In Goa, a beacon of glamour

That bloody tamasha!" grimaced a friend as I left to watch the Indian Premier League cricket at Mumbai's Wakhede Stadium last year.

A "tamasha" here means an overblown, tasteless spectacle, and for the IPL it was spot-on. Whenever a four or six was hit, a player out or an over ended, play stopped, the screens flashed and the chanting, wiggling hips and Bollywood beats began. "They have to get bored of this," I thought. "It's happening every two balls". They never did. So the record $1.55 million teams forked out for England players Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff is not too much of a surprise.

Neither Indian liquor baron Vijay Mallya nor India Cements chairman N Srinivasan is untouched by the slowdown. But at the auction in Goa, the sheer glamour of Bollywood team owners Preity Zinta, Shah Rukh Khan and Shilpa Shetty chased away any recession blues. A very hardheaded journalist I know who reported on the auction came away touched.

"Nowadays, nobody talking about anything depressing is good fun," she said. "In Mumbai the talk now is about how many people are going to be laid off and how bad things are. In Goa, there was money, there was glamour, and there was happiness."

She's convinced that whatever happens to the economy, the IPL will be even bigger business this year than last. Indians, it seems, love a tamasha.

Satish C Jha, an economic adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is pushing the line that India will become the world's fastest-growing major economy. India's growth rate may drop from 9% to 7% this year, he says, but China's could fall from 2007's 13% to as low as 6.5%. Even in bleak times, you can't snuff out Indian economic triumphalism.

The last time I saw British deputy high commissioner Vicki Treadell speak, she voiced relief at how smoothly the move to the commission's new offices had gone.

The Foreign Office hit the peak of the city's property bubble last April when it forked out about £20 million for floors in the Bandra-Kurla Complex — you'd pay about a third less today.

But two months in, the bottom floor is still boarded up and staff take their tea in an unfurnished concrete hangar because the canteen still isn't finished.