BLOODY HELL: A QUIET DAY ON BOMBAY'S BOURSE 

ERIC ELLIS, Bombay 

MONDAY was quite a day for young Anil Parikh.

His face streaked with blood, he had been headlocked twice, had his neck pinned in a human vice several times, been mugged by a gang of seven against a marble pillar and three times he had been pushed to the ground and trampled over by a marauding mob.

His cotton shirt was ripped, and once he smeared the blood away from his left eye you could see it turning a shade more purple than his right.

And it was still only 2 pm on the floor of the Bombay Stock Exchange.

Anil, a wiry share-trader, had simply been placing a large order of blue-chip Reliance Industries on a day when the shares of India's biggest conglomerate were running.

"Wait until they get into a frenzy," he said, dusting himself down to get back into it again.

To describe the BSE trading floor as a human maelstrom would not do the scene justice. Rather, imagine 2,000 frenetic dhoti-clad bodies, their veins bulging, sardined into a room built for 500.

Then mix in the ripe aromas of BO, urine, cardamom and incense, decorate it with woefully irrelevant stock monitors and portraits of Hindu deities, crank the volume up several thousand decibels, and you have something approximating Asia's wildest sharemarket.

This is a market where share-trading has been elevated to cult status, and where the publication of a prospectus in Bombay's Economic Times, India's equivalent of The Australian Financial Review, is nearly an incitement to violence.

Indeed, it is a miracle anyone actually gets anywhere near the BSE building on Dalal Street, India's Wall Street.

Three streets out from Dalal, the bonnet of every second parked car is an impromptu table for scrip-wallahs doling out new issue application forms. Closer to the BSE, it is every car, table and flat space. Outside, a mass of humanity swirls, those that can write filling out forms for companies with names such as Zillian Pharmachen, Vesuvius Investments and OK Play India Ltd -three of the 50-odd coming to the market every month.

At one table, Mr Bhatia Chandar is sizing up the 54 issues on offer. With the characteristic sub-continental head waggle, he advises: "One has to be very selective."

He settles for Modern Syntex India, lured by its "guaranteed" 25 per cent dividend and recommendation in the tipsheets Rupee Gains and Moneytech.

Punters bearing 2,000- and 4,000-rupee cheques have turned BSE environs into a virtual mall, the only cars getting through being taxis with roof racks loaded with new paper and scrips.

The queue to get into the State Bank of India to register applications snakes around the block three times.

The scene is the same at the Canara Bank, the Bank of Allahabad, the Bank of Baroda and also at the BSE itself, where there is a 30-minute wait just for the lifts to get to the visitors' gallery and the brokers' offices in the tower above.

Back on the BSE floor, it is 20 minutes from the close - Bombay trades for just two hours a day - and a pimply-faced, petrified English youth is guided through the ruck by a beaming BSE official.

He turns out to be a junior fund manager from Jardine Fleming, one of the dozens of international financiers now touting India as the world's hottest emerging market.

The attraction is the 501 new BSE issues since January 1993 that have risen a collective 144 per cent, out-performing the 60 per cent hike in the BSE's Sensitivity Index.

One stock, the aptly named Jayant Aggro, has risen 2,400 per cent despite -if not because of - the "Big Bull" manipulation scandal that snared ANZ Grindlays and three other foreign banks.

But the authorities that uncorked a market genie with economic liberalisation seem unfussed about putting any of it back in the bottle.

Indeed, brokers celebrated - with an 8 per cent single-day rise - the kicking upstairs last month of the Securities and Exchange Board's G.V. Ramakrishna, who had had the gall to suggest greater transparency and shareholder rights.

The Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Mr C. Rangarajan, calmly told the AFR that "India's markets are regulated to well-known internationally accepted principles but sometimes there is this, er, enthusiasm."

He should try telling that to young Anil Parikh's mum