India is in the news in London for lots of reasons. Firstly India is likely today to wrap up a brilliant victory in the (cricket) test match.

Secondly, Bloomberg focused today on the role of caste in business success. Marwatis dominate the entrepreneurial class, Chandrahas Choudhury writes. "As anyone who has ever studied business in India knows, the country does not offer a level playing field for new entrepreneurs. For at least two millennia, the 'jati,' or caste system -- the form of social stratification, and indeed suffocation, unique to Hinduism and India -- has regulated society into different orders of mainly hereditary occupations." Forget who has an MBA and think about their caste! If they are millionaires they are probably Marwaris, descendents of desert traders, as are 3 of India's 9 richest Indians on the Bloomberg Billionaire list, Lakshmi Mittal, Kumar Birla, and Savitri Jindal.

Of considerable importance is India's grain stockpile set up by the former Congress government to store for a possibly famine,. If the grain-buying is maintained by the new BJP rulers, it may bring the Bali Round of global trade talks to a halt.

But nobody knows which side the current government will come down on. Examining exactly what EconoModics requires is the current conundrum. Here is an attempt from Michael Kurtz of Nomura in Hong Kong who writes that Japan has what India needs:

The RBI's inflation fight will go hand in hand with the business-orientated Modi government's strong mandate to cut red tape and jump-start supply-side reforms. We expect reforms to revitalise real investment growth to 10%/yr lifting potential output growth to around 7% in the next 5 years; if reforms are fast-tracked, real investment could hit 15%/yr raising potential growth to above 8%. (We) expect India to stand out as the biggest EM turnaround story in the next 5 years.
Consider the low hanging fruit waiting to be plucked because of India's still-early stage of economic development: GDP per capita at market exchange rates is only about US$1,500; nearly half its population is under 25 years old, with 70% yet to urbanise; and the economy has been running far too long on creaking infrastructure. India's Planning Commission estimates infrastructure-funding needs total US$1trillion over 2012-17.
Enter Japan. The overseas production ratio for Japanese manufacturers was 20.6% in FY12, much higher than FY11's 17.2%, but the FY18 forecast for the ratio is 25.5% - the highest on record. Surveys of Japanese MNCs show that China is losing its attractiveness as an investment destination due to its rising labour costs, whereas India has moved up to now be Japan's most attractive destination over the next decade. Japan and India signed a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement which went into force in 2011, and to illuminate the potential, India's accounts for only 1.2% of Japan's total FDI and 1.0% of Japan's total trade.
Serendipitously, much of what India needs, Japan can offer. Engineering and construction companies can help with massive infrastructure projects such as the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor - the poster project. High-speed railway networks, roads, power generation and renewable energy are areas where Japan can offer its cutting-edge technological expertise. Japan can bring India into Asia's vertical manufacturing supply chain, as it has done for so many other Asian countries. As it happens, infrastructure-system exports are a key plank of Abenomics, looking to target JPY30 trillion of infrastructure-system orders in 2020 (triple today's).
A recent Nomura survey of Japanese institutional investors revealed that they too have a positive outlook on India's financial markets, ranking India No. 1 among key EMs for investment potential. India offers opportunities for Japan to diversify its enormous financial assets (both public and private); Japanese households are have ~JPY1,630 trillion of funds, over half in investable cash and deposits.

In polite society it is not common to talk about another Indian infrastructure gap, the traditional Hindu means of elimination in the fields and on the side of the road, although this week's Economist raises the matter. While India's Muslims are much poorer than its Hindus, they are healthier because they are less reluctant to use toilets and wash their hands afterwards. What India desperately needs is not just fixtures but also sewage lines and septic tanks, perhaps also from Japan which is a world leader is lavatory luxury but which can also make basic toilets which are neither heated nor musical.

It is not yet August but two world leaders have stumbled into the guns of war without fully considering the consequences of a populist war move: Putin the Tsar and Netanyahu the Kaiser. Neither Gaza nor Ukraine vaut une messe to say nothing of a world war. What they need is not war but more. But the uncertainty is good for gold and dollar and not just for funerals.

