Times Of India
Indian Express
Mid-Day
Rediff
IBNLive
DNA
ZeeNews
The Hindu
Career India
NDTV
FilmiBeat
Business Standard
'India-Pak talks only on PoK now'
Suicide bombing at wedding hall kills 63 in Kabul
Kabul: Joy and celebration turned into horror and carnage when an Islamic State (IS) suicide bomber targeted a packed Afghan wedding hall, killing at least 63 people in the deadliest attack to rock Kabul in months, officials and witnesses said on Sunday.
The massive blast, which took place late on Saturday in west Kabul, came as Washington and the Taliban finalise a deal to reduce the US military presence in Afghanistan and hopefully build a roadmap to a ceasefire.
The groom recalled greeting smiling guests in the afternoon, before seeing their bodies being carried out hours later. The attack "changed my happiness to sorrow", the young man, who gave his name as Mirwais, told local TV station Tolo News. "My family and my bride are in shock, they cannot even speak. My bride keeps fainting," he said.
A wounded man receives treatment as people gather around him at the Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital. Pics/AFP
"I lost my brother, I lost my friends and my relatives. I will never see happiness..
Mumbai Diary: Monday Dossier
Mumbai: BMC begins sealing city's leaky pipelines
Ganesh Chaturthi 2019: Mandals in Mumbai vow to go green
The Dutch Mystery: We don't know why Mumbai police are delaying his arrest, says Avdhut Shinde
Mumbai: Zomato's Gold membership no longer viable
Tired of being arm-twisted by food aggregators into offering loss-making discounts to customers, over 1,350 restaurants in the country—all under the umbrella of the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) which has 5,00,000 restaurants across India as members—have logged out of the apps. If you are a customer of Zomato, EasyDiner, DineOut, Gourmet Passport, MagicPin and NearBuy, you will no longer be able to avail offers such as Zomato Gold's two-on-two drinks or a 50 per cent discount by DineOut for its ongoing festival.
The move, restaurateurs say, has been growing from small murmurs of angst, culminating into a final protest that was announced a day ahead of Independence Day. Rahul Singh, owner of The Beer Café, which has 40 outlets across India and NRAI's president, saying it's almost like a mass bunk at a college. "We took a unanimous decision to protest the arm-twisting methods followed by all aggregators. The fear of missing out [FOMO] became an epidem..
Three names, many histories and one pincode
What's in a name? Much, in an area as variously referred to as Kennedy Bridge, Pavan Pul or Congress House. Tell a cabbie "Kennedy Bridge" and he says "Pavan Pul bolo na." Asking for Congress House, I hear "Aap Shapur Baug jayenge?" He has decided I must live in this Parsi enclave off Grant Road.
Kennedy Sea Face (Marine Drive) is named for Lieutenant Colonel Michael Kavanagh Kennedy who served in the Engineers in Bombay. Kennedy Bridge, however, is for John Pitt Kennedy, Government Railway Engineer in 1850.
Saadat Hasan Manto called this Pavan Pul—Bridge of Breeze. The Urdu author was windblown walking from Byculla, where he lived, to Nana Chowk, where he worked at Jyoti Film Studio for Ardeshir Irani, director of the first talkie. In 1937, Manto wrote Kisan Kanya for Irani, the first indigenously processed film. The colourful mujra dancers' kothas around Congress House featured in his story Haarta Chala Gaya.
Vitthalbhai Patel Road (after Sardar Patel's elder brother, co-found..
Aryavarta
The word 'Aryavarta' has become quite popular. There are novels written about it, tele-serials based upon it, and it is increasingly being associated with an extremist Hindu vision of the past. But, the word 'Aryavarta' means land of the civilised people. Those who spoke Sanskrit were considered civilised, much as in Europe, in Classical times, when those who spoke Greek and Latin considered themselves to be civilised and non-Greeks to be barbarians.
What we do know is the word 'Aryavarta' is found in two places. One in the Avestan manuscripts found in Iran. The Avestan manuscripts of the Zoroastrian people gives rise to the word Iran and it is supposed to be one of the 16 lands sacred to Ahura Mazda. People are not sure if this land, which is said to be in the north, actually refers to Afghanistan, Kazakhstan or Kashmir.
Most Indians don't realise that the country of Iran is named after its Aryan heritage. This Aryan heritage was established in Iran over 1,800 years ago with the rise ..
