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The Morning Wrap: Om Puri Passes Away, Bengaluru Police Says 'Mass Molestation' 'Didn't Happen'

Our selection of interesting news and opinion from the day's newspapers.
Veteran actor Om Puri passed away in Mumbai on Thursday evening.
Mark Blinch / Reuters
Veteran actor Om Puri passed away in Mumbai on Thursday evening.

The Morning Wrap is HuffPost India's selection of interesting news and opinion from the day's newspapers. Subscribe here to receive it in your inbox each weekday morning.

Kiran Bedi, Lieutenant Governor of Puducherry, has clean bowled Puducherry chief minister V Narayansamy in what seems to be the first match in the New Year. On January 2, Narayansamy issued a ban on the use of social media by government employees for official work. His argument was that the server of the social media companies were located abroad, thereby making official communication and documents shared on them accessible to anyone. Bedi saw in it an attempt to sideline her given how active she is on social media. She hit back 48 hours later, cancelling the CM's notification.

The opposition parties have demanded a postponement of the Union budget for 2017-18, scheduled for 1 February, since it comes just a few days before elections in five states begin. R Jagannathan, in this article, argues that the demand for a postponement is 'ludicrous'. "Once this becomes a precedent, no government--at centre or state--will be able to present budgets on time, assuming there is some election or the other round the corner somewhere in India," he writes.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who is currently visiting India, addressed 3,000 students at his alma mater IIT Kharagpur today. In between discussing India's startup ecosystem and digital economy, Pichai also spoke about himself. "I had learnt Hindi in school but I never spoke it much. Listening to others speak in my first two weeks in college, I thought you address people as abbey saale. One day, I called someone in the mess, abbey saale. The next I thing know, the folks in the mess were quite upset and temporarily shut it down," he said.

Veteran actor Om Puri passed away in Mumbai on Thursday evening. He was 66. Filmmaker Ashoke Pandit, who was a close friend of the actor, first confirmed the sad news of his demise on Twitter. Puri returned home last evening after a shoot. Reportedly his door bell went unanswered on Friday morning, following which his driver raised an alarm.

The alleged mass molestation of women on Bengaluru's iconic MG Road stretch on New Year's Eve "did not happen", the new chief of city police, Pravin Sood has told TV channels. Later, he clarified that while such a thing "could have happened" in a city of 10 million, there was "no evidence" of it.

Beijing has blocked thousands of Tibetans from attending a Buddhist event in Bodh Gaya which is being attended by Dalai Lama, according to reports from Nepal and China.

A 28-year-old woman was attacked with a sharp object by an unidentified person near Mumbai's Mahalaxmi Race Course on Thursday night. She has been admitted in a hospital. The woman was waiting for a friend when the attacker stabbed her from behind.

After addressing a huge rally in Patna on Thursday, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was having a lavish lunch with Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, Lalu Yadav, and his two sons, he decided to joke around with Tej Pratap Yadav, Bihar's 28-year-old Health Minister and older son of Lalu Yadav, whose party is a member of the ruling coalition in Bihar. "Aap toh Kishan Kanhaiya ho gaye hain (you are becoming a likeness of Krishna)," teased the PM, referring to Tej Pratap Yadav's visit to Mathura last month, the birthplace of Lord Krishna and a recent photograph of him playing the flute, the instrument that the deity is usually depicted with.

6-year-old Fayaz can't understand why schools in Srinagar would not admit him. He had lost both his legs in a mortar shell explosion outside his home in Kashmir's Budgam district, near an army firing range three years ago. His parents have been struggling to get their differently abled son into school.

Sandhya Menon writes why TV channels should called it 'Bengaluru's Shame'. Menon calls it a stupid, thoughtless and typically Indian response to a women's safety story. "It isn't concern for women and their safety that spurs us into action, but the belief that we as a nation/city/state will be shamed and humiliated in the eyes of others. If cases of molestation and rape weren't reported, we'd just shrug our shoulders, move on and say, "unfortunate girl." Throw a little spotlight on the brutal way men around the country - even the world - treat women and suddenly it is about the way you are perceived."

A Hindustan Times editorial notes how MS Dhoni's journey has encouraged boys from the heartland to dream big. "The man who started as a football goalkeeper and became India's first cricketing mega star from the hinterland, put power over proper shots in batting and confounded the purists while making the keeper's role his own for a decade."

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.