Cafe Coffee Day patrons and entrepreneurs paid tribute to founder VG Siddhartha after news of his death was confirmed by the police on Wednesday.

Siddhartha’s body was found on the banks of Netravati River in Dakshin Kanna district of Karnataka two days after he went missing.

People condoled the tragedy and shared fond memories of the time spent at Cafe Coffee Day outlets, speaking of the impact the coffee tycoon’s work had had on their lives.

Women spoke of how access to restrooms in the cafe helped them on long travels.

People spoke of the courtesy and kindness of the outlet workers as a mark of the kind of brand Siddhartha created.

People also shared stories of how meeting over coffee changed their lives. 

Entrepreneurs expressed gratitude for the haven Cafe Coffee Day outlets provided to startups across the country.

Siddhartha is expected to be laid to rest at his native place in Chikkamagaluru.

Meghan Markle’s guest-edited September issue of British Vogue hits newsstands this Friday and on the cover are 15 “Forces of Change.” 

The cover, shot by Peter Lindbergh, shows 15 black-and-white portraits of women ― all trailblazing change makers in their own right ― and include names like model Adwoa Aboah, activist Greta Thunberg, actresses Laverne Cox and Jameela Jamil and author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. 

But alongside the portraits, there’s a very noticeable blank space on the cover. It’s intentional, of course. 

As the Duchess of Sussex wrote in a letter introducing the September issue, the space is supposed to represent a mirror.

“Among all of these strong women on the cover, a mirror — a space for you, the reader, to see yourself. Because you, too, are part of this collective,” she said. 

Edward Enninful, the editor-in-chief of Vogue UK, elaborated on the idea of the mirror in his own account of putting the September issue together.  

“The 16th spot on the magazine’s cover represents a mirror, at the request of the Duchess, to include the reader in this unique moment and encourage them to use their own platforms to effect change,” he wrote.

In the magazine, Prince Harry interviewed Dr. Jane Goodall for the issue, while the Duchess of Sussex spoke with former first lady Michelle Obama, whom she says she now calls a friend. 

Meghan and the former first lady spoke to each other about motherhood in an interview that the “Suits” actress said left her “speechless.” 

The hate and bigotry that we usually see on social media against minorities seems to now have spilled on to real life. And not for the first time. With the political climate in the country fanning communal fires, people seem to have problems with even interacting with certain communities. 

A Twitter user @NaMo_SARKAAR on Wednesday took to Twitter to tell food delivery app Zomato that he was cancelling an order because the delivery person was a “Muslim fellow.”

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The user was upset because he was charged a cancellation fees for not accepting the order. He said, “Just cancelled an order on @ZomatoIN
they allocated a non hindu rider for my food they said they can’t change rider and can’t refund on cancellation I said you can’t force me to take a delivery I don’t want don’t refund just cancel.”

The Twitter user also went on to say that he will approach his lawyers over the issue. 

On the brighter side, Zomato clapped back at the customer saying, “Food doesn’t have a religion. It is a religion.” 

On Wednesday morning founder Deepinder Goyal also took to Twitter to announce that the company represented the diversity of India and had no qualms about losing business that came in the way of their values. 

The food delivery app received much applause on Twitter for standing up to bigotry. 

This is not the first time such an incident has taken place. In April 2018, a man from VHP had cancelled an Ola cab because the driver was Muslim, saying he did not want to give his money to “jihadi people”. Twitter had outraged over this incident asking Ola to block this user’s account. 

Ola had responded saying, “Ola, like our country, is a secular platform, and we don’t discriminate our driver partners or customers basis their caste, religion, gender or creed. We urge all our customers and driver partners to treat each other with respect at all times.”

In June 2018, a woman on Twitter had told an Airtel customer service executive that she had no faith in the service provided by him because he was Muslim and had requested for a Hindu representative. 

“We absolutely do not differentiate between customers, employees and partners on the basis of caste or religion. We would urge you to do the same,” Bharti Airtel had said in a response to her. 

The hatred against Muslims is not just in India alone. Uber and Lyft had banned a far-right activist who complained about Muslim drivers in the aftermath of the New York City terror attack. 

NEW DELHI — Delhi has banned the world’s largest brewer, Anheuser-Busch InBev, from selling its products in the market for 3 years for allegedly evading local taxes, government orders seen by Reuters showed.

Delhi government orders from earlier this month followed a 3-year investigation which found that beer maker SABMiller — acquired by AB InBev in 2016 for around $100 billion — used duplicate barcodes on its beer bottles supplied to city retailers that year, allowing it to pay lower levies.

AB InBev said in a statement it denied the Delhi government’s allegations and would appeal against the order.

“The barcodes were being duplicated by... SABMiller and supplied to the retail outlets to evade payment of excise duty,” said a 19-page order, dated July 16, which detailed the findings.

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In a second order last week, the Delhi city authority said that AB InBev should be put on a “blacklist” for three years. It also called for the sealing of two of AB InBev’s warehouses in the capital, an action that a senior Delhi government official told Reuters on Tuesday had already been completed.

“This means the company is debarred from Delhi market for all purposes, unless they appeal against this,” said the official, adding that no fresh stock of AB InBev beer brands can be sold at liquor shops or restaurants.

Neither of the orders had been previously reported.

AB InBev, which counts popular beer brands such as Budweiser, Hoegaarden and Stella Artois in its portfolio, told Reuters the Delhi government’s allegations related to operations of SABMiller prior to its takeover, and it looked forward to receiving a fair hearing on the matter.

“Integrity and ethics are part of our core values ... (We) look forward to presenting our views in full cooperation with the excise appellate process,” a company spokesman said.

AB InBev is the second biggest player in India’s $7 billion beer market, accounting for a 17.5 percent market share, according to research firm IWSR Drinks Market Analysis.

Though separate local market share figures were not available, industry executives said the Delhi ban would be a major setback for AB InBev, which is also battling a separate Indian antitrust probe concerning alleged beer price fixing by SABMiller and other companies. 

“New Delhi remains an extremely critical market for any beer company ... this is the country’s social capital, apart from Mumbai. It’s a showcase market for the premium beer portfolio,” said a former senior AB InBev executive, who declined to be identified.

This month, AB InBev cancelled the planned listing in Hong Kong of its Asia Pacific unit, citing “several factors, including the prevailing market conditions”.

PUB CULTURE

A young and affluent population and a growing pub culture, especially in the big cities, have spurred beer consumption in India. That is despite the fact that the industry is tightly regulated, with most states individually regulating pricing and imposing taxes, which form a vital source of their revenues.

Sandeep Chilana, a New Delhi-based lawyer specializing in excise law, said that rules mandate each beer bottle sold in the city has to have a unique barcode for track and trace purposes, and to ensure there is no duty evasion.

The current dispute centres around a random inspection at BarShala, a drinking spot in a posh New Delhi area, on the night of August 16, 2016. City officials said they found 12 beer bottles of SABMiller brands at the bar that barcode records showed should have been in the company warehouse at the time.

A follow-on investigation showed that some beer bottles sent to the bar in November had identical barcodes to those found in the inspection in August, the government order said.

The bar denied any wrongdoing.

The brewer argued the discrepancy could be due to the technical or clerical errors in the barcoding system, but the Delhi government said the company’s defence was “devoid of merit”, according to the order.

The Delhi government said it was “reasonable to believe” that the same barcodes were duplicated multiple times and supplied to various retail vendors in Delhi, adding that this amounted to the offence of selling non-duty paid liquor.

“The same barcodes were supplied twice at the same restaurant and hence the discrepancy could be noticed. Had the same been supplied to a different retail outlet the discrepancy could not have been noticed easily,” the order said.

Children on either side of the US-Mexico border are finally able to play together after an innovative set of see-saws was installed at the barrier wall. 

The result of a decade-long project dreamed up by two professors, Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, the idea became a reality on Monday when the Teetertotter Wall finally opened to the public. 

It consists of pink see-saws anchored to the fence separating the two countries.

Posting a video of the project on Instagram, Rael described it as “one of the most incredible experiences of my... career” and an “event filled with joy, excitement, and togetherness”.

He added: “The wall became a literal fulcrum for US-Mexico relations and children and adults were connected in meaningful ways on both sides with the recognition that the actions that take place on one side have a direct consequence on the other side.”

The installation is welcome ray of light from an area that consistently makes headlines for stories of death, detention and political posturing.

