Confused Salman Khan campaigns for Cong, BJP

Mumbai: It is election time and actor Salman Khan campaigns for whoever asks him to! Quite similar to the way he signs his films.

On March 20, Salman arrived in Unnau, Uttar Pradesh to campaign for a little known Congress candidate Anu Tandon.

The actor asked the crowd about their problems and assured them that the Congress party will solve them. That’s not all, the star campaigner even entertained the crowd.

On April 9, Salman took time off to reach Gurdaspur in Punjab on a private jet but this time his loyalties had changed. He campaigned for BJP candidate and actor Vinod Khanna.

And just like Anu Tandon there, too, he was all praises for the BJP leader.

“I campaign for candidates. Vinod is like my elder brother so I have come to support him. I request everyone to go and vote,” Salman said.

On April 12, it was another day and another candidate for Salman. This time the actor was at home in Mumbai and his loyalties were back with the Congress party and its young MP Milind Deora.

Salman hit the campaign trail with Deora in some of Mumbai's most crowded pockets of Crawford Market and Nagpada.

Considering his friendship with Sanjay Dutt, it won’t be surprising if Salman is seen campaigning for the Samajwadi Party next.

But whose side is Salman on? Which party should his fans back? Well we'll let you know as soon as the actor makes up his mind.

Is a high IQ a burden as much as a blessing?

By Sam Knight

Published: April 10 2009 14:36 | Last updated: April 10 2009 14:36

Marilyn vos Savant with husband Robert Jarvik outside New York’s Metropolitan Club

The Metropolitan Club, on Fifth Avenue at 60th street, is a palazzo in the mighty Manhattan style. Damn the expense. That’s what J.P. Morgan is supposed to have said when he commissioned Stanford White, the city’s most flamboyant architect, to build him a private gentleman’s club in 1894. Inside, on a Monday evening in late January, only a few members drifted over the red, monogrammed carpets, but it was still early, only a little after seven. This, however, is when Marilyn vos Savant likes to show up.

Savant, who has the world’s highest recorded IQ, is fond of dancing. She took it up seriously a few years ago with her husband, Robert Jarvik, the inventor of the Jarvik artificial heart, and they get to the club about once a month. If they arrive early enough, they can have the dance floor to themselves. And so it proved that Monday. The room was largely empty, the band were playing “Anything Goes” and once a happy, though quivering, old man was led from the floor by his partner, Savant and Jarvik could foxtrot wherever they pleased. A slim, prosperous couple in their sixties, they moved easily: she with a simple precision, he with the odd heel-tap, a bit of dash. After a time, though, as the floor filled up and became a carousel of perfectly tailored, carefully moving couples, they came back to their table. “It’s a social scene,” said Savant, who is 62, with a smile. “But it’s not our social scene. Let me just say that.” A few minutes later, when a serious-looking man happened to make a goofy swish right in front of them, Savant and Jarvik caught each other’s eye and couldn’t help laughing. Not long afterwards, they took a taxi home, to their midtown penthouse. “We usually dance more, a lot more,” said Savant as they are leaving. It is only 8.30pm. “And then we go back to the office.”

Savant – the surname is real, it was her mother’s maiden name – has had a unique claim to fame since the mid-1980s. It was then, almost 30 years after she took a test as a schoolgirl in downtown St Louis, Missouri, that her IQ came to light. In 1985, Guinness World Records accepted that she had answered every question correctly on an adult Stanford-Binet IQ test at the age of just 10, a result that gave her a corresponding mental age of 22 years and 11 months, and an unearthly IQ of 228.

The resulting publicity changed Savant’s life. She appeared on television and in the press, including on the cover of an in-flight magazine that Jarvik chanced to pick up. He decided to track her down and ask her out. It also led to the role for which she remains best known in America, writing a question-and-answer column, “Ask Marilyn”, for Parade, a Sunday magazine syndicated to more than 400 regional newspapers. For the past 22 years, Savant has tended their ceaseless queries – “How happy are larks, really?” “My wife blow-dries her hair every day. Can the noise damage her hearing?” – and in the process achieved a status that is Delphic yet tabloid. To her fans and other members of the world of high IQ, Savant is a prodigious, unusual talent who delights in solving problems. To her detractors, she is either trivial, someone who has squandered her gift, or proof, if they needed it, that IQ scores don’t add up to anything. In whatever form, she lodges in people’s minds. As evidence of her imprint on the national consciousness, Savant featured in an episode of The Simpsons in 1999. She was a member of the Springfield Mensa society, along with Geena Davis, the Hollywood actress and one-time star of Earth Girls are Easy.

