Bollywood actor Preity Zinta, who is the most prominent and significant shareholder in the Kings XI Punjab cricket team, is the least wealthy among the eight team owners in the Indian Premier League (IPL) according to Wealth-X, which tracks ultra-high-net-worth individuals.

Ms Zinta's estimated net worth of $30 million, or Rs. 183 crore (at 61 rupee per dollar), is a mere 0.14 per cent of that of India's richest man Mukesh Ambani, whose wealth was pegged at $21.2 billion or Rs.1.29 lakh crore. Mr Ambani owns the Mumbai Indians team, which is the defending IPL champion. He is the chairman and managing director of global energy conglomerate Reliance Industries.

Mr Ambani's estimated net worth of $21.2 billion is almost 10 times the personal fortune of media baron Kalanithi Maran, who owns the Sunrisers Hyderabad team, Wealth X noted. Mr Maran has an estimated net worth of $2.2 billion and is in second spot among the richest IPL team owners, according to Wealth-X.

"Collectively, the eight ultra-high-net-worth individuals on the Wealth-X list control $25.17 billion of the $935 billion wealth in India," the Singapore-based consultancy noted.

At number three is UB Group chairman Vijay Mallya, who has an estimated wealth of $640 million. Mr Mallya is locked in a bitter fight with creditors of his grounded premium airline Kingfisher. The airline also owes over Rs. 7,000 crore to banks.

Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan, who co-owns the Kolkata Knight Riders team, has a net worth of $600 million, while GM Rao, the owner of Delhi Daredevils, has an estimated wealth of $270 million, Wealth X said. Mr Rao is the founder chairman of GMR Group, a global infrastructure developer, which has built the Delhi and Hyderabad airports.

Manoj Badale, the promoter of Rajasthan Royals cricket team, has an estimated wealth of $160 million.

The wealth of ousted BCCI chief N Srinivasan, who owns Chennai Super Kings team, has been pegged at $70 million. Mr Srinivasan is also the managing director of India Cements Limited.

The 2014 IPL season is currently underway in UAE.

Mr Rai has served in the past as the national auditor; his allegations of massive malpractices in the areas of telecom and coal mining licenses left the government severely bruised.

The Supreme Court has also appointed a committee of five people to temporarily manage the Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple, which dates back to the 16th century and is dedicated to Lord Shiva. In a scathing explanation of their decision, judges said, "The (temple) trustees have failed very badly... they can't continue... if it is returned to them, let God save the temple."

The main trustee is the head of the former royal family of Travancore. He has been asked to hand over the keys to all secret vaults to the new committee, which has been asked to complete an inspector and inventory of the temple's vast wealth.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court expressed its concern over a detailed report that alleged blatant malpractices and corruption by the trustees. The report was presented by famous lawyer Gopal Subramaniam ,who had been asked by judges to help them determine whether the temple was being grossly mismanaged.

The Kerala High Court has already ruled that this temple in Thiruvanthapruam, like most others in the state, should be managed by the government. The former royal family of Travancore has appealed against that verdict in the Supreme Court.

Sonam's analysis of Bollywood - "If you are not good-looking, they think you are a good actor."

Sonam's diktats on good acting - "That's like rubbish. This is not acting, hello"

Sonam's notion of humility - "Being considered an icon in my 20s, when people in their 40s or after they die are considered icons, I think it's amazing"

Sonam's understanding of the world - "You know, according to me, in a lot of ways, everybody's sitting and watching TV"

Sonam's lofty intentions - "I want to do lots of social work"

Sonam's plan for eternity - "I want to go down in posterity"

This rather unflattering video might not be the path to posterity Sonam was hoping for but it's entirely likely the Raanjhanaa actress will see the funny side. As she does.

Twelve-year-old Mumpy Sarkar ended her own life in an attempt to donate organs to her father and brother, but was cremated before her suicide note detailing her wishes was found.

The young girl from eastern India decided that suicide was the only way she could help her family, who couldn't afford eye surgery to save her father's vision and a kidney transplant to save her brother's life, reports The Times of India.

