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What you’re seeing is not a casting call for Gandhi: The Musical, nor is it a collection of Mahatma Gandhi clones popping out of some strange moustachioed alternate dimension, but rather the making of a world record!
To mark the 64th anniversary of Gandhi’s passing, 485 kids gathered together to celebrate their fallen leader by dressing up like him, complete with glasses, moustache and bald cap, and in doing so set a world record.
I wonder if any of the students who took place in the world record costume party went on to become Groucho Marx impersonators?
In
2012, and Keith Pariat is fighting for equal rights for men in Meghalaya,
India. You read that right: men. See, in that part of the world, women
rule:
Timothy Allen wrote the intriguing article over at the BBC: LinkMr Pariat, who ignored age-old customs by taking his father's surname is adamant that matriliny is breeding generations of Khasi men who fall short of their inherent potential, citing alcoholism and drug abuse among its negative side-effects.
"If you want to know how much the Khasis favour women just take a trip to the labour ward at the hospital," he says.
"If it's a girl, there will be great cheers from the family outside. If it's a boy, you will hear them mutter politely that, 'Whatever God gives us is quite all right.'"
That, Neatoramanauts, is the 2,065 miles-long border fence between India and Pakistan:
A striking feature is the line of lights, with a distinctly orange hue, snaking across the center of the image. It appears to be more continuous and brighter than most highways in the view. This is the fenced and floodlit border zone between India and Pakistan. The fence is designed to discourage smuggling and arms trafficking. A similar fenced zone separates India’s eastern border from Bangladesh (not visible).
The photo was taken by the crew at the International Space Station: Link - via TYWKIWDBI
A homeless man once approached me in a grocery store parking lot and asked me to buy maxi pads for his wife. I understood the importance and did so right away. If a woman can’t afford maxi pads, then she’s going to have a bad time. That’s why Arunachalam Muruganantham decided to invent a maxi pad that was affordable and accessible for India’s rural poor who used rags, leaves, and newspapers as substitutes.
He devised a prototype and set about trying to find female test subjects. His failed efforts cost him greatly:
He tried to get female medical students to wear them and fill out feedback sheets, but no woman wanted to talk to a man about such a taboo topic. His wife, thinking his project was all an excuse to meet younger women, left him. After repeated unsuccessful research attempts, including wearing panties with his do-it-yourself uterus, he eventually hit upon the idea of distributing free napkins to the students and collecting the used ones for study. That was the last straw for his mother. When she encountered a storeroom full of bloody sanitary napkins, she left too.
Muruganantham discovered that turning pine wood into a maxi pad is actually a complex and expensive process, so he spent years trying to simplify and cheapen it. He was successful:
Powered by electricity and foot pedals, the machine de-fibers the cellulose, compresses it into napkin form, seals it with non-woven fabrics, and finally sterilizes it with ultraviolet light. He can now make 1,000 napkins a day, which retail for about $.25 for a package of eight.
Though he’s won numerous awards (and won his wife back) he doesn’t sell his product commercially. “It’s a service,” he says. His company, Jayaashree Industries, helps rural women buy one of the $2,500 machines through NGOs, government loans, and rural self-help groups. “My vision is to make India a 100% napkin-using country,” said Muruganantham at the INK conference in Jaipur. “We can create 1 million employment opportunities for rural women and expand the model to other developing nations.” Today, there are about 600 machines deployed in 23 states across India and in a few countries abroad.
Link -via Gizmodo | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user scaredy_cat
We read about the adventures of Dave Prager and his wife Jenny on their blog Our Delhi Struggle, which we’ve linked to several times here at Neatorama. Now Prager’s book, Delirious Delhi, is available for purchase, and he’s launched a blog about the book, in which you can follow his adventures in publicity and read some excerpts as well. Link
The guys start out with light, easy tricks such as smashing fluorescent bulbs on themselves and slapping each other with sledgehammers. Then they get serious about their routine. It ends with a human pyramid on spiked boards and one guy on top of it waving the Indian flag in the weirdest and greatest display of patriotism the world has seen.
-via Kottke
Before
they say yes to the dress, a growing number of Indians are saying yes
to "wedding detectives":
Agencies say they've seen a huge rise in pre-matrimonial investigations to check a suitor's background, because more people are meeting online and families are less involved.
