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They are both "partners in a crime", and it is in their joint interest to keep the exchange hidden from law. But, Prof Basu argues, if you make bribe giving legal, the interests of the giver and taker collide and it is highly likely that the giver will blow the whistle and the bribe taker will get caught. One caveat: this will work only in checking what Prof Basu calls "harassment bribes" - holding back income tax refunds, property paper work and the like in return for graft - which is widespread in India, "breeding inefficiency and [having a] corrosive effect on civil society".

At a time when India is fiercely debating corruption after being hit by an avalanche of scandals, Prof Basu's radical prescription has predictably kicked up a storm. India's communist politicians - usually suspicious about new ideas - have trashed it as a "dangerous and unethical proposal". "Making it legal to pay bribes," said a communist functionary, "would undermine the values of honesty and integrity. Indeed, it would make people who don't pay bribes look like fools."

It is another matter that it is exceedingly difficult to find Indians who haven't paid a baksheesh in their lives.

Other critics like leading journalist P Sainath offer a more nuanced rebuttal. Bribery, he says, will exist as long as scarcity exists. There is an acute mismatch of demand and supply of government services. Making bribe giving legal will in no way curb bribery in sectors where scarcity exists, he argues. Indeed, Mr Sainath says, it will raise the stakes - making for more expensive bribes or the victims "facing heavier demands". "After all," he writes, "the bribe taker needs to be compensated for the higher risk he runs."

However, I found the highly respected development economist and social activist Jean Dreze's critique most compelling and informed. At the root of Prof Basu's thesis is the assumption that the bribe giver will blow the whistle and put the bribe taker in prison. If that does not happen, what is the use of decriminalising bribe giving?

Prof Dreze picks on this and feels that the chances of the bribe giver blowing the whistle against the taker are slim considering the "huge litigation costs, possible harassment and little chance of getting justice - not a far fetched assumption". A perfectly valid observation considering that India's judiciary crawls at a snail's pace.

The real choice, says Prof Dreze, is between not paying a bribe, and paying a bribe without blowing the whistle. "It is perfectly possible that many people would choose the former if bribing is illegal and punishable, but the latter (paying a bribe) if bribe-giving is legalised," he says.

Clearly the onus is on the bribe giver to nail the taker. How does he or she do it? Prof Basu suggests that the bribe giver will "try to keep evidence of the act of bribery" - a secret photo or jotting the numbers on currency notes handed over and so on - so that "immediately after the bribery" the giver can turn informer and get the taker caught. This is easier said than done.

Do you think Prof Basu's proposal legitimises corruption? Or should it - with some tweaks - be given serious thought?

On the face of it, it is all this and more. By all accounts, the violence was allegedly instigated by a right-wing regional party which is struggling to regain lost political ground in the Konkan coastal area where Jaitapur is located. The upshot of such cynical politics: one 'protestor' dead when police fired on irate villagers, at least 20 wounded, a hospital damaged and passenger buses gutted by the mob. A BBC colleague who is travelling in the area reports that many of the locals feel that their movement against the proposed nuclear plant is now "getting lost in the political din". They also blame the right-wing party for trying to "hijack" their movement.

This is tragic because there are much more significant and vexing issues at stake in Jaitapur. After the disastrous tsunami-induced meltdown in Fukushima, Japan, should India reconsider its push towards nuclear energy? (With the landmark nuclear deal with the US under its belt, India can now import reactors and nuclear fuel.) Will acquiring large tracts of land for nuclear power stations again set the government on a collision course with sections of the unwilling - and sometimes uninformed - farmers?

There are no clear answers. Anti-nuclear energy campaigners are unequivocal about their opposition to the plant. They insist that India will have to pay a high social price for nuclear energy.

Critics like Praful Bidwai believe that India's nuclear energy drive will sound the death knell of precious ecosystems - six 1,650 megawatt reactors will be built at Jaitapur on the west coast, it is planned, in what would turn out to be the world's largest 'nuclear park'. They say the government has forcibly acquired farmland using a colonial law to build the plant. Mr Bidwai, who visited Jaitapur, writes that the nuclear plant will be situated on fertile farmland, not barren wastelands as the government would have people believe. Then there is the threat the plant poses to thriving fisheries. Officials say no local will be displaced from his land, although more than 2,000 people have had to sell parts of their land. So are the protests about better compensation for land, and guarantees about safety?

Most scientists I spoke to dismiss a lot of what the campaigners say, insisting that nuclear power is really the only option India is left with to meet its growing energy needs. An astonishing 400 million Indians continue to live in the dark, without electricity. "You have to choose the lesser evil - more carbon dioxide or the threat of radiation," one told me. Smoke-belching thermal power plants use the atmosphere as a "sewer" and impact climate change. Solar and wind energy cannot meet India's energy demands, they say. Ergo, nuclear power, they say, is the only sensible and clean option. That is why India is planning to set up some 30 reactors over as many years and get a quarter of its electricity from nuclear energy by 2050.

Scientists agree the government has to tread carefully in building consensus at the grassroots and while acquiring farmland to set up the nuclear plants - there is no room for forcible acquisition of land at unremunerative prices.

Then there is this shrill debate over the safety of the plant. Critics point out that the French-built reactor meant for Jaitapur has still not been approved by nuclear regulators worldwide. They say that the site is seismically hazardous - the area was apparently hit by 95 earthquakes between 1985 and 2005 - and since it will be built on the coast will be prone to tsunamis.