Mumpy killed herself on June 27 but her wishes were not able to be carried out. Adding to the tragedy, the suicide note explaining her plan was found the day after she was cremated.

According to the paper, the pre-teen told her older sister about her plan and urged her to join her for the "cause," but her sister "laughed it off" and left for school. Mumpy then drank Thioden, a pesticide and ran to tell her father that "she had dreamt that someone had poured poison into her mouth and her stomach ached." The girl was rushed to hospital as her conditioned worsened and she died later that day.

A local state council representative visited the family's home and promised financial assistance for medical treatment for both Mumpy's father and brother, reports The Daily Mail.

Didi has her eyes firmly set on Delhi, and her party Trinamool is gearing up to give the biggies Congress and BJP a run for their money, virtually!

On Sunday, the party launched the official Trinamool Congress app to enhance its presence in the virtual world. The customized application can be accessed on mobile handsets and tablets. Supporters can now use the new app to get all the information they want about their favourite Didi and her team online.

Compatible with over 5000 devices, the mobile app comes in Android as well as Apple versions. “We are very excited about this! This app is absolutely free. For Google, you can download it from the play store and for Apple devices; you can get it from i-store. Our first target is to get 10,000 downloads, says MP Derek Brien, the brain behind Trinamool's social media strategy.

The party also introduced 'Didi Direct', a new section on its website that will solely focus on party chief Mamata Banerjee's campaign activity all through the election season.

“I have always heard that digital communication means Facebook and Twitter. But that is not the case. They hold only 30% of the digital space. So we are launching 40 blogs as well. This will be a first and no other political party in India has so many blogs, adds Derek Brien.

The Trinamool has already got on board two Indian Institute of Management (IIM) graduates as interns who will write these blogs for the party.

The party may have been a late started but it's catching up fast in the online race. Mamata herself has more than six and a half lakh followers on Facebook and her party MP Derek Brien is perhaps one of the most popular handles on twitter in India.

Derek says, very few regional parties have a strong online presence and the Trinamool Congress takes pride in being one with the lead.

After a 19-hour long struggle, a three-year old girl who fell into an abandoned borewell in the district was today rescued, but she later died in hospital.

R Madhumita, stuck at around 28-30 ft of the 500-feet borewell at Pallagaseri village since yesterday, was pulled out around 3 am and rushed to the Kallakurichi Government General Hospital, police said.

After nearly an hour-long effort to save her, the doctors declared her dead.

"The child was in a state of coma when brought to the hospital, affected by lack of oxygen for long hours," hospital Superintendent Dr Udayakumar said.

The girl, who was playing in the field owned by her father, fell into the borewell around 8 am yesterday as polythene sacks covering it gave away when she stepped on it.

Teams from police, fire and rescue services personnel began resuce efforts, which included supply of oxygen into the borewell and digging a pit parallel to the borewell.

TVS Community College personnel from Madurai too pitched in to support the rescue efforts and tried to pull out the girl using robotic arms in vain.

The incident exposes yet again failure to enforce the 2010 Supreme Court guidelines on safety measures while digging borewells, issued in the aftermath of increasing number of fatal falls into borewells across the country.

In September last year, a six-year old girl child met with a similar fate after falling into a borewell in Pulavanpadi village in Tiruvannamalai District.

Marriage was supposed to bring them together. Instead, it was the beginning of a long ordeal apart. Germany blocked Nguyen from entering the country after she flunked the language test that Germany requires aspiring immigrants to pass - even those married to Germans.

"I thought marrying the person you love and living together was a human right," Guhle said in his modest two-room apartment on the outskirts of Berlin. "Apparently this is not the case in Germany."

Germany adopted German language regulations for prospective immigrants in 2007. Most EU countries - including France, Italy, Spain and Sweden - do not require foreign spouses to pass mandatory language tests before they join their partners in Europe. Austria, Britain and the Netherlands are among countries that require language tests before foreign spouses can enter the country, but experts say Germany's test is the toughest.