BMC spends over Rs 17,000 per pothole in Mumbai on repairs
As absurd as it sounds, an RTI query has revealed that in the past two years the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has spent over Rs 17,000 on every pothole that it repaired in the city and suburbs. The reply reveals that it spent over Rs 15 crore to repair 8,879 potholes in this period. But while this seems exorbitant, from 2013 to 2015, it spent over Rs 80 crore on repairing 3,654 potholes. In all, the BMC has spent over Rs 116 crore in the past six years on repairing potholes. In a reply to an RTI query filed by activist Shakil Shaikh, the BMC has said the actual expenses per pothole are Rs 17,693. "There is a lot of corruption happening in filling up potholes. How can filling one pothole cost over R17,000? It is beyond logic," said Shaikh. He added that though the civic body has spent crores on potholes and claimed to have filled more than 90 per cent this year, the roads are full of them and people have even died due to them.
Also Read: BMC runs out of cold mix to fix ..
Mumbai: No more free parking on five city stretches
A life without Eunice
On the last Friday of July, the Reference Library at St Xavier's College, where I was fortunate enough to study for a Bachelor's degree a great many moons ago, dedicated a section to the memory of Eunice de Souza. She passed away on July 29, 2017, two days before what would have been her 77th birthday.
There were all kinds of tributes paid to her in the weeks that followed, from students, writers, colleagues, and people from all walks of life, all of whom mentioned the impact, marginal or peripheral, she had on their lives.
I mourned too, standing outside the crematorium in Dadar where her mortal remains were consigned to flames, surrounded by the young and old, friends and strangers, all looking on in respectful silence. What came to my mind that evening wasn't the hundreds of conversations she and I had continued over a quarter of a century, but the way in which her mere presence had irrevocably changed the course and quality of my life.
Over the next few months, I began to grow used..
Mumbai: Man receives multiple e-challans for illegal parking of scooter he doesn't own
Cops keeping 'hawk-eye' on drug trafficking suspect Ali Punjani
Alleged drug trafficker and business tycoon Ali Punjani, who was admitted to Bandra-based Asian Heart Institute where he underwent angioplasty, was discharged on Thursday. Sources told mid-day that Punjani has now come on the radar of the Mumbai police. A senior doctor from the hospital confirmed to mid-day that Punjani had been discharged. Punjani, along with a woman and two men boarded a chauffeur-driven car and reached a five-star hotel barely a kilometre away from the hospital, the source told mid-day. mid-day visited the hotel, but Punjani and his family members refused to speak. However, another source told mid-day that the hotel room, in which Punjani has been staying, had been booked against the name of a woman who accompanied Punjani, who claimed to be his sister.
Punjani was discharged from the hospital at 4 pm. Sources told mid-day that he had learnt about mid-day photographer waiting outside the hospital premises. "In a bid to dodge the media, Punjani and his relatives boar..
The silence of the damned
The Dutch Mystery: 'We don't know why Mumbai police are delaying his arrest'
BSP MLAs differ with Mayawati
Jaipur: While BSP supremo Mayawati has slammed the acquittal of all six accused in the Pehlu Khan lynching case, BSP MLAs in Rajasthan have come out in support of it. Six MLAs of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which supports the Congress government in Rajasthan, met Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot on Friday evening and took a different stand from that of the party chief.
Mayawati had on Friday tweeted in Hindi: "Due to the gross negligence and inaction of the Rajasthan Congress government, all six accused in the Pehlu Khan mob lynching case were acquitted by the lower court, this is unfortunate. If the government would've been cautious in bringing justice to the victim's family, would this (acquittal of the accused) ever be possible, perhaps never."
BSP MLA Rajendra Guda, after his meeting with Gehlot, said, "Mayawati had been conveyed wrong information. She has been sitting in Lucknow and is not updated on the process of the probe. In fact, none of the Dalits under Chief Minister Ash..
Mumbai: Walking on a 400m death line in Palghar
Even as Palghar prepares to make room for the country's first bullet train, road infrastructure in several parts of the region continues to suffer neglect. For decades, the 2,000-odd residents of the villages of Vadhiv and Saravali in the district have been forced to walk through dirt roads and cross dangerous railway bridges, built over Vaitarna river, to reach the nearest railway station. Four people have died since March this year, after accidentally falling into the river, while attempting to cross the tracks on these bridges. The villagers are now demanding better road connectivity and a foot-over bridge to prevent any more casualties.