Scientists dismiss these arguments as naive and ill-informed. India, they say, will not buy these third generation reactors until international and local regulators clear them. India's nuclear regulators say that Jaitapur is in a "significantly low seismic zone" compared with Japan and Fukushima. Also, the reactors will be built on a cliff 82ft (25m) above the mean sea level. With its 20 reactors, India, scientists insist, has a good safety record. (There was a turbine room fire at a plant in 1993, and a sodium leak in another in 2000). "There have been no serious incidents. There has been no radiation leak. Our record is clean," one official said.

In the tangled skein of conflicts bedevilling Jaitapur, it is easy to lose sight of the main issue: should India pursue nuclear energy to solve its crippling energy shortage? Or should it stumble along, uncertain about the alternatives and keeping 40% of its people in the dark?

India's government officials charged with corruption can be prosecuted only after an approval by the federal or state government. However, by simply sitting on requests from prosecuting agencies, governments can easily slow down prosecutions or make sure that the offenders are never prosecuted.

But are governments serious about prosecuting their own officers? Consider this.

• The federal government has not responded to 236 requests to prosecute public servants on corruption-related charges till the end of 2010. The overwhelming majority of these requests -155 or 66% - were pending for more than three months.

• State governments run by different parties have not fared much better. They have not responded to 84 requests till the end of 2010 of which 13, or 15% were pending for more than three months.

• India's Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) is tasked with fighting corruption in the federal government. Between 2005 and 2009, only 6% of the cases in which the agency found corruption were sanctioned for prosecution by the government. The remaining 94% were let off with departmental penalties, some of them minor.

• The powerful Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is the main investigative agency used by the CVC to probe corruption and misuse of office by government officials. But till the end of 2010, 21% of its key jobs remained vacant, seriously hindering its working.

• The criminal justice system is also failing in prosecuting officials charged with corruption. There were nearly 10,000 CBI cases pending in the courts till the end of 2010 - and 23% of these cases had been pending for more than 10 years.

• As I reported earlier, whistleblowers are facing serious challenges. In 2004, the government empowered the CVC to act on complaints from whistleblowers. Between 2005 and 2009, the CVC received only 1731 complaints from whistleblowers, a paltry annual average of 346.

Is it any surprise then that an anti-corruption bill has been introduced eight times in the parliament since 1968 with no results?

The idea of setting up an Ombudsman type institution in India was first floated in 1963 during a parliamentary debate. Ideally, it would be an institution independent of the judiciary, executive and legislature and would be free to chose the investigation method and agency.

A total of 140 countries around the world have the office of an Ombudsman. Many believe India needs it most. Has its time finally arrived? The government agreed over the weekend to form a panel to draft a stronger law as per the demands of anti-corruption campaigners led by the redoubtable Anna Hazare, who broke a four-day fast over the issue. Watch this space.

Well, the answers are simple enough. Indians are fed up of sleaze - the country has been rocked by a string of corruption scandals in the past few months. Mr Hazare is a calm man of unimpeachable integrity with a pleasing smile. He has a track record of fighting corruption in Maharashtra - one of India's most corrupt states. Evoking Gandhi's example, he has become a rallying point for the burgeoning anti-corruption fight and the infuriated middle classes. And there is no greater symbol of coercive non-violent protest in India than a fast - again a Gandhian legacy - however much this form of protest may have been debased in recent years by some politicians who snack surreptitiously while on "hunger strike".

Mr Hazare's tactics appear astute. He has now upped the ante, exhorting his followers to "fill India's jail" - again a throwback to Gandhi - in a mass campaign of civil disobedience. It is clear Mr Hazare is not about to ease the pressure. His fast, played out in the full glare of 24/7 news television, is a significant moment in India's largely jaded fight against corruption. The middle classes have responded, happy there are no politicians taking part. For most Indians, politicians, unfortunately, epitomise all that is wrong with the country. Two politicians were turned away from the site of the fast at Jantar Mantar, a historic Delhi observatory, by irate campaigners.

The fast has also had a bizarre side, with assorted Bollywood stars, controversial gurus and publicity hungry lawyers flocking to the stage. There have been also excited and absurd claims that this could be India's Tahrir Square moment.

Anna Hazare has made enough sacrifices to earn the leadership of this powerful protest - most Indians feel their politicians have conspired to remain silent about rampant corruption. The last time corruption was an issue in election was in 1989 when a minister in the Congress government quit against alleged kickbacks in a defence deal, and became a rallying point for the opposition.

But commentators like Pratap Bhanu Mehta eloquently warn that "sometimes a sense of unbridled virtue can also subvert democracy". They say that the Jan Lokpal Bill (Citizen's Ombudman Bill) that the activists want will amount to an anti-corruption institution vested with draconian powers. They ask: Why do we think that this institution will be corruption-free?

Corruption is a complex malaise in India. It is rooted in opaque and badly-run institutions that have been fostered and tolerated over the years. Then there is the stifling, post-colonial bureaucracy. Everyone knows the warped government policies, like misplaced food and energy subsidies, are open to abuse. Add to that the failure to reform India's election system with its shadowy private funding of candidates, many of whom have criminal records. And many people - some now protesting against corruption - have become habitual bribe givers to navigate the system they have lost faith in. More cynicism has bred more corruption. It's not clear how far Mr Hazare's campaign will go - but setting up an citizen's ombudsman will not be the end of corruption. There's much more to do.