The European Commission has criticized the law in Germany, saying it may violate European treaties. And a legal challenge to the European Court of Justice is expected to be heard this month. As things stand, however, binational couples like Guhle and his wife face costly and daunting challenges.

Germany defends the law as a way to prevent forced marriages and to help immigrants integrate more easily. Critics maintain the law discriminates against the uneducated and poor. Most agree immigrants should learn German, but opponents of the law say that could be done more quickly, cheaply and easily in Germany.

"Well-educated people who can afford the language classes won't have any problems meeting the language requirements quickly - but not the others," said Hiltrud Stoecker-Zafari, the head of the national Association of Binational Couples and Partners. "Therefore we think: This country obviously wants to send out the message that financially weak and not well-qualified spouses should not even come here."

Fueling that argument are some of the exceptions to the German language proficiency rule: People with university degrees and people who have founded companies are exempt.

Another quirk: If a non-German EU citizen living in Germany wants to bring his or her non-German speaking spouse to the country, that's not a problem. A Frenchman living in Berlin could bring his Vietnamese wife to Germany immediately - but not Guhle.

"We only wanted to live together," said Guhle, a soft-spoken 43-year-old with a stubbly beard and warm gray-blue eyes. "How are you supposed to learn German if you are poor and uneducated and live in a remote Vietnamese fishing village?"

The government defends the measure, saying it requires only basic language knowledge - including conversational German and some reading and writing skills.

"If an immigrant doesn't have to start from scratch but already knows how to communicate, he will be more motivated to successfully work on his integration after he has received his visa," said a spokesman for Germany's Interior Ministry, speaking on condition of anonymity in accordance with ministry policy.

While the government does not have statistics to show how many forced marriages were prevented by the regulation, the spokesman said that authorities have repeatedly been told by German diplomatic missions abroad that victims of forced marriages use the language test as a way to avoid getting into an unwanted marriage.

"They repeatedly and on purpose fail the test to make sure they don't get a visa for Germany."

It is not clear how many couples have been separated by the law. According to the latest official statistics, some 40,000 people took the test at Germany's partially state-funded Goethe Institute language schools around the world in 2012. Of those, around 14,000 failed and would not have been able to obtain a visa.

When Guhle first went to Berlin's city hall in the fall of 2006 and said he would like to marry his girlfriend from Vietnam in Germany, an official told him - without explanation - that it wasn't possible. The couple then decided to have a traditional wedding with 300 guests in Nguyen's fishing village Doc Let. They got married in Vietnam in the summer of 2007 and planned to move to Germany straight away - not knowing that Germany had just enacted the language law.

Their relationship soon became a story of long stretches of loneliness - and thousands of euros in expenses.

Guhle, a low-paid nurse's assistant, took on a second job cleaning streetcars at night so he could finance his wife's German classes in Nha Trang, the nearest city where they could find a private German school. He paid for her hotel for nine months while she studied, and also financed the trip to Ho Chi Minh City where she would take the language test.

"These classes are unacceptable for people who are illiterate or come from rural areas," says Sevim Dagdelen, a Left Party lawmaker who has been lobbying to scupper the law. "There are many couples whose relations were shattered because of all of these burdens."

Nguyen failed the test and did not get her visa. She kept trying to learn German, but it was never enough. German authorities even refused to issue a tourist visa to let Nguyen visit her husband in Berlin.

"I reduced my life to working and visiting my wife on vacation. Every morning and night I would call her," said Guhle. "It wasn't easy for her either - people in the village gossiped about why the man from rich Germany wasn't able to come and take her home."

The couple took their case to a German court. After proving that Nguyen had repeatedly tried to learn German for over a year, she was finally allowed to immigrate.

She arrived in Berlin last September.

Sitting in their apartment, the two hold hands and talk to each other in a chaotic but fluent mix of English, German and Vietnamese. They call each other "honey" all the time.

"I'm so relieved to finally be in Germany with my husband," said Nguyen, a shy woman with long black hair. The 27-year-old has signed up for an intensive German language class and is eagerly looking for jobs at Vietnamese restaurants.

"One is married in good times as in bad," Guhle said. "I guess we started with the bad."