"It's not spying, we just wanted to know about my sister's boyfriend before she married him," says Anita (not her real name). She hired a private investigator to verify her now brother-in-law's background. Her sister met and fell in love with him at work, but Anita and her parents wanted to "authenticate" his family's status and finances before the wedding went ahead.
She enlisted the services of one of India's many pre-matrimonial detective agencies, which spent a month drawing up a report into his earnings, family history and past relationships, among other things.
"He told us he was from a good family, but we needed to ensure he was telling the truth.
"Earlier in India with arranged marriages which were set up by the family, relatives would know about a partner, but now you don't know if he's married or has children or whatever, so we needed to hire someone to check all this," says Anita, adding her still-happily-married sister never knew about the detectives.
Link (Photo: Shutterstock)
The Kathputli Colony is a community of performers: formerly itinerant magicians, puppeteers, acrobats, and others that settled into an area in West Delhi about 50 years ago. Most are poor.
But amidst the squalor is a remarkable tale of slum dwellers who have lived lives of the lowest degradation and of the highest luxury. Perplexing as it may sound, the Indian government bandies the community’s greatest puppeteers and magicians around the world anytime they needs to showcase the cultural excellence of India.
As the filmmakers tell us, “you’ll sit in someone’s ramshackle home and watch as they flip through photo albums where they are pictured alongside [former Prime Minister] Rajeev Gandhi or Laura Bush.”
But now the land has been sold to a developer who plans to bulldoze the slums and set up a shopping mall. The plight of the Kathputli Colony is shown in a video called Tomorrow We Disappear, which you can see, along with more pictures, at Atlas Obscura. Link -Thanks, Seth!
(Image credit: Joshua Cogan)
For more than fifty years after the formation of the Indian Railways in 1857, there was one crucial element that was missing on the nation's trains: toilets.
Passengers had to wait till till the stations to answer the call of nature, and it was not until a passenger named Okhil Chandra Sen wrote this angry yet amusing letter in 1909 that toilets were installed on Indian trains.
So if you're in India, and you have to go to the bathroom aboard one of their trains, you have Mr. Sen to thank:
Image: Richard Fellowes
From the notable Letters of Note
All this time kids have been singing about the London Bridge falling down, but it turns out it’s the Taj Mahal that’s in trouble.
That’s right, if you’ve always wanted to see the stunning Indian landmark, you’d better make plans to see it soon because experts are warning that it could fall down in as little as two years thanks to a crumbling wooden foundation. Cracks are already showing up in the monument’s marble walls.
Have you seen the Taj Mahal? If so, is it worth a visit in your opinion?
Link Via Flavorwire
We've got Books on Wheels, so why not the Internet on Wheels? Here comes the Google Internet Bus, a free, mobile cybercafe that roams the backroads of India, bringing the joy of the Interweb to many:
LIKE the travelling fairs that still roam India, a snazzy white bus trundles along the subcontinent's B-roads, stopping in small towns for a few days at a time and inviting locals into another world. But in place of tightrope-walking girls and performing monkeys, its main attraction is access to the internet. For some visitors, it is their first time online.
The Google Internet bus is a free, mobile cybercafe dreamed up by the search giant and run in association with BSNL, a large state-owned internet service provider (ISP). It has covered over 43,000km and passed through 120 towns in 11 states since it hit the road on February 3rd, 2009. Google estimates that 1.6m people have been offered their first online experience as a result. Of those, 100,000 have signed up for an internet connection of their own.
There is, however, a dark side to the project:
Like a high-school drug dealer, though admittedly less nefarious, the idea is to hook them young and keep them coming back. In return for its efforts, Google says it gains a better understanding of their needs. That, in turn, lets it develop products for the potentially huge local market.
India lags behind many other countries in computer technology. Only half of the colleges in that nation have access to the Internet. To broaden computer and especially Internet access, the Indian government is now selling a simple tablet computer called the Aakash at a subsidized rate of $35 each:
The 13-ounce touch-screen device can handle basic computing, including email, social networking, surfing, online banking, instant messaging and multimedia. The stripped-down system uses Google’s Android 2.2 operating system and comes with headphones, Wi-Fi access, two USB slots, 256 megabytes of internal memory and a 7-inch screen. It is not considered on the same level of the more advanced tablets available to consumers.
“This will allow basic computing beyond the mobile phone,” said Vishal Tripathi, an analyst with Gartner, a high-tech research firm.
