Sitting amid the blackened remains of his home, 32-year-old Nikesh Gawali carefully broke open a half-melted plastic box with a screwdriver. His hands shook slightly, not out of fear, but out of hope. “I’m trying to find my daughter Aarti’s gold earrings,” he said quietly, still focused on the box. “She’s just five. I got them made recently after months of labour work.” The plastic box, warped and blackened by heat, was one of the few things left from his two-room house on the outskirts of Dhamangaon village . All around him lay ash, broken tin sheets and charred wooden beams. The walls had cracked under the heat and the front room’s tin roof had caved in completely. What remained was a blackened debris all around - almost nothing to suggest a home once stood there. Nikesh earns his living as an agricultural labourer, like many in the village. Work is uncertain and depends on the season. Those earrings weren’t just jewellery - they were a small dream, a reward for his hard work,...
Mahatma Gandhi eyeglasses stolen from Sevagram ashram THE missing glasses of Mahatma Gandhi from Sevagram Ashram, Wardha, are providing a clear picture of the State Criminal Investigation Department’s inefficiency in cracking the theft. Three years on, since the spectacles went missing, it has remained a wild-goose chase for the CID with no breakthrough in sight. The Mahatma’s glasses went missing from the Sevagram Ashram in November 2010 and the theft came to light on June 14, 2011. The probe was handed over to the State CID. Since then the department is groping in dark with no results. Additional Superintendent of Police (CID) Ratan Singh Yadav has maintained that the CID was still probing the case. Till date the department has managed to seize a laptop from a woman inmate of the Ashram but yet to study the contents on the hard disk. The woman got the laptop as a gift from someone. During investigation cops found that an important file had been deleted. They sent hard dis...