A small shrine along the treacherous Gata Loops in India’s mountainous Ladakh region has become famous for the large number of plastic bottles left as offerings to a spirit known as the Ghost Of The Gata Loops.

Bicycle and motorcycle racers traversing the Gata Loops as part of their Trans-Himalaya tours are often confused by a large pile of plastic bottles around what looks like a makeshift shrine. Some confuse it for simple pollution, a consequence of the increase in popularity of the region with adventure tourism enthusiasts, but the explanation for this bizarre sight in the middle of nowhere is much more intriguing. Many of those who attempt to cross the Gata Loops leave water bottles at the shrine as offerings for the Ghost Of The Gata Loops, the wandering soul of a poor man who died here decades ago due to thirst and extreme cold. Some people believe that passing by without leaving a water bottle will upset the ghost and bring them bad luck on their arduous journey.

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An Indian man who had wrongfully been pronounced dead by the government turned to crime as a desperate way of proving that he was very much alive.

Baburam Bhil a 40-year-old man from Rajasthan’s Mithora village, had long been trying to convince authorities that he was still alive after they issued a death certificate in his name. He tried to correct the error, appealing to his village elders and state authorities, but to no avail, so he decided to go for a more extreme option. Afraid that all his properties would be confiscated by the government after his “death”, Baburam came to the conclusion that becoming a serious criminal was the best way of attracting attention to his problem. On July 19, he grabbed a knife and a petrol bottle and began terrorizing a local school.

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A 20-year-old Indian man claims to have been subjected to a sex change operation without his consent by another man who planned to marry him for his family’s land.

Mujahid, a 20-year-old man from Sanjak Village in Uttar Pradesh, has become the talk of an entire country after claiming that a male rival tricked him into going to the Begrajpur Medical College in Mansoorpur where a team of doctors sedated him and performed a gender change operation on him without his consent. The victim told authorities that a man named Omprakash deceived him into believing that he was suffering from a serious medical condition and then offered to take him to Mansoorpur to be treated. Mujahid claims that shortly after arriving at the hospital, he was sedated and then operated on by a team of doctors who had colluded with Omprakash. When he woke up the next day, he was told he was no longer a man, but a woman.

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The residents of an Indian village recently called the police about a floating human body in their pond, but it turned out to be a man taking a nap and cooling off on a hot summer day.

To their credit, the people of Reddypuram Kovelakunta, a village in India’s Andhra Pradesh state, didn’t immediately panic and call the police when they noticed a motionless human body in their pond. They tried calling out to it when they first spotted it, around 7 AM, but they got no answer, and seeing as the body didn’t move until 12 PM, they finally decided to call the authorities. A police unit and emergency services rushed to the scene, where they indeed discovered a human body floating in the water. Only what looked like a corpse turned out to be an inebriated man napping in the water after a grueling 10-day work stint at a local quarry.

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In what can only be described as an unconventional love story, an Indian man fell in love and ended up marrying his mother-in-law with his father-in-law’s blessing.

This bizarre tale begins with a tragedy. After the death of Sikandar Yadav’s wife, the father-of-two moved in with his in-laws in Bihar’s Heer Moti village. Over time, the relationship between 45-year-old Sikandar and his mother-in-law, Geeta (55), evolved into a romantic affair that they could only conceal for so long. As rumors of their secret affair started spreading through the village, Geeta’s husband became increasingly suspicious and one day caught the two lovebirds in a romantic embrace that confirmed his fears. Furious, the man brought the affair to the attention of the Panchayat (village council), demanding that the matter be resolved.

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Topi Amma, the mysterious ‘Hat Mother’ of Tiruvannamalai, a Hindu pilgrimage city in Tamil Nadu, is a controversial religious figure that has divided Indian society.

India has no shortage of mystics and real-life incarnations of Hindu deities that people flock to worship, but even in this context, Topi Amma is an unlikely religious figure. The hat-wearing woman is often referred to as a ‘siddha’, an enlightened being who has attained perfection, but to those with a more secular view of the world, she is just a mentally disabled woman in need of medical help. Where believers see a mystic walking through the streets of Tiruvannamalai and speaking in an ancient Tamil dialect that no one understands, others see a homeless woman wandering aimlessly and mumbling jibberish. It’s all a matter of perception, but considering Topi Amma doesn’t even seem to realize the religious craze she has inspired, the latter is probably true.

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A wealthy couple from Gujarat, India, have decided to donate their entire Rs 200 crore fortune to charity and become Jain monks, relying solely on the generosity of others for survival.

Bhavesh Bhandari and his wife have built their wealth in the lucrative construction business, amassing an enviable fortune of over Rs 200 crore ($24 million). Like most other millionaires, they have enjoyed a life of luxury complete with opulent houses, expensive cars, and pretty much anything else their hearts desired. But the two recently decided to give it all up in order to become Jain ascetic monks, inspired by their two children – a 16-year-old son and a 19-year-old daughter – who adopted the same path in 2022. On April 22, the Gujarat power couple will renounce all worldly possessions, sever ties with their families, and embark on a barefoot journey across India, surviving only on alms.

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Roughly the size of a studio apartment, the world’s largest passenger elevator weighs a whopping 16 tons, is supported by 9 steel cables, and can accommodate up to 235 people at a time.

