While the world celebrates Thanksgiving, Hannukah and Christmas, India dedicates its Decembers to weddings (upon weddings… upon weddings).

Following Arpita Khan‘s parade of parties and Rriddhi Malhotra‘s couture-studded big day, was the wedding of Shirin Morani, daughter of producer Ali Morani.

As is to be expected, the guest list was nothing short of glamorous. The attire, predictably sparkly, was a combo of pretty pastels and powerful pop hues.

Almost always spotted in ethnic ensembles these days, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan attended the wedding in a delicately embroidered Abu Jani-Sandeep Khosla churidar. Anushka Sharma made her minty green Sabyasachi salwar kameez stand out with a red velvet dupatta. Esha Gupta’s Payal Singhal lehenga was a favourite too – you can’t deny the simple elegance of that barely-there blue.

In stark contrast, a very decadent Priyanka Chopra walked into the wedding almost draped in liquid gold. Blood red roses in her hair made the perfect accessory. Going with a slightly less intense look, Malaika Arora Khan chose a bubble gum pink Seema Khan sari, followed by Anusha Dandekar, wearing a floor-length anarkali also accentuated with bright rosy shades.

The pink loving didn’t stop there. Favouring bright hues quite a bit lately, Bipasha Basu unveilied the music of her upcoming release in a hot pink Zulekha Shariff gown: a great hue for that envy-worthy bronze skin.
 

Running with pride of being an Indian comes naturally to this Gorkha girl, Roshni Rai. With her project “Run with Roshni”, she wishes to bring her Nepali-speaking community, which has been facing racial discrimination and an identity crisis, to the Indian mainstream. A Mumbai resident for 10 years, Rai will be running at the Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon in January with 10 of her community members from Darjeeling.

Coming from a small village called Pedong in Darjeeling, 34-year-old Rai has represented India at various national and international marathons and races. She claims to be the fastest of the three Indian women at the 2012 South African human race “Comrades Ultramarathon” of 89 km and takes pride in her nationality, but everything hasn’t been a smooth sailing for her as she struggled with identity crisis in her own country. “We are Nepali-speaking Gorkhas but we are Indian. Many people don’t realise that Nepali is a language listed in the Indian constitution and found on Indian currency notes,” says Rai, who began the project with the express purpose of being accepted as Indian.

Run with Roshni began in 2011 to support native Darjeeling athletes and bring them to the forefront. “Athletes in Darjeeling participate in every single race to support their own education and, with this project, I wish to bring empowerment and enlightenment to our community,” she says.

Rai began running at the age of 23 when she suffered a heartbreak. “I was heartbroken and bedridden for 15 days. I couldn’t eat or sleep, and felt utterly useless. One day, I just went out on a run and cried my heart out. I kept crying and running. At one point, the tears stopped but my feet didn’t. I felt so light and kept doing it regularly. That was in 2003 and in 2006, I saw the Mumbai marathon and tried to run it without any practice. I injured myself and felt I couldn’t run in future,” says Rai, who ran six half marathons in 2009.

Rai is a Powai resident and an advocate by profession. She completed her law degree from Mumbai university and started working at Colgate Palmolive, where she got to know the runners club and her coach Daniel Vaz, who taught her the systematic way of running a marathon. She took up Run with Roshni in 2011 as a part of a leadership course. Ever since she has been collecting second-hand shoes and funds through Facebook and other means to send them to promising athletes back home in Darjeeling. “Most of them come from a poor background and can’t afford train tickets sometimes. I know these runners and I am confident that they can run a full marathon under three hours without practice. We want to represent our country so that we get accepted as countrymen,” she stresses.

Rai says she is tired of explaining her nationality to everyone. “Even when I practise, exercise or run on the roads, I get called Chinese or chinki. The friendship treaty between Nepal and India further complicates our identity crisis and, for the same reason, we want a separate state of Gorkhaland. The Ghorkaland agitation of the1980s saw 1,500 deaths but nobody talks about it. I only want to spread awareness,” she says.

Rai, who has been honoured with the Kalimpong Ratna award back home, has taken a break from work and is focussing on her book that she wishes to publish next year. She wants to become a full-time social worker.

