Amroha girl chose jeans, not burqa, joined Indian Space Research Organisation

Among the scores of families of ISRO scientists who woke up early on Wednesday, prayed and waited for the successful lift-off of Chandrayaan I, was one in Chaugori Mohalla, a tiny, traditional Muslim neighbourhood in UP’s Amroha.

Khushboo Mirza is just one of the 12 engineers of the Check-Out Division of Chandrayaan I which carried out the thermal, vacuum and assembling checks on each component of the satellite. But the story of the 23 year-old is inspiration for a village which once looked at her journey in shock and disbelief.

When her father died when she was seven, her mother, Farhat, broke norms to run the family’s petrol pump to keep her children in school. Her brother, Khushtar, a 2005 BTech from Jamia Millia Islamia, shelved his career ambitions to take charge later. To get out of the claustrophobic by lanes of Amroha, Khushboo applied for B Tech at Aligarh Muslim University. A volleyball player, she qualified through the sports quota. When she graduated, she landed a lucrative job with Adobe but gave it up to join ISRO two years ago.

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Hunt begins all over again: Same prime suspect, similar bombs, SIMI links

A day after serial Blasts left at least 21 dead and nearly 100 injured, Delhi limped back to normalcy while police, looking for leads, were said to be questioning two persons who had been detained. Police Commissioner Y S Dadwal said they had come across “vital clues” which would help them track down perpetrators of the blasts who police suspect belong to the Indian Mujahideen-SIMI network.

Abdus Subhan Qureshi alias Tauqeer, who remains at large and is wanted by police in Gujarat for his alleged role in the Ahmedabad bombings, is emerging as one of the main suspects in the Delhi blasts too.

Sources said police and Central security agencies were looking for three SIMI sympathisers — Abu Zair, Danish and Aftab — who apparently arranged a safehouse in Delhi for Abu Bashar, arrested from Azamgarh in UP after the Ahmedabad blasts. Bashar, police sources said, stayed in Delhi from July 24 to 26.

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Kanpur Bhartiya Janata Party edit: Atal out of Advani rally posters, then back in

Atal Bihari Vajpayee has just been sighted in and around Kanpur.

After the Uttar Pradesh BJP gave the former Prime Minister a complete go-by in the run-up to prime ministerial candidate L K Advani’s June 27 rally, the local leadership, in a belated move, has started erecting hoardings with Atal’s pictures.

“This (hoardings without Atal’s pictures) is just not acceptable. It was the responsibility of the state BJP unit. They will have to include Ataljee’s pictures,” said a leader, close to Advani, when asked. Last week, Uttar Pradesh BJP chief Ramapati Ram Tripathi had an ingenuous explanation to offer: “Ataljee hamare hriday mein baste hain” (Atal resides in our hearts). On Saturday, he told this paper that the hoardings did carry Atal pictures.

The new cutouts, with Atal inscriptions, are embellished with a catchy slogan: “Ataljee ka yeh sandesh, Advani ko saupon desh (Atal’s message — give the reins of the country to Advani)”.

For a party that has turned sloganeering into an art, the message may just be apt. When Vajpayee became Bharatiya Jana Sangh president upon the death of Deendayal Upadhyaya, writes Advani in his memoirs, one slogan that fired the imagination of the party workers was “andhere mein ek chingari, atal bihari atal bihari (Atal is the only ray of hope in this darkness).

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Some infiltrators from across border, no one is complaining

These are cross-border infiltrators the country shouldn’t mind having. Haldwani in Uttarakhand and the Terai belt in Uttar Pradesh have been receiving guests from neighbouring Nepal—the critically endangered Indian one-horned Rhinoceros.

Even as the Kaziranga National park reels under a spate of rhino poaching, the Indo-Nepal border has proved itself to be a valuable corridor for the Indian one-horned rhinoceros. Rhinos have been crossing over from Nepal’s Bardia and Shukla Phanta Wildlife reserve park towards the Lagga Bagga forests and the Katerniaghat Wildlife Sanctuary in Uttar Pradesh.

And last month, a rhino from Nepal was found in Haldwani. It’s almost like a trip down history: it was rhinos from Nepal which formed part of the parent stock for the first-ever rhino trans location done in Duhwad National Park in Uttar Pradesh in 1984. Wildlife experts say that this is just the right time for allowing co-mingling of the Indian and Nepali rhinos to augment population of this rare animal.

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