Carla Power

In Bangalore and Hyderabad the young engineers talk of "bodyshoppers." These are employment agents who prowl India's high-tech centers in search of the technology workers America craves.

You don't see a lot of youthful exuberance at the New Delhi campus of the Indian Institute of Technology. On a recent sunny day there were no cricket bats or nuzzling couples in evidence, no blaring boomboxes.

The sweet-faced museum guard in Damascus was bewildered. "Why," he asked, "don't Americans come to Syria?" I gave him the polite answer: that it seems far away and foreign, and that they probably didn't know about the great Crusader castles, the Jewish synagogues and the souks.

Millau, a small town in the south of France, was host last weekend to an anti-globalization fest billed as a "Seattle-sur-Tarn." On the banks of a sleepy creek, the organizers had hoped to capture the spirit of last December's tumultuous showdown over global trade in the American Northwest.

On paper, the people in the slum on Delhi's Lodi Road don't even exist. The Dalits, or literally "broken people," as members of India's Untouchable castes are now called, don't show up on electoral rolls, ration cards or water bills.

You can tell the "servants of God" from the other Dalit women outside the Hindu temple in Manvi, a village in northern Karnataka, by their jewelry. They're wearing red beaded necklaces with silver and gold medallions.

On a crowded beach in Beirut, girls wearing head scarves and track suits splash in the waves. Their mothers picnic on the sand, chatting and sucking on hookah pipes.

Pictures of Tony and Cherie Blair with baby Leo beamed across the world last week, showing a tired family basking in a postpartum glow. With Leo came thousands of people clamoring to see his portrait on the Downing Street Web site, newspaper debates over breast-feeding and swift congratulations from Bill Clinton.

IslamiQ.com is a financial Web site, but its home page is a virtual bazaar. Surfers can check prayer times, plan pilgrimages to Mecca or "Ask the Scholars" about how to handle finances under Sharia, the religious law, which shuns profit from interest payments or "sins" like alcohol and pornography. "I have daily nightmares that Allah will punish me in the hereafter for working in an interest-based industry," wrote one worried banker.

The queen's trooping the colors on British TV, and an Indian immigrant sits watching with his son. Britain's monarch is actually Indian, asserts the father. "Think about it, ya?" he says. "They all live in the same family house?

Tom Cruise didn't even make the list. Marilyn Monroe finished ninth, and Sir Lawrence Olivier was runner-up. In a worldwide BBC Online poll last year on the millennium's biggest star, the winner was a 57-year-old man born in Allahabad, India.

Every day at dusk for the next month or so, the top floor of Paris's Pompidou Center will become a shrine of sorts. Some 50 French writers will read the entirety of Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" aloud in four-hour shifts as part of an exhibit on the concept of time.

A little-known consequence of European integration: the size of David Best's shirt collection. "You get to own a lot of shirts," says the France-based Briton, who has stashed wardrobes around Europe in the course of doing business across it. "My dinner jacket, it's in Burgundy just now." Best, who now works for the Pan-European auto-collision company MotorCare, has been around.

Life is full of guilty pleasures, and reading Bridget Jones's diary is one of them. It's a bit self-indulgent to tuck yourself in with frappe-light musings by a fictional Londoner who opens most journal entries with her weight.

Future historians researching millennial Britain can skip the dull stuff. No combing through faded Sunday supplements to figure out what brand of olive oil or embroidered mules the middle classes bought.

Bill Nelles doesn't look like a drug addict. A 44-year-old graduate of the London School of Economics, he works as a senior manager in Britain's National Health Service and sings madrigals in two choirs.

What does a woman want? Freud never figured it out, but today's travel agents know the answer. We want to travel. And not just on bus tours past English gardens or the great cathedrals of Europe.

Bill Nelles doesn't fit the stereotype of a European drug addict. A 44-year-old graduate of the London School of Economics, he works as a senior manager in Britain's National Health Service and sings tenor in two choirs; he's partial to Elizabethan madrigals.

When he first saw the smoke, supermarket manager Vince Balzan thought his store's gas station had caught fire. He ran outside, and quickly looked at the rail tracks below: "Twisted metal.

Sick of the hassle of clubbing the hard way? Weary of sweaty crowds, snotty bouncers and watery beer? Curl up on a couch, boot up your laptop and surf to a virtual club.A good place to start is the newly revamped Ministry of Sound, a U.K.

Should you listen to a pop star who cites Proust as an influence? Not unless he's Neil Hannon, singer-songwriter for The Divine Comedy. Since 1995, the British group has been producing music that looks back--to the big-band era, Bond film scores and Noel Cowardesque wit--while looking straight ahead--at tabloid culture, millennial ennui and loneliness.

Roddy Doyle tells of a press release for one of his American readings, which began "Like any Irishman worth his pint... " The Dublin-born novelist called his publishers at once.

Turkey's earthquake cracked the world's heart. Sixty-five countries, even old rivals like Greece and Armenia, sent aid. And in those first days after the Aug. 17 disaster, when foreign rescue teams walked through Turkey's cities, whole streets applauded them.

The Turkish earthquake shattered not only lives, homes and industries but Turks' confidence in their state. Many Turks believed the government was responsible for many of the 40,000 estimated deaths.

To the naked eye, there's no reason that 11-year-old Marinko Adjail shouldn't cross the road to go to the Federation Supermarket. But he wouldn't dream of it. "The Muslims are there, and I am a Croat," he says simply.

It's a midsummer Saturday at Notre Dame, and the cathedral is packed. Outside, a soaked queue waits patiently in the Parisian rain. Inside, throngs file by the confessionals and shuffle for space to light votive candles.

Shakespeare knew best, of course: mid-summer's nights make for the best drama. Across Europe, a range of new plays, revivals and theater festivals offer ways to fill the hot summer evenings.

Everything gets sticky in the summer. Vacations mean time to read more than e-mails and office memos, and long hot days make summer reading--like summer loves--sweeter and more intense.

Just shy of noon, Lt. Col. Joe Anderson of the 82d Airborne Division rides his jeep into a gas station in the Urosevac area of Kosovo. It's hot, and the air smells of diesel and roses.

Nobody--except perhaps some Serb police and a few prisoners--knows whether to use the past or present tense when talking about Albin Kurti. The 24-year-old activist hasn't been seen since late April, when Serb police took him, his father and his younger brothers to prison.