Last month a picture of a father and her 23-month-old daughter, dead and lying face down in the Rio Grande laid bare the often fatal reality of the thousands of migrants that flee South America in search of a more prosperous life in the US.

President Trump’s quest to build his long-vaunted border wall was given a boost earlier this week when the US Supreme Court cleared the way for the his administration to use billions of dollars in Pentagon funds to build it. 

The court’s five conservative justices gave the administration the green light to begin work on four contracts it has awarded using Defence Department money.

Funding for the projects had been frozen by lower courts while a lawsuit over the money proceeded, the Press Association reports.

Twitter can’t stop talking about Romania’s Pavel Florin after a video of his unique bowling action in the European Cricket League went viral. Florin is a bodyguard-turned-amateur cricketer from Transylvania, according to Scroll. 

He took up bowling at the age of 32 and plays for the Cluj Cricket Club, the report added. 

Here’s the clip:

Talking about his bowling, he said, “My bowling is not beautiful but I don’t care because I love cricket.”

Shane Warne and Jofra Archer have come out in support of the cricketer after people on Twitter made fun of Florin.

“Cricket is a beautiful game. Well done and congrats to everyone who made this happen,” Warne tweeted, while adding that he would love to check this tournament out next year and help out, if needed.

Archer, according to The Guardian, offered his “respect” to the cricketer. 

Several people offered words of encouragement to Florin on Twitter:

The cat got Idris Elba’s tongue when he was asked to explain the plot of Cats.

The actor appeared on The Late Show Monday to promote his new blockbuster, Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, and was asked by host Stephen Colbert to sum up the story of his upcoming film, Cats.

The 46-year-old actor plays the villainous Macavity in the Tom Hooper-directed movie based on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s famous musical — which was itself inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a collection of poetry, about, well, kitties.

Idris seemed pretty perplexed by the question.

“Ah, wow,” the actor said. “What a way to throw me under the bus there!”

But after some thought, Idris gave it his best shot:

“It’s a classic. It’s a big musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber. I guess it’s about a cat? How am I doing?”

He continued: “It’s one cat’s journey towards what is essentially cat heaven.

“The idea is we all... you know, we aspire to get towards cat heaven. It’s this young cat... and she gets sort of... you know... taken on this story about how to get to cat heaven. Or what you should do to get into cat heaven. How am I doing? Does anyone know what the story is?”

It was a pretty purr-fect response considering the plot of the musical can feel like it was written by a feline on catnip. But for future interviews in which Idris will be asked to explain the loose and confusing story of this popular play, we suggest that he keeps this tweet handy:

A young, talented beauty blogger walks into a small, neighbourhood beauty parlour. It is nothing like the salons we’ve had the privilege to visit. No funky lighting, no massive mirrors, no speakers blasting the latest hip-hop hits. The walls are a chalky yellow, and the seat a simple chair ― none of the plush, revolving sofas you get at expensive salons.

So why is a woman — who regularly posts make-up tutorials with top end products and has a few thousand followers on her social media handles — at this parlour?

She told HuffPost India that she was at the salon as a part of a social media challenge which involved getting make-up done by the ‘worst reviewed makeup artist in one’s city’. Akanksha Komirelly thought it was a fun idea to take the challenge up — especially since it seemed to have gone viral around the world. She Googled parlours in her city and found the one with the least number of stars and reviews.

Komirelly is not alone, there are a bunch of such videos where young, affluent women shoot themselves getting make-up done at modest neighbourhood salons and take digs at the make-up artist’s skills, the products used and the general state of the parlour.

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The almost nine-minute long video, filmed secretly by the blogger in a parlour which she said has “bad lighting”, features her exaggerated disgust at the artist “touching (her) hair with her wet hands (sic)”, and takes potshots at the artist’s drugstore products. The comments are not made while the video is being shot, but as text added to the video while editing — as a result the subject of her criticism doesn’t get to know that she is being mocked.

One of the comments appended to the video reads: “Looking at my friend helplessly cause she was using Vaseline to clean my face (dead) (sic)”. She goes on to call the shiny bindis that Indian women widely wear “iconic” with obvious sarcasm. She asks her friend to “be sneaky” while recording the video, and then chortles, “We’re going to hell for lying.”

In another video with over 1.2 million views, YouTuber Nilanjana Dhar and her blogger friend Ria are seen making an opening mono-vlog about how ‘scared’ they are to get makeup done by the ‘worst reviewed makeup artist’ they identified in their vicinity.

They then proceeded to walk through the broken, rusty doors of a small enclosure that houses a local beauty parlour, but not before guffawing at its dilapidated condition. “Neeche toh dekho,” she says in her voice-over to point at the rusty, broken bottom half of the door. She scrubs off the remnants of the cream the beautician applied to her face in revulsion, and acts fake-impressed by the fact that the artist had a beauty blender and does not use “cheap products,” saying, ‘didi bilkul bhi cheap cheezein use nahi karti hai’.

Immediately after, she starts chuckling at the artist’s ‘ten-rupee lip glosses’. All this, peppered with giggles and eyerolls just to remind her subscribers every so often how much she loathed being in that setting.

Is this ‘fun’?

From the ‘LOLs’ the videos seem to have gotten in their comments section, it is perhaps fun for a great number of people to watch a woman roll her eyes as her cheeks are getting painted a bright pink and her lids green. They are also not the first to have indulged in this kind of ‘humour’.

A popular social media trend of jokes is to photograph menus of roadside dhabas, small eateries and stalls and share the erroneous English spellings on them for laughs. While some of them simply are pictures of hoardings and menu cards, like on this Buzzfeed article, there’s a photo of a man standing with his momo cart.

This challenge, however, is way more problematic as it singles out people in a social group that is anyway at a disadvantage. Going by the products used by them and the state of the studios, it is clear that the women the videos target enjoy fewer economic privileges than the bloggers making these videos.
The makeup artists Indian vloggers have picked on predominantly come from economically weaker backgrounds, and work at the kind of local establishments that typically cater to customers with lower budgets.

Komirelly, an articulate makeup blogger, runs a fairly new channel and posts elaborate, fun tutorials about everyday makeup from what appears to be her room. Nilanjana Dhar, is another young YouTuber, seemingly from around Kolkata. She blogs in Hindi and occasionally Hinglish, and makes videos about shopping hauls, makeup and states in one of her videos how she always ‘tries to make her subscribers laugh’.

Komirelly told HuffPost India that she did not intend to ‘put down weaker background people’.

“I totally understand that everybody has their own audience. Many amazing artists work around the same cost. I am obsessed with drugstore products too. My video’s intent was only to educate people on how bad it could get if the artist’s approach is not correct or if they lack experience and knowledge. It’s just sad that she calls herself as a bridal mua and charges people (Rs. 1500) for it when she is not really good at it. I was only pointing out that my experience with her was really bad,” she said.

But here’s the problem. Like Komirelly had a chance to explain her stance, the woman in her video is not given a chance to explain where she learnt make-up from, who she caters to, how much she charges usually and if she is willing to learn if someone like the blogger tried to help her.

The video is not an average product review since Komirelly’s target viewer — English speaking social media users — is least likely to use the services of this woman. It is clear that the woman was not apprised of the intent when the girls visited, and chances are she doesn’t even know that this video exists about her.

The classism did not, however, go completely unnoticed. A user named Randeep Kaur commented on Dhar’s video: “Honestly i didn’t like the main entrance fun,, if they are poor that s why the gate is broken,, plz girls don’t make fun of someone s poverty,,(sic)”. Some others reiterated Kaur’s sentiments. HuffPost India has reached out to Dhar, the article will be updated if she responds.

But the number of views on this trend are supremely telling. In fact, Dhar made two videos on the challenge, both of which clocked over a million views each.

Naturally, Komirelly wondered, why ‘everything has to be offensive these days and can’t simply be funny’.

Not ‘Funny’

The disparities in the lives of the two women — the make-up artistes and the bloggers — are glaring in every frame of the videos. The quintessentially bright coloured cement walls of local parlours, adorned with vintage posters of Aishwarya Rai staring at you with the full might of her blue eyes, Sushmita Sen in coffee and gold-coloured lips and Karisma Kapoor with her spunky big-haired phase from the 90s are clearly indicative of the demographic of the clientele they appeal to, as opposed to the shiny white marble-floored salons the more privileged frequent, for their weekly self-care fix.

And most of these videos almost exclusively target women trying to make a living, rather than men.

