For over 700 years, the Indian state of Bihar has been hosting a unique groom market where women and their families come to shop for husbands.

Every year, thousands of men gather under the Pipal trees in the local market area of Madhubani district, India’s Bihar state, and wait to be chosen by prospective brides. Called Saurath Mela or Sabhagachhi, the 9-day groom market was allegedly started by Raja Hari Singh of the Karnat dynasty over seven centuries ago to make it easier for women to find the right husband from a diverse group of men. Each groom is priced based on their capability, including their educational qualifications and family background.

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A 62-year-old man from Bihar, India has been getting a lot of attention in his home country after it was revealed that he has not taken a bath in over two decades.

Dharamdev Ram is famous in his home village of Baikunthpur. Everybody knows that he hasn’t taken a bath or even a quick shower in 22 years, but nobody mocks him for it, on the contrary, he gets a lot of respect for his decision. That’s because the 62-year-old man vowed to shun bathing until violence against women, land disputes among men, and the killing of innocent animals stop. That has yet to happen, so Dharamdev continues to uphold his vow.

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An Indian politician who drank a glass of water straight out of a polluted ‘holy river’ to show locals that it was safe to drink was reportedly airlifted to a hospital a couple of days later.

On Sunday, July 17, while visiting Sultanpurlodhi, Bhagwant Mann, Chief Minister of Punjab, pulled off a rather daring publicity stunt, one that reportedly cost him an emergency hospital visit. Accompanied by reporters, local officials and Sikh elders, Mann at one point bent down, scooped water right out of the Kali Bein rivulet and downed it to show everyone that it was safe to drink. That got cheers and applause from those around the politician, but they probably had no idea how dirty and polluted the river actually was.

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The Quwwat-ul-Islam Mosque complex in New Delhi is home to an ancient wonder of metal work – a 1,600-year-old iron pillar that is exceptionally resistant to rust.

The Iron Pillar of Qutub Minar, as this ancient monument is sometimes referred to, measures 7.21-meters-tall, has a diameter of 41 centimeters and weighs about 6 tons. It’s also more than a millennium and a half old, believed to have been erected during the reign of Chandragupta II, one of the most powerful emperors of the Gupta Empire. And even though it has spent all that time outdoors, the Pillar of Qutub Minar shows almost no sign of rust damage. For decades, scientists and metal workers from all over the world speculated about the properties of this unusual marvel, and it wasn’t until 2003 that the mystery was finally cracked.

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An Indian man was recently ousted as the cause of frequent power outages in his native village, as he always cut the power in the entire settlement whenever he wanted to see his girlfriend.

For weeks, the people of Ganeshpur, a small village in eastern Bihar’s Purnia district, had to put up with frequent power outages that only seemed to occur a few hours after sunset. No one seemed to know what was causing the problems, as the power company had not reported any power grid malfunctions, and none of the neighboring villages were dealing with similar issues. Exasperated, many in the villages started paying attention to the time when the outages occurred and came to the conclusion that power always went down after dark. They started to suspect foul play and came up with a plan to investigate…

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Bera, a small town in the Indian state of Rajasthan is famous for being the only place on Earth where humans and leopards live in perfect harmony.

India is one of the most densely-populated countries on Earth, and as humanity continues to encroach on the still-uninhabited woodlands and mountains, conflicts between leopards and humans are inevitable. In fact, with human expansion at peak levels and the number of leopards higher than they’ve been in decades, tensions between the two species are growing. But there’s one place where humans and leopards have allegedly been living in peace and harmony for at least a century. Known as “leopard country”, the town of Bera is said to contain the highest concentration of leopards on the planet.

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After losing her husband to a heart attack, an Indian woman spent 39 years pretending to be a man so she could raise her daughter alone in a patriarchal society.

S Petchiammal had only been married for 15 days when her husband succumbed to a massive heart attack. She was 20 years old at the time and pregnant with her daughter. Soon after giving birth, she started working various jobs to make ends meet, but raising a child as a single mother in Tamil Nadu’s Katunayakkanpatti village, a dominant patriarchal society, was tough. The young woman worked jobs at construction sites, hotels, and tea shops, but she faced harassment and sexual taunts every day, so one day she decided that she needed to make a big change.

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K Praveen, a 21-year-old man from Thiruthangal in Virudhunagar, Tamil Nadu, has a 10.8-centimeter-long tongue, according to the India Book of Records.

