AHMEDABAD — Gujarat water supply minister Kunvarji Bavaliya was caught on camera on Saturday telling a group of women who complained about drinking water woes in their village that they should have voted for him.

After the video, shot on mobile camera, went viral, the minister said the question came from “uneducated women” and had been prompted by local politics.

Bavaliya quit the Congress last year to join the BJP and was made a cabinet minister. He won the ensuing Assembly by-election to Jasdan, which falls in Rajkot Lok Sabha constituency.

Campaigning for the BJP candidate at Kanesara village, he faced a group of angry villagers, most of them women, who complained that only half the village gets drinking water.

To which, the minister said only 55 percent of the villagers had voted for him last time.

“I have the entire water resources ministry, I am in the government, and if required, I can sanction crores of rupees to arrange water supply to the village,” he said.

“When I contested the election this time, I got only 55 percent votes. Why didn’t you all come together to vote for me?” he asked.

When questioned by reporters later, Bavaliya defended his remarks, saying the protesters were “uneducated women”, and local politics prompted them to ask the question.

He also said that the complaint was not about his ministry, but the local panchayat. “I told them this is a panchayat issue and does not concern my ministry,” he said.

Congress leader Hardik Patel lambasted Bavaliya.

“If somebody did not vote for the BJP and voted for other party, shouldn’t they be given basic amenities? This is vindictive politics,” Patel said.

March 9 found Bihar’s health minister Mangal Pandey at a national conference on a ‘Partnership to Scale up Mental Healthcare in Bihar’, so perhaps it was protocol that the Bharatiya Janata Party politician share some thoughts.

“Take, for instance, a politically conscious man. He feels Pakistan is doing India wrong. Our PM’s action, he feels, could have been different. He doesn’t think he is in an office, that his work isn’t getting done, and that the PM’s work is not his. Even that man is mentally ill.” Shot with a smartphone, the video is grainy, but you can hear people giggle. Pandey got what all speakers often want—a laugh. The joke, though, was on him.

Pandey did make some right noises in his speech—he said Bihar needed to develop a policy for mental health that was separate from the Centre’s—but he forgot to tell us what happens if his politically aware idler did not have an office to work in. What if he was one of the many lakhs of Indians who are unemployed? Disillusioned, without any job to hold, are they going to be branded mentally ill as well?

If looked at dispassionately, however, Pandey has done us a favour. He has shown us that Pulwama and Balakot can make us ill. If the health minister’s equivalence is to be taken at face value, our mental afflictions are not just a result of biology. We are social beings, but also political creatures. Current affairs affect us, and at no point is that impact more profound than when a general election kicks off.

Pandey has also given us a clear choice—we can either question the government or be branded mentally ill. Holding the government accountable has perhaps never done anyone’s mental health any good, but American writer and activist Susan Sontag did have a pithy lesson to teach wannabe dissenters. She had once said, “Sanity is a cosy life.” In her life Sontag abjured cosiness. Though this piece ostensibly tries to map the points where our mental health and our nation’s politics awkwardly intersect, it also argues that in these times, it may be best if we give up on some of our ‘cosiness’ too.

COLLECTIVE ANXIETY

On March 27, 2017, prime minister Narendra Modi was gentle in his Mann Ki Baat address.

“Depression,” he said, “is not incurable. There is a need to create a psychologically conducive environment to begin with.” The PM was right. Compared to other mental illnesses, depression has been considered more treatable. But by asserting it was one’s family and friends who had the responsibility of creating a firm and secure environment, Modi deftly let himself off the hook.

According to a report by Amnesty India, India has allegedly witnessed 721 incidents of hate crime since September 2015. Because a majority of these were against Dalits and Muslims, it would be safe to assume that these social groups suffer an anxiety, perhaps even a depression, that is greater than those more privileged. The rhetoric of UP CM Yogi Adityanath makes clear that Modi lets that pot stir.  

An October 2018 survey—Stress in America—found that 62 percent of Americans feel the current political climate of their country is a significant source of stress. According to mental health practitioners, this stress has now escalated into a “collective anxiety.” Donald Trump, it is clear, has not unified his country. India has a similar problem. For that “conducive environment” he prescribes, Modi must know that mental turmoil cuts across party lines. He leads the nation, and the mental health of his detractors is also his business.

THE MENTAL ILLNESS BARB

Narendra Modi, it must be said, uses learning disorders to mock his opponents, not mental illness. At IIT Kharagpur this March, Modi interjected a student who wanted advice on a project that would help dyslexic children be creative. He asked if such research could help “children” in the age group of 40-50. Only dyslexic individuals and Rahul Gandhi would perhaps find this veiled jibe offensive, but the Congress chief ought to have been unaffected. He’s used to far worse.

In August 2017, BJP leader Uma Bharti was so concerned about Gandhi’s mental wellbeing, she said she’d “pray to God to grant him wisdom”. Earlier this year, the BJP and its supporters put their weight behind a tongue-in-cheek hashtag—#GetWellSoonRahul. A week after it had begun trending, the party used its official handle to tweet a definition of Multiple Personality Disorder. This time the “get-well-soon-Rahul” had more punch. In January, Subramanian Swamy said Priyanka Gandhi was bipolar.

Even though the Gandhi siblings seem to have been singled out for the mental illness barb, it has been frequently employed in Indian politics. Samajwadi chief Akhilesh Yadav, for instance, said recently that the BJP itself was “schizophrenic”. For its part, the Indian Psychiatry Society (IPC) has written to the Election Commission (EC) last week. It hopes the EC will caution politicians who are reinstating mental health stigma and trivialising suffering. All of 13.7% of Indians are mentally ill. Despite their turmoil, this sizeable demographic is still guaranteed voting rights. It is arguably entitled to more consideration.

A POLITICIAN’S MENTAL HEALTH

Though politicians only ever insult the mental wellbeing of their colleagues, the electorate can—and should— assess the mental health of those they elect to power. In his article, ’The Mental Health of Politicians’, British psychologist and professor Andrew Weinberg writes, “Perhaps it does not help that as citizens we can be sceptical of the role of our politicians in making important decisions that shape the world in which we live, yet if we turn away from scrutinising their behaviour we risk compounding the issue and compromising our own well-being too.” Weinberg works with the simple assumption that politicians are human and can be fallible.

Political office, Weinberg argues, is also a workplace, and the psychological support we give our employees, must also be made available to, say, the members of the BJP, the Congress and all other parties. Parliamentarians, in particular, also have their constituents to think about, and some MPs are inevitably tasked with governance. Unlike sport, politicians do not receive special training for public life. The stress they suffer is immense. They need to be mindful of their limits. The PM, for instance, has said he hasn’t taken a day’s holiday in his tenure. He sleeps for four hours. This ideal he has invented is impossible, and for his voters and colleagues, this is a dangerous and unhealthy precedent.

Given his alacrity, one can’t accuse Modi of neglecting strain, but leaders before him have shown that it is possible to govern even while struggling with mental illnesses. Diagnosed retrospectively, Abraham Lincoln is believed to have fought clinical depression all his life. Thought to be bipolar by some, and a depressive by others, Winston Churchill once confessed to his doctor, “I sat in the House of Commons, but black depression settled on me.” Norwegian PM Kjell Magne Bondevik announced that he was suffering from a depressive episode in 1998. He stepped down, and waited for three weeks to resume office. Then in 2001, he was again elected PM. Bondevik’s candour is said to have bolstered mental health awareness in Norway. In India, sadly, mental illness remains the monopoly of the weak.

TRIGGER WARNING

In July 2017, IndiaSpend concluded that between January 1, 2017, and July 5, 2018, 33 persons were killed as a result of mob violence and at least 99 injured in 69 reported cases. National Crime Records Bureau figures from 2016 show that of the 106 daily rapes in India, four out of ten victims are minors. In Uttar Pradesh, 44 people were killed as a result of 450 communal incidents in 2017. The apathy of politicians can be triggers, but these numbers can have a more adverse impact. Twitter did laugh about our GDP, but most figures in these past five years have not afforded humour.

If Twitter, however, was a barometer of social cohesion, it’s clear that ours is a society irreparably divided. Trolling, which was once primarily some clever jibing, is now treacherous. At the height of the #MeToo movement, trolls targeted women who had already been harassed. Their tweets were mostly misogynistic. Given a free pass this election, trolls have even taken their bullying offline. Not just was journalist Barkha Dutt assailed with nearly a thousand texts and calls, she was also sent ‘dick pics’. Such bullying is known to cause depression in teenagers. Adult trauma is usually one’s own to process.

According to a study conducted by a group of Canadian researchers, trolls are generally psychopathic and sadistic individuals. This diagnosis, though, is little solace. It doesn’t offer an escape. Deleting your social media accounts is perhaps an option, but that means giving up on a ready, sometimes essential, source of news and information. Besides, it’s often only avenues like Facebook and Twitter that gives those on the margins their voice. You’d do well to tune in. There may be only one way left for you to safeguard yourself. The self-preservation manual dictates—when the going gets weird, just walk away.  

BE STOIC

The Stoic philosopher Seneca lived above a Roman bathhouse. When “assailed by a cacophony of noises”, Seneca uses every trick in the Stoic handbook—he forces his mind to pay attention to itself, he stems the turmoil inside, etc. Someone comes along and asks why he won’t move. Seneca hadn’t thought of that. He promptly decides to pack his bags. The point of the story is not that you should leave the country. It simply insists that you take practical measures. We often forget that doing something to change our mood—reading a book, watching a film, taking a walk—is easier than changing the nation. We also forget that the nation, like moods, will always need changing.

Yet another Stoic philosopher, the Greek Epictetus, had once said, “People are disturbed not by things, but by the views they take of things.” Though this offers little consolation to those directly impacted by political high-handedness and cyber-bullying, it is perhaps important to remember that this quote was a primary inspiration behind the inception of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). Now used by a majority of therapists the world over, CBT insists that your health matters more than the world outside, or to put it simply—the internal matters more than the external. The impact of political discourse on your health can’t be undermined, but at times only humour and detachment offer relief.

Of all the pictures taken in New York on 9/11, Thomas Hoepker’s was perhaps the most controversial. Sitting across the river from Lower Manhattan, a group of New Yorkers sit chatting casually. They could just be sunbathing. Smoke and dust, however, fill the sky. They do know something terrible has happened, but apparently, they are unmoved. Hoepker waited for five years before he published this photograph. Expectedly, it was met with anger, and Hoepker’s subjects were accused of being callous. These accusations might well be true, but rather than exacerbate it, the photograph may also force us to economise our outrage. Frenzy, it shows, is never the only option, and May 23 is thankfully no 9/11.      

BTS took “Saturday Night Live” by storm as the K-Pop band became the first in  history to appear on the program. 

V, Jungkook, Jimin, Suga, Jin, RM, and J-Hope performed their new single “Boy With Luv” for the first time live, in black suits with pops of color, highlighted by their signature high-energy precision dance moves and killer vocals.

They also took to the stage to do “Mic Drop.”

The “SNL” audience — and fourth time “Saturday Night Live” host Emma Stone who introduced the singers — were thrilled. 

Stone gushed to Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show” earlier in the week: “I just saw their soundcheck today and I involuntarily screamed. It was like, ‘Ahhh!’ It was like a chemical reaction that happens. They’re incredible.”

The BTS appearance was teased with a pre-show “SNL” video featuring fangirl Stone and comedy cast members playing teens at a slumber party waiting for the big event. The real-deal fans started camping out Monday at 30 Rock for the chance to get last-minute tickets to see BTS.

BTS’ seven-track album, “Map of the Soul: Persona,” which includes “Boy With Luv,” was released Friday.

The “Boy With Luv” video features Halsey. But she’s at Coachella and didn’t appear in the “SNL” performance. The “Eastside” singer is scheduled to perform with BTS May 1 on the Billboard Music Awards.

The band was the first Korean group in history to attend and appear onstage at the Grammys in February.

For two years, Game Of Thrones fans have been being trying to guess what will happen in the eighth and final series. 

This has resulted in plenty of theories – some more likely than others. 

