Interview with Joan Mencher, an anthropologist who has worked in India for long on issues such as agriculture, ecology and caste.   JOAN P. MENCHER is a Professor emerita of Anthropology from the City University of New York’s Graduate Centre and Lehman College of the City University of New York. She is the chair of an embryonic not-for-profit organisation, The Second Chance Foundation, which works to support rural grass-roots organisations...

Democracy is, everywhere, a work in progress. Like many other countries, India has imposed electoral quotas to improve the political empowerment of women and racial-ethnic minorities – that is, it has a political system that requires women to be elected to certain leadership positions. These rules represent a form of affirmative action, but they also resemble a feature of our own Constitution that reserves space in the Senate for two representatives...

For about a week after the Dubai crisis broke, international financial markets chose to ignore it. Stock-markets climbed, commodity prices rose and the dollar continued to be beaten down. It is not too difficult to explain this initial indifference. For one, the magnitude of the Dubai crisis appeared piffling, at first glance, compared to the “subprime” crisis or the meltdown following “Lehman’s bust”. When global banks had run up losses...

In his engaging book on a love affair between a Hyderabadi princess and an Englishman in the 18th century, William Dalrymple reminds us that “the road from Hyderabad to the port of Masulipatam was one of the most beautiful in the Deccan”. In unearthing this fact from travelogues of the time, Dalrymple draws attention not just to the wealth of Hyderabad, inherited from the richest kingdom of the Deccan, Golconda,...

Climate change is posing a serious threat to communities in the Hindu Kush-Himalayan region, bringing both drought and catastrophic floods to hundreds of millions of people, according to a new United Nations-backed report. Food security, housing, infrastructure, business and even the survival of people living in mountainous regions and their neighbours in river basins downstream in the region are extremely vulnerable to climate change, it said. The publication was launched...