RIVANCH

In the land of Chandra and Bhaga rivers, only the tough survive. Flanked by snow-peaked mountains, glaciers and little top soil, the region can really get you high, like 11,000 ft and above. Temperatures range from sub-zero to 25°C, with heavy snowfall making life very difficult here. Yet, a plant with green leaves, thorns and succulent orangish berries — sea buckthorn (SBT) — beats the odds. It is a miracle plant filled with benefits from regulating blood pressure to boosting immunity, and perhaps that’s why it has even caught the fancy of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The problem is, it’s not available to most of us. So, I took a trip to Lahaul valley, which is home to two sub-species of sea buckthorn berry — hippophae rhamnoides and hippophae salicifolia — to find out more about them. After all, the Modi government has designated sea buckthorn as “one-district, one-crop” for the Lahaul region. But why sea buckthorn? Lahaul areas are native habitat for this nitrogen-fixing shrub. I

On the 31st death anniversary of former Congress prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, leaders across the party took to Twitter to pay their tribute to him. As is the tradition nowadays, many shared their tribute in the form of a creative or infographics, including Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury. But no sooner had the creative appeared on his Twitter handle than it was taken down and replaced by another creative. What happened When the Congress leader first shared the creative, it carried the infamous lines spoken by Rajiv Gandhi in the wake of the Sikh pogrom that was followed by the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 - “when a big tree falls, the ground shakes”. Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury's now-deleted tweet; he had posted this earlier today. pic.twitter.com/EF77RlskQE — ANI (@ANI) May 21, 2022 On 31 October, 1984, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards. In the aftermath of the assassination, many places including Delhi saw attacks on Sikhs and thei

The Kerala Lottery Department will release the results for the Karunya KR 550 draw at 3 pm today, 21 May. The Karunya KR 550 lottery results will be announced on the department's official website . Winners need to note that the detailed results of the Karunya KR 550 lottery shall be available from 4 pm onwards. For the convenience of the ticket holders, the Karunya KR 550 lottery results will also be published in the Kerala Government Gazette. The Karunya lottery draw will be held at Gorky Bhavan in Thiruvananthapuram, near Bakery Junction. The Karunya KR 550 first prize winner will take home a sum of Rs 80 lakh. The second and the third prize winners will receive an amount of Rs 5 lakh and Rs 1 lakh, respectively. Individuals should take a note that Kerala lottery tax deduction of 30 per cent and an agent lottery commission of 10 per cent is applicable on the amount of money won. Here is how to claim the Karunya KR 550 prize money: Winners of the lottery draw should match the

Congress interim president Sonia Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi paid homage to former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi on his 31st death anniversary at Vir Bhumi in the national capital on Saturday. कांग्रेस अध्यक्ष श्रीमती सोनिया गांधी जी, महासचिव श्रीमती @priyankagandhi जी व वरिष्ठ कांग्रेस नेताओं ने पूर्व प्रधानमंत्री राजीव गांधी जी की पुण्यतिथि पर समाधि स्थल वीरभूमि पहुंच कर उन्हें श्रद्धांजलि अर्पित की। राष्ट्र निर्माण में राजीव गांधी जी का योगदान अविस्मरणीय है। pic.twitter.com/Go408CWKzM — Congress (@INCIndia) May 21, 2022 Congress leaders P Chidambaram and Sachin Pilot also paid tribute to the former prime minister at Vir Bhumi. Taking to Twitter, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Saturday said his father was a visionary leader whose policies helped shape modern India. My father was a visionary leader whose policies helped shape modern India. He was a compassionate & kind man, and a wonderful father to me and Priyanka, who taught us the value of forgiveness and empathy. I

Former Punjab Congress chief Navjot Singh Sidhu would have been disqualified from contesting elections for six years if the Supreme Court imposed two years or more jail term on him, a legal expert said. Soon after the Supreme Court imposed a one-year jail term on him in a 1988 road rage case, legal expert and former Lok Sabha secretary general P D T Achary told PTI “If the sentence was two years or more, then he would have been disqualified from contesting elections for six years." He made the observation by citing Section 8 of the Representation of the People Act-1951 which deals with disqualification. A bench of Justices A M Khanwilkar and S K Kaul on Thursday allowed the review plea filed by the victim’s family on the issue of the sentence awarded to Sidhu. Though the apex court had in May 2018 held Sidhu guilty of the offence of “voluntarily causing hurt" to a 65-year-old man in the case, it spared him a jail term and imposed a fine of Rs 1,000. “…we feel there is an

