When your first love isn’t the love of your life 💍 In Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, #AishwaryaRai’s Nandini falls hopelessly in love with Sameer (#SalmanKhan). After she’s married off to Vanraj (Ajay Devgn), that love is put to the test. Director Sanjay Leela Bhansali faced pressure to change the ending; Khan felt Nandini should reunite with Sameer. But Bhansali stood firm. Turns out, training season’s over.  Read our story on the film here: thejuggernaut.com/bengali-ni…

No, this isn’t science fiction: San Francisco-based Marathon Fusion says it just created lab-made gold. For millennia, philosophers have mused about creating gold from lead or mercury. Scientists have since attempted it. In 1941, Harvard researchers produced radioactive gold from mercury. In 2025, CERN said it created 29 trillionths of a gram of gold from lead between 2015 and 2018, but the gold nuclei survived only fractions of a second. Now, Marathon Fusion claims it has converted mercury into stable gold at 10 times CERN’s rate. Mercury has 80 protons in its nucleus, while gold has 79. To make gold from mercury, you need to remove or transform one proton from a mercury atom. Marathon says it used neutrons generated by nuclear fusion to transform mercury into a radioactive form. As the mercury decays, one of its protons becomes a neutron, turning that atom into gold. The claims haven’t been independently verified and Marathon hasn’t disclosed how much gold it produced or at what cost. But if its tech becomes commercially viable, the implications are enormous. In 2025, gold reached record highs. Lab-made gold could put downward pressure on prices — impacting everyone from miners and wholesalers to gold investors. India is the world’s second-largest gold market after China. In 2025, Indians purchased about 430.5 metric tons of gold jewelry, according to the World Gold Council, with total demand at $52 billion. In 2023, Kyle Schiller and Adam Rutkowski founded Marathon Fusion to develop tech primarily for nuclear fusion plants. The company’s investors include Anglo American, the mining giant that owns a majority stake in the diamond company De Beers. Marathon estimates a commercial fusion plant could produce up to five metric tons of gold a year per gigawatt of electric capacity. But the technology remains years away from commercial deployment.

Zeenat Aman is the OG diva 🧚🏼‍♀️ Decades before Victoria’s Secret debuted its fantasy bra, Bhanu Athaiya — India’s first Oscar winner — designed Aman’s sculptural outfits in this dream sequence from Satyam Shivam Sundaram (1978).  “She was prolific and meticulous,” the actor wrote of Athaiya. “No other designer in my life has come close to creating outfits for me that were as comfortable as they were sensual.”

Nepal estimates that it needs $4.7 billion to recover from August floods that killed about 1,500 people. The UN provisionally approved only $20 million, less than 0.5% of the amount. On October 22, the UN Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage provisionally approved the fund’s first allocation of $20 million to Nepal. The fund was created in 2022 to help developing countries recover from climate-related disasters, since they often contribute the least to global emissions. Wealthier countries have pledged more than $820 million to the fund, but it already faces 176 requests totaling approximately $2.8 billion. A glacial collapse on August 26 at the Nepal-Tibet border left over 5,000 missing and damaged homes, roads, and schools. According to World Weather Attribution, rising temperatures had thinned glaciers and thawed permafrost, weakening the ice and frozen ground that helped hold mountain rock in place. The destabilized mountainside collapsed, causing flooding. Scientists warn that rising temperatures are causing glaciers to retreat across the Himalayas, threatening the livelihoods of millions. Separately, Nepal received $102 million from donors by the end of September, still far short of what it needs to rebuild. “It’s a very small amount compared to what we lost,” Maheshwar Dhakal, an official in Nepal’s climate and environment ministry, told AP. South Asia is home to nearly 25% of the world’s population but accounted for just 8.4% of global CO2 emissions in 2024. Nepal’s Prime Minister Balendra Shah addressed this inequality at the UN General Assembly in September. “We did not create this crisis, yet we are paying a colossal price for it,” he said, speaking of South Asian nations. The funding gap comes amid shrinking aid contributions, including from the U.S., Germany, U.K., France, and Japan.

Happy 50th birthday to Mallika Sherawat 👑 Born Reema Lamba, the actor adopted her mother’s maiden name to honor her. At Cannes in 2013, she called India “regressive for women.” Back home, she responded with facts. She cited that 40% of girls in India had married before age 18. In 2013, UNFPA said that number was 47%. She also called out female feticide in Haryana, which had the most skewed sex ratio of any Indian state in 2011.

