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As far back as he can remember, people told Hari Kishan Pippal that he was unclean, with a filthiness that had tainted his family for centuries. Teachers forced him to sit apart from other students. Employers sometimes didn't bother to pay him.
A century ago, in a tent city of 25,000 people built on the plains of north India, a new king stood before princes and maharajahs, soldiers and bureaucrats, and made a surprise announcement that would change the fate of this city. Delhi, the king said on that December day, would be the new capital of India.
Out on the edge of town, a few steps from the railroad tracks and across the street from an emerald-green field that stinks of sewage, Sanjeev Saxena sits inside a signpost of a new Indian era. Occasionally, he glances up from his desk to see if anyone is coming through the door.
When her husband died suddenly of a heart attack, Rukmani Devi and her oldest son went to the local government offices so the state pension checks — her only source of income — could be shifted to her name.
The hopes of the Arab Spring have, for some of the world's most established democracies, given way to a Summer of Despair.
At the traffic circle in front of the prime minister's office, demonstrators still crowd the streets every week after Friday prayers. Six months since the protests in this desert kingdom started, hundreds of people still join in weekly chants calling for political reform. They still hold up signs demanding an end to government corruption.
When the Arab Spring came to Talkalakh, the little Syrian hill town a few minutes walk from this border village, it seemed to last barely a moment. Squads of secret police descended on the town within hours of the first protests. Then the army came with its tanks, and the shadowy pro-government militia called the shabiha.
Years later, long after their handmade shacks had been reduced to rubble, after fresh concrete had erased the scene of so many lifetimes, they look at the place that was once their neighborhood and see the ghosts of what is no longer there.
It came as little surprise in India's capital when Osama bin Laden was found deep inside Pakistan, living in a sprawling residence just a short walk from the military academy. Around here, suspicion of Pakistan is a natural reflex.
They gathered Friday in distant outposts of what used to be the British empire, a world of not-quite-subjects watching the wedding of the heir to the crown.
When he was younger, the carpenter picked a spot just off the Shikaori River and built his house. Toshio Onodera chiseled the joints for the wooden roof beams and cemented the tiles onto the front porch. He mounted ivory-colored siding on the outside walls.
Those in search of the dead go to Natori's bowling alley, walking up the cracked concrete steps and through the glass door. "Enjoy Coca-Cola," says a neon sign out front.
The priest's dream, police say, was a chain of Hindu worship centers across India, where boys in saffron robes would attract throngs of devotees.
The villagers set out from this shattered hamlet long before dawn, walking without flashlights on trails they can navigate without looking.
This book, he insists, will be his last.
Pakistan is "hypnotically obsessed" with India's military and has done next to nothing to prosecute suspects in the 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai, top Indian diplomats have told U.S. officials.
Their tale begins in the 18th century, with an ancestor who served a Mogul emperor and an aristocratic family's rise to immense wealth and power.
The teenage boy, with his gentle smile and scraggle of whiskers, stands in the fading light of the day and talks about the college entrance exam that he is certain will change his life.
The British empire's athletes first gathered 80 years ago, facing one another in friendly competitions as a way to bind together the king's vast dominions.
Thousands of farmers have crowded this once-quiet Pakistani town. They live on the hospital's lawn, they camp on overpasses. Their fields are destroyed, covered by billions of gallons of brown soupy floodwater.
This is what Anar Gul found when he came home: Eight thin mattresses covered with polyester swirls; a dozen blankets; a broken tape player; and a large metal box buried deep in the mud. The clothes inside had begun to rot after more than two weeks in the ground.
The old man stepped carefully through his village, dodging craters as deep as graves where they had been mining soil for embankments to hold back the floodwaters. Already, nearly half this village of tenant farmers had been destroyed. The crops wiped out.
In real life he's a pharmacist, a polite young man who dispenses antibiotics and advice in a tiny Jalalabad shop barely 40 miles from where Osama Bin Laden disappeared into the mountains.
The question looms over this raggedy hillside town, a place where ancient mysticism constantly brushes against the realities of modern geopolitics. The monks who fled across the Himalayas ask it quietly, as do the exile politicians. Even the angry young activists are careful how they raise the issue.
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