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/ 22 October 2007
The stock market boom in India reached new heights on Monday with the Mumbai index shooting past 19 000 for the first time and creating paper fortunes worth billions of dollars for the country’s richest industrialists. The record high, which saw Mumbai’s Stock Exchange Sensitive index, or Sensex, rise almost 3,5% in the course of the day, was fuelled by foreign investors seeing rapid economic growth and company profits in India.
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/ 20 September 2007
For almost two decades, the Indian and Pakistani armies have fought a near-war along the freezing peaks of the Himalayas. But now the world’s highest battlefield is to become an adventure playground. The Indian army this week announced it would ”encourage mountaineering and trekking expeditions” across the Siachen glacier.
Surrounded by alpine mea-dows and snowcapped peaks, the town of Punakha in central Bhutan bears witness to the difficulty of taking a Buddhist Himalayan monarchy into the 21st century. Inside the 17th-century Tibetan dzong, topped with pagoda-like golden roofs, are 172 civil servants running the affairs of thousands of villagers.
Arundhati Roy wrote a Booker winner, then became a political activist. Ten years and two court cases later, she has begun a second novel. Randeep Ramesh speaks to the author.
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/ 15 December 2006
If marriages are made in heaven, the angels must have been busy for weeks. Wednesday night was wedding night for 30 000 couples in Delhi after Hindu astrologers declared December 13 the last auspicious day to ”circle the fire” for a month.
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/ 4 December 2006
The deaths of four French climbers who tried to scale a 7 242m Himalayan summit after crossing illegally into Tibet has highlighted the high-risk culture of ”peak hopping” in the growing adventure sport. The group had bought a relatively inexpensive permit for the 5 928m Mount Paldor, about 80km north of Kathmandu, which is described as a ”straightforward climb”.
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/ 20 October 2006
A Bangladeshi economist last week won the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to lift millions out of poverty by lending tiny amounts of money directly to the neediest people on the planet. Muhammad Yunus and the bank he founded were presented with the award and the 10-million kronor cheque for his work in creating a nation of entrepreneurs.
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/ 16 October 2006
Sitting on the edge of the water in the Gulf of Kutch on India’s western shore is one of the United States’s dirty secrets. A mass of steel pipes and concrete boxes stretches across 33km2 — a third of the area of Manhattan — which will eventually become the world’s largest petrochemical refinery.
Outside the morgue of Bhabha hospital two men embrace before wiping the tears from their faces. Inside lies the body of their friend and colleague, Tejas Shah, a 35-year-old salesperson whom they last saw boarding a train on the southern tip of Mumbai’s peninsula.
The last time Sinnathurai Kandasamy saw his wife, Thiraviyam, was a little more than two weeks ago, when she left home for a hospital check-up in the east coast Sri Lankan town of Trincomalee. Hours later Kandasamy found his wife dead in a mortuary.