Can the elites be ever trusted to act for the common good? The sanctions engineered by the United States in Yugoslavia raises important questions. Defenders of the faith take recourse to history. George Washington fought oppression when he led the American Revolution; Abraham Lincoln freed slaves during the Civil War; Franklin Roosevelt doled out the New Deal to help the poor. The case for American benevolence is clear, says PLC

Intergovernmental organisations like the United Nations are the sum of their members states. The decisions, therefore, reflect the will of the governments. Barring the odd exception, governments act at the behest of their own economic, political or security interests and compulsions. Their human rights treaty obligations, more often than not, go for a toss. Since governments, in the first place, undertake these obligations freely, they must be held accountable for their actions in their respective countries and at the international level, writes Subir Ghosh

The choice of themes, the sets of concerns, the specific problems articulated, even the structures of the films keep on changing so as to adapt themselves to changes in the larger society. From the mythologicals, to the historicals, to the socials, to the romantics and then to the post-'70s films, the changes in conventional films have closely followed and reflected the changes in Indian society itself. However, amidst all these changes, one thing that has always remained central in all these different genres has been some notion of injustice, of exploitation, of suffering, always shown from the perspective of the victim. Excerpts

Marketing has completed a full cycle - it is back to the primitive marketing form. Only that it is now an electronic barter system that marketing analysts and observers now talk about. The author traces the evolution of marketing, the contributions of other disciplines to the concept of marketing and identifies as many as 36 trends that, he believes, are likely to change the course of marketing in the next millennium. He feels the concept of marketing itself has been myopic in by wasting efforts and resources on cosmetic issues like advertising and image-building, says Subir Ghosh

ntil Isabel Allende burst onto the scene with her 1985 debut, The House of the Spirits, Latin American fiction was, for the most part, a boys' club comprised of such heavy hitters as Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and Mario Vargas Llosa. But the Chilean Allende shouldered her way in with her magical realist multi-generational tale of the Trueba family, followed it up with four more novels and a spate of nonfiction, and has remained in a place of honour ever since, says Amazon.com