Mixed Shots

Airport To Hotel In 74 Days

It could have been like the Tom Hanks movie The Terminal. Or worse, Mehran Nassiri, the Iranian-origin refugee who lived in a Paris airport from 1988 to 2006. But Ghanaian footballer Randy Juan Muller’s residence at the Mumbai airport ended after a relatively short stint—74 days—thanks to the timely intervention of the Sena youth wing. Rudy was scheduled to fly home on a Kenya Airways flight, but international flights were suddenly suspended due to the pandemic. He bided time in the airport’s fancy artificial garden and bought food from the stalls there. Airport staff helped him by recharging his phone and giving him WiFi access. A post on Twitter bought the man’s plight to the attention of Aaditya Thackeray, who shifted him to a local hotel, mercifully avoiding a repeat of Mehran’s fate.

Fire The Firer

The Maharashtra State Reserve Police Force should be worried. One of its jawans is so off the mark that during target practice, a bullet he fired crossed a “mountain range” (sic) and wounded a woman in Sitepaar village, Gondia district. The force has now instituted a probe team to find out how the bullet travelled “accidentally” for 3 km!

Beep Beep? Pee Pee

after 25 years as a surgeon, Walliul Islam thought he had seen it all—until he saw a charging cord in a 30-year-old man’s bladder at a private hospital in Guwahati. The man came to him complaining of stomach ache after eating a headphone cable “by mistake”. A surgery found nothing in his gastrointestinal tract, but an X-ray found a charging cord in his bladder. For those who were wondering how the cable entered his urinary tract, the doctor unequivocally spelled out the anatomical nitty-gritty in a Facebook post with a heartening conclusion: “Everything is possible on earth.” He also questioned the man’s mental health, though it seems more a case of misdirected pleasure-seeking.

Worship Goes Viral

shitAla Mata, that divine healer of fevers, sores and diseases, might lately see a drop in devotees thronging her temples for a cure. For there’s a new goddess in town—Corona Devi. To end the pandemic, women in several districts of Bihar are making offerings to the Devi at waterbodies—rituals generally associated with the Chhatth festival and sun god. Quite apt, we think, considering the sun has a corona too. A woman at Sarveshwarnath Temple in Brahmapura, Muzaffarpur, says she realised that the disease could only be eradicated with offerings of laddoos, sesame seeds and flowers after “watching a video”. Another learnt of it in a dream. It’s too early to say what the Devi thinks of her followers’ oblations presented with adequate social distancing, but COVID-19 cases have been rising steadily in Bihar. 

The practical Maths Teacher

I f there is one thing India doesn’t lack, it’s talent. What that talent might be used for is another matter altogether. Take Anamika of Mainpuri, Uttar Pradesh. The enterprising pedagogue allegedly “worked” simultaneously in 25 schools in Baghpat, Aligarh, and Saharanpur among others, earning a neat sum of over Rs 1 crore in 13 months. This despite a digital database and “real-time attendance monitoring” in UP schools. All the more easier, we guess, with a name like Anamika, which means unnameable. Too bad. We won’t be able to call her for a webinar to find out the details behind her stupendous heist because she who must not be named has gone incommunicado.

Brevis

Illustrations: Saahil; Text by Syed Saad Ahmed, Alka Gupta