In fact, this article on an institute’s website also references the fact that working at a parlour and training to become a make-up professional are two entirely different approaches to navigating the beauty services industry. The latter makes you much more poised to earn the rumoured big-bucks in the ever-burgeoning beauty services industry, by granting you access to a more “elite” clientele.

The women who work at parlours, on the other hand, take on these gigs often treating them as odd jobs because they have to make ends meet, and then learn the craft on the job. The beautician in one of the videos, in fact, lives on the floor above the parlour she ran, and supposedly juggles her time between being upstairs and downstairs, to care for her young child.

Given this context, for a makeup professional in India to break their fourth wall, so to speak, and interact with the other side - populated with women who never had the wherewithal to get trained - not to uplift, but rather, to ridicule, is an obscene show of privilege.

Take on someone your own size

A fair translation of this trend would have been for the Youtubers to find other artists with backgrounds similar to their own - in that they identify trained artists who received every bit as much opportunity as they did - and challenge them to a face-off. Critiquing the work of someone who was always withheld from having the same proficiency as you - even for the sake of entertainment - is not only unfair, it’s terribly insensitive.

A family holiday isn’t a family holiday without a few bust-ups, right? A Monopoly board flying across a caravan scattering an aura of green plastic houses is a key element of every successful getaway. (Nobody knows how Monopoly is meant to end, btw – no game of it has ever ended in any way other than throwing.)

There’s a limit, though, and nobody wants a holiday to descend into nothing but squabbling. You want to get a few activities in there that involve voices remaining at normal volumes.

Psychologist and parenting author Linda Blair believes the key to avoiding holiday arguments is to make sure you’re already well-rested when you go – rather than planning to relax when you get there.

That’s right, clock up those hours of sleep in the run-up to your holiday – naps and lie-ins galore.

[Read More: The Total Joy (And Abject Horror) Of Camping Holidays With Children]

Planning for a getaway is stressful – just think of the first 15 minutes of Home Alone, where everyone’s at each other’s throats – and late night packing followed by early trips to the airport means everyone is knackered when they get there.

Blair told the BBC the mistake many families make is going on holiday already burned-out and irritable from planning, scrabbling about to buy stuff, cramming to get ahead with work and sorting everything out so your house doesn’t get robbed/repossessed/cut off while away. We’re going on holiday pre-stressed.

Maybe what we need to do is shift everything forward, and aim to have everything packed and ready a few days before travelling, so we can ease into it.

It all seems easier said than done – as surely half the point of going on holiday is that real life makes relaxation extremely difficult – but if it is doable at all, it sounds like it makes a lot of sense. 

If you need a few more tips on how to ease into your holiday stress-free, try some of these ideas on how to properly switch off, plus some cheap things to do with your kids if they’re already bored on day one. 

NEW DELHI — The CBI has booked Uttar Pradesh MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar and nine others on murder charges in connection with the truck-car collision that left the woman who had accused the legislator of rape critically injured, officials said on Wednesday.

A special team formed by the agency to probe the case reached the accident site in the Gurubakshganj area of Uttar Pradesh’s Rae Bareli district.

A speeding truck hit the car in which the rape survivor was travelling from her home in Unnao to Rae Bareli on Sunday, killing two relatives and leaving her and a lawyer critically injured.

“The CBI has constituted a team for speedy and smooth investigation of the case,” the agency’s spokesperson said.

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The team inspected the crime scene, the truck which had hit the white Maruti Swift car.

The accident took place when the woman, who has accused the BJP MLA of raping her when she was a minor on the pretext of arranging a job for her, was returning after meeting her uncle Mahesh Singh lodged in the Rae Bareli prison.

The BJP claimed that it had suspended the MLA from the party after the allegations surfaced last year.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which is probing the rape case as well, has already filed a chargesheet against the MLA and his kin.

The number plate of the truck, which was coming from the opposite direction on the wrong side, was smeared with black paint, according to eyewitnesses.

The CBI team also spoke to police officers who were the first respondents after the accident was reported.

The team will also record statements of the police officers in the security cover of the woman and will seek their responses why they did not accompany the survivor on Sunday when the accident took place, agency sources said.

According to normal procedure, the CBI has taken over the investigation into the case from the Uttar Pradesh Police by re-registering its FIR.

The accident FIR was first registered by the UP Police on a complaint by Singh, who is lodged in the Rae Bareli prison.

After her niece accused Sengar of raping her, Singh was slapped with multiple false case by people close to Sengar, Singh alleged. The police had arrested Singh and he was transferred to Rae Bareli prison.

“It was alleged that the accused persons were conspiring, threatening and harassing the family of the complainant. It was further alleged that in this matter, the accident that occurred on July 28, 2019 has resulted in loss of two lives. Also, the Unnao survivor and the family lawyer (both passengers in a car) are still under treatment at a hospital in Lucknow,” the CBI spokesperson said.

Besides Sengar, those named in the accident FIR include his brother Manoj Singh Sengar, Arun Singh, Vinod Mishra, Hari Pal Singh, Navin Singh, Komal Singh, Gyanendra Singh, Rinku Singh, advocate Awadhesh Singh, and 15-20 unidentified persons.

In the FIR, Singh had alleged that the family was under constant pressure from the kin of Sengar.

They had been threatening to kill the entire family if the case against him was not withdrawn, he alleged.

He also alleged that false cases have been slapped against him for not yielding to the pressure and he has been transferred to Rae Bareli prison where threat to his life looms.

Singh, who lost his wife and sister-in-law in the accident, has also alleged that complaints by the survivor’s family were not paid heed to by the local police, the FIR said.

On Tuesday, the Centre handed over the probe to the CBI on the recommendation of the Uttar Pradesh government.

The state government has come under severe criticism for failing to provide security to the 19-year-old woman who was allegedly raped by the BJP MLA in 2017.

The Uttar Pradesh Police had on Monday filed a murder case against Sengar and nine others after the rape survivor’s family filed a complaint, alleging “conspiracy” behind the car crash.

With very few exceptions—Karthik Calling Karthik (2010), Dear Zindagi (2016)—Bollywood has never quite seen the difference between the psychotic and psychopathic. More problematically, it has seemed amused by issues of mental health. Rather than focus on the suffering of the mentally ill, Hindi films have delighted in the absurdities of their circumstances. The levity, sadly, hasn’t been all-inclusive either. Patients, soft targets for cinema’s ridicule, have rightly felt laughed at.

In the opening scene of Tanu Weds Manu Returns (2015), for instance, Manu Sharma (R Madhavan) and his wife, Tanu Trivedi (Kangana Ranaut), find themselves facing a panel of mental health practitioners. Manu suspects Tanu is bipolar. According to him, his wife’s anxiety, thyroid problems and erratic hormones are all symptoms of a deeper mental disorder. The doctors joke that if mood swings were considered evidence, “all the world’s women would be bipolar”. Tanu soon turns the table on Manu. As she questions his virility, he becomes irate and is taken away by men in white coats. 

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Filmmakers and Kangana Ranaut might today find it hard to get away with a scene so naïf. Strident advocates are calling out the industry’s apathy and the cruelty of its humour. In April this year, when posters of Mental Hai Kya were first released, mental health advocates were outraged. The image of Ranaut and Rajkummar Rao balancing a blade on their tongues was considered a “trigger”, and the film’s title itself was called “stigmatising, degrading and inhuman” by the Indian Psychiatric Society. There were justifiably some concerns about the blade-on-tongue imagery, but our new correctness, it seemed, also left little room for ’Mental Hai Kya’s’ tongue-in-cheek irony.

By changing their film’s name to Judgementall Hai Kya, the movie’s producers did something clever. Not only did they retain the word ‘mental’ in their title, they inverted the question. Rather than the derogatory undertone of ‘mental hai kya?’—a question clearly directed at the film’s characters—the Ranaut-and-Rao-starrer was now asking audiences if they were judgemental. Dropping their first ill-thought tagline, “Sanity is Overrated”, the film chose for itself a more fitting slogan—“Trust no one.”

Judgementall is an unquestionably brave film. The part-comedy, part-thriller primarily relies on the mental health of its protagonist, Bobby, for its laughs and its suspense, but the film never mocks her disorder(s). Mental illnesses are arguably hard to depict on screen. While you’re damned if you’re insensitive to the ill, your film is also damned if you mollycoddle them to the point of unrecognition. Judgementall treads this line carefully. Bobby’s condition makes her vulnerable, but also very fallible.