In conversation, Savant steers clear of fancy remarks. She is overtly normal. “People expect me to be a walking encyclopaedia or a human calculator,” she says, or to “have very unusual, very esoteric, very arcane gifts and I’m really not that way at all.” Instead, she talks with the practised clarity of her columns, the pedantry of someone wary of misinterpretation. At one point, for example, Savant was describing a house where she lived in St Louis. “You could actually see stars,” she said, “unlike here in New York, where you can only see Venus,” then she halted. “I’m sorry, Venus is not a star.” When Savant, who is the author of several plays and half-a-dozen self-help books, does makes a cultural reference, she is careful not to sound too snooty. She prefers Proust to Joyce, she told me, although, she concedes, “Joyce does some nice bits in Ulysses.”

Marilyn vos Savant in her office

This blandness masks the rarity of her brain. Because whatever else Savant is, she is not a fraud. Her IQ has been tested and tested and tested again. When I asked her to describe how her mind approaches a problem, she said: “My first thought, maybe not thought, it’s almost like a feeling, is overview … It’s like, almost, a wartime decision. I keep thinking about all of the fronts, what’s supplying what, where are the most important points … ” Jarvik, her husband for the past 21 years, says Savant’s gift is to be able to approach questions dispassionately, without our usual fears of or hopes for a particular answer. Walter Anderson, the chief executive of Parade, who has been friends with Savant since he hired her in 1986, believes she is a genius and, as with other geniuses, her ability is inexplicable to him. “Marilyn just does it,” he said. “Her answer is so quick. If light or electricity travels at 186,000 miles per second, do you realise how quick those synapses are? She knows the answer to your question. She knows the answer before you’ve finished the question.”

All of which only makes people wonder why Savant has found no higher purpose. In 1995, the issue became so bothersome to Herb Weiner, a software engineer in Portland, Oregon, that he set up a website called Marilyn is Wrong! Weiner says that he aims to redress errors in her column and ensure that Savant’s daunting IQ does not mean that she goes unquestioned. But what really seems to nag him is that she writes the column at all. “Look at Barack Obama, look at how he is applying his intelligence,” he told me. “It just sort of seems strange to me that instead of dealing with more complex problems, a lot of what she does is just answer riddles or simple research things, things that anybody could go to a library and look up the answer to.”

Weiner’s complaint is oddly deferential. As his website notes: “Marilyn is more intelligent than I am, as measured by standard intelligence tests.” But for many people, the story of Savant and “Ask Marilyn” are just two more pieces of evidence in a larger, decades-long argument about the accuracy and objectivity of intelligence testing. Even Guinness has succumbed. In 1990, two years after inducting Savant into its Hall of Fame, the publisher, in its parlance, “rested” its high IQ category altogether, saying it was no longer satisfied that intelligence tests were either uniform or reliable enough to produce a single record holder. Depending on how you look at it, Savant will either never be beaten, or was not worth beating in the first place.

. . .

Humans have been measuring each other’s intelligence for a long time. In China during the Xi Zhou dynasty (1046 to 771BC), candidates for official positions were formally tested on a range of criteria including the “six skills”: arithmetic, archery, horsemanship, music, writing and the performance of rituals and ceremonies. The notion of a universal, objective scale of intelligence, however, did not take shape until the 19th century and the arrival of Darwinism. If Charles Darwin is the father of modern biology, then the father of modern intelligence testing is his cousin, Francis Galton – statistician, polymath and founder of eugenics. In 1884, he set up an “anthropometric laboratory” at the International Health Exhibition in London, and measured, among other things, the reaction times, eyesight, colour sensitivity and steadiness of hand of more than 9,000 men and women as he looked for links between their physical and mental characteristics.

Searching for genius, Galton failed to develop a working intelligence test. That was left to a French psychologist, Alfred Binet, and his student, Victor Henri. Binet was commissioned to study the large numbers of poor children in the city’s asylums and to find out whether they were mentally incapacitated or simply untaught. His resulting 1904 test of 30 indicators – from the eye being able to follow a lit match, to memory and vocabulary questions – provided the basis of modern intelligence testing. In 1916, Lewis Terman, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, revised and expanded the test, creating the Stanford-Binet IQ test, which is still used today. Although more moderate than many of his contemporaries, Terman adhered to the social Darwinism of his time – in 1930, 24 US states had sterilisation laws – and he had hopes for the social potential of his work. “This,” he wrote in 1919, “will ultimately result in the curtailing of the reproduction of feeble-mindedness.”

Intelligence testing has proved contentious ever since. In the US, where more than nine million men underwent various forms of IQ and ability tests during the second world war, the enthusiasm for testing has been matched only by the ferocity of arguments over what exactly it proves. IQ tests for children, the SAT Reasoning Test for college applicants and psycho metric testing by companies may have been designed with the goal of identifying individual talent, but often their larger consequence has been to highlight differences already inherent in society. Variations between the sexes and ethnic groups have led to toxic arguments about bias and inequality and power: who gets to define intelligence? Who designs the tests? In its various iterations, the debate about IQ testing in the US normally returns to the persistent, albeit shrinking, lag between results for white and black populations.

