Yakshagana Performance in its original form is truly a mesmerising experience. Through the night air there come the tense high-pitched drumming beats of the chande, mellower rhythm of the maddale and the tinkling brass peal of the tala accompanying the melodious singing of the story-teller the “Bagawatha”. Yakshagana is a rare and unique traditional theatre of Coastal region of Karnataka state in India and has a recorded history of more than five centuries. It is a rich artistic blend of loud music, forceful dance, extempore speech and gorgeous costumes, this art combines the features of opera as well as drama, the characteristics of moral education and mass entertainment.

A few hours before Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a forum of investors in the city last month, police constables surrounded Pooja Shukla as she stepped out of her friend's house in Ismailganj.

Shukla, a 23-year-old activist with the Samajwadi Party (SP), said the policemen and women dragged her to a waiting jeep, snatched her phone, drove her around the city for five hours and only let her go when she pretended to be ill. Another group from the police, she said, raided her house in Sarojini Nagar, where she lives with her parents.

Y. Abdul Rasul, an IT person from Indian city of Chennai, earned a place in the Guinness Book of Records for his collection of stamps on mosques.

Amit Shah mortgaged two of his properties for his son Jay Shah’s business venture Kusum Finserve LLP, which has recorded dramatic increase in credit facilities in recent years despite its poor finances. The BJP national president’s contingent liability with respect to this credit facility is, however, missing from his 2017 electoral affidavit. Publicly available documents indicate that in 2016, two of Amit Shah’s properties were mortgaged to the Kalupur Commercial Co-operative Bank, one of Gujarat’s largest cooperative banks, to secure Rs 25 crore in credit for Kusum Finserve. New documents accessed by The Caravan show that since 2016, Kusum Finserve has secured credit facilities amounting to Rs 97.35 crore—in tranches of Rs 10.35 crore, Rs 25 crore, Rs 15 crore, Rs 30 crore, and Rs 17 crore—from two banks, and one government undertaking. The credit extended to Kusum Finserve has gone up by nearly 300 percent in the last year, even while its latest reported balance sheets show a net worth of only Rs 5.83 crore.

A progressive writer, visionary, a social thinker, a philosopher, an educationist - Rabindranath Tagore was a polymath. And it is this vastness that fascinated author Radha Chakravarty to take translate Tagore's writings from Bengali to English.

Newsclick pieces together the emerging evidence of an underground network of ‘Hindu Rashtra’ supporters bent upon the physical elimination of liberal and secular voices like Dabholkar, Pansare, Kalburgi and Lankesh.

As the world gears up to celebrate Friendship Day on Sunday, small screen actors like Pearl Puri, Aashka Goradia and Sneha Wagh share their best moments with their friends.