At its heart, Judgementall is a whodunnit. As Bobby tries to piece together elements of a puzzle, the viewer is invited to be her own detective. Has Bobby’s fervid imagination mistaken an accident to be a murder? Are her accusations and suspicions a sum of her delusions, or is she more committed to truth than those whose sanity makes concessions for ambivalence? When compared to the film’s larger concerns—gender equality, identity, social inclusion—these conundrums seem banal, but it is through the grid of its mystery that the film tries to answer a larger question: What really is madness?   

‘What’s wrong with her’

For the mentally ill, childhood is often a crime scene. If there isn’t abuse, there is blood. Judgementall, a film that at one point slashes the wrist of its protagonist and burns alive women and children, starts by depicting a rather everyday violence. A husband regularly beats up his wife, accusing her of infidelity. His daughter, Bobby, cowers under a bed, stricken and helpless. She intervenes one Holi, but as she breaks the violence up, her parents fall off a balcony, smash their heads and die. It’s hard to see their blood—they lie in a pool of gulaal—but Bobby’s guilt is tangible. You can see it drip off her face.

Even though memory is notoriously unreliable, we tend to believe filmi flashbacks. Judgementall uses the past to explain personality. To understand the film, one must understand Bobby (Ranaut), and, for the most part, she seems almost impossible to comprehend. Her trauma hasn’t just left her mentally ill; it has made her opaque.  

When we see an adult Bobby for the first time, she is doing a headstand. She sees the world upside down. She lives alone. Her cat, Panauti, seems well-fed, and though quirky, her clothes are fashionable. Despite her checking these boxes of functionality, however, we know all is not well. Varun (Hussain Dalal), her on-again, off-again boyfriend, tells her, “Bahut complexes hain tujhe. Normal nahin ho tum.” Bobby can be seen tossing pills she has been prescribed for a mental ailment, and as a result of this perhaps, she gets little sleep. Her behaviour is usually manic. She starts to seem bipolar.

Psychiatrists might possibly find watching Judgementall frustrating. For much of the film, its makers refuse to spell out Bobby’s diagnosis. Her symptoms don’t belong to any one end of the mental health spectrum, they slide all over it. Bobby can easily get anxious. When Keshav (Rao) and his wife Reema (Amyra Dastur) move into her house, she considers their tenancy an intrusion. The doggedness with which she stalks them suggests she is obsessive and compulsive. You think she is schizophrenic when she sees cockroaches that are never there, and when Keshav finally scans her records to see she suffers from dissociative identity disorder, you wonder about the accuracy of the diagnosis. Bobby had a troubled childhood, but she doesn’t really have an explicit, second personality.   

While it is, of course, possible for mentally ill patients to suffer more than one disorder, writer Kanika Dhillon seems to have had a more audacious agenda. By creating a character who defies any easy diagnosis, she has challenged our expectation of predictability. If we knew what ailed Bobby, we would have been able to write more comfortably our prescriptive think-pieces. Dhillon, however, seems to suggest that diagnoses can sometimes stonewall our empathy. Knowing what’s wrong with someone can help us excuse their behaviour, but it can also prevent us from understanding it. A prescription cannot be shorthand for biography and medical files cannot be a substitute for history.  

Bobby, who is said to have “17-18 people in her head”, also, oddly, wants to be 17-18 people. Her job as a dubbing artist requires her to immerse herself in disparate roles, but Bobby takes this doubling very seriously. She rents costumes and gets herself photographed, first as a police officer and then a ghost. These pictures all go up on her wall. Seen together, they form an album of selves that gives the drab reality of Bobby’s life possibilities far more exciting. They are all heroes with happier childhoods. 

Judgementall wants to make us believe that Bobby desires Keshav’s affection. When she sees Keshav and Reema drenching themselves with a hosepipe, she tries to imitate their sexual game. Later, when you see she has photoshopped herself into all of Keshav’s pictures with Reema, you again think of Bobby as unhinged. That, though, misses the point.

Bobby doesn’t want to eliminate Reema in order to stand in her place. Reema is never the conduit that leads her to Keshav. He is instead the peril she needs to protect Reema from. Men are beasts, Bobby believes this. Expectedly, she only ever desires comeuppance for Keshav. She does not desire him. It is perhaps only in the end that you realise Bobby never wished a man would save or complete her. She only ever wanted to justice for Reema, another more joyful woman she wanted to become. 

Sita becomes her

For decades at a stretch, mentally ill women were dismissed as “hysterical”, their symptoms disregarded as their gender’s excesses. Diagnoses then had an opposite effect. Their afflictions were written off as a result of their biology, not a consequence of social factors such as patriarchy and discrimination. The2015-2016 National Mental Health Survey of India, for instance, does acknowledge that more women suffer depression, neuroses, anxiety, obsessive and compulsive disorders, but it never once suggests that their suffering is compounded by structural inequality. Judgementall again makes mental health a feminist issue.

Varun constantly pesters Bobby for sex. She asks him to be like an <aloo>, “adjusting”. Psychiatric medicines are known to thwart sexual desire, yes, but Bobby’s steadfast refusal is unmistakably feministic too. When a producer in her dubbing studio gets handsy, she assaults him with a paper cutter.. Even though she is the victim of harassment, it is telling that she is the one dragged to a police station. Given the choice of a fine or three months in an “asylum”, she chooses the latter. “I am comfortable,”she says.

Her stay in the state-sponsored institution is surprisingly a breeze. She avoids the daily routine of breathing exercises and ward boys even smuggle bars of chocolate for her. Months later, however, when she is re-admitted, the institution seems more asylum-like. Having accused Keshav of burning his wife Reema to death, Bobby, now faced with a therapist, mutters that it’s her mother who wants justice. One suspects Bobby has universalised her trauma. Every woman, for her, is a potential victim.

In countries like theUS and theUK, more women are singled out for electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), and when we see Bobby strapped to a hospital bed with rubber stuffed in her mouth, one fears that the ordeal may only be too gendered in India as well. According to a2016 report released by India’s National Commission for Women, women are often abandoned at institutions where they are admitted. A closer analysis of the report also suggests that while her mental illness leaves Bobby untrustworthy, it’s her gender that makes her easy to repeatedly institutionalise. Her wish to protect Reema is distorted by others around her. For psychiatrists, only shocks can cure her Keshav obsession.

In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë writes, “[...] and it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it.” Judgementall offers its viewers a choice. We can either look at the ‘mad’ Bobby being devoured by her secret love for Keshav, or we can see her as someone who empathises with his lovers to the point of a dangerous immersion. We can see Bobby as ‘the other woman’ or we can see her wanting to pretend to be ‘another woman’.

When we see Bobby pretending to be pregnant with a pillow stuffed inside her shirt, we are trained to think she wants to know what it’s like to carry Keshav’s child. We never see a connotation more implicit—she is making literal her desire to be more than one person. Bobby’s mimicry does come with its own frustrations, though. The women whose photos she morphs are invariably weak and dependent. Bobby, on the other hand, would never pander to men or their assumed superiority. So, rather than usurp the identity of women such as Reema, she only assumes the roles of their personality, and her adventures in the dubbing studio make clear that she knows how to better these roles with an unrestrained and wholly unsentimental chutzpah. Moreover, identity theft, Judgementall suggests, is Keshav’s preoccupation, not Bobby’s.     

While her cocktail of symptoms makes her a stand-in for most mentally ill people, her ability to place herself in the shoes of other women makes her a fitting gender advocate. Men, in her experience, are violent. They beat their wives. They are desperate for sex. They are hard to trust. When Bobby encounters Keshav, she greets him with a wariness, but it’s his quiet menace and habitual lying that leave her scared and curious. By the time she meets him in London, he has transformed into Shravan. Bobby may adopt personas in her photos, but men, she fears, never change.

In London, Bobby signs up to be the understudy of an actor who is playing Sita in the production of a futuristic Ramayana. As she learns her lines, she finds herself internalising the radicalness of a new, empowered Sita, someone who doesn’t need Ram, someone who saves herself. For Bobby, this Sita is not just a character, she is a lodestar who must be imitated. It’s comic to see her stretch her arms and tell Keshav, “Main Sita hoon”, but when you finally see her dressed in an ochre saree with an axe in her hand, you suddenly get the point. 