Rai believes that they can compete with Kenyans and Ethiopians as running is in their blood. “Walking 16 to 20 km everyday is normal for people in the hilly areas. I was inspired by author Brandon I Koerner’s piece on why Kenyans win all marathons and observed that we could challenge them too in the Olympics. There is a boy in our group who used to be a drug addict but became clean due to running. He says it gives him the same high. Running releases the happy hormone,” she says. [From DNA News]

The before and after pictures say it all. And now, exactly 10 years on, it is almost unimaginable that Aceh was left devastated by a massive tsunami, triggered by an undersea earthquake so powerful it made the earth itself wobble on its axis.
On the western tip of Indonesia, Aceh province was the closest landmass to the earthquake epicentre, and by far the worst affected. About 170,000 people died, hundreds of thousands more lost their houses and livelihood. Most man-made structures, some of them three miles inland from the 500-mile coastline, were completely destroyed.
The disaster triggered a massive influx of international aid, and a decade later, Aceh can say it has been successfully rebuilt. “On the ground, if you look around, things are really normal, much better than before,” says Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, who headed Aceh’s reconstruction agency.
Some 140,000 houses were rebuilt across the province, as well as clinics, schools and other buildings. A total of 3,500 roads were rebuilt. “I think it’s the only place in Indonesia where village roads are paved,” says Mr Mangkusubroto.
Banda Aceh, the province’s capital, is now a small pleasant city on the seaside. But most of its inhabitants today are survivors who lost relatives. Buildings might have been rebuilt, but the disaster still dominates the identity of the city and its people.
Across the city, tsunami landmarks have been preserved for remembrance. In Gampong Lampulo, a fishing boat stranded on top of crumbling houses stands out. The tsunami’s massive waves flung it here, nearly two miles from the sea.
Fauziah, 45, sells souvenirs to tourists who come see the “boat on the roof”. Her house used to be under the fishing boat, and she is one of 59 people who managed to climb on to it and survive the wav
After the earthquake, my son went to see what was going on,” she remembers. “He came back running and screaming ‘Go upstairs, Mum, upstairs’.” Fauziah took her five children to the second floor, but, “in seconds the water was everywhere.” Soon, they had water up to their chests. “We thought it was the end, that Judgement Day had arrived,” she says, as she shows how she carried her five-month old baby with outstretched arms to try to save her. “Then we heard people screaming that there was a boat stuck on the roof.
READ MORE: How the tsunami sparked a huge fertility boom
Where did all the toxic debris end up?
“My son managed to kick a sheet of metal from the ceiling, just enough for one person to get through. He climbed on to the roof, and then helped us out, and on to the boat.” For hours, they watched their city being destroyed. “The sea was everywhere, no building standing. The waves hitting houses sounded like bombs being dropped.”
Today, Fauziah sells dried fish that she prepares herself and displays in boxes decorated with photos of the boat.
While she feels grateful for the fact that the boat became a tourist attraction, allowing her to make a living, she admits to having mixed feelings. Fauziah’s five children survived, and the baby she held above her head is now a shy 10-year-old girl. But her husband, her mother and brothers and sisters all died in the tsunami.
“Sometimes I feel sad,” she says. “I see people over there having fun and laughing. As if this is a place for having fun.”
Elsewhere in the city, a 2,600-tonne cargo boat brought in by the waves was also left untouched. This boat hasn’t saved any lives; it razed an entire neighbourhood. “We suspect there are still lot of bodies under it,” says Herlina, 29, who works as a guide on this site.
Like most of those who work on tsunami-landmarks-turned-tourist attractions, she’s also a survivor of the tsunami. “At first, it was very hard to talk to people about what happened. But working here, I got used to it,” she says, adding that her job has actually helped her. “As time goes by, I feel like this is trauma therapy for me.”
As many as 1,000 people visit the cargo ship on weekdays, at least twice as many during weekends and holidays, and many locals in the area benefit from this unexpected boost in tourism. “It’s turned into a good thing after the bad thing,” Herlina believes.
The most noticeable tsunami landmark in town is the massive museum dedicated to the tsunami, built in the city centre during reconstruction. Visitors enter through a dark, cave-like tunnel, water running down the high walls to the sound of echoing, almost monastic, chants. In one narrow, high-ceilinged tower inside the museum, names of victims are displayed on the wall, and only receive light from a small, round window at the top.
Its director, Zuhardi Hatta, says the museum is essential “to remember the hundreds of thousands of people we lost.” But many have found its high cost hard to swallow – the local tourism department says 150 billion Indonesian Rupees (£7.7m) has already been spent on it. People also complain there is not much inside. Even Mr Mangkusubroto, whose reconstruction agency contributed to building the museum, is less than positive.
“I don’t regret that we built a tsunami museum. The structure is good and it’s a beautiful building. But you go inside, you see nothing. There is no soul in this museum,” he says. Azhari Aiyub, who runs a local cultural centre, calls the museum a waste of money, and says it’s “ridiculous.”
“I went there yesterday, I saw all these people taking pictures, smiling. This is not about sadness, this is entertainment,” he says.
But the local authorities are proud that the museum has been conceived to serve as an escape building in case of a new disaster alert. “It can resist 12 to 15m waves and hold around 3,000 people,” Mr Hatta says.
Authorities have made disaster prevention a priority. Other escape buildings have been built, and people have been educated on evacuation procedures.
The country’s meteorological agency monitors potential earthquakes and tsunamis, a warning alert system has been put in place, and signs indicating the route to the nearest escape-building have been placed across the city.
The disaster prevention system has also been criticised – the warning sirens failed to ring during an earthquake in 2012 – but locals say they’re now prepared.
Rusmaizar, a 48 year-old fisherman living near the small port of Deah Glumpang in Banda Aceh, says “everyone ran straight to the escape building” following the 2012 earthquake. In case of a new disaster, “people will know what to do,” he says.