Nothing could have been a better advert for the 50-over game than the World Cup which concluded over the weekend. The average run rate touched more than five runs per over for the first time in the 36-year-old championship - the 2011 edition averaged 5.03 runs per over, compared to the previous highest of 4.95 runs per over in the 2007 championship in West Indies. Twenty four centuries were scored, the highest number in any World Cup. Teams batting first won 24 games and lost 23 - a fairly even win-loss ratio. Seventeen totals were above 300 runs. Nearly 70 million people watched the pulsating India - Sri Lanka final on television.

India's rousing win has also helped the rejuvenation of the format. It turned World Cup history on its head, becoming the first host nation to win the championship and chasing down the highest number of runs successfully in a final. India won seven of its nine matches, boasted four of the top 10 run scorers, and shared the top bowling honours. Suitably emboldened by the success of the World Cup, English county cricket administrators are reportedly thinking about returning to the 50-over format, scrapped at the end of the 2009 season in favour of 40-over games.

But the onus falls on the administrators to handle the cricket calendar with care to ensure that the 50-over game stays exciting and relevant. Jonathan Agnew, writing for the BBC, worries that the format has been flogged by administrators and television companies for extracting maximum revenues, leading to excessive and sometimes, meaningless games. "The legacy of this World Cup should be that if treated properly and with respect, the 50-over game is by far the best format for one-day cricket," writes Agnew. Many like Mike Selvey believe that the World Cup needs to be trimmed - the four-week long league stage, they say is inordinately long, and could be easily shortened by having two matches per day.

The ICC has cut the number of competing teams from 14 to 10 for the 2015 tournament to be held in Australia and New Zealand. (Sadly, there is no place for Ireland who beat England in the 2011 World Cup.) "The length of 50 overs will find certain teams out but I think there are 10 teams that can seriously compete in that format," the ICC chief executive Haroon Lorgat says. He says the ICC conducted a survey of 676 million people in five "markets" - England, New Zealand, India, South Africa and Bangladesh" - which showed there was "not just an interest but a passion for one day internationals". Just handle it with care.

The country has added 181 million new people over the past decade, the equivalent of the population of Brazil, which is the fifth largest country in the world. With 1.21 billion people, India now accounts for 17% of the world's population. UN forecasters say that by 2030 India will overtake China as the world's most populous nation.

The good news is that at 17.64%, the rate of growth between 2001-2011 represents the sharpest decline over a decade since Independence. The growth rate was at its lowest between 1941-1951 when it was 13.3%: that was a time of famine, religious killings and the transfer of populations in the run-up to partition. The growth rate was more than 24% between 1961 and 1981. So a 17.64% growth rate points to a slowing down that will cheer those who are concerned about how India will bear the burden of its massive population.

The bad news for those with such concerns is that India still has more than a billion people, and this number is rising. Indian politicians and policy planners speak eloquently about how this population will fetch demographic dividends, and ensure India's growth story.

But such optimism may be unfounded if the state is unable to harness this potential. It is very easy, warn social scientists, for this demographic dividend to turn into a deficit with millions of uneducated, unskilled and unemployed young people on the streets, angry and a threat to peace and social stability. "There is nothing to brag about our population growing and crossing China. Do we know how we are going to skill all these people?" asks India's top demographer, Ashish Bose.

The government would like to say that the dip in population growth has to do with pushing a successful contraception programme in the country. But social scientists say that with rising urbanisation, it is no surprise that population growth is on the decline. Increasing urbanisation leads to nuclear families in small homes paying high rents in increasingly expensive cities. Having more children does not help matters.

The biggest shock in this census is the decline in the child gender ratio at 914 girls (under the age of six) for every 1,000 boys. This is the lowest since Independence and it looks like a precipitous drop from a high of 976 girls in the 1961 census.

Social scientists and demographers believe that the decline in the number of girls all over the country - in 27 states and union territories - points to deeply entrenched social attitudes towards women, despite economic liberalisation and increasing work opportunities.

They link sex determination tests and female foeticide - banned in India, but still quite widespread due to lax enforcement - to the rising costs of dowry, a practice which even the burgeoning middle classes have been unable to get rid of. "Marriages have become costlier, dowries have been pricier, so there is a lot of social resistance to having girl children in the family," says Mr Bose.

One demographer told me that when they went counting a family during the census in the patriarchal northern state of Haryana, he found that it didn't count the girls. When asked why, they told him that the girls would be leaving the family after marriage anyway.

The government says it will reconsider its policies to make sure that this shameful trend is arrested. I take this to mean that they want to make sure that anti-sex determination laws are enforced strongly. But increasing the numbers of girls requires a shift in attitudes and more imaginative policies. In Bihar, for example, the government is giving away free bicycles to girls to go to school. And Gujarat has launched vigorous drives to check female foeticide and educate girls.

The census has also thrown up an interesting conundrum. How do you explain that the overall gender imbalance has narrowed when the number of baby girls being born has plummeted? This census found 940 females to 1,000 men, up from 933 females in 2001. This is the highest since 1971, and just a shade lower than 1961. This contradiction confounds social scientists. Is this a statistical discrepancy which needs to be investigated further?

