How would China's government have responded to an Anna Hazare type challenge? To answer that question, one needs to assess the phenomenon and mechanism of the Hazare-led protests this past week. In some respects, these are more important than the immediate issue of a strong ombudsman law or Lok Pal Bill.

When Hazare and a small group of supporters went on fast at New Delhi's Jantar Mantar grounds, the symbolism was just too tempting: a frail, diminutive man taking on the might of the state; a government riddled with financial scandals; a ruling party with a succession of incompetent, 'I don't give a toss' spokespersons.

Television channels took the story to living rooms across the country. Public impatience, growing with every swindle in the past few months, reached boiling point. Soon enough, Hazare was a folk hero. He found backing from movie stars and business leaders alike, and from tens of thousands of ordinary middle class people. There were copycat demonstrations in city after

The Cocoa Exchange on Wall Street, a highrise built in the early twentieth century, is now dwarfed by characterless towers containing offices of the world's biggest trading institutions. The building's name is as surprising as its quaint, ornate appearance. Who would have thought cocoa once merited a skyscraper of its own in the world's financial capital? Despite the millions of chocolate addicts across the world (I can be counted among them), cocoa does not figure in our imagination today as a crucial driver of the world's economy. When the French military participates in a UN backed operation in Ivory Coast, we do not cynically dismiss it by saying, "It's a conspiracy to control the world's chocolate, led by France whose culinary industry depends heavily on the commodity." Few politicians will lose votes because Easter eggs are dearer this year than they were in 2010.

Cocoa was first grown and consumed in Mexico, but it was Europeans who discovered it combined well with sugar, and

When I was doing the research for my book on Jaane bhi do Yaaro two years ago, writer-director Ranjit Kapoor (the film's dialogue writer) told me about an incident that changed his life. It was 1969 and Kapoor was a young man in dire straits, nudging towards a life of crime — "main galat raaste pe jaane wala tha" — when he chanced to see Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Satyakam. The film, about a stubbornly honest man struggling with hard realities, wasn't exactly fast-paced entertainment, but Kapoor was riveted.

"My friend sitting next to me fell asleep out of boredom, but I was weeping silently in the hall," he recalled. "After that film, the world began to seem like a very different place — I had hit rock-bottom, but I picked myself up." Forty years later, the experience was still so fresh in his mind that he dedicated his own movie Chintuji to Mukherjee, Dharmendra and Narayan Sanyal (who wrote the novel on which Satyakam was based).

Watching Satyakam recently, I realised that its central