Although the tablets were designed in the UK, they’re being assembled in India in the hope of spurring domestic production of computer hardware.
Link -via Geekologie | Photo: Gurinder Osan/AP
With waterborne illnesses affecting 40 million Indians each year, Sarvarjal has targeted a way to meet the need for clean water. The water “ATMs” are solar powered and franchised throughout villages. A liter of water on the average Indian’s income of $.60 a day is $.006 or less.
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This stomach churning tale is of an otherwise healthy man who went to the hospital suffering from abdominal pains. Only the doctors informed the father of two and farmer that he had a full set of female reproductive organs.
Doctors suspected a normal hernia, but when they carried out an exploratory operation they were shocked to discover it had been caused by a female uterus, ovaries, Fallopian tubes, a cervix and underdeveloped vaginal tissue.
Dr Pramod Kumar Shrivastava, a surgeon at the Chhindwara district hospital said the patient had external male organs, was fit from working in the fields, and lived a normal life.
What did you do for a summer job? Andrew Marantz got himself something quite unique: he worked at an Indian call center. Did you get your printer fixed over the phone? Talked to someone about refinancing your mortgage? Perhaps you’ve spoken to someone like him.
Andrew told his tale over at Mother Jones, which includes some rather interesting observations about Australian (apparently they’re touchy about their pets) and American cultures:
Next is "culture training," in which trainees memorize colloquialisms and state capitals, study clips of Seinfeld and photos of Walmarts, and eat in cafeterias serving paneer burgers and pizza topped with lamb pepperoni. Trainers aim to impart something they call "international culture"—which is, of course, no culture at all, but a garbled hybrid of Indian and Western signifiers designed to be recognizable to everyone and familiar to no one. The result is a comically botched translation—a multibillion dollar game of telephone. "The most marketable skill in India today," the Guardian wrote in 2003, "is the ability to abandon your identity and slip into someone else’s."
Link – via metafilter
The next time you get an Indian talking from a call center on your customer service call, don’t get too upset. Instead, have pity as your counterpart may soon be talking from jail!
For a man serving a life sentence for murder, Pradeep Deburma has a slightly unlikely dream: to work in a call centre like hundreds of thousands of other young ambitious Indians. Even more improbably, he has every chance of realising it while still behind bars.
Deburma, 24, is detained in a high-security prison near Hyderabad which is launching an innovative scheme to turn convicts into "outsourcing providers" for local firms and eventually, it is hoped, international clients.
The scheme is in its early stages, with prisoners being trained in basic data entry skills. Jail authorities hope that inmates will soon be just as likely to tap at a keyboard as dig vegetables, make carpets or stitch uniforms.
"We have got so many computer literates and professionals in our prison," said Gopinath Reddy, director general of prisons in the state of Andhra Pradesh.
Talk about being chained to the desk! Jason Burke of The Guardian has more: Link (Photo: Jason Burke)
Street sweeping isn’t a glamorous job anywhere, but in India’s ancient walled city of Ahmadabad, which is famous for its jewelry, it’s a golden job of sorts:
Gohel isn’t a street cleaner. She’s a dhul dhoya, a dust washer. And not just any dirt. Although the streets in India aren’t exactly paved with gold, a few in Ahmadabad are at least flecked with it.
Motivating her are the estimated 5,000 gold and silver shops in this western city. As the 40,000 workers from the shops come and go, flecks of gold fall from their hair and clothes, to be scooped up by Gohel and other dhul dhoyas. Some enterprising collectors even follow workers home, raiding their sewer pipes for the muck from their showers. [...]
Once she and her mother separate the gold-specked dirt from the betel nut wrappers, cow manure, stained newspapers and other trash, it’s sold for about $8 per bag.
Mark Magnier of the Los Angeles Times has the story: Link
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Jenny and Dave usually write about impressions of India on their American sensibilities. Now they are turning the tables, and blogging about how the United States appears to those who arrive for the first time from India. They followed the stories of two visitors, and then opened up comments for more experiences. One commenter said:
During my first visit to the USA I was put up at Hotel Hilton Garden Inn in Atlanta…being from India where generally there is only one hotel of any chain no matter how big … it was a shock for me when my cabbie drove me across the city for half an hour and I spotted 7 different hiltons before I reached the one where I was booked. I could spot the same pattern repeating every few miles … same Mc Donalds and KFC’s … same walmarts, circuit city and best buys …. it was very weird
If you have a story about your first thoughts upon arriving in the U.S, you are welcome to leave a comment here or at Our Delhi Struggle. Link -Thanks, Dave!
