Where are the dollars ?

The RBI has been furiously buying dollars to stem the rise of the rupee. It has bought over 84 Billion since Jan 2007. Where are these dollars going ?
From the historical data from US treasury India had about 15 Billion US dollars invested in US treasuries. The latest data shows that India is not even on the list. So it has less that 11 billion dollars of US treasuries.
So where are the dollars going ? Is RBI buying other countries treasuries and thus insulating itself from any weakening of the dollar ? If RBI is doing that, hats off to it. It is passing on the role of managing the dollar depreciation to other central banks, while keeping the rupee from appreciating.

Michael Lewis on "Why I'm Ready to Be New Citigroup CEO"

Micheal Lewis column: "Why I'm Ready to Be New Citigroup CEO".
Fun stuff! Here is an excerpt.

The Wall Street CEO must possess an extraordinary ability to be paid huge sums of money each year without losing composure.

This isn't as easy as it sounds, especially when the firm is losing billions. Imagine if some board handed you $40 million or so a year (before benefits) and tossed in a nine-figure severance package. If you're like most people, you'd dance around the kitchen naked with the drapes wide open -- until you realized what people who raised you would say when they read about it in the paper.

AP tops the chart

Andhra Pradesh has the distinction of topping the chart on the number of NGOs blacklisted by CAPART. Of course the data can be interpreted in many ways. May be the blacklisting criteria was tougher for AP, the AP based NGOs were stupid enough to get caught etc. The lesson to be learnt from this exercise is, if you plan to donate to NGOs, do your homework before giving away the money.

Here is the state wise list that I have compiled.

Andhra Pradesh	176
Bihar	123
Tamilnadu	75
Karnataka	71
Uttar Pradesh	69
Kerala	33
Rajasthan	33
Delhi	21
West Bengal	21
Haryana	20
Maharashtra	19
Orissa	19
Madhya Pradesh	14
Manipur	11
Nagaland	10
Gujarat	8
Jharkhand	8
Himachal Pradesh	6
J&K	4
Mizoram	4
Assam	2
Pondicherry	2
Chattisgarh	1
Meghalaya	1
Uttaranchal	1

Erosion of core constituency ?

How much the CPI(M)/CPI's core constituency has been eroded can possibly be gauged from the JNU elections . Its student wing ( SFI-AISF) supported candidates finished 3rd in three of the four central panel posts and just about managed to cling on to second position in the other post. JNU has always considered a bastion for SFI, with both Prakash Karat & Sitaram Yechury being past presidents of the JNU students union. Does this election provide a pointer to the direction in which the wind is blowing ?