One more piece of good news. The literacy rate has shot up to 74% from about 65% in the last count. More hearteningly, new female literates outnumbered male literates during the past decade. Ten states and union terriorities achieved a literacy rate of above 85%. The quality of education may be uneven and debatable, but this is an achievement India can be proud of.

But can cricket help? Will the presence of Indian PM Manmohan Singh and his Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani and their respective entourages at Wednesday's semi-final between India and Pakistan help revitalise the jaded peace process? Or will cricket diplomacy merely end up causing nightmares for the harried organisers of Wednesday's game which will be held at a small stadium in Mohali in Indian Punjab?

Reports from Mohali suggest that the politics of the event is threatening to take centre stage. "The cricketers have suddenly become the bit-part actors in the drama," writes analyst Sharda Ugra. "The two states and their prime ministers have struck. The Indian invited and the Pakistani accepted which now leaves the local hosts worrying about more than whether their sofas and carpets are spruced up and smelling of roses."

Politicians, Ms Ugra says, have certainly made things difficult for organisers. "Hosting prime ministers is one thing, but where the devil can the 50-strong "entourages" that will accompany each of them, be fitted in?" she wonders. "Surely their Honourable-nesses could have watched the game on some giant LED television? " It's a good question.

Cricket diplomacy between India and Pakistan has a chequered history. Sometimes it has come as an icebreaker; at other times; it has merely marked a deceptive lull before another storm.

Former Pakistani President General Zia-ul-Haq started it all when he came to India to watch a Test match between the two sides in February 1987 as part of his "cricket for peace initiative". Delhi had launched a huge military exercise on its border during the winter, and a rattled Islamabad had bolstered troops on its borders in response. The game in Jaipur turned to be a dismal affair, plodding to a draw after rain washed out a day's play and Pakistan objected to sawdust being strewn on the pitch. Two games later, Pakistan grabbed its first Test series win in India.

During the game, the grapevine buzzed, President Zia apparently whispered to Indian PM Rajiv Gandhi that Pakistan had the nuclear bomb. Later, using pointed metaphors, he reportedly asked Indian reporters: "Why do you ignore my sixers to Indian bouncers?" The "peace initiative" came a cropper - though the tension on the border was defused, Indian-administered Kashmir exploded into full blown militancy two years later. Much of it, India alleged, was plotted, fanned and executed by groups across the border.

Some believe that cricket diplomacy may have sometimes actually helped in lowering the temperature between the two countries. They point to the two sides resuming cricket ties in January 1999 - after a decade-long hiatus - just six months after the two countries exploded nuclear devices. In India, the regional right wing Shiv Sena objected violently: its supporters dug up the cricket pitch and demonstrated outside the Pakistani embassy in Delhi, attacked the cricket board's offices in Mumbai and threatened to release snakes in the stadiums.

On field, things were more cordial. Former Pakistan foreign secretary Shaharyar Khan, who was the team manager, remembered a "certain maturity" among the crowds watching the games in this landmark home series. "Good performances were appreciated without bias," he wrote. "The teams interacted sportingly on the field."

Ten thousand Pakistani fans crossed the border to watch a one-day game at Mohali. Mr Khan remembers the "memorable" hospitality shown by Indians - shop owners and taxi drivers gave out discounts to fans from across the border, and a generous Punjab government organised a free Bollywood film show for Pakistani cricketers and a free dinner for visiting fans. He called the 1999 tour "a huge diplomatic and public relations" success.

A few months later, the war in Kargil neutralised cricket's gains. Relations between the siblings deteriorated. Only in 2004 - three years after the failed Agra summit between the two sides - the then Indian PM Atal Behari Vajpayee travelled to Pakistan for a regional summit to break the ice as India announced a cricket tour of Pakistan. "Mr Vajpayee has, in fact, opened the innings," said Mr Khan who was by then chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board.

Pakistan was to host an Indian team after 19 years. Twenty thousand visas were issued to Indian fans for the five-week tour. It was a resounding success and Indian fans returned with incredible stories of Pakistani hospitality. India won both the Test and one-day series, both closely fought.

A year later, Indian PM Manmohan Singh tried his hand at cricket diplomacy. He invited former president Pervez Musharraf to watch a one-day match between the two sides in Delhi in April 2005. Pakistan thrashed India by 159 runs and won the six-match one-day series 4-2, an amazing comeback after trailing 0-2. Opening for Pakistan, Shahid Afridi scored 44 quicksilver runs in 23 balls, and returned later to pick up two Indian wickets.

Off the field, Mr Musharraf savoured every moment of the game. He later wrote:

Unfortunately for my hosts, the match turned out to be an embarrassment for India because one of Pakistan's star batsmen, Shahid Afridi, clobbered virtually every ball that the Indians bowled at him. Many of his hits headed straight for our VIP enclosure. Like any normal cricket fan I wanted to jump out of my seat shouting and clapping, but I had to control my enthusiasm in deference to my hosts.

Before the match was over, we left for our discussions. It goes without saying that I was dying to get back to the exciting match. So during our official one-on-one meeting I suggested to the prime minister that we go back to see the last hour of the match and also distribute the prizes. I made him agree in spite of his concerns about security. But then, as the meeting continued, my staff kept sending in notes informing me about the collapse of the Indian team when its turn came to bat. India's entire team got out long before the end of the game. Tightly repressing any outward signs of my inner joy, I had to inform Manmohan Singh that the Indian team's batting had been wasted and there was no point in another visit to the stadium.