In 2022, Finnish elevator company KONE installed the world’s largest passenger elevator inside the Jio World Center building in Mumbai, India. Designed to cater to large groups of people attending weddings or exhibitions at the state-of-the-art convention center, this marvel of design and engineering measures 25.78 square meters and offers all-round scenic views of the complex and its beautiful gardens. Due to its enormous size, the world’s largest passenger elevator relies on an innovative pulley beam system that consists of 18 large pulleys, 9 steel cables, and rails fixed over steel columns.

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Arshia Goswami, a 9-year-old girl from India’s Haryana state, has been dubbed the female version of Hercules after deadlifting a whopping 165 pounds (75 kg).

Arshia first started attracting attention a couple of years ago when she set a national record as India’s youngest deadlifter, with a personal best of 45 kilograms. She has been training ever since, though, and she recently went viral once again by deadlifting 75 kilograms, more than two times her own body weight. The impressive feat was captured on video and shared on the young weightlifter’s Instagram page, where it went viral. But although most of the feedback was positive, with people praising her strength and form, some comments also expressed concern for her wellbeing, claiming that lifting such heavy weights at her age could have serious health consequences.

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K. Padmarajan has been dubbed the “Election King” and the “World’s Biggest Election Loser” after participating in 238 political elections and losing every single time.

K. Padmarajan’s story is one of perseverance. The 65-year-old repairman from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu has participated in hundreds of elections over the past three decades and spent thousands of dollars on registration fees. The closest he has ever come to winning an election was in 2011 when he ran for the general assembly in the town of Mettur and got 6,273 votes. He was way behind the winner – he got over 75,000 votes – but it gave him hope that he could one day win. That day is yet to come, but Padmarajan recently pointed out that winning is the secondary goal. Resilience and accepting defeat are key and no one is better at it than him.

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23-year-old Ganesh Baraiya is living proof that nothing is impossible. Despite facing discrimination because of his short stature, he managed to become the world’s shortest doctor.

Ganesh Baraiya was born in the Talaja Thaluka area of Gujarat, India, and faced adversity from a very young age. He was born normal, but at the age of four, his parents noticed that his head was outgrowing his body, so they took him to a doctor. They learned that the boy suffered from an incurable condition and there was nothing anyone could do. Wanting to help her son, Ganesh’s mother put a tub-like helmet on his head to prevent it from growing and give his body a chance to catch up. In school, he was often ridiculed because of his large head and short stature, but he also had friends who stuck by him and he was able to focus on his studies.

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Friends and family of Class 10 students taking an important exam at a school in Haryana, India were filmed climbing the back wall of the building to pass cheat sheets to their loved ones.

The Chandrawati School in Haryana’s Nuh district recently found itself at the center of a massive exam cheating scandal after viral videos of people scaling the wall of the school in order to pass cheat sheets to students found their way on social media. School officials insisted that no cheating occurred during the  Class 10 board exam on Wednesday and that people merely attempted to help their friends and relatives, but some sources claim that these real-life Spider Men only started climbing the school after being given the exact questions on the test and looking up the right answers to them.

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An Indian man was arrested for wearing a police uniform and impersonating a police officer to help his sister cheat on her 12th standard exam.

The Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC) exams, a pivotal moment for students across India’s Maharashtra state began on February 21, and we already have a viral cheating scandal. A 24-year-old man entered the Shahbabu Urdu High School in the town of Patur wearing a khaki police officer uniform with a very clear goal – to help one student pass the tough exam by passing her cheat sheets. Anupam Madan Khandare thought he had it all figured out when he got his hands on a realistic police uniform. He planned to infiltrate the examination center under the pretext of supervising the students and give his sister the information needed to pass the exam. Only things didn’t really play out as planned.

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A video of a lightly-clothed yogi meditating in the middle of a snowstorm in the Himalayas has gone viral online sparking a heated debate about its authenticity.

We live in a time when the old saying “seeing is believing” just doesn’t apply anymore. The advent of artificial intelligence and deepfake technology has made it possible to create virtually anything and make it look authentic. Realistic-looking AI news anchors and digital influencers are a part of this new reality, so you can’t blame people for doubting their eyes. Case in point, a viral video out of India showing a yogi with his hair and beard caked with snow meditating high up in the mountains during a snowstorm. He looks so comfortable in one of the harshest environments on Earth that many people rightly believed it was staged or the result of AI digital manipulation.

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An Indian man has been caught trying to take an exam at a Punjab university on behalf of his girlfriend by wearing lipstick, makeup, and female clothes.

Officials at Baba Farid University of Health Sciences in Punjab’s Faridkot district recently caught a young Indian man using a disguise and fake documents in order to take the exam of multi-purpose health workers on behalf of a woman believed to be his girlfriend. The youth, identified as Angrez Singh from Fazilka, showed up at the examination center in Kotkapura on January 7  dressed in full female attire, complete with red bangles, bindi, and lipstick, and carrying documents in the name of the woman he was trying to impersonate, one Paramjit Kaur. While his disguise may have fooled the staff, they couldn’t trick the biometric scanners when his data didn’t fit the one in the database.

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