Five badly behaved but photogenic young louts, and their hanger-on girl, regularly gather at night at a geographical feature resembling the Grand Canyon. There they take deep slugs of beer. Next they speed through rural Punjab on motorbikes and eat parathas with one of their mothers who tells them about...

There is a wonderful work on the Indian caste system called Homo Hierarchicus by Louis Dumont. Some critics have called Dumont's book an oversimplification, others have called it Orientalist, but one of the book's most important contributions is the argument that the caste system is not just a social arrangement....