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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 
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 
Charlie Chaplin has a fan club in Adipur, Gujarat, India called the Charlie Circle. A couple hundred local people are members, and have a celebration every year on April 16th, Chaplin’s birthday. For this year’s party, more than 100 people attended dressed as Chaplin’s character the Little Tramp. The man behind the town’s fascination with the actor is film buff Ashok Aswani, who became a Chaplin fan in 1966 when he watch The Gold Rush four times in one day.
The young man, his life changed by Chaplin’s cinema, dropped out of college and applied for an actor’s course in India’s most famous cinema school in the western city of Pune. He passed the admission test, joined the school but was thrown out after six months when he failed his tests.
Returning to Adipur, Mr Aswani opened the Charlie Circle club in 1973. He became a practitioner of indigenous medicine, giving away free Chaplin CDs with his potions.
The annual celebration includes a street party and procession and the showing of a Chaplin film. Link -via Fortean Times
(image credit: Sanjoy Ghosh)
Bharti Kumari of Kusumbhara, Bihar, India is the headmistress of the village school at the age of twelve! Every day, she walks two miles to another village to attend school from 10AM to 3PM. Before and after her own classes, she teaches language and math to 50 village children between the ages of five and ten.
Her pupils are among the 10 million Indian children who are outside the state education system because their parents are so poor that they need them to work or no schools are nearby. Earlier this month the Indian government pledged £3.6 billion for a “right to education” scheme which aims to provide free schooling for all.
Kumari has decided she wants to be a teacher, even after she grows up. Link -via Arbroath
For years, two nations have both claimed the territory of an uninhabited island the Bangladeshis called South Talpatti Island and the Indians called New Moore Island. The dispute is now moot, as the island has vanished underwater.
“What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming,” said Professor Sugata Hazra of the School of Oceanographic Studies at Jadavpur University in Calcutta.
Anyone wishing to visit now, he observed, would have to think of travelling by submarine.
The island never rose more than about six feet above sea level. Professor Hazra predicts more islands in the Indian Ocean will vanish as sea levels rise. Link -via J-Walk Blog
India’s bhut jolokia is acknowledged by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s spiciest chili. That nation’s military has responded by developing a grenade that carries small quantities of it:
It has more than 1,000,000 Scoville units, the scientific measurement of a chili’s spiciness. Classic Tabasco sauce ranges from 2,500 to 5,000 Scoville units, while jalapeno peppers measure anywhere from 2,500 to 8,000.
“The chili grenade has been found fit for use after trials in Indian defense laboratories, a fact confirmed by scientists at the Defense Research and Development Organization,” Col. R. Kalia, a defense spokesman in the northeastern state of Assam, told The Associated Press.
“This is definitely going to be an effective nontoxic weapon because its pungent smell can choke terrorists and force them out of their hide-outs,” R. B. Srivastava, the director of the Life Sciences Department at the New Delhi headquarters of the DRDO said.
Link via Say Uncle | Photo: (unrelated) US Department of Homeland Security
Neatorama readers may remember Lakshmi Tatma, the little girl who was born with eight limbs due to a headless parasitic twin. The twin was surgically removed two years ago. Lakshmi is now four years old and has started school, but her physical problems are not over.
Six months after the complex operation to remove Lakshmi’s parasitic twin, doctors discovered she had developed scoliosis, or a curvature of the spine.
Without a complex operation to correct her spine doctors have warned her back will be forced into increasingly severe deformities as she grows, possibly leaving her disabled.
Separately, Lakshmi requires an operation to ‘detether’ her spine after it was discovered she was born with abnormal tissue connecting the spinal cord to her nervous system.
In a further operation orthopaedic surgeons must perform a procedure to ‘close her hips’, which are set too far apart and result in an unusual ‘gaited’ walk.
