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This paper makes a specific attempt of locating Kanara in the Indo-Jewish historiography. It finds the need to distinguish between Kanara and Malabar as two distinct entities of south western India to achieve clarity while interpreting the nature of the cultural milieu, which the Jews encountered when they visited this multicultural complex in the twelfth-century. While accepting the role of Malabar in Jewish trade, this paper analyzes the role of Kanara in this enterprise. It will use the indigenous sources of Kanara apart from the Geniza records to prove this argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article informs that India's vulture population is one of many species of bird threatened by habitat loss and man-made hazards. For centuries, India's Parsis have disposed of their dead by offering the bodies to scavenging vultures, but recently the birds haven't been keeping up their end of the work. In the last decade, the country's vulture population has declined nearly to the point of disappearance. According to a recent paper in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" ten percent of all bird species may become extinct by the end of the century, and as many as a quarter may become functionally extinct--reduced to one or two percent of their original numbers.