Very public battles are being fought, some of them on national television, over the Radia tapes. A former minister and a host of formerly "good/great/passable" journalists, and quite possibly, our 2G connections are at the crux of it. Yet, Ratan Tata, of Tata telecom and other odd concerns, says the Niira Radia tapes are private. Predictable, given that Radia's "PR" services have often serviced Tata interests, evidences of some of which are the taped conversations. So now, Tata has approached the apex public arbiter (ironically), the supreme court, to get a blanket ban on the use/making public of the said tapes.

What Tata may have said to Radia could be entirely private, but what possibly followed from these and other conversations, could have cost the country a whopping Rs 1.76 lakh crores!

So, today if your 2G tariff is fixed by companies who might have used Radia's connections to land spectrum allocations from A Raja's office, do the tapes still remain private?

Or as SC lawyer Kamini Jaiswal says, "If public policy is decided in people's bedrooms, we have to invade them. The issue of privacy talked about is just a means to hide what is behind it"?