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.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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A farmer in India’s West Bengal state has been working on an unusual-looking house modeled after the famous RMS Titanic ship that sank after colliding with an iceberg.

Mintu Roy, a man from Bengal’s Darjeeling district, has been dreaming of living in a house shaped like the Titanic since he was a small child growing up in Kolkata. One year, during the Durga Puja festival, he was so impressed with a Titanic-shaped pandal – a temporary structure built to venerate gods during Hindu religious celebrations – that he decided to one day build his own house to resemble the iconic passenger liner. Today, at age 52, Roy still hasn’t given up on his dream and he is working hard to finish his already impressive Titanic house in Darjeeling.

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An Indian man has become somewhat of a celebrity in his home state of Uttar Pradesh thanks to his unusual best friend, a wild crane that follows him everywhere he goes.

30-year-old Mohammed Arif, a harvester operator from Mandka village, in Uttar Pradesh, was working in a field in February of last year, when he saw an injured sarus crane in dire need of help. It was bleeding from one leg and seemed in a lot of pain, so the young man picked it up and took it home where he started nursing it back to health. It took a while, but the red-necked crane made a full recovery. Only instead of flying away the moment it was set free, the majestic bird stuck by its benefactor, accompanying him everywhere.

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The United States of Kailasa, a non-existent country created by a controversial Indian guru, somehow managed to sneak into two United Nations meetings this year.

Founded by Indian fugitive and self-proclaimed godman Nithyananda Paramashivam, the United States of Kailasa claims to be the first sovereign state for Hindus. However, you’ll have a tough time trying to locate it on any map, not because of its size, but because no one knows where it actually is. In 2019, when Nithyananda announced the formation of Kailasa as a state, he claimed to have bought an island off the coast of Ecuador as its headquarters, but the government of the South American country denied any knowledge of the transaction. The controversial guru hasn’t made any public appearances in the last 4 years, but the fictional nation’s ambition has grown, and this year its representatives have attended two UN meetings.

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Balakrishnan Palayi, an Indian man from Kasaragod, claims to have eaten nothing but coconut for the last 28 years in order to treat his gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD).

Imagine eating only one thing for over two decades. As a foodie with access to so many delicious treats, the mere thought of restricting one’s diet to a single food for a month, let alone 28 years, sounds almost impossible, but one Indian man claims that it has kept him healthy and fit. Balakrishnan Palayi, a man from Chandera in Kasaragod, was diagnosed with gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), a condition that caused him to lose all his strength to the point where he could hardly move around. As part of his treatment, he started eating coconut, and he felt so much better that he soon decided it was the only thing he was going to eat moving forward.

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An Indian man recently made national news headlines after filing a police complaint against his own father, accusing him of seducing his wife and eventually eloping with her.

They say all is fair in love and war, and that love is blind, but there is also such a thing as forbidden love. Pawan Vairagi, a worker from India’s Rajasthan state, is accusing his own father of falling in love with his wife and luring her away from him. Vairagi, who hails from a village called Silor, told authorities that he had been spending a lot of time away from his family because of work, which allegedly gave his father the opportunity to spend more time with his wife and seduce her. The pair recently eloped, leaving Pawan’s six-month-old daughter behind.

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