INDIA SUMMARIZED

This man took everyone by surprise through his shameless act. In a shocking incident, a man was caught relieving himself inside a coach of Delhi Metro. The said incident took place a few days ago and now the video has surfaced on internet and is going viral. The video, shot by a fellow passenger, shows the man relieving himself in a cold drink bottle. When the passengers questioned, he blatantly said, "This was the last metro, so I could not afford to miss it." Reportedly, the person who had filmed the incident, had informed the DMRC officials.

Growing up in a deeply religious family, I never once heard the word Ramadan used to refer to the holy Islamic month of fasting and penance.  These were God-fearing people well versed in the ways of Islam and the Quran. But for them it was always Ramzan, or Romjan among many of the Bengali and Assamese-speaking members of our family. (Both languages don’t have a letter that approximates the sound of the English ‘z’.) In travels to different parts of India, till a few years ago, I found very few people who referred to the month of fasting as Ramadan. Which is why I find this sudden shift from the very familiar Ramzan to Ramadan all the more perplexing. Thus, it was heartening to see Prime Minister Narendra Modi referring to the month as Ramzan. And I’m aware of all the folks who talk of the Arabic spelling of Ramzan, with the ‘d’ sound, but may I humbly submit that we don’t live in an Arab-speaking country. And if you’re really keen on switching over to Arabic...

True story: While visiting his parents in the town of Naya Nangal in Indian Punjab, Aman de Guerre, a resident of the UK , decided to take a look at Google Maps to check out the towns nearby. One of the results thrown up was Lahore. Curious, he asked Google Maps for driving directions from Naya Nangal to Lahore. This is what he got: © Provided by Quartz Geographically, Lahore is quite close: The distance between Lahore and Naya Nangal is less than that between Delhi and Chandigarh. The route is also quite conducive to road travel: The plains of the Punjab are as flat as a paratha (flatbread). But of course, there’s the matter of the Radcliffe Line—the bristling border between India and Pakistan—which cleaves through Punjab. It is an impermeable, if invisible, wall between Lahore and Naya Nangal. Always angry with each other, India and Pakistan do not allow vehicular traffic across their borders (unless they’re fighting a war and the vehicles are tanks). To get to ...

Women hardly benefit from getting married while men who tie the knot are healthier than their single counterparts, a new study had found. The research conducted by University College London, the London School of Economics and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found unmarried men suffered more negative health effects than single women. But middle-aged women who had never wed had almost same chance of developing a combination of diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity, known as metabolic syndrome, as their married counterparts. “Being married appears to be more beneficial for men,” Dr George Ploubidis, a population health scientist at the UCL Institute of Education, told The Telegraph .  “Not marrying or cohabiting is less detrimental among woman than men.” The study which analysed information on more than 10,000 people born in England, Scotland and Wales in the same week of spring 1958, found that although single men showed higher levels of ...

How has India taught you to respond to sexual violence? With outrage? Not really. With fear? Somewhat, yes. With shame? Most definitely. No one should know that your breasts have been groped by random strangers in public spaces or by men you know in professional spaces. No one should know if your butt has been pinched, your body rubbed against or touched in ways that made you want to puke. In popular understanding of sexual violence, it is your body's shame first. So the first response to it should be denial and silence. Till the trauma just spills over. The Delhi University PhD student, who has accused a St Stephen's College assistant professor of sexual harassment, followed this widely endorsed though unwritten rulebook of responding to sexual violence in India. So it took her over three years to to take resolute steps in acting against the supervisor, who she alleges began harassing her in 2012. Firstpost now has a copy of her FIR, where she details how Satish...

One of the problems addressing the issue of black money is that India’s tax system could be perceived as being arbitrary, the chief economic adviser said. “For example, our tax system is seen as somewhat arbitrary. The whole going after black money could play into that and I think we need to be very careful about that,’’ he said. “Much more important thing about black money is to understand why do we create black money in the first place and address those things. To me, black money is more important in terms of what it signals we are doing — arbitrariness, tax rules, discretion, corruption, all these things. We need to be very serious about addressing them,’’ Subramanian said. In his talk, he described macroeconomic conditions as positive and said that India will record growth in the current fiscal irrespective of whether growth was being measured by the old GDP series or the new GDP series. He, however, expressed concern over stagnation of export growth...

Written by  Utkarsh Anand  | New Delhi |  Updated: June 18, 2015 10:34 am A senior advocate arguing in favour of the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) Wednesday told the Supreme Court that its judges should walk in the court corridors wearing a burqa to get a sense of increasing frustration among lawyers over bad appointments and the deteriorating justice delivery system. “My Lords should wear a burqa and roam in the court corridors to hear the way lawyers talk about the judges of this court. You will get first-hand account of the rotting justice delivery system. The kind of lawyers who are being appointed as judges is a disgrace,” senior advocate Dushyant Dave, arguing for the Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA), told a Constitution Bench led by Justice J S Khehar. Dave, who is also president of the SCBA, said the top court has used the Collegium’s power to appoint judges as a “giant”, and has turned its duty to protect human rights into a “sha...

China has banned civil servants, students and teachers in its mainly Muslim Xinjiang region from fasting during Ramadan and ordered restaurants to stay open. Most Muslims are required to fast from dawn to dusk during the holy month, which began on June 18, but China's ruling Communist party is officially atheist and for years has restricted the practice in Xinjiang, home to the mostly Muslim Uighur minority. "Food service workplaces will operate normal hours during Ramadan," said a notice posted last week on the website of the state Food and Drug Administration in Xinjiang's Jinghe county. Officials in the region's Bole county were told: "During Ramadan do not engage in fasting, vigils or other religious activities," according to a local government website report of a meeting this week. Each year, the authorities' attempt to ban fasting among Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang receives widespread criticism from rights groups. Uighur rights...

