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Mocambo, a well-known restaurant in Kolkata's Park Street area, left a bad taste in many mouths after a woman wanting to eat there on Saturday narrated in a Facebook post how she was refused service just because she was accompanied by her driver. Dilashi Hemnani, Marketing Manager at Tata Motors, wrote a post on Facebook giving a detailed account of the restaurant's alleged discriminatory behaviour.
The ten days of Onam, that have coincided with Ganesh Chaturthi and Bakrid this year, are witnessing a churning of the kind Kerala is not used to. With a 45 per cent combined Muslim and Christian population, Kerala has been God's own communally harmonious country, largely. But incidents in September indicate an attempt to create fissures. Despite Onam celebrated as a secular and a Kerala state festival, with the non-Hindu communities taking part as well, the RSS this year has attempted to alter the narrative by talking of Onam as an occasion to celebrate Vamana, in its party organ, Kesari.
Rajan Anandan, the Google vice president overseeing India and South East Asia told HuffPost India that there are about 350 million people who access the internet. About 150 million among them use the internet in non-English Indian languages, also known as Indic languages. The next 250 million that he expects to come on the internet by 2020 will almost entirely be Indic language users. The tools to negotiate the internet in Indic languages have grown, but products and services as well as content need to keep pace. Indic language searches on Google have gone up 10 times in the last year and a half. And Hindi content consumption is growing five times as fast as English. He also added that the company has very high market share in search as well as in digital advertising, which, although growing rapidly, is about 12% of the country's ad spends.
At least one person was killed and another wounded when police opened fire to quell rioting that erupted in Bengaluru on Monday over a long-running river water dispute with Tamil Nadu. Fifteen policemen were also wounded after protesters set cars and buses on fire and pelted people with stones. The violence erupted after the Supreme Court ordered Karnataka to release 12,000 cubic feet of water per second per day from the Cauvery river to Tamil Nadu until 20 September.
The Pentagon confirmed on Monday that Islamic State leader Abu Muhammad al-Adnani was killed in a US air strike on 30 August in Syria. Adnani was one of the most high-ranking figures in ISIS. In addition to his role as propaganda chief, he was thought to have been in charge of the group's external terror operations.
The Muslim Rashtriya Manch, a branch of the RSS, has decided not to sacrifice a goat or any other animal on Bakr-Eid, but instead celebrate the festival in an 'eco-friendly' manner by cutting a cake in the shape of a goat. The 5-kg cake will be cut at the Manch's Awadh prant office in Lucknow on Tuesday.
In a piece of good news for children all across the country, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) on Monday asked all its affiliated schools not to assign any homework to students of Class I and II. In a circular the CBSE also has asked all its affiliated schools to take a series of measures for schools, teachers and parents to reduce the weight of school bags, which have 'adverse' and 'irreversible' effect on health of children.
Payyoli municipal authorities in Kerala surprised over 150 under-privileged, bed-ridden patients in the area with new clothes and gifts as a part of Onam celebration. The fund for distributing Onam kit was collected as donation from traders, non-resident Indians and others.
Amidst all the tension between meat-eaters and Gau Rakshaks, a 31-year-old Muslim man recently went out of his way to save a cow which was stuck in a ditch at the Ahmedabad. The man, one Ehtesham Saiyed said he risked his life to save the cow simply because he wanted to save the life of another living being. He had helped rescue another cow found in a similar situation in August earlier this year.
Over 60 years, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) has seen an erosion of its authority. The debt crisis of the 1980s hit the economic ambitions of NAM states, writes Vijay Prashad in The Hindu. "India will not be represented by its head of government — Prime Minister Narendra Modi — but by its Vice President. Only once before has the Indian Prime Minister not been to the NAM Summit, and that was in 1979 when caretaker Prime Minister Charan Singh did not go to Havana (Cuba). Is NAM now irrelevant, so much so that India's head of government no longer feels the need to attend its meetings," he asks.
Syria's Eid peace bid shows that both Russia as well as the US have learnt important lessons, says an editorial in The Indian Express. "The US has come to realise that the insurgency it backed, cheered on by Western human rights groups, has provided opportunity to jihadists who endanger regional and global security. For its part, Russia has learned President Bashar al-Asad's forces are too weak, and lack the legitimacy, to retake all Syria. The 2,80,000 people who have died, and 5 million who have been displaced, are each a reason for political forces in Syria to embrace this reality — and reconciliation," it says.
Behavioural economics could help overcome social obstacles in policy implementation, says an editorial in Mint. "The recent news that the government think tank Niti Aayog could be setting up a behavioural economics unit is thus welcome... Behavioural scientists have shown that human choice is a complicated affair. We have cognitive biases, we use heuristics to decide, framing effects are important, we cannot discount the future very well, we need commitment mechanisms to stick to goals," it says.
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