At 10 am on Saturday, two days after a suicide bomber tore into a convoy of the Central Reserve Police Force in Kashmir, killing 41 soldiers, a group called “Clean the Nation” was created on Facebook by a man named Madhur Zucc Singh.
Since around 2002, farmers in Odisha have been noticing that fewer bees visit their fields each year. It was not just one single species of bees that began to disappear but several, many of which farmers knew were linked to the health of their fields.
Bajirao and Mastani’s love story is widely known in Maharashtra. Peshwa Bajirao I, the greatest leader of the Maratha empire after Shivaji, married Mastani, the daughter of Bundela king and an Iranian woman, in the face of family opposition, imprisonment, and crippling orthodoxy.
Giving birth can be a complicated process at the best of times.
On June 30, a small storm was raised about edits to a Wikipedia page on Jawaharlal Nehru. The new edits claimed that India’s first prime minister was born in a former brothel, and that his family had deviously hidden its descent from the Mughals by claiming to be Kashmiri Pandits.
When people think of Africans in Indian history, Malik Ambar tends to be the first name to come to mind. Brought to Ahmadnagar as a warrior-slave in the 16th century, he rose to be the general of the Deccan sultanate’s army—and eventually its regent.
When a report recently declared that there were no tigers left at the Buxa Tiger Reserve in West Bengal, it sent alarm bells ringing. On May 18 and 19, officials from the reserve got together with representatives of the Wildlife Institute of India, the National Tiger Conservation Authority and the West Bengal Forest Department to chart a plan to reintroduce the national animal there.
Urine is once again on people’s minds, after India’s road transport minister Nitin Gadkari made public his penchant for recycling his urine to fertilise plants at his Delhi bungalow.
At the beginning of January, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC uploaded its entire Asian collection online.
An advertising campaign urging India’s shrinking Parsi community to go forth and multiply profusely has raised a small storm even before it hit the mainstream press.
Over the weekend, Prime Minister Narendra Modi caused a few eyebrows to be raised when he suggested that ancient India must have been skilled in plastic surgery. How else would Shiva have grafted an elephant head on Ganesha after having beheaded the boy, Modi asked, reaching for an example from mythology.
Qatar has received a torrent of bad press recently as attention has been focused on the hazardous conditions under which labourers building facilities for the 2022 FIFA World Cup live and work. But far from the heat of Doha, in the Kerala village of Beypore, where a small fleet of luxury yachts is being built for tournament, workers insist that Arabs are better employers than local contractors.
Among Mumbai’s more abiding urban legends is the one that the bouquets sold at traffic lights are actually floral offerings stolen from the city’s graveyards. How else, the logic goes, could the vendors afford to sell flowers so cheap?
Everyone associates the Aam Aadmi Party with a symbol of a jhaadu, or broom, but had the Election Commission (EC) not allowed its usage, the party could have contested under signs ranging from a diesel pump to a frock. These are among the wonderful and slightly bizarre symbols on the EC’s latest list of 85 free symbols that any aspiring party or independent candidate can choose from.
India’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warns of a global famine in 50 years, and scientists have begun to experiment with an alternative source of protein: insects.
A Mumbai businessman has revolutionized the way hot take-out food will reach you. His solution: making sure the packaging has proper ventilation.
