The road to Khardung La begins in the Indian town of Leh on the northwestern fringe of the Himalayas. Exhaust-spewing army trucks rattle up the side of dry rock, past Buddhist monasteries clinging to the craggy mountainside and alongside small farms barely scraping fertility from the earth. Khardung La, the highest motorable mountain pass in the world, is more than 18,000 ft. above sea level, the air so thin that...

Allahabad High Court today partly quashed the acquisition of 2,500 acres for Anil Ambani’s jinxed Dadri power project, rekindling memories of the Singur dispute. A high court division bench of Justices Ashok Bhushan and Sudhir Agarwal quashed the land purchase by the Uttar Pradesh government in 2004 under emergency provisions of the Land Acquisition Act of 1894. The court noted that the state government had failed to record the objections...

SOMETIMES, TO accentuate the intransigence of the present, one must revisit the past. So first, a flashback. The year is 2006. An ordinary November evening in Delhi. A slow, halting voice breaks into your consciousness. “How shall I explain? It is not a punishment, but my bounden duty…” A haunting phrase in a haunting voice, made slow with pain yet magnetic in its moral force. “My bounden duty.” What could...

There is much about Dubai that is artificial and based on illusion: the man-made islands designed to represent a map of the globe; the indoor ski slope in the midst of desert; the incredible hotel with glass walls looking onto a sea aquarium mimicking the surrounding ocean. Dubai had also become synonymous with excess: building the tallest tower in the world and the biggest and most expensive luxury hotels, residences,...

FIVE HOURS’ bus ride from Kolkatta, just past the railway crossing at Beldanga, is a dilapidated concrete structure covered in half-torn posters variously advertising a Marxian utopia, films for red-blooded adults and bedroom advice for couples intent on children. Inside, in a tiny, dank room behind a desk, sits someone the Queen of England knows by name – and you should too. Lanky, awkward and at 16, the possessor of...