Ahead of the first new episode, we’re breaking down seven of the most intriguing, and which ones have a strong chance of being right... 

1. Littlefinger is still alive 

We know it’s wrong to wish ill on people, but this is Game Of Thrones and some of them deserve it.

After seven seasons of scheming and plotting murders, Lord Petyr Baelish met a grisly end in the series seven finale, when Arya Stark slit his throat. 

“That’s that,” you might think. Sadly, this may not be the case.

Getting your head around this one involves casting your mind all the way back to series four, but thankfully, YouTube user Neo has broken it down: 

Thank you, Neo. 

Likelihood? It would be incredibly clever for bosses to have planted the seeds for this so long ago. And so much so, that we’d actually forgive them for bringing him back.

2. Daenerys Targaryen will be pregnant with Jon Snow’s baby 

In the last couple of episodes, the Mother of Dragons mentioned that she can’t have kids on a number of occasions.

So many times in fact, that it seemed a little too obvious – the writers clearly want to make sure we know she believes is. Is this the set-up for a not-so-shocking shock pregnancy? 

Likelihood? Erm... maybe? The writers made such a point of Daenerys’ inability to conceive that there has to be more to it. 

If she is pregnant, it could spell the end for her though as Targaryen children have often killed their mothers previously (with Jon and Dany both doing so themselves). 

3. Cersei is faking her pregnancy

Then there’s the Queen (for now), who claimed to be expecting another child with brother, Jaime, at the end of series seven.

Cersei made sure Tyrion knew – and indeed, this was the first anyone heard – before he returned to Team Daenerys, probably certain he’d pass the information on. This could potentially rattle Daenerys, who currently believes herself unable to produce an heir. 

Cersei then told Jaime, while trying to gain leverage. It was convenient, to say the least. 

Likelihood? The latest trailer didn’t help solve this, as there were no shots of a visibly pregnant Cersei. Faking a pregnancy would be very her as well, we’ll say that much. 

4. And that she’ll die at the hands of Jaime

Having clung on through numerous onslaughts on the Lannisters, and outliving all of her children (apart from one, maybe, but we’ll get to that) Cersei’s time could soon be up. 

According to fans and bookies alike, she’s likely to die at some point before the closing credits roll on series eight. But when? And how?

Let’s talk about the ‘Valanqor’ theory, and try to keep this as clear as possible.

A previous flashback scene showed a young Cersei visiting a fortune teller, who correctly predicted events including her children becoming kings and all being killed. 

As Cersei was leaving, the oracle added: “And when your tears have drowned you, the valonqar shall wrap his hands about your pale white throat and choke the life from you.”

This line has been agonised over endlessly as “valonqar” means “little brother” in High Valyrian – and Jaime, born two minutes after Cersei, is technically younger. 

Cersei does, of course, have two brothers and not one, but given the closeness and toxicity between the twins, it would round both her story and his redemption arc off well if he killed the queen.

Likelihood? We reckon this will happen. 

5. The Dead Ned Theory 

This one has been kicking around for a while and following the release of the series eight trailer, plenty of fans were fussing over it again.

The first scenes of the trailer show assassin Arya Stark running through the crypts at Winterfell and given that she’s been trained to be completely fearless, everyone is wondering why she’s so terrified. 

After brightening up the very dark trailer, some Redditors appear to have found that two men are behind her. Could they be Ned Stark and the undead Kings of Winter, awoken from their crypts?

Could it be that they had awoken from their graves? As our HuffPost US colleagues have pointed out: “Why else would there be catacombs full of the corpses of lords and ladies if not for an epic reason?”

Read their detailed breakdown of this line of thinking here. 

Likelihood? It’s a slight leap when there are plenty of living men who could be chasing Arya. But whatever it is, we’re terrified that she’s terrified. This is not going to end well. 

6. And the Lady Stoneheart Theory 

Never mind Ned – in the books, it’s his wife, Catelyn Stark, who rises from the dead. 

If you’re planning to read them at some point then we should warn you that a spoiler is coming, OK? Right...

In George RR Martin’s novel, a zombified version of Catelyn, called Lady Stoneheart, rises from the dead and seeks revenge on the Freys for the Red Wedding.

Now Arya did spend a lot of season seven getting revenge on them, but back at Winterfell, as she spoke to Brienne of Tarth about her oath to protect the Stark daughters, a mysterious figure could be seen in the background:

See? In the door way. It’s creepy, to say the least. 

Likelihood? This feels like a bit of reach, especially as Arya has pretty much had the whole revenge thing covered. 

That hasn’t stopped one of the show’s stars from backing the theory though. 

7. Bran is the Night King 

This theory first began gaining serious attention while series seven was still airing and dates back even further than that. 

Thanks to Bran’s complex ability to time travel and alter the past, it’s all a bit weird but basically people think Bran could accidentally become the Night King during a trip back in time.

The two of them are often wearing similar outfits and have similar abilities too, with HuffPost US pointing out that the Night King can see Bran while he’s in visions.

Then in the series finale, the White Walkers could be seen making their way through Westeros, having broken down the wall with the help of their brand-new dragon. 

Redditor sannybop points out that it formation of the Army Of the Dead is very similar to the Stark direwolf symbol. Could this mean there’s some sort of link between the Starks and the White Walkers? And could that link be Bran? 

Isaac Hempstead Wright, who plays Bran, doesn’t think so.

There is a story about the legendary 18th-century poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, known for iconic works like ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Kubla Khan’. Coleridge was living in a farmhouse in the English countryside in the 1790s when the entire course of the poem ‘Kubla Khan’ came to him in a dream. Waking up, he realised that he distinctly recollected all the words, and eagerly set about putting pen to paper. He was not even midway through it when he was interrupted by an unexpected visitor, the ‘person from Porlock’, who detained him for an hour. After that, when Coleridge tried to get back to the poem, he struggled to remember anything but scattered lines. ‘Kubla Khan’, considered among the most exquisite works of poetry, was finally published in 1816, in its unfinished form of 54 lines.

We all have our creative moments, when we are inspired and almost possessed by ideas that we feel could turn into the next literary masterpiece, the next blockbuster movie, a sublime sonata or the next billion-dollar entrepreneurial idea. Then reality intervenes like the ‘person from Porlock’, with its unceasing demands — deadlines, targets, financial pressures or family commitments — and we find the inspiration slowly slipping away from our grasp, almost like a twig carried away by a stream, never to come back to us again.

For those of us with corporate careers or family responsibilities, this frustration must seem rather familiar, and I am no exception. I wrote my book KaalKoot – The Lost Himalayan Secret as I juggled demanding corporate jobs and business travel, along with the accompanying jet lag and the constant feeling of sleep deprivation. Parts of my journey might resonate with those of you who are attempting to find a balance between things that scream for your attention and the things that inspire you. To borrow author Stephen King’s terminology, the former — the things that have to be done — are the ‘haftas’ (have to’s), while the latter — the things that you want to do — are the ‘wannas’.

The most important part is to figure out what is important to you and to make peace with the trade-offs. Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, said, “If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it.”Quitting a full-time job to explore creative pursuits might work for some, but it involves taking a drastic hit on your financial security, not to mention the emotional toll of toiling away with minimal interim reward or validation towards an uncertain outcome. I chose to pursue my creative pursuits in parallel with my role as a business leader, as I felt that both roles gave expression to different aspects of my personality. But that also involved getting used to the constant tussle for time and the gnawing feeling that I might not be doing justice to either. 

A corporate career comes with certain advantages too. It has enabled me to travel and meet people, and has provided a rich reservoir of life experiences that I can tap into for creative inspiration. As a private equity investor and a board member, I got to work closely with businesses and experience the peaks and troughs. My stint in investment banking gave me first-hand experience of what happens when the primeval human emotions, greed and fear, are tightly packed together in the adrenaline-filled powder keg of the stock markets. Working with firms across the world has helped me appreciate cultural nuances, while also underlining the universality of human emotions.

The other big learning for me was to learn to keep the ‘haftas’ at bay, and make space and time for the ‘wannas’. For most people, this is easier said than done, with clients, bosses, friends, family and social commitments all jostling for space. Many writers use the early morning hours to write, when the demands of the day have not yet started screaming for attention. I used the time I spent on flights and in airport lounges to quieten my mind, keep the external noise at bay, and focus on tuning into my inner voice. A few years ago, I was travelling extensively on business, and ended up taking over three hundred flights in a couple of years. That is when most of my book KaalKoot was written.

It is also important to be consistent, rather than waiting for a flash of inspiration. While creative inspiration is important and can strike at unexpected times, it is also true that inspiration comes easier to those who are prepared. To start with, I found it useful to set aside a couple of hours every day to write, and to not be disheartened even if a large part of that involved staring at a blank screen. In his book ‘Outliers’, Malcolm Gladwell says that it takes around ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in any area. To become good, you need to make a start at clocking those hours.

An exaggerated need to achieve perfection is often a roadblock to unleashing creativity, as insecurity frequently masquerades as perfectionism. Creativity flourishes best when it is allowed to bloom and express, unfettered by the fear of failure. To rephrase Steve Jobs, it needs to ‘be crazy enough to think it can change the world’. When our creative endeavours are in their infancy, they need to be protected from the harsh glare of judgement, not only from the external world, but also from the cynical part of ourselves. Rather than wait for perfection, it makes sense to make a start, albeit an imperfect one. There is a separate time for editing and seeking external feedback, and I found it easier to do that after I finished the first draft of my book.

It is important to provide fodder for our creative mind. For an entrepreneur, this would mean meeting people and understanding more about the market and business models. For a musician, it would involve listening to more music, and for a writer, it would mean to read, read more and then read some more. I try to make time for this by replacing time spent checking phone messages and social media with reading books, even if it’s in small bite sizes.

Lastly, the single most important ingredient of creativity is fun. That means letting go of the illusion of control, and being open to the voyage of discovery your creative pursuits might take you on. That also means letting go of the need for determinism and logic, and being open to intuition and serendipity. It means taking the first step, and to believe, as the Tao Te Ching says, that ‘a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’.

NEW DELHI — Opposition parties on Sunday held a meeting to discuss the issue of EVM malfunctioning and said they will approach the Supreme Court again to demand that at least 50 percent of paper trails be verified with EVMs. 

Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, who on Saturday met Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora to raise the issue of EVM malfunctioning, said 21 political parties have demanded verification of VVPAT paper trails of 50 percent of the EVMs.

Congress leader Abhishek Singhvi said opposition parties will approach the Supreme Court seeking a direction to the EC for counting of at least 50 percent of the VVPAT slips with the EVMs in every assembly segment.

He said the opposition parties will carry out a nationwide campaign on the issue of discrepancies in EVMs.

“We do not think the EC is doing enough to address issue of EVM malfunctioning,” Singhvi alleged.

The Supreme Court Monday directed the EC to increase random matching of VVPAT slips with EVMs to five polling booths per assembly segment, from one at present, in the Lok Sabha polls, saying it will provide greater satisfaction not just to political parties but the entire electorate. 

A giant aircraft with the world’s longest wingspan has landed after its first ever flight.

The twin-fuselage Stratolaunch jet landed two hours after taking off from Mojave Air and Space Port in California.

The company said the jet hit altitudes of up to 17,000 feet above the Mojave Desert while performance and handling qualities were evaluated.

CEO Jean Floyd said the aircraft made a “spectacular” landing, adding it was amazing to “watch this majestic bird take flight”.

Established by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Stratolaunch is vying to be a contender in the satellite launch market. Allen died in October 2018.

The aircraft is designed to release rockets attached to the centre of its enormous wing, which stretches 385 feet from tip to tip.

NEW DELHI — More than a thousand pilots of debt-laden Jet Airways will not fly from Monday as they have not been paid salaries for the past three months, President of the National Aviators Guild said on Sunday.

Saddled with more than $1.2 billion of bank debt, the airline has been teetering for weeks and has yet to receive a loan of about $217 million from its lenders as part of a rescue deal agreed in late March.

“Pilots haven’t been paid for the last three months,” Capt Karan Chopra told Reuters.

The crisis at Jet has deepened in recent weeks as lessors have started applying to deregister planes, signalling the planned bailout had failed to assuage their concerns.