The gang-rape survivor told NDTV today, "I am happy and relieved that there has been justice and that people have got to know the truth." She was raped more than 60 times in hotels, homes and cars. Her attackers included a retired professor, lawyers and businessmen.

In 2005, in a verdict that shocked women's rights activists, 34 of the 35 suspects were acquitted by the Kerala High Court. The woman challenged that in the Supreme Court, but had to wait eight years for a hearing. In January 2013, the Supreme Court ordered a re-trial of the Suryanelli rape case (the woman belongs to Suryanelli in the Idukki district of Kerala).

Five of the accused died during the trial.

The woman and her parents say that their fight for justice has been a long and lonely one. They shifted base to a different district because they say neighbours were hostile. The rape survivor says she leaves home only to go to work.

She was kidnapped by a bus conductor on her way to school. Dharmarajan, a lawyer in his 40s, convicted for orchestrating her sexual exploitation by other suspects, was sentenced to life in prison today.

Ever since the Chinese "bike hugging" dog video hit the Internet nearly two years ago, it has generated over four million hits on YouTube, as well as concerns about LiLi the dog's safety. A Thai blogger even started a blog to raise money for a bike for LiLi.

In the video the Golden Retriever guards its owner Luo Wencong's bicycle with its front paws until he returns. The dog then jumps on to the back of the bike and balances itself while indicating it is set for the ride with a few barks. The owner then pedals away with LiLi comfortably perched at the back.

Luo has revealed that the intelligent LiLi's skills are not restricted to merely guarding bicycles but that the dog also counts, carries shopping baskets and takes out the garbage. He claims to have turned down a 10,000 Yuan offer for LiLi. Following the popularity of the video, LiLi has gained something of a celebrity status in China and is known as the "Bike hugging dog"to locals of Nanning the capital of Guangxi province.

If so, then how about trying piping hot idli sambar with vada or briyani prepared by well-known restaurants.

Even though there are several food plazas operating in Chennai Central Railway Station, travellers often voiced their concern about the rates and quality of food items served. To help the travellers, the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) South Zone has introduced a ‘Dial-a-Meal’ concept by joining hands with Ratna Café in Chennai Central Railway Station. This is being done after carrying out a trial run at Trivandrum Railway Station for the last one month.

All that an inbound or outbound traveller/visitor to the station has to do is to dial a designated number (90432 77777) just 40 minutes in advance and place an order for food items from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. It would be more useful to those arriving at Chennai Central at odd hours, said an IRCTC official

Talking to Media, the official said: “We have about 14 food courts operating in Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. We are asking them to do this as an additional service at major stations. The service providers will not be collecting any money from anyone, until they deliver food packets. As food vendors are not allowed to enter the platform or the compartment with valid ticket, it would be the responsibility of the customer to pick up the items from the food stall after paying the amount.”

According to Ratna Café, Chief Executive Officer, Lokesh Gupta, the menu would have about 100 different types of items ranging from tiffin, snacks, sweets, briyani to mini-meals. On reaching the stall, the customer has to cite the reference number, pay the amount and pick-up the food items. “It would be a hassle-free process. Next in line would be the introduction of web-based reservation system,” he said.

Amid various studies being conducted on the health benefits of chocolate that inspire you to munch another one, a new research reveals that a key ingredient in chocolate might help lose weight and lower type-2 diabetes risk.

The researchers from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University added the flavanol named oligomeric procyanidins (PCs) found in cocoa - the basic ingredient of chocolate - in the food for mice. They found that it made a huge difference in keeping the mice's weight down if they were on high-fat diets. This compound also improved glucose tolerance which could potentially help prevent type-2 diabetes.

People know that cocoa has the potential to boost heart health, lower blood sugar and decrease body fat. "Now we know that a particular flavanol can also help you fight obesity and type-2 diabetes," said lead author Andrew P. Neilson.

The scientists fed groups of mice different diets, including high-fat and low-fat diets, and high-fat diets supplemented with different kinds of flavanols.