For much of the film, we doubt Bobby’s sanity. She becomes other women too easily. Yet, it is only when she chooses to become Sita that the film finally starts to work as metaphor. Valmiki had given Ravan ten heads, yes, but his text might perhaps have been more relevant if he had given Sita as many selves to choose from. Sanity, Judgementall suggests, lies not in the coherence of self. The ‘sane’, one infers, only handpick their best self in order to positively impact the world around them.

In the order of our epics, excess is as natural as coincidence. The same is true for Judgementall. To view it as a realistic depiction of mental health or gender relations will amount to mistaking the forest for a lone tree. Kanika Dhillon’s farfetched plot sometimes feels clumsy because there is a dissonance between our world and the one she wishes to herald. In that world, a woman lets a man fall during a ‘trust’ exercise, a psychotic patient has the smarts to detect a careful conspiracy, and in it, it is Sita who burns Lanka down, not Hanuman.

Psycho vs psychopath

‘Psychotic’ is an umbrella of an adjective that does little to protect the people for whom it is used. The psychotic subject is considered irrational and often dangerous. Bobby, who is repeatedly referred to as “psychotic”, doesn’t altogether reject violence. She does, for instance, once break a chair on Keshav’s head. But while Keshav sees her as psychotic, she thinks he is murderously psychopathic. Much of the film’s drama is based on this opposition. For Bobby, sanity is impossible. For Keshav, however, sanity is potentially only an act. As the two protagonists continue to cross paths and swords, the film asks an essential question: If sanity can be performed, how can one know who is really insane? 

Bobby seems neurotic when you see her compulsively take to origami. For paper, she only uses newspaper cuttings of macabre crime stories. She practices tongue twisters obsessively. You’d be right to think of her as deranged, but repetition is known to ward off psychosis. A little madness can, at times, prevent greater, more brutal manifestations. Bobby has other self-preservation mechanisms as well. She interrupts genial conversations to talk about the violence of her childhood. Her tone is deadpan, her delivery funny. The darkness of her humour may stop you from inviting her for dinner, but it does also serve as a reminder. Mental health jokes, when cracked by Hindi films, only ever seem to trivialise trauma, but Judgementall’s levity can help us transcend it too.

The Mad Pride movement started in 1993 with a single objective—it wanted mentally ill persons to reclaim their “mad” identity and subvert words like “nutter” and “psycho”. Formerly Mental Hai Kya, Judgementall has a similar goal. When someone asks Bobby if she is all right, she smiles and says, “I’m not. I’m mad.” Bollywood, of course, has for long been using words such as “mad” to refer to the mentally ill, but it’s only in Bobby’s articulation that a Hindi film can claim to have gotten its lingo right.   

Shreevatsa Nevatia is the author of How to Travel Light, a bipolar memoir.

This article is part of Second Thoughts, a series on mental health in India. Write to us here: secondthoughts@huffpost.in

If you or someone you know needs help, mail icall@tiss.edu or dial 022-25521111 (Monday-Saturday, 8am to 10pm) to reach iCall, a psychosocial helpline set up by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS).

Sawing logs lately?

Snoring affects90 million Americans and the majority of these people “are unaware of why they snore or what snoring could indicate about their overall health,” according to Jagdeep Bijwadia, a board-certified doctor in internal, sleep and pulmonary diseases medicine.

Snoring can be a telltale sign of an underlying sleep disorder like sleep apnea, a condition that can cause a pause in breathing while asleep. But simple, daily habits or decisions can also make you vulnerable to snoring, Bijwadia added. 

And while people may take snoring lightly, the condition can do more than just keep your bedmate up at night. Recentstudies have shown that snoring can lead to a high risk for hardening of the arteries, a leading cause of stroke, and general cardiac issues, said Steven Olmos, founder of TMJ & Sleep Therapy Centres International.

Fortunately, you can control many cases of snoring. The first step is to figure out what causes it and get the condition treated appropriately. Here are just a few unexpected things that could be behind your unwanted snoring habit.

1. You’re Enjoying An Evening Nightcap 

Having a glass of wine at the end of the day may take the edge off, but it isn’t necessarily doing your sleeping habits any favors. According to Bijwadia, alcohol relaxes your airway muscles, which can lead to excessive snoring ― even if you’re not a regular snorer.

“And the less restorative and deep sleep you get each night, the more it builds and causes you to become more disoriented and foggy throughout the day,” he said.

2. You Have A Nasal Obstruction

Having something blocking off your nasal passageway can definitely contribute to snoring. This could be due to a possible allergy or a deviated septum, according to Brian Drew, a physician at Ear Nose and Throat Specialty Care of Minnesota.

An allergist can help to treat your issues with sensitivities like dust mites or an ENT doctor can help you find an effective way to reduce snoring that occurs because of nasal obstruction.

“Nasal sprays ... have been shown to increase nasal volume by 20%, which dramatically increases flow rate,” added Olmos. These products can help alleviate soft tissue swelling due to generalized inflammation and environmental sensitivities.

3. You’re A Back Sleeper

Sleeping on your back may make you much more likely to snore, saidMarcella M. Frank, a sleep medicine specialist at Deborah Heart and Lung Center in Browns Mills, New Jersey.

“When someone sleeps on the back, there is a natural tendency for the jaw and tongue to drop into the back of the throat,” Frank explained. 

According to one study,around 92% of those suffering from sleep-disorder breathing can breathe better when they’re not on their back.

“Sleeping on your side helps to reduce snoring, and for those that suffer from more serious sleep disorders like sleep apnea, it can help alleviate some of those symptoms as well. It can increase your nightly oxygen intake and protects the airway from collapsing,” Bijwadia added. 

4. It May Be Weight Related

Excess body weight can lead topoor muscle tone and an increased amount of tissue around the throat and neck. Both of these can catalyze a snoring condition.

Ensuring you’re active throughout your day will set you up for more quality sleep down the line, Bijwadia said, noting that maintaining a healthy weight may lessen your snoring.

5. Your Thyroid May Be Out Of Wack

“With an under-active thyroid, there may be changes within the upper airway that lead to difficulty breathing during sleep,” saidShoshana Ungerleider, an internist at Sutter Health in San Francisco.

Studies show that hormonal stabilization in those with a hypothyroid condition improves snoring severity. Some other signs that your thyroid might be low functioning include fatigue, weight gain, dry skin, thinning hair and depression.

6. It Can Be Age Related 

Snoring is more common as we age “simply because of floppy tissue” in the bodies, Frank said.

Exercises like singing, believe it or not, can help with this, Olmos added. Using nasal dilators like Breathe Right strips can also help with age-related snoring.

7. Your Mouth Shape Could Be Causing The Problem

People are all built differently and some of us have amouth anatomy that can make us more prone to sawing logs. For example, having a lower, thicker or softer palate can narrow your airways and prompt snoring.

Drew noted that some of these structural differences that can lead to snoring can be treated. For instance, custom night guards or mouth appliances might be able to reduce the issue, he said.

8. You’re A Male

Sorry, dudes. Research suggests that physical differences between genders can contribute to snoring. For example, men have narrower air passages that could exacerbate the issue. Men statistically drink more alcohol than women, which can lead to inflammation-induced snoring.

If None Of These Is The Culprit, You May Need To Look Into Sleep Apnea

Snoring can be a sign of obstructive sleep apnea, which is a serious medical condition. The condition can cause you to stop breathing throughout the night when you’re asleep because the soft tissues in your throat collapse and block your airway.

“The vibrations of these soft tissues is what causes the snoring noise,” said Kimanh Nguyen, an ENT physician in Beverly Hills.

Symptoms of OSA may include loud snoring, daytime tiredness, morning headaches, restless sleep and periods where you stop breathing or wake up gasping for air. The condition, which can be treated by an ENT doctor or sleep specialist, is diagnosed by a test called a polysomnogram or a sleep study.

If left untreated, it can lead to high blood pressure and cardiac problems. So if none of the above issues seem to be the reason for your snoring, chat with a doctor ASAP.

We’re sure she has better things to do. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In an interview on “Entertainment Weekly Live,” Angela Bassett, who portrays Queen Ramonda in “Avengers: Endgame,” let it slip that she has yet to see the movie. 

“It’s three hours long, right?” she said during the radio show. “I haven’t seen it.”

She admitted that, though she “was there,” she doesn’t “know where it is up in there and how it plays out.” 

