Moved by the plight of a poor student, Dr M S Sunil reached out and provided him with a roof above his head. But this was just the beginning for the zoology professor from Pathanamthitta, a town in Kerala. Today, she has constructed 15 houses for the needy, transformed the lives of tribes from Sabarimala and started her own literacy campaign for the orphans, all by herself. Rediff.com's Arun Lakshman catches up with Pathanamthitta 'home maker'.
The Kerala government on Thursday informed the state high court that it does not propose to conduct any kind of probe into the controversy related to Makara Jyothi and Makara Vilakku, in the backdrop of the Sabarimala tragedy on January 14, which claimed 102 lives.The submission in this regard was made by the government pleader before the division bench comprising Justice Thothathil B Radhakrishnan and Justice P S Gopinath when three petitions.
In the backdrop of the Pulmedu tragedy, which claimed lives of 102 Sabarimala pilgrims, the Kerala high court on Thursday asked the Tranvacore Devaswom Board that manages the hill shrine of Lord Ayyappa, if 'Makara Jyoti' (celestial light) was man-made.
Stampedes at temples and other religious places in India have claimed nearly 900 lives in the past nine years, including those who died in Friday night's melee at Sabarimala shrine.
A local court has returned the chargesheet filed by police against Kannada actress Jayamala and two others on the ground that it was lacking required documents in the case relating to her claim that she once visited the Sabarimala temple and touched the idol of Lord Ayyappa, defying the custom of the hill temple.
Kerala Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan on Monday said the issue of lack of coordination among government departments, raised by the Kerala high court in context of the Sabarimala stampede, will be brought within the ambit of the judicial probe into the tragedy."All these issues will be included in the ambit of judicial probe and the guilty will not be spared," he said when reporters sought his reaction to the strong observations made by the division bench of the high court.
The court noted that several devotees visiting the Jagannath temple in Puri were being harassed.
According to custom, only believers of Hinduism are permitted entry at the temple, a major pilgrim centre and tourist attraction in the southern part of the country.
Banks in talks with temple trusts to push gold scheme
Seeking to downplay the debate over the Makara Jyothi of the Sabarimala temple, Travancore Devaswom Board said it was known to most believers that it was a man lit-fire, but there was a Hindu belief behind it. "It is known to everybody that Makara Jyothi is a fire lit up by men at Ponnabalamedu and TDB also recognises this',TDB president M Rajagoplan Nair said.
Interim president of the Congress party in Kerala M M Hassan has courted a controversy with his remarks that menstruation was impure and women should not enter temples during that period.
"People are committing sins and to get rid of them they are going to temples and offering money," the chief minister remarked, during his inaugural address at the two-day conference of district collectors in Vijayawada on Wednesday.
Unlike the regimes of Jayalalitha, Palaniswami and Karunanidhi, ministers are actually getting to make decisions on their own, with the unmentioned rider that they would be held responsible and accountable, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
'The judicial procedure was influenced which led to no convictions in the anti-Sikh riots of 1984'
Rajasekharan resigned from the post as he is keen on contesting the upcoming Lok Sabha polls on a Bharatiya Janata Party ticket from Kerala.
Taking note of the higher turnout of 2.5 million for the ritual in March 2009, Guinness upgraded the record recently as a religious event that draws the largest gathering of women, temple sources said.
In Jaipur, the combination of lopinavir and ritonavir, both second-line HIV drugs, was administered was administered on an elderly Italian couple undergoing treatment for Covid-19 at the SMS Hospital.
Pongala falls on the penultimate day of the 10-day festival at Attukal temple. Boiling earthen pots spread around 6 km around the city premises headlined the festive spirit. All roads in Thiruvananthapuram led to the Attukal temple on Tuesday with celebrities conducting the rituals shoulder to shoulder with the common women.
The BJP had replaced Raj from the North West Delhi Lok Sabha constituency with Punjabi Sufi singer Hans Raj Hans.
Justice Ranjan Gogoi, who will demit office as the Chief Justice of India in a week's time, has etched his name in the annals of history by giving finality to one of the most politically and religiously sensitive cases, the Ayodhya land dispute, which dates back to even before the Supreme Court came into existence in 1950.
The people of the southern part of the country could see a greater part of the partial solar eclipse because of the geometry of the eclipse path.
In a no-holds-barred interview, 20-year-old Nikita Azad discusses the backlash she has faced after #HappytoBleed, the campaign she launched to protest a derogatory statement made by the chief of the Sabarimala Devasom Board.
'On the one hand it will appeal to pan-Hindu sentiment and on the other opposition to it could well strengthen support for the BJP among Hindu voters.'
Justice Gogoi's tenure as judge and as CJI was marked by some controversies and personal allegations but that never came in his way of his judicial work that was reflected in the last few days when benches headed by him delivered some path-breaking judgments.
As soon as the Zero Hour commenced at noon, AIADMK and TDP members trooped in the Well, raising slogans and carrying banners demanding stalling of a dam on river Cauvery and special state status to Andhra Pradesh respectively.
Verdicts paving the way for construction of a Ram Temple at Ayodhya and India's multi-billion dollar Rafale fighter jet deal with France were 2019's landmark imprints of the Supreme Court, which also found itself at the centre of a controversy with then Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi being accused of sexual harassment before getting the clean chit.
After the controversy surrounding Kannada actress Jayamala's entry into the Sabarimala temple, a new row has been kicked up by Malayalam actress Meera Jasmine, a Christian, offering prayers at Raja Rajeshwara temple at Taliparamba near Kannur.
The board will decide future action in a meeting soon.
Barring entry to non-Hindu devotees should be construed as 'contempt on Hindu religion' and anyone who is ready to follow the temple traditions should be allowed to worship, Bhattathiripad said.
The temple board is likely to seek the co-operation of the state government as its own investigative wing had limitations in conducting the probe in a sensitive matter involving inter-state ramifications.
The situation is unlike any other legislation/ordinance that governments at the Centre and states had passed on earlier occasions after the higher judiciary had held certain laws, orders or decisions ultra vires of the Constitution, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
The special team would decide on arresting the accused only after completing the questioning.
"We direct the government to either bring in a law or an ordinance (for the construction of the Ram temple). There will be no compromise on this," Ramanandacharya Hansdevacharya, the patron of the ABSS, said in his concluding remarks at the conclave.
After the Kerala government declared the coronavirus outbreak as a 'state calamity', as the three positive cases were detected from Thrissur, Alapuzha and Kasaragod, tourism minister Kadakampally Surendran admitted that the sector had suffered a hit. The sector had aggressively launched promotional advertisements in the domestic and international markets after the floods to revive the sector. However, all the efforts took a beating, with mass cancellations of hotel bookings after the outbreak of the infection in the state was reported.
The Thiruvananthapuram-bound train will leave Chennai on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesday and Fridays.
At his farewell function, CJI Dipak Misra said that tears of a poor man is equal to tears of a rich man.
'He was tortured in police custody.' '"Do you not have any rape cases to write about in Kerala?" "Why is it that a Muslim from Kerala has so much sympathy for a Dalit woman in UP?" "Why did Rahul Gandhi visit your wife?"' 'These were the kind of questions the UP police asked him.'
The new TTD chairman's Venkateswara pendant seems like a simple yet effective tool to silence his critics and to unburden the baggage of his family's religion.
He said the wait for the court's verdict on the long-pending issue has been too long.
© 2026 Rediff.com - Advertise with us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy - Sitemap - Feedback - About us - Terms of use - Grievances