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It happens all of a sudden. One moment Anil Lakhotia is talking, the next his face is buried in his hands and his shoulders are shaking. He is lost in his own world of pain, a world that began when his young son was kidnapped and murdered in January 2009. The silence grows heavier before Anil tugs at a handkerchief and dabs at his eyes. "I used to try to scare him, to make him laugh," he says, struggling to find the words. He looks around, a grown man helpless, and the tears roll down his face. It seems a long time before he speaks again. "I can't imagine how scared he was when it happened to him and I was not there for him. Everyone wants to protect their child but we were helpless."
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Aarti is stumbling across the fields, tears streaming down her face. Every now and again, she turns to look back over her shoulder, terrified that she is being followed. The man had shown her a gun, threatened her. She knew if they caught her that her life would be in great danger. She started to cry again. It was the third time her mother had sold her to a stranger. All to keep her away from Sanjay, the boy she loved, the boy she had first seen on the rooftop of the neighbouring house in the city of Agra, home to the Taj Mahal, that most famous monument to love. The boy who was from the wrong caste, the boy her mother would never let her marry. Aarti reaches the road, hails a rickshaw, finds a phone and calls Sanjay. He calls the Love Commandos. |
Tiger poaching |
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Shehla Masood had a secret. She was about to break her silence, scuppering plans for a US$4.7 billion diamond mine, exposing a nest of corruption and rocking the political establishment to its core. Then she was murderered. |
Love commandos
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THE track ahead is blocked. For mile after mile, the trees on either side have been felled and turned into a natural roadblock. Deep pits have been dug to hinder any attempt to drive into the jungle. Someone here really does not want visitors. From the knee-high undergrowth comes the occasional hiss of a snake moving unseen. A little further on, there are two sentries, armed with bows and arrows. “Go forward and someone will meet you,” they say. Suddenly, the trees open on to a clearing and the most unexpected sight. Here, in the heart of the jungle, someone has built an imposing war memorial. And what makes it all the more extraordinary is that it does not honour the fallen of the Indian state: this memorial, the Hindi script proclaims, is to the martyrs of the Maoist Naxal insurgency. |
Mumbai recovers |
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WHEN he found the bull the tiger had killed, Mangya Moghiya set to work quickly. The wily old poacher knew the tiger would be back soon, and he wished to stack the odds in his favour. He began digging a series of holes and inserted the inverted T-shaped metal plates attached by chains to his leg traps before stamping the soil back down. Then he retired to the safety of a tree and waited. Mangya was 55, extraordinarily thin, bald and almost deaf, but he had a lifetime of experience killing tigers in Rajasthan’s Ranthambhore tiger reserve, one of 37 national parks set up by the Indian government to protect the critically endangered animals. He knew the animal would return. |
Rural drought |
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For his 50 million followers, Sai Baba is a profound spiritual leader and guru. But for hundreds of defectors he’s at best a cheat and a liar, and at worst a sexual deviant who preys on the young men who worship him. The vast, high-ceilinged hall is overflowing with people, thousands upon thousands of them, craning their necks, eager, attentive, oblivious to the heat of the Indian afternoon, oblivious to everything but the knowledge that they are about to get a glimpse of God. |
Uranium in Punjab |
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SWAPAN Haldar had no inkling the tiger was there until it pounced, clamping its jaws around his head and dragging him backwards into the thick mangrove forest. It was the last time anyone saw him alive. Haldar, 35, had set off the day before to fish for crabs, clambering onto a boat and pushing off from the small stone jetty in the village of Deulbari on the edge of the Sundarbans mangrove forest that spans India’s border with Bangladesh. “Don’t go,” his wife, Minati Haldar, had begged him. There seemed to be tigers everywhere and they were getting bolder and more aggressive. But Swapan would not be swayed. |
The real slumdogs |