More from Israel, Portugal, Canada, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, and Britain:

Given the mounting restraints on press freedom in Hong Kong as China uses its clout, I think it is shocking that the Forbes family are selling their magazine empire to a group of investors from the former British colony which really no longer has a China-free political system.

*During Sunday trading in Tel Aviv most shares were down on the war news, with one exception, Teva, which faces a proxy fight led by Israeli-Canadian graphics entrepreneur and millionaire Benny Landa over the new chairman-designate, a member of the founding Elstein family. It would be something like letting a Johnson or a Hoffman or a Kline run a drug major from their country. Interestingly, one of his female cousin , Ruth Cheshin, is among those opposing the nomination of a non-drug person to head the board. Glass Lewis, adviser to US institutional investors, is now backing the Landa position which has also been widely publicized thanks to his good relations with the press. 
Landa bought into TEVA big time when a fellow-Canadian was named CEO, and he has not forgiven the board for then sacking Dr Jeremy Levin last Oct.

*Japan has ok'd the restart of 2 nuclear power stations in the country's south which meet the new increased safety standards imposed after the Fukushima disaster. This is good news for Cameco, CCJ, of Canada, our uranium mining stock.

*It is also good news for my other mostly US nuclear play, Uranerz, NYSE-URZ or URZ-Toronto, which operates mostly in Nichols Ranch, next door to CCJ. Its stock is down because it upped the size of a capital increase in Canada to US$12 mn or 9.6 mn new shares and warrants, because of high investor demand. There are no preemption rights for US owners like me. Ultimately URZ plans to raise $100 mn to build out its Wyoming mine.

*My attempt to average down further on Portugal Telecom may be defeated by the market. The Lisbon share is up 5.51% so far today. Friday night Espirito Santo Investment International, the Luxembourg holding co. of the bank, sought protection from its creditors. It owns 100% of Rioforte, the entity whose short-term commercial paper PT bought in April with funds raised to take over Oi in Brazil. Via various holding companies it also controls Espirito Santo Financial Group which owns just over 20% of, Banco Espirito Santo, the 2^nd largest Portuguese commercial bank. Because a trading haltwas imposed on the bank‘s shares, the vehicle for shorting BES is PT.

*We dined with a British financial services exec on Sat. night. He told us that if Scotland votes for independence his insurance firm and the Aberdeen funds managers will move south of the Tweed to England. The manager runs our Aberdeen Global Income and Aberdeen Asia Pacific Income funds. Our informant also that the Scottish nationalist leader, Alex Salmond, formerly an employee, was a strong supporter of the excesses under Fred Goodwin, formerly Sir Fred Goodwin, at Royal Bank of Scotland prior to its last-ditch nationalization by the UK. Scotland is home to many fund and insurance companies. We own preferred shares of RBS in our income portfolio. While it is early days still, we need to think about the potential winners from the disruption a Scot Nat victory would cause to the former United Kingdom. One thing for sure: the London housing market will not suffer but that of Edinburgh and Glasgow surely will.

You may wonder why the Tories offered the referendum in the first place. It was a Nixon-like move to end the solid South, except here it is the North. Scotland has only one Conservative Member of Parliament. Without Scotland, the lower house will become like our House of Representatives, a purely right-leaning body and Britain's rump will be Tory forever.

*The takeover of a small stake in ITV by the former VirginMedia, our Liberty Global is getting into content from cable. In this program, John Malone, its principal, will confront an even older media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, who is buying into content as well, starting with a buy of the British bake-off production company, Love Productions, for an undisclosed sum today. To monetize content you need a lot of watchers outside Britain which both magnates are lining up. LBTYA is my preference largely because Malone is not Murdoch.

*Tesco CEO Philip Clarke resigned after a lousy earnings report. We sold just in time when your editor remarked on the rise of low-overhead German-owned cheapo grocery chains like Lidl and Aldi, and the failure of its prestige-seeking attack on the US supermarket world with Fresh n Easy, now shuttered. About 2/3 of TSCDY sales are in Britain.