Chapter 11 highlights the need for ground control, such as GNSS survey points, to bring InSAR deformation measurements into a geodetic reference frame. It also explains the theory for projecting vector GNSS displacement into scalar line-of-sight (LOS) InSAR displacement and the computation of strain rate from InSAR.

Over the millennia, gold has been an instrument of choice that has served as money or as an anchor for money. In the twentieth century, confidence placed in physical gold was gradually replaced by confidence in abstract constructs such as institutions (for example, central banks), rules (for example, IMF Articles of Agreement) and global regimes (for example, exchange rate regimes to maintain stability) as the idea of money transited from the real to the symbolic and the imaginary.

Contemporary money is essentially an abstract unit of account. It is typically issued as a central bank liability (Kumhof et al. 2020) and derives its value from government fiat (authoritative order). Today, money is once again being reimagined. Technology and private initiatives are contesting the idea of money as a central bank liability. Geopolitics is eroding the certainties of a rule-based order, impacting established institutions and regimes that govern international monetary relations. Furthermore, the overhang of excess liquidity arising from easy monetary policies initiated during the global financial crisis and pursued during the Covid pandemic portends inflationary pressures. In this context, gold is once again assuming a new significance.

In this chapter we seek to examine the Indian evidence for the increased attraction for gold from the perspective of the central bank and of individuals as an alternative to fiat money. To do so, we attempt a long view of gold in India's quest for monetary stability, delving into her monetary history. We try to locate the Indian experience in the global story of monetary gold and its evolving significance in a country that is home to the largest private holdings of gold in the world, estimated variously at about 23,000–25,000 tonnes (Government of India 2018: 84; WGC 2016b). We also focus on the use of gold as an anchor for money in India.

Rawls had misgivings about the account of stability he gave in A Theory of Justice. It ignored “the fact of reasonable pluralism,” that is, that the social contract has to attract people who disagree about fundamental values of the kind embraced in “comprehensive” doctrines. The contract doctrine welcomes reasonable comprehensive doctrines but forbids the use of state power to promote a comprehensive liberalism, which he confessed he had assumed. There is also a “fact of oppression,” that no state can stabilize itself by imposing a comprehensive doctrine without resorting to the tactics of Torquemada or Stalin. A “liberal principle of legitimacy” forbids this. One must hope for an “overlapping consensus” of reasonable, comprehensive doctrines to settle upon a “political conception of justice.” Rawls’s concessions may lead even further, amounting to a “fact of justice pluralism,” that is, that there are multiple, incompatible, but equally reasonable political conceptions of justice – including ones that reject political equality as Rawls conceives it. Rawls admitted there was a “family” of such conceptions but insisted that each must satisfy a “criterion of reciprocity.” This chapter ekes out Rawls’s published remarks to construct a “reciprocity” argument for fair value, complementing the “stability” argument of Chapter 15.

Conclusion: The book ends by reflecting on the boundaries of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ in the context of maritime writing and the range of texts that render the different forms of lived experience associated with seafaring. It restates the book’s focus on the everyday global sea of the long nineteenth century that shaped the lives, labour practices, and imaginative worlds of working-class individuals and their families.

While education studies and urban studies have flourished as rich areas of research in South Asia, the interface between education and the urban has received little scholarly attention. It is quite difficult to trace any mention of the processes of acquisition, allocation or demarcation of land for the universities in the archival records on education. Similarly, specific discussions concerning university land seem to be largely absent from land department records in post-independence India. This is perhaps why the literature on the land question in India, in the fields of both agrarian and urban studies, rarely mentions the histories of land acquisition for universities. That the first education commission formed after India's independence was the University Education Commission of 1948 indicates that higher education was meant to have a significant role in the planned development of the new nation state. Many such institutions were built in the 1950s and 1960s, often at the fringes of big cities. The earliest were the higher technical institutes, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the first campus of which was opened in Kharagpur, a little far from the city of Calcutta (now Kolkata). A study of the architectural history of the institute argues that patterned on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, IIT Kharagpur was India's first ‘college town’ (Jain 2020). An Indo-American partnership enabled the establishment of agricultural universities in various states between 1952 and 1973. The ‘land grant university’ model in the United States served as the basis for envisioning these universities (Goldsmith 1990).