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AMID a narrow warren of side streets close to the mosque that dominates the skyline on the edge of the mega-slum of Dharavi, in the heart of Mumbai, a young boy tilts his head back and stares up at the narrow strip of blue which is all that can be seen of the sky. Rickety warehouses crowd in from all sides, their high sheet-metal walls and overhanging asbestos roofs blocking out the sun, plunging the dirt streets below into a gloomy half-light, though it is nearly midday. Far, far above, the vapour trail of a plane is breaking up, fraying at the edges and drifting away. Ten-year-old Anwar Khan watches it for a while, thinking about the question he has been asked. Eventually he gives his answer: 'A pilot,' he says. 'I'd like to be a pilot. I'd love to know what it feels like to be in the air. I've never been in the air. I want to be closer to the sky.' |
After Slumdog |
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In Bhopal, India's City of Lakes, a severe water shortage has turned deadly as residents fight for survival, writes Gethin Chamberlain THE tanker lurches to a halt by the side of the kerb in the Pushpa Nagar slum, water sloshing from the open hatch on the back, and all hell breaks loose. Men scramble up to the hatch, pulling behind them green plastic tubes which they ram inside before passing them down to their wives or mothers waiting on the ground to suck hard on the other end to siphon the water off. At the back of the tanker, women and men jostle for position to shove their plastic containers under the tap; elbows are jammed into faces, the weakest shoved aside, tempers fray. |
High and dry in Bhopal |
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THERE is a small boy, standing up to his waist in the flood water, staring at the boats that have pulled up to the burial ground in the village of Bago Daro. I’m not sure at first what draws my eye to him. There are dozens of other people clustered on the shore and in the shallows, but there is something about him that seems to pull the eye back again and again. |
Pakistan floods
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'We want to work in Hollywood- but God still hasn't fulfilled our dreams' IT is raining, the water dripping from roofs of tin and plastic into the pale grey ooze of the drain running down the narrow lane between the shanties that make up Bombay’s Garib Nagar slum. Rubina Ali, Slumdog Millionaire starlet and precocious 10-year-old, is skipping from one concrete slab to another, trying to avoid the stinking puddles and the filth strewn all around. It is futile: the dirt is as much a part of the slum as are its 5,000 impoverished inhabitants. |
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Since they began emerging from the jungles of South Andaman Island 14 years ago, the Jarawa have become a tourist attraction, and a lucrative sideline for some of those assigned to protect the tribe. "Dance," the policeman says. The girls, naked from the waist up, jiggle for him. The camera, held by a tourist, pans around to another young woman, naked but for a bag of yellow grain held awkwardly in front of her groin.
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SKIPPING past his marker and making for the byline, Sunil Chhetri looked up and squared the ball into the penalty area. It was the 75th minute of the final of the AFC Challenge Cup and India were already two goals to the good. Chhetri, though, had an appetite for more. Continuing his run, he nudged the ball away from the fumbling hands of the Tajik goalkeeper, pulled back his right foot and lashed the ball past two defenders into the bottom right corner of the net. |
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THE POKER is glowing red hot, flames from a small pile of burning wood lick around it and leap into the air. Suklal Hembrom holds a leaf against his stomach and warily eyes the man sitting on the other side of the fire. Everyone in the village knows what should happen next. The child will scream loudly as the flesh begins to blister. Held down, he'll writhe in agony. Again and again, the poker will be jabbed at his belly. The more the child screams, the happier everyone will be, because the villagers of Mirgitand, in the East Singhbhum district of India's Jharkhand state, believe the distended stomachs of their famished children can be cured by branding them with red-hot pokers. |
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Do they know it's Christmas? RUBINA turns the card round and round in her hands, peering blankly at the Christmas trees on the front. Maybe they are foreign houses, she ventures after a while, giggling. It is clear she has no idea what the shapes are, though she stuck them to the card. In Sreepur village, Bangladesh, the Muslim women who make what are probably the UKs most ethical Christmas cards are certainly aware that Christmas is coming, but they have only the vaguest idea of the trappings that accompany it. |
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