India, ask any one non-resident non-Indian, is an unforgettable experience. And, if one has lived for five years, travelling and interacting with an entire diaspora, some part of this very real, often painful and at the same time exotic, oriental yet modern culture inevitably gets rooted in the psyche. Diana Bridge, wife of a former New Zealand High Commissioner to India, has transmuted some experiences of these five years in simple lines and often telling imagery. Not only India, even her experiences in the land of the inscrutable Chinese, and her very own New Zealand comprise the three sections of The Girls on the Wall, writes B Ashu

Some modern-day practices are anachronistic. Most traditions, like it or not, in fact, are. There are few primeval rituals steeped in as much societal perversion as is the exalted Indian, nay South Asian, custom of giving, taking and killing for dowry. Every year, both in India and in non-resident South Asian communities settled across the globe, thousands of young brides are grotesquely murdered in, what are, ironically dubbed "dowry disputes". The word "dispute" is a redundancy. It does not matter whether the bride's family were willing partners in the give-and-take game in the first place. India ought to be a land of snake charmers and rope-trick magicians, argues Subir Ghosh

Toward the end of World War II, a young American woman named Hannah M. Turner was serving in a Red Cross Clubmobile unit in northern Italy. One evening she was asked to report to one of the medical aid stations, to help with the wounded who were waiting to be evacuated by truck and ambulance to a rear hospital. "Most of the men were not even conscious," Mrs. Turner recalled in a letter she wrote me in 1996, "but I knelt down by one who was, looked at his dog tag to see his name and, holding his hand, I looked at him and said something. I don't remember what. Then he said, "If you could have anything right now, what would it be? I don't mean anything abstract...something physical, something you could put your hands on." Excerpts

The subject of trade and environment is a touchy one. More than being touchy, in fact, it is contentious. For an issue as contentious as that of the prospects of trade and environment being mutually beneficial, there is never any dearth of ideas and analyses. About a year-and-a-half back was organised a conference on Trade, Investment and Environment where experts from both the North and the South thrashed it out, says Subir Ghosh

This in-depth, engrossing book tells not only the story of Galileo Galilei, the inventor of the telescope, but also of his oldest daughter, Virginia, or Suor Maria Celeste. Galileo was wronged by the authorities of a Church to which he gave his faith as well as his daughters (they were nuns) when they misinterpreted the Bible and tried him for heresy because he said that the earth not only moved, but that it was not the centre of the universe. This misunderstanding of the way the solar system works arose from a misinterpretation of the Bible by the Church, feels Cynthia Arbuthnot