"Oligomeric PCs appear to possess the greatest anti-obesity and anti-diabetic bioactivities of the flavanols in cocoa, particularly at the low doses employed for the present study," the researchers noted. The study was appeared in the Journal of Agricultural & Food Chemistry.

This becomes India's second final in five World Twenty20s after they won the inaugural event held in South Africa in 2007. They meet Sri Lanka in the final in Dhaka on Sunday. (Scorecard | Highlights)

In contrast, South Africa, regarded as perennial chokers in crucial matches, yet again failed to reach any world level final since their readmission into cricket in 1991.

Kohli smashed five boundaries and two sixes off 44 balls in a brilliant display of batting, highlighting India's strength at chasing a target. He hit paceman Dale Steyn for a boundary to seal the win much to the jubiliation of a packed Shere Bangla stadium.

Kohli and other Indian batsmen blunted South Africa's best bowlers, leg-spinner Imran Tahir -- joint highest wicket-taker so far in the tournament with 12 -- and paceman Steyn with authority. Tahir managed just one wicket for 30 runs in his four overs while Steyn went for 36 in 3.1 overs.

Kohli brought up his seventh T20 fifty with a huge six off Tahir and despite the loss off Yuvraj Singh (18) and Suresh Raina (21) kept the run-chase smooth. Rohit Sharma made a 13-ball 24 with a six and four boundaries and Ajinkya Rahane scored 32 off 30 balls.

South Africa, who batted after winning the toss were helped to 172-4 with skipper Faf du Plessis scoring a 41-ball 58 for his fifth Twenty20 fifty. He added 71 for the third wicket with Jean-Paul Duminy who made an unbeaten 40-ball 45 to bolster the innings.

Du Plessis, who missed South Africa's last game against England because of a slow over-rate suspension, hit five boundaries and two towering sixes as the duo negotiated an Indian spin quartet with aggressive batting.

South Africa lost opener Quinton de Kock (six) in the first over before Hashim Amla and Du Plessis took the score to 44 in the fifth over. But Ravichandran Ashwin, who took 3-22 in his four overs, put the brakes on South Africa's progress, claiming Amla (22) and then dangerman AB de Villiers (ten) off a miscued pull shot which was smartly held by Rohit Sharma at long leg.

In between du Plessis and Duminy batted with guts to take South Africa to 115 before Ashwin bowled du Plessis off a miscued sweep. Duminy, who hit three sixes and a four, added another 43 for the unbroken fifth wicket with Andrew Miller (23 not out) to help South Africa add 106 in the last ten overs.

Leg-spinner Amit Mishra, India's most successful bowler in the Super-10 stage, went for 36 runs in his three overs without taking a wicket.

Kochi: Opposition Leader V.S. Achuthanandan has moved the High Court seeking a central agency probe into the solar scandal case.

In a plea filed at the court on Friday, the CPI-M leader demands a CBI probe into the multi-crore fraud as the special investigation team which went into the case failed to probe effectively the allegations against the chief minister’s and ministers’ offices, their telephone calls and that of their staff.

The UDF ministers like A P Anil Kumar have links with the key accused Saritha Nair. There are some central ministers involved in the case too. The state police probe has failed to unearth the financial involvement of those ‘big names’ in the case, the plea says.

As per reports, Achuthanandan’s move is aimed at bringing the solar case into focus during the election campaign thereby boosting the LDF's prospects.

The party is also backing him to go ahead with the legal battle.

The 2014 election is a landmark of its kind. It is different in many ways and we have to savour every little difference to grasp the new texture of the historical. The future seems to have arrived and, as a novelist explained, this future is a different country where people do things differently. As a sociologist and a gossip one must ask where does the difference lie. The answers flow in unexpectedly.

To begin textbook style, this election confronts the demographic dividend. The demographic dividend, or DD, is a dull label for the fact that 70 per cent of our population is under 25. This means that this is a generation that read about the national movement in NCERT books, was born after the Emergency and sees nationalism and the Nehruvian epoch as nostalgia. This is a generation that has none of the significant memories that forged the idea of India and of Indian unity.

