Two Indian sisters recently got the shock of their lives after their 82-year-old mother showed up at their doorstep 40 years after they had laid her body to rest on the Ganges river, following a cobra bite.

It all started on a summer day in 1976, when 42-year-old Vilasa, a woman from Bidhoo village, India’s Kanpur district, went out into the fields to collect fodder for the family animals, as she had done countless time before. Only this time, she unknowingly got to close to a black cobra snake, and got bit. Upon returning home, her family immediately took her to a traditional healer, but his methods failed to alleviate the effects of the venom, and Vilasa soon lost consciousness.

Thinking she had died, her family wrapped the woman’s body in cloth, placed it on a wooden float and released into the sacred Ganges river, hoping it would bring her to life. Open-air cremation is practiced by millions of Indian Hindus, with the ashes of their loved-ones then scattered in holy bodies of water, but in the case of snake bites, some believe that the sacred river can wash away the poison from the body and bring the person back to life. It wasn’t something Vilasa’s family actually expected, though.

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Naveen, a 38-year-old a Sabarimala pilgrim claims he has found a friend for life in Malu, a stray dog who accompanied him on a 600-km walk from the Mookambika temple in Kollur,to the Sabarimala shrine in Pathanamthitta, India. Apart from keeping him company, the dog also protected his belongings and even woke him up when he overslept.

It was on the second day of his pilgrimage that Naveen met Malu. He had become worried about the stray dogs that would approach him, especially in the morning hours, shooing them away so they wouldn’t attempt to attack them, but he quickly realized that Malu was different. “It was after nearly 80 kilometers or so, that I noticed her. She walked towards me from the opposite direction and stopped when she reached right in front of me, the young Pilgrim recalls. “I did try shooing her off many times, but she would just not go.”

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In India, it is expected that the bride’s family organize and especially pay for the wedding, so when a young woman’s father (the main bread earner) dies, she can almost certainly forget about having a wedding, especially if she comes from a poor family. Most often than not, widowed mothers simply don’t have the means to marry their daughters. That’s where Indian real-estate tycoon Mahesh Savani comes in.

Ever since 2008, Mr. Savani has organized weddings for over 700 fatherless brides, not only paying for the event itself, but also giving each one of his new “daughters” a substantial dowry  (gold, jewelry, furniture, home appliances, etc.) worth around 400,000 rupees ($5,900). At each wedding, the successful businessman also steps up to play the role of their father and perform their ‘kanyadaan’ – the traditional ritual of giving away the bride. From that moment on, the girls become his daughters.

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45-year-old Rakesh Shukla is a talented software engineer and CEO of a successful tech company, but among India’s animal lovers he is known as “The Dog Father”, an exceptional man who founded the country’s most advanced dog rescue center and who personally takes care of 735 abandoned pooches that nobody else wants.

10 years ago, Rakesh and his wife founded The Writers Block, a technical communication outsourcing company which today works with some of the biggest names in the tech industry – Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.. The Bangalore-based company quickly became successful, and over the next few years the software engineer got to travel the world, buy expensive cars and lead the fancy lifestyle he always thought he wanted. But he still didn’t feel happy and fulfilled. It wasn’t until 2009, when Kavya, a beautiful Golden Retriever, came into his life that he truly felt that his life had meaning.

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Ajay Munot, a rich businessman in Maharashtra, India, has recently built and donated 90 houses to the poor, instead of spending the money on a lavish wedding for his daughter.

Munot had been planning to spend Rs 70-80 lakh ($115,000) on his daughter Shreya’s wedding, but after consulting with a local politician, he decided there was a better way to spend all that money. Apparently, the grains and cloth trader realized that investing in a one day event, including booking hotel rooms for all the guests was unnecessary, especially with all the poor people in need of real help. So he asked Prakash Bamb, a family friend and member of the Legislative Assembly for advice on how best to spend that money.

