist Samir Parikh advocates the judicious use of the power of information that rests with the media.
 
“Do not give out half information, act responsibly,” he says.
 
For the impressionable section of India’s uneducated population without access to correct information, speculations based on a colourful imagination could act as a trigger, as in the case of Chayya.
 
Most vernacular channels and newspapers have realized the untapped marketing potential in the semi-urban and rural populace who in turn are indirectly redefining content by wanting their own spin and refusing to be force-fed news from mainstream English media.
 
On the whole, media does more good than bad, says Parikh. And I agree. It was the pro-active role by the Indian media that led to the triumph of justice in the murder case of model Jessica Lall.
 
I could go on about the countless times my brethren saved the day, but among other things, this post is mainly about restraint.

What was it about family dramas that kept millions of Indian women glued to their TV sets each evening? I intended to find out.

In one such episode, a mother-in-law laments the loss of an unborn grandchild.

“We have lost our grandson and our daughter-in-law cannot bear a child after this. Now we will never have a grandson to take the family name forward.”

I wondered how the mother-in-law could be so sure the unborn child was male. Did she get a sex-determination test done? Or was it some divine revelation.

As the story of one serial after the other unfolded on screen, I realized that to be the “perfect” woman on Indian television, one needed to be a docile housewife and sacrifice everything for the family’s happiness.

Even if that meant putting up with philandering husbands.

Women who wear western clothes or work for a living invariably have loose morals, or so these soap operas would have you believe.

I am all for escapist TV and can forgive the sight of glamorous women going to bed in flashy saris and make-up.

But I find it hard to accept that millions of eyeballs are being exposed to such regressive programmes day after day.

Can the television industry shrug off its responsibility so easily in a country where killing of female foetuses is common and preference for sons runs deep?

In a report last year, the United Nations estimated that 2,000 unborn girls are illegally aborted every day in India.

Experts warn that fewer women will spark a demographic crisis in India which could lead to more crimes against women — as there would be fewer left to marry.

I am not asking television producers, many of whom are women and lead very different lives than that of their characters on the telly, to broadcast sermons on female foeticide.

But it will take them just a few changes in their scripts to conjure up a healthy dose of daily entertainment — without sending their audiences the wrong message.

Downloadable GPS, games, AIM, Facebook on the go and of course 24-hour access to the iTunes store are just some of its pluses, but at 30,000 rupees (give or take a few hundred) for the 8GB model, the iPhone certainly doesn’t come cheap.

Slight problem though. Added applications are great on a phone that provides basic features like message and business card forwarding and video recording.

Unfortunately, these very basic features are not available on Steve Jobs’ latest offering as default.

Chayan Hazra, 30, is one iPhone owner who says he is willing to switch brands if something better comes up.

“If Nokia comes up with a phone that allows you to download applications and has a touch screen I will switch to it in a heartbeat because I know it will have all the basic features that I have become accustomed to in addition to these cool new apps,” he said.

Hazra fits right into mobile service provider Airtel’s category of “Achievers - young working, corporate professionals,” a target segment for the iPhone.

An Airtel spokesperson said they are also focussing on the “Funster segment” — tech-savvy individuals between the ages 18-35.

But for 20-something Soheil Engineer, his newly-acquired iPhone 3G doesn’t really live up to its name since 3G technology is yet to make an entry in India.

“I want to be able to live stream my favourite television shows on my phone while I am on the move,” he said.

That left me wondering. Just how many people are interested in the iPhone?

Both Vodafone Essar and Bharti Airtel, the two iPhone 3G retailers in India, are not revealing how many of the much-hyped smartphones have been sold in India since its launch last month.

A grey market dealer in Mumbai said he has sold 25-30 iPhones in two weeks and uses one himself.

I am sure that’s not good news for Apple… Unless they reduce the price by at least 10,000 rupees and India heralds in 3G technology, I certainly won’t buy one. Would you?

The latter part of his comments is not that new, nor indeed that different from the policies of the current U.S. administration. But it is his comment about India that has been seized upon by the media in South Asia. "We are providing them military aid without having enough strings attached. So they're using the military aid that we use, to Pakistan, they're preparing for war against India," he says.

You can see the stories in The Times of India and Dawn here and here. 

It will be interesting to see if Obama expands on those comments next week, either in the Fox News interview (so far only the early part has been released) or elsewhere. The main question is how the United States would try to convince the Pakistan Army to turn its full force against al Qaeda and the Taliban on Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, while easing up on its traditional preoccupation of defending its border with India. Holding Pakistan accountable for U.S. military aid is one thing; changing the psychology of the Pakistan Army is quite another.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Obama has said the U.S. war in Afghanistan would be made easier if the United States worked to improve trust between India and Pakistan. "A lot of what drives, it appears, motivations on the Pakistan side of the border, still has to do with their concerns and suspicions about India," he told a news conference in Amman back in July.

So pressure on Pakistan to crack down harder on al Qaeda and the Taliban is likely to be accompanied by U.S. pressure on India to make peace with its much smaller neighbour. But India deeply resents any outside interference in its dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir, which it sees as a bilateral issue.

The United States desperately needs Pakistan's help to avoid a humiliating failure in Afghanistan.  But it is also anxiously courting India (as highlighted by the U.S.-India nuclear deal) as it realigns its alliances in Asia to deal with an increasingly powerful China. 

So what gives?