The charity that looks after Lakshmi’s progress is stretched to its limit, so a fund has been set up for her future operations. Link -via Digg
Fumiko Nagano of the World Bank writes that petty bribery is a normal part of government bureaucracy in India. If you need some license or form or permission, you’ll probably have to pay a bribe. An organization attempting to reform this practice has begun distributing rupee notes with a designated value of zero, to be offered to government officials when they ask for money:
According to Anand, the idea was first conceived by an Indian physics professor at the University of Maryland, who, in his travels around India, realized how widespread bribery was and wanted to do something about it. He came up with the idea of printing zero-denomination notes and handing them out to officials whenever he was asked for kickbacks as a way to show his resistance. Anand took this idea further: to print them en masse, widely publicize them, and give them out to the Indian people. He thought these notes would be a way to get people to show their disapproval of public service delivery dependent on bribes. The notes did just that. The first batch of 25,000 notes were met with such demand that 5th Pillar has ended up distributing one million zero-rupee notes to date since it began this initiative. Along the way, the organization has collected many stories from people using them to successfully resist engaging in bribery.
One such story was our earlier case about the old lady and her troubles with the Revenue Department official over a land title. Fed up with requests for bribes and equipped with a zero rupee note, the old lady handed the note to the official. He was stunned. Remarkably, the official stood up from his seat, offered her a chair, offered her tea and gave her the title she had been seeking for the last year and a half to obtain without success. Had the zero rupee note reached the old lady sooner, her granddaughter could have started college on schedule and avoided the consequence of delaying her education for two years. In another experience, a corrupt official in a district in Tamil Nadu was so frightened on seeing the zero rupee note that he returned all the bribe money he had collected for establishing a new electricity connection back to the no longer compliant citizen.
Link via Marginal Revolution | Image: 5th Pillar
When Mother Teresa died in 1997, she was buried at the Missionaries of Charity headquarters in Calcutta. Now that she is expected to be canonized as a saint, the government of Albania has asked that her remains be disinterred and turned over to Albanian authorities. India has formally rejected the demand.
“Mother Teresa was an Indian citizen and she is resting in her own country, her own land,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Vishnu Prakash said.
A spokeswoman for the nun’s Missionaries of Charity described the Albanian request as “absurd”.
Mother Teresa, an ethnic Albanian, was born in Skopje, now part of Macedonia.
Correspondents say that the row over her resting place could develop into an ugly three-way squabble between India, where she worked most of her life, Albania where her parents came from and Macedonia where she lived the first 18 years of her life.
Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha said his country will continue the quest to regain Mother Teresa’s remains before the 100th anniversary of her birth next year. Link -via Arbroath
Our pal Asylum blog has a fantastic article about how some of the world’s most bizarre riots got started. Like this one in New Delhi, India in 2007, that was caused by … monkeys!
In New Delhi, where monkeys are a touch more revered and tolerated than they would be in most countries, rhesus macaques, numbering over 20,000 in the city, have a history of biting people. They’ve also been known to break into hospitals to pull out I.V. feeding tubes and drink the liquid themselves (because monkeys are diabolical like that). Somewhat more impressive is that the monkeys have a political agenda and actually killed the deputy mayor of New Delhi by pushing him off a balcony.
Unlike most riots, this one was fought the old-fashioned way, with more monkeys. Langurs, which are just bigger monkeys, have been brought into the city and strategically placed around important buildings to scare off the nuisance monkeys. Never has a more awesome solution to a problem been devised.
Check out the article here: 5 Unlikely Reason for Riots – Thanks Alex!
It’s like a modern day version of Captain Ahab’s quest for the white whale Moby Dick. But ickier. A whole lot ickier and much more intriguing.
Sam Miller, BBC’s former South Asia correspondent, has been obsessed with finding a man "whose dexterity and gall [he] admires beyond reason," … the New Delhi Poo Squirter:
I was in Connaught Place, in the heart of New Delhi, and as I emerged from an underpass a shoe-shine man came up to me, and whispered into my ear.
He then pointed at my right shoe on which sat, to my amazement, a small worm of brownish goo. He offered to wipe it off, but I knew that something was, well, afoot, and cleaned my shoe with a few leaves.
