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These are the best of times and worst of times for India. The economy is growing at a , and aspirations of people continue to soar. But corruption scandals, high inflation, the breakdown of bipartisanship, a stalled parliament and a worrying drift in governance threaten to sully the narrative of Buoyant India which the world has happily embraced.

So when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh sat down for a rare hour-long press conference in Delhi this morning, he, unsurprisingly, faced a barrage of questions on what his government was planning to do to crack down on corruption in high places. Unfortunately, say analysts, his answers did not reveal a more assertive chief executive who was fully in control of the situation.

For one, say critics, the reticent Mr Singh appeared to be more bothered by how India's image might have been damaged by the media coverage, than by the rising tide of corruption itself. He gave reassurances that the government was "dead serious" in bringing to book "all the wrongdoers regardless of the positions they occupy". When pressed further, he said: "Wrong doers will not escape this time."

But he also worried that in "projecting" (read, the media reporting) these events, "an impression has gone round that we are a scam-driven country". This was, he felt, "weakening the self confidence of the Indian people". He told the journalists: "In reporting the affairs of our nation, you should not focus excessively on negative features."

Many find Mr Singh's plea disingenuous as India remains one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and graft continues to eat away at its vitals. It hurts the poor most, widens inequity, kills initiative and saps energy out of society. For all its foibles, India's noisy and vibrant media has done more than a good job in relentlessly chasing the scandals - from alleged underselling of telecom licences to purchases for last year's Commonwealth Games. India's merchants of feel-good, however, insist that to highlight corruption at the cost of the country's considerable achievements - and there are many - is wrong.

Critics say Mr Singh should not be worrying about the self-confidence of his citizens. The rising self confidence of Indian people, they say, is despite the weak and ineffectual state; and it mostly comes from the opportunities they have been able to mine for themselves in a highly competitive nation.

Indians may be inured to corruption, but the recent spate of allegations has taken their breath away. Many believe that the time has come for an all-out war against corruption, something consecutive governments have been loathe to do. So, few believe the government when it says it is moving to bring back illicit money that Indians have stashed away in foreign banks. People believe there is a silent consensus among political parties to go soft on corruption. Nothing much has changed during Mr Singh's regime, they say, despite his exhortations and promises.

Mr Singh appears to have taken refuge in the uneasy compulsions of coalition politics to try to take the heat off on the corruption charges plaguing his government - after all, a former minister who is being investigated for his alleged involvement in the telecom scandal belongs to a key ally. So he kept insisting that coalition politics had hobbled him.

"You have to tolerate a lot in coalition politics," he said rather sheepishly. "We can't have elections every six months. Some compromises have to be made." The problem is that many feel that Mr Singh and his party are making too many compromises. "I am not saying that I have never committed a wrong," he said, smiling wanly. "[But] I am not the kind of culprit as some reports are making me out to be."

Mr Singh was characteristically honest and weakly convincing. He tried to shore up confidence in his government saying: "People say I run a lame-duck government, I am a lame-duck PM. But we take our job seriously, we govern seriously." But recent opinion polls point to Mr Singh and the Congress-led government's stock falling and it will take more than words from the prime minister to prove that his government isn't losing the plot.

The prime minister, as one of the journalists at Wednesday's meeting later said, appeared to be a "disturbed man". Prannoy Roy said he appeared to be more at ease at answering questions related to the economy and inflation - again, no surprises, because he is a trained economist - than he was tackling the complex web of charges in the telecom scandal.

Mr Singh has reasons to worry. He rightly despaired at the breakdown of
parliament and bipartisanship. He spoke about the need for a "spirit of rejuvenation, a spirit of self confidence. "We have problems," he said, "but we have credible mechanisms to overcome them."

The problem is that most of the so-called credible mechanisms - the police, judiciary, investigative agencies, regulators - are weak and discredited in the eyes of many people. India urgently needs to reform these state institutions. With little progress on these fronts many, according to BJP leader and former minister Arun Shourie, are feeling that the And it needs demonstrable action - and not stirring words alone - to rejuvenate the spirit of a nation which lives in hope and despair simultaneously.

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Where is the buzz? Where is the fever? The is five days away, but India, the driver and engine of world cricket and leading host of the event, appears to be strangely lackadaisical about it.

Last week, I travelled through India's most populous state of , which has sent a number of cricketers to the national team. I found little enthusiasm about the event among the locals and spotted no billboards or fan hoardings of cricket stars.The electronics shop owner in my Delhi suburb says there has been no significant surge in TV sales - typically fans migrate to bigger, wide-screen sets before such a major sporting event - despite a high-definition telecast of the event for the first time. "I am not getting a sense of any buzz," concurs my friend and leading sports writer Suresh Menon. "I wonder if there is actually fan fatigue."

Nobody is arguing yet that the World Cup in the subcontinent will go the way of the in the West Indies, which was plagued by high ticket prices, an interminable 46-day schedule, and major upsets which saw India and Pakistan getting knocked out early.

I also believe India will be gripped by cricket fever as the tournament progresses and the top teams reach the knockout stages at the quarter-finals. But that begins on 23 March.

There is nothing to get excited as the tournament gets underway - the eight teams likely to be in the quarter finals are pretty predictable barring near-impossible serial upsets.
So the group games could end up as an extended warm up for the main teams at the expense of weary fans.

That could be one reason behind the lukewarm fan response even as TV news and sports channels and newspapers are trying to pump up the adrenalin with special programming to ride on the advertising gravy train that cricket brings to India.

Also, I suspect that both the tournament and the 50-over format, as cricket writer Mark Marqusee says, may be . Fourteen teams and 49 matches over 43 days promises to be another grinding event - the organisers seem to learned few lessons from the Caribbean debacle.

More importantly, Twenty-20-addled cricket fans, especially the younger ones, have no patience to sit through an eight-hour, 50-over game any longer. And if they watch at all, they are most likely to skip what they call the "meaningless" middle.

Twenty-20, despite its crude grammar, has . With a three-hour game amid razzmatazz, cricket has a format which can compete globally. If the ferocious 1932 Bodyline series between England and Australia was the "violence and ferocity of our age expressing itself in cricket", as the game's prophet-philosopher put it eloquently, then today's love for instant gratification and mammon express themselves gloriously in the lucrative Twenty20 game.

But an exciting, global format doesn't mean that cricket has become a truly global game - the gap between the Test playing and the rest, as Marqusee says, has grown wider than it was a decade ago. Minnows have not grown into masters.

So is it time to take a fresh look at the World Cup? Does it need fewer teams and matches, and more equitable and competitive formats? Why not have a humdinger of a tournament with just six teams playing each other twice after a qualifier which separates the best from the mediocre? Has the 50 over format reached its apogee with nothing new to offer? Nearly four decades after it began, has the format run its course? The fan ennui could be explained by answers to these questions.

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