She came, he saw, she conquered. And the most ironic part: Sakshi Singh Rawat didn’t even have to make an effort to capture the interest of India’s most eligible bachelor. The two first met at the Taj Bengal in Kolkata in November-December, 2007. Yudhajit Dutta, Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s manager and one of his closest friends, and Sakshi, who was interning at the hotel, were pals.

India were playing Pakistan at the Eden Gardens and staying at the Taj, and Dutta dropped in to meet Dhoni. He also called Sakshi up and asked her to stop by. It was, coincidentally, Sakshi’s last day at the Taj Bengal, so some would say their meeting was fated.

Sakshi dropped in, was introduced to Dhoni and they went their separate ways. Unknown to Sakshi, Dhoni asked Dutta for her phone number and texted her. In fact, say sources, Sakshi did not believe it was Dhoni texting her when he first did.

It took a few months of serious wooing on Dhoni’s part before they started dating in March 2008.

She attended Dhoni’s birthday bash in 2008 in Mumbai, but they did not spend time alone till Dhoni took an hour off from his friends to drop her back to a relative’s place.

From there on, their love story has been India’s best-kept secret, through the two years till they finally got married last Sunday. More:

Also read: Girl next door

James Nachtwey, Raghu Rai and Sebastião Salgado in Delhi at the wedding of the son of a friend and former colleague Deepak Puri (second from left).

A couple of Saturdays ago in New Delhi, I had briefly dozed off as a performance by chanting Buddhist nuns drew to a close. Then, the lights in the auditorium had been dimmed and in the near darkness only the outlines of the flowing robes of the group on stage were visible. One member wore a kind of white wizard’s hat, another a close-fitting black outfit with a skullcap. A Syrian Sufi group, they both looked completely foreign and yet oddly familiar. When the lights went back on, and the lead singer started singing with the lusty enthusiasm of the late Pakistani star Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, I realised the austere, slim man wearing a black skullcap was a Swiss convert to Islam whose home in Aleppo I had visited some months ago. There I had seen photographs of the Al-Kindi Ensemble decorating the walls.

Coincidence? Perhaps, but after a few of such occurrences, I felt that the world really was shrinking and that New Delhi, perhaps the most staunchly individualistic of major capitals, was becoming part of the global village. The term has become shorthand for a contradictory cosmopolitanism, evoking both a smaller world and McDonald’s arches, duty-free arcades and foreign cars. In Delhi, even a decade ago, these mercantile markers were much less common than in other Asian capitals. Alighting at the government-run airport in Delhi, you used to walk into a nightmare that might have been straight out of Salman Rushdie’s novels: a rugby scrum at baggage claim as porters arbitrarily grabbed suitcases in case the overloaded belt broke down; filthy toilets with overflowing urinals; queues at immigration so long that the arrivals hall looked like a refugee camp. Now, the privatised Delhi airport could be in another country.

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Click here to watch James Nachtwey’s presentation at TED. It’s an incredibly moving story.

And click here for Raghu Rai and here for Bob Nickelsberg

Kabul — On the afternoon before his wedding day this fall, Hamid was sitting in an empty teahouse worrying a glass of green tea between his fingers, his brow furrowed in concern.

He confessed to feeling a certain anxiety at seeing his bachelor’s independence slipping away. But something else was troubling him, as well: the cost of his wedding.

In Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, bridegrooms are expected to pay not only for their weddings, but also all the related expenses, including several huge prewedding parties and money for the bride’s family, a kind of reverse dowry.

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