Congress leader Navjot Singh Sidhu surrendered before a court in Patiala on 20 May and will be serving his one-year sentence in the central jail. The Supreme Court on Thursday pronounced the sentence in a 1988 road rage death case. In Patiala prison, Sidhu will not be earning wages for three months before he is classified as unskilled, semi-skilled or skilled. The 58-year-old former Punjab Congress chief surrendered shortly after 4 pm on Friday, and was taken for a mandatory medical examination to Mata Kaushalya Hospital. After the check-up, he was taken to the jail in a police jeep. Patiala is the native town of the former India cricketer. Here’s what a day in Sidhu’s life may look like in prison: The day in jail starts at 5.30 am At 7 am, biscuits or black chickpeas are served with tea A brunch of six chapatis, dal or vegetables will be served at 8.30 am following which the inmates go to work Inmates finish their work, allotted as per category, at 5.30 pm Prisoners eat their

A purported video showing Himachal Pradesh Assembly deputy speaker Hans Raj slapping a school student in Chamba district has surfaced on social media. चम्बा के रैला स्कूल में हिमाचल विधानसभा के उपाध्यक्ष हंसराज ने छात्र को जड़ दिया थप्पड़। #hpgovt pic.twitter.com/tAaJuJu9dP — Virender Thakur (@VirenderKthakur) May 20, 2022 However, the child's father, Riaz Mohammad, downplayed the incident that took place on Thursday, saying the deputy speaker's hand had brushed against his son while he was trying to make him understand something. In the clip, Hans Raj can be seen talking to the students of a government school in his assembly segment Churah when one of them started laughing. The deputy speaker was then seen slapping the boy. Congress MLA Vikramaditya Singh termed the incident "unfortunate and unacceptable". The student's father, in a video shared on Facebook, said Hans Raj had "just touched" his son and some mischievous elements shot a video a

Anti-Terrorism Day is marked every year on 21 May to promote national harmony and unity among the Indian citizens of all caste and creeds. The foremost objective of observing this particular day is to suckle the youth from terrorism and the cult of violence by highlighting the suffering of common people caused by terrorism. The day is marked on the death anniversary of the former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi who was killed in a terrorist attack in 1991. This year, the nation will observe Rajiv Gandhi’s 31st death anniversary. History of Anti-Terrorism Day: It was on this day in the year 1991, the seventh Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by the LTTE terrorists while attending an election campaign for the Congress Party at Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu. The shocking attack was carried out by a woman who was a suicide bomber and she was associated with a terrorist organisation named Liberation of Tamil Tiger Eelam (LTTE). On that dark day, the explosion also cla

The first case of the Omicron BA.4 variant in India has been reported from Hyderabad through India’s COVID-19 genomic surveillance programme on Thursday. According to scientists associated with the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Consortium on Genomics (INSACOG) said that from India, details of a BA.4 sub-variant were entered on GISAID, a global science initiative that provides open access to genomic data of influenza viruses and the coronavirus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic , on 9 May, reported Moneycontrol . The first case of BA.4 subvariant of Omicron has been detected in India in Hyderabad through India’s COVID-19 genomic surveillance programme. Read more 👇 https://t.co/aPphv7ndJD #Omicron #BA4 #COVID19 #Hyderabad — Moneycontrol (@moneycontrolcom) May 19, 2022 Random cases of BA.4 may have also been detected in other cities in India over the last few days, said a scientist with the Indian Council. What is the BA.4 variant? The BA.4 is a sub-variant of Omicron and has bee

