The potential exchanges between the officials of IBBF and the Maharashtra Body-Building Association has all the trappings of a drama we are accustomed to.

In the case of sports persons, there is room for some sympathy, but the apathy of the administrators, which has even led to sanctions from international bodies, is unpardonable.

A case in the point is the hefty penalty of US $10,000 slapped on the Indian Body-Building Federation for not fulfilling its commitment for holding the Asian Championships in Mumbai in October.

 It is a matter of deep regret and concern that the sports administrators often cause more harm to the image of the country than sportsmen and sportswomen do through their dismal performances. 

Nonetheless, Tocqueville was only one of the first of a long line of thinkers to worry whether such rough equality could survive in the face of a growing factory system that threatened to create divisions between industrial workers and a new business elite.

“The government of democracy brings the nation of political rights to the level of the humblest citizens,” he wrote ,” just as the dissemination of wealth brings the notion of property within the reach of all the members of the community”.

Tocqueville was far too shrewd an observer to be uncritical about the US, but his verdict was fundamentally positive.

No visitor to the US left a more enduring record of his travels and observations than the French writer and political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, whose ‘Democracy in America’, first published in 1835, remains one of the most trenchant and insightful analyses of American social and political practises.

1971 war changed the political geography of the subcontinent.

Despite the significance of the event. There has been no serious book about the conflict.

Surrender at Dacca aims to fill this gap.

 It also profoundly altered the geo-strategic situation in South-East Asia.

The town of Liberal is said to have been named for an early settler famous among travellers for being free with drinking water.

Liberal is conservative in a moderate Midwestern kind of way which is changing fast due to big National Beef Packing plant which relies on Hispanic migrants and thus four-fifths of the children in Liberal’s public-school system are Hispanic.

This should make the town receptive to Democrats, but Mr Trump easily won the county of which it forms part.

Liberal’s mayor, Joe Denoyer, who was raised in a Democratic family near Chicago and moved to Liberal in search of work.

Mr Denoyer voted for Mr Trump by being impressed by his promise, though he thinks it unlikely that the president will keep his promises.

Nevertheless the air was still sticky with damp-heat, and it was in a cloud of perspiration that we began to unpack

Normally in Delhi, September is a month of almost equatorial fertility and the land seems refreshed and newly-washed.

But in the year of our arrival, after a parching summer, the rains had lasted for only three weeks.

As a result dust was everywhere and the city’s trees and flowers all looked as if they had been lightly sprinkled with talcum powder.

The main problem with Volkswagen is the past.

Despite posting healthy profits, Volkswagen shares trade at a discount to peers due to bad reputation among investors.

A disastrous capital hike, an expensive foray into truck business and uncertainty about the reason for a share buyback has in recent years left investors bewildered.

Many investors have been disappointed and frightened away.

 Volkswagen shares trade at about nine times the 2002 estimated earnings compared to BMW’s 19 and are the second cheapest in the sector. 

The topography of the ocean floors is none too well known, since in great areas the available soundings are hundreds or even thousands of miles apart.

Numerous other major irregularities diversify the Atlantic floor.

However, the floor at the Atlantic is becoming fairly well known as a result of special surveys since 1920.

A broad, well-defined ridge- the Mid-Atlantic ridge- runs north and south between Africa and the two Americas.

Closely spaced soundings show that many parts of the oceanic floors are as rugged as mountainous regions of the continents.

I have over and over again introduced ants from one my nets into another nest of the same species; and they were invariably attacked, seized by a leg or an antenna, and dragged out.

And it is a lesson to us that no one has ever yet seen quarrel between any two ants belonging to the same community.

The communities of ants are sometimes very large, numbering even to 500,000 individuals.

However, they are in hostility not only with most other insects, including ants of different species, but even with those of the same species if belonging to different communities.

It is evident, therefore, that the ants of each community all recognize one another, which is very remarkable.

Hence nomadic hunter- gatherer societies have few or no such full-time specialists, who instead first appear in sedentary societies.

But stored food is essential for feeding non-food-producing specialists, and certainly for supporting whole towns of them.

So, while some nomadic hunter-gatherers may occasionally bag more food than they can consume in a few days, such a bonanza is of little use to them because they cannot protect it.

 A consequence of a settled existence is that it permits one to store food surpluses, since storage would be pointless if one didn’t remain nearby to guard the stored food. 

It abolished the previous system of annual contracts.

SEPAHUA, a ramshackle town on the edge of Peru’s Amazon jungle, nestles in a pocket on the map where a river of the same name flows into the Urubamba.

In 2001 the government, egged on by WWF, a green group, tried to regulate logging in the relatively small part of the Peruvian Amazon where this is allowed.

That pocket denotes a tiny patch of legally logging land sandwiched between four natural reserves, all rich in mahogany and accessible from the town. “Boundaries are on maps,” says a local logger, “maps are only in Lima,” the capital.