An Indian man who had been pronounced dead by doctors allegedly came back to life when the ambulance transporting him home to his family hit a deep pothole.

India’s pothole problem is a well-documented one. It annoys and exasperates millions of people every day, and on occasion, it can cause serious injuries and even death, but according to the family of an 80-year-old man from Haryana, potholes can also be miracles in disguise. Darshan Singh Brar allegedly owes his life to a pothole. The man had not been feeling well for several days, so one of his grandsons decided to take him to a hospital near his home. He was diagnosed with a severe chest infection which also took a toll on his pre-existing heart condition, and despite doctors’ best efforts, he was pronounced dead after four days on a ventilator. But that’s only the beginning of our story…

Read More »

An 85-year-old woman is set to end a self-imposed 30-year vow of silence that only allowed her to speak for an hour a day.

Saraswati Devi, fondly known as ‘Mauni Mata’, began her ‘maun vrat’ (vow of silence) in 1992. She devoted her life to Lord Ram after the death of her husband in 1986 and has spent most of her time on pilgrimages ever since. In 1992, she arrived in Ayodhya, where she met Mahant Nritya Gopal Das, head of Ram Janmabhoomi Trust, who ordered her to circle Kamtanath Mountain as a sign of devotion to Lord Ram. On December 6, the same day that the Babri Masjid was demolished in Ayodhya, Saraswati met Swami Nritya Gopal Das, the head of Ayodhya’s largest temple, the Mani Ram Das Ki Chavani, and was so inspired by him that she vowed to refrain from speaking until a new temple dedicated to Ram would be built in the city. Her vow will finally end later this month, with the inauguration of the Ram Mandir temple in Ayodhya.

Read More »

As part of a post-Diwali celebration in Madhya Pradesh’s Bhidavad village, brave men lie on the ground and allow themselves to be trampled by dozens of cattle in the name of religion.

The festival of Diwali is marked with various rituals and traditions across India, but none quite as bizarre as the custom of one village in Madhya Pradesh, where men lie on the ground and allow cows to walk all over them in the hopes that it will make all their wishes come true. According to tradition, the cows are worshipped in the village in the morning, and then daredevils lie down on the ground while the cows trample them. People believe that 33 crore (330 million) gods and goddesses reside in cows, and by allowing cows to walk over them, one receives the blessings of the gods.

Read More »

The village of Baktawng, in India’s north-eastern state of Mizoram, is home to the world’s largest known family, 199 people who live under the same roof in a giant building.

Pu Ziona was the patriarch of what was generally regarded as the world’s largest family – 38 wives, 89 children, and 36 children. Ziona passed away in 2021, at the age of 76, due to health complications caused by hypertension and diabetes, but his family continues to live under the same roof in the impressive living complex Ziona built in the hills of Baktawng. Some of his children got wives of their own, some more than one, and the family member count now stands at 199. They all gather in the great hall of their home twice a day to eat, in a scene that looks more like a busy canteen than a family dining room. The members share everything, from the daily workload to the food and finances, and even though everyone wants to carry on the legacy of Pu Ziona, things are changing for the world’s largest family…

Read More »

An Indian man who has been separated from his wife for nearly 40 years and has been trying to divorce her for 27 years, had his request for divorce dismissed by the Supreme Court earlier this month.

It’s no secret that divorce is a taboo subject in India, a country where the legal annulment of marriage is usually only obtained in cases of clear proof of violence or cruelty by one of the spouses. Family and social pressure often force people to remain engaged in unhappy marriages, but even when one of them demands a divorce, it is rarely granted by the courts. These irrefutable facts were recently confirmed once again in a court case that made international news headlines. An 89-year-old retired Air Force Officer and qualified doctor who had been trying to divorce his 82-year-old wife, a retired teacher, for almost three decades, has once again been denied by India’s Supreme Court, despite agreeing that their marriage was ‘beyond salvation’.

Read More »

Maleesha Kharwa grew up in Mumbai’s infamous Dharavi slum, but thanks to a chance encounter with an American actor, she became one of India’s most popular teenage models.

At just 15 years of age, Maleesha Kharwa has already graced the covers of international fashion magazines like Vogue and Cosmopolitan, become the face of a luxury skincare brand, and amassed over 300,000 followers on Instagram alone. She is one of the most recognizable faces in India, and it’s almost impossible to believe that only three years ago she was just another girl in the slums of Mumbai. It was only thanks to a lucky encounter with Step Up 2: The Streets and Grey’s Anatomy actor Robert Hoffman that her life changed drastically and she got the chance to live out her childhood fantasy of one day becoming a fashion model.

Read More »

Government employees working in a decrepit building in Telangana, India, have taken to wearing motorcycle helmets to prevent slabs of concrete from the ceiling falling on their heads.

A video of several male employees at the ‘Development Office’ of Jagtial district, in Telangana, wearing motorcycle helmets while working has gone viral on Indian social media. Ironically, the Development Office is tasked with developing the district by giving the internet to villagers and creating infrastructure, but the workplace is in such a terrible state that workers have to protect themselves against falling debris. Local media reported that the staff have been demanding relocation to a safer office building after a colleague nearly suffered brain damage when a cement slab of cement fell from the ceiling.

Read More »

A heartless couple in India was reportedly arrested for selling their 8-month-old baby to buy an iPhone 14 and make Instagram reels while traveling.