An urgent meeting to discuss the Jet situation was held at the prime minister’s office on Friday, which was also attended by the country’s aviation secretary, Pradeep Singh Kharola.

After the meeting, Kharola said the carrier had money to operate 6-7 planes over the weekend and after that the lenders would have to decide how many jets it could fly after Monday afternoon, ET Now reported late on Friday.

Kharola said the company will meet bankers on Monday for infusion of funds in the interim, the TV channel said.

According to a Business Standard report on Sunday, Jet’s lenders, led by the State Bank of India, are considering a proposal to infuse $144.55 million to keep the airline afloat.

The money is expected to be disbursed after the Jet management submits an operational plan on how it intends to use the money till May 7, the report said.

The lenders, who have been seeking a new investor to take a stake of up to 75 percent in the airline, hope to complete the selection of bidders by May 7.

Initial bids were to be submitted by the end April 10, but SBI extended the deadline to April 12.

Abu Dhabi-based Etihad Airways, which owns a 24-percent stake in the airline, private equity fund TPG Capital, government owned sovereign fund National Investment and Infrastructure Fund and ousted chairman Naresh Goyal are among those to have submitted bids, Business Standard reported.

It’s almost time, y’all. The cold winds in the North are rising, death is marching beyond The Wall. Winter is finally here and ”Game of Thrones” fans are on the edge of their seats, eager for the premiere of the final season of our favorite epic drama on April 14.

Avid “GoT” watchers like myself have spent years agonizing over who lives, who dies and who will sit upon the Iron Throne. We’ve theorized, we’ve binged, we haven’t been able to shut up about it for the last year and eight months since season seven ended. The intense fandom the show (which boasts one of the largest viewerships in television history) has created is fun to be a part of. But those in our lives who love us but don’t watch the show may feel a bit left out and a tad irritated by all of the hoopla and fanfare. 

“GoT” fans totally get it if you don’t like the show. You’re wrong, of course, but we get it. Still, these left-behind significant others can start to feel like “GoT widows” who’ve lost their loved ones to the hit HBO series and can’t get a word in edgewise or even direct eye contact on Sunday nights at 9pm.

“It’s so annoying, to be honest,” Dummea Vincent, a 29-year-old executive from Pittsburgh, told me. Her husband, Lalit, has been a “GoT” fan throughout their six years of marriage, but she is not. “I just think the show is tedious. Each episode was so long and stupid. ’Game of Thrones’ has got y’all brainwashed. It feels like a cult following.”

As we prepare for the final six episodes of the series, I spoke with three women in relationships with “GoT” fans about how they cope, how they bond and most importantly, why they don’t watch the greatest show of all time for themselves. 

“Most people who don’t watch the show probably don’t watch it because they know it’s going to be gory,” said Nicole Howard, a 31-year-old writer from Maryland who’s longtime boyfriend Aaron regularly watches the show despite the violence. It’s true, it’s not an easy series to get into. The gratuitous nudity, murder and sexual violence has certainly been a deterrent for some viewers.

“I’m a black woman and I’m a proponent of watching shows with characters that look like me. One of the things that turned me off from ′Game of Thrones’ is that it’s a very white-centered show, that made me a bit uncomfortable,” added Maud Acheampong, a 20-year-old student who’s been in a relationship with a fan named Kosi for a year.

“’GoT’ is also not a show that gives you happy feelings; it’s very much a show of crisis,” she continues. “One of the reasons I didn’t want to watch it is because I didn’t want to be anxious and sad all the time.”

Despite the problems these ladies had with the show, their partners powered through and fell in love with the fictional series, which occasionally resulted in leaving their real loves in their lives on the outside looking in.

“(He and his friends) would have these very tense, existential conversations that were contextualized by this apparently amazing show and I felt a little bit out of place sometimes,” Acheampong said. “And it would always feel like they were walking on eggshells around me when they were talking about ′Game of Thrones.’”

In other cases, being left out of the loop would be preferred.

“After every episode, I won’t hear the end of it,” Vincent said. “Whether it’s ‘You know nothing, Jon Snow’ or ‘Hodor!’ or stuff like that. What even is Hodor?! He will not stop saying lines from the show for the entire week before the next episode comes out. I won’t hear the end of it!”

Added Howard, “If he wanted to ever talk about the show, he’d have to talk to other people in the (‘GoT’) community. I don’t know enough to have that discussion. I’ll probably just listen and eventually tune him out.”

“Game of Thrones” itself isn’t known for its portrayal of healthy fictional relationships but it’s refreshing to see, at least with these couples, how the show isn’t getting in the way of real life partnerships and teaching unexpected lessons on compromise. One of these “widows” even had a change of heart and recently decided to start watching the show.

Regardless of their varying levels of involvement in the show, these three relationships are stronger than Valyrian steel (that’s my last obscure “GoT” reference, I promise). A “Game of Thrones” fandom (or lack thereof) is just another thing that keeps their love lives interesting.

“Being able to argue [with Kosi] about ’Game of Thrones’ has actually been a positive in our relationship,” said Acheampong. “Disagreeing about ’Game of Thrones’ stories and characters in a very weird way has emphasized to me that being with Kosi is safe place; he’s here for the long haul, which is really comforting.”

As Vincent conceded, “I guess one good thing about being a ’Game of Thrones’ widow is that on a Sunday night, I know exactly where he’ll be at and what he’s doing and why he’s not picking up my phone calls. I do hope his favorite characters end up winning at the end of the show.”

When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die, and we can safely say there haven’t been too many winners thus far.

Over the HBO show’s seven seasons, thousands of “Game of Thrones” characters have been maimed, mauled and met their ends in some form or another, so with the fantasy drama’s final season coming up, we wanted to see how they thought the show would ultimately meet its end, too.

HuffPost reached out to a number of actors behind dead characters on the show, making a point to get the opinions of some of the often forgotten but impactful or interesting roles. Some declined (likely, the pain from those old wounds still hurt too much), and some wanted remuneration (perhaps death doesn’t pay as well as we thought), but eventually we found quite a few who were brave enough to share who they thought would win the Iron Throne (if there even is a throne in the end).

Loras Tyrell (Finn Jones)

Cause of death: Blown up in Sept of Baelor by Cersei.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: N/A

What will actually happen: Throne will be destroyed.

“I don’t think there will be a throne in the end. I think ice and fire will destroy the throne and each other in the process of war. It will decentralize power, there will be chaos and out of that chaos and disorder a collective of survivors (hopefully Arya, Brienne, Tyrion, Podrick! to name a few) will lead the way rebuilding the seven kingdoms into something more democratic and sustainable.”

Ros (Esmé Bianco)

Cause of death: Shot with crossbow by Joffrey.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: Varys

“I want Varys to win it because I think he genuinely wants the best for the people of Westeros, and I think he might just be a good guy.  But I’m pretty sure I’ll get proven wrong!”

What will actually happen: Throne will be destroyed/melted by a dragon.

“I’m not sure why anyone would want to sit on the Iron Throne, frankly — it seems to bring nothing but trouble to those that do, plus it looks bloody uncomfortable. I think it will actually be destroyed or melted by a dragon. I just don’t see there being a clear ‘winner’ at the end of it all. ‘Game of Thrones’ isn’t like that!”

Rickon Stark (Art Parkinson)

Cause of death: Couldn’t zigzag.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: King in the North and Dany.

“I would like to see Jon Snow as well as Daenerys on the Iron Throne, as I believe they deserve it and it would make a great happy ending to the show.”

What will actually happen: IDK.

“I’m unsure as to who is going to end up on the Iron Throne, as the show is so unpredictable, which is one of the things that makes it so great and that I believe [why] it has become so popular over the years.”

Olly (Brenock O’Connor)

Cause of death: Hanged by Jon Snow.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: Jon Snow.

“I think I’ve got to be purely selfish, and I’d want to have been killed by the winner. It’s got to be. Jon killed me, from a selfish standpoint ... the real king killed me ... I think Jon deserves it. He’s been through enough. He died and came back. He’s been through the horrors.”

What will actually happen: Night King, duh.

“I think it’s going to be the Night King on the Iron Throne. Just to be honest, I don’t see it going any other way. He’s unbeatable. He’s got a dragon now, and he’s got the biggest army. So I reckon it’ll end with him.”

Shireen Baratheon (Kerry Ingram)

Cause of death: Sacrificed by her dad, Stannis.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: Tyrion.

“I would love for Tyrion to sit on the throne, I think he’s a great character. He thinks before he does!”

What will actually happen: Cersei or White Walkers world domination.

“As much as I would love Tyrion on the throne I do believe that either Cersei will continue to rule or the White Walkers will take over!”

Roose Bolton (Michael McElhatton)

Cause of death: Ramsay sends his regards.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: The ladies of Winterfell.

“I’d like to see Sansa and Arya rule together on the Iron Throne.”

What will actually happen: N/A

Black Walder (Tim Plester)

Cause of death: Baked into a pie by Arya.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: Hot Pie. 

“Is Hot Pie, the baker’s apprentice, still alive? For obvious reasons, I retain a somewhat sentimental attachment to pies.”

What will actually happen: Edmure will rule. Lol.

“When I was on set with Tobias Menzies, we used to joke about how it would be his character, Lord Edmure Tully, who would ultimately end up winning the ‘game.’ We pictured a scenario in which everybody else would be killed off in an epic final battle, either by fire or ice (possibly a combination of the two), leaving the final credits to roll over abject desolation. Then, in an unexpected coda to what had just transpired, we envisaged cutting to the reinforced door of a toilet cubicle slowly opening to reveal Lord Edmure — a little shaken but otherwise unharmed, with his trousers still aroundabout his ankles. Noticing that no one else was around, and spotting the Iron Throne sitting strangely unoccupied, Edmure would then saunter across The Great Hall and tentatively sit himself down on the throne, before turning directly to camera and offering up an embarrassed shrug by means of an explanation. ... It should be noted that this scenario was inspired, in part, by the fact that The Great Hall set was situated in the same Belfast building as the set for the Red Wedding, meaning that you had to pass by it on your way to using the (actual) lavatories.”

Mace Tyrell (Roger Ashton-Griffiths)

Cause of death: Blown up in the Sept by Cersei.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: “No one.”

What will actually happen: Westeros will become Atlantis.

“Westeros is a wholly a-classical environment — not a Corinthian column to be seen. Since the classical world and its legacy has dominated all Western cultures for two millennia, I have to conclude, therefore, that the events in ‘GoT’ take place in a time before the classical age. So what happened to all those sentient life forms (and dragons)? Where is their legacy?

“I reckon that everyone will die in the forthcoming war, leaving behind just a small population to develop over millennia from their reduced state of stone-aged desolation into the civilization of which we are the descendants today. Moreover, the fading memory of what will then be pre-historic Westeros will develop into the myth of Atlantis.

“That’s what I’d write anyway!”

Cause of death: Thrown over bridge by Euron.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: N/A

What will actually happen: N/A

“Balon Greyjoy never engages with the outside world!” 

Syrio Forel (Miltos Yerolemou)

Cause of death: Killed by Meryn Trant ... maybe.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: Tyrion.

“I want Tyrion to sit on the Iron Throne. He is really the only one who deserves to.”

What will actually happen: Someone will wear the throne.

“I think no one will be sitting on the throne at the end of Season 8. In fact, I have a perverse feeling that instead of someone sitting on the throne, someone may end up ‘wearing’ the throne. Like Viserys, who wanted a golden crown so much, he ended up getting so much more. Be careful what you wish for. It will be a very bittersweet ending.”

Meryn Trant (Ian Beattie)

Cause of death: Stabbed a million times by Arya.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: Tyrion or Cersei.

“Tyrion because he cares for the people, or Cersei because I love her!!”

What will actually happen: Throne will be destroyed.

“No one because there won’t be one. The problem is not who sits on the throne but who comes next! Plus Mr. Martin doesn’t do easy!”

Janos Slynt (Dominic Carter)

Cause of death: Beheaded by Jon Snow.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: Samwell Tarly.

