Whilst most people struggle to learn one new language, a 16-year-old from New York has managed to master 23 different tongues.

Scared of Spanish? Flunked French? It could be time to try again, says Enjoli Liston, who's finally tackling Hindi

The sudden death in Bangalore of the lively and ebullient Mathoor Krishnamurti at the age of 85 has stunned his friends, disciples and admirers in both Britain and India. He was born on Janmashtami, the birthday of the Hindu god Krishna, hence his name. Though rooted in ancient Indian culture and literature he was essentially a man of the present: he could quote from the Vedas while busy employing up-to-the-minute computerspeak. He was compounded of past and present and believed in the creed of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam ("The world is one family").

BBC Hindi, the shortwave radio service that since 1940 has brought global news and current affairs to some of India's poorest and most remote regions, scaled back its transmission yesterday in a move that the author Vikram Seth said was contributing to "a great loss of goodwill and increase of mistrust in India".

I was absolutely amazed to find out from a series of recent questions in parliament that the BBC hadn't even consulted the Foreign Office when they made their decision to axe their shortwave Hindi programmes, which resulted in such a great loss of goodwill for Britain in India - and concomitant increase of mistrust.

Rather than hook up with an Indian singer of existing repute, the first collaborative album by the criminally underrated Cornershop is recorded with Bubbley Kaur, an unknown who was working in a Preston launderette and singing in cellar clubs prior to their chance meeting.

This gem of a book deserves to outshine the narcissistic platitudes of Eat, Pray, Love. After crises in both health and career, Rich "no longer had the language to describe my own life. So I decided I'd borrow someone else's". She went to India not to imbibe some mish-mash mysticism but to learn Hindi via "total immersion" in the lakeside city of Udaipur.

India has finally got a symbol for its currency, the rupee. The government announced it had selected one of five short-listed designs it hopes will become as recognisable as the shorthand for the dollar, the yen and the euro.

Sri Lanka's election could be decided by those who lost the civil war, reports Andrew Buncombe in Menik Farm

The Japanese title means "Journey to the West", which in this case indicates a journey – led by the Paris-based Vietnamese Nguyen – with the Japanese koto-player and singer Mieko Miyazaki, tabla-player Prabhu Edouard and the great Hindustani flute player Hariprasad Chaurasia. Each is conversant withtransnational modernstyles. The resulting musicchanges its cultural centreof gravity from track totrack. Sometimes it's northIndia; sometimes it linksJapan and San Francisco.Asparky experiment.

In 1966 Yehudi Menuhin uttered the words that have reverberated in many of the sarod maestro's obituaries. When introducing Ali Akbar Khan, ustad [master] of the sarod, he called him "an absolute genius... perhaps the greatest musician in the world." Uncounted thousands of musicians and music lovers would contest the "perhaps". His music affected the Beatles, Byrds and Grateful Dead and, as the Indian classical singer Rita Ganguly wrote, "... there is hardly any instrumentalist in our country today who is not indebted to the great musical philosopher, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, directly or indirectly."

Now known for strict conservatism, India was the birthplace of erotica, famed for its sensual literature and carvings. Andrew Buncombe looks at a modern expression of an ancient urge.

To hear Kishan Maharaj or his contemporary Ustad Alla Rakha play tabla – the two-piece hand drum now synonymous with the Hindustani art music of northern India – meant you knew you were in the presence of musical giants. It would be difficult to overestimate Maharaj's reputation as the living embodiment of the Benares style of tabla playing.