India

Perhaps some credit should go to the Oscar-winning film "Slumdog Millionaire" for the near-capacity crowd on hand for the India Calling! event Sunday night at the Hollywood Bowl. A grand panoply of traditional and modern music, dance, art and cuisine, the evening highlighted India's seemingly limitless aesthetic varieties. The Ravi Shankar Centre Ensemble's performance presented the classical and folk elements of India's fertile musical legacy using intriguing hybridized forms.

Ved Pal Maun, 27, was something of a catch in this small farm community northwest of New Delhi. But his family members rejected several marriage offers; they said he just wasn't ready. Truth was he was holding out for a particular woman, 18-year-old Sonia Banwal of the neighboring village of Singhwal. Falling in love with the girl next door would be cause for joy and celebration in many countries. But in parts of rural India, ancient traditions are rooted more deeply than the tall corn and lush green rice plants.

The rage surged through the crowd, mixing with the heat, the sweat and the frustration to create a volatile stew, as several hundred locals incensed over power and water shortages blocked the main Alwar road here today. Most residents said they hadn't seen a lightbulb's worth of energy come through their wires in the last 60 hours, and this after suffering protracted cuts for the past month. With no power to pump well water, some said they had to walk miles to find a hand pump.

Photographer Fazal Sheikh's two most recent projects tell of indignity but show only beauty. It's an unusual combination for a photographer drawn to populations under duress. Throughout the history of the medium, socially concerned photographers have tended instead to advocate for justice by showing its absence, by illustrating injustice. Think of Jacob Riis' turn-of-the-20th-century pictures of New York's dank and dirty tenements, Lewis Hine's images of child laborers, or Dorothea Lange's Depression-era chronicle of need, hunger, want.

Mention tigers to the residents of Indok Village and you elicit an immediate growl. The community of 300 families on the periphery of the Sariska Tiger Reserve says it has lost 20 cows and water buffalo in the last several months and 1,000 in a generation. For those living at subsistence level and measuring their wealth in hooves, that's seen as a pretty good reason to hate tigers -- and their protectors. "When the tigers attack our livestock, we're never compensated," said Buddhalal Meena, a farmer in his 40s dressed in a dirty undershirt, jabbing the air with a scythe to make a point.

Hundreds of children who were jammed into a narrow school staircase panicked and set off a stampede that left five girls dead and 31 students injured in India's capital. Five of the injured were in critical condition, said O.P. Kalra, medical superintendent of Guru Tegh Bahadur Hospital in East Delhi, where the children were taken. The stampede occurred early Thursday as students arrived for an exam, Kalra told reporters. Amod Kanth, a well-known child rights activist, said the students were told to move to a higher floor because heavy rain was causing flooding on the ground floor.

Tikam Chand wheels up on a rusty bicycle, navigates past a tangle of pedestrians, the odd beggar, a pile of garbage and kiosks selling Coke in battered green bottles, and unties a 50-pound camera that took its first photograph around the time President Lincoln was assassinated. It's been doing daily duty ever since, much of it on this stretch of sidewalk in front of the maharaja's palace -- used first by Chand's grandfather, and then by his father and now, for the last three decades, by Chand.

A card, chocolate and roses, an affectionate evening with your sweetheart -- what's not to like about Valentine's Day? Plenty, if you're one of the extremist groups in India that see in Cupid's pointed arrow a lance aimed at the heart of Indian culture.

There was a bit of a street brawl outside a pub, nothing too unusual on the face of it, except for what happened next. After pushing a few men out of the way, the 40 or so attackers revealed what they were really after: young women at the bar, whom they slapped, pummeled and yanked by the hair, in what they later justified as a bid to safeguard traditional Indian culture.

Some counter-terrorism experts in India are convinced that the country's growing ties to Israel were a prime factor behind the targeting of a small Jewish center in the deadly Mumbai attacks. These experts, despite an ongoing investigation of the assailants' motives, have concluded that the assault on the obscure Nariman House was more sophisticated than those on the city's two luxury hotels, an indication that it was a prime target in the November operation.