“I’m feeling very weak,” he said, stating the obvious.

Rahaman and a hundred others like him — including women and children — are 10 days into what they say is a fast-unto-death, a desperate call for release from a permanent state of limbo for the residents of the India-Bangladesh enclaves.

Officially known as "adverse possessions" — and colloquially known as "chitmahals," or paper palaces — are a collection of Indian and Bangladeshi villages home to 51,000 people, where for generations, citizens have been stuck on the wrong side of the border.

The residents of the 102 enclaves inside Bangladesh are technically citizens of India. Those in the 71 enclaves inside India are technically citizens of Bangladesh. In reality, they are stateless and virtually prisoners in their homes, cut off from public services such as electricity, schools, and hospitals.

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From there it's directly overhead the apocalypse of Karachi, followed by a turn southbound, out across the Arabian Sea toward Mumbai.

It's true about the smell. At around 10,000 feet the airplane begins filling with the rank bouquet of India: a soupy waft that tastes of putrefaction and exhaust fumes. As if, somewhere below, the world's largest garbage dump has been set on fire. It's a smell that burrows into your clothes and your hair and right through the concrete bunker walls of your five-star hotel.

Twenty-four hours downtime.

The concierge hooks me up with young driver named Faiyaz -- a most conscientious and law-abiding wheelman with a silver Toyota and remarkably handsome teeth. A hundred U.S. dollars for the day it will cost, gas and sporadic commentary included.

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And yet even beyond the particularity of their stories, it's clear the teenage garbage collectors and would-be power brokers and brides all live within a hopelessly broken and corrupt system that crushes their aspirations daily, an unmistakable conclusion of the book. “I don’t really believe in the representative poor person as a construct,” Boo told me this week. “But even if every individual is anomalous in every class and every country, I hope there’s another way to read the book, looking at the way in which money that’s intended for schools and child laborers and girls gets diverted, or the realities of police brutality.”

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"Behind the Beautiful Forevers" is the result of intensive, immersive observation over the course of four years in the life of a Mumbai shantytown called Annawadi. Boo's technique is as exhaustive as it is self-effacing. She conducts countless hours of interviews with her key "characters," interviews that, to judge by the results, can be as searching as therapy sessions. She backs these up with documentary research and shoe leather reporting. To establish what actually happened during a crucial event -- the self-immolation of a one-legged woman following a dispute with one of the book's central families -- she interviewed 168 people, many of them more than once. She never mentions herself.

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“We wanted it to be a place where you could meet Salman Rushdie, not just read him. Before Jaipur, you might only have been able to see him at some British Council event,” said William Dalrymple, the festival’s genial host. That was just about a month ago.

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Our prolonged summers made us long for rain. In our largely agrarian land, farmers prayed for rain to come nurture their crops. Lovers in Hindi movies broke into song when the heavens opened, schools shut early, trees turned green and the sky a gray that would not be considered charming in most places on earth. But for us, rain was a respite. And it was the only form of precipitation most of us would ever see.

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Once ubiquitous in so-called "morning shows" at theaters across the country, softcore films like "Biwi Anadi Sali Khiladi" ("Innocent Wife, Cheating Sister-in-Law") and "Kaam Tantra" ("Principles of Sex") have slowly disappeared from the big screen in India with the increasing availability of hardcore pornography on the internet.

But now, as mainstream cinema sheds its former reticence about sex and female sexuality, Indians are beginning to take a second look at softcore porn, this time for what it says about Indian culture.

This December, television soap magnate Ekta Kapoor will release "The Dirty Picture," a mainstream Bollywood biopic about Silk Smitha -- a skin-show specialist from the '80s who crossed over to perform sensuous so-called "cabaret" numbers in mainstream films.

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Unlike the United States, which can take its guns and go home, India will have to deal with the fallout of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistani radicalism for the next decade.

A resurgent Taliban and the return of a radical Islamic regime in Kabul could create a new safe haven for anti-Indian terrorist groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba -- the Pakistan-based terrorist organization responsible for the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai.

Some analysts fear that even as Islamabad works to bring the Taliban on board for a peace deal in Afghanistan, the Taliban leadership may help broker a settlement between Pakistan and various domestic terrorist groups like the Tehrik-i-Taliban, uniting the various jihadi organizations to focus on India, according to Indiana University professor Sumit Ganguly.

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Local media reported the Home Ministry had called the explosions a terror attack. No Home Ministry officials could be independently reached for comment.

Television footage showed dozens of police officials, several of them armed, at the sites of the explosion and at least one car with its windows shattered.

An official at the city's Police Control Room said one blast was in the crowded neighborhood of Dadar in central Mumbai. The others were at the famed jewelry market Jhaveri Bazaar and the busy business district of Opera House, both in southern Mumbai and several miles (kilometers) apart.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of office policy.

"It must be a bomb blast," Chhagan Bhujbal, a state minister told a TV news channel.

The explosions took place around 7 p.m., when all the neighborhoods would have been packed with office workers and commuters.

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Which countries were found to be most dangerous? Afghanistan was ranked the most dangerous, followed by the Congo, then Pakistan, then India, then Somalia.

