Why Percy Mistry hates pink papers :)

Being pink, has its own set of complications. I have often bored the hell out of my friends about how strongly I feel about the importance of business journalists to be exact and articulate (I know how inarticulate and inexact we can be)

Following are two instances where Percy Mistry draws attention to the pink papers, in India and abroad.
1. Reading India's pink papers suggests incontrovertibly that the country is paying a high price for pervasive ignorance, that is, the innate beliefs/prejudices of: (a) its political and administrative class; as well as (b) an uninformed public brought up on a diet of propagandised falsehoods for over six decades. Those beliefs are a deadweight drag on continuing with reform.
(For more read - http://business-standard.com/common/storypage_c.php?leftnm=10&autono=323196)

2. Another instance where Mr Mistry blasts the business media - about western pink papers on the sub-prime crisis -
"...With all this happening, a number of commentators (e.g. in the FT) are indulging in heavy-duty, sanctimonious huffing and puffing about how rotten things are in the land of Nod. They are going overboard with criticisms of financial markets and eliciting applause for striking a chord with Joe-Public. They are attempting erroneously to (again) answer age-old questions definitively, and with finality. These `legends-in-their-own-mind' are relying on their mighty cerebrums, cerebellums and egos. But they have no experience of finance at any time, nor do they have any practical idea of financial decision-making in firms, banks, central banks or treasuries. Their knowledge of theoretical economics is (hopefully, but I am never sure about this) sound, but their knowledge of finance is suspect. And, like all economists with a PPE tripos (we have too many in India) they are inherently sceptical about finance. They do not understand it. The maths are probably too tough. They believe it is not `real' and mostly tosh; stuff dreamt up by barrow boys in the City and on Wall Street with the only innovations being nomenclatural rather than substantive.

Such commentators seem sagacious. They write so well that they obscure flaws in what they say. But they can, on occasions like these, be eccentrically off-the-mark: i.e. by proverbially hitting their thumbs, rather than the intended nail on the head, with their verbal sledgehammers. And, because they have a wide audience, they run the risk of destabilising the situation even more, with ill-considered, ill-timed remarks, when everyone who was anyone, is too nervous, stressed and broke (their stock options are now worthless) to think straight, and lacking in confidence in their own judgements. The worst time to kick someone is when they are down; unless your agenda is to make sure they never get up again. But that is what our brave commentators and regulators in India are also now doing, imitating the FT's columnists. The crisis has made clear that the $100 million dollar a year masters-of-the-universe (Motu's), seem not to be worth 10 cents when the crunch comes. What John Mitchell said was true: ``When the going gets tough, the tough get going''. He should have added: ``And the babblers babble too much''. But we knew that from before."