Professor Arjun Appadurai is a Mumbaikar at heart; coming to the city is an annual pilgrimage for this internationa­lly renowned cultural theorist and anthropologist. Appadurai, 62, who studied in Mumbai’s Elphinstone College, is currently Goddard Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He has been consultant and advisor to a wide range of public and private foundations such as The Smithsonian. In his seminal work Disjuncture and...

-The Financial Express   Bhim can't understand what he's done wrong.   Before dawn every day he joins hundreds of wholesale traders at Delhi's Azadpur Mandi, a sprawling, chaotic market where trucks blare Bollywood music, porters haul huge brown sacks of fruit and vegetables and hawkers ply tea and cigarettes. His own trade is in rosy red apples, laced with calcium carbide. Bhim says he's been adding chemicals to his apples for years to artificially ripen...

Interview with Teesta Setalvad of Citizens for Justice and Peace. TEESTA SETALVAD, through her organisation Citizens for Justice and Peace, has been at the forefront of the fight for justice for the victims of the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat. She has also worked extensively on many other issues affecting minority communities in the State. In this interview to Frontline, she speaks about Chief Minister Narendra Modi's new tactics and the marginalisation...

We have elections coming up in five states, notably giant -- thus politically crucial -- Uttar Pradesh. We have an Indian cricket team seemingly determined to eat crow. We have yet another brouhaha over Salman Rushdie. But my electricity bill is in front of me, so I want to talk about food -- and those who prepare food. What, you may well wonder, is the connection between the two? The bill is made...

While one year has passed without polio caused by natural poliovirus, we can claim complete eradication only after we ensure the absence of wild and vaccine polioviruses in the population. Today, India passes one whole year without polio caused by natural (wild) poliovirus — a major milestone towards polio eradication. This spells relief from an agonising decade of wild polioviruses refusing to surrender. Many experts believed that India posed the greatest...