It is not nationalism alone that feels quaint. It is also the socialist era: the ration card scarcity, the long lines and the boredom of waiting that marked the Fifties and Sixties. This was a time where tightening the belt was a patriotic act.

It was a generation which was seen as lacking ideology, which lacked a sense of the political but which struck back by reinventing the political. A sense of consumerism reworked the ideas of citizenship and recreated new possibilities of political. But a historian cannot stop here because the changes are deeper. Beyond demography, the political itself has changed as fact and memory.

The biggest change is that the Congress party has become an embarrassment. It is no longer seen as a national unifier but as a family legacy, mediocre in intent and limp in its history. The decline of the Congress is the background.

Yet politics means more because the Aam Aadmi Party has reinvented politics. In fact, the youth blew life into both, the Modi movement and the rise of the AAP. AAP is a new hypothesis, it is a party which like an amoeba is inventing newer versions of itself.

If AAP is fluid, the Bharatiya Janata Party moves like a juggernaut, desperately scared of failure. The BJP looks like an energetic dinosaur next to the AAP which behaves like a creative virus infecting the most unlikely people.

Yet there is a negative side we need to examine. While celebrating the inventiveness of the political, we also confront the decline of some other kinds of the political. The party as an institution seems archaic. In fact, at points it appears paradoxical. The Modi movement literally portrays him as a man without a party. The old guard of Jaswant Singh, M.M. Joshi or even L.K. Advani stand humiliated and Modi seems indifferent to that. In fact, the biggest casualty of the Modi movement might be the BJP. It seems more and more irrelevant in Modi’s presidential style of behaviour.

In terms of value, there is something more tacitly frightening. The amount of intolerance we have today is converting politics into the zero-sum game.

Earlier politics appeared to be a battle between rivals not enemies. Many of them were friends outside battle. Today our politics seems more exterminist.

Our sense of difference is also worrying. When one watches media or political debate, one senses the witch-hunt. The media seems to want to hunt down people whom it sees as politically incorrect. The media witch-hunt of those it sees as anti-national or corrupt shows that media in its hunt for news has lost its head.

Society amplifies the hysteria of the media by considering every difference, each piece of diversity as sedition. Today books, movies, plays seem to require the consensus of right-wing or extra-constitutional parties to emerge. Whether it is Valentine’s Day or Wendy Doniger makes little difference. The BJP’s cynical effort to recruit is a sign of its rampant McCarthyism.

India was once proud of its diversity, convinced that the tribal was also a part of the modern. Today our middle class wants to flatten the difference and in doing this it threatens the marginal, the radical and the eccentric.

Thirdly, despite everything Arvind Kejriwal might have campaigned for, the rapist and the criminal are part of the normalcy of politics. We treat rape, murder and corruption as initiations to politics. Somehow the logic of electoral politics cannot stand the clean and honest.

Finally, this election has a collection of strange silences. Issues like the fate of agriculture, the debates on biotechnology, the suicide of farmers and the death of soils plays little role in the election. Medha Patkar, who led the anti-Narmada protest, is now a battler for the slums. But big livelihood issues are missing. The minority question seduces but the fate of marginals is forgotten. Development has to look at marginals. Any social audit has to represent them. Otherwise democracy would be empty.

The bigger silence is about unemployment. There is little news of retrenchment in the IT industry, and even less is said about media people losing jobs. Unemployment and inflation are background words. They are not problems in themselves, merely invectives to hurl at the Congress party. No party has a global concept of itself. The Congress is dispirited. Modi thinks his ego is global but there is no sense of real politics of South Asia or of the wider region.

All in all this is a strange election, full of surprises, replete with anticipations, an inkling that the new is being born but the midwives are a bit slow. A wonderful time to be in, full of rumours, waiting for a future that might surprise us all.

Dowry, though banned by law in India, is still prevalent in large swathes of the Indian countryside, and parents of marriageable girls go through daytime nightmares to locate a suitable groom for their daughters. 

There is a reverse trend too. Overaged males offer to "buy" brides, when they fail to get women to marry. 

