Once again, how do you not notice that you have the Mona Lisa hanging on your walls?

On a personal note, I am rather sad that this news breaks now rather than a couple of years ago. Two Januaries ago I was in Madrid and had an opportunity to spend a few minutes (only a few minutes sadly) at the Prado. I would definitely have tried to see this picture if I knew it was there. And the Prado is a very nice museum by the way. They have some wonderful works by Goya and Velasquez including the latter’s Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour). This alone is worth the trip to the museum. The collection is very large and it is worth the best part of a day. As I recall it, photography was not allowed inside.

The street with the Prado also contains two other major Madrid museums Thyssen-Bornemisza and Reina Sofia. From the latter comes this photograph of Picasso’s Guernica Composition Study. This was the only museum that allowed photography (must be because most of the stuff was ugly modern art). The only major work was not allowed to be photographed.

What is really interesting is how much forward this has gone today. Hoover may have balked at tapping of journalists’ phones, but today that seems like a small thing.

Of course thanks to the fact that Hoover’s secret files were never recovered, one assumes that a lot of the story is “filled in” for the sake of a story. But it is a movie, not a documentary. So the license is there for the taking. Watch the movie for DiCaprio’s portrayal of J Edgar.

So instead of bickering over whether Top Gear was sufficiently respectful of India in its show, I think it is much more relevant if we tried to do something about road safety in this country. As the presenters on the show pointed out, our roads are extremely dangerous with people choosing to drive on the wrong side of the road, repair work on roads without adequate marking & lighting, people parking on highways because they want to…

And all this without taking into account the worst offenders on the roads: state transport drivers. The recent incident in Pune may have brought this to note, but this is one of the worst aspects of highway driving in India. I myself have had a close call when a bus coming in the opposite direction drove into my car’s way when the driver decided to overtake another bus that itself was passing another vehicle. There were THREE abreast coming down a two lane highway. Thankfully I managed to drive off the road and escaped with only a smashed right hand side mirror.

Indeed, it is very easy to observe dangerous driving by these state transport bus drivers in Mumbai. Just take a trip down to the Dadar-Sion belt. I am only surprised that the streets are not littered with cars and bikes side-swiped by these monsters.

Photo taken at Worli Sea Face. Handheld.

This story brought to us by the hardworking Hindu Business Line. The taxman noted that the finance minister had stated that he “propose[s] to explicitly provide retrospectively since the inception of Income Tax Act, 1961 that any money paid by way of extortion will not qualify for deduction as a business expense.”

Perhaps that’s where all the money has disappeared to & why the Indian money market conditions are so tight these days?

P.S. If you see a box with 20B9 written in it, it is time to update your computer’s fonts. That is the new unicode character for the Indian Rupee.