Marilyn vos Savant with husband Robert on the cover of New York magazine, 1989

The last time the debate flowered in full was in 1994, on the publication of The Bell Curve by the psychologist Richard Herrnstein and the conservative political scientist, Charles Murray. They argued that intelligence test scores were both a good indicator of social success and strongly determined by our genes. The implication, that an unequal society was inevitable and fair, and that a black, inner city “cognitive underclass” was having too many children, made it seem as though eugenics had never gone away. “Mr Murray can protest all he wants,” wrote Bob Herbert, a columnist for The New York Times, “his book is just a genteel way of calling somebody a nigger.”

Underlying the heated politics – making the arguments even harder to resolve – is an incomplete science. After The Bell Curve controversy, the American Psychological Association convened a task force, which concluded that children’s IQ scores could predict about 25 per cent of the variation in future academic performance. They were, in other words, on the cusp of being statistically reliable, better than nothing.

. . .

There is an almighty gap between what IQ tests can measure and what we want to them to show. “If you tell anyone their IQ at any age they will remember it for the rest of their life,” says Professor John Rust, the director of the Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge. “It’s like an astrological chart.” Rust reminded me of the contrast between the quasi-spiritual idea of intelligence rooted in western language and culture – the notion of a single, overarching quality comparable to, say, a saint’s halo – and what we can learn from our response to a series of logical problems. Yet in the absence of anything better than IQ tests, whose questions still underpin many modern “ability” tests, people continue to see something in these IQ scores that, while not meaningless, do not hold “the answer”.

The fault, in the end, lies on both sides: in us, the credulous patients, who see too much in our results, and the doctors, who have also been furiously theorising and extrapolating. “Tests of IQ have never simply been about our ability to solve problems,” said Rust. “There has always been the idea that people with high IQs are actually more advanced, more evolved, closer to the human destiny, if you believe that sort of thing, closer to God. But in fact all you have really got is answers to questions.”

The world of high IQ societies certainly does not suggest the existence of a higher evolutionary plane. Although the best known, Mensa, was set up in the UK in 1946 with utopian goals – it was envisioned by its founder, Roland Berrill, as a panel of brilliant minds that would improve society – such groups are often a refuge for people who have trouble fitting in elsewhere. “High cognitive ability is very often a mixed blessing,” Patrick O’Shea, the president of one such society, the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry (ISPE), told me. Too wide a deviation from the mean IQ of 100 brings with it an inherent isolation. “If you have an IQ of 160 or higher,” O’Shea explained, “you’re probably able to connect well with less than 1 per cent of the population.” Among the 600 or so members of the ISPE, whose IQs are all around 150 or higher, O’Shea described a “common experience of being socially marginalised” and the challenge of finding suitable outlets for their gifts. “It’s good to be smart, it’s good to get ahead, but past a certain threshold, you can’t be trusted: you’re a nerd, you’re a geek,” he said. “You have somehow a tremendous social deficit.”

. . .

Ron Hoeflin, who says that his IQ of 190 has given him the confidence and recognition that he was denied by mainstream education, in which he struggled

In between conversations with Marilyn vos Savant, I also spent time in New York with a man called Ron Hoeflin. Hoeflin is two years older than Savant, also from St Louis, and also has a remarkable IQ score – 190 – yet has frustratingly little to show for it. He lives only a few blocks from Savant’s penthouse, above a café/Laundromat, and describes himself as self-employed. I met Hoeflin in the local Wendy’s, a hamburger place where he spends every afternoon working on the final volume of a self-published philosophical treatise called The Encyclo paedia of Categories: A Theory of Categories and Unifying Paradigm for Philosophy With Over 1,000 Examples.

We slowly went back to Hoeflin’s apartment – he is almost blind due to repeatedly detached retinas – and I asked him what his IQ and intelligence testing had done for him. Hoeflin, who devised a series of well-respected tests in the 1980s, said that it has provided him with a degree of confidence and recognition that he had been denied by mainstream education, in which he struggled. Hoeflin believes the objectivity of IQ tests makes them more reliable than the subjective evaluations of teachers and professors. “I don’t want to have some ruthless creep mess me up,” he said.

A fan of psychometric testing in general, Hoeflin also showed me the results of a personality test he once took. Lines of Xs march across the page, showing the extent of his various personality traits, from the “vigilant” to the “leisurely”. In one column, for the “dramatic”, there were no Xs at all. “Zero,” said Hoeflin, evenly. “This is why I don’t write novels because on the dramatic level I’m zero.” When I objected, saying that surely our personalities are too complex, too cosmic, to be captured in a questionnaire, Hoeflin suggested politely that maybe I was incurious, or afraid, or both. “Why do you think a personality can’t be measured?” He asked me. “Just because it’s complicated doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and figure it out. It’s patterns. Even our personalities are just patterns, right? Like waves on the ocean. You can do a study in hydrodynamics and figure out how waves rise and collapse. It’s the same for human beings.” In an e-mail a few days later, Hoeflin explained his interest in psychometrics another way: “Being this shy makes one wonder what is going on.”