Poor parents are often forced to sell their daughters in the guise of marriage, as was the case nearly four centuries ago, when both male and female slaves used to be sold at slave bazaars.

There are four major reasons behind this gruesome trade in human trafficking:

1. Skewed male-female ratio: Seems like Indians are now paying for their skewed  male-female ratio. 

In states like Haryana, Punjab, Bihar, Rajasthan and western UP, marriageable brides are just not available.

Men of marriageable age then hunt for brides from other states. Naturally, most of these "brides" hail from poor families from eastern and northeastern states. 

These "brides", which are bought by men in these states, are used  as servants in the households. 

They are also used to give birth to offsprings to keep the genealogical tree alive. These women are never considered part of the male's society, and after they are "used" they are simply left to remain like second-class citizens.

2. Illegal sale of girls: One such racket was busted by Haryana Police in 2011. The gang used to sell teenage girls as brides to middle aged men in exchange for money.

These girls were first abducted by gangs and then sold to their clients.

Shockingly, these girls, often younger than 15, were subjected to the worst form of slavery. They performed household chores all day and then had to become sexual victims of over-aged men at night.

1. “Were you trying to get pregnant/Did you plan for this?” I don’t know exactly what portion of society deems it okay to ask these kinds of questions, but they translate to “Do you have sex regularly? Are you using birth control? Do you have a basic understand of the human reproductive system?” All of which are entirely unacceptable. Obviously.

2. “Can I touch your belly?” Do you want your hand bitten off? Have you lost your mind? Does the phrase “personal space” have any meaning to you at all? Hell no, you may not rub my belly.

3. “Are you sure there’s just one baby in there?” Positive, ass wipe.

4. “Wow! You still have a ways to go!” You want to tell that to the foot jammed in my ribcage, and my inability to sit/stand/lay down comfortably? Or the fact I have been dealing with this for 33 weeks? I mean, thanks for not blurting out that I’m as big as the broad side of a barn, but I really don’t need to be reminded that I’m not at the finish line quite yet. I’m very much aware of just how many days I have until my due date. Thanks.

5. “You are going for a natural birth, RIGHT?” I don’t remember asking for your opinion, but, okay. I will make every effort to make sure to do what you think was right for you, during my birth.

6. “Isn’t it hard working while you’re pregnant? Shouldn’t you be resting?” Yessss. It is hard. It kills my back. I feel awful. But not all of us are financially stable enough to afford to take time off work when pregnant.
I intend on working until my water breaks (which will probably happen at work).

7. “You know, ____ is bad for the baby.” (*insert horror stories about everything here*)
Coffee, soda, hair dye, GMOs, McDonalds, pizza, nail polish, sandwiches, standing too long, sitting too long, green tea, exercising, not exercising, etc. etc. etc. Apparently all these things are making me a horrible mother already because I do not abstain from almost everything on the planet.

8. “Are you planning on breast feeding?” Would you randomly ask someone in the grocery store if they wax their vagina? Because that’s the same level of personal that we’re dealing with here.

9. “You’re quite hormonal!” Okay, maybe I am just a little crazy/weepy/ragey right now, but that doesn’t invalidate my thoughts and feelings, or mean that something isn’t important, just because I seem to be sobbing endlessly over everything. (The latest Budweiser commercial, for example.)

10. “I thought you didn’t want kids!” Thank you ever so kindly for the reminder of my inability to take a pill every day.

Basically, just hold the door for me and pass the damn chocolate for nine months.

Bachchan bahu Aishwarya Rai's big Bollywood comeback - after almost three years because of baby Aaradhya - has been a matter of much speculation. A recent development brings us closer to the 'reel' deal.

Are you dating a night owl who loves to stay up late and wake up late in the morning?

Read this carefully as night owls, unlike early birds, are less likely to be in long-term relationships and have the same high propensity for risk-taking as men.

"Night owls, both males and females, are more likely to be single or in short-term romantic relationships versus long-term relationships when compared to early birds," said study author Dario Maestripieri, a professor in comparative human development at University of Chicago.