They both agreed that providing slum dwellers of their town with their own houses was the best idea. Munot began constructing 108 houses on two acres of land, with the goal of completing them by the day of his daughter’s wedding. He only managed to finish 90 of them by the big day, and the bride and groom, who were very supportive of the businessman’s initiative, were the ones who handed the keys to the carefully selected beneficiaries.

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In an effort to combat plastic pollution, Indian startup EnviGreen has come up with a combination of natural starch and vegetable oils that looks and feels just like plastic, but is 100 percent organic, biodegradable and eco-friendly. You can even dispose of such a “plastic” bag by eating it.

EnviGreen founder Ashwath Hedge came up with the idea for these revolutionary bags after seeing people struggling to find alternatives to plastic bags, following bans imposed by several Indian cities. “People were concerned bout how they would carry products from the market now. Everyone cannot afford a bag worth Rs. 5 or Rs. 15 to carry a kilogram of sugar,” he told The Better India. So the 25-year-old decided to work on something that would solve this problem while being environment-friendly.

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A team of doctors who recently performed surgery on an elderly woman suffering from severe gastrointestinal problems, were shocked to discover that her stomach was clogged with plastic threads that she had been eating for lack of actual food.

Tara Devi, a 52-year-old deaf-mute woman from the Sirmaur district of Himachal Pradesh, India, was brought to the emergency room of the regional hospital in Solan by a local who had noticed she was ill and suffering great pain. After running a series of tests, doctors spotted a sort of spherical mass tuck in her stomach, which they assumed was a large ball of hair and recommended immediate surgery to remove it. However, during the procedure, doctors discovered that what they had believed to be hair was actually a ball of tangled plastic threads from plastic gunny bags. Some of the plastic threads that formed the bird nest-like mass clogging up the woman’s intestines were reportedly up to 7-feet long.

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It’s not entirely unusual for bosses of successful companies to give out bonuses to employees on major holidays, but how many can claim that they are as generous as Savji Dholakia, CEO of Hari Krishna Exports, who recently gifted some 1,200 cars and 400 apartments to over 1,600 of his most loyal and hardworking staffers.

“If we keep our employees happy, God will keep us happy,” Dholakia says, and while he is certainly not the only boss to claim that he puts his staff first, the man actually puts his money where his mouth is. He started a long streak of generous bonuses 20 years ago, when he gave three of his top employees their own cars, and he has been upping his game every year since then. In 2014,  he distributed Rs 500m (£6m, $7.5m) as performance incentives and last years he gave away 491 cars and 200 apartments, but this year seems to be the most special yet. To celebrate his company’s 25th anniversary, the man known as India’s most generous boss just gave away over 1,260 cars and 400 apartments to over 1,700 of his most valuable employees.

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Most people barely manage to pull one car using both their arms, but an Indian teenager can pull two of them using only his unusually strong shoulder blades.

18-year-old Abhishek Choubey, from India’s Madhya Pradesh state, started using his shoulder blades to pull various objects when he was just 8, after noticing that they were of a different shape than those of his friends. At first, he used hooks from the local market, but they didn’t fit very well between his shoulder blades, so, after noticing his unusual talent, his father, Avdesh, designed a special wooden hook for him, as a gift. With it he managed to practice with increasingly heavy objects, until he finally managed to pull a car weighing 2314 lbs for 27.5 meters. Inspired by his success, he decided to challenge himself even more, by pulling two cars, and he succeeded.

“I realised there are many people who can pull heavy vehicles with ears and even hair, but I am the only one who can pull two cars at a time with my shoulder blades,’ Abhishek said. His new goal is to have his achievement acknowledged by the Guinness Book of Records.

 

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Vets in Chennai, India, were recently stunned to discover two “miracle puppies” that had survived a 25-day, 3,000-kilometer journey from China to India, sealed in a shipping container without food or water.

When workers at the Salcomp electronics factory in Sriperumbudur opened a sealed container on Friday, they found an unexpected surprise – a couple of frightened puppies hiding behind the spare parts that they had ordered from China. Seeing that the animals were in bad shape -dehydrated famished and sick – and realizing that the container had been sealed in China on September 5th, security at Nokia telecom park quickly contacted a local animal shelter.