Lalit Modi had apparently given a loan of Rs 11.6 crore to a company run by Dushyant Singh, son of Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje, who found herself embroiled in the controversy surrounding the former IPL chief . Two former directors of a company owned by Mr Modi -- Ananda Heritage -- are currently under the Enforcement Directorate's scanner over the matter, sources said. The agency has summoned them for questioning. Sources said between 2007 and 2009, Ananda Heritage had given loan of Rs 11.6 crore to the firm of Dushyant Singh -- starting with an unsecured loan of Rs 3.8 crore in 2007. The money was apparently invested in the Niyant Heritage Hotel, which the Rajasthan CM's son and his wife had set up in 2005, with Rs 1 lakh. Within three years, the price of each share of the company was found to have gone up from Rs 10 to over Rs 96,000, sources said. "Lalit Modi's company had also bought a share, which had a face value of Rs 10, a...

A hotel bill amounting to Rs 1.56 crore that the BCCI refused to pay in 2010 tells the story of IPL’s Lalit Modi days, with a guest list including top politicians such as Vasundhara Raje of the BJP and Shashi Tharoor of the Congress. From January 1 to April 30, 2010, the IPL chairman made the ‘Club’ suite (Room No 9132) of the Four Seasons Hotel in Mumbai his base, instead of operating from the BCCI office in the same city. Raje and Tharoor, who had no direct connection to cricket at that point, stayed at the hotel during the IPL with the expenses billed to the league. Raje stayed in a Deluxe Sea View Room (No 3202) on March 11 and checked out on March 13. Her room was charged Rs 19, 719. Tharoor, meanwhile, stayed in the Deluxe Sea View Room (No 1906) on March 12, checking out the next morning. His room was charged Rs 25,612. The IPL season opener was on March 12 at the DY Patil Stadium in New Mumbai. Swaraj Kaushal, the husband of BJP’s senior leader Sushma Swa...

Mail Today  –  15 hours ago In an embarrassment to Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal, AAPs social media head Ankit Lal's wife Prerna Prasad has called the Delhi chief minister a "manipulator". This comes at a time when AAP MLA Somnath Bharti's estranged wife has accused him of domestic violence. Bharti has been charged with beating her and their two children besides forcing her to abort her third child. Meanwhile, former law minister Jitendra Singh Tomar in under police custody regarding his fake degree. Prerna took to social media to accuse Kejriwal of manipulating her husband Ankit who forced her to delete her Facebook account so as to prevent her from speaking the truth. In a series of posts, Prasad said that she is too small to advise Kejriwal on how to run a party but said that he should love those who were with him in his struggle days. She said that true leaders are those who are open to criticism and improve on their shortcomings. She accused Kejriwal ...

Daring the Enforcement Directorate to prove any charge against him, former IPL boss Lalit Modi named three senior UPA leaders for having helped him in recent years even as he blamed media baron Rupert Murdoch for being behind the Sunday Times leak linking him to external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj. Living outside India for several years now, Modi faces 16 Enforcement Directorate cases and has of late become a headache for the BJP-led government after the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times of London reported Swaraj helped him obtain British travel documents to fly to Portugal. Modi told India Today channel that former Union ministers Sharad Pawar, Praful Patel (both from the Nationalist Congress Party) and Rajeev Shukla (Congress) had helped him get travel papers. All three were ministers in the previous Manmohan Singh government, and Shukla and Pawar denied the charges to India Today. Shukla said he had never helped Modi. “I have never helped him and neither have...

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley says there are 16 cases pending against Lalit Modi, former chief of the Indian Premier League (IPL), for violating the provisions of the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) and its adjunct, the Anti-Money Laundering Act. In 15 of them, show-cause notices have been issued by the government. This is the nub of the issue in which External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj has been under harsh media glare. What she did was let the UK government give him travel papers to Portugal to be at the side of his wife, who was being treated for cancer. If there was any money laundering by Lalit Modi, it must have happened in cahoots with politicians across the political spectrum. Most of it may have happened during the 10-year UPA regime. Yet he was allowed to flee the country. Modi, who was extremely loquacious in a TV interview yesterday (16 June), has given a lot of spin to his act of fleeing: that he was the target of Islamic terrorists, a situ...

There seems to be no relief in sight for the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) as the Delhi Police on Wednesday began filing a chargesheet against 21 AAP MLAs, including the Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. Kejriwal has been named in 6 cases out of 25 cases in which the police is filing the chargesheet. The police is also probing two other cases against Kejriwal, according to The Times of India . The report added that the cases against the Delhi CM involve holding protests despite prohibitory orders and preventing public servants from performing their duty. These charges against Kejriwal come at a time when the Delhi CM and Delhi Lieutenant-Governor Najeeb Jung were in the middle of a power tussle over the appointment of bureaucrats in the state. AAP also faced a lot of criticism after the former Delhi Law Minister Jitender Singh Tomar was arrested for allegedly producing a fake law degree, immediately after which grave allegations of domestic abuse were made agai...

Indian security personnel patrol the  India-Pakistan border. Photograph: Alamy An Indian military operation along its eastern border with  Burma  has Pakistani leaders rattled, resulting in threats of swift retaliation should India ever try similar manoeuvres along its western border with Pakistan. The Pakistani statements – which include provocative reminders that  India  is not the only subcontinent power with nuclear arms – are once again exposing the deep-rooted suspicions and lingering potential for conflict between the longstanding rivals despite groundbreaking outreach to ease tensions. It has been worse. The two countries have fought three major wars since 1947, engaged in a nuclear arms race in the 1980s and clashed in the 1990s. But the current uneasiness underscores the challenges for leaders on both sides seeking to overcome the rifts and shift to shared issues, such as regional economic cooperation, water resources and the rise of ...