Knowing all this makes high IQs and the story of Marilyn vos Savant seem rather different. Has her IQ been a burden as much as a blessing? According to John Rust, at Cambridge, to produce an extraordinary IQ score a mind must have two unusual qualities. The first is “mechanical facility” – useful but sometimes harmful in extreme cases, hence the preponderance of people with Asperger’s syndrome who have high IQs. And you must also excel at a wide variety of tasks. Intelligence tests measure a range of mental abilities, whereas most people naturally, and happily, concentrate on just a few. Abnormally high IQ scores, by their nature, often speak of a brain too general to be of much use. “Effectively,” said Rust, “you are mastering far too many things.”

Broadness, though, is what Savant craves. “Reading all about these subjects,” she says of her work, “I am becoming amazingly informed to a superficial extent.” One afternoon we met in her office, 50 floors up among the foggy, snowbound towers of Manhattan, and she showed me her desk. Three computer screens and an old word processor looked out, north-west, over a thousand roofs towards the Hudson River. It is from this vantage point that she answers the 200 or 300 e-mails a day that come in for her column in Parade magazine: questions on every subject, from the personal to the algebraic, that are bothering those down below. “I’m hearing from everyone, I told you, this vast range,” she said. “And I really enjoy that view. It’s hard to express. It’s like being at a scenic outlook point. I feel like I am gaining so much insight about people, and there is a particular joy in that.”

Marilyn vos Savant in 1950 with her parents Joseph and Marina and brothers (from left) Bob and Joe

It has taken her a long time to get there. Savant was born Marilyn Mach in south central St Louis in 1946. Her parents, Joseph Mach and Marina vos Savant, were immigrants, German and Italian respectively, and ran a bar and grill in a blue-collar part of town. Savant describes her childhood, the first half of her life in fact, at a kind of ironic distance. She laughed when she told me about how her parents tried to raise her and her two older brothers as Americans. “All I heard around the house was this fractured, lame, ungrammatical English for I don’t know how long. It was really very funny. You know, this was their best effort.” And she gently warned me off reading too much into her past. “It’s funny how these background things mean so much to people,” said Savant. “It feels strange, a bit, to me because it seems like the dark ages or another time, or another persona, which I guess I was.”

In school she was quickly identified as gifted, getting maximum scores on IQ tests at the ages of seven, eight and nine. And when Savant got full marks on the adult Stanford-Binet at the age of 10, a psychologist from the local school board said he had never seen anything like it. Savant, however, recalls no surprise. “That didn’t seem like news,” she said. “It just seemed perfectly normal.” Her principal, however, was sufficiently impressed to pull Savant out of several classes and put her to work in his office, so beginning an odd phase in her life in which she was one of the only people in the school with access to the other pupils’ IQ scores. Her hobby became matching her fellow students to their results. “I would make my best guess after talking to them for a while and then I would go and see how accurate my guess was,” she recalled. “I got to be very good at it.”

Marilyn vos Savant with with her mother in 1953

By the age of 16, however, Savant’s precocious schoolgirl was no more. She married, as her mother had done at her age, and was drawn into the family business, which by this time was a chain of dry cleaners. “It was a long time. It was a long time,” she said when I asked her when she realised that this life was not for her. “You have to understand the level of control. I was not aware of things outside.” Apart from a few audited classes at the city’s Washington University, Savant’s formal education ended in her late teens when she had her two children. She divorced in her twenties and married again, all the while working with her brothers and father to expand the business to about 40 dry cleaners and a firm that sold dry cleaning equipment. She joined Mensa, she says, to help her educate her children, but most of the time Savant was busy keeping the family accounts. “I was the trustworthy one,” she said. “I was the one that everyone could turn to for an unbiased decision.”

It was only after her second marriage ended, when she was 35, that Savant began to think about leaving St Louis. She decided to become a playwright. She saved some money and started spending time in New York, even renting an apartment in Manhattan. When her father died, she permanently moved away.

. . .

Savant is elliptical about her early years in New York – the crucial period from 1983 to 1985 in which she went from being a dry cleaner to the cleverest person in the world. “It was just a confluence of things,” she says. But contemporaries, such as Ron Hoeflin, recall her as a member of the various high IQ societies in the city. “She wanted to be a writer, I know that,” he said. Savant now distances herself from the world of high IQ, but at the time she was willing to see how it could help her prospects. She says she can no longer recall how her childhood scores were submitted to Guinness, but Andrew Egendorf, a lawyer from Boston, says the idea came up over a dinner in 1983. Egendorf, who wanted to write a book about high IQ societies, says he remembers proposing a couple of book ideas to Savant, and suggesting that they send her IQ results to Guinness as a way of making her famous. “She was just another person trying to make it in New York,” he told me. “The fact that she had this credential just gave her something different and I remember thinking, ‘How can we cash in on it?’ It didn’t matter what it was. She could have been green, the only green person in the world.” Egendorf first wrote to Guinness on Savant’s behalf on July 25 1983. In 1985, the IQ record was hers, 31 points higher than the two previous holders. The next year, she was writing for Parade.