“I’d like, by default because all of the usual suspects will have destroyed each other, Samwell Tarly to end up on the Iron Throne. With Varys as his Hand and Tyrion as his head of entertainment. Mainly because I believe brains always win over brawn. And they are my favorite characters!”

What will actually happen: Throne will be destroyed.

“I guess because the wait between seasons feels longer than the Brexit process ... there will have to be an epic series of huge battles and conflicts ... the Iron Throne will have to be melted down to help with the war effort ... so there will be no actual throne to sit on. But ultimately I think the new king or queen will be very unexpected! And true to form, nobody will second guess this one, I reckon.”

 Pycelle (Julian Glover)

Cause of death: Stabbed by a bunch of kids.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: Tyrion. Jon Snow is boring.

“I hope that Tyrion will be sitting on the throne at the end of the tale; he’s by far the brightest button in the box for all his faults, which are human and understandable. He has empathy, a quality lacking in most other characters. Jon Snow is a goody-two-shoes and a frightful bore, and would be a hopeless leader. 

What will actually happen: Cersei for the win.

“I expect Cersei will get the seat because she is so entirely ruthless. I do hope they don’t go for a so-far-unknown outsider, which would so disappoint the viewers. Tyrion is a thoroughly good egg as far as I can see, and would lead with the same common sense and integrity as Ned Stark would have done. It could go any which way, and whichever way it does go will thrill lots of folk and deeply disappoint others, such is the commitment of the fan base.”

Cause of death: Executed by Dany, carried out by Daario Naharis. 

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: Missandei and Greyworm

“I want Missandei and Greyworm to do a timeshare on the throne. Perhaps co-rule/take it in shifts or just squish on. Because they both have suffered and yet persevered. They are strong, yet sensitive, and both beautiful, of course.”

What will actually happen: Daenerys

“After Mossador’s untimely death it was increasingly traumatic to continue watching. I’m just about recovered and my neck has never been the same since. My heart does, however, belong to Daenerys ... despite her trying to stop my bag. She’s worked hard, and her intentions are ultimately good.”

White Rat (Marcos James)

Cause of death: Throat cut by Sons of the Harpy.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: He’s loyal to his queen.

“I’m going to stick with White Rat’s allegiance to Daenerys and support House Targaryen for rule of the Iron Throne. On a personal level, this will somewhat make up for being taken out by the Sons of Harpy, mid-pleasure, in the brothel. I mean, come on, even with the lack of essential manly bits, they really could have left me in there a bit longer to feel the cuddle and listen to some lullabies. Still in my feelings about this.”

What will actually happen: Targaryens will rule, but there’s a twist.

“In Season 8, everyone will be related to everyone else, and there will be more intricate bloodline revelations. As such, the battle for the throne will be complex, and more characters will be getting major side-eye for their intimacy. Top of the list is Dany and Jon, even though their union does make them a formidable force for taking over the Iron Throne. In the end, House Targaryen will rule, but PLOT TWIST! potentially not with Daenerys as Lord but a newly revealed member of the Targaryen bloodline. ‘Game of Thrones’ is definitely going to throw a curve ball, and, whatever happens, it will be epic!” 

Young Hodor (Sam Coleman)

Cause of death: Good manners. Spent too long holding doors.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: Nobody.

“I want them all to club together, fight the wights and then, after they just scrape through, I want those that are left to decide they will abandon their tribal allegiances and form a democracy.”

What will actually happen: Final face-off with the Night King.

“I think we’ll seemingly lose everyone. I think the Night King will look to reign supreme. But ... underground we find some humans are still alive and hiding out, plotting a rebellion. Then there will be a final stand with the last remaining heroes and their troops slaughtering the Night King, all his minions disappearing with him.”

Rorge (Andy Beckwith)

Cause of death: Stabbed by a Needle.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: The Starks.

“I would like the Stark family to still be alive at the very end and sitting on the Iron Throne, with Sansa and Arya in charge, as I feel they have been the characters who have suffered the most starting from Season 1.”

What will actually happen: The Mother of Dragons will be victorious.

“Daenerys Targaryen will be victorious at the end, with the help of Jon Snow, and they will be aided by the Stark family. I think they will then destroy the Iron Throne and live happily ever after, but, as you know, this is ‘Game of Thrones,’ and anything could happen. Can’t wait for Season 8.”

Ser Rodrik Cassel (Ron Donachie) 

Cause of death: Beheaded (not easily) by Theon.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: Podrick (his real-life son, actor Daniel Portman)

“I’d like Podrick Payne to be king. He’s been an interesting, enigmatic character throughout; determined, selfless, brave and loyal, he’s a rarity in Westeros. Mostly, though, it’s because he’s my son. Fair enough? Yep, balanced and fair.”

What will actually happen: No idea.

“Genuinely no real clue. I’d like it to be one of the surviving Stark kids ― if any are surviving at the final bell. The Starks have been the repository of decency and honor across the piece, despite all the vicissitudes they’ve endured, so a Stark on the Iron Throne would help towards a resolution of all the horror. I’d also be happy if Tyrion got the gig; he’s been wonderful throughout, Lannister or not. Speaking of Lannisters, if Jaime made it to the top it would be an extraordinary essay in repentance, self-discovery and the power we have to change ourselves, but I think that’s probably a bridge too far, even for ‘GOT.’ His has been a remarkable journey, though. Stopping now before I list the whole cast.” 

Craster (Robert Pugh)

Cause of death: Stabbed by Karl Tanner, Gin Alley legend.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: King in the North.

“Jon Snow. He deserves it for his courage and determination against all the odds!”

What will actually happen: Craster will rise again?

“From the carnage and devastation, Craster will rise from the grave to rule supreme! Well, that’s what I dreamt anyway!”

Lord Greatjon Umber (Clive Mantle)

Cause of death: Offscreen. Reported by his son to Ramsay.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: Tyrion.

“I am furiously trying to catch up on ‘GOT,’ as I only ever watched the first series on original transmission. I’m up to the end of Series 2 and really enjoying it and hope the wonderful Peter Dinklage wins in the end. But judging by the casual and wanton discarding of some of Britain’s finest character actors, he might follow suit and get knocked off early in Series 3. Who knows? Well, you lot do because you’re well ahead of me. But my money’s on Dinklage. Unless, of course, I get a late call to reprise The Greatjon Umber, who really should be on the throne by virtue of the immense volume at which he spoke.”

What will actually happen: Still catching up on the show.

“Whatever happens I’ll catch up with the result in about a year’s time.”

Nymeria Sand (Jessica Henwick)

Cause of death: Strangled by her own whip.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: Tyrion.

“I mean half of the people left are sociopaths, so it’s a pretty small pool to choose from, haha. I’d love to see Tyrion on the throne because it would be a heck of an underdog story and because he has a sense of humor.”

What will actually happen: Everyone will die.

Cause of death: Blew herself up to save Bran. 

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: Mr. “Game of Thrones” Google search.

“Bran, otherwise Leaf sacrificed herself for Nothing, Hodor held the door for Nothin! Poor little Meera having to drag a full-grown-sized Bran across snow for NOTHIN!!!! Come on, Bran!!!”

What will actually happen: Dragons.

″The dragons because they can fly. We will need to build 2 more thrones and make them much bigger… and flameproof, of course. ”

Mycah, the Butcher’s Boy (Rhodri Hoskings) 

Cause of death: Joffrey’s a liar. Cut down by the Hound.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: A Girl Has A Throne?

“I have to be biased and go with Arya because obviously our characters are old pals, so I’ve just got this image of a chubby younger self of mine from beyond the grave just rooting for her. To go completely away from the series that seems to be coming out, I think it’d be cool to see my old friend up on the Iron Throne.”

What will actually happen: King in the North.

“It’s so tough. I love the show. I’m a huge fan. I’ve kept up with it the whole way. I think that Jon will probably end up on it. Obviously, not being on the show for ages, I have no idea what’s actually going on, but I think just from watching as a fan that Jon will probably end up on it. He’s got a good claim to it, not that he knows that.”

Ser Dontos (Tony Way)

Cause of death: Shot with crossbows on Littlefinger’s orders.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: The Hound. Or Dontos resurrection?

“Well, I was still hoping for the call to resurrect Dontos Hollard as a white-walking ice zombie who grabs the throne against all the odds, but seeing as that’s off the cards... I’ll go for The Hound, because he’s about the right size for the throne, he’d look good on it. A nice fit. Big throne, big fella. Plus he’s really good at swearing. I like that.”

What will actually happen: Tyrion.

“I think Tyrion just might nab the Iron Throne. And I think he would do a great job, too. He’s got no armies, no dragons and he’s not a great warrior, but he’s got his wits, and look how far they have got him so far. Don’t count him out, or you may end up dead on the toilet like his dad. ” 

Rattleshirt (Ross O’Hennessy)

Cause of death: Did not know how to talk to Tormund nicely.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: Dragons should melt it. 

“I don’t want anyone to win the Iron Throne, to me (as Ross) and in the eyes of the Wildlings, the Throne is a power of despotism. From The Mad King, through Joffrey and now to Cersei Lannister, every person that has had any connection to the throne has turned into a tyrant. It would be best if the dragons melted the throne and a republic was created. Fair votes from all the seven kingdoms.”

What will actually happen: Jon, Dany & fam live happily ever after.

“I think that the Iron Throne will be ruled by Jon Snow and Daenerys and their offspring. The joining of Fire and Ice. Fire is Daenerys and Ice is Jon Snow, not because of his connections to the Starks household but because he was killed and brought back to life. Like the king of the White Walkers, he is undead, he is Ice. As the title says... ‘Game of Thrones,’ the song of Ice and Fire.”

Khal Moro (Joe Naufahu)

Cause of death: Mother of Dragons with a classic burn. 

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: Khal Moro. Only Khal Moro.

“Khal Moro ... he will return from the dead with the White Walkers.”

What will actually happen: Dany.

“Probably Dany ’cause she’s the Mother of Dragons and the only one that could defeat Moro.” 

Razdal mo Eraz (George Georgiou) and Belicho Paenymion (Eddie Jackson)

George Georgiou (left)

Cause of death: Pissed off the Mother of Dragons. 

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: Just hopes the story is anti-Brexit.

“I think the seven kingdoms will be in such a state that there will be no need for an Iron Throne, but the disarray should remind us of the importance of the U.K. staying in the EU! That’s my wish, anyway.”

What will actually happen: Only dragons will survive.

“I think nobody will win the throne (that’s too predictable). All the leaders will die and the only survivors will be the dragons. Because they are cute.”

Eddie Jackson (right)

Cause of death: Same.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: Sansa and Gendry. Sendry?

“There are so many great characters or even possible power couples who could do a good job at ruling Westeros: Dany and Jon (still a bit confused why Rhaegar would name both of his sons Aegon, but anyway), Brienne and Tormund, Brienne and Jaime, Ser Davos, Samwell. But who I really want to sit on the Iron Throne in the end is Gendry and Sansa, because I think they have what it takes to be fair. When we meet Sansa, she sees the world in songs and stories, and her story has turned into a nightmare. With Gendry we get a character who thinks he means nothing and now maybe is one of few people who can help stop the wights. I think these two character arcs would make them both very good rulers, plus then Ned’s daughter still gets to marry Robert’s son. George R.R. Martin is great and foreshadowing.”

What will actually happen: Dany will break the wheel!

“I think Daenerys will keep her promise and break the wheel. After fighting the White Walkers is done, I think the people of Westeros in general will be sick of being pawns in the game of thrones. So I don’t think there will be an Iron Throne, or many major families left. I think the seven kingdoms will be just that and anyone with half an army will be fighting for whatever is left, which won’t be much. My other little theory is that in this world of dragons, White Walkers, Children of the Forest and magic, that humans are the unnatural force who cause war and suffering, and this is nature fighting back. That or it’s dragons’ time to rule.”

Beric Dondarrion (Richard Dormer)

Cause of death: He’s still alive on the show, but he’s also already died six times, so we thought, “Why not?”

“I get six choices then?” asked Dormer.

Who deserves to win the Iron Throne: Good ol’ dead Ned.

