Hail Queen Noorjahan
Name the king of fruits after a Mughal beauty and dig into royalty fit for an emperor. Her Fruitiness is the sweet and well turned Noorjahan mango—an exclusive from Madhya Pradesh’s Katthiwada region. It is fetching Rs 500 to Rs 1,000 apiece this season following a good yield because of flattering weather. But not quite the record it set in 2019 when each Noorjahan weighed around 2.75 kg and wore a price tag of Rs 1,200. The Noorjahan ripens towards the beginning of June; it can grow up to a foot long and its kernels weigh around 200 grams. Like the Mughal empress who came from Persia via Kabul, this mango breed is said to be of Afghan origin and cultivated solely in Katthiwada of Alirajpur district along the Gujarat border.
A Shot Worth In Gold
When a Covid-hit world is pulling up its sleeves for a shot in the arm, villagers in a flood-prone Bihar district are reluctant to take the vaccine for a variety of reasons, one of them is the false belief that it is more dangerous than the virus. Trying to talk them out of this fear is a snail-pace process, and officials don’t have enough time because the monsoon is within pouring distance and reaching those places in the rain is a tricky exercise. And so, the Sheohar district administration laid out the most effective plan—the fastest way to get people vaccinated. Those who take the jab will be eligible for a raffle each week, and the prizes are gold coins and home appliances such as refrigerators, desert coolers, microwaves etc.
Mine-Sniffing Rat Retires
After five years of sniffing out land mines and unexploded ordnance in Cambodia, Magawa is retiring. The African giant pouched rat has been the most successful rodent trained and overseen by a Belgian nonprofit, APOPO, to find land mines and alert its human handlers so the explosives can be safely removed. Magawa has cleared more than 141,000 sq m of land, the equivalent of some 20 soccer fields, sniffing out 71 land mines. APOPO decided that African giant pouched rats were best suited to land mine clearance as their size allows them to walk across mine fields without triggering the explosives.
A Job Well Done
A government employee died in 2019 and his daughter and daughter-in-law petitioned the administration separately that she be given the job on compassionate grounds. The two claimants are Gomathi, daughter of Arumugham, a village assistant who died in harness, and Sangeetha, her brother’s wife. Gomathi has been living with her parents with her two children after her husband deserted her. Sangeetha lost her husband in an accident a few months after her father-in-law’s death. She is struggling to fend for herself and her child. After Arumugham died, Gomathi got her mother’s consent for her father’s job, but Sangeetha too staked her claim. After the Madras High Court asked both women to reach an amicable agreement, Gomathi agreed to pay 30 per cent of her pay to Sangeetha each month and another Rs 20,000 a year for her child’s education. Case solved.
Amazon Crosses Bikini Line
Anyone can sell anything on Amazon. Not really. The e-commerce giant had to take a piece of merchandise off its inventory in the lingerie section because it was—for goodness sake—too provocative. The offending product on sale in Canada was a bikini in the yellow-and-red colours of Karnataka’s unofficial flag with the state’s Gandaberunda emblem, a two-headed mythological bird, in the middle. Kannadigas have been salty lately and rightfully so. Before Amazon’s bikini fail, tech giant Google showed Kannada as India’s “ugliest language” as a search result. The search engine apologised.
Brevis
Illustrations: Saahil, Text curated by Alka Gupta
