MUMBAI: The state has proposed an elaborate security arrangement for the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj memorial in the Arabian Sea off Mumbai, including a system that will keep it invisible on radars, bunkers and an independent security unit, including the National Security Guard (NSG).   The measures are aimed at deflecting or countering terrorist attacks, like 26/11 when the terrorists sailed into the city, at the memorial isle that the government […]

Mumbai may pace to a frenetic beat, but the metropolis has hidden corners where life moves more leisurely. If you want to see what life was like a few decades ago, I’d suggest a visit to Mumbai’s 92-year-old Bombay Development Directorate’s chawls. Families manage in tiny rooms and neighbours, unlike what happens in much of Mumbai, are very much a part of each other’s lives. The chawls’s residents still share […]

The 26/11 Mumbai attacks happened as a result of one of the “most devastating near-misses in the history of spycraft” in which the US, British and Indian spy agencies failed to pull together all the strands gathered by their high-tech surveillance to thwart the assault on India’s financial capital, according to an investigative report said. A detailed report by the New York Times, ProPublica and the PBS series ‘Frontline’ titled […]

Doctors in India have extracted 232 teeth from the mouth of a 17-year-old boy in a seven-hour operation. Ashik Gavai was brought in with a swelling in his right jaw, Dr Sunanda Dhiware, head of Mumbai’s JJ Hospital’s dental department, told the BBC. The teenager had been suffering for 18 months and travelled to the city from his village after local doctors failed to identify the cause of the problem. […]

Riding a sleek black Harley-Davidson motorbike and wearing a smart jacket and biking gloves, 27-year-old Arjun Bafna looks every bit the wealthy young man that he is. He comes from a family that owns one of India’s oldest and biggest automobile dealerships. He has taken the business one step forward though. Arjun runs Seven Islands Harley-Davidson, the only Harley-Davidson franchise in Mumbai. “I love automobiles, it’s my passion, because I’ve […]

Sahara investor Surendra Kumar Jaiswal, at his shoe-buckle workshop in Baiganwadi slum in central Mumbai. In the narrow lanes of Baiganwadi, a slum in central Mumbai, it’s hard to spot the local office of India’s multi-billion-dollar Sahara Group, which owns hotels in New York and London, and a Formula 1 racing team. Sahara’s one-room Baiganwadi office, just a few kilometers from a municipal garbage dump, is located on top of […]

Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar on Wednesday asked Raj Thackeray-led Maharashtra Navnirman Sena to mend ways and desist from the smear campaign against the Nationalist Congress Parry or face a “befitting reply”. “Some people are trying to defame the NCP. If they try to attack us by doing nautakni(theatrics), we are ready to give a befitting reply. We have done good developmental work and that is why people are electing […]

Indian Mujahideen operatives — Tabrez and Waqas — involved in the 13/7 Mumbai bombings could be behind the Hyderabad blasts as well, says NIA. Vicky Nanjappa reports Preliminary investigations by the National Investigation Agency into Thursday’s Hyderabad blasts suggest that the same module that carried out the 13/7 Mumbai blasts is behind the attack. The NIA has said that two operatives — Tabrez and Waqas — who were part of […]