And since then it has been questions, questions, questions. Walter Anderson, at Parade, remembers how at cocktail parties in the 1980s people would throw Savant riddles and mathematical puzzles. It was hard to persuade her not to reply. “From the time she was a little girl, she was asked questions all the time,” he explained. Not that these logical problems seem to faze Savant. Rather, they have been the scene of her greatest triumphs [ The “Monty Hall dilemma” ], and Anderson still gets excited, after all these years, about what conundrum Savant will answer next. He is convinced, for instance, that she understands the financial crisis in ways that most of us do not. “You know for the last quarter of a century, people have written stone bullshit about Marilyn,” he said at the end of our interview. “Writers want to come and show off how clever they are. But the real question is: what should we be asking her? We should take her seriously.”

There is only one question that seems the wrong thing to ask Savant, and that is what else she is supposed to have done with her life, with her glimmering brain. To ask it is to miss the point. I told her when we met that I had always imagined intelligence to be nothing more than a tool. On that foggy afternoon, before we said goodbye, she wanted to correct me. “I suppose it could be and it should be,” she said. “But it also seems to be an attribute or a quality or an aspect of one’s humanity that one need not use to get something that you want … It can just simply be part of you. And I think that’s fine too.”

Sam Knight is a regular contributor to FT Weekend Magazine.

Do you have a question for the world’s cleverest person? E-mail your questions toAskMarilyn@ft.com – the pick of them will be put to Marilyn vos Savant and featured with her answers in a future issue.

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The “Monty Hall dilemma”

Marilyn vos Savant’s column gained national notoriety in the early 1990s, thanks to her response to the “Monty Hall dilemma”: the make-or-break decision facing contestants on the game show Let’s Make a Deal that was then hosted by Hall. The question was posed by Craig Whitaker, of Columbia, Marinaland, on September 9 1990. “Dear Marilyn,” wrote Whitaker. “Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car, behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say #1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say #3, which has a goat. He says to you: ‘Do you want to pick door #2?’ Is it to your advantage to switch your choice of doors?”

Savant’s answer, that it was better to switch doors, provoked an extraordinary response: thousands of letters of complaint, many of them from science teachers and academics. “There is enough mathematical illiteracy in this country, and we don’t need the world’s highest IQ propagating more. Shame!” wrote one reader from the University of Florida. “You are the goat!” said another. “You made a mistake, but look at the positive side,” wrote Everett Harman, of the US Army Research Institute. “If all those PhDs were wrong, the country would be in some very serious trouble.”

But Savant had not made a mistake. In the end it took her four columns, hundreds of newspaper stories and a challenge to children to test the options in classroom experiments, to convince her readers that she was right. “Oh, that was so much fun. I just enjoyed these nasty letters I got,” she said. “The audacity of people! I just loved them.”

The key to the solution lies in the role of the host, who will always pick a door which does not have a prize behind it. Statistics from the game show, in which those who switched won about twice as often as those who did not, bear out Savant’s explanation from her third column: “When you first choose door #1 from three, there’s a 1/3 chance that the prize is behind that one and a 2/3 chance that it’s behind one of the others. But then the host steps in and gives you a clue. If the prize is behind #2, the host shows you #3, and if the prize is behind #3, the host shows you #2. So when you switch, you win if the prize is behind #2 or #3. You win either way! But if you don’t switch, you win only if the prize is behind door #1.”

Indian Justice Party leaderfound hanging from tree

Lucknow: Dalit leader and Indian Justice Party's (IJP) Lok Sabha candidate Bahadur Sonkar was found hanging from a tree near his home in Uttar Pradesh's Jaunpur town Monday, a death his relatives blamed on the ruling Bahujan Samaj Party's nominee (BSP).

Sonkar, who was contesting against BSP'sDhananjay Singh, a mafia don turned politician, was found hanging near Raja Ka Talab, barely 500 metres from his home in Ahiyapur-Rasheedabad locality.

There was high drama with his relatives and supporters trying to prevent police from taking away the body -- recovered after the family found him missing from his bed in the outer verandah of his residence.

His slippers and mobile were lying near the cot while the mattress and sheet were also littered around the bed, indicating a scuffle before he was forcibly carried away.

Sonkar's family members said Dhananjay Singh had been issuing death threats to Sonka through a police officer.

A relative alleged that police circle officer Ditendra Chaudhary had been pressurising him to withdraw his candidature in favour of Dhananjay Singh.

"When Bahadur told the officer that it was not possible for him to pull out of the election fray, the cop warned him to be ready to face serious consequences," the relative said on condition of anonymity.

The candidate had informed election observers and had spoken to the media about the matter.

"Even last night (Sunday), he was referring to another phone call from the officer," said a brother of the victim.

IJP chief Udit Raj, who has arrived in Jaunpur, has demanded a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe and sought the immediate arrest of the circle officer as well as a police inspector.

