Harish Gilai

6 days ago | thehindu.com | Harish Gilai |B. Madhu Gopal

When Umamaheswara Rao and wife Sailaja set out to the Simhachalam hills in Visakhapatnam from their home at Chandrampalem at 2.30 a.m. on April 30, they were probably thinking of the moment they would finally fulfil a long-cherished dream: to witness the ‘nijaroopa darshan’ of Sri Varaha Lakshmi Narasimha Swamy, a rare sight available only once a year during the temple’s ‘Chandanotsavam’. The couple were just three years into their marriage, and life seemed good.

3 weeks ago | thehindu.com | Sumit Bhattacharjee |Harish Gilai

Like every other day, Sangarthi Jayalakshmi, in her mid-30s, prepared a lunchbox for her husband, Sangarthi Govindu, 41, on April 13. She saw him off to work from the doorstep of their modest house in Kailasapatnam village, Kotavuratla mandal, Anakapalli district, Andhra Pradesh. Around 1 p.m. that day, Jayalakshmi received a phone call asking her to rush to the firecracker unit where Govindu had been working for 12 years.