Rolland Garros Slugfest
The home of the French Open tennis championship will host boxing matches in September, 75 years after French great Marcel Cerdan fought and won there. Court Philippe-Chatrier, which has a capacity of 15,000 and a new retractable roof, has witnessed fights before—the last being in 1973. Roland Garros will host tennis and boxing events at the 2024 Paris Olympics. In 1946, Cerdan beat American Holman Williams on points. Cerdan, a European middleweight champion, won 110 of his 114 fights and is widely considered his nation’s finest boxer. One of his defeats came against Jake LaMotta in what proved to be Cerdan’s final fight.
The Overqualified
One hundred engineers, 500 graduates and 2,200 postgraduates. They are among 8,000 candidates who applied for six posts of laboratory assistants—called dom in morgue parlance—to handle corpses at the forensic medicine and toxicology department of the state-run Nil Ratan Sircar Medical College and Hospital in Calcutta. All of them are “overqualified” for the job as the minimum qualification required is Class 8 pass, and anyone between 18 and 40 could apply. And the salary? Rs 15,000 a month. A list of 784 candidates, including 84 women, was prepared for a test.
Man In A Niqab
An Indonesian man with the coronavirus has boarded a domestic flight disguised as his wife, wearing a niqab covering his face and carrying fake IDs and a negative PCR test result. But the cover didn’t last long. Police say a flight attendant aboard a Citilink plane travelling from Jakarta to Ternate in North Maluku province noticed the man change clothes in the lavatory. He bought the plane ticket with his wife’s name and brought the identity card, the PCR test result and the vaccination card with his wife’s name. All documents were under his wife’s name. He was arrested upon landing. Police took him for a Covid-19 test, which came back positive.
Stretch Of No-Road
Stretchered off to hospital won’t conjure images of a long, 8km walk in high heat and humidity on a piece of bed cloth tied to bamboo poles. Such a haunting image—like from a war movie—did surface recently. A cellphone video showed a 20-year-old pregnant woman being carried on a makeshift stretcher by her relatives in Madhya Pradesh’s Barwani district because the nearest motorable road from their village, Khamghat, is 8km away at Ranikajal and the hospital is another 20km away at Pansemal. An ambulance was available for the second leg of the arduous journey—which is incidental, but for the context. This story repeats itself in India’s hinterland, especially villages inside deep woods. Officials say building roads in such areas is difficult because of various factors such as terrain and strict forest laws that demand an array of permits.
Pay Per Selfie
She did a puja without a mask for divine intervention against the coronavirus sometime ago. She defended an Uttarakhand CM’s remarks that girls wearing ripped jeans is against Indian culture. She had offended a tribal group by calling its members unpatriotic, anti-national Maoists. She is Madhya Pradesh culture minister Usha Thakur, 55, and she shoots her mouth better than Olympic shooters. But we cannot agree more with her latest eye-popper—that selfie photo sessions at official functions eat up time and delay programmes. Mobbed by selfie-seekers at a recent event, Thakur said anyone seeking a selfie with her must pay Rs 100 to the BJP and the money would be used for party work.
Brevis
Illustrations: Saahil, Text curated by Alka Gupta
