Weekend reads

  1. The Budget 2018 has been marketed as one for rural India. So what does it have for business? Yamini Aiyar in The Mint argues that it is unlikely to improve ease of business. 
  2.   In an extremely dynamic business world, it is naive to think that our government bureaucrats appear to know all and can make policy once a year for the rest of us, says Rajkamal Rao in BusinessLine as he backs the scrapping of the “Budget spectacle”.   
  3. What will be the impact of Rajinikanth’s political entry in Tamil Nadu? D Karthikeyan and Hugo Gorringe analyse in the Economic and Political Weekly. 
  4. Catherine Bennett in The Guardian weighs in on Formula One’s decision to scrap the custom of grid girls and wonders if this was the right time. 
  5. Doreen St. Félix in the New Yorker on what it means to hold the ‘Black History Month’ under the Donald Trump regime in the United States. 
  6. Cole Stangler in Jacobin on the chaos that Emmanuel Macron’s labour reforms have unleashed on France. 
  7. Who is the greatest batsmen cricket has seen? Is it possible to compare batsmen across generations when the game has changed so much in the last four decades? Using statistical analysis, Srinivasan Ramani tries to find an answer in The Hindu. 
  8. What is it like to live in a surveillance state? James Millward writes on the Chinese attempts to keep track of Uighurs in the autonomous region of Xinjiang.  
  9. Any attempt by the Supreme Court to introduce safeguards in the Prevention of Atrocities Act will send a wrong signal, argues Anurag Bhaskar in Livelaw. 
  10. Robert Frantz in The Baltimore Sun says it was time the United States put an end to politically-motivated gerrymandering that has polarised the US Congress.