According to the University of Edinburgh, the average human male tongue is around 8.5-cm-long, which makes K Praveen’s tongue over 2.5cm longer, and probably the longest in the world. The young robotics student has known that his tongue was longer than usual ever since he started showing friends and family what he could do with it… And by that we mean touching the tip of his nose and his elbow with it, and almost touching his eyes. Due to a lack of funds, he has not been able to get his tongue officially measured by Guinness Records, but he did get his name in India’s own Limca Book of Records, for having the longest tongue in the country.

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Lal Bihari is probably India’s most famous living dead, one of many people killed off in official records so that relatives can claim their possessions for themselves.

Killing off somebody on paper is apparently not that hard to do in India. All you need is some bribe money and local officials willing to do some dirty work in exchange for that money. Victims are usually people who have been away from their birthplace for a long time, and the culprits are greedy relatives trying to claim their land or their family homes. But once you’re dead in official records, proving that you’re actually alive is a much more difficult endeavor, especially when the people you are trying to convince are the very same who were paid to kill you off in the first place.

Lal Bihari’s story is probably the most famous example of a “dead man’s” struggle in India. His woes began in 1976, when he returned to his birthplace, the village of Khalilabad, in Uttar Pradesh, for residence, income and caste certificates, needed to secure a loan for his heirloom business. When the clerk first looked up at him and told him that Lal Bihari was dead, he smiled, but the clerk didn’t smile back…

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An Indian wedding recently ended as a total fiasco, after the bride refused to tie the knot to a man whom she had just discovered was bald…

Arranged marriages are common affairs in India, but despite families arranging and negotiating well in advance, they don’t always go without a hitch. Sometimes the bride or groom runs off with their lover, sometimes tragedy strikes, and other times not knowing enough about the person you’re marrying can be a problem. Case in point, a recent wedding in the Etawah district of Kanpur, in which the bride refused to marry her betrothed after finding out that he was bald.

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A medical student in India was recently caught cheating on his graduation exam with a Bluetooth device embedded in his inner ear to avoid detection.

On February 21, 78 medical students took part in the final MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery) exam at the Mahatma Gandhi Medical College in India. One of them, however, was more desperate to pass than the rest. Apparently, the unnamed medical student had been admitted 11 years ago, but had failed the final exam multiple times over the last few years, and this was his final chance to pass. To increase his chances, the man apparently turned to cheating, getting a Bluetooth device surgically implanted in his ear.

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An Indian man was recently arrested for allegedly marrying at least 27 well-off women over the last 43 years purely for financial gains.

Ramesh Chandra Swain, a 66-year-old man from Odisha, in Eastern India, stands accused of tricking dozens of women into marrying him by posing as a successful doctor and important official of the Indian Ministry of Health. Swain, who only has a Class 10 education, used fake identity documents to convince his victims, before proceeding to swindle important sums of money and assets from them. Interestingly, most of the women he married over the last decade were very well-educated, ranging from doctors and accountants to Supreme Court lawyers.

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An 85-year-old man from India’s Bihar state is being investigated after claiming to have received 11 Covid-19 vaccine doses in less than a year.

Brahmdeo Mandal, a retired postman from Bihar’s Madhepura district was stopped from getting what he claimed would have been his 12th Covid-19 shot at the beginning of January. Although it’s unclear how exactly word of Mandal’s vaccination marathon reached authorities, it is believed that he boasted about the positive effects of the repeated jabs on his general health to someone, and they tipped off the police. You see, instead of the terrifying potential side effects touted by anti-vaxers, Brahmdeo Mandal claims that the Covid-19 vaccine has made his ailments, many of them considered normal at his age, disappear.

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Indian police recently arrested a disgruntled charity worker accused of setting fire to a bank branch in Karnataka after being denied a loan.

33-year-old Wasim Hazaratsab Mulla, a charity worker from Haveri, approached state-run Canara Bank for a loan of 1.6 million rupees ($21,600) in December of last year. His application was eventually denied, because of discrepancies in the submitted paperwork which broke the bank’s credit policy. Wasim allegedly didn’t take the news too kindly, riding his motorcycle to the bank branch on Sunday, January 9th, breaking open a window to spray a flammable liquid inside and setting the building on fire.

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An Indian man who had become paralyzed and unable to speak after being involved in a tragic car accident 5 years ago, reportedly started walking and talking again after getting the Covid-19 vaccine.

We keep hearing about potential negative side-effects of getting vaccinated against the coronavirus, but Dularchand Munda, a 55-year-old man from India’s Jharkhand state will tell you that getting the Covid-19 vaccine was the best thing that ever happened to him. Bedridden and unable to speak ever since being involved in a serious car accident 5 years ago, Dularchand got the jab on January 4th and started regaining feeling in his legs within a few hours. Now, he is able to speak again and can walk with the help of a walking cane.

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