Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi had some backpedaling to do this week during her first visit to India in 40 years. But the world's most famous dissident failed to extricate foot from mouth in recasting her "disappointment" in India for its soft stance on Myanmar's military dictatorship as sadness.

As FirstPost.in's Venky Vembu reports Thursday, both India and Suu Kyi have tumbled off their pedestals. India has discovered Realpolitik as its rising status in world affairs made it so other people actually care what New Delhi thinks and does. And Suu Kyi has discovered the merits of dealing with the devil, rather than simply railing against it, after Myanmar's junta let her out of house arrest to become an opposition politician.

"Suu Kyi has in the past given voice to her sense of 'sadness' that India had in recent years fallen off the pedestal on which she herself – and a lot of other freedom-loving people around the world – had placed it," Vembu writes. "India had, she felt, silenced its moral voice, and begun to strike dirty deals with dictators and military rulers."

"In particular, the fact that the Indian government had openly embraced Myanmar’s military junta, which had robbed her of her election victory in 1990 and jailed her, rankled with her. India, she observed last year, 'is not as concerned' about the fate of the pro-democracy movement in Myanmar 'as we would like them to be.'"

“I think rather than disappointment, sad is the word I would use because I have a personal attachment to India through my friends as well as because of the friendship that existed between my father and Jawaharlal Nehru, because of the closeness that existed between the countries. So rather than disappointed, I was sad that it had to be like that,” the Myanmar opposition leader said in an interview with the Hindu before this week's visit.

As Reuters reports, Suu Kyi urged India on Wednesday to push for full-fledged democracy in Myanmar, on her first trip to India since it dropped its support for her democracy movement two decades ago in order to gain the support of the ruling junta in fighting an insurgency along the India-Myanmar border.

“We have not yet achieved the goal of democracy, we are still trying, and we hope that in this last, I hope, and most difficult phase the people of India will stand by us and walk by us,” the news agency quoted Suu Kyi as saying in a memorial lecture for Nehru.

India is edging closer to pushing through a value-added tax or goods and services tax (GST), as it is known here, that some are touting as "the single most important initiative in the fiscal history of India."

But edging closer doesn't necessarily mean actually passing legislation, suggests Bloomberg. After all, this is India.

"The implementation of the new system has been held up on many fronts: disputes over its precise shape, resistance on the part of some state governments because they fear a loss of revenue from the levy of state taxes, the need to amend the Constitution (which has a different view of taxation powers divided between the central government and the state than the one the GST envisages), and the absence of any concerted pressure from the citizenry," writes Chandrahas Choudhury.

And none of those problems has really disappeared -- which is perhaps why last week's Business Standard reported that "the Parliamentary Standing on Committee on Finance may not be able to submit its report on the Good and Services Tax (GST) during the forthcoming Winter Session."

India's factory output shrank 0.4 percent in Septemer compared with a year earlier, frustrating hopes for an increase of 2 percent or more, while the trade deficit rose to $21 billion in October from $18 billion a month earlier, according to the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times.

India's endangered vulture population has increased for the first time in 20 years, following the death of 99 percent of the scavengers over the years. The decline had prompted the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to put India's vultures on its list of critically endangered species.

A research paper by scientists from the Bombay Natural History Society (BHNS) shows that the number of vultures, once found across the country, increased marginally between 2011 and 2012, the Times of India reports.

Vital to the ecosystem and beloved by India's small community of Parsis -- who rely on the carrion eaters to dispose of their dead -- India's vulture population was nearly wiped out before researchers discovered what was killing them: a drug called diclofenac that farmers use widely to treat cattle for various ailments. A palliative for cattle (and humans), diclofenac causes kidney failure in vultures when they eat the carcasses of cows that have been treated with the drug, scientists eventually discovered.

According to the TOI, a ban on the use of diclofenac across South Asia in 2006 led to a drop-off, between 2007 and 2011, in the numbers of birds being killed. Ornithologists said the vulture population had stabilized by 2011, when the numbers remained roughly the same as the previous year.

"Between 2011 and 2012, there has been a slight increase in the population," the paper quoted Vibhu Prakash, deputy director of Bombay Natural History Society and lead researcher of a recent study on the subject, as saying.

Prakash said population estimates are difficult, but the numbers are slightly higher than in 2011, when there were only 1,000 slender-billed vultures (Gyps tenuirostris), 11,000 white-backed vultures (Gyps africanus) and 44,000 Long-billed vultures (Gyps indicus) remaining in the country, according to the paper.