Mumbai:  A hip-hop dancer, who was born without legs,  appearing on an Indian television reality show - India's Got Talent-  has become a rage with his swift dance moves and acrobatic skills.

21-year-old Vinod Thakur shot to fame after performing on the television show India's Got Talent.

After qualifying in the first round, Thakur has been rehearsing and training for the subsequent rounds of the talent show to be recorded in Mumbai.

Hailing from a poor neighbourhood in East Delhi, Thakur was born without legs due to a

Madhulika Sonkar

New Delhi: The small classroom is abuzz with conversations in Persian. But it ends as soon as a young woman in salwar-kameez enters and starts teaching English. Meet Aarzoo Hussain, an Afghan national, who is fiercely independent and wants womenfolk from her country to lead a free life too. Hussain is happy that her family chose to come to India and she is away from the land of “tyranny and subjugation”.

Living in a middle-class neighbourhood in Bhogal in south Delhi, Hussain runs a tuition centre for Afghan nationals who like her have made the national capital their home away from home.

“Life was difficult there. Restrictions brought immense fear. The conflict made things worse,”

New Delhi: Show them a boy-meets-girl story and chances are today's Indian youth will switch off their TV sets. What they are looking for is some serious 'love, sex aur dhokha' on the small screen that is closer to the reality of their own lives.

Shows like "Emotional Atyachaar", "Dadagiri", "Axe Ur Ex", "Splitsvilla", "Dare 2 Date", "Love Net" - about double timing your partner, backbiting and making a mockery of relationships - have become a craze among college-going students

Chris Cairns spent half his life on a cricket pitch - these days, the only time he picks up a bat is when he plays with a social cricket team in Dubai.

For the past two years, the former matchwinning all-rounder has been keeping his head down as he reinvents himself in the United Arab Emirates. Among the cricket world, he has been seen to disappear to Dubai. And his life is dramatically different from what it was even just a few years ago.

Runs and wickets have been replaced with textbooks and diamonds, as 40-year-old Cairns relaunches himself as a diamond trader. He is also on his third marriage, to Mel Croser, a former Australian basketball star turned marketing executive. His sons, aged six and eight,

92-year-old has 'miraculously' survived without a single drop since she was 14

Could a woman who claims to have had no water for the last 78 years hold the solution to manage water shortage better? Unlikely, but what could be only termed as a miracle unless medical science proves otherwise, 92-year old Narasamma from Hanamant Nagar has been doing just that.

Narasamma said, "I haven't had water since childhood. Even today, I don't feel the need for it, and my body has always responded well. I only have coffee twice a day.

Maybe, it's unbelievable for a lot of people, but this is how I have been living. Until now, only my family members have known about it. I never talked about it because then doctors and researchers will start investigating me, and I will be an object of scrutiny for everyone, which I don't want."

It was not always like this.  In 1932, when Narasamma was 14, she developed a peculiar problem.

Thrissur: Over 600 dancers painted like tigers and 300 percussionists took to the main thoroughfare of this sylvan Kerala town to perform the ancient Pulikali or the tiger dance as part of the Onam festivities.

More than 20,000 people Thursday lined the streets of this town, around 300 km from the state capital Thiruvananthapuram, braving the steady drizzle to witness the Pulikali folk dance that is being promoted as a tourist attraction and competitive event like the snake boat race by the state government.

The dancers, divided into 10 teams or "Sangams" from nearly 25 villages in the Thrissur district, paraded down the high street, showing off their colourful and intricate tiger body art replete with stripes, rosettes, whiskers and fangs in natural hues of yellow, black, pink,

Bangalore: This is how Shashi Tharoor's twins Kanishk and Ishan welcomed Sunanda Pushkar, after the wedding in his ancestral village in Kerala yesterday. "Amma, welcome to the family," these were the words that moved Sunanda Pushkar, soon after she married Shashi Tharoor, yesterday morning. Kanishk and Ishan, Tharoor's sons from his first marriage to Tilottama Mukherji, were lined up to welcome their new mother, while Shiv, Sunanda's son from her marriage to Sujit Menon, was at her side.

If you thought Bollywood celebrities only read scripts, here is a surprise. From fiction to philosophy and thrillers to romances, they love reading books and consider it their favourite pastime. Many B-town celebrities swear by well-known tomes like The Idiot, Chariots Of The Gods, The Kite Runner and Interview With A Vampire.

Actress Deepika Padukone’s favourite book is The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. “It’s a wonderful book, I really liked it,” the actress said.

Surprisingly, actor Chunky Pandey has quite a hefty list of favourites. “I’m currently reading a series of books by Erich von Däniken. The one I just finished is called Chariots Of The Gods. I loved it. The book is based on the premise that what humans across the globe refer

One after the other, Bollywood films are collapsing at the box office and none of them are small budget films. Huge inputs of money, superstars, exotic locales, foreign actors and elaborate sets have only translated into even bigger losses.

Every film producer, film-maker and any other person who has a stake in the success of the Indian film industry is trying to come up with newer marketing gimmicks to titillate the interest of the audience and to woo them back to theatres.

It is said that from January till June this year, Bollywood has already lost approximately Rs200 crores. Big guns that were expected to set the screen on fire collapsed. The list includes much-awaited and hyped films such as Kites, Raavan, Ran, Veer, Karthik Calling

Tezpur: These are no ordinary jackfruit that are served to patients and staff at the 155 Army Base Hospital here. But living products of history grown on the ashes of India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
Lt. Col. Rajesh Kalia, spokesperson of the army in Guwahati, Assam, said: "It was our first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru's desire that his ashes be spread across the country." Nehru died May 27, 1964.
"Accordingly, a packet of his ashes was brought here May 31, 1964, to the army's 4 Corps headquarters and buried at the base hospital's old location, in the refugee market," Kalia told IANS.