(Image credit: Flickr user Nick Sherman)
Photo: Johntrathome [Flickr]
You’re looking at the Blue City of Jodhpur, India. Why are there so many blue houses? Kuriositas explains:
It is thought that Brahmins – members of the priestly class – first took to coloring their houses blue (yet perhaps it should really be called indigo) to signify their domicile and to set them apart from the rest of the population. Soon, however, the rest of the population followed suit. History does not tell us which brave non-Brahmin was the first to do it, yet it happened and since that day the people of Jodhpur have steadfastly maintained this tradition.
Ask a local why all the houses are painted thus and the usual reply is that the color keeps the interiors cool and fends of mosquitoes. Yet if this truly worked then it would be quite likely that the whole subcontinent would be awash in various hues of indigo.
More likely is symbolism. Although an unscientific response, what answer would most give when asked the color of water? It is likely that the ubiquitous blueness of Jodhpur is an exuberant display of human resilience against the stark Thar desert which surrounds the town. Against the bleak backdrop of parched brown earth the blue city exerts itself magnificently.
When you’ve got a deity as powerful as the Lord Shani, who needs locks? (I mean, according to Wikipedia, when Shani opened his eyes as a baby for the very first time, the sun went into an eclipse.)
That’s what the management of the United Commercial Bank in Shani Shinganapur, Maharashtra, India, thought when they opened the first lockless bank:
"We took note of the general belief and faith of the people. Ever since the most revered temple came into existence several years ago, the village has not witnessed a single crime. In fact, all houses in the entire village have no doors. We took the risk and started the lockless bank a week ago," a senior bank official said. [...]
Gadakh explained that, by and large, it is believed that because of Lord Shani’s power, the village has not witnessed a single theft or robbery in the recent past. "People here fear that if there is a theft or robbery, then the culprit and their family have to bear the wrath of Lord Shani," he said.
Meanwhile, the cops aren’t too happy:
… unhappy local cops said the branch has been started in violation of norms prescribed by the Centre. "In view of increasing bank robberies, the Centre has made it mandatory for all banks to provide state-of-the-art security. If a bank opens a lockless branch, it amounts to a breach of conditions. We will take it up with the DGP and RBI," a senior police official said.
In Korawan, a remote area of India, there’s a bank that allows people to deposit goats as savings, or borrow goats on credit. Local coordinator Subedar Singh explained how it works:
“Wives of these people help them in crushing stones and breed two-three goats for additional income,” Singh said.
“Though the area is best suited for goat breeding, no effort was made to establish it as a full fledged business activity,” he said.
“We provide goats to women having interest in taking up breeding as a full-time activity as loan. When a goat gives birth to kids, generally two to three in numbers, one of them is deposited with the bank again,” Prema explained.
Goats in the bank are medically examined every week.
“In case a goat dies, then it is either replaced from the market or from the bank depending upon the availability,” Prema said.
Link via J-Walk Blog | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user Pete Markham used under Creative Commons license
India has deployed large langur monkeys in Delhi to serve as security guards during the upcoming Commonwealth Games. They will chase smaller monkeys away from sporting venues in the city:
From Wednesday, 10 langurs will be put on duty outside several Games venues in the Indian capital, with the swimming complex seen as particularly vulnerable to monkey misbehavior, an official said.
The New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) has a regular team of 28 langurs which are used to scare away their weaker brethren in VIP areas of the city.[...]
Monkeys are a common sight in the verdant Indian capital, where they routinely scamper through government offices, courts and even police stations and hospitals.
Link via Hit & Run | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user mckaysavage used under Creative Commons license
Well, if you think about it, many of us drink cow’s milk, so this Indian villager is just returning the favor:
Since the death of the calf’s mother when it was only three days old, Chouthi Bai has breastfed the animal three or four times a day.
"After her mother died, I held her in my arms and breastfed her. I nurtured her by feeding her my milk. She was so young when the cow died. For me there is no difference between a calf and an infant," Bai, a resident of Kilchu village in India’s desert state of Rajasthan, said on Saturday.
Link [video clip in the article shows breastfeeding in action] – Thanks Tiffany!
