28-year-old Rita Sarkar’s husband frequently complained about her family’s failure to pay her dowry after their wedding, but she never imagined he would go as far as stealing one of her kidneys to make up for the unpaid dowry. She was wrong.

The young woman recently told reporters that she had been the victim of domestic abuse from her husband and his family over her unpaid dowry for many years. She had gotten used to it, but what Rita didn’t know was that her husband, Biswajit Sarkar, would stop at nothing to get his hands on the money he felt he was owned. So when an opportunity to steal one of his wife’s kidneys presented itself, the man did not hesitate.

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A devoted father in the eastern Indian state of Orissa has single-handedly constructed an 8-km (5 miles) stretch of mountain road so that his children, who live away from home for school, can visit him more frequently. For the past two years Jalandhar Nayak, 45, set out every morning with an ax and crowbar and spent up to eight hours a day cutting rocks and moving boulders.

Nayak, who has never received formal education himself, lives in an isolated village, 10 km (6 miles) from the residential school where his three sons study. It would be a small distance with proper roads, but the commute takes the sons three hours as their route includes a trek across five hills to reach their home. “My children find it difficult to walk on the narrow and stony path while going to their school,” the man recently told Kalinga TV. “I often saw them stumbling against the stones, and I decided to carve a road through the mountain so that they can walk freely.”

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They say that love brings out the best in people, but there are times when it just makes them commit unspeakable acts, murder included. This was the route taken by two Indian lovers, who hatched a plot worthy of a crime thriller. Swathi, 27, and her lover Rajesh murdered her husband and disposed of his body by throwing it away in a forest. In order to be together and claim the assets of the victim, they took another drastic step: Swathi used acid on Rajesh’s face to disfigure him and pass him off as her murdered husband.

The evil deed was comitted on November 27, when the lovers injected Swathi’s husband, 32-year-old Sudhakar Reddy of Nagarkurnool, with an anesthetic and then killed him with an iron rod. They later transported the body in a car trunk and dumped it in a Nawabpet forest area in the Mahbubnagar district.

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One of India’s largest coal reserves, the Jharia coalfield, situated in the Dhanbad district of Jharkhand, is the site of one of the longest-burning fires in the world. The area has been burning continuously for over 100 years.

Mining in the Jharia coalfields, which cover over 100 square miles, began in the late 1800s, under British rule. The first detected fire broke out in 1916, but by the 1980s over 70 blazes had sprouted up, and none of them could be contained, let alone extinguished. As they were often deep underground, they were left to smolder in the hope that they would eventually burn out on their own. Unfortunately, a new mining operation in 1973 smothered that hope.

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An Indian driver has received the Manush Sanman award for not honking once in the past 18 years. It may seem a strange award, but India is well known for the chaos of its roads, and the typical driver’s almost constant use of the car horn. Dipak Das, a Kolkata-based driver, believes that India can change this and eventually achieve peaceful, quiet roads.

Honking is a huge part of the driving experience in India, as people pretty much use them as an alternative to side mirrors. Some cars don’t even have side mirrors, while others have them folded, as to extend them outward could lead to collisions with other vehicles. Instead, Indian motorists honk incessantly to avoid collisions on the road where traffic is chaotic and so dense that cars appear just about to bump into each other at all times. Drivers honk to indicate that they’re about to make a pass or to indicate that another driver is too close. This creates unbearable noise pollution that many consider hugely detrimental to Indian society.

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Hotel owners, beware: sometimes respectable-looking, well-behaved guests are after your room fixtures! An Indian man actually made a career of it, taking off with more than 120 TV sets from hotels over a period of four months.

Vasudev Nanaiah, 37, was arrested last month and charged with 21 counts of theft after wreaking havoc among budget hotels in southern India by stealing an impressive number of TV sets from the rooms he booked. The TV pilferer would reserve the rooms by telephone and always make a small advance payment, informing the staff that he would be staying there for several days, in order to avoid suspicion. Nanaiah always arrived with bulky suitcases in tow, and in case they proved too small for the targeted TVs, he would simply go out and buy new ones.

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There’s strange eating habits and then there’s crazy eating habits. Sometimes the latter can be life-threatening, as in the case of 35-year-old Maksud Khan. The Indian man was recently admitted into hospital on suspicions of having severe food poisoning, but as it turned out, his three months of stomach pains were the result of having seven kilos (15.4 pounds) of foreign objects in his belly, including 263 metal coins.

The doctors who took Khan’s case got a massive shock when an endoscopy revealed that food poisoning had nothing to do with the problem. The surgeons at Satna’s Sanjay Gandhi Hospital in the state of Madhya Pradesh rushed Khan to the operating room and proceeded to extract 263 coins, 100 nails, a hefty piece of rusted iron shackle, dozens of razor blades, glass shards, and stones from his stomach.

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A 35-year-old Indian widow claims needles, nails, and syringes come out of her legs, and that she has no idea how they got there. Anusuiya, from a small village in Fatehpur district of Uttar Pradesh in Northern India, says that the bizarre phenomenon has been occurring since 2012 and that she has been in unbearable pain ever since.