Boys will be boys, some might say, but they obviously don't know cricket, or the importance of a match between Pakistan and India.

Mr Singh's foray into cricket diplomacy fetched mixed results, say analysts. The two leaders talked about Kashmir, and conflicts over Siachen and Sir Creek. "Coming after a series of failed summits, the conversation between Mr Singh and Gen Musharraf was a game-changer," says analyst C Raja Mohan. "At least for a while."

Three years later, nine gunmen attacked Mumbai and more than 170 lives were lost. India blamed Pakistan-based militants for plotting the terror attack - and peace talks were shelved again.

Will Mr Singh be luckier the second time around? Cricket has suddenly sprung in what could turn out to be a season of bonhomie between India and Pakistan. But relations between the two have been frosty and precarious for long, and it is unfair to expect the cricketers to improve them. Let the cricketers play an exciting game. Let the politicians talk, because silence pays no dividends in this stormy relationship. If things work out in the end, cricket, as Shashi Tharoor says, will only be the "icing on the cake".

Many would say the same of Wednesday's World Cup cricket semi-final match between India and Pakistan in India's Mohali, not far from the Pakistan border. Listen to the metaphors ex-cricketers are serving up to describe the epic encounter. Vivian Richards says this is "the best war that can be fought ... a war without weapons". Imran Khan insists - quite correctly - that there will be a "curfew in the subcontinent on the day of the match". He also flags up a concern: "I hope it is played in the right spirit."

Khan's concern is understandable. The two sides haven't played a single match on each other's soil since the 2008 Mumbai attacks. With ties between the two neighbours plummeting, Pakistani cricketers have been kept out of the lucrative Indian Premier League after the first season. Since the attacks, the two sides have played each other only twice: Pakistan won a 2009 Champions Trophy game in South Africa by 54 runs, while India won a closely fought 2010 Asia Cup game in Sri Lanka by three wickets with one ball remaining. So the pressure on both sides playing in Indian Punjab will be enormous.

And not many expected an India-Pakistan semi-final this World Cup. The subcontinental twins had been disgraced - ousted unceremoniously by minnows - in the last edition of the Cup in West Indies in 2007. And in the run up to this edition, Pakistan cricket had reached its nadir with three top players found guilty of corruption and the usual selection controversies. A team which appeared to be in a shambles has already confounded pundits and proved that they excel when in trouble.

So Pakistan have won five of the six league games and decimated the West Indies in the quarter-finals.They boast of two of the four top wicket takers in the tournament: captain Shahid Afridi and Umar Gul have picked up 35 wickets between them so far. And thus, this epic battle has been literally foisted upon Indian soil by Pakistan, a rousing victory of sports over politics.

No one believes that Wednesday's game will help ease relations between the squabbling neighbours despite Indian PM Manmohan Singh's cricket diplomacy. Nobody believes that it will pave the way for resumption of bilateral cricket ties, which have been disrupted in the past by wars, the demolition of a mosque, an attack on the Indian parliament and religious riots. The irony is that India and Pakistan had become quite comfortable with winning and losing as they played more frequently before the Mumbai attacks: the two sides played a Test series every year between 2003 and 2007. The honours had been even: India and Pakistan had won one series each and drawn the remaining two. "These days," wrote Indian scholar Ramachandra Guha, "Indians don't take failure as national humiliation. Perhaps they consoled themselves that the country surpassed Pakistan in all spheres. It had better scientists, better writers, a more vigorous film industry, and was a democracy besides."

Will Wednesday mark a return to the old days of crude nationalism and jingoism? I hope not. I hope fans from India and the few thousand from across the border will be generous in their cheer for both the teams. Who can forget the time when Pakistan lost to India during the 1996 World Cup? Fans in Pakistan smashed TV sets, a college student fired a hail of bullets from a Kalashnikov into his TV set and then on himself, another fan died of a heart attack, captain Wasim Akram received death threats, a fan filed a petition in the court against the "disappointing performance" and a cleric said Pakistan would never win at cricket so long as a woman - Benazir Bhutto was the prime minister - ruled the country. Even the plane carrying the players had to be diverted to Karachi as irate fans waited in Lahore carrying expletive-laced banners and rotten eggs. Surely such passions have abated with the passage of time.

So who will win this "final before the final"? Though Pakistan has an overwhelming 60% win rate against India in one-day games, history is heavily stacked against them in the World Cup: it has lost all the four previous encounters with India. Imran Khan says India begin as favourites. But mercurial Pakistan could easily provide the most tantalising twist in the tail.

What is Sarah Palin doing in India? The former vice-presidential nominee and Alaska governor is famously travel-shy and a largely unknown entity in the subcontinent.

Though her reality Alaska TV show premiered this month (aired on Monday nights) it doesn't appear to have been a hit with audiences addled on political scandals, cricket and soap. People are not even sure what Ms Palin knows about and thinks of India. "I am very excited to visit India," she has been quoted as saying in what appears to be her only observations on the country so far. "Americans have a great respect for the world's largest democracy."

Ms Palin, who arrives in India barely three months after President Obama's high-octane visit, is a key speaker at a glittering annual conclave organised by India Today Group, a large media conglomerate. She shares this widely-attended mega-talkfest with such speakers as Germaine Greer and Fatima Bhutto, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Niall Ferguson and Mohammed ElBaradei.

