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Marrakech: The Style | Mustapha Blaoui’s Showroom
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Lemurs, Madagascar
Photo: Stephen AlvarezDecken’s sifakas appear right at home in their karst home in western Madagascar. These lemurs live...
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GujuratiMatrimony is just one of the many localized marriage websites across India. (Image: screen grab of gujaratimatrimony.com)
The model is familiar to anyone who’s been online dating in the US: you make a series of selections to narrow down your search. The Indian matrimony sites offer countless drop-down menus covering things like eating habits, religion, income, and caste.
The caste system in India is now more about shared commonalities than social standing, says the company CEO, Murugavel Janakiraman. It’s about removing friction in a relationship, simply reducing the chances of two people having uncomfortable differences of opinion. Caste as an indicator of commonality in terms of things such as food, tradition or culture.
Indeed, the higher up India’s social ladder you go, the easier it is to pick and choose which aspects of caste matter to you. In fact, at the very top of the ladder you find a group that’s now able to leave caste behind altogether: the new super-rich, India’s millionaires. More.
Contestants for the Miss India pageant pose in front of judges: A scene from “The World Before Her,” a new documentary film which looks at the lives of Indian women today. (Photo: Storyline Entertainment)
The film, currently playing at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, portrays a stark choice for Indian women: They are either beauty queens or staunch opponents of all things modern.
More.
‘Untouchable’ Indian woman becomes a tycoon: Dalits still face discrimination in India’s caste system, but Kalpana Saroj has worked her way up from poverty, becoming a manufacturing tycoon.
Must-read for the day.
Emerging from extreme poverty and pariah status to a position of strength and wealth has certainly been satisfying, she said. That fact that she is a woman — in a country ranked by the United Nations as among the world’s most dangerous places to be born a girl, given high female infanticide, inferior healthcare and nutrition — made her rise more extraordinary.
And although her ascent hasn’t been without its share of speed bumps or caste-related jibes, she said, she has tried to channel anger and frustration into getting things done.
“I’m aware people may still look down on me because I’m a dalit,” she said. “But even when I was very agitated, I never lost my cool, always trying instead to find my way out of difficult situations.”
Photo: Kalpana Saroj. Credit: Mark Magnier / Los Angeles Times
We like how this story starts with:
“She was called dirty, ugly, a “little packet of poison,” the offspring of donkeys. These days, Kalpana Saroj is called something else: a millionaire.”
Man finds his mother after 25 years using Google Earth
Twenty five years ago, when Saroo Brierly was five years old, he and his brother boarded a train in India, searching for lost coins and other valuables. Saroo became separated, and ended up on another train. He fell asleep, and woke up 14 hours later on the other side of India, in Calcutta.
Brierly couldn’t read or write, or understand the local Bengali language. And he couldn’t go home, because he didn’t know where he was from. Brierly became a beggar, one of the many children on the streets of Calcutta. After some time, he was taken in by an orphanage, and put up for adoption. An Australian couple adopted him and took him home to Tasmania.
Fast forward a couple decades and Brierly is still wondering where exactly he’s from. He decided to use Google Earth and a formula to try to figure it out.
“I zoomed down and -BANG – it just sort of came up,” Brierly said.
“It” was the town of Khandwa. More.
Happy Friday — here’s a Hindi rock video promoting the new “Avengers” movie.
Hollywood is looking to maximize revenues in India, a major market for movies. And the way to do that in the land of Bollywood is through music. More.
The Sulabh International Toilet Museum is located in a quiet courtyard in a neighborhood far from the heart of India’s capital city, New Delhi. (Photo: by Rhitu Chatterjee/PRI’s The World.)
Nearly half of India’s population does not have access to modern toilet facilities. This stems in part from religion, says Bindeshwar Pathak from the organization that runs the museum, because ancient Hindu texts instructed people not to defecate near their homes.
“Now from 5,000 years, Indians have been told not to have the toilet inside the house,” Pathak explained. “And now we say, please have the toilet inside the house. So there’s a gap of culture.”
American football in India? Believe it — India’s first professional American-style football league, funded by a long list of Indian and US investors — including former NFL player and coach Mike Ditka, and former Green Bay Packers linebacker Brandon O’Neil Chillar — will officially kick-off in November.
Kevin Dieball, one of the league’s investors, said India’s booming economy means football has huge potential there — even though cricket has been India’s sport of choice since the British Raj.
(Photo: The Elite Football League of India holds training in Pune, India. By Sindya N. Bhanoo, PRI’s The World.)
Artisans hand craft mridangums — drums used in Indian classical music.
In Chennai, India, it’s what’s called “the December Season”. It’s a time when the city comes alive with thousands of concerts featuring Carnatic music, the classical music of South India. People from around the world flock there through January to hear it live.
From PRI’s The World.