Shahjahanabad, a city that the Mughal emperor Shahjahan (1627–1658) named after himself, was a walled city and had seven gates. The Red Fort (Lal Qila) was home to upper-caste Muslims and Hindus, while areas near the walls were inhabited by various craftsmen and workers. The transformation of these caste-and craft-based spaces into communal areas during colonial and postcolonial India has been a long and complex process (Parveen 2021).

Historians describe Shahjahanabad as a place of ‘composite culture’, where both Muslim nobility and upper-caste Hindus shared cultural practices, learned Persian and etiquettes (Gupta 1981). The city was known for its diverse population living in mixed urban spaces, fostering close relationships between Hindus and Muslims across social classes (Chenoy 1998).

Referring to significant changes in the sociocultural and political landscape of Delhi over time, Narayani Gupta (1981) points out: ‘Delhi has died so many deaths.’ Poet Altaf Hussain Hali echoes Gupta's feelings in this couplet:

Three major shifts in social relations are clearly visible over time. First, the Britons, after the 1857 revolt, treated communities differently based on their loyalty towards them. They labelled Muslims as ‘traitorous’ and Hindus as ‘loyalists’. This marked the symbols of Muslim presence as ‘contested sites’ for the first time (Parveen 2014). Many older inhabitants, including the tyre biradri (caste brotherhood) and the Punjabis, discussed later in this chapter, shifted to areas outside the city walls and were permitted inside only with passes issued to them.

Composed in the summer of 1905 outside the penumbra of Arnold Schoenberg’s teaching, and inspired by Giovanni Segantini’s Trittico della natura, Webern’s String Quartet M. 79 has garnered much scholarly attention since its posthumous publication in 1965. While some commentators discerned in the work the critical turning point at which Webern self-consciously began to embark upon his famous ‘path’ to atonality, others have sought to explain its ostensibly tripartite form in programmatic terms. Drawing on recent developments in sonata theory and harmonic analysis, as well as new insights into the manuscripts and sketches, this chapter considers the quartet in terms of a complex dialogue between ‘programmatic’ and ‘absolute’ meaning strata, mediated by the contemporaneous reception of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In this way, it challenges those interpretations that deem the work either as merely a blueprint of Segantini’s triptych or as the inception of Webern’s ‘high modernism’.

Radio, television, film, the phonograph, wire recorders and mechanical instruments are but some of the technologies that Arnold Schoenberg wrote about or utilized during his lifetime. Infinitely curious and inquisitive, Schoenberg invented all sorts of things, some of which, including a typewriter for musical notation, belie his interest in technology. Rather than provide a broad survey of Schoenberg’s engagement with technology, this chapter focuses more specifically on how Schoenberg interfaced with technology as a means of presenting artistic ideas, particularly musical ideas. Though Schoenberg’s views on technology may appear ambivalent or, at times,even contradictory, something approaching consistency emerges when his writings about technology are considered in the context of his writings about how the musical idea is transmitted from composer to listener.

Near-death experiences, including out-of-body experiences, are introduced as personally perceived phenomena which are now open to informed scientific explanations. Recent progress in monitoring brain activity in altered states of consciousness and during the process of dying provide the bases for the explanations. Consciousness is introduced as a key factor for the understanding of NDEs. Also discussed are the history, phenomenology, incidences, scientific models, and examples of personal near-death experiences. These aspects will be combined in the book to show how personal truth against the background of belief and credo can change to the understanding of NDEs as a window on the amazing complexity of our brain and mind.

Stand-up comedy is one of the simplest theatre forms in existence. The comedian stands on a (usually) bare stage, talking straight to the audience in the hope of getting laughs. Yet it has never been more popular, with national scenes developing across every continent except Antarctica. In this insightful and accessibly written volume, diverse chapters explore the subject from many angles, ranging from national scenes, live venues, and recordings to politics, race, sexuality, and the question of offensiveness. Chapters also consider the performance dynamics of stand-up in detail, examining audience, persona, and trauma. Interspersed throughout the chapters are a series of originally commissioned interviews with comedians from nine different countries, including Maria Bamford, Jo Brand, Aditi Mittal, and Rod Quantock, providing rare insights into their craft.