The theme of the conclave is "the changing balance of power". India Today owner-editor Aroon Purie believes America's supremacy is being challenged. "A feisty former vice-presidential nominee from America," said Mr Purie, while opening the conclave, "who will be our gala night speaker [on Saturday] will surely disagree with this."

Clearly, there are high expectations of Ms Palin, who will speak about her vision of America.

Whether or not Ms Palin knows much about India, few Indians know what she stands for. On a frenzied Internet debate on the conclave site, a woman participant says it would be "interesting" to have a woman in the White House "after a black president". She is promptly admonished by another respondent - gender unclear - who writes: "Shaking my head at the naive casual support thrown by a woman to a woman who does not support rights of women such as the right to her own body." Please "familiarise yourself with Sarah Palin [and] her political views," implores the writer.

But to put Ms Palin's appearance at a private Indian conclave down to a sizeable fee - the organisers are reported to have paid thousands of dollars to marquee speakers such as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Pervez Musharraf in the past - and a paid holiday, might be unfair.

Indian commentator Pranay Gupte, who describes the conclave as the "biggest private-sector megaphone in the world's largest democracy", says Ms Palin's journey to India is an important one: she will be able to discover how politics works in the subcontinent, seek to deepen her "geopolitical education" about South Asia, experience the "colours" of India and hear from Indians their concerns about China's rise.

The media coverage of Ms Palin's visit has so far been subdued, though one expects things will heat up over the weekend, when she makes her appearance.

The Times of India wonders whether the trip is a build-up to a White House bid in 2012. Others back home take the opposite view. A blog in The New Hampshire Union Leader, the leading newspaper in a state that hold's the US's first primary, speculates that Ms Palin's visit means that she is not interested in contesting the elections. The blogger Andrew Cline writes he finds it difficult to believe that "someone who makes a trip to India a higher priority than a trip of New Hampshire is a serious presidential candidate". So, he writes, "chalk this up as one more bit of evidence that she's probably not running". A Huffington Post cartoon is acerbic - one of the characters in it says that Ms Palin is going to India "probably because she can't see it from her house in Alaska" (a reference to an ABC interview in 2008, when she talked about Russia being visible from an Alaskan island).

But what is quite certain is that Ms Palin will be well received. As a rank newcomer, she has novelty value with the audiences. Also, as analysts like Gupte say, India loves women leaders - India's most powerful leader is Sonia Gandhi, the Congress party chief and daughter-in-law of Indira Gandhi, the country's most powerful prime minister ever. Indians also have traditionally loved Republicans. So while Ms Palin's journey to India may never be fully explained - unless she comes clean to the Delhi glitterati in audience on Saturday night - it will possibly end up provoking a lot of interest. To mop up that kind of attention in the world's largest democracy cannot be a bad thing for any aspiring US presidential candidate.

Federal aviation authorities say they will be checking the licences of some 4,000 pilots flying commercial aircraft after allegations that at least four were found to have fake documents. Two have been arrested for using fake certificates to obtain licences.

The first, a pilot from the perpetually ailing, state-owned Air India, apparently fabricated his qualifications. The other, who was arrested last week after damaging the aircraft during landing, was found to have used fake documents to get her licence. The licences of the other two pilots are apparently riddled with irregularities, and both have reportedly disappeared.

According to one report by news channel CNN-IBN, a pilot who was caught cheating during a flying test in the US in 2000 and denied a licence, got a commercial licence on his return to India by forging his qualifications and has since been working as a senior pilot with Air India. Air India spokesman Kamaljeet Rattan would not discuss that particular case with the BBC. But he tells me the airline is scrutinising the papers of a dozen pilots. "It's nothing very serious, and not at all scary," he says. "These are routine checks."

Senior aviation officials echo the views of Mr Rattan. "Fake licences are very few so there is no need to panic," says Bharat Bhushan, India's most senior civial aviation official. But there are suspicions that pilots cannot be faking their papers without some inside help. And aviation analysts believe this is the time to crack down. "This is a very serious issue," Kapil Kaul of Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation tells me. "When pilots are faking their certificates it is a criminal offence. It points to a systemic failure. Airline operators also cannot absolve themselves of responsibility. They need to have more vigorous checks. And decisive action needs to be taken against the pilots."

As if all this was not enough, last week the government announced that 57 pilots reporting for duty had tested over the limit for alcohol in the past two years. All were prevented from joining their aircraft. The issue was raised in parliament - according to a parliamentary document I have seen, the pilots were employed by every leading private airline as well as Air India. Ten were sacked; others had their licences suspended or were taken off the flight roster.

The airlines have been keeping a low profile on this - like Mr Rattan they want to play down the severity of the problems. By and large Indians appear to have been reassured by the government announcement. There's been no public outcry. But concerns about the quality of some pilots have been around for a while. Last August former civil aviation minister Praful Patel was asked in parliament whether commercial pilots had been drunk on duty. He replied there had been no such incident. Another MP actually asked Mr Patel this year whether "under-trained pilots are flying commercial flights... risking the lives of hundreds of passengers". Again the minister denied any such possibility.