Anusuiya Devi claims that she develops small cysts on her legs which eventually burst and discharge a fluid which pushes out a needle or nail. She has encountered difficulties walking, standing, and sitting, but doctors refuse to help her as they believe that she is inserting the needles herself, an accusation that she denies. The widow insists that she has never self-harmed, a claim that is backed up by her brother Awadhesh Kumar, who has lived with her for the last seven years. He does not believe his sister harms herself or does anything to her legs.

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A small school in rural India is gaining attention over the fact that all 300 students are ambidextrous. Data shows that only one percent of the global population is ambidextrous, but the ambitious founder of Veena Vandini School, in Madhya Pradesh, is aiming to change that, starting at a local level.

Former soldier and Veena Vandini School founder VP Sharma stated that he was inspired to focus on ambidexterity training by India’s first president Rajendra Prasad (in office from 1950 to 1962) who was ambidextrous. “I read in a magazine that Dr. Rajendra Prasad India’s first president used to write with both hands. This inspired me to give it a try,” Mr. Sharma said. “Later when I launched my school at my native village, I tried training the students.”

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Sexual assault against women is a really big problem in India, as hardly a day goes by without a case being reported in the media. Until authorities decide to take it seriously and adopt a proactive approach, a 18-year-old teenage boy is trying to help women fight back against aggressors by literally giving them the shock of their life.  

After witnessing multiple instances of disturbing and life-changing acts of violence against women, as well as attending many protests with his mother demanding change, Siddharth Mandala, a student from Telengana, India decided he needed to do something himself. He spent years working on the “ElectroShoe”, a unique type of anti-sexual assault footwear that electrocutes attackers by inflicting 0.1 Ampere of electricity while also alerting police and family members that the wearer is in danger. All the wearer has to do is kick the perpetrator.

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You think obtaining an academic degree is a daunting task? Try 145. Professor VN Parthiban, who teaches in Chennai, India, has obtained 145 degrees over the last 30 years and has no plans to stop studying anytime soon.

Parthiban’s journey started after he struggled with his first degree. He was a disorganized student who would often mix up course work and study for the wrong test – leading him to flunk major exams and projects. After he finally graduated, Parthiban got a job working for the Judiciary Department, but the desire to study never completely went away. Enticed by all the amazing subjects and areas of study that were available to him in university, Parthiban decided to go back and seek a second degree. And then a third. And then 142 more.

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Saraswati Bai, a 75-year-old woman from India, claims that she hasn’t consumed a grain of rice, or any other solid food, for that matter, in the last 60 years. Apart from one banana a week – eaten only occasionally – she survives on water and tea alone.

Saraswati remembers that she used to have a normal diet until she got a Typhoid infection, right after her first son was born, 60 years ago. She couldn’t keep anything down and suffered severe stomach aches, so she gave up eating completely. As her condition improved, she started taking small sips of tea, but her appetite never returned. Concerned about both her well-being and that of their son, her husband Dwarka Prasad Patikar, tried convincing her to start eating, but she just couldn’t do it. She felt fine living on water and tea alone, and continues to do so today.

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An 11-year-old from the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh has allegedly been popping out 35 to 40 small white pebbles of what looks like cotton from her eyes, every day for over two weeks.

Manasi, a sixth-grader from the village of Pachkhura, apparently started producing the bizarre white “cotton tears” on August 25, and her father, as well as the locals are convinced that she is possessed by a ghost. Villagers have been avoiding the girl and her family ever since word got out about her condition, fearing divine wrath, and her parents are so superstitious that they have yet to consult an ophthalmologist.

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Harsukh Bhai Dobariya, of Gujarat, India, is very popular with birds. Every day, between 2,500 and 3,000 parrots and sparrows visit his 4-acre farm to feed on tasty millet cobs and build their nests away from predators. Nicknamed “The Birdman”, Dobariya has spent the last 17 years of his life looking out for the birds and transforming his land into a safe ecosystem for them.

It all started in the year 2000, when Harsukh Bhai Dobariya suffered a leg fracture on his property in the Junagadh district of Gujarat, and had to spend most of his time in bed. After a neighbor came to buy some pearl millet from him, he had the idea to hang a millet cob on his balcony, which soon caught the attention of a parrot. The next day, two parrots came to feast on the delicious treat, then three, four, and within a month, there were already 100-150 parrots and sparrows visiting him every day.

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Saja Pahad, a small village in Chhattisgarh, India, has been dealing with severe water shortages for as long as anyone can remember. With only two wells available, locals were barely able to secure enough water to feed their cattle, let alone irrigate their crops. Villagers didn’t know what to do and the government ignored their plight, but one “crazy” teenager took matters into his own hands.

Shyam Lal was only 15-years-old when he took it upon himself to solve his village’s water problem. He identified a spot in a nearby forest and decided to dig a pond to collect rainfall that could then be used by the entire village. Lal shared his idea with the rest of Saja Pahad, but instead of volunteering to help, they just laughed at his crazy plan and called him a lunatic. But the young man didn’t let the people’s reaction get him down. Instead, he grabbed a spade and started digging the pond himself. He kept on digging for the next 27 years.

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