Some months later it happened again and I had a minor altercation with the shoe-shine man. Then one day, I decided I would take a photograph of the person who squirted my shoe. But I was daydreaming as I wandered through the underpass and was squirted again.
Link – via Cabinet of Wonders
Some jobs could be done by a trained monkey. So it’s all the more impressive that an untrained monkey on a farm in India herds 75 goats out to and back from the fields every day. National Geographic reports:
Martin K, Estate Manager- “She takes out the goats for grazing and brings them back. A shepherd is usually required to accompany the goats all day long and bring them back in these hills. But because of her, manpower can be spared. She is as good as a shepherd. The only thing is that she does not speak, but otherwise carries out all responsibilities.”
They say they feel confident that the goats will be safe when Mani accompanies them.
Mani is said to make a strange sound when she discovers a goat is missing or when danger lurks.
There’s a (non-embeddable) video of the monkey at the link.
image by flickr user eirikref used under creative commons license
The world’s cheapest car is set to go on sale in India as the first customer receives the key to the vehicle, handed to him personally by the chairman of the car company.
The Tata Nano, created by Tata Motors costs only 123,360 rupees ($2,531), with upgrades such as air conditioning and cup holders available for up to $3,536 more. The Nano is set to revolutionize the transport industry in India.
From the 203,000 people who pre-ordered the Nano, 100,000 of them were selected from a ballot to be the first to get their hands on the car.
With an engine of just 624 cubic centimeters, it is smaller than those found in motorcycles and has been compared to the European Smart Car and the Volkswagen Beetle.
The vehicle is set to come to the U.S. in two years…Just in time for us to be out of the recession?
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by pigjockey.
In India, a newly discovered color-changing frog has been worshipped as a god. Reji Kumar, the person who found it, keeps the frog in a glass jar at his home where hundreds of people come to see it every day.
Apart from the obvious biological findings this hopping lava lamp can provide, it also gives an additional insight as to how religions and spiritual groups can emerge. I don’t blame them either. Who needs color-saturating hallucinogens for spiritual transcendence when you have a kaleidoscopic animal?
I say this new rainbow frog will become the new symbol for racial equality, just as long as it doesn’t croak (which is actually a concern).
The frog was a dazzling white colour when Reji, who is from Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala, in south India, first spotted it.
Then it changed to yellow and had gone grey by the time he got it home.
“By night the frog was dark yellow, and then it became transparent so you could see its internal organs,” Reji, a life worker, reportedly said.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by robkullberg.
When other kids are going to kindergarten, the children of the nomadic Indian tribe of Vadi are also going to school of sorts. Except that the ABCs aren’t in the curriculum – instead, these kids are learning to be snake charmers with real cobras:
Divided between the sexes, the act of snake charming with traditional flute is the role of the men, while the Vadi women care for the snakes and handle them when their husbands or brothers are not around.
‘The training begins at two, the children then are then taught the ancient ways of snake charming until they are ready to take up their roles in our community,’ said chief snake charmer Babanath Mithunath Madari, 60.
‘At twelve the children will know everything that they can know about snakes.
‘They are then ready to continue the traditions of the Vadi tribe which can be stretched back over one thousands years to India’s great Raja’s (kings).’
The worldwide rate of twins is one in every 80 births. In India, the normal rate is lower, only one 250 births. But in the village of Kodinhi, in the Indian state of Kerala, there are at least 250 sets of twins in a population of 2,000 families. And the rate of twin births has been increasing over the past decades. Dr Krishnan Sribiju has been studying the phenomenon.
“Without access to detailed biochemical analysis equipment I cannot say for certain what the reason for the twinning is, but I feel that it is something to do with what the villagers eat and drink.
“If that is the case then maybe whatever is causing this exceptional level of twinning can be bottled and provide help for infertile couples.” Categorising the twin phenomenon as a naturally occurring anomaly, Dr Sribiju has ruled out genetic factors as the cause due to the localised nature of the village.