Last week, Indian media reported the shocking case of a young couple from West Bengal who were so obsessed with Apple’s newest handheld that they sold their toddler in order to buy one. Jaydev and Sathi Ghosh started attracting the attention of their neighbors in North 24 Parganas when they started traveling around the state and flashing their brand-new Apple iPhone 14. The couple had been known to earn a meager monthly income and had often struggled financially in the past, so the drastic change didn’t make any sense, especially since it had coincided with the mysterious disappearance of their 8-month-old son, something that Jaydev and Sathi didn’t seem at all concerned with…

Read More »

A young girl from the Indian state of Bihar kept cutting the power in her entire village so she could meet a boy from a rival village without anyone seeing them together.

The people of Bettiah, a village in Bihar’s West Champaran district, had been on edge for over a week due to the unusual power outages that seemed to occur almost every night. The total darkness created perfect opportunities for thieves, so people appealed to the electricity company to fix their network, but its representatives reported no infrastructure issues. No one could understand what was going on until one night, when some of the locals stood watch in the village and caught a young couple meeting under cover of darkness. It turned out that the local girl, Priti Kumari, had fallen in love with Rajkumar, a young man from a rival village, and she kept cutting the power in the while village to keep the relationship a secret.

Read More »

An Indian man who spends his days asking people for pocket change on the streets of Mumbai has been dubbed the ‘world’s richest beggar’ by Indian media who claims he is worth over $1 million.

While many people in India toil long hours every single day for a few hundred rupees, Bharat Jain, the so-called ‘world’s richest beggar’, reportedly makes between 2,000 and 2,500 rupees every day by asking generous people for handouts. Jain has been begging at busy Mumbai locations like Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus railway station (CSMT) or Azad Maidan for many years now and has accumulated quite a fortune. His net worth is expected to be around 7.5 crore ($1 million), and includes a 2-bedroom flat in Mumbai worth 1.2 crore, and two shops in Thane that rent for 30,000 rupees per month. His monthly income is estimated to vary between 60,000 rupees ($731) and 75,000 rupees ($914), which is apparently a lot more than most employed Indians earn.

Photo: Brijesh Nirmal/Unsplash

According to the Economic Times, Bharat Jain did not afford to pursue any formal education and resorted to begging to earn a living. His kids, on the other hand, will not be following in his footsteps. They have already completed their education in convent schools and are already employed. Jain’s family constantly advises him to stop begging as they can afford to live comfortably without it, but he continues to hit the streets almost every day.

Bharat Jain has been making news headlines in India for his less-than-meager earnings since 2015 when his reputation as a wealthy beggar started growing. His name has since been mentioned constantly by Indian media looking for the next viral news story.

In what many are calling a real-life Bollywood movie script, an Indian man married his wife to her lover after catching them cheating.

In the 1999 Bollywood classic Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, Ajay Devgn’s character, Vanraj, finds out that his wife is in love with another man and decides to unite them. It’s one of India’s most famous love stories and one that was recently replicated by a scorned husband who, upon learning about his wife’s infidelity, arrange the union of the spouse to her lover. The unusual incident took place in Nardiganj, a village in India’s Bihar state after villagers caught a young married woman visiting the home of her lover while her husband was away. They beat the man, who was also married with three children and had decided to drive the pair from their village, but then the woman’s husband returned and came up with another solution.

Read More »

An Indian man is currently under investigation for fraud, after allegedly spending a total of 603 nights at a New Delhi 5-star hotel despite only paying for one night.

On May 30th, Ankush Dutta booked a room at the renowned Roseate House Hotel in Delhi. He was supposed to check out the next day, but according to investigators, he ended up living at the hotel continuously until January 22, 2021, without paying a dime for his stay, food, beverages, or any other services he used at the hotel during that period of time. It’s unclear how exactly the Indian man managed this feat, but the hotel has already filed a complaint against one of its employees, whom management suspects of conspiring with the clandestine guest. The exact nature of their relationship is unclear, but investigators believe that the employee may have received some kind of financial incentive for their assistance.

Read More »

Locals in the Indian state of Maharashtra were shocked to discover that their newly-laid road was actually just a carpet with a thin layer of asphalt poured over it.

According to the Lokmat Times, the people of Karjat-Hast Pokhari, a village in Maharashtra’s Jalna district, had long been pleading with elected representatives to rebuild their poor roads, and last month, their prayers were finally answered. Or, at least, that’s what they originally thought when they saw the layer of asphalt covering their dirt roads. Only their joy was short-lived, as it soon became clear that the company in charge of the project did a very shady job, laying a very thin layer of asphalt over a carpet-like canvas that could easily be lifted from the dirt base with little effort.

Read More »

An Indian IT company recently sparked outrage online after it was reported that one of its managers ordered the exit of the office building padlocked to prevent employees from leaving without his permission.

A video of a security worker using heavy chains and large padlocks to seal off the exit of the Coding Ninjas office building in Gurugram, India, recently went viral on Twitter. In it, the guard claims that he had been directed by one ‘Anurag sir’, later identified as a manager with the company, to lock the exit to ensure no one can leave without his express permission. The video sparked outrage and once again brought issues like employee exploitation and a degrading working environment into the spotlight. As for the company, it recently issued a statement acknowledging the incident, describing it as an ‘anomaly’ rectified ‘within minutes’ of its occurrence.

Read More »

A Government official in India has been suspended after reportedly ordering an entire water reservoir to be drained just so he could recover the smartphone he had accidentally dropped into it.

Rajesh Vishwas, a 32-year-old food inspector in Chhattisgarh’s Kanker district, has become the talk of Indian social media because of his involvement in an incident that highlighted the ignorance of government officials in the face of serious environmental issues, like water shortage. Vishwas allegedly abused his power to have roughly two million liters of water from a reservoir in the city of Pakhanjur just so he could recover the brand-new Samsung Galaxy S23 smartphone he had accidentally dropped into the water. The water drained into a nearby canal was reportedly enough to irrigate 6 square kilometers (600 hectares) of farmland.

Read More »