Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu's charisma may be on the wane back home but it worked wonders for him at the World Economic Forum in New York. Naidu clearly stole the show from the rest of the Indian contingent, including Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha. He has been wooing investors for his two new pet projects-stoking start-ups in biotechnology at the newly christened Genome Valley near Hyderabad and the Andhra Pradesh Special Economic Zone (APSEZ) being set up at a 9,000-acre, duty-free, commercial enclave near the port city of Visakhapatnam. His efforts seem to have paid off.

In all, Naidu has clinched a series of MoUs with biotech companies, kicked off his roadshows for the APSEZ project and also got investment commitments from chemical majors like Monsanto and Pfizer. He has also signed an agreement with the North Carolina state for setting up a state-of-the-art biotechnology park.

The finance minister, meanwhile, had little else to offer other than his oft-repeated promises of faster reforms. He hinted at a possible cut in tariff rates. In return, he demanded better access for Indian products and services to markets of developed economies.

-Anil Padmanabhan

Kazakhstan became independent in December 1991, and Nursultan Nazarbayev has been its president since then. When he visits India for the third time between February 11 and 15, it will be "to mark the significance of friendly ties between our countries". Trade, always a good cause for friendship, will likely take up much of his time in India.

The trade turnover between Kazakhstan and India for January-October 2001 was $51 million (Rs 245 crore)-down 6.1 per cent from the same period in 2000. This is in contrast to Kazakhstan's expanding ties with China which is now over $1.5 billion.

For a country that has the second-largest oil field in the world in Kashgan, and sits on an estimated three billion tonnes of oil and two trillion tonnes of gas, Kazakhstan has been largely neglected by India. Renewed talk of the North-South Transport Corridor and oil swaps via Iran may generate some excitement during Nazarbayev's visit.

Testing Believers

Over 1.5 million pilgrims from 100-odd countries are converging on Saudi Arabia for the Haj, the major event of the Muslim religious calendar that culminates on February 21. In this age of Osama bin Laden and other terrors, security has become enough of a concern to spur the Saudi Government into setting up retinal scan and fingerprinting machines at the King Abdul Aziz International Airport in Jeddah. The official explanation is that all this is to prevent people overstaying their visas. Do the believers believe that?

Jubilee Queen

Fifty years ago, on February 6, 1952, Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor became Queen Elizabeth II of Britain, "Queen of this Realm and of Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith". The golden jubilee celebrations of her accession to the throne will take place between May and July 2002. In those days, royalty was sacrosanct. Come August and any tourist with $16 can get into Buckingham Palace.