Morning:
8°c
Hillary Clinton descended on the city for the weekend and brought gridlock in her wake. For some reason, the authorities thought shutting down key traffic lights a vital anti-terrorist measure - perhaps to entrap Al Qaeda operatives in a honking morass of black and yellow cabs.
Clinton elegantly negotiated India's biggest political mantrap, its rabid suspicion of Pakistan, managing to discuss the issue of terrorism without triggering a diplomatic crisis (unlike David Miliband six months back).
On the business front, though, she unwittingly took sides on an equally acrimonious dispute. At a meeting with leading Indian businessmen, she positioned Mukesh Ambani, India's richest man, to her left. But Anil, his estranged younger brother, was nowhere to be seen. And this in the week that Anil confirmed plans to pump $325 million (£199 million) into Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks Studios, a US investment on a scale far greater than anything Mukesh has done.
You can see why Anil Ambani, the youngest of India's estranged billionaire Ambani brothers, is throwing himself into the fantasy world of Hollywood. This week, India's government also turned against him, trying to overturn a high court judgment which confirmed that under their 2005 split, Mukesh owes Anil tens of billions of dollars' worth of natural gas at close to half the government-set price.
The government is claiming that the two halves of Reliance had no right to make the agreement as the gas is Indian sovereign property anyway, a claim that will irk companies such as BG Group and Cairn Energy, who have invested heavily under identical contracts that state that they can sell to whom they like and at any price they like.
The best moment of the week came after Tata chairman Ratan Tata handed over the first three ultra-cheap Tata Nano cars. I popped back to the Tata Motors garage as the TV cameramen were clearing up to find Ashish Balakrishnan, the lucky recipient, looking distraught. Within an hour of Ratan Tata's historic handing over of the keys, Balakrishnan had gone and lost them.
A note on local business practices. I phoned a senior PR executive on Saturday. She answered - it was definitely her - and then she handed the phone to a man, presumably her boyfriend, who denied ever having heard of her or her company, and then hung up. A brief canvass of expatriates confirmed that this is far from unusualalthough it's more usual to fake a bad line.