The wildly popular movie, which clocks in at just over three hours, recently became the highest-grossing film of all time, making Bassett’s confession all the more amusing. Though she hasn’t seen it, the actress said that her kids have watched it twice. 

“I’m like, ‘Y’all have fun. I’m just gonna relax and chill at home, thanks. Tell me all about it,’” she said on the show. 

The actress is currently promoting her Netflix movie “Otherhood,” which also stars Patricia Arquette and Felicity Huffman. The film centers on empty-nester moms whose “sons are not connecting with them,” so they decide to celebrate Mother’s Day in one another’s company, she told NPR. The three end up making moves to surprise their adult sons and repair the relationships. 

BENGALURU, Karnataka—In the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections in 2019, Facebook, Google, and Twitter all rolled out ad transparency programs to allow researchers to study ads placed by political parties. Although this was a good start, most of these tools were hard to use, and offered limited information.

Now, two researchers — Manuel Beltrán in The Hague, and Bengaluru-based Nayantara Ranganathan, who are investigating new forms of propaganda in social media and elections — have created a simple tool called ad.watch that presents researchers with a much simpler and more detailed way to find information about political advertising on Facebook around the world. Ad.watch shows data from 34 countries, including India, at present with the small team working to add more.

The tool allows anyone with an internet connection to get accurate answers for some fairly standard questions that have proved hard to answer, and also provides fascinating insights into the online strategies adopted by India’s political parties. The tool even has interactive maps that breakdown spending by state and region.

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For instance, it may not come as a surprise that the largest number of political ads on Facebook were targeted at Uttar Pradesh residents, however, there were more advertisements targeting Assam residents (which sends only 14 lawmakers to the Lok Sabha) than Maharashtra residents (which sends 48).

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) predictably outspent all its rivals by a massive margin, spending nearly Rs 3.3 crores on Facebook advertisements compared to the Congress’s Rs 2.4 lakhs. However, Congress’s spending appears better targeted: the party ratcheted up close to 180 million impressions on its ad spend, compared to the BJP’s 200 million impressions gained at a much higher cost.

The tool even has interactive maps that breakdown spending by state and region. So we can see that the BJP concentrated its ad spend on the Hindi heartland stretching from Rajasthan and Haryana in the West to Bihar in the East, along with a special focus on West Bengal, but steered clear spending in Punjab — where the party is in alliance with the faltering Akali Dal. 

In the south, the party steered clear of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu, but Kerala was an exception in the south, with the party devoting resources in the aftermath of the Sabarimala temple entry controversy.

The Congress ad-map, shows a major focus on Uttar Pradesh (where the party hoped to make and impression), and Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan (where the party has state governments). But the party surprisingly placed almost ten times as many advertisements in Tamil Nadu than the BJP did — despite neither party really having a chance in a state long dominated by its two state parties.

“Facebook has released two transparency tools for political advertising, apart from a transparency report: the Ad Library Explorer and the Ad Library API. Both these tools defeat any meaningful access or understanding of political ads,” said Ranganathan, explaining the rationale behind Ad.watch.

“We started by trying to understand the violations of electoral law on social media during the Lok Sabha elections. In the larger context of ad.watch, this was an important start, Lok Sabha being the largest electoral exercise in the history of democracy, and the one in which social media had more importance than ever before,” said Beltrán.

Ad.watch also lets you compare advertising across the world and see what trends can be spotted in this manner. Predictably, the big-spenders are mostly US-centric — the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is a huge advertiser in India but it’s advertising is ten times less than that of Bernie Sanders, and almost a hundred times behind Donald Trump.

Ad transparency is critical for free and fair elections

Social media has changed the way elections are fought, with shadow campaigns on Facebook and giant advertising spends on Google and other online platforms becoming the norm. Looking back at the 2019 general elections in India, parties that won the elections (such as the BJP nationally, or the YSRCP in Andhra Pradesh) were also the parties that spent the most online.

Getting this information through the official tools is a time consuming process, and collating data is left to the people using Facebook’s library. What this means is that if you’re a reporter trying to gather information, a researcher or just a concerned citizen trying to learn about political advertising, then ad transparency tools are fairly opaque.

While Ad.watch cannot capture proxy spending by entities that do not register themselves as political parties but buy advertisements anyway, the tool is a welcome step towards greater transparency.

“It so happens that misinformation, polarising content or ads catering to you based on your personal data are ones that garner the most engagement, then that is potentially what is incentivised,” said Ranganathan. “Without transparency around how and why ads are delivered where they end up, we cannot understand how the new means of political advertising impacts our personal-political lives.”

This isn’t a problem that’s restricted to India either. As reported in theNew York Times, Facebook’s ad transparency tool doesn’t work as advertised. When Facebook launched the ad library, the goal was to make it easy for researchers and journalists to analyse advertisements. However, studies by Mozilla and the French government showed that the ad library is “effectively useless,” writes the NYT’s Matthew Rosenberg.

He writes:

Providing access to tens of millions of ads through an A.P.I. is not a simple proposition, but it is also not an engineering feat for a company like Facebook. With 2.4 billion users, Facebook routinely rolls out complicated new features and products at scales that few tech firms could hope to manage.

“This is not like a problem that technology hasn’t solved and they’re really trying to do their best,” said Laura Edelson, a researcher at New York University. “No, that’s not what is going on. These are fixable problems.”

Speaking to Politico, former Dutch politician Marietje Schaake said that nobody is doing enough to solve this issue because the problem is so vast. During the elections for the European Parliament in May, Politico noted, Facebook did not detail any steps taken to stop foreign meddling in elections despite accusations form the European Commission that Russia had launched a coordinated disinformation campaign.

Worse still, some tools to analyse Facebook ads already existed, but the company shut off access to them, noted Gizmodo:

Tools—functioning tools—to glean rich data about these ads already existed, built by Mozilla and ProPublica among others. Facebook made the intentional move to shut them out in January, claiming the code changes that locked out these tools were part of “a routine update and applied to ad blocking and ad scraping plug-ins, which can expose people’s information to bad actors in ways they did not expect.”

Writing to HuffPost India, PEN American Center, a nonprofit organisation headquartered in New York working on issues of free expression stated that the ad library has failed to serve its basic purpose.

“It’s disheartening to hear that Facebook’s Ad Library has been hobbled by technical limitations and errors. While we commended Facebook in March for establishing the database, we noted back then that the company needed to take additional steps to ensure the Ad Library was both comprehensive and effective,” said Summer Lopez, senior director of Free Expression Programs, PEN America.

“Unfortunately, it seems the Library has instead failed to serve even its basic purpose as a research tool. Facebook has become one of the most important social forums of the 21st century. This means that people deserve to know what ads are appearing on the platform, whom these ads are targeting, and where they appear.”

“Realising how inaccessible Facebook’s tools were, unaccountable Facebook was being, we decided to try and collect data in other countries,” said Beltran. “The amount of data we collected was huge, and we started to find ‘questionable’ (to say the least) behaviours and interesting stories emerging from our findings. We soon realised we needed to open these datasets to other journalists and society at large to investigate. ”

However, as with most researchers, Beltrán and Ranganathan quickly ran into roadblocks, as getting the data required to build the tool was proving difficult. “We collected the data through months of working our way through the Facebook Ad API for political advertisement,” he said. “First we had to map all the major political actors in the 34 countries, find their FB pages and whether they publish Ads.”

“Then we started collecting the data, this involved plenty of technical obstacles and we had to design creative ways to circumvent limitations such as rate limits and segregation of the FB API. The project involved a lot of manual collection going around the framework FB created, that strongly blocks efforts for systematic collection.”

If Dalit literature is gaining the imagination of the public today, much of the credit goes to one person, Annabhau Sathe, whom other Dalit writers have acknowledged as the ‘founder of Dalit literature’.

Dalit literature mostly emerged from the lived experiences—fight for survival, casteist abuse incurred, and revolt against inequality—of marginalised communities and craves for equality while rejecting age-old customs and exploitation. It gives voice to the voiceless and exploited groups in a casteist society. Powerful condemnation and brutal attack on caste and class differences are the main themes of Dalit literature, which mostly is inspired from Ambedkar’s ideology and philosophy.  

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Tukaram Bhaurao Sathe, popularly known as Annabhau Sathe, was born in the Dalit community (Matang) on 1 August 1920 in Wategaon village in the Sangli district of Maharashtra. Poverty and caste discrimination stopped  him from getting any formal education and forced his family to move to Mumbai in 1931, where he worked in various jobs such as porter, shoe polisher and daily wage labourer, before finally ending up as a mill worker. While working in the textile mill, he got attracted to the Communist ideology.

