“Let's walk with the rains. Not try and run from it,” said Salil Mukhia. Few seemed to pay heed. A persistent drizzle had turned into a downpour and participants at the Confluence of Indigenous Story Tellers were making a rush to the nearest shelter. Unfazed at the silencing of the drums and cymbals, Mukhia smiled and said “we will continue in the hall. Only it won't be an open air session. At least the elements have not interfered in a ritual that involves seeking permission from the mountain gods to tell the stories.”

In 1990, McDonald’s threatened activists of a London-based ethical food group with libel suits. A pamphlet, What’s wrong with McDonald’s, had earned them the ire of the fast food biggie. Three of the activists from London Greenpeace—not to be confused with Greenpeace International, which distanced itself from the matter— apologised to McDonald’s and agreed not to circulate the leaflet. But Helen Steel, a part time bar worker earning £65 a week, and David Morris, an unemployed single parent, were dragged to a London court.

Many of my favourite childhood memories have to do with the time I spent with my grandmother in her kitchen, the ranna ghor. Ma usually was the first to wake up.

What led you to file the public interest litigation (pil)?

On July 26, 2005, there was a deluge in Mumbai. It caught the administration unawares; all utility services broke down. I was one of those stranded, who spent the night under a flyover.

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It's to the directors' credit that they has gotten to a virtually forgotten area. Sometime in the 1980s People magazine staged a photograph of a local man frying an egg over one of the vents in the coal seam. ABC's Nightline also swooped in to a meeting of local residents and officials. But gradually the fire became old news.

Smoking bans are hardly new--and rarely permanent

On October 2, India joined a growing number of countries that have implemented far-reaching smoke-free legislation. But a look back reveals that tobacco bans are hardly new--and rarely permanent. Some of the earlier smoke-free legislations:

In the summer of 2007, Shell officials at the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago were in a spot of bother. Business was fine for the oil company and environmentalists and other usual gadflies weren't making much noise. But the Shell factory in Barracones Bay was confronted with an awkward demand musicians planning to play at the cricket world cup wanted oil barrels.

This is the autobiography of a man whose job was to entice leaders of underdeveloped countries. In the 1970s John Perkins was an economic hit man, among those highly paid professionals who cheat developing countries of trillions of dollars by funnelling aid money into the coffers of transnational corporations. Fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion and a lot of other kinds of sleaze were his stock-in-trade.

Car dependency may now have become a serious problem, but in 1882, when the German car maker Karl Benz took out his rudimentary internal
combustion engine for a test drive in the streets of Stuttgart, he was arrested. The French count Albert de Dion fared no better. When he tried to
produce his steam automobile commercially, his father got a court to restrain him.

In 1999 an American historian, John Hunwick, came upon a cache of old documents in a family library in Timbuktu, Mali. The discovery was seminal. It revealed that Africa had a sophisticated literary culture. This went against the grain of historical writing then Africa's history was thought of as all oral tradition.

The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of The World by John Ralston Saul Penguin, New Delhi 2005

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THE major outcome of the second World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) was sealed even before the summit for-mally began in Tunis, Tunisia. On November 15, 2005 -- a day before the three-day WSIS got underway -- US negotiators secured a deal that would let their country retain charge of the net's addressing sys-tem.

Globalization and Indigenous Peoples in Asia, Changing the Local-Global Interface edited by Dev Nathan, Govind Kelkar and Pierre Walter Sage Publications New Delhi 2004 Rs 650

The Source of Life for Sale by K P Sasi 2004 70 minutes

Pedal Soldier of india a film by Siksha directed by Kaukab and Raza VCD 28 minutes

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Throughout the 1860s a frail young European woman with a medicine chest was a conspicuous presence at the women's ghats of the river Yamuna in Delhi. This was Priscilla Winter, an Anglican missionary who had absolutely no training in medicine. Missionaries like Winter were quite common in European colonies in the nineteenth century.

Edison's Eve A Magical Quest for Mechanical Life written by Gaby Wood Random House New York 2002