Udit Raj, who left the Indian Revenue Service (IRS), entered public life by launching IJP to promote the cause of Dalits. The party is seen as making a dent in the BSP's support base in a few places.

In Lucknow, a spokesperson of the Mayawatigovernment said the guilty would not go unpunished.

"Anyone no matter how high and mighty would not be spared if he were involved in the killing," he said.

Jaunpur District Magistrate Aparna Upadhyaya said: "Until I get the post mortem report, I will not make any comment."

NYSE probes Satyam's deals with 'terror states'

Months before Satyam Computer Services [Get Quote] founder B Ramalinga Raju made disclosures about committing fraud, authorities in the US had initiated an investigation into the company's dealings with Syria, Sudan, Cuba and Iran, identified by the US government as state sponsors of terrorism, and subject to US economic sanctions and export controls.

In a letter to B Rama Raju, the then Managing Director and CEO of Satyam and brother of Ramalinga Raju, the Office of Global Security Risk had pointed out that the computer firm had not made disclosures regarding the contacts with these countries and sought clarifications on the past dealings, and anticipated contacts.

Satyam, which is currently up for sale, did not respond to a questionnaire e-mailed on Wednesday. However, its reply to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which is posted on the NYSE Euronext website, confirmed that it had transactions with companies in Syria and Sudan but did not disclose them due to the "insignificance of these sales."

In its response on November 26, without disclosing the identity of the clients in Syria and Sudan, Satyam said the revenue contribution from the services rendered in these countries was less that 0.006 per cent of the company's revenues in 2003, 2005 and 2006.

"Given the de minimis nature of the company's dealings with Sudan and Syria outlined above, the company does not believe that this represents a material concern for the company's investors, from either a quantitative or qualitative perspective," its reply says. "The company acknowledges that investor awareness in the US and elsewhere has heightened in recent years regarding investments in companies which have dealings with the state sponsors of terrorism.� However, the company reiterates that it firmly believes that such concerns are inapplicable to the company."

Tech Mahindra wins bid for Satyam Computers

HYDERABAD: Tech Mahindra, which counts BT as its top customer has won the bid to acquire a majority stake in the scandal-hit Satyam Computer Services, after almost three month-old process to find a new Satyam owner culminated on Monday.

According to sources who requested anonymity, Tech Mahindra offered Rs 58 per share for the Satyam bid, while engineering firm L&T made an offer of around Rs 49 for each Satyam share.

The Satyam acquisition will help Tech Mahindra diversify its software services business, and compete aggressively with bigger rivals such as TCS, IBM, Infosys and Wipro.

Satyam, which serves customers such as GE, GM and Ford will also help Tech Mahindra build a better portfolio of customers.

100,000 Tamil supporters march through London

London: At least 100,000 people marched in London today to demand an immediate end to Sri Lanka's bloody offensive against Tamil Tiger rebels.

Ethnic Tamils and their supporters packed the streets of the capital, brandishing Tamil Tiger flags and urging the UK to suspend development aid to Sri Lanka, a former British colony.

London's River Thames embankment was flooded by Tamils wearing red, black and yellow scarves emblazoned with the rebels' tiger insignia.

In Trafalgar Square, protesters carried a skeletal effigy hanging from a scaffold labeled with the words: "Continuous rape and murder."

Elsewhere, children carried a mannequin representing a dead woman on a stretcher. A sign read: "Caused by government force."

Sri Lankan forces have recently made significant gains in their more than 2-decade-long war against the rebels, who draw their support from the country's minority Tamil population.

But the offensive has sent the civilian death toll soaring and led to international criticism.

“The people here have lost direct family members," said Suren Surendiran, of the British Tamils Forum, which organised the march.

"They are here for a reason. They are worried about their next of kin. This is not about a 'Stop the War' march or anything like that," he said, referring to the massive London protest against the Iraq war in 2003.

Infosys fires 2,100

BANGALORE: Infosys Technologies has fired 2,100 people across the country, after an annual performance appraisal exercise concluded mid-March.

TV Mohandas Pai, head of the company's HR, said that based on the performance, 2,100 employees had left Infosys. "The tolerance for non-performance has come down to zero," said Pai.

"The appraisal was conducted for 60,000 of our employees. At the bottom, some 3.5 per cent of the people were either outplaced or left the company. It's an annual scenario after every performance assessment. In fact, normally the bottom size is 5 per cent,'' he said. Trainees were not part of this exercise.

Outplacement is a new jargon used by enterprises, which means off-loading excess/unwanted staff to another employer. However, outplacing is not a viable option in the current scenario where few jobs are available in the market.

Infosys currently has an employee base of 1,05,000 which includes 45,000 trainees who were not part of this appraisal exercise. During quarter ending December 31, the company had a total headcount of 1,03,078.

A quarter ago Infosys had said it would hire 26,000 people during fiscal 2008-09, more than what it had projected in the beginning of the year. During the third quarter, the company made a gross addition of 5,997 with the net intake being 2,772.