The 1991 film opens with a quasi-scientific premise: a rare few are born with the gift of premonition. They can see the future in vivid detail, long before it unfolds. The narrator goes on to tell us that “these” eyes belong to our lead, Devi — perhaps a shoutout to Satyajit Ray’s film of the same name. We meet a sporty Madhuri Dixit who’s playing a spirited game of tennis. But the match comes to an abrupt halt because she starts seeing disturbing images: a man in a black trench coat, the back of a familiar woman blow-drying her hair, and then her murder. Her friend Sudha assures her that Devi is just imagining things, but Devi is sure: “No, this wasn’t a dream. Something will happen!” Her vision comes to pass. Devi can’t escape the niggling feeling that her visions hold the key to solving a murder everyone else believes to be a disappearance. This spooky season, there’s no better time to revisit the unabashedly scary 100 Days (1991) — especially in an industry that often can’t serve up horror without comic relief. Who remembers this movie? 👇🏽

Who’s responsible for climate change? Piyush Goyal highlighted a stark imbalance: India makes up ~18% of the world’s population and has contributed 3.6% of cumulative carbon emissions, while the EU27 makes up ~5.5% of the population and 16% of emissions. Goyal was speaking to Marcegaglia Steel CEO Emma Marcegaglia. His remarks echoed those of Nepal Prime Minister Balen Shah at the UN: South Asian nations have contributed little to the crisis but bear the burden. Do you agree?

In May 2025, Natasha Poonawalla, the executive director of the Serum Institute of India, ascended the steps of the Met in New York City in a Manish Malhotra ensemble. The deep purple skirt was cut out of two vintage Parsi garas — silk saris covered in hand embroidery — one of them a century-old heirloom. For Parsi families (Poonawalla’s mother is Parsi), the gara is the heirloom of heirlooms. By some accounts, its origin is a love story: Parsi traders in China brought silk home as gifts for their wives. Later, when these items became symbols of excess, Parsi homes would cut up the treasured fabric. Today, they cut them up for the Met Gala. The embroidery on Poonawalla’s black jacket was crafted from a single thread, featuring a Chinese warrior on a horse, a pagoda, poppies, vines, and trees. The gara’s history is riddled with its own tangled threads, involving the British, Canton, and opium traders. But as the craft increasingly disappears, the Parsi community is evaluating how to preserve it — and not everyone agrees.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has charged one Pakistani and two Indian nationals with voting-related crimes in California. On October 19, federal authorities arrested 11 people in California as part of a crackdown on noncitizen voting. In total, 28 green card holders face charges ranging from voting illegally to making false statements on their U.S. citizenship applications. The DOJ says it has charged 113 noncitizens across 20 states in the last seven weeks. On October 13, the DOJ gave Los Angeles a list of 20,000 “likely noncitizens,” demanding that officials investigate them within 48 hours. On October 15, the federal government sued California for declining to investigate and on October 19, it filed an emergency request asking a federal judge to prevent people on the list from voting. California, along with 13 states and Washington D.C., doesn’t require voters to show ID at polls. Amandeep Kaur, 30, an Indian citizen living in Rancho Palos Verdes, allegedly registered to vote in December 2022 by claiming to be a U.S. citizen. Prosecutors say she cast a ballot in November 2024. Kamlesh Shah, 68, an Indian citizen in Sacramento, voted for Kamala Harris in November 2024. He’s charged with voting illegally in a federal election, which carries a maximum sentence of one year in prison. Shah told the Sacramento Bee that he thought his driver’s license and U.S. citizenship application allowed him to vote. An election worker told him he was good to vote and handed him a ballot. “It was a really big mistake,” Shah said. Muhammad Khan, 50, a Pakistani national living in Anaheim, allegedly submitted a provisional ballot in 2020 and lied on his naturalization papers in 2025. Documented cases of noncitizen voting are rare, according to ProPublica. Just 41 people were charged between January 2025 and May 2026, including Mukeshkumar Chaudhari, who falsely claimed U.S. citizenship to vote in November 2024.

🔱 As Durga Puja comes to a close, one tradition has long captivated hearts: Kolkata’s pandals.