His 35 novels, 10 folk dramas, 23 short stories, 10 powadas (ballads), one play and a travelogue have been published in Marathi by the Maharashtra government in 1998 and many more remain unpublished. Brahminical control over art has ignored Dalit art and culture. American writer Eleanor Zelliot, in her book ′From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement’, notes that various art forms such as Tamasha (loknatya), Powada (Ballads), Lavani (combination of traditional song and dance), and Jalsa were unquestionably produced by low castes, but [kept] anonymous and never considered respectable.

He founded Lal Bavta Kalapathak (Red Flag Performing Troupe) in 1944 along with Shahir Amar Shaikh and Shahir D. N. Gavankar and became a full-time propagator of the communist party. 

Annabhau Sathe’s fascination with communism is evident from his travelogue, Maza Russiacha Pravas (My Journey to Russia), that he wrote on his visit to the Soviet Union in 1961 as representative of Indo-Soviet Cultural Society. It tries to show how anti-USSR propaganda is misleading. Before his travel to USSR, some of his works were already translated to Russian, Czech, Polish and German languages such as ‘Stalingradche Powada’ (Ballad of Stalingrad, throwing light on labor issues and dedicated to workers’ struggle), so he was well-received in the USSR. His travelogue is attributed as the first travelogue by a Dalit (Ambedkar had travelled to many countries and wrote letters but those were not published in the form of a book).  

Sathe’s writings contributed toward creating class consciousness among workers in society. In another ballad, ’Mumbaicha Girani Kamgar’ (Mill Worker of Mumbai) written in 1949, Sathe traces the miseries of factory workers and captures the disparities between the rich and poor in Mumbai.

 There are divine looking high-rise buildings on Malabar hills, Indrapuri

There is a colony of Kuber, rich people enjoy all material comforts. 

On the contrary, people living in Parel

Work hard day and night, eating whatever they get and sweat it out.

Coming from a poor background and experiencing the realities of life, he wrote on day-to-day realities, class/caste struggle and social interactions. His writing skills, sharp voice and mastery over various musical tools such as harmonium, tabla, drum, and bulbul made him a shining star on the streets.

He was a unique combination of Marxism and Ambedkarism, who analyzed class and caste struggles in his writings and wrote in praise to Lenin and Ambedkar. In the early 1950s, when then home minister Morarji Desai banned Tamasha (mainly because these were used by Communists party against Congress), he defied such oppression and changed Tamasha to Loknatya (public play) which achieved great fame.

His protagonists in the award-winning novel ‘Fakira’ (1959) not only reclaim their identity but also teach humanity and the value of forgiveness - a path towards much needed communal harmony in our times. Fakira (the titular character) depicts the reality of Dalits, living on the margins, and being exploited and suppressed not only by British rulers but upper castes. 

Fakira emerges as a Robin Hood while looting grain from British stores and distributing it to starving people. Morally upright and ready to sacrifice his life for principles, Fakria believed that it is an absurdity that people are starving while food is rotting in a rich man’s house. He would rather die fighting than dying meekly - ‘I desire to live and die like a lion’. This is what we still see in a society that while thousands of tonnes of food rot in ‘godowns’, people starve to death. On India’s independence, Annabhau Sathe said, ‘this freedom is fake, when people of the country are starving’. After winning the state award in 1961 for his ’Fakira’, he dedicated it to Ambedkar. Annabhau Sathe’s novels had women protagonists as well, such as in ‘Chitra’, characters who fought against British and challenged patriarchy.  

Annabhau inaugurated the first Dalit Sahitya Sammelan (Dalit Literary Conference) held on 2 March 1958 at the Bengali School auditorium, Mumbai. In his speech, he said these popular words, “the old belief that the Earth rests on the head of Sheshnag is untrue. It finds its balance on the palms of toiling Dalits and workers.” He also reminded Dalit writers of the responsibility that they have: “Dalit writers are entailed with the responsibility of liberating and shielding Dalits from the existing worldly and Hindu tortures as the long-standing conventional beliefs cannot be destroyed instantly”.

Annabhau’s poetry mirrors the anguish, helplessness and pitiful life of lower classes and lower castes in the society and gives a call to oppressed classes and Dalits ‘to break the chains of class and caste’, taking inspiration from Ambedkar. In his poem ’Take a hammer to change the world’, Annabhau calls for unity to fight against the tyranny and envisions a society without exploitation, almost on the similar lines as Saint Ravidas envisaged in his couplet ‘Begumpura’ almost 600 years ago.

Take a hammer to change the world 

So saying went Bhimrao!  

Why the elephant is stuck sitting 

In the mud of slavery? 

Shake your body and come out, 

Take a leap to the forefront! 

The rich have exploited us without end 

The priests have tortured us 

As if had eaten jewels 

And thieves had become great 

Sitting on the chariot of unity 

Let us go forward 

To break the chains of class and caste 

Hold to the name of Bhim!

(Annabhau Sathe Samagra Vagnmay, 1998)

Though he remains unacknowledged, Sathe’s work played a vital role in India’s labour as well as freedom movement, creating awareness about labour rights and issues.

He actively engaged in ‘Samyukt Maharashtra Movement’ (United Maharashtra Movement) and composed the much-quoted and compelling song ’Majhi Maina Gawawar Rahili′ (My Maina Got Left Behind in the Village). ‘Maina’, the beloved, became the symbol of the separation of Maharashtra from Mumbai, convincing masses to see Mumbai as an integral part of Maharashtra. 

My maina is left behind in the village

my heart yearns for her.

(Annabhau Sathe Samagra Vagnmay, 1998)

He also wrote, Mazee Mumbai Arhat Mumbai Konchi? (My Mumbai means whose Mumbai?) during Samyukt Maharashtra movement highlighting problems of migration and issues of unemployment.  

In the story Smashanatil Sone (Gold From The Grave), Annabhau Sathe describes the pain of a Dalit man, Bheema, who comes from a small village and, unable to find a job in Mumbai, starts digging graves at midnight to find gold buried with the corpses. Sorrow, anger, rejection, poverty, unemployment, rebelling to get freedom from the shackles of class and traditions and circumstances that lead people to do unconventional jobs are common imagery in Annabhau’s writings.

Present-day Communists ignore him due to his caste and Ambedkarites disregard him for his inclination towards Communism.  To ignore any of this side would be an injustice to his legacy. His poetic genius cannot be matched by anyone. There was no poet like him, there is none and there will be none like him. He was truly a legend beyond imagination.

While the Communist Party published works of most of its members, Annabhau Sathe’s work was hardly published (or published depending on the political agenda of the party) by them. Ignored by society and government, Annabhau Sathe died on 18 July 1968 in dire poverty and remains marginalized within mainstream literary opinion.

Pardeep Attri runs the Ambedkar Caravan, a website that runs anti-caste campaigns. 

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YouTube personality Grant Thompson, whose “The King of Random” channel entertained millions with life hacks and experiments, died in a paragliding crash at age 38, according to reports.

Thompson was killed in the accident Monday evening in Utah, his brother Mark confirmed to TMZ. The Canadian-born social media star was married and had four children, “Entertainment Tonight Canada” noted.

A statement on The King of Random Instagram announced his death on Tuesday “with great sadness,” and urged fans to perform an act of kindness to honor his legacy.

Thompson’s channel posted a video homage.

Thompson began his channel in 2010 and has amassed more than 2.4 billion views, according to YouTube.

Among his most viral entries was “How To Make LEGO Gummy Candy!” which has attracted more than 34 million views since it was posted in 2015.

“What is the guarantee nothing like this can happen to me?”

Police officials holding an awareness campaign at a school in Uttar Pradesh were stumped when a girl student asked pointed questions about their handling of the Unnao rape case.

Police officials, including the Additional Superintendent of Police (North) RS Gautam, were at the Anand Bhawan school in Barabanki to speak at a ‘Balika Suraksha Jaagruktaa Abhiyaan’, a safety awareness campaign for girls.

During the session with students, Gautam said the girls should remain alert, and if they felt something wrong had happened to them, immediately call up the toll-free number.

A class 11 student, identified by NDTV as Muniba Kidwai, asked whether they would get justice if the man involved was someone influential like the BJP MLA, accused in the Unnao case.

