Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. More than 170,000 Indians were stranded there. Buses took them through Basra and Baghdad to Amman in Jordan. From there, Air India and Indian Airlines flew them to Bombay on 488 flights. Air India entered the Guinness Book of World Records for the most people evacuated by a civil airliner.
Indians based in Kuwait helped organize it. Among them was Mathunny Mathews, called Toyota Sunny. The 2016 film Airlift, starring Akshay Kumar, drew on their work.
In December 2015, floods hit Chennai. Twitter helped with the rescue and relief work. The actor Siddharth and the radio host RJ Balaji collected food and volunteers. “We have around 2,000 odd food packets as of now and we are segregating them as we get them,” Siddharth said.
A team of economists followed 822 people in Delhi who set out to get a driver’s license. “More than 70% of the participants in our study who obtained a license hired an agent.” Seventy percent of the participants reported getting a permanent license without taking the mandatory practical test at the Regional Transport Office.
The study, by Marianne Bertrand, Simeon Djankov, Rema Hanna and Sendhil Mullainathan, was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
In Khosla Ka Ghosla (2006), directed by Dibakar Banerjee, Kamal Khosla spends his savings on a plot of land in South Delhi. A builder, Khurana, has it taken over by squatters. The family appeals to the police, lawyers, ministers and social workers, and gets nowhere.
Friends then plan a con. A theater group plays an industrialist from Dubai with land to sell. Khurana pays an advance in cash, and the Khoslas use his money to pay him off.
In 2020, Transparency International published its Global Corruption Barometer for Asia. India had the highest rate of citizens using personal connections to get public services, 46 percent. It also had the highest bribery rate, 39 percent.
In March 2020, during the Covid-19 lockdown, Aslam Chaudhury ran a kitchen for hungry workers from the mosque in Kalu Sarai, Delhi. It made 600 to 700 food packets a day. He needed cooking vessels. “The langar is shut, so I asked them if I could borrow their vessels,” he told The Caravan. The Gurdwara Shri Singh Sabha in the same village lent the vessels and sent two cooks.
On January 22, 2024, the idol of Ram Lalla was consecrated in the new temple at Ayodhya. The auspicious moment lasted 84 seconds, from 12:29:08 to 12:30:32. Pandit Ganeshwar Shastri Dravid of Kashi had fixed it.
Some parents planned births for the same day. At one hospital in Surat, doctors performed more than 22 cesarean deliveries, “all mothers choosing this date for their babies’ arrival.”
On Diwali, India’s stock exchanges hold a one-hour session called Muhurat trading. It marks the start of the new Samvat year. On October 21, 2025, the NSE and the BSE opened the session at 1:45 p.m. for the start of Samvat 2082.
The Confederation of All India Traders expected about 48 lakh weddings, 4.8 million, between November 12 and December 16, 2024. The season began on Dev Uthani Ekadashi. CAIT counted 18 auspicious wedding dates in it, up from 11 the year before. A pause of about a month was to follow, until mid-January.
Vidyarambham means the beginning of learning. It is a ceremony before a child starts formal education, and it is popular in South India. On Vijayadashami, the father or a teacher holds the child’s finger and traces a mantra in grains of rice. Then the letters of the child’s own language are written.
Vijayadashami, the last day of Navaratri, “is considered auspicious for beginning learning in any field.”