Although the Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA)is a respected and tested regulator, experts say that breakneck growth has presented regulatory challenges across the industry from the airline operators to their government overseers. The number of domestic air passengers is expected to grow 9%-10% annually to more than 150 million by 2020. India now has some 15 airline operators with a fleet of 400-plus planes. The number of airports has shot up to 82 from 50 in a decade. Pilots faking papers is not unheard of. In China 200 pilots were found with fake papers in 2008, according to the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation. The Philippines also faced a similar problem. India now has the world's fourth largest number of domestic fliers after the US, China and Japan. Many here are hoping such growth does not come at the expense of passenger safety.

For the Congress party-led government whose credibility is battered by a tsunami of corruption scandals, the hugely ostentatious wedding by a party member should come as an embarrassment, many here feel. One minister is reported to have said recently that nearly 15% of India's grain and vegetables is wasted through "extravagant and luxurious functions". Party chief Sonia Gandhi has pleaded with her workers to be frugal and her MPs to fly economy class. The embattled PM, Manmohan Singh, had feebly exhorted businessmen to refrain from ostentatious displays of wealth because such "vulgarity insults the poor". But what he possibly forgets is that the poor in India are actually insulted every day by many of the men and women they vote into power.

The government is apparently working on a law to curb waste at extravagant weddings and functions. No law will be able to change soon a people and society that remain deeply hierarchical, feudal and class-conscious. At one end of the scale a hapless farmer may take ruinous loans from money-lenders to host a wedding beyond his means. At the other end a billionaire unabashedly builds the world's priciest home (more than $1bn) in Mumbai where half the people live in slums. All this is symptomatic of a society which thrives on perpetuating inequity. With near double-digit growth, there's going to be more money to throw around and flaunt. So don't expect any lame law to curb India's vulgar, overblown weddings any time soon.

So when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh sat down for a rare hour-long press conference in Delhi this morning, he, unsurprisingly, faced a barrage of questions on what his government was planning to do to crack down on corruption in high places. Unfortunately, say analysts, his answers did not reveal a more assertive chief executive who was fully in control of the situation.

For one, say critics, the reticent Mr Singh appeared to be more bothered by how India's image might have been damaged by the media coverage, than by the rising tide of corruption itself. He gave reassurances that the government was "dead serious" in bringing to book "all the wrongdoers regardless of the positions they occupy". When pressed further, he said: "Wrong doers will not escape this time."

But he also worried that in "projecting" (read, the media reporting) these events, "an impression has gone round that we are a scam-driven country". This was, he felt, "weakening the self confidence of the Indian people". He told the journalists: "In reporting the affairs of our nation, you should not focus excessively on negative features."

Many find Mr Singh's plea disingenuous as India remains one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and graft continues to eat away at its vitals. It hurts the poor most, widens inequity, kills initiative and saps energy out of society. For all its foibles, India's noisy and vibrant media has done more than a good job in relentlessly chasing the scandals - from alleged underselling of telecom licences to purchases for last year's Commonwealth Games. India's merchants of feel-good, however, insist that to highlight corruption at the cost of the country's considerable achievements - and there are many - is wrong.

Critics say Mr Singh should not be worrying about the self-confidence of his citizens. The rising self confidence of Indian people, they say, is despite the weak and ineffectual state; and it mostly comes from the opportunities they have been able to mine for themselves in a highly competitive nation.

Indians may be inured to corruption, but the recent spate of allegations has taken their breath away. Many believe that the time has come for an all-out war against corruption, something consecutive governments have been loathe to do. So, few believe the government when it says it is moving to bring back illicit money that Indians have stashed away in foreign banks. People believe there is a silent consensus among political parties to go soft on corruption. Nothing much has changed during Mr Singh's regime, they say, despite his exhortations and promises.

Mr Singh appears to have taken refuge in the uneasy compulsions of coalition politics to try to take the heat off on the corruption charges plaguing his government - after all, a former minister who is being investigated for his alleged involvement in the telecom scandal belongs to a key ally. So he kept insisting that coalition politics had hobbled him.

"You have to tolerate a lot in coalition politics," he said rather sheepishly. "We can't have elections every six months. Some compromises have to be made." The problem is that many feel that Mr Singh and his party are making too many compromises. "I am not saying that I have never committed a wrong," he said, smiling wanly. "[But] I am not the kind of culprit as some reports are making me out to be."

Mr Singh was characteristically honest and weakly convincing. He tried to shore up confidence in his government saying: "People say I run a lame-duck government, I am a lame-duck PM. But we take our job seriously, we govern seriously." But recent opinion polls point to Mr Singh and the Congress-led government's stock falling and it will take more than words from the prime minister to prove that his government isn't losing the plot.

The prime minister, as one of the journalists at Wednesday's meeting later said, appeared to be a "disturbed man". Prannoy Roy said he appeared to be more at ease at answering questions related to the economy and inflation - again, no surprises, because he is a trained economist - than he was tackling the complex web of charges in the telecom scandal.

Mr Singh has reasons to worry. He rightly despaired at the breakdown of
parliament and bipartisanship. He spoke about the need for a "spirit of rejuvenation, a spirit of self confidence. "We have problems," he said, "but we have credible mechanisms to overcome them."

The problem is that most of the so-called credible mechanisms - the police, judiciary, investigative agencies, regulators - are weak and discredited in the eyes of many people. India urgently needs to reform these state institutions. With little progress on these fronts many, according to BJP leader and former minister Arun Shourie, are feeling that the "situation is ripe for another people's movement". And it needs demonstrable action - and not stirring words alone - to rejuvenate the spirit of a nation which lives in hope and despair simultaneously.