Kidwai brought up the car crash involving the Unnao rape survivor and her relatives and said, “Everyone knows it was no accident. The truck number plate was painted black...It is one thing to protest when an ordinary person is involved, but what happen when the person is someone powerful?”

Kidwai asked, “If the person against whom we are complaining comes to know about it, and if we meet an accident, what will happen?” 

“Will I get justice on registering a protest because we know a teen was raped by a BJP leader, and when she was fighting the legal battle, she met an accident. She is now battling for her life.”

On the police’s handling of the case, she said, “There was no action taken, and even if there was, nothing came of it. Now that girl is hospital in a critical condition.”

Kidwai further asked: “Will we get justice? What is the guarantee that I will remain safe? What is the guarantee nothing like this could happen to me?”

The question was met with big rounds of applause by her fellow students in the audience.

The police answered it with a vague “all complainants to toll-free number would be provided help”, according to PTI. 

On Sunday, the car in which the Unnao rape survivor, her family and lawyer were travelling was hit by an overspeeding truck in Rae Bareli, killing two members and leaving her and the advocate critically injured.

The CBI, which has taken over the investigation into Sunday’s truck-car collision, booked 10 people for murder, including BJP legislator Kuldeep Singh Sengar who is already in jail, charged with the rape of the Unnao woman when she was a minor in 2017.

The Uttar Pradesh Police on Monday filed a murder case against Sengar and nine others after the rape survivor’s family filed a complaint, alleging conspiracy behind the accident.

Cafe Coffee Day started brewing coffee in Bengaluru in the mid-90s, offering a cuppa to busy techies, youngsters and aspiring entrepreneurs who would throng the Brigade Road outlet brainstorming over the next big idea.

It was around this time that the city was fast emerging as the Silicon Valley of India, wooing tech companies from around the world with its great talent pool, investor-friendly policies and pleasant weather.

Of the thousands of entrepreneurial stories scripted in Karnataka, one of the most distinctive ones has been that of Cafe Coffee Day founder VG Siddhartha.

Born to a coffee grower, Siddhartha expanded his empire from a single outlet to a thriving network of 1,750 cafes across more than 200 cities, including international locations like Prague, Vienna and Kuala Lumpur.

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The son-in-law of former Karnataka chief minister SM Krishna, Siddhartha also recognised the opportunity in the Indian tech space early on.

Through Sivan Securities, he underwrote Infosys’ IPO in 1993 when the issue was under-subscribed. Infosys is now India’s second largest software services company.

Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani would later invest in Coffee Day Enterprises when it went public.

Later on, Siddhartha invested in more IT companies ― Ivega Corp and Kshema Technologies. In 1999, he bet on Bengaluru-based Mindtree ― an investment that he finally cashed out on earlier this year with over Rs 3,000 crore in his kitty amid a high-voltage takeover by L&T.

Siddhartha’s death leaves entrepreneurs in shock

Many would believe that Siddhartha’s journey has been truly inspirational. However, in a purported letter written by him to the CCD board, Siddhartha said he had failed as an entrepreneur. The letter indicated that he was anxious about pressure from banks, investors and the tax authorities.

Siddhartha had gone missing since Monday evening, and his body was found on Wednesday in the Netravati river in Dakshina Kannada district of Karnataka after 36 hours of intense search.

The entrepreneurial hub continues to be in a state of shock over the incident.

Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal tweeted: “I had known #VGSiddhartha personally and was always amazed at his energy and positivity” as he described Siddharta as an inspiring entrepreneur and investor.

GOQii founder Vishal Gondal expressed condolence, tweeting: “Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them. A lot can Happen Over Coffee. Keep Shining sir!”, while Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma said he was saddened beyond words.

Bengaluru has witnessed the highs and lows of many entrepreneurial journeys.

CCD’s original Brigade Road outlet has since shut down, edged out by swankier coffee shops that have mushroomed in the neighbourhood.

Siddhartha’s legacy will, however, remain an integral part of CCD outlets where aspiring startups even today make their pitches to potential investors ― in the hope that “a lot can happen over coffee”.

The IT hub in Karnataka

While Gujarat and Maharashtra were known for their brick-and-mortar industrial empires, Karnataka was developing into a hub of innovation-driven companies like biotech major Biocon.

The 1980s saw the likes of Infosys and other tech companies setting up base in Karnataka. In the years that followed, global digital giants like IBM, Cisco, Intel and Amazon made a beeline for India, choosing Bengaluru as their base camp.

As per estimates, Karnataka continues to be the centre of investor interest ― it attracted the maximum amount of investment proposals for the first three quarters of 2018, ahead of Gujarat and Maharashtra that aggressively position themselves as investment destinations.

According to available statistics, Karnataka received investment proposals worth Rs 88,493 crore in 2018 (till November), Rs 1,52,118 crore in 2017 and Rs 1,54,173 crore in 2016.

Karnataka has been on the forefront of India’s startup boom, hosting now household names like Flipkart and Ola. These new-age firms have gone on to become celebrated unicorns and helped India earn the distinction of being the world’s third largest startup ecosystem.

On Wednesday, Zomato and its founder Deepinder Goyal received much praise around the internet after refusing to give in when a customer tried to cancel his order because the delivery was being made by a Muslim delivery man. The restaurant aggregator cancelled the order, but charged a fee since the food was already on its way.

The customer complained, and after the company shut him down, Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal responded by saying that he was happy to lose the business of anyone who did not support India’s ideals of diversity.

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Now, it appears that a number of right-wingers have decided to take him up on the challenge. Although for much of Wednesday, the bigger news was that people were praising Zomato and Goyal, late in the day, a number of tweets suddenly started emerging with the hashtag ‘IStandWithAmit’ (the name of the person who complained).

The people sharing this hashtag have been advising one another to go to the Google Playstore and give Zomato’s app a 1-star rating for being “biased against Hindus”. Many of the same users have also been tweeting a screenshot of an older tweet where a Zomato customer complains about receiving Halal food and gets a refund (most of the tweets are similarly worded too. Nope, not suspicious at all).

Leaving aside the false equivalence of respecting a customer’s religious food preferences versus not allowing people from another community to touch your food (really, how does this customer know that the chef who made the food wasn’t a Muslim?), the trolling of Zomato has been picking up steam. If you go to the app’s Google Play page and sort the reviews by new, you’ll find hundreds of single-star reviews where users are vowing to teach India’s largest food-delivery app a lesson.

Curiously, we also came across a few that accused Zomato of causing caste divide, and spreading religious hate, which suggests that the reasons for the campaign might be unclear to some trolls.

It’s not all trolling though—some people have been leaving 5-star reviews on the Zomato page, praising the company for its stance on this issue, and some people have tweeted that they installed Zomato just to give it a 5-star rating. And while rival Swiggy doesn’t seem to have any thoughts on the matter yet, Uber Eats has also tweeted in support of Zomato, attracting some negative attention itself from trolls.

At the time of writing, the Zomato hashtag on Twitter seems to mostly have positive responses, and had around twice as many tweets as #IStandWithAmit.

This is not the first time right-wingers have tried to target apps on Google Play Store when they feel the company has done something deserving of outrage (usually, this involves taking a stand against hate). 

Earlier this year, when Surf Excel released an ad on Holi, it was strangely accused of promoting ‘love jihad’ and met with immediate outrage.

Unable to locate Surf Excel though, trolls ended up giving Microsoft Excel 1-star ratings instead. Even earlier, a similar mix-up took place, with Snapdeal getting 1-star ratings because people were outraging about Snapchat. Snapdeal has borne the brunt of this behaviour in another incident too—outraged by statements Aamir Khan made in 2015 that were seen as critical of the government, Snapdeal was targeted since Khan was its brand ambassador.

Swati Chaturvedi has described this incident in her 2016 book I Am A Troll—she writes that the move to give Snapdeal low ratings was not a spontaneous reaction, but was ordered by the BJP IT cell chief, who wanted to ‘force Snapdeal to dump Aamir’ — and soon after, his contract with the company was not renewed.

This fits in with a larger pattern of coordinated trolling online, via social media, and also apparently app stores. This has become the standard procedure over the last few years, and trends like TempleTerrorAttack come up to fan the flames on any given day.

What this actually means for companies is harder to understand. In recent times, Airtel and Ola have faced similar demands from customers, and not entertained them. Both companies are still alive and kicking, so the impact of such campaigns appears to be limited.