“It should be Ned Stark. Sean Bean’s a lovely actor and brilliant in the show.”

ISLAMPUR, West Bengal —Scroll down Biplab’s Facebook page and you’ll see a photo of him sporting a fade haircut, a gloomy quote on being single, a selfie with friends and the lyrics of popular Bengali song. His WhatsApp display image, however, is of Ram aiming a bow-and-arrow against a background of flames.

“We don’t have Urdu students in the school. Why did the school get an Urdu teacher?” said Biplab, who is 16, as he fiddled with the ropes of a string bed laid out in front of his one-storey house in Darivit, a small village in Islampur, a West Bengal town near the Bangladesh border.

Yet what sounds like a routine complaint about school teachers turned into a communal conflagration last September and brought life in this town to a halt.The ripples of the riot, which left two young men dead and Biplab with a bullet wound to his leg, continue to this day and are likely to affect the election scheduled for 18 April.

A year on, the deadly argument over the appointment of an Urdu teacher to a local school illustrates how the ruling Trinamool Congress’s sops to the male religious heads of the Muslim community, and the BJP’s relentless efforts to instil fear in the minds of Hindu voters that they will become a minority in Bengal, have created an almost unbridgeable gulf between the two communities.

These deaths indicate how everyday life in towns and villages across India has become so irrevocably polarised that even the appointment of a school teacher can pit Hindus and Muslims against each other. The price of this lethal politics is becoming almost impossible for society to sustain. 

The bodies of the two dead men — who the locals believe were shot by the police — have been buried, but not cremated, as their families insist on an inquiry by the Central Bureau of Investigation. The police have denied firing at the crowd. Five months since the death of their children, the families haven’t even received the autopsy reports from the police.

The only two Muslim staff members at the school have not gone back to work since the clashes erupted, a person familiar with the matter told HuffPost India, and students — essentially a group of children who live in adjoining neighbourhoods — have been divided along religious lines.

“We talk and work together when there are group activities and stuff,” Biplab said of the Hindu and Muslim children in his school.“But they stay with their guys, we stay with ours.”

“URDU GO BACK”

Manju Barman remembers her son disappearing in a cloud of smoke from tear gas shells, and minutes later, staggering back in sight, his t-shirt soaked in blood.
“He kept saying ‘I’m okay, I’m okay’. I was screaming in horror, so he tried to calm me,” Barman said. 21-year-old Tapas died a day later of gun-shot wounds at a local hospital.

Manju was sitting on a wooden bench in their sweet shop, where half-a-dozen massive flex boards with photos of her son’s dead body plastered on them were piled against a wall. The boards, with slogans condemning Mamata Banerjee’s government, were made by the BJP and are meant to be plastered across Islampur. A BJP flag fluttered in behind a faded sign board for a catering service Tapas had started.

Months after the clashes, the exact sequence of events leading up to the riot in Islampur, and the deaths that followed, is still a matter of dispute.

Some locals say the clashes broke out when students of the Darivit High School staged a protest against two new teachers — one for Urdu, one for Sanskrit — who arrived at the school premises on September 20 2018, ready to start on the job.

Yet this was no ordinary school day. In the days prior to their arrival, the school’s students had taken to protesting against the appointment of the Urdu teacher — a language now associated with Muslims.

Biplab, the student, claimed that they were demanding science teachers instead. While local BJP workers repeated Biplab’s claim, they also presented a theory of impending persecution of Hindus which the student never brought up.

Raju, a local BJP worker who gave only his first name, claimed that the appointment of an Urdu teacher was a ploy to get more Muslim students to enroll in the school, which would eventually lead to Muslims taking control of the village.

He added that there are 150 shops in Darivit, out of which not a single one belonged to Muslims. “Everyone knows there’s no place for Muslims in the village. They come from other villages, work and go away and we are okay with that. But the local panchayat person wanted to employ a Urdu teacher forcibly, why?” Raju said. To illustrate his point, he said that if a Muslim offered to pay Rs 25lakh for a piece of land owned by a Hindu and worth Rs5 lakh, the latter won’t sell him the land. “The Hindu villager will sell it to some one who pays even less than that,” he said.

While Biplab made no mention of it, Raju said the students made a slogan ‘Urdu go back’ and then made it go ‘viral’. “They did not viral the Sanskrit teacher.” 

Locals also alleged that they’ve heard rumours that the local TMC panchayat samiti head had been promised a position of power in the party in exchange of placing a Urdu teacher in the school. “But we have only heard all this, we don’t have any proof,” Burman’s neighbour said.

A crowd gathered at the school, the local police also arrived. A melee ensued, shots were fired, and Tapas Barman, Manju’s son, and Rajesh Sarkar — neither of whom were enrolled in the school as students — died of gunshot wounds.

The police has denied killing the two men, and an inquiry is underway.

Villagers in Darivit allege that a tempo escorting the injured to the Islampur hospital faced an attack from a mob from a neighbouring Muslim village, less than three kilometres away from the school. A journalist based in Islampur told HuffPost India that during his conversations with locals in the neighbouring village Amaljhari, he was told that the vehicle was stopped for a few minutes as rumour had spread about a Muslim teacher being beaten up in Darivit, and then allowed to leave when they saw the injured.

 When HuffPost India called up the local police, two officers refused to comment on the incident. One said that since the case was being handled by the CID, they were the ones who should be speaking about the case.

Yet, this ‘attack’ — believed to have taken place by Darivit villagers and denied by their neighbours — has driven a wedge between two communities, who recollected living in peace for decades.

Meanwhile, rumour has taken the place of fact, and since then the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)’s student wing — the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP)—  has been peddling its own divisive, and false, narrative on social media. 

Versions of Raju’s theory have been floating around Islampur, online, in social media posts calling for Hindus to unite, and offline, through eager locals who claim Muslims are ‘overthrowing’ Hindus.

When HuffPost India called the only two Muslim employees of Darivit high school — a teacher and a clerk who had worked there for the past 7-8 years — one sounded alarmed and said he had nothing to say before hanging up. The other muttered something about being in a ‘training’ course and again, hastily hung up. A person, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the only plausible reason the men refused to turn up for work would be fear.

Fake News and Polarisation

Within days of the protests and the deaths, the headquarters of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of the RSS, was bustling as activists worked hard to spin the story into a Hindu-vs-Muslim conflict, and more specifically, a Bengali-vs-Urdu conflict.

This is despite the fact that the protests were never about the need for a Bengali-language teacher, a fact confirmed to HuffPost India by BJP workers as well.

On 23 September, three days after Rajesh’s death, ABVP called for a rally to protest the killings and immediately linked it to the “larger issue of Bangladeshi infiltration”.

Its main Twitter handle tweeted out a poster that proclaimed ‘we want Bengali, not Urdu’. The same posters also painted the incident with a communal brush by demanding citizenship for Hindu refugees from Bangladesh, the passing of the controversial Citizenship amendment bill and deportation of illegal immigrants. By doing this, the outfit also attempted to associate Bengali as a language of Hindus where as thousands of Muslims in the state, including ones HuffPost India spoke to for this article, speak Bengali.

A series of Facebook posts, meticulously designed and shared right from the day of the deaths itself by verified, official pages of the ABVP, claimed that the students were demanding Bengali teachers but the school hired Urdu teachers instead. Sit-in demonstrations were called for across the state, numerous photos of which the ABVP uploaded on social media pages, amplifying their false claim. The posters, tweets and photos conveniently omitted the fact that a Sanskrit teacher had also been recruited at the same time as the Urdu one, and that the students had been supposedly asking for science teachers, not Bengali language ones. 

“Urdu Noi, Bangla Chai (Don’t want Urdu, Want Bengali),” the posters screamed. In a tweet still pinned on his Twitter profile, Asish Chauhan, the national general secretary of the ABVP, claimed that the police had cracked down on students for demanding Bengali teachers instead of Urdu ones.

The tweet put out by the handle — followed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi — had been retweeted 2,700 times and liked 3,300 times. Websites such as Rightlog propelled the lie in articles where they went a step ahead to claim that, instead of a Bengali teacher, the school had recruited three Urdu teachers.

Pasarul Alam, a school teacher in Islampur and a member of National Alliance Of People’s Movements, told HuffPost India that it was strange that the students had got together to protest the teachers joining.

“How do students come to know which teacher is being recruited and when? Unless someone—a teacher or an insider—tells them and they are provoked?” he said.

When HuffPost India asked Biplab how he found out about the teacher recruitment, he said the older boys at school had been telling people. But he couldn’t identify one person who first said it, nor could he explain how he came to know when the Urdu and Sanskrit teachers had arrived on the school premises on the day of the clashes.

“We did not know. I was in class and then suddenly everyone was rushing to the headmaster’s office. We came to know that the Urdu teacher was there,” he said. He explained that they then took it upon themselves to explain the younger students — as young as nine and ten years old — that the school was harming their studies by not hiring science teachers.

Earlier, Surojit Roy, a BJP leader in Islampur had explained how class V students took to vandalising school furniture when they saw older students protesting.

The person cited earlier, who is familiar with the school’s functioning, said the institution — which has 1600 students — didn’t have a single permanent teacher for science subjects. The students, the person said, had occasionally approached teachers a few times earlier asking if science teachers would be recruited.

“In 2018, there was just one student who had taken the board examinations in Urdu. There are about 100-150 Muslim students in the school, but they mostly study in Bengali,” the person said.

However, Alam said that he discovered during his investigations that in 2018, Darivit High School’s administration abruptly handed transfer certificates to 165 Muslim students, asking them to go to other schools. While some went to Manibhita High School in the neighbouring village, others spread out. “A few students came to my school, Islampur High School as well.” A representative of Darivit High School said he could not comment on the transfer of students.

Meanwhile, Roy, the BJP leader, told HuffPost India that on 19 September, a day after the first round of students’ protests in Darivit, students in Manibhita High School set up a road blockade and vandalised their school, demanding Urdu teachers instead of Bengali ones at their school.

“Why the police never went there to arrest anyone?” he asked.

 Ujir Alom, the teacher-in-charge (TIC) of the Manibhita High School, confirmed that students and the parents had blocked roads and vandalised vehicles. In the school, said Alom, 55% of the 2,200 students speak and read in Urdu, and the remaining 45% study in Bengali. Yet, the school has not had a Urdu teacher since 2014. The former TIC of the school also told HuffPost India that he had asked for Urdu teachers during his tenure, but even until his retirement, there was no progress.

“So when they heard that a Urdu teacher has been sent to Darivit when no one in the school even wanted one, they got angry. They have been asking for a Urdu teacher for months now,” Alom said, adding with just 16 teachers, he feels desperate at most times.

 Linguistic Conflict

Islampur became a part of West Bengal in 1956 and was carved out of Bihar’s Purnea district. A majority of the residents of the area, as a result were speakers of Hindi and Urdu. When the Left Front came to power in Bengal in the ’70s, Alam said, government insisted on Bengali being taught more extensively than Urdu, or Hindi. “As a result, there were high drop-out rates in schools, with students moving to Bihar for studies,” Alam said.

HuffPost India found posters of residential schools and entrance coaching classes from Bihar slapped on walls of schools across villages like Monibhita. A representative of Insan, a popular coaching institute for girls in Kishanganj in Bihar, confirmed that they get several from Islampur. “They insist we teach in Urdu, or Bengali, but we explain the importance of learning English to them,” a representative of the coaching centre told HuffPost India.

In 2012, the Mamata Banerjee government amended the West Bengal Official Language Bill (1961) to make languages spoken by over 10% of an area’s population as one of the official languages of the area. By virtue of that, Urdu is one of the official languages of Islampur.

“Urdu almost disappeared from schools and colleges under the Left regime in the area. There were barely teacher recruitments in the language,” Alam said. After extensive campaigning by locals, and letters to government offices, the area saw a slim resurgence in Urdu teaching.

But the tension, created by the incorporation of Islampur, the imposition of Bengali and the proximity to the Bangladesh border and influx of refugees from both religions remained. Nearly 25 years ago, Alam said, at Jibon More in Islampur town, five Muslims were killed in clashes with Hindu refugees who had moved from Bangladesh and allegedly wanted land owned by the Muslims. Ten years later, a Hindu boy was murdered in a village in Islampur over similar clashes.

