Mandy’s message dogged by bad luck

Peter Mandelson has hardly been the UK's luckiest politician and his visit to India last week proved the point. On Friday morning, Mandelson led a conference on opportunities for Indian lawyers to work with UK companies and on Friday afternoon Vodafone suffered one of the biggest court setbacks ever by a UK company in India.

After two years, the Supreme Court rejected its appeal over a $2 billion tax bill on its $11 billion acquisition of Indian mobile-phone company Hutchison Essar. In Mumbai, Mandelson headed a conference promoting investment by Indian companies in the UK and vice-versa only for it to come out on Sunday that the biggest such investor, Tata Group, is about to lay off 5000 people at Corus and Jaguar Land Rover.

Mandelson's bridge-building efforts won't be helped by either Vodafone's problems or the Tata lay-offs. But his bad luck didn't end there. He made his keynote speech just as the other Brit in town, Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle, won 10 Oscar nominations for his film.

Within minutes of the result, PRs were frantically ringing journalists at the Slumdog conference to try to get them to jump into taxis to watch Mandelson. Not many did.

* Nothing succeeds like success. The Oscar nominations have pretty much silenced most complaints here of Slumdog Millionaire — that it's "made for America", that it's "poverty porn" and even the slum-dwellers' complaint, "we are not dogs". But Vikas Swarup, who wrote the original novel, is not entirely happy at the Jaipur Literary Festival. The film starts with the three slum children being lectured in school about the Three Musketeers. "Even we weren't taught about the Three Musketeers at school," scoffed Swarup, a career diplomat.

* Kashmir is the only place in India where David Miliband is almost a hero for his bold but undiplomatic suggestion that India should solve the Kashmir problem to help reduce terrorism. I am already suffering with the Kashmiris. It is Independence Day so the Indian Government has shut down all the internet here for three days. They say it's to stop terrorists organising themselves.