Vadhiv and Saravali are situated between Vaitarna and Safale railway stations, but there is no road to connect them to either of these stations. While Safale is nearly 10 km from the villages, Vaitarna station is 3.4 km away. In both the cases, it's only possible to reach the stations after crossing a 400m-stretch on the bridge—in this scenari..
A woman, thinking
A woman, asleep on a train, wakes up suddenly to find she is the lone passenger. Terrified, she tries to pull the chain but it is broken. The train pulls into a station. She gets off, but it is eerily deserted. As the train leaves, it is suddenly full of people, leaning out, waving, laughing. Desperately, she chases after the train. Abruptly, she wakes up. It was a nightmare.
This is how the film Rajnigandha (Tuberoses) begins: inside the mind of its protagonist Deepa, played by one of Hindi cinema's most unusual heroines, Vidya Sinha, who died last week.
Rajnigandha, based on a short story by the celebrated Hindi writer Mannu Bhandari, remains true to its beginning. It features several train journeys, but is essentially a young woman's internal journey as she tries to figure herself out.
Deepa is engaged to the prosaic Sanjay (Amol Palekar). He brings her tuberoses, a flower whose appearance, like his, is unassuming, but whose fragrance, like him, is steady. In Bombay for a job interv..
Vasai's hero auto driver stops another robbery
The Vasai autorickshaw driver, who had prevented a burglary attempt at a shop last month, has earned himself the hero tag with once again helping the police put a criminal behind bars. In the wee hours of Friday, Ganesh Pandey was waiting for passengers outside the Vasai railway station when he noticed a 19-year-old boy heading towards the platform with two expensive bicycles.
"Around 2:30 am, I saw a boy riding one bicycle and carrying the other in his one hand and heading towards Vasai railway station. Suspecting that he was stealing the bicycles, I swung into action to nab him," said Pandey, who plies rickshaw at night. Suspecting something fishy, he called other autorickshaw drivers -- Jitendra Chaube, Bablu Yadav – who were nearby and followed the boy, identified as Aniket Rajbhar.
Pandey and others nabbed Rajbhar after chasing him for about a kilometre. When they started asking him questions about the bicycles, he confessed that he had stolen them from Stella Bhabola Road i..
Police write to RTOs: What is leading to faulty e-challan mess
Radio City's 'Plastic-Free Beaches' mission culminated with a Clean-up Drive at Juhu Beach
Rainwater harvesting sites in Mumbai civic schools awash with garbage
Mumbai: IMC Ladies' Wing Women Entrepreneurs' Exhibition presents wide canvas of products
No e-challans here, just 'pay and settle the matter', say Thane traffic police
To curb corruption and bring more transparency to the Traffic department, the Mumbai, Thane and other commissionerates introduced e-challans. For these, payments have to be made online or at traffic department offices, not to traffic cops. But Thane cops have bypassed e-challans and adopted a pay-the-police-on-the-spot approach. If violators cannot pay, they have to go to the traffic division and bribe contractors, or 'settle the matter' to claim their vehicle. In a sting operation, mid-day unearthed these wrongdoings in the Thane traffic department.
On August 14, Dilip Bhanushali, a businessman from Mulund, had gone for some work with his son to the Thane court. When Bhanushali came out, he found traffic cops asking contractual towing van boys to pick up his bike. He and his son requested the boys not to tow the bike. "One of the towing boys told me to pay R200 and take the bike back. When I asked if he would give a receipt, he replied, of course not," said Bhanushali.
Bhanushali pays..
Ready for Ganesha?
"Why the sulk, Pheroze? I must admit that despite the long face, you are looking really 'with it', especially with those trendy earmuff-like things. Is it after you watched that film, Gully Boy? I believe it was quite the rage," Lady Flora's battery of questions didn't exactly go down well with her friend, Sir PM.
"Not Gully Boy but Ganesh Chaturthi. These 'things' are called noise cancelling headphones, and I have decided to wear this for as long as the 10-day festival carries on in the city. I am not quite sure if my hearing can take the high decibel levels any more. And, I actually thought you'd come by to wish me and the missus on Navroze. I know, it's peak tourist season for you, but a wave would have sufficed," Sir PM realised he might have said too much, after the last line was uttered, so quickly tried to amend things with, "here, try some lagan nu custard. It's a far cry from your Yorkshire pudding but I am sure you will appreciate it." Lady Flora took a few spoonfuls and reli..