A journalist from the area pointed out there’s a deep feeling of persecution that has been dormant for over a decade among both communities in border towns, one that has now been fanned into violence by both TMC and BJP. “The Hindus in border areas feel they have been driven out of Bangladesh and now Muslims are taking ‘their’ Hindu land. And Muslims feel this is needless attack on them.”

ABVP’s manipulation of the students’ protests into a narrative that ‘Hindus are in danger’ therefore tapped this discontent, which snowballed into a Hindu-Muslim tussle over land. The Trinamool Congress — which has been accused by locals of trying to strong-arm recruitments in the school — added fuel to fire, when ministers blamed RSS and BJP for the deaths with no proof. 

Since 2014, Islampur has seen a resurgence in Hindutva, and BJP workers told HuffPost India that the ‘second largest’ Ram Navami procession in India is hosted by the town and fronted by the VHP.

“Last time, we had 120 DJs and 70 quintals of khichdi. This year, we’ll have more,” one of the workers said.

A school run by the RSS also hit the news for allegedly changing its address to ‘Iswarpur’ from ‘Islampur’. Khudiram Roy, the principal of the Saraswati Shishu Mandir, said that the West Bengal government rescinded its affiliation after it learnt of the incident through media reports. However, two months later, parents demonstrated, set up a road blockade and the government returned the affiliation after a court order. However, this time, all documents pertaining to the school say it is in ‘Islampur’. Personally, said the principal, he thinks the place should be called Iswarpur. After admissions dropped, however, he is settling for Islampur.

These series of seemingly harmless events simmer on the surface of a larger communal discontent stoked by political parties in the area. Dozens of Facebook pages calling Islampur ‘Iswarpur’ have mushroomed on Facebook. On social media, squabbles over Hindu and Muslim religious functions aren’t rare as well. For example, HuffPost India came across the a Facebook status message posted by a Muslim car dealer saying he was bothered by the loudpseakers, DJs and motor cycle army of the Ram Navami procession. A Hindu man popped in to say: “First Muslims should stop their processions.” In response, the dealer said, “Both sides should stop.”

 BJP versus TMC

“There was no BJP here for a while, now it’s only us,” beamed Roy as he made calls to set up meetings for this reporter with the families of Tapas and Rajesh. He chastised a party worker for not keeping an eye on a TV crew in the area and then told HuffPost India, “This is the state’s biggest issue now. This is our biggest issue.”

While Raju and Roy confirmed that neither of the dead young men were associated with the BJP or any party, the ABVP’s posters and social media posts claimed Rajesh was an assistant general secretary of the outfit in Darivit.

ABVP’s posters — exhibited at rallies across West Bengal — scream a plethora of anti-Muslim slogans. “Chhatro Mere, Muslim Prem? (Killing Students, Loving Muslims?)”, ’They want a Bengali Prime Minister, They don’t want a Bengali teacher?”, “Bangla Hoeche Por, Urdu Apon, Chhatro Mere, Haye Re Unnoyon? (Bengali is other, Urdu your own, Killing students is your development?). The same pages uploaded pictures of local ABVP leaders with home minister Rajnath Singh, claiming he had promised to look into the matter.

Facebook posts show students from the school attending marches organised by the ABVP, holding the organisation’s posters. Though ABVP office-bearers confirmed that they only operate on college level, the photos show young school students posing with ABVP posters in Darivit.

The BJP candidate from Raiganj, Islampur’s Lok Sabha constituency , kicked off her campaign by lighting candles at the graves of the young men and then parading their mothers across the area.

“Mamata Banerjee can’t even enter Darivit now,” a BJP leader said.

Several TMC leaders have had to shift their meeting venues after protests from locals. The CPM has demanded a probe into the incident and has been warning voters against the dangers of voting for either the BJP or the TMC instead of following their ‘true secularism’.

Meanwhile, the CID has sent several notices to Barman and Sarkar’s families, requesting them to participate in the investigation.

“But we have refused, we only want a CBI probe,” said Ujjwal, Tapas’s father. The families were taken to Delhi by the BJP to meet Amit Shah. The party shared photos of Ujjwal with Shah on social media.

“He said he will look into the matter, but I have not heard from them since,” Ujjwal said.

Manju pointed at indentions on the concrete on the wall she’s leaning against.
“Can you see this?” she said, running her fingers over the wave-like dents on the wall, “Tapas marked them a few days before he died. He wanted the part below to be fitted with tiles. He had many, many dreams.”

Jon Snow finally knows something.

In the “Game of Thrones” Season 8 premiere on Sunday, Samwell Tarly (John Bradley) finally revealed to Jon Snow (Kit Harington) the mother of all secrets: his parents are Lyanna Stark (Aisling Franciosi) and Rhaegar Targaryen (Wilf Scolding), his name is Aegon Targaryen, and he is the rightful heir to the Iron Throne.

The King in the North is shook.

We knew it was coming. After years of theories (decades really), the show’s sixth season confirmed fans’ suspicions that R + L = J (that’s fanspeak for Rhaegar + Lyanna = Jon) with a pivotal scene at the Tower of Joy. Of course, Rhaegar was known to have married Elia Martell, so technically Jon still could have been a bastard. But in Season 7, Gilly (Hannah Murray) discovers Rhaegar got an annulment, and it’s later revealed that he and Lyanna were legally married. Jon Snow, aka Aegon Targaryen, is the legitimate heir to the throne. 

Sam and Bran, aka the Three-Eyed Raven, aka the Westerosi Google search, learned all of that information in some of the final moments of Season 7, so it was only a matter of time before Jon learned the truth. 

Following the Season 7 finale, Bran himself (Isaac Hempstead Wright) got on the phone with HuffPost and said he hoped Sam would be the one to ultimately deliver the news to Jon.

“It’d be a bit of an underwhelming reunion for Jon to come back like, ‘Bran, how are you?’ [And Bran goes], ‘Great. I know everything and you’re the heir to the Iron Throne.’ Probably don’t want that kind of delivery,” he said.

On Sunday, Hempstead Wright got his wish.

Toward the end of the episode, Bran prompts Sam to tell Jon the truth of his parentage, basically saying, “The fans have waited long enough! Just do it!”

Sam finds Jon in the Winterfell crypts and, after an awkward reunion — he’s obviously been avoiding Jon the whole time he’s been at Winterfell to keep from telling him the news — he drops the truth bomb, saying Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) shouldn’t be the queen. Jon’s really Aegon Targaryen, Sixth of His Name, the whole shebang:

You’ve never been a bastard. You’re Aegon Targaryen, true heir to the Iron Throne.

There’s a lot going on in this moment. Sam has also just learned from Dany that she incinerated his brother and father when they did not bend the knee, so the idea of serving under the Mother of Dragons doesn’t sit too well with him. He tells Jon as much, saying he should be the king and asking him if he would have also burned the Tarlys.

Jon says he’s executed men before, but the implication is, no, he wouldn’t have had a dragon fry Sam’s family to a crisp. Understandably.

Talking to HuffPost about the moment, Sam actor John Bradley, said:

“It’s never going to be easy telling somebody what Sam’s got to tell Jon, but I think that as far as Jon’s concerned, if he had to hear that, he’d want to hear it from Sam. I think he knows that Sam’s the one who does love him and he has his best interest at heart. ... He wouldn’t be telling Jon for any kind of agenda or to kind of start trouble. He’d be telling him because he feels that he needs to know. I think if Jon was to hear it from anybody, he’d rather hear it from a source he trusts and loves.”

During the scene, Jon protests that Ned Stark (Sean Bean) wouldn’t have kept that truth from him. (Sure, maybe he wouldn’t have if he had made it out of King’s Landing.)

But in the end, and with surprisingly little evidence from Sam — no worries, Sam, we all know you’re right — Jon seems to accept his parentage, reaching his final form: an R + L = J stan.

Bradley added, “I think [fans] will take away from that moment a real sense of the right thing’s been done by the right person.”

Composer Ramin Djawadi’s score puts the punctuation on the moment, making it the standout scene of the Season 8 premiere.

The implications here are game-changing. Like Sam says, Jon is the true heir to the throne. The weight of that statement hits him hard. Well, it’s that, or the fact that he just found out he’s been hooking up with his aunt.

That’s not a cute look.

Of course, “Game of Thrones” has already had Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Cersei’s (Lena Headey) “twincest” relationship going on for years, and the Targaryens have a history of marrying each other. Dany’s parents, for instance, were brother and sister, and if not for Khal Drogo (Jason Momoa) she would have likely ended up with her brother Viserys (Harry Lloyd). 

George R.R. Martin, author of the “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels on which the HBO series is based, said as much in the first book: “She had always assumed that she would wed Viserys when she came of age.”

 (Guess she’ll have to settle for her nephew. Tough break, bruh.)

All that being said, still … gross.

So what now? Will Jon tell Dany immediately? Will he still “keep his queen warm”? Could he suddenly realize that earlier he was riding Rhaegal, a dragon named after his daddy? Whatever happens, rest assured: Jon Snow knows something. Actually, forget that, now he knows way too much.

MUMBAI — Cash-strapped Jet Airways Sunday averted a deeper crisis after its pilots body, the National Aviatior’s Guild, deferred its “no flying” call to a later date from Monday, when the management is scheduled to meet the lenders.

Earlier in the day, the guild, which has around 1,100 pilots as its members, decided to stop flying from April 15 in protest against non-payment of salaries since March.

However, in a late evening communication to its members, the pilots body announced postponement of its “no pay no work” call for the second time in less than two weeks, saying it wanted to give more time to the company which is struggling to survive due to severe paucity of cash.

“It has come to our notice that there is a critical meeting planned tomorrow (Monday) morning with the airline management and SBI. In light of the meeting, the members have requested, through their team leaders, that the call of ‘no pay no work’ be deferred to give the airline a chance of survival,” the Guild said in the communication.

“Accordingly, as requested, the NAG Committee would like to inform all that the decision stands deferred for the time being,” it said.

Friends! Foes! Spouses! Siblings!

“Game of Thrones” characters who haven’t seen one another since, in some cases, the very first season met face-to-face in Sunday night’s long, long awaited Season 8 premiere.

We’ve had a lot of time to imagine these moments, playing them out and pondering their significance to each of the characters involved. Here, we remind you when each pair last hung out together, how they parted, and rank how well their reunions met our expectations. 

8. Arya & The Hound 

“Cold bitch” might be, uh, somewhat of a deserved greeting between these two. Arya (Maisie Williams) and the Hound (Rory McCann) last saw each other in awkward circumstances, when the former left the latter to die from his fighting wounds.

A recap: Having captured Arya in Season 3, the Hound tries unsuccessfully to sell her back to her family, once at the Red Wedding and again in the Vale. Both times, he arrives just a short time after her family had been killed (a fact that Arya finds rather hilarious the second time around). Initially foes ― the Hound had earned a place on Arya’s hit list when he killed her sparring partner in Season 1 ― the pair sort of gets to know one another during their long journey. Arya even admits to the Waif that she eventually took the Hound off her list. But when Brienne showed up and tried to rescue her from him, Arya is tired of being looked after by anybody. So she left the severely injured Hound behind and headed off to Braavos. 

7. Jorah & Sam

In Season 3, Sam Tarly (John Bradley) bids farewell to Jorah Mormont (Iain Glen) after miraculously saving him from greyscale by performing a very dangerous and very disgusting treatment ― all against the Grand Maester’s orders. Jorah had found himself in the Citadel as a last-ditch hope of finding a cure; by chance, he happened to meet Sam, who heard his last name and resolved to help. The first Night’s Watch commander Sam knew, you’ll remember, was Commander Mormont, who suffered an untimely death by mutiny.

Given Jorah’s devotion to his queen, it was therefore understandable that he wanted to show Sam off. (Tragically for Sam, that queen had less positive news for him.)

6. Jon & Bran

Jon Snow’s (Kit Harington) embrace of Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead Wright) upon the former’s return to Winterfell was almost ... fatherly. 