India recorded 2,259 new cases of COVID-19 and 20 deaths in the last 24 hours, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) informed on Friday morning. The fresh infections reported were 4.44 per cent lower than 2,582 cases logged on Thursday. With the new cases reported on Friday, the total tally of COVID-19 cases in India has now risen to 4,31,31,822 (4 crore 31 lakh 31 thousand 8 hundred and 22). The daily COVID-19 positivity rate was at 0.50 per cent on Friday, while the weekly positivity rate was at 0.53 per cent. The country now has 15,044 active cases of COVID-19. There was a decrease of 375 cases in the active COVID-19 caseload in a span of 24 hours. The active cases comprise 0.03 per cent of the total infections, the health ministry informed. So far, 5,24,323 (5 lakh 24 thousand 3 hundred and 23) people have died of COVID-19 in India. In the last 24 hours, 2,614 patients got recuperated from COVID-19, increasing total coronavirus recoveries in the country to 4,25,92

On 9 September 1991, during the debate over the Places of Worship (Special Provision) Bill tabled in the Lok Sabha, BJP leader Uma Bharti posed an important question: Can we alter historical facts through manipulation of dates? Are we scared to face history? Uma Bharti was opposing the Places of Worship (Special Provision) Bill, which sought to prohibit conversion of any place of worship and to provide for the maintenance of the religious character of any place of worship as it existed on 15 August 1947. In course of her speech, she referred to the Gyanvapi mosque that was built in 1669 by Aurangzeb after demolishing the Vishweshwar temple, a fact that has been documented in the book,  History of Benares: From the Earliest Times Down to 1937 , authored by AS Altekar’ who was the head of the Department of the Ancient Indian History and Culture at Banaras Hindu University (BHU). Three decades later, in April last year, the Gyanvapi mosque was subjected to historical and archaeological

Senior Samajwadi Party leader Azam Khan was released from the Sitapur jail in Uttar Pradesh on Friday morning, a day after the Supreme Court granted him interim bail in an alleged cheating case. स्वागत एवं शुभकामनाएं। pic.twitter.com/7kcGQiqzDi — Shivpal Singh Yadav (@shivpalsinghyad) May 20, 2022 While his family expressed happiness on getting him back, they were joined by Pragatisheel Samajwadi Party Lohia Chief Shivpal Yadav, who has been maintaining a steady ‘support’ to Khan said to have been deserted by his own party leadership, especially Shivpal’s nephew Akhilesh Yadav. Azam Khan’s son, Abdullah Azam tweeted, “Inshallah tomorrow (May 20) with the first ray of sun in the morning my father will come out of jail like a new sun. The rays of this new dawn will remove the darkness of all oppression.” इंशाल्लाह कल 20.05.2022 को सुबह सूरज की पहली किरण के साथ मेरे वालिद इंशाल्लाह एक नए सूरज की तरह जेल से बाहर आएंगे और इस नई सुबह की किरणे तमाम जुल्मतों के अंधेरों को मिटा देंगी

The word  linga  means “the form”. We are calling it “the form” because when the un-manifest began to manifest itself, or in other words when creation began to happen, the first form that it took was that of an ellipsoid. A  perfect ellipsoid  is what we call as a  linga . Creation always started as an  ellipsoid or a  linga , and then became many things. And we know from our experience that if you go into deep states of meditativeness, before a point of absolute dissolution comes, once again the energy takes the form of an ellipsoid or a  linga . So, the first form is  linga  and the final form is  linga . The in-between space is creation and what is beyond is Shiva. The word “Shiva” literally means “that which is not”. That means nothing. Nothing is a very negative word. You would understand it better if you put a hyphen in between: no-thing. That which is, is physical manifestation. “That which is not” is that which is beyond the physical. In India, there are thousands of temples w

While most parts of north India are reeling from heatwave conditions , Karnataka in the south has been experiencing heavy rain and flooding, causing temperatures to fall to surprising lows. The state has been witnessing heavy rains since last week and the heavy downpour has left residents drenched and desperate. Normal life in the state has been thrown out of gear, as heavy rain continued to wreak havoc in various parts of Karnataka, including Bengaluru for the third day on Thursday. News agency PTI reported that families living in low-lying areas struggled to remove rain water that gushed into their houses. There was waterlogging in many parts of Bengaluru. Several roads in the city were damaged. The city witnessed traffic snarls at many places. Earlier, Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai had announced a compensation of Rs 25,000 to families living in houses that were flooded. Let's dig into why the state is seeing such torrential rain in May and its impact on the residents. Wh