The global slowdown has failed to divert India from its path to expansion, but reforms are needed. Nikhil Kumar reports

Newspaper offices waste quite a lot of paper. So, in fact, do newspapers, as yesterday's splendid pine tree becomes (depending on your point of view) today's finely crafted chronicle of our times, or semi-literate showbiz goss, and tomorrow's guinea-pig toilet.

In her latest film, two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank takes to the sky as aviatrix Amelia Earhart. The 'Million Dollar Baby' star tells James Mottram why she identifies with high-flying women

The monsoon season is now drawing to a close, and the newspapers are rife with articles on how India will wrestle with the drought that was this year declared in 25 per cent of her districts.

It's a baking pre-monsoon afternoon in Lonavla, a dishevelled Indian hill town that lures Mumbai's weekend crowd out of the city with vague and unfulfillable promises of cool air and mountain vistas. I'm lying prone on an oil-slicked plastic mattress, a pair of swimming goggles strapped to my head. Through the holes that used to be the front lenses, spoonfuls of hot ghee are dribbling on to my eyelids. Then just as things appear to have reached their freakish peak, Mayur, my 20-year-old torturer – sorry, therapist – issues the quiet instruction: "Now open your eyes."

Delhi Notebook

Documenting the potential problems of climate change in southwestern India

The delay in monsoon rains in India has left the country's financial capital facing a water crisis.

On the anniversary of the Burmese cyclone, more than a hundred thousand survivors are still living in makeshift shelters hopelessly inadequate to the monsoon rains that will soon engulf the country.

A landslide at a gold mine killed four workers and left 11 missing on the Indonesian island of Lombok, a Health Ministry official said Sunday.

"Has anybody here seen us busking?" Not a question you expect headliners to ask at this mecca of UK jazz, the preferred venue for US greats to hold court with their residencies.

Troops and aid workers are scrambling to reach hundreds of thousands of stranded people across flood-devastated northern India in one of the country's largest-ever relief efforts, as hungry villagers began to riot, desperate families swam for their lives and widespread chaos ruled.