Delhi

DELHI, India -- Aided by a white-bearded Hindu priest, Rajiv Gandhi's 19-year-old son sprinkled water from the sacred Ganges River on his slain father's funeral pyre.Rahul Gandhi then circled the shrouded corpse seven times with a small burning torch in his hand. Bending over, he gingerly ignited the stack of sandalwood.Black smoke billowed up from what quickly became a roaring fire. Bugles sounded over a stream of Hindi-language prayers. In the distance, tens of thousands of mourners strained against stick-wielding security forces in more than 100-degree heat.

Gov. Martin O'Malley departed Friday night on a trade mission to India — the first by a Maryland governor to the world's second-most-populous nation — with a stop along the way in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar. The governor is heading a delegation of more than 100 state officials, business leaders and educators on a trip that will include stops in Hyderabad, Mumbai and New Delhi. On the way, the governor will stop in Doha, Qatar, where he is scheduled to discuss investment opportunities.

NEW DELHI, India - The American head of an Indian Internet firm caught up in a video scandal involving teen sex was released on bail yesterday as police interrogated the private school student who filmed the lewd clip with a cell phone camera. A Delhi High Court judge ordered the release of Avnish Bajaj, head of eBay-owned Baazee.com, who faces charges of allowing sale of pornographic material on the Web site. Bajaj was arrested Friday and initially held in Delhi's high-security Tihar prison after a video clip of two private school students engaged in a sexual act was posted for sale on Baazee.

In the 2010 census, the population of Indian-Americans will surpass that of American Indians. Jack Knott, the South Carolina State senator who called Nikki Haley a "raghead," will want to take note. As will George Allen, who derailed his Senate re-election by calling a young Indian-American "Macaca." Messrs. Knott and Allen may not have noticed, but the next decade is set to be the Indian-American decade. Second generation Indian-Americans are building on their parents' success and achieving in diverse fields.

The president of State University of New York at Delhi was named president of the 5,081-student Howard Community College yesterday, replacing Dwight A. Burrill, who resigned in September.The Columbia institution's third president in its 28 years, Mary Ellen Duncan will be the school's first female leader. A former Catonsville Community College administrator, she is expected to assume the $120,000-a-year post July 1."We are excited," said David A. Rakes, who chairs the board of trustees and announced the appointment before about 200 students, faculty and administration officials at the Student Activities Center.

NEW DELHI -- The topic is ''virtual communities,'' the speaker a Silicon Graphics rep, the setting a ''CyberCity'' exhibition. A slick multi-media presentation and a large-screen video projection of the speaker flank the platform. The whole scene is brightly illuminated by an overhead chandelier. In the audience, hundreds of corporate delegates and local journalists hang on every word.You might think this country of 900 million was truly on the brink of the Information Age. But without a special back-up generator, there might be no CyberCity exhibition at all. Because India, which Bill Gates calls the next ''Software Superpower,'' is running short of the one thing that makes electronic data communications possible -- electricity.

DELHI, India - Notes from a railway aficionado visiting India. An anniversary occurs here Tuesday. It seems hardly worth remembering or noting in the pantheon of India's history, but there is some metaphoric poignancy in the event. One hundred and 10 years ago, on Sept. 28, 1894, in the time of the British Raj, a mail train traveling through the Saranda jungle, near Goilkera, about 220 miles from Calcutta, hit an elephant. The train was knocked off the tracks. The elephant was killed.

NEW DELHI, India -- After a week of savage sectarian riotin in dozens of cities and towns set off by the demolition of a 16th-century mosque by Hindu militants a week ago, India struggled toward calm yesterday, with far fewer reports of deaths and injuries trickling into the capital.Still, spasms of sectarian conflict erupted, raising the number of people killed in six days of Hindu and Muslim strife above 1,100. In Bombay, which was one of the cities hardest hit by the violence, police again opened fire on stone-throwing mobs, but yesterday there were no reports of deaths.

DELHI, India-- --Cardamom. Indigenous to India, this astringent spice has a name that sounds like a mental reminder of something you really must do before Mother's Day. "Note to self: Send flowers or, at the very least, a cardamom." This somewhat-punishing pun occurred to me one afternoon a few weeks ago as I jostled along on the back of a bicycle rickshaw and my hardworking driver pedaled me deep into the ever-narrowing streets of Old Delhi, India. A chaotic warren of atmospheric alleys, this was once the walled city of Shahjahanabad, a Mughal capital founded in the mid-17th century.

As my year of writing and volunteering in Delhi was drawing to a close last July, the weather approached inferno status (highs of 113 degrees, lows in the upper 80s). I slept in sweaty dread of the moments when the lords of Delhi's electric grid would cut power to my neighborhood and I would wake to the last pathetic turns of my ceiling fan. Motivated by a very unspiritual but focused craving for cooler weather, I fled with two friends from the baking Indian plain and headed for the hills of Dharamsala, 370 miles north and 5,000 feet above sea level, when the Himalayas would be wearing their best face: misty, with mingled rain and sun. Since 1959, when the 23-year-old Dalai Lama escaped to India from Tibet across stark mountain passes, Dharamsala has been home to the Tibetan government-in-exile and thousands of refugees.