Why? In Afghanistan, "violence, poor health care and brutal poverty," notes Al-Jazeera, afflicts women, "while in Congo there are horrific levels of rape" (reportedly some 420,000 women are raped a year). Other practices and circumstances found in countries considered the most dangerous include domestic abuse, genital mutilation, acid attacks and economic discrimination.

The NATO airstrikes in Afghanistan, one women's rights advocate told Al-Jazeera, are among the dangers threatening women in the country.

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This unsettling experience gave Carney his first inkling of how a human being becomes a thing. When he abandoned academia for investigative journalism (he writes for Wired, Mother Jones and other publications), his South Asian surroundings offered him many examples of the ways human bodies -- in part or in whole -- are transformed into commodities. He calls this the "red market," a term that encompasses the trade (legal and illegal) in human bones, blood, organs, embryos, surrogate pregnancy and living children.

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The navy captured 61 pirates fleeing the battle and the fire that broke out aboard the hijacked vessel. The battle is the latest example of the piracy trade's turn toward increased violence.

A pirate in Somalia threatened Indian sailors and the government with targeted attacks in retaliation for the arrests.

The Indian navy said a patrol aircraft spotted the mothership Friday while responding to another vessel reporting a pirate attack. The pirates aborted the hijacking attempt and tried to escape on the mothership.

When the Indian ships closed in Sunday night, the pirates fired on them. The hijacked vessel caught fire when the Indian navy returned fire, the navy said.

The pirates had hijacked the Mozambique-flagged Vega 5 in December and had used it as a mothership. Indian sailors rescued 13 crew members from the Vega 5 Sunday night about 700 miles (1,100 kilometers) off Kochi in southern India, the statement said.

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But tut tut, Bloomberg. The term "opium dens" can't actually be found in the story, which turns out to be primarily focused on the potential for additional urban redevelopment in the neighborhood near AT&T Park known as "China Basin." What is now called Willie McCovey Cove was once a major trans-shipment point for goods from the Far East.

The ballpark itself sits where the Pacific Mail Steamship Company unloaded silk, tea, rice and opium from Asia in the early 20th century. That commerce, and the large number of Chinese workers on those docks, led to the area being called China Basin.

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The bottom line is that, by 2013, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong will be cruising to ever more dizzying economic heights courtesy of natural gas supplied by the 1,833-kilometer-long Central Asia Pipeline, then projected to be operating at full capacity. And to think that, in a few more years, China's big cities will undoubtedly also be getting a taste of Iraq's fabulous, barely tapped oil reserves, conservatively estimated at 115 billion barrels, but possibly closer to 143 billion barrels, which would put it ahead of Iran. When the Bush administration's armchair generals launched their Global War on Terror, this was not exactly what they had in mind. 

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Since its premiere last Thursday, writers have questioned whether "Outsourced" is xenophobic and racist. But "racism" suggests a level of malice on the part of the producers, a concerted desire to denigrate a community or a culture. I may have felt nauseated watching the show, but I can't say the creators of "Outsourced" (which is based on a 2006 movie) are anything but well-intentioned. Of course, they're also insular and ill-informed. (Kwapis has pointed out in interviews that his writing staff includes three Indians. I assume he means "Indian-Americans," but regardless I can only say: For shame.) The India on "Outsourced" is an antiquated, pre-globalization, pre-capitalist India. The Indians are ancient caricatures of themselves. It bears little resemblance to the country where I grew up.

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Brazil, China, and India. I name-checked those three countries in my post yesterday on Malthus and the Discovery Channel gunman as likely sources of the human capital that might help us innovate our way through the challenges of the 21st century. But while skimming the headlines today, I realized that even I, ostensibly a writer about globalization, had not been paying enough attention to what's been going on in the "emerging" world.

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The 23-year-old, who posts videos to YouTube under names such as "oppressedkashimir1," is part of a wave of Web-savvy protesters in Indian-controlled Kashmir who have begun using social networking to publicize their fight and keep fellow demonstrators energized and focused.

"(I am) an anonymous soldier of Kashmir's resistance movement, using Facebook and YouTube to fight India," Ahmed said, showing off his most recent work, a montage of protest videos and photos set to London-based Sami Yousuf's popular song, "Try Not to Cry Little One." Like other protesters, he declined to give his full name for fear of arrest.

The last three months have seen an upsurge in violent protests against Indian rule in Kashmir, a region divided between India and Pakistan and claimed by both.

The protesters, mostly youths wearing jeans and hooded shirts, call themselves "sangbazan," or the stone pelters. They have covered Srinagar and other major Kashmiri towns with pro-independence graffiti and mounted fierce stone barrages against security forces, sometimes surrounding armored vehicles and throwing stones inside through the firing slats.

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What they probably won't know is that the unnamed guru is a hugely controversial figure who has disappeared from public view amid allegations of manipulation, financial misconduct and intimidation. And as that guru's organization, the Siddha Yoga Dham of America (SYDA), has come under fire, her own guru (yes, gurus also have gurus), the "old lion," has been accused of sexual abuse, molestation and sexual intercourse with minor girls.

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