The puppies ended up at The Blue Cross of India animal shelter, where it was determined that they were about three months old. They both had fever and required serious medical attention. However, everyone agreed that the mere fact that they were still alive after their long journey was a miracle. Upon searching the container the puppies arrived in, workers and animal activists found no trace of food or water, which makes their survival a medical impossibility, especially at such a young age.

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The colonial-era District Central Jail in Sangareddy, India, is giving people the chance to live like an inmate for a day, in exchange for a small fee.

“Feel the Jail” is an innovative initiative created by the the Prisons Department of Telangana district that allows people to experience the feeling of being under detention for a period of 24 hours. During their stay, voluntary inmates are provided with prison uniforms, steel meal plate and glass, soap as well as other facilities according to the prison manual, and are expected to follow the day-to-day routines of regular prisoners, including spending time in their cells and eating prison food.

Although there is no official work schedule for visiting inmates, they have to earn their keep during their stay, so when they are allowed to leave their grated cells, they are required to clean the barracks and plant saplings.

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Two notorious Indian criminals recently detained for forging documents and scamming people have managed to secure bail by doing what they do best – faking documents signed by nonexistent cops and guarantors.

Mohammed Lukman Shaikh, 48, and Bashir Mulla, 62, both with long criminal records under their belts, were put behind bars a little over a month ago for forging passports and other Government-issued documents. The two were so well-known for their document-faking talents that during their trial hearings, the Thane court warned police to recheck documents submitted during the proceedings, as both had a history of fabricating papers and cheating the authorities. Even so, Shaikh and Mulla managed to use their skills to secure bail and now they are nowhere to be found.

The two con artists were in judicial custody when they managed to secure bail and walk free. This happened a month ago, but the police just learned about it three days ago, after Vijay Sanap, a constable attached to Srinagar police station in Thane, discovered something suspicious in the paperwork of their case.

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42-year-old Jarnail Singh was recently admitted to The Corporate Hospital in Gurdaspur, India, after complaining of severe stomach pains and general weakness. What he failed to mention was that he had voluntarily swallowed 40 sharp metal knives over the past couple of months.

After asking Singh a few questions and performing the routine checkup, doctors were puzzled about the cause of the pain, so they did an ultrasound. That revealed a large solid mass in the man’s stomach, which led medical staff to believe he was suffering from cancer. To confirm the diagnostic, they performed a gastroscopy – inserting an endoscopic camera in his stomach. The mass appeared metallic and doctors could identify shard of blades and wood, which was very unusual.

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Vimal Govind Manikandan, an engineering student from Kerala, recently made international headlines after building a fully-functional exosuit inspired by Marvel superhero, Ironman.

People have been building their own Ironman suits for years, but while those are all just good-looking replicas, Vimal’s version actually works. The 100-kg-heavy suit doesn’t fly, or shoot energy beams like that of the actual Ironman, but it can move at a decent pace, perform basic actions and even lift up to 150 kg, thanks to battery-powered pressurized air chambers. And it only cost $750 to make.

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In a shocking incident that occurred recently in India’s Madhya Pradesh state, a 19-year-old college student sliced off her own tongue as an offering to the Goddess Kali, in exchange for the fulfillment of her wishes.

Aarti Dubey, an undergraduate student at TRS College in Madhya Pradesh, apparently dreamed about Kali asking her to cut off her tongue in exchange for her heart’s desire, and the next day she went to the goddess’ temple in the town of Reeva, to do just that. While it’s not unheard of for devotees to offer their body part to the goddess Kali, Aarti’s sacrifice is considered highly unusual because she is an educated young woman.

“There have been incidents of people offering their organs to the gods, expecting to get their wishes granted by the supreme power. What is startling in this case is the girl in question is educated. Illiterate people are bound to be superstitious, but when educated people become superstitious it does not bode well for the society as a whole,” local journalist Shyam Mishra told The Daily Mail. Read More »