Mahatma Gandhi never used the words environment protection. However what he said and did makes him an environmentalist. His writings are replete with remarks on the excesses of industrial society. Political psychologist and social theorist Ashis Nandy has written extensively on Gandhi. In a freewheeling chat with Kaushik Das Gupta he spoke on Gandhi's vision of social change, his critique of industrialisation and the way movements draw inspiration from Gandhi. Edited excerpts:

Water crisis behind the decline of Angkor Wat

Kaushik Das Gupta attends a festival that celebrates endangered stories

The UK’s longest case was a PR disaster for the fast food giant

Automobiles were not the harbingers of good roads—at least not in USA

A typical Bengali meal is eaten course by course. Kaushik Das Gupta shows how the tradition helps refine taste buds

Jagdish Gandhi wears many hats. A historian writing a book on Mumbai’s colonial past, he was among those responsible for restoring the Kutchh palace. He also filed a PIL to rescue the Mithi river. Kaushik Das Gupta spoke to him on this petition

Book>>Report>>A moving story, but sans villains--humankind is pitted against nature's fury. But the Centralia inferno was created by sins on all sides. American coal barons mined the anthracite veins of Centralia until petroleum-based fuels became the rage, they then fled without bothering to clean up the mess

Report>>his is the autobiography of a man

film>> The Right to Survive - Turtle Conservation and Fisheries Livelihoods • Directed by Rita Banerjee and Shilpi Banerjee • Produced by International Collective in Support of Fisherworkers

A dictator and a timber dealer fomented West Africa's civil wars

The US retains control over the Internet

Till very recently, it was taken for granted in India that film festivals were avenues, which encouraged critical voices. Selection committees were appointed on merit and not because of their malleability to the official line. Not anymore, if developments surrounding the Mumbai International Film Festival is anything to go by. Several hard-hitting films have been excluded from the festival for displeasing the ruling edict. But there is a silver lining...

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...

After he was done with the phonograph and the electric bulb, the American scientist Thomas Alva Edison focused his attention on a living doll with perfectly feminine features. For years the prolific inventor remained obsessed with the bizarre thought of little girls spewing forth from his factory, as if they were lamps or clocks. The endeavour was a disastrous failure, says the much acclaimed book...