We present some fundamental aspects of the representation theory of reductive p-adic groups, mapping out some recent developments, including the ABPS conjecture and the description of the structure of the reduced C*-algebras of reductive groups. The exposition proceeds fairly rapidly, but is essentially self-contained.

Our realist commitment to both Christology and biology entails that the God–Human, Jesus Christ, came into an evolutionary world. Christology and biology further entail that Jesus, who was fully human, had to have a fully human genome as understood by contemporary genetics – which is a logically necessary condition for the truth of the Chalcedonian assertion of his humanity. In this chapter, we build our discussion around issues raised by this entailment in relation to the initial event of Jesus’s coming, his Virgin Birth. In Chapters 3 and 4, we laid the groundwork for our discussion by presenting orthodox Christology and mainline biology on their own independent terms, but on this rich topic of the Virgin Birth, we put them together for the first time.

We start by introducing C*-algebras associated with locally compact groups. Next, the theory of Hilbert modules, C*-correspondences, crossed-product algebras, and Morita equivalence are discussed. This is followed with applications to Mackey’s theory of induction of representations and Howe’s theory of theta correspondence. Next, K-theory and (equivariant) KK-theory are introduced. Connections between isolated points in the unitary dual and generators of the K-theory of C*-algebras of liminal groups are discussed.

The state's climate is unique among Indian states. Following the Koppen– Geiger classification of climatic regions of the world, over two-thirds of the land in India is tropical savanna, desert or semi-arid. Most of Kerala is monsoonal or highland tropics. The difference is this. The average summer temperature in the former regions can reach levels high enough to dry up surface water. The monsoon rains relieve that aridity, but only for a few months in a year. That dual condition makes water storage and recycling a fundamental precondition for economic growth. It elevates the risk of droughts and diseases from seasonal or periodic acute water shortages. Kerala, by contrast, does not get as fierce a summer as the other areas of India and receives a lot more rainfall. That dual condition implies a natural immunity from seasonal food and water scarcity and a low disease risk.

With its extraordinary biodiversity, this is a vast storehouse for natural resources. The state has a surface area of 38,855 square kilometres and is bounded by the Arabian Sea to the west and the Western Ghats to the east. The eastern highlands, the central midlands and the western lowlands, with 580 kilometres of coastline, can access a wealth of ocean resources and means of subsistence for their fisherfolk and the general populace. Compared with semi-arid India, the benign environment largely explains the head start in life expectancy (Chapters 1 and 6). Further, nature provides industrial resources that cannot be found elsewhere. The highlands have the ideal climate for growing coffee, tea and spices. Low hills are often planted with rubber. The seaboard traded with West Asia for centuries. The state's Gulf connection, thus, had a prehistory. A large tourism business has developed by selling nature.

On the other hand, recent experience shows that climate change and overdevelopment can jointly raise the risk of disasters. In the first three weeks of August 2018, Kerala received 164 per cent of the average rainfall for that time of the year. The following floods were devastating, comparable only to a similar event in 1924. In 2019, extreme weather repeated, now causing landslides. Mining and quarrying, frequent blasting and unscientific changes in land use patterns affected the highland ecology.

Surely this is not how I, or the women I worked with, had envisioned the conclusion. How does one begin to recalibrate lives now bracketed between two viruses? Albeit CoV-2 is not HIV, the intimate familiarity with another global contagion understandably generated a blasé attitude, as it happened in the early days of the epidemic in Sonagachi. With the closing of national borders, as though the virus too would respect them, my relationship with Sonagachi and the didis abruptly and solely devolved into the ecosphere of WhatsApp. While I was petulantly transitioning to “working from home,” they tenderly reminded me that “it's not so bad after all, we have been doing this all our lives.”

India announced a two-week-long nationwide lockdown beginning on March 22, 2020. The sex workers, like others, were used to bandhs (strikes), so the lockdown simply seemed another version of everyday life on pause. However, this time it was not the usual strike to protest a hike in fuel prices or a policy imposed on the state by the central government. Most importantly, bandhs have usually been a windfall for Sonagachi. Typically, around late afternoon, the bandh's grip loosened, and customers – from in and outside Kolkata who attended the political rally – began pouring into Sonagachi. The talabandi (lockdown), however, defied the hours and stared the women in the face with desolate streets and a troubling silence.

Everyone had heard about the indomitable creep of the “corona” but few paid attention to this respiratory virus that was gripping the globe. When Basu inquired, Kohinoor Begum explained:

The scenario began changing drastically on March 24: a police barricade was set up at the entrance to Sonagachi. The police were not just surveillance agents; the barricade was undoubtedly the cordon sanitaire.

We start by describing the fundamental theory of representation theory of a semisimple Lie group. This is followed by a classification of almost all irreducible tempered representations of a connected, semisimple, linear Lie group. We apply this classification to describe the structure of the reduced group C*-algebras of such groups.

The summer of 2012 was unusually busy in Sonagachi. It was marked by three events that catapulted the sex workers into a tangle of imperial feminism, immobility, and insubordination. They found themselves – unwittingly and unwillingly – at the global center. That summer was first marked by Gloria Steinem's “Learning Tour” to India in April. Steinem's visit was arranged by Ruchira Gupta, the founder-president of Apne Aap Worldwide and Apne Aap International, the abolitionist NGO in India. For Steinem, the “trip [to Sonagachi] was life changing.” She found it “very hard to look at women – or men – treated as if they were objects, as if they have no feelings, no will of their own. Their phrase in many countries is ‘survival sex’.”

Steinem's visit was followed by Hillary Clinton’s, then the US secretary of state. Uma Das, the youth coordinator of Apne Aap at the time, urged Clinton to wear a wristband that stated: “Cool Men Don't Buy Sex.” She promptly agreed, and, as Ruchira Gupta, reported, “Then she asked everyone in the room to wear the band too. Soon, the entire diplomatic corps, members of the Secret Service and even the travelling press corps were wearing a wristband. Next day, most newspapers published photographs of this.” “Cool Men Don't Buy Sex” is an abolitionist campaign launched by Apne Aap in 2011 (Figure 4.1), and in 2017, Ashley Judd too wore the wristband, again upon the request of Uma Das. Clinton also visited Kolkata and attended a performance by sex workers’ children at the Indian Council for Cultural Relations usually known as the Rabindranath Tagore Centre. Notably, Steinem is a Clinton feminist (Dowd 2016). So, the interest of the two white women in India signals a particular kind of feminism, one of the key themes in this chapter.

Later in July, the International AIDS Society organized the 19th International AIDS Conference or AIDS 2012, themed, “Turning the Tide Together: A Declaration to End AIDS Epidemic.” It was hosted by the US for the first time in 22 years, in Washington, DC. However, sex workers from Sonagachi and elsewhere alongside intravenous drug users (IDUs) could not travel to the US to participate given the “ineligibilities” listed in Section 212(a), “Inadmissible Aliens,” of the Immigration and National Security Act as follows: