Looking for a little travel inspiration? Pinterest has a few suggestions. The website recently released its list of 20 most pinned places of all time, which takes readers through almost every continent. Well-known tourist spots such as New York City and Positano, Italy, and namibia hunting safaris made the list, along with more unfamiliar destinations including Lake Todos los Santos in southern Chile and Somoto Canyon in Nicaragua. “A lot of […]

After smoggy, sooty Delhi, the crisp air at Bhutan’s Paro airport is unmistakable and, descending after a three-hour flight, the first instinctive reaction is to breathe in a lung-full of the clean, soft and scented air. A light drizzle only adds to the magical feeling of landing in the Land of the Thunder Dragon. The airport looks small – maybe a few of them could easily fit into Delhi’s T3 […]

1. With Diwali approaching near, the demand for owls, red sand boa and turtles with 20 nails has increased once again as people are trying to secure these animals for use in Tantrik rituals said to bring great fortune to the person conducting the rituals. 2. Though the Forest Department officers claim to have declared a red-alert in the State, the strike by forest guards and subordinate forest staff has […]

Deepawali or Diwali is certainly the biggest and the brightest of all Hindu festivals. It’s the festival of lights (deep = light and avali = a row i.e., a row of lights) that’s marked by four days of celebration, which literally illumines the country with its brilliance, and dazzles all with its joy. This year Diwali falls on Wednesday, November 11, 2015. Each of the four days in the festival of Diwali […]

A mouse has been caught transporting drugs between cells in a Brazilian Prison. Officers at Barra da Grota prison in Araguaina spotted the tiny creature running through a prison corridor with bags of drugs tied to a hook on its tail. Prison director Gran Carlos Gomes said police are reviewing CCTV footage in an effort to discover who trained the mouse, according to The Daily Star. He said: “They attached […]

Harjit Sajjan, a former police officer and veteran of three military deployments to Afghanistan, was named Canada’s new minister of defense on Wednesday, bringing first-hand expertise to one of the country’s top cabinet positions. Sajjan will oversee an anticipated change in Canada’s military involvement in the battle against militants in Syria and Iraq. Newly sworn-in Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has already said he wants to end Canada’s air strikes […]

There were no tracks that we could see and no landmarks in the distance to which he was pointing the vehicle to. We were getting deep into the desert and there was not a soul between us and the horizon. The road disappeared and we were surrounded by old, craggy red rocks, the kind I suppose you would expect to see on, well, Mars. Sandeep Sreedharan shares his wonderful visit […]

Toronto: Four years after Punjabi became Canada’s third most common language, it has now attained the same status in the country’s new Parliament after English and French following the election of 20 Punjabi-speaking candidates to the House of Commons. Twenty-three Member of Parliaments of South Asian-origin were elected to the House of Commons, Parliament of Canada on October 19 parliamentary elections. Three of them, Chandra Arya – born and raised […]

India has moved up one position to become the world’s seventh most-valued “nation brand”, with an increase of 32 percent in its brand value to $2.1 billion – the highest among all the top 20 nations on the list. As per a report on world’s most valuable nation brands by global consultants Brand Finance, India is sole among the Brics nations to have witnessed an increase in its brand value, […]

Hard to believe that some of these surreal places do exist. The vast dusty reddish stretches in Ridley Scott’s The Martian looked so forlorn and out-of-the-world that for a while we thought we actually landed on the red hot planet with a heavy thud just like Mark Watney. But as we came to senses, we realised it was very much our own soil. The landscape of Wadi Rum in South […]