Mumbai Diary: Sunday Dossier
Mumbai: Two-year-old dies in a freak pothole accident in Thane
Mumbai's potholes have become the jaws of death again. In Shanti Nagar, Ulhasnagar, a two-year-old boy died after his uncle's bike toppled. In a strange series of events, when a truck went over a deep-seated pothole, the jerk caused its tyre to burst, which broke the ring of the tyre and hit the bike behind. The bike was carrying three people, one of whom was a toddler, who passed away soon after arriving at the hospital.
On Friday evening, the truck was transporting some heavy material in Shanti Nagar when it neared the pothole. The busted ring hit the bike so hard that the rider couldn't control his bike and fell down. The three riders were Arjun Pal (30), Sabulla Chaudhari (16), and Habibulla Chaudhari (2). They were immediately taken to the nearby Maxlife Hospital.
Also Read: BMC spends over Rs 17,000 per pothole in Mumbai on repairs
Rhe ring from the truck's tyre
A spokesperson from the hospital said, "Habibulla had a serious injury on his head. When we took him for an MRI, h..
Where are the men?
"Are you a virgin?" Ajith Kumar, playing a lawyer, asks his own client, a woman, this offensive personal question, and in an open court. The woman looks him in the eye and says no, unrepentant and without guilt—as any man would. In this, and many other effective ways, H Vinoth's Nerkonda Paarvai (Direct Gaze), the quietly powerful Tamil remake of Pink, calls out our double standards when it comes to women's morality. Pink, starring Amitabh Bachchan and Taapsee Pannu, was directed by Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury in 2016. Nerkonda Paarvai is a superbly directed film led by Ajith Kumar, one of Tamil cinema's biggest stars. The prosecution claims that the men were not molesters, but the girls were of loose morals and soliciting. Ajith emphasises that regardless of a woman's virginity, character or any circumstance: No. Means. No.
Vinoth directs a clever genre-bender: a thriller, courtroom drama and feminist film. Information comes to us in slivers. The sequence of what actually happened c..
Nirupam, Shaikh on BJP-Sena radar?
Uneven road at Ghodbunder results in five-year-old's death
A five-and-a-half-year-old boy, who was travelling with his parents, died when he fell off the bike after it hit an uneven patch at Ghodbunder Road and came under a passing truck. Dinu Behra, a local chai vendor, said, "It is only because of these potholes and uneven patches on the road that accidents happen. Every single day there are incidents of bikes skidding here. I have kept a basic first aid box now for these people."
Vikrant Das, the father of Vedant, said, "He was my only son and our life. We were going for Rakshabandhan. Near Kasarvadavali, there is a gap between the new road and the old one. I could not control my bike while going over the gap and it skidded, throwing Vedant on to the road when a tempo coming from behind ran over him," he said.
"The tempo driver immediately applied the brakes but it was too late. We rushed him to the nearby Vedant hospital where he was declared dead during treatment. My wife also suffered a serious injury and needs surgery to her hand and sp..
Mumbai diary: Saturday Dossier
Lost for words
(From left) MP Gopal Shetty, Union Minister for Road Transport & Highways Nitin Gadkari, and Minister of State for Education Vinod Tawde, at a ceremony in Borivali West on Friday. Pic /Sameer Markande
Vegan ivory comes to Mumbai
The buttons are made using the corozo nut of the fruit found in the forests
The upcoming fashion week in Lower Parel will introduce a new, sustainable product on ramps, thanks to a collaboration between Pro Ecuador and sustainable fashion label. The collection will have buttons, embellishments and accessories made using a vegan ivory called corozo, which comes from a native wild palm that grows in the Ecuadorian rainforest. Called Tagua in the South American country, corozo had been the go-to material for buttons since the 1860s, till the appearance of plastic around the 1940s. Ecuador is the only place that produces and exports corozo blanks, which are used to make eco-friendly buttons. "The corozo nut that is extracted from the fruit is col..
China ready to 'quell unrest swiftly' in crisis-hit HK
Art director's murder: Victim may have been killed for his art works
Mumbai Diary: Friday Dossier
%20(1).jpg)
%20(1).jpg)