Infosys has made offers to around 20,000 engineering graduates for the current year. The company has been vocal about honouring all the offers it made to freshers. Infosys' earnings for 2008-09 will be out on April 15.

Satyam still among top 5 software firms: MCA

Satyam Computer Services Ltd [Get Quote] continues to retain its position among India's top five software service providers, according to a senior ministry of corporate affairs official.

The employee strength of the Hyderabad-based information technology firm was around 50,000, even three months after its founder, B Ramalinga Raju, confessed to manipulating the books of accounts, said the official on condition of anonymity.

"Satyam continues to have strong revenues. The difference between its turnover and the next highest is around 10-15 per cent," he said. He did not disclose his idea of the revenue and net profit, saying it would interfere with the ongoing process for selling a strategic stake in Satyam.

Based on the data available, HCL Technologies [Get Quote], which was the fifth largest IT firm before the scam-hit Satyam, recorded a revenue of Rs 4,860 crore (Rs 48.60 billion) in July-December 2008 (see table). So, 10-15 per cent less than HCL means Satyam's turnover is Rs 4,100-4,400 crore (Rs 41-44 billion). At this turnover, Satyam's top line has dipped by only 1-7 per cent compared with the year-ago period (July-December 2007).

Tech Mahindra [Get Quote], which is in the race to pick up a stake in Satyam, is a distant sixth, with a turnover of only Rs 2,297 crore (Rs 22.97 billion) in the six months ended December 2008.

After the government-nominated directors took control of Satyam's board, two audit firms -- KPMG and Deloitte -- were asked to restate the accounts of the company. While the two audit firms are expected to take six months for the job, the companies that have evinced interest in picking up a stake in Satyam are being given restated accounts for six months ended December 2008.

However, the restated accounts are not available for January-March 2009, the critical period after Raju's confession and the government taking control of the company. The official said Satyam had performed well in January and February by operating without taking bank loans, adding that the client churn rate was not abnormal

On employee numbers, the official said it had come down only to 50,000, from 53,000 when the crisis hit Satyam.

The financial bids for acquiring a strategic stake in Satyam will be opened on April 13. Larsen & Toubro, India's largest private engineering firm, and Tech Mahindra, are reported to be in the fray. If the difference between the top two bids is more than 10 per cent, the name of the winner will be announced the same day. If it is lower than 10 per cent, an open auction will be conducted.

DOWN BUT NOT OUT (Rs in Crore)
	Sep-07	Dec-07	Sep-08	Dec-08	Sept- Dec 2007	Sept- Dec 2008
Infosys [Get Quote]	4106	4271	5418	5786	8377	11204
TCS [Get Quote]	5761.82	6041.3	6784.45	7105.04	11803.12	13889.49
Wipro [Get Quote]*	4867	5302.5	6507	6618.3	10169.5	13125.3
HCL Tech**	1709.2	181660%	2369.3	2490.8	3525.8	4860.1
Satyam***	2142.26	2266.05	2898.87	#	4408.31	�
Tech Mahindra	897.5	970.4	1164.8	1132.2	1867.9	2297
* includes non-IT revenue ** as per US GAAP *** the original numbers, not restated # results not yet announced Source: Investors section of respective companies

Maytas Infra, the company promoted by the kin of the disgraced founder of Satyam, said Thursday it had appointed K Ramalingam and Anil K Agarwal as directors on the board of the company. In a filing to the Bombay Stock Exchange, Maytas said Ramalingam would also be the chairman on its board.

Ramalingam, a former chairman of the Airport Authority of India, is an engineering graduate from IIT-Chennai and has served on the boards of Indian Airlines and Air India. Agarwal, was president of Cosmos Group and headed the industry chamber, Assocham, in 2006.

SP vows action against English language, computers

Lucknow: Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav, who unveiled his party's manifesto for the Lok Sabha polls on Saturday, said the party is against English medium education and the use of computers and will work to ensure that they are curbed if a government is formed with its support.

"The use of computers in offices is creating unemployment problems. Our party feels that if work can be done by a person using hands there is no need to deploy machines," Mulayam Singh said at a press conference after unveiling the manifesto.

The party is also against the use of agricultural machines and high corporate salaries.

"A harvesting season brings employment for the labour class for at least six months but these harvesters will snatch their earnings.

"The salaries provided by private firms should be in sync with the minimum wages that have been set by the government. This is only the way to build up a strong national capital," he said.

"Previous governments have promoted forward trading, share trading and mall culture. Any government formed with our support will either reduce or stop it completely," he added.

The party's manifesto also mentions that it will work to abolish schools providing expensive education in English medium and provide free education for girls till graduation.

However, modifying this promise, Mulayam Singh said, "We will only press for removing the compulsory use of English language in education, administration and judiciary. We favour the use of national and regional languages."

He said the party will ensure that India has stronger ties with Pakistan and Bangladesh if a government is formed with its support.

"The Samajwadi Party will focus on increasing security at the borders and ensuring that India has better policies with regard to neighbours like Pakistan and Bangladesh so that the three countries develop together.