Have you ever seen a squirrel like this? You might, in the forests of India. This is Ratufa indica, or the Malabar Giant Squirrel. They grow up to 16 inches long, and that doesn’t count the tail! Learn more about the Malabar Giant Squirrel at The Ark in Space. Link
(Image credit: Wikimedia user Bishancm)
How much does that iPad cost again? It’s going to have stiff competition from this $35 Tablet computer from India.
The $35 tablet computer made headlines a few weeks ago, and some had dismissed it as vaporware. Now, NDTV has a video clip of a prototype of the tablet computer in action: Link [embedded YouTube]
Apparently, pole dancing means something completely different in India. For one, it’s for dudes. Granted, they probably have had their testicles removed (I can’t explain it otherwise) but these guys have mad skillz.
It’s actually called mallakhamb (translation: pole gymnastics) and is quite a competitive sport in India.
Let’s make this an Olympics sport! Who’s with me? Link
Tired of dealing with the rising number of accidents on the road, Indian police came upon a novel (and they say, surprisingly effective) approach: harnessing the positive-power of pyramids!
The stretch of the Mumbai-Kolkata National Highway near Nagpur city was among 12 spots identified as most accident-prone but now the stretch is considered safe. “No accidents have occurred in these accident-prone spots in the past six months,” Bernama quoted Nagpur Commissioner of Police (Rural) Yashasvi Yadav as saying.
“I am no great propagator of Vasthu Sastra but, in the public interest, we will try to adopt new ideas,” he said. If the experiment proved successful, police would install Vasthu pyramids in 30 to 40 “killer” stretches, he added.
This may sound illogical to some people but not for Nagpur police who are serious about saving lives on the roads. The number of accidents in the city, home to 2.5 million people, had been increasing since 2003, with about 500 human casualties on the road a year.
“Most accidents happen because of the negative energy surrounding these places. Suicides, accidents and murders happen when people are surrounded by negative energy. Using pyramids, we can try to correct the negative energy,” said Vasthu expert Sushil Fatehpuria, 50, who offered his service for free to Nagpur police.
“We’d be lying if we didn’t admit skin-based advantages are bestowed on foreigners in India. Autorickshaw drivers, for instance, would hone in on us at the expense of everyone else waving their arms at them. (And they’d give us choice grumbles when we’d refuse to cut ahead of those who’d been bypassed their rightful ride.) The sidewalk chaiwallah near my office would always boil a fresh batch for me, even as he poured from a premade kettle for the factory workers who arrived the same time as I did. And while the guards at Saket Citywalk would grope us for poorly-hidden bombs just like every Indian shopper — as if Al Qaeda’s training manuals advised keeping their explosives in their front pockets — their hands always seemed to linger more tenderly with us.”
Wait, that’s not a good thing.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by mmmmdave1870.
More than 1 billion people of diverse cultures, languages and religions are united by India’s national borders. Between 2010 and 2011, the country’s census will not only count and categorize them by gender, religion and occupation, but also probe their access to technology, toilets and personal transport. In a monumental orchestration, aided by a newly designed census form, government departments, local councils and 2.5 million census collectors will continue the increasingly complex national effort to tally India’s inhabitants, which it has conducted every decade since the late 1800s.
What an enormous undertaking! 2.5 million census collectors and forms in 16 different languages! This article focuses on the challenges involved in designing a census form that is user-friendly to a huge and diverse population.
Before the "green" movement became trendy, there is a village in India that takes eco-conservation to the level of religion.
Bishnois, a community following the tenets prescribed by Jambeshwar in the 15th century, teaches its followers to respect nature, be kind to animals and not to cut trees. The followers are so principled as to lay down their lives to protect a tree.
Bishnois do not cut or lop green trees; instead they use dried cow dung as fuel. They do not cremate their dead as Hindus normally do, because it involves the use of firewood; instead, they bury them. Agriculture is the mainstay of the people; they also carve wood during the time they are not busy on their fields. The required wood comes from trees that have have fallen during storms. Each Bishnoi family creates a tank in their field to provide water for black bucks and antelopes
in the arid summer months. They maintain groves for the animals to graze and birds to feed. Solar energy is used to extract underground water to irrigate the groves. The region where they live is a desert (Thar desert), and these groves help to recharge rain water in the aquifers in the desert.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by ushankari.