Last week, I travelled through India's most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, which has sent a number of cricketers to the national team. I found little enthusiasm about the event among the locals and spotted no billboards or fan hoardings of cricket stars.The electronics shop owner in my Delhi suburb says there has been no significant surge in TV sales - typically fans migrate to bigger, wide-screen sets before such a major sporting event - despite a high-definition telecast of the event for the first time. "I am not getting a sense of any buzz," concurs my friend and leading sports writer Suresh Menon. "I wonder if there is actually fan fatigue."

Nobody is arguing yet that the World Cup in the subcontinent will go the way of the dismal 2007 edition in the West Indies, which was plagued by high ticket prices, an interminable 46-day schedule, and major upsets which saw India and Pakistan getting knocked out early.

I also believe India will be gripped by cricket fever as the tournament progresses and the top teams reach the knockout stages at the quarter-finals. But that begins on 23 March.

There is nothing to get excited as the tournament gets underway - the eight teams likely to be in the quarter finals are pretty predictable barring near-impossible serial upsets.
So the group games could end up as an extended warm up for the main teams at the expense of weary fans.

That could be one reason behind the lukewarm fan response even as TV news and sports channels and newspapers are trying to pump up the adrenalin with special programming to ride on the advertising gravy train that cricket brings to India.

Also, I suspect that both the tournament and the 50-over format, as cricket writer Mark Marqusee says, may be on trial. Fourteen teams and 49 matches over 43 days promises to be another grinding event - the organisers seem to learned few lessons from the Caribbean debacle.

More importantly, Twenty-20-addled cricket fans, especially the younger ones, have no patience to sit through an eight-hour, 50-over game any longer. And if they watch at all, they are most likely to skip what they call the "meaningless" middle.

Twenty-20, despite its crude grammar, has revolutionised the game. With a three-hour game amid razzmatazz, cricket has a format which can compete globally. If the ferocious 1932 Bodyline series between England and Australia was the "violence and ferocity of our age expressing itself in cricket", as the game's prophet-philosopher CLR James put it eloquently, then today's love for instant gratification and mammon express themselves gloriously in the lucrative Twenty20 game.

But an exciting, global format doesn't mean that cricket has become a truly global game - the gap between the Test playing and the rest, as Marqusee says, has grown wider than it was a decade ago. Minnows have not grown into masters.

So is it time to take a fresh look at the World Cup? Does it need fewer teams and matches, and more equitable and competitive formats? Why not have a humdinger of a tournament with just six teams playing each other twice after a qualifier which separates the best from the mediocre? Has the 50 over format reached its apogee with nothing new to offer? Nearly four decades after it began, has the format run its course? The fan ennui could be explained by answers to these questions.

Thanks to opposition and public ire over a series of corruption scandals, "black money" is back in the spotlight. The Supreme Court has been chiding the beleaguered government for not doing enough to unearth illicit money. "Is there no basis to figure out black money?" the court wondered on Thursday. "What is the source of black money, which has been stashed away in foreign banks? Is it from arms dealing, drug peddling or smuggling?"

Strong words indeed. But they may not be enough to uncover India's biggest and longest-running scandal. This week, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee unveiled what critics said was a laundry list of tedious platitudes and obscure, non time-bound plans to check the "menace of black money". This includes joining a "global crusade" against it, creating appropriate legislation and institutions to deal with such funds and imparting skills to officers tasked with detecting such funds. In effect, what the government is saying is that after 63 years of independence, India has no institutions or trained people available to curb a brazen and thriving underground economy which rewards tax evaders, humiliates tax payers and widens inequity.

There is enough evidence to show that there is little political or administrative will to curb "black money". India has double taxation treaties with 79 countries. But 74 of these treaties need to be tweaked significantly to include exchange of banking information between the countries. (Letters have been issued to 65 of these countries to initiate negotiation, says the minister.) India has apparently chosen 22 countries and tax havens for negotiating and signing exchanging tax information. Last year, a law to prevent money laundering was given more teeth - but laws are often flouted with impunity in the world's largest democracy. The government says it plans to hone direct tax laws further to begin taxing deposits in foreign banks and interests in foreign trusts.

It also talks about a new amnesty scheme for "black money", which is really a slap in the face of the honest tax payer. Since Independence, the government has offered the "voluntary disclosure scheme" six times, most recently in 1997. Less than $1bn was declared, which most experts believe was a fraction of the black money in the market at that time. India's autonomous federal auditors once remarked that the disclosure schemes encourage people to become "habitual tax offenders", knowing full well that they can hoard money without paying income taxes.

Independent economists believe that despite the government's recent noises, "black money" will continue to blight India and its economy. For one, it is a systemic problem. Those who don't pay taxes or stash away illicit money overseas comprise the political and professional creme de la creme - politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen, doctors, lawyers, chartered accountants, judges. That the government is not keen upon cracking down on illicit capital flows was evident, analysts say, when, in 2008, it refused to accept a compact disc from Germany containing names of account holders in a Liechtenstein bank. Last year, under opposition pressure, the government accepted the CD, but refused to disclose the 26 names of Indian account holders in it. Many believe that a year is enough for the account holders to move their money out of the bank. "Unless there is political will to dig out black money, nothing will happen," says Arun Kumar of Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University, who has investigated India's underground economy in detail. And the humiliation of the honest citizen will continue.