Jon had last seen Bran way back in Season 1, while the boy was still lying in a coma after being shoved out of a tower at Winterfell. Although constantly reminded of his place as a bastard of House Stark, Jon was nevertheless committed to playing the role of older brother as well as he could. In the series pilot, he praises Bran for not looking away from the gruesome moment when Ned Stark beheads a deserter of the Night’s Watch. 

5. Arya & Gendry

Down in the blacksmith’s den, metallic sparks weren’t the only ones flying. Could Gendry (Joe Dempsie) and Arya become ... an item???

The pair met all the way back in Season 1, when Arya is shepherded into a band of King’s Landing misfits bound for the Night’s Watch following the death of her father. With her hair chopped off, Arya successfully passes for a boy called “Arry” until early in Season 2, when she reveals her true identity to Gendry. The group doesn’t make it too far, though, before coming under attack and being dragged off to Harrenhal, at the time commanded by Lannister forces. Luckily for Arya, Hot Pie and Gendry, though, the Faceless Man Jaquen H’agar owed Arya a favor and helps them escape.

In Season 3, Arya and Gendry are absorbed into the Brotherhood Without Banners, but get separated when the Brotherhood sells Gendry to Melisandre. (Gendry, recall, has king’s blood as the bastard son of Robert Baratheon.) And soon after, Arya is kidnapped by the Hound. 

4. Sansa & Tyrion 

Although Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) and Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) might technically still be a legally married couple, there was just a bit of love lost between them at Winterfell.

“Many underestimated you. Most of them are dead now,” Tyrion tells Sansa as a sort of olive branch.

The Lannister, you’ll recall, was ordered to marry the Stark in Season 3 when his father decided it might help smooth over the Mariana-Trench-sized rift between the South and the North. Neither party was into it. Nevertheless, they were wed in a largely humiliating ceremony after which Tyrion got super wasted and physically threatened his nephew the king ... but still managed to reassure Sansa that their marriage could remain unconsummated as long as she wanted. 

Tyrion and Sansa seemed to foster a mutual respect. Some time after she escaped King’s Landing in the chaos of Joffrey’s Season 4 death, Sansa remarks that Tyrion was always the kindest Lannister. Tyrion, at Dragonstone with Jon, recalls how Sansa is smarter than she lets on. (“She’s starting to let on,” Jon replies.)

3. Arya & Jon

Even though they said goodbye to one another very early in the show’s first season, Jon and Arya were always the cutest sibling pair ― each something of an outcast in his or her own way. 

Jon gave Arya the sweetest bear hug when they parted ways back then, with him leaving to join the Night’s Watch and her heading on down to King’s Landing. As a token to remember him by, Jon also gave Arya a sword he asked the Winterfell blacksmiths to forge especially for her. And because all the best swords have names, she dubbed it Needle.

“Stick them with the pointy end,” he told her. 

At Winterfell in the Season 8 premiere, following a warm embrace, Arya confirmed she’d followed that advice “once or twice.” (Understatement of the season.)

2. Jon & Sam

Samwell Tarly and Jon Snow. BBFs. Best Bros Forever.

These guys had a lot to catch up on. Having trained together, fought together, shared some laughs together and journeyed far beyond the Wall together, Jon and Sam last saw one another way back in Season 5, when Maester Aemon Targaryen’s death left Castle Black with no doctor-slash-historian at all. 

With Gilly and Baby Sam in the picture, and little in the way of fighting skills, Sam made Jon an offer he couldn’t refuse: Sam would go to the Citadel and train to become a maester for Castle Black, at the same time researching ways to defeat the Night King and his army of the dead. Along the way, he ends up picking up his family’s Valyrian steel sword from Horn Hill and a fair dose of self-confidence. 

Meanwhile, Jon is murdered in a Castle Black mutiny and brought back to life by Melisandre. By all accounts, Sam had no inkling about his friend’s deadly adventures before returning to the North ... when he confronts his old friend about the truth of his parentage and title ― rightful ruler of the seven kingdoms.

1. Jaime & Bran

Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Bran are two completely different characters after last seeing each other at Winterfell in the series pilot episode, when the former unceremoniously shoves the latter out a window and leaves him crippled. Jaime, as he told Bran’s mother, was hoping the fall would kill the boy, whose climbing skills had allowed him to stumble upon a Lannister sibling sex scene. (Vom.)

Although Jaime has traveled all over Westeros in the intervening seasons, slowly becoming a better human being, he had yet to confront the person he most deeply wronged. It was a humbler Jaime, with one less hand but many more pearls of wisdom ― thanks in no small part to his pal Brienne ― who faced Bran in the final, wordless moments of the Season 8 premiere.

There’s a caveat here: Bran has a wholly different identity than the little boy in Season 1, having become, as he keeps goddamn reminding all of us, the Three-Eyed Raven.

So, in a sense, it was almost like these two were meeting for the very first time.

“Game of Thrones” airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO.

Halfway through the premiere episode of the eighth and final season of “Game of Thrones,” Jon Snow (Kit Harington) rides a dragon. It’s a moment fans of the HBO show, and George R.R. Martin’s “A Song Of Ice and Fire” book series, have been anticipating for years: Aegon Targaryen, the true heir to the Iron Throne, confidently mounts the dragon named after his father and fiercely protects Winterfell against the army of the dead.

Except it doesn’t happen that way. In actuality, Aegon Targaryen timidly mounts Rhaegal for a humorous glide through the northern landscape with his boo Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) and her favorite child, Drogon. It’s the perfect wintertime date.  

“It’s cold up here for a southern girl,” Jon tells Dany in front of an icy waterfall. “So keep your queen warm,” she responds before they share an over-the-top kiss in front of their embarrassed dragons. (“Ew, mom,” I imagine Drogon saying.)

For starters, this moment truly disappointed. I’ve been waiting years to see Jon ride a dragon ― “dracarys” rolling off his tongue. Instead, at the premiere event in New York City earlier this month, I thought to myself, “Am I watching ‘Enchanted’?!” The cheese was melting off the screen, and most members of the audience at Radio City Music Hall gobbled it up. 

But that’s the goal of “Game of Thrones,” isn’t it? To entertain its mass audience. Everyone from my brother to my mom watches this show ― one vigilantly looking out for clues to confirm a theory, the other half-paying attention while pouring another glass of wine. And as the seasons have gone by, surpassing the brilliance of Martin’s dense novels, showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss have somehow satisfied those wine guzzlers’ needs and left the perhaps overly invested viewers wanting a bit more depth. Long gone are the sharp back-and-forths between Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie). Forgotten is the mental sparring between Arya (Maisie Williams) and Tywin Lannister (Charles Dance), or the eloquence of Tyrion’s (Peter Dinklage) plea before the court of King’s Landing. Slow-burning scenes are a thing of the past.

As someone who’s obsessively watched the show since the first season aired in 2011, my expectations for the Season 8 debut were high. After waiting nearly two years for new episodes, and parsing through every theory I could find, I was convinced David and Dan would not let me down: The final season’s premiere would be iconic and would surely call back to the gripping scenes that started it all.

“Winter Is Coming,” the pilot episode, featured an opening scene that left me shivering with fear, and excitement. While one brother of the Night’s Watch patrols the outskirts of the Wall, he finds a bevy of frozen, dead Wildlings ― their severed body parts forming a symbol. When he brings his companions back to the gravesite, the bodies are mysteriously gone and a pair of blue eyes appear behind them ― blue eyes we now know belong to the undead, a White Walker. Ramin Djawadi’s theme song kicks in as the opening credits begin. Before long we’re introduced to the Stark boys ― Jon (Harington), Robb (Richard Madden), Bran (Isaac Hempstead Wright) and Rickon (Art Parkinson) ― who are practicing their archery skills in front of their parents, Ned (Sean Bean) and Catelyn (Michelle Fairley). Then we meet their sisters Sansa (Sophie Turner) and Arya (Williams) ― the former a talented needlepointer, the latter a natural assassin. 

The Season 8 premiere, however, had no creepy opening, despite the oncoming threat of the Night King. We’re immediately thrust into Winterfell as we witness the arrival of power couple-in-love Jon and Dany. We see reunion after reunion (after reunion), all of which happen as fast as you can say, “Wow, Gendry’s a fantastic runner.” We see Cersei (Lena Headey) impulsively let Euron (Pilou Asbæk) into her bed, Theon (Alfie Allen) rescue Yara (Gemma Whelan) with no issues, and Sam (John Bradley) get oddly weepy about the fiery death of his asshole dad, Randyll Tarly (James Faulkner), and standoffish brother, Dickon (Tom Hopper).

Instead of building up the ominous energy ahead of the Great War, the premiere was much more lighthearted than expected, with Tyrion continuing to joke about Varys’ (Conleth Hill) lack of balls to Arya poking fun at the Hound (Rory McCann) and flirting with Gendry (Joe Dempsie). The only person who is concerned about the army of the dead is Sansa, who is trying to band the North together after Jon betrayed their trust and bent the knee to the dragon queen. She seems to be the only one with her head in the game, even outsmarting Tyrion during their long-awaited, post Purple Wedding meet-up. 

“I used to think you were the cleverest man alive,” she tells him. (Same, Sansa.)

It’s not the story but the writing that’s gotten a bit fan service-y. Although Martin has consulted with the team, since Season 5 the HBO series has functioned without his books. (Books he promises to finish.) Like we saw with Season 7, the dialogue is now seemingly aimed at making viewers chuckle instead of analyze. Take “Beyond the Wall,” for example, when Tormund (Kristofer Hivju) and the Hound are making small talk. Or Ed Sheeran’s cringey cameo in the Season 7 premiere. Moments like these, as “fun” as they are, only make the rushed final seasons feel slightly uninspired. 

This is “Game of Thrones,” though, and, partly due to its sizable budget, it never fails to impress. There are a handful of moments in the Season 8 premiere that live up to expectations: Sam (John Bradley) telling Jon about his true parentage, Beric (Richard Dormer) and Tormund discovering a new Night King symbol, Bran coming face-to-face with Jaime Lannister. Those scenes were incredibly satisfying and set up significant storylines for the end of the show.

But my mind still floats back to that fanciful dragon scene, something I’ll never forget for all the wrong reasons. 

“We could stay here for a thousand years and no one could find us,” Dany tells Jon in a moment reminiscent of a certain cave rendezvous with his first love ― foul-mouthed Wildling Ygritte (Rose Leslie). 

The lovey-dovey stuff worked then, but with the undead now marching south, let’s leave the cheap tricks at the door. (But, like, hold the door, because I’m still coming in.)  

Michelle Obama is making fashion waves across the pond. 

The former first lady wore a pink suit covered in crystal embellishments in Copenhagen, Denmark, on Tuesday during the first stop on her European book tour for “Becoming.”

Stine Goya, a Copenhagen-based designer, made Obama’s suit. 

“We’re beyond proud to have designed this custom made & hand embellished suit to the one and only Michelle Obama,” Goya’s Instagram caption read, alongside a photo of the former first lady in the piece. 

Obama paired the look with pink heels and $16,250 diamond earrings from Vhernier, according to Page Six. 

It’s clear Obama is becoming attached to chic paitsuits, as she wore yet another one with a crystal collar by Acne on Wednesday. The author paired the suit with embellished high heels for her book tour stop in Stockholm. 

Obama’s U.S.-based book tour was equally fashionable.

She wore a pair of show-stopping $3,900 Balenciaga boots with a bright yellow dress from the label’s spring/summer 2019 collection at her Barclays Center appearance in Brooklyn, New York, in December.

It’s safe to say the outfit was Carrie Bradshaw-approved, as actress Sarah Jessica Parker moderated the panel. 

In “Becoming,” Obama describes thinking about every detail of her outfits and what they conveyed during her husband’s first presidential campaign and later, his presidency and second campaign. 

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal accused the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of “programming” the electronic voting machines to win the Lok Sabha polls, while his Andhra Pradesh counterpart Chandrababu Naidu said 21 political parties have demanded matching of the VVPAT slips with at least 50 per cent of the votes cast through the EVMs.