Patna: Taking strong exception to selection of non-tribal Raghubar Das as the new Jharkhand CM, senior JD(U) leader Nitish Kumar on Friday slammed BJP for breaking the tradition of a tribal heading the government in neighbouring state since its inception in 2000.
“It has been a tradition that a tribal has headed all governments so far in Jharkhand since its inception in 2000,” Kumar said.

By making a non-tribal as the next Jharkhand chief minister, the BJP has not only broken a long standing tradition but has also sent out a message that it has no faith in the tribal people of that state, he said.

“Jharkhand was created to cater to the aspirations of the tribal people and the sentiment was reflected in the fact that the chief minister’s post had gone to tribal population as a matter of their right so far,” Kumar said.
Claiming that the tribal population of Jharkhand may feel aggrieved and uncomfortable with a non-tribal leader leading the state government, the senior leader charged the BJP with laying foundation of ‘disaffection’ between the tribal and non-tribals in the neighbouring state, which he alleged, fitted with the divisive politics being pursued by the saffron party.

PTI

A wave of joy spread among the dabbawallahs in Mumbai, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday nominated the world-famous lot among nine people and organisations to take forward the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan.

As soon as the news broke on television and word spread, the 5,000-odd dabbawallas, who deliver around 2,00,000 dabbas across Mumbai daily, began to celebrate. “By nominating us, the Prime Minister has gone beyond celebrities and business tycoons and encouraged hard-working ‘kaamgar’ (workers) like us. We are very thankful to him. It is a special moment for us,” said Subhash Gangaram Talekar, spokesperson of the Mumbai Dabey Wahatuk Mandal.

At around 11.15am, the time when these ever-busy men who ferry thousands of tiffin boxes across the city take a few minutes’ break, the dabbawallas celebrated their nomination by distributing laddoos. “It is a matter of pride for us. We are also aware of the fact that we now have a great responsibility towards the nation,” said Talekar.

Well known for their efficient and nearly error-free business model for 124 years, the dabbawallas said they won’t waste a moment and will carry out the drive as early as Friday. Again at 11.15am, hundreds of them will wield brooms and clean up the area around Lower Parel station.

“Our brooms and garbage bags will be ready at the station when we reach. We plan to complete our task in 20 minutes, as we cannot delay in supplying the dabbas,” said Bhasaheb Karvande, the association’s chairman.

Talekar said their contribution to the national cleanliness movement, launched by Modi on October 2, won’t end with the drive. “We will carry the message to all our clients every day. We all live in chawls and small houses, and have always seen our areas full of filth. We know that cleaning up the country is no mean task; it is a long and slow process,” he said.