He also dismisses any suggestion that the unusual level of twins could be caused by an unknown pollutant pointing to the high number of healthy twins born without any deformities.
Preciously at Neatorama: the village of Brazilian Twins.
It doesn’t sound very appetizing. But the Cow Protection Department of the Rashtriya Sawyamseval Sangh wants to make a cola from cow urine, claiming that the soda would taste good, be healthy and could cure diseases, even cancer.
The drink is undergoing lab testing in Lucknow and the group hopes to have it on the market by the end of the year.
Dr. Donald Hensrud, chairman of the Division of Preventive Medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, remains skeptical of its supposed health benefits.
“I think I’m perfectly comfortable in saying that I’m aware of no data that cow’s urine– or any other species’ urine– holds any promise in treating or preventing cancer.”
– Dr. Donald Hensrud, Mayo Clinic
Link – via growabrain
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.
If you’re one of the millions of people practicing yoga for mental and physical health, you may soon run into legal trouble: a lot of the traditional poses are being patented and trademarked by Western yoga teachers.
So, India is fighting back: it has set up a team of yoga gurus and scientists to identify and patent all ancient yoga positions or asanas to stop "patent pirates."
… as the number of Western yoga teachers has grown, there has been a steady increase in patent applications claiming each pose in their class is not part of the ancient discipline of mind and body, but their own unique invention. In the United States alone, there have been more than 130 yoga-related patents, 150 copyrights and 2,300 trademarks. Now India’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library is being made available to patents offices throughout the world so they can establish whether the claim is a genuine innovation or "prior art" from Indian systems of medicine.
[...] The attempt by US teachers to patent traditional poses has caused disbelief and anger in India, where it has been practiced for around 6,000 years.
"Copyrights over yoga postures and trademarks on yoga tools have become rampant in the West. Till now, we have traced 130 yoga-related patents in the US. We hope to finish putting on record at least 1500 yoga postures by the end of 2009," said Dr V.P Gupta, of the CSIR, who created the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library.
Pramod Mutalik, who heads the little known Ram Sena and is now on bail after he was held following the attack, has said it is “not acceptable” for women to go to bars in India.
He has also said his men will protest against Valentine’s Day on Saturday.
The Facebook group urges its over 28,000 members to send pink chaddis (underpants) to Mutalik’s office on Valentines Day in protest. Link to story. Link to website. -via Arbroath
No motor? No problem! In India, this ferris wheel is powered by men climbing up and using their body weight to rotate the wheel.
I guess you’d want to try this ride early, since the operators must be exhausted at the end of the day!
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Christophe.
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by 
In a strange traditional ceremony, two 7 year-old girls in Tamil Nadu, India were married off to two frogs.
The ceremony, an annual feature during the Pongal (harvest) festival, is conducted “to prevent the outbreak of mysterious diseases in the village”.
The girls, Vigneswari and Masiakanni, dressed up in traditional bridal finery — gilded sarees and gold jewelery — married the frog ‘princes’ in separate, elaborate ceremonies at two different temples in the presence of hundreds of villagers.
These are two frogs that will not be turning into fairytale princes, they actually got released back into temple ponds after the ceremony. I wonder if the girls are still allowed to get married when they grow up.
Link Image Via Somegl [Flickr]
Photo: our_bangladesh [Flickr]
It took almost 20 years for the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan to build the Taj Mahal in the 1600s, but it took only 5 years for wealthy movie director Ahsanullah Moni to build his replica near Dhaka, Bangladesh:
He has imported marble and granite from Italy, diamonds from Belgium and used 160kg of bronze for the dome.
In support of his project, he said: "Everyone dreams about seeing the Taj Mahal but very few Bangladeshis can make the trip because it’s too expensive for them."
The Indians, however aren’t amused and are thinking of suing Moni for copyright infringement: Link | Reuter has the video – via Oddly Enough, Thanks Robert Basler !
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