Naidu had met Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora Saturday to raise the issue of alleged malfunctioning of EVMs.

The demand by the parties comes days before the 2nd phase of the ongoing Lok Sabha elections on April 18, when the a total of 97 constituencies across 13 states go to polls. The first of the seven-phase polls was held on April 11.

The Supreme Court had on Monday asked the Election Commission to increase the random matching of VVPAT slips with votes cast through EVMs at five polling booths per assembly segment, from one at present, in the Lok Sabha polls. 

It had given the direction saying the measure would provide greater satisfaction not just to political parties but the entire electorate. The opposition parties, including the Congress, have been demanding that at least 50 per cent of all votes polled through EVMs be verified against the paper slips of the the voters’ verifiable paper audit trail (VVPATs) machines.

A VVPAT is an auxiliary, independent device linked to an electronic voting machine to allow voters to see if the votes cast by them have gone to the right candidate. The VVPATs are also meant to help detect any possible “election fraud” or malfunction of EVMs.

The Election Commission of India has decided to use VVAPTs with all the EVMs in the ongoing elections to impart greater transparency and credibility to the country’s poll process.

The BJP, meanwhile, termed the opposition parties’ meet in Delhi an exercise “to find excuses for their impending massive defeat” in the Lok Sabha polls.

In a separate press conference, BJP spokesperson GVL Narasimha Rao said, “The so-called all party meeting convened in Delhi is nothing but a confession of defeat by the so-called Mahagathbandhan.” 

“They are already trying to find excuses for their impending massive defeat. They have not only failed to mount a challenge against the BJP in this election but have also failed as an opposition in the last five years,” he added.

After the opposition parties’ meet on EVMs, AAP supremo Kejriwal told reporters that the people were losing faith in EVMs and the election procedure. 

Congress leaders and senior advocates Kapil Sibal and Abhishek Singhvi also attended the conference.

Singhvi said the opposition parties will approach the Supreme Court for a direction to the EC for matching at least 50 per cent of the votes recorded in VVPAT slips with those registered by EVMs in every assembly segment.

Sibal said, If the EC ignores this issue, we will take other measures. We will not sit quietly. We will approach the Supreme Court.” 

Singhvi said the opposition parties would launch a nationwide campaign on the issue of “discrepancies” in EVMs and alleged the EC was not doing enough to address it.

“Questions were raised after the first phase of elections, we don’t think the EC is paying adequate attention. If you press the button before X party, vote goes to Y party. VVPAT displays (paper slips) only for 3 seconds, instead of 7 seconds,” he claimed.

“Why the EC does not want 50 per cent VVPAT slips to be counted. Today, 20 to 25 per cent EVMs are not working properly. People vote till 4 am and wait in queues. What does this mean? asked Sibal, doubting the EC’s intentions.

It will be unfortunate if the EC supports voting machines instead of the voters, he added. 

Accusing the BJP of “programming the EVMs” to win the poll, Kejriwal claimed, “People don’t believe in EVMs anymore.” 

He said all opposition parties, except the BJP which is “benefitting out of this manipulation of machines”, want the counting of at least 50 per cent of the VVPAT slips.

The loss of faith in the electoral procedure is raising a question mark on the country’s democratic structure,” he said.

He also accused the poll panel of ignoring the complaints of manipulations of EVMs. 

“Why is the EC not listening or acting on the complaints? There is a serious manipulation of EVMs. Why is the EC ignoring this?” he asked.

Claiming that all votes goes to the BJP irrespective of the buttons pressed on EVMs, Kejriwal asked why this discrepancy was not being investigated by the EC.

Asserting that the EVMs are not reliable, the opposition parties’ key interlocutor Naidu said they are not satisfied with the Supreme Court order to the EC to increase the number of EVM’s to be randomly verified from one to only five per assembly constituency. 

He said a fresh petition will be filed in the matter.

Amid controversy over his ‘khaki underwear’ remarks allegedly against Jaya Prada, Samajwadi Party candidate Azam Khan has said that the comments he made were against a man and that if was proven guilty he would not contest in the 2019 general elections. 

Khan, speaking to ANI said:

“I was a nine-time MLA from Rampur and have been a minister. I know what to say,” Khan said amid outrage over his remarks.  

Reports suggest an FIR was registered against Khan for his comments. 

In a video that has now gone viral on social media, Khan can be heard saying, “Rampur waalon , Hindustan waalon , uski asliyat samajhne main aapko 17 baras lage. Main 17 din mein pehchaan gaya ke inke neeche ka jo underwear hai woh khaki rang ka hai (People of Rampur, people of Uttar Pradesh and people of India, it took you 17 years to understand her reality. But, I could recognize it in 17 days that she wears a khaki underwear.)”

Khan is contesting from Rampur on a ticket from the Samajwadi Party against Jaya Prada who is the BJP candidate. 

The BJP alleged that the remarks were indeed made against Jaya Prada. 

“It’s a very obnoxious and shameful remark.”

“The level of politics cannot fall lower than this,” said the BJP spokesperson.

“This remark by Azam Khan reveals the actual face of the Samajwadi Party in which he is expressing his real thoughts about women oblivious of all dignity,” said Chandra Mohan.

The BJP also asked BSP supremo Mayawati to make her stand clear on “this indecent remark against Jaya Prada.” The BSP and SP have joined hands to contest the Lok Sabha elections together. 

National Commission for Women Chairperson Rekha Sharma also construed Khan’s remarks as having been made against the actor and termed the same as “extremely disgraceful”.

She said the women panel will be sending a show cause notice to Khan.

 (With PTI inputs)

Huawei’s truly got its mojo back. After releasing the highly acclaimed Huawei Mate 20 Pro with its stellar camera, the folks at Huawei have done one better with the Huawei P30 Pro. With its all-seeing and immensely versatile camera setup, a battery that refuses to give up and a design that’s slick enough to stand out, the Huawei P30 Pro is a fantastic flagship that stacks up well against the Samsung S10 series and makes a strong play for your wallet.

If you’re all about mobile photography, the Google Pixel used to be the undisputed champ, but the Huawei P30 Pro changes that and wrests the mobile photography crown, at least for the time being.

The Huawei P30 Pro is available on Amazon starting 15th April and is priced at Rs. 71,990 for the 8GB/ 256GB Breathing Crystal (pearlescent blueish-white, pictured above in the sunset) and Aurora (blue) colorways, with early bird consumers getting a Huawei Watch GT for Rs 2,000 if bought as a bundle. Read on for the detailed pros and cons, but if you’re a camera enthusiast with a big budget — this is the phone to buy right now.

P30 Pro Pros

Cameras: How is Huawei’s take on the quad-rear-camera setup any different? Let’s start with that insane periscope-like telephoto lens setup, which channels light through the series of lenses inside the body, a setup that would otherwise be impossible to fit in, depth-wise, into a smartphone frame. The result? True 5x optical zoom which, when combined with the main 40MP image sensor, allows Huawei to produce a hybrid 10x zoom that the company claims is lossless (spoiler alert: it isn’t completely, but the detail levels are impressive and the loss in quality and sharpness is negligible).

Take a look at what the zoom setup can manage, more so when you take it all the way to the insane 50x digital zoom a.k.a creep mode. At full stretch, it’s just about usable in good light, and there’s nothing in the market that can compete against this at the moment. Jaw, meet floor – these are images from a smartphone!

Yet, the zoom capabilities are just one half of the camera story. Courtesy the new RYYB sensor (as opposed to the traditional RGB setup), Huawei claims it can collect 40% more light which helps in detail capture, more so in low light.

Not idle claims these – the P30 Pro has, put simply, the best low-light camera in a smartphone, besting even the auto-magical Night Sight on the Pixel. This is just the auto mode, and there’s a dedicated Night Mode and a Pro mode if you feel the need to tweak the shots further.

Bear in mind, while the telephoto camera has optical stabilization, the disappointing f/3.4 aperture (vs f/1.6 on the main sensor) makes the zoom sensor fairly ineffective, so much so that the camera app completely switches to digital zoom even if there’s a mild drop in ambient light.

Rounding out the diversity of shooting options is the 32MP front camera and the 20MP ultra-wide-angle shooter, the latter enabling those all-encompassing landscape shots and a surprisingly good super macro mode. The last “camera”, a Time of Flight or depth sensor, helps in focusing in low light and separating the subject from background objects for portrait photos that throw up delightfully dreamy bokeh more often than not, though the edge detection could definitely be improved.

Pitted against its chief rival, the Pixel still eked out more detail in well-lit shots while the Huawei P30 Pro edged ahead with the low-light and zoom shots. Overall, images taken with the Huawei P30 Pro are crisp, offer good dynamic range and accurate white balance, and turn out colors that are pleasant, without going completely overboard.

It’s not perfect – you still get some color inconsistencies when switching between different cameras and video quality doesn’t compare well against the iPhone/ Samsung Galaxy S10 – but when it comes to stills, the Huawei P30 Pro excels where most stumble and blazes a new trail for mobile photography. Refreshing to see strides being made by a company other than Google, Samsung or Apple.

Design: If you’ve used the Huawei Mate 20 Pro, you’ll know what the Huawei P30 Pro broadly feels like in the hand, although the latter is a hair bigger. Yet the design is anything but old, and while the Aurora blue is still a stunner, the ‘Breathing Crystal’ finish white-to-blue pearlescent finish is strikingly different and rewards you if you take the risk of using it without a case.

No hole-punch cutout here - Huawei’s stuck around for this round with a small dewdrop notch a la the OnePlus 6T, which means you only get the single selfie camera, with no laser-based face unlock as on the Huawei Mate 20 Pro, making it easier to spoof and slower in low-light face unlocks. Biometric authentication is via the in-screen fingerprint scanner, an optical variant which is reasonably quick and accurate as long as you consciously press your fingerprint firmly on the screen, it works.

Also missing is the conventional earpiece speaker, which is now present under the screen and uses a bunch of magnets to create vibrations on the screen to project audio into your ear. Voice calls are loud and clear, oftentimes a bit too loud if you push the volume way up.

The downside? There’s only one bottom-edge speaker, so no stereo separation. No headphone jack either, which is odd given that the smaller Huawei P30 includes one, but at least they’ve retained the infrared module.

Performance and Battery: Coming in mid-cycle for the company’s launches, the Huawei P30 Pro has the same flagship Kirin 980 chip as the Huawei Mate 20 Pro, with 8GB of memory and 256GB of storage.

There’s a new file system that gives the phone a boost while transferring files and launching apps, but there’s nothing new here, grunt wise, over the Mate 20 Pro – it’s fast and smooth for everyday use, knuckle gestures shortcuts execute without any lag and gaming benefits with the GPU Turbo 3.0 performance boosts – pretty much in line with what you’d expect a phone priced at this point to be, although I expect the Kirin 980 to be overrun with the new bunch of Snapdragon 855 smartphones that are just around the corner.

After the camera, the 4200mAh battery is the other star of the show, fast charging at up to 40W (zero to full in just a bit over an hour) using the included charger and lasting nearly two days of the usual — Internet browsing, WhatsApp, watching YouTube and some Asphalt 9 – the phone is the Duracell bunny of flagships. The now-familiar party trick that the Huawei Mate 20 Pro first introduced – reverse wireless charging – is present as well.

Huawei P30 Pro Cons

Display: For all of its bleeding edge hardware, Huawei seems to have played it a little too safe with the display. The 2340x1080 pixels resolution on the 6.47-inch panel is a lot lower than its peers, but with most of those same peers shipping with a lower resolution selected by default in the box, you’re unlikely to tell the difference unless you’re pixel peeping.

It helps with the Huawei P30 Pro’s battery life as well and it’s not a bad display per se… plus it’s tuned to the DCI-P3 color gamut (with HDR support). It’s just that while one should be happy with a rich, color accurate display… at this price, a higher resolution panel is about par for the course.

EMUI: For the most part, Android 9.0 based EMUI 9.1 addresses the usability concerns that plagued Huawei’s software for the past several generations but it’s still a tad dated and looks rough around the edges, more so when you compare it to the cleaned up OneUI on Samsung’s flagships. Install a third-party launcher and you should be fine.