NEW DELHI -- The streets of India's sprawling capital are not for the faint of heart. Platoons of motorcycles, ramshackle buses, fume-spewing trucks and struggling bicycle-rickshaw riders jostle for space with wandering sacred cows, motorized rickshaw taxis, legions of cars, magazine-waving vendors, horse-drawn carts and the occasional plodding elephant. Motor-scooter drivers, fed up with traffic jams, roar down the sidewalks, threatening to flatten pedestrians. Everybody honks, all the time.

DELHI, India-- --Cardamom. Indigenous to India, this astringent spice has a name that sounds like a mental reminder of something you really must do before Mother's Day. "Note to self: Send flowers or, at the very least, a cardamom." This somewhat-punishing pun occurred to me one afternoon a few weeks ago as I jostled along on the back of a bicycle rickshaw and my hardworking driver pedaled me deep into the ever-narrowing streets of Old Delhi, India. A chaotic warren of atmospheric alleys, this was once the walled city of Shahjahanabad, a Mughal capital founded in the mid-17th century.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush recently returned from India and Pakistan burdened by yet another foreign policy headache of his own making. In an effort to build closer strategic ties with the New Delhi government, the administration has said Mr. Bush will ask Congress to make special exceptions to long-standing U.S. nonproliferation laws in order to permit the United States and other countries to sell nuclear materials and reactors to India. In exchange, India says it will implement a complex, phased plan to separate its civilian and military nuclear facilities and put many - but not all - of its power reactors under safeguards to ensure foreign assistance wouldn't directly contribute to its weapons program.

NEW DELHI, India -- A series of bomb blasts shook the heart of the Indian capital yesterday evening, killing more than 50 people in crowded marketplaces and a public bus in an apparent coordinated attack on the eve of a national Hindu holiday. Three explosions went off within minutes of each other starting about 5:30 p.m., during peak shopping hours. The first hit a busy market directly across from the central railway station, in an area popular with backpacking tourists. It was closely followed by two more blasts, one aboard a bus in the southeastern part of the city and another - the most lethal of the three - in a south Delhi marketplace, where at least 36 people died.

NEW DELHI, India - The American head of an Indian Internet firm caught up in a video scandal involving teen sex was released on bail yesterday as police interrogated the private school student who filmed the lewd clip with a cell phone camera. A Delhi High Court judge ordered the release of Avnish Bajaj, head of eBay-owned Baazee.com, who faces charges of allowing sale of pornographic material on the Web site. Bajaj was arrested Friday and initially held in Delhi's high-security Tihar prison after a video clip of two private school students engaged in a sexual act was posted for sale on Baazee.

DELHI, India - Notes from a railway aficionado visiting India. An anniversary occurs here Tuesday. It seems hardly worth remembering or noting in the pantheon of India's history, but there is some metaphoric poignancy in the event. One hundred and 10 years ago, on Sept. 28, 1894, in the time of the British Raj, a mail train traveling through the Saranda jungle, near Goilkera, about 220 miles from Calcutta, hit an elephant. The train was knocked off the tracks. The elephant was killed.

In the 2010 census, the population of Indian-Americans will surpass that of American Indians. Jack Knott, the South Carolina State senator who called Nikki Haley a "raghead," will want to take note. As will George Allen, who derailed his Senate re-election by calling a young Indian-American "Macaca." Messrs. Knott and Allen may not have noticed, but the next decade is set to be the Indian-American decade. Second generation Indian-Americans are building on their parents' success and achieving in diverse fields.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush recently returned from India and Pakistan burdened by yet another foreign policy headache of his own making. In an effort to build closer strategic ties with the New Delhi government, the administration has said Mr. Bush will ask Congress to make special exceptions to long-standing U.S. nonproliferation laws in order to permit the United States and other countries to sell nuclear materials and reactors to India. In exchange, India says it will implement a complex, phased plan to separate its civilian and military nuclear facilities and put many - but not all - of its power reactors under safeguards to ensure foreign assistance wouldn't directly contribute to its weapons program.

As my year of writing and volunteering in Delhi was drawing to a close last July, the weather approached inferno status (highs of 113 degrees, lows in the upper 80s). I slept in sweaty dread of the moments when the lords of Delhi's electric grid would cut power to my neighborhood and I would wake to the last pathetic turns of my ceiling fan. Motivated by a very unspiritual but focused craving for cooler weather, I fled with two friends from the baking Indian plain and headed for the hills of Dharamsala, 370 miles north and 5,000 feet above sea level, when the Himalayas would be wearing their best face: misty, with mingled rain and sun. Since 1959, when the 23-year-old Dalai Lama escaped to India from Tibet across stark mountain passes, Dharamsala has been home to the Tibetan government-in-exile and thousands of refugees.

NEW DELHI, India - A senior Indian official said yesterday that a "promising process" had begun to diminish the military crisis with Pakistan and could lead to Indian responses to reduce tensions within days. The official credited Pakistan's military ruler with ordering a halt to the infiltration of Islamic militants into Indian Kashmir - and said those orders are being obeyed. That begins to fulfill the most important condition India had set for stepping back from the brink of nuclear war. A top State Department official who visited Pakistan and India last week agreed yesterday that tensions were being reduced.