BENGALI

JHUMPA LAHIRI, 40, stopped at Manhattan's famous Strand Bookstore, as fans queued for hours to get a signed copy of her new book that is high on the bestseller lists, 'The Unaccustomed Earth'.
The author is known to be reclusive and recalled that as a grad student she and a friend browsed the Strand with little money but spent long hours pouring over the treasured books. 
The Unaccustomed Earth is the much anticipated follow up to her novel The Namesake and Interpreter of Maladies, which won her the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000.

AKSHAY MISHRA 25, from Dubai took on a six day trek of 100 km to the freezing icy weather en route to the North Pole, to raise money for the Children's Hope Foundation and Environmental Camps for Conservation Awareness charities.
Mishra and his team spent a week training on Spitsbergen, a Norwegian island, before leaving for the Russian base camp. He went through a gruelling training and made adjustments to dealing with clothing, food, and sleeping in the -40 degree temperatures.
The 10 hour a day trek ended with the team reaching the North Pole in six days instead of the nine they had earlier scheduled.

NEW ZEALAND

IT IS not often that decorating a roof draws accusations of racism, but that is the charge facing an Auckland family after they painted a swastika on top of their house.
But for Kerin and Ambrish Gupta, who arrived from India eight years ago, the symbol is a sign of their religious devotion. And they are horrified that the symbol has caused offence.
The swastika has been used by Hindus for thousands of years to denote peace, tolerance and good fortune.
The Guptas’ neighbour Lindsay Johnston—whose father fought in the second World War—is outraged to see what he considers a Nazi swastika.
"Well obviously anything to do with the Nazis or the Germans was a definite no-no and I think it's very offensive for all the returned men and for the Jewish community," Johnston said.
"I've now changed the symbol to make it look more like the Hindu version and less like the Nazi version," Kerin Gupta said. "I hope this keeps everybody happy."
The Guptas hope New Zealanders will in time become more familiar with the true meaning of their symbol, especially in their suburb of Mt Roskill. "We had no idea that it still had such bad connotations 60 years after the war," the couple said.

ORIYA

MALAYSIA WILL host a month-long Odissi dance festival from May 21 showcasing artists and scholars of the dance form from home and across the world. 
Bijayini Satpathy, Aruna Mohanty, Arushi Mudgal, Rahul Varshney and Madhavi Mudgal of India will be joined by January Low, Shantona Bag and Rathimalar of Malaysia, Masako Ono of Japan, Mitali Devi of Britain, and Raka Maitra of Singapore in performances through the month till June 22, says the New Strait Times.
Other dancers include Malaysia's renowned Sutra Dance Theatre founder Ramli Ibrahim, Guna, Ajith Bhaskaran, Jagatheyswara, and Harenthiran.

SOUTH AFRICA

DEVOTEES OF Lord Ayyappa in South Africa can now have darshan of the Lord with an Ayyappa temple being consecrated in the capital city of Pretoria. 
A senior official of the Pretoria Bhajanai Mandram, Raj Kolapan, said priests from India officiated the consecration ceremony, which was attended by devotees from all over South Africa. 
The temple was the realisation of the efforts of the Hindu community, he said. 
"Devotees now have an institution to achieve spiritual balance, a gift to humanity made possible by the generosity of devotees worldwide", he said. 
The construction of the Ayyappa Seva Hindu Temple is the latest in the scores of temples being built by Indian-origin South Africans all over South Africa, especially in the KwaZulu-Natal province. 
The temples have been built ever since Indian indentured labourers were brought to South Africa in 1860. Most of the temples are found along the coast, to the north and south of Durban.

United States

WHEN MANOJ Night Shyamalan heard he'd got the Padma Shri, he didn't know how to react. Simply because he did not know the significance of the award. But when his friends and relatives from India and the US began to congratulate him effusively, he realised this was something very different. 
On May 10 when he received the award he said: “It feels like a singular event in my life.”
"I know my identity begins and ends as a filmmaker. But I have always wanted to make my family proud of what I do. Today, I feel my family has extended to the one billion people of India," he exults. 
“It has reinforced me for being Me: an Indian filmmaker with an unusual balance of ingredients. Personally speaking, I am proud of this eclectic mix, where despite living abroad for so long, the cultural values of India are deeply seeped within my psyche." 
Unlike Jhumpa Lahiri and Mira Nair, Shyamalan's creative outpourings have never voiced a lament for a lost world, nor articulated a sense of exile in them. "But that's because there is no confusion of identity within me," he explains.

INDIA

NRIS FROM Kerala contribute 40 per cent of India's international revenue.
Two million Keralites live abroad and one million temporary migrants, mostly construction labourers who make up the collective overseas workforce send home remittances that is changing lives in Kerala.
Bottomline—one in three Keralites benefits by migrants according to a scholar with the Centre for Development Studies in Trivandrum.
Gulf remittances form almost a third of Kerala's income, most of which is spent on housing or savings.
Banks say NRIs are their top customers with over a quarter of deposits coming from Dubai, Sharjah and Bahrain.