'Manmohan Singh's fond hope of avoiding conflict over territory by 'making borders irrelevant' is increasingly difficult to realise in a world where institutional restraints on aggression are weakening and the new game in town is unalloyed power play,' notes T N Ninan.

'Anyone can string together a few alliterative words, but are they a substitute for serious thought?' 'And do they make for a strategy or plan for coherent action?' asks T N Ninan.

When emerging from this crisis, the govt must consider a fresh approach to reviving growth, revisiting the Centre-state fiscal balance, and devising a re-imagined GST 2.0, suggests T N Ninan.

Dhirubhai may or may not have owned the government; it would seem his son wants to own the market, notes T N Ninan.

'Rahul Gandhi's recent video performances offer little hope - the first fell flat in attacking government 'strategy'; the second showed him in a position unbecoming of a leader,' argues T N Ninan.

Will people buy as many cars as before if more office-goers are working from home? How much existing office space in commercial buildings will become surplus, and what will that mean for the construction industry, asks T N Ninan.

'This is not without risk because extraordinary steps taken in exceptional times have the habit of becoming habits until the next crisis intervenes,' warns T N Ninan.

'Now Mr Modi has been offered a more real but different kind of war, which he has likened to the Mahabharat,' notes T N Ninan.

'We may have moved back three decades on the fiscal situation,' notes T N Ninan.

India did not create the problem. But if it had a better functioning government system, it would have been able to deal with it at lower cost to its citizens, explains T N Ninan.

Only a leader with sufficient moral authority with voters can pull off such experiments, notes T N Ninan.

Banks can collapse, markets can be rigged, investment instruments can become worthless overnight, auditors can fail to blow the whistle, board directors can be asleep, and regulators can be incompetent, notes T N Ninan.

'The new trains should be fast, but the roll-out of the privatisation plan should be slow and well-considered,' recommends T N Ninan.

'While growth will bounce back from the current sub-5 per cent, it will stay lower than the already inadequate long-term average of 6.6 per cent,' notes T N Ninan.

'As the 1991 experience showed, the solution to a large trade deficit may be to open up the economy, not putting up protective walls,' points out T N Ninan.

The ones who came more recently were clutching the green cards that gave them an escape hatch through which to return to green pastures: Arvind Panagariya, Raghuram Rajan, Arvind Subramanian and other perfectly honourable gentlemen like them, points out T N Ninan.

Mr Modi should be conscious that it was his choice to slash the number of tax-payers from 60 million to 15 million, notes T N Ninan.

'What is unusual about the current period of slow growth is that it has come without an external driver -- high oil prices and/or successive monsoon failures -- as was the case with all previous periods of slowdown, going back 50 years, notes T N Ninan.

'It is almost certainly wrong in assuming that the Modi government will use its strong mandate to undertake some serious reform measures.' 'For it is fairly clear that the government's priorities lie elsewhere, in the powerful home minister's domain,' notes T N Ninan.

'There is a time for lowering one's expectations of the economy -- and therefore not trying to do too much in the Budget,' notes T N Ninan.