"The basic cause of terrorism lies in regional differences. The forums across the world which deal with the issue of terrorism work at the behest of America. If a government comes to power with our support, we will ensure that action is taken against communal powers and attack terrorism at its roots," Mulayam Singh said.

The manifesto also promises to take up the cause of the farmers and pressurise the central government to implement unemployment allowance scheme in the entire country.

"We will ensure that the agricultural land of farmers is not forcefully confiscated for industrialisation and besides ensuring profitable rates for agricultural produces we will make sure that the government drafts a national water policy.

"We have launched the unemployment allowance scheme (which provided monetary relief of Rs.500 per month to every unemployed youth) in Uttar Pradesh but it was withdrawn by the Mayawati government. We will ensure that this is implemented in the entire country," Mulayam Singh said.

Samajwadi Party leaders Sanjay Dutt and Amar Singh also attended the meet to present the manifesto that also promises welfare schemes for lawyers and the business community, besides the reinstatement of the 18,000 policemen of the state who were sacked by Mayawati.

End-game nears for India's Satyam, but buyers wary

* Bids to be submitted on Monday, winner may be named then

* Bidders still conducting due diligence on select details

* Uncertainty remains over how to price bids

* Satyam valued at roughly $600 million in the market

By Sumeet Chatterjee

BANGALORE, April 9 (Reuters) - Fraud-hit Satyam Computer Services' search for a white knight could end on Monday, but bidders face an uphill task to put a price tag on the Indian company due to uncertainty about its finances and liabilities.

The government-appointed board meets on Monday to receive bids from suitors. On the same day, it could announce a buyer of a 51 percent stake in the outsourcing company that had to scramble to raise funding to meet short-term needs this year.

Three months ago, Satyam's founder and chairman shocked investors by saying profits had been overstated for years, and putting in doubt the survival of the company once ranked as India's fourth largest outsourcing firm.

The government quickly stepped in and sacked the board as it sought to limit damage from India's biggest corporate scandal.

Satyam's (SATY.BO) board met in Mumbai on Thursday, in a move analysts said could be to finalise the procedures for Monday. Chairman Kiran Karnik told Reuters the due diligence by suitors of Satyam was still going on.

Indian engineering conglomerate Larsen & Toubro (LART.BO), which has a small software services unit, mid-sized outsourcer Tech Mahindra (TEML.BO) and U.S. private equity firm WL Ross & Co are among the suitors.

Larsen & Toubro, which has built up a stake of about 12 percent in Satyam, is seen by many analysts as a front-runner.

"For now, our advice could be skewed to a price lower than the current market price, but at the end of the day we want to win. So there can be some room left to go higher," said an investment banker, who did not want to be named as he was not authorised to speak to the media.

Indian media have reported IT services provider Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTSH.O) has joined the race. A spokesman for the U.S. company declined to comment to Reuters on market speculation.

New York-listed Satyam's (SAY.N) market value has plunged to around $600 million from $7 billion in May. The stock ended at 47.15 rupees (90 U.S. cents) on Thursday, down more than 90 percent from its last year's high of 544 rupees.

Analysts said Satyam looks attractive due to its long list of marquee clients and due to the plunge in market value.

However, they are unsure how to value the company due to uncertainty about its accounts and legal liabilities arising from the lawsuits filed in the United States by its shareholders.

Indian media has reported more than 40 clients of Satyam have left the company since the revelation of the $1 billion-plus fraud, but Satyam has declined comment.

NO INTENSIVE BIDDING

Tarun Sisodia, head of research at Anand Rathi Financial Services in Mumbai, did not expect bids to top 60 rupees a share.

"I don't think the bidding will be intensive. If anything, the market would be disappointed by the outcome of the bidding," he said. "Bidders will be extremely cautious in going overboard given the lack of information."

In October, Satyam had said it had around 53,000 employees and more than 600 clients including General Electric (GE.N), Cisco Systems (CSCO.O), and Qantas Airways (QAN.AX).

Investment banking sources with knowledge of the proceedings said bids would be finalised only after due diligence was completed.

The inspection by bidders is being done through access to data containing "certain non-public information", and Satyam's management will provide an overview of operations and strategy.

Forrester said in a report last week while the sale would allay fears about Satyam's survival, clients would still face uncertainty about the acquired outsourcer's direction, service offerings and client relationship.

"Another uncertainty is the risk that the deal falls apart and Satyam goes back to square one," Sudin Apte, country head of the market research firm, wrote in the report.

On Tuesday, India's federal crime bureau filed charges against nine people including Satyam's founder, former chief financial offer, former managing director and two former external auditers. All of them are being held in jail.

Satyam has not reported earnings since reporting July-September in October as its accounts are being restated.

For a FACTBOX on Satyam, see [ID:nBOM417149]

For a TIMELINE on key events at Satyam, see [ID:nBOM435389] (Additional reporting by Narayanan Somasundaram; Editing by John Mair and Anshuman Daga)