In 2002 a woman living inside one of the most powerful religious organisations in north India wrote an anonymous letter. She said the man at the top was raping his female followers. Every big newspaper refused to print it. A man who ran a small evening paper in Sirsa printed it. His name was Ram Chander Chhatrapati. He was 53. His paper was called Poora Sach, which means the whole truth. It was a local Hindi evening daily, a few pages, in the same town as the headquarters of Dera Sacha Sauda. The head of that Dera was Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh. He had millions of followers. Politicians visited him before elections. On 31st May 2002, Poora Sach published the letter. The threats started almost immediately. He kept publishing. On 23rd October 2002 he ran another report on the sexual exploitation of women at the Dera. The next evening, 24th October, 2 men came to his house on a scooter and shot him 4 times from close range. He died of his injuries on 21st November, in a hospital in Delhi. Most national newspapers barely noticed. His son Anshul was a young man. He went to court and asked for the case to be taken away from the local police and given to the CBI. The High Court agreed. Then came 16 years. In August 2017 Ram Rahim was convicted of raping 2 of his followers and sentenced to 20 years. His followers rioted across Haryana and Punjab. People died. In January 2019, a special CBI court in Panchkula convicted Ram Rahim and 3 others of Chhatrapati's murder and sentenced them all to life. His former driver had testified that he heard Ram Rahim order it. Anshul said afterwards that they had been waiting 16 or 17 years, and that they had suffered a great deal because the man they were fighting was so powerful. That should have been the end. It was not. On 7th March 2026, the Punjab and Haryana High Court acquitted Ram Rahim in the murder case. It upheld the life sentences of the 3 other men, including the man who fired the shots. So the people who pulled the trigger are guilty. The court did not find it proved who sent them. Ram Rahim is still in prison, serving his sentence for rape. Anshul has taken the case to the Supreme Court. In August 2026 the court issued notice to Ram Rahim. He has been fighting it since he was a young man. He is still fighting it. His father printed one letter that nobody else would touch. Everything that happened to Ram Rahim afterwards began with that page.

A bus conductor in Karnataka started buying books he could not afford. He kept doing it for 50 years. He sold his house to keep doing it. He now owns 2 million books, and he lets anyone read them for free. His name is Anke Gowda. He is 79. He was born into a farming family in Chinakurli, in Mandya district. Books in that house were a luxury nobody could justify. He worked as a bus conductor. Later he was a timekeeper at a sugar factory, which is the man who records when each shift starts and ends. Neither job pays enough to build a library. So most of what he earned went into books, decade after decade. When that