The Akshaya Patra Foundation, a nonprofit based in Bangalore, partners with the government to make close to 1.3 million nutritious meals a day for schoolchildren throughout India.
One of Akshaya Patra's kitchens, just outside Bangalore, churns out an average of 17,000 pounds of rice and 4,500 gallons of lentil soup every school day. A kitchen overseer checks in on the food preparation in the early morning.
Rice falls down a chute (top left) and is packed into sterilized stainless steel vessels for delivery to schools. Over time, Akshaya Patra has learned what children like in different regions and has customized the kitchen according to the local palate.
A workman closes the door of an Akshaya Patra truck filled with fresh school lunches. Some 34 trucks head out from this kitchen every school day, providing lunch for nearly 150,000 children in the Bangalore area.
Many malnourished students have benefitted from the Akshaya Patra school lunch program. Bangalore middle school student K. Suchitra (center), 13, often comes to school with an empty stomach, but she knows she'll eat at school and can have as many servings as she wants.
The school lunch program customizes the menu in different parts of the country to local preferences. At this middle school in Bangalore, lunch often consists of a South Indian meal of rice and vegetable-lentil soup.
Akshaya Patra's daily meals keep dropout rates low and provide many parents, who cannot afford to feed their kids adequately, a reason to send them to school, the foundation's executive director, Shridhar Venkat, says.
At a government-run public middle school in Bangalore, the blackboard's cracking, the textbooks are tattered and most of the students are barefoot.
But with all those challenges, the biggest obstacle that teachers face in keeping kids in school is hunger. Many students show up at school having had nothing to eat for breakfast.
On mornings one student comes to school hungry, the thought of school makes her break down, she says.
"When I had to get on the bus, I would start crying," says K. Suchitra, 13.
The Motion Picture Association of America and The Weinstein Co. have finally come to an agreement: After editing some profanities, the MPAA walked back its R-rating and Bully, a documentary about school bullying, will be released on April 13 with a PG-13 rating.
Two homeless men lie on mattresses in central Budapest in 2010. Hundreds of people live on the streets in the Hungarian capital; many refuse to stay in night shelters for fear of having their goods stolen.
Zoltan Szarka is a 27-year-old unemployed construction worker. He grew up in and out of foster care, ending up in Budapest's Danko street homeless shelter after losing his job and apartment.
Hungary's new anti-vagrancy laws — the toughest in Europe — now mean that homeless people sleeping on the street can face police fines or even the possibility of jail time.
Advocacy and human-rights groups are alarmed by the new efforts to crack down on and effectively criminalize homelessness, where the ranks of the needy have increased during the country's dire financial crisis.
Debt, joblessness and poverty are on the rise. The country's bonds have been downgraded to "junk" status, and the nation's currency, the forint, has dropped sharply against the euro.
We head to Ohio now for Bruce Lackey's view of the economy. He's CEO of Happy Chicken Farms, a wholesale egg and dairy distributor in Urbancrest, Ohio. The company has been in business since 1953, now has 32 employees. Mr. Lackey joins me from his office. Welcome to the program.
BRUCE LACKEY: Well, thank you very much for the invitation.
Guerrilla grafter Tara Hui grafts a fruiting pear branch onto an ornamental fruit tree in the San Francisco Bay Area. She doesn't want the location known because the grafting is illegal.
Spring means cherry, pear and apple blossoms. But in many metropolitan areas, urban foresters ensure those flowering fruit trees don't bear fruit to keep fallen fruit from being trampled into slippery sidewalk jelly.
But a group of fruit fans in the San Francisco Bay Area is secretly grafting fruit-bearing tree limbs onto those fruitless trees.
Rachel Syme is a frequent contributor to NPR Books. She is the former culture editor of The Daily Beast, and has written and edited for Elle,Radar, Page Six Magazine, Jane, theNew York Observer, The Millions, and GQ.
When I hear the word "Titanic," I picture a tuxedoed Leonardo DiCaprio, waiting at the bottom of a gilded staircase while the voice of Celine Dion swells in my mind. It's all Edwardian glitz and glamour, decadence and passionate love, the kind best enjoyed in a dark theater with plenty of popcorn. And then I quickly remember that the ship sinks, and that Titanic is more than just an epic film from my youth. On April 15, a century will have passed since the ship plummeted into the icy Atlantic, and it is the tragedy we should remember, not just the mythology surrounding it.
You don't go through corporate communications to meet the executive steering committee at Gideon Shoes.
Instead, you walk through a basketball court with graffiti-covered walls and into a sound studio. There, Gideon employees are warming up their talking points: rap lyrics.
"There's no excuses in this life, so I'm fighting on. ... The flame inside my heart is more like a firestorm," they rap.
The team is made up of Suhkdeep Bhogal from India, Thane Poloai from Samoa and Allan from New Zealand, who doesn't want to give his last name.
Diane Turner can't find work. She spent 30 years managing dental practices in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, but lost her last job in that field a couple of years ago.
She worked for a while greeting customers at an auto body shop, but lost that job a year ago. "It was very depressing," Turner says. "I always worked, and I was always able to get a job."
For people with dyslexia, problems recognizing words can make life difficult. Children usually aren't diagnosed until elementary school, when it becomes clear they're struggling with reading. But scientists say it could be possible to diagnose and help kids much earlier by identifying problems with visual attention — long before they learn to read.
