February 10: Russia, India, Lata, China

Festive but fraying India’s democracy is not as healthy as this month’s elections make it seem It is not just sectarianism that is ailing the body politic . Three different sorts of communists are competing: Marxist, Marxist-Leninist and the garden variety. ....... Uttar Pradesh may be as poor as Mali, and deeply divided by caste and religion, but it is also a genuine democracy. Its voters have a meaningful choice, and often confound the pundits. ......... A shocking 43% of those who won seats in the national parliament at the most recent general election, in 2019, had been charged with crimes of some sort. For 29% the charges involved grave offences such as rape or murder. ......... Fewer and fewer bills are debated in committee; many are approved by voice votes. .......... Campaign finance is another worry. The bjp has introduced what it calls electoral bonds, which allow individuals and businesses to donate unlimited sums to political parties in secret, in effect. The bjp hoovers up three-quarters of the money donated in this way, but other parties are also happy to accept the scraps. It is impossible to allay suspicions that India’s industrialists are buying favours from the government, since no one knows who is making donations, much less whether there might be any quid pro quo involved. .......... In a world where authoritarian China seems to grow stronger by the day, it has never been more important for India not just to hold elections, but to repair the underpinnings of its democracy, too.

The next crisis What would happen if financial markets crashed? Look to history for a guide, but know that next time will be different . Having soared in 2021, shares on Wall Street had their worst January since 2009, falling by 5.3%. The prices of assets favoured by retail investors, like tech stocks, cryptocurrencies and shares in electric-car makers, have plunged. The once-giddy mood on r/wallstreetbets, a forum for digital day-traders, is now mournful. .......... Asset prices are high: the last time shares were so pricey relative to long-run profits was before the slumps of 1929 and 2001 ...........

the reinvention of finance has not eliminated hubris

......... the total borrowings and deposit-like liabilities of hedge funds, property trusts and money market funds have risen to 43% of gdp, from 32% a decade ago. ......... The second danger is that, although the new system is more decentralised, it still relies on transactions being channelled through a few nodes that could be overwhelmed by volatility. etfs, with $10trn of assets, rely on a few small market-making firms to ensure that the price of funds accurately tracks the under lying assets they own. Trillions of dollars of derivatives contracts are routed through five American clearing houses. Many transactions are executed by a new breed of middle men, such as Citadel Securities. The Treasury market now depends on automated high-frequency trading firms to function. .............

The market-based financial system is hyper active most of the time; in times of stress whole areas of trading activity can dry up. That can fuel panic.

............... Fully 53% of American households own shares (up from 37% in 1992), and there are over 100m online brokerage accounts .......... The financial system is in better shape than in 2008 when the reckless gamblers at Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers brought the world to a standstill. Make no mistake, though: it faces a stern test.

India’s nightingale Lata Mangeshkar was the soundtrack of newly independent India The most celebrated of all playback singers died on February 6th, aged 92 . The young woman in “Mahal” (The Palace), made in 1949, was the great actress Madhubala, then still a teenager. But she was not the one singing. In trademark Bollywood fashion she lip-synched the words to a song recorded by a short, slightly dumpy, barefoot girl in a sweltering studio with the fans turned off, because they made too much noise. For “Aayega Aanewala” she crept towards the microphone from 20 feet away, mimicking the echoes of the song. The combination of her passionate voice with the elegant beauty of Madhubala was a peak of Bollywood’s art. ....... She came from Indore in central India, the daughter of a touring theatre producer. ....... over seven decades of playback singing, her fame grew exponentially. She performed for every Indian prime minister, sang for actresses from Madhubala to Kajol, did duets with all the famous actors and built a catalogue of more than 5,000 songs, half of them solos. Directors fought to have her in their films, and she sang in more than a thousand. Inevitably, her voice also became the soundtrack of newly independent India. Through pa systems in malls and factories, from radios in chai stalls and barbers’ stands, out of the windows of idling, hooting cars, at funerals and weddings, her songs wove India together. She seemed to be always there ............ She could never have imagined fame on such a scale. It meant that she could support her mother and her siblings and, later, get a second-hand Mercedes, indulge her love of Test cricket, buy diamonds and take holidays in Las Vegas, where she played the slots all night. ............ and she, at 13, took up acting to support the family, she could not bear to be in front of the camera. It did not love her, with her plumpness and her eyebrows, which one director told her were “too broad”. Nor could she bear to be directed what to say. By contrast to be an unseen playback singer, freely adding high emotions to the drama, felt exactly right. ........... Not that it was always easy. Her voice at first struck many as too high and thin, when the vogue was for a gutsier sound. With practice she made it fuller, improved the vital coloratura and developed her own honeyed way of singing, which others quickly copied. .........

Practise, practise, was her mantra; and then get tough.

She fought doggedly for playback singers to share in the royalties given to composers, as well as for higher fees for herself. There were frosty spells in that dispute when she refused to work with Mohammed Rafi, the playback partner with whom she sang 450 duets, and the director Raj Kapoor, whom she usually counted as a friend. .............. and in 1999 she was appointed to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of parliament. She did not go much and did not take any mp’s perks, which included a free phone and cooking-gas connection. What did she know about politics? Her world was music, and it was wide enough to contain Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, the Beatles and Nat King Cole. Music was her god and her husband too, for she never married. ..........

When she died, of covid, people wept in the streets.

Jupiter the peacemaker Emmanuel Macron’s Ukraine mission buys time, but works no miracles He is treading a perilous path between his own friends’ suspicions and Vladimir Putin’s belligerence .

A question the size of an army What are Vladimir Putin’s military intentions in Ukraine? Only he can say

Daily chart A new low for global democracy More pandemic restrictions damaged democratic freedoms in 2021

Climate change Targeting methane “ultra-emitters” could cheaply slow climate change Patching up leaky oil-and-gas works across the world would be a good place to start

Daily chart America’s covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich But the country was ill-prepared to do better

China’s other dreams To understand China, says Megan Walsh, turn to its literature “The Subplot” is a pacy tour of contemporary Chinese literature . Some sensitive subjects, such as the Tiananmen crackdown of 1989, have always been off-limits for Chinese authors. But between the 1980s and early 2010s, Chinese novelists such as Mo Yan and Yan Lianke were able to portray the enormities of Maoism as experienced by ordinary people. That freedom has shrivelled since Xi Jinping took power in 2012: amid intensifying authoritarianism, Megan Walsh notes in “The Subplot”, the number of cultural figures imprisoned for “subverting state power” or “picking quarrels” is “the highest in the world”.

Films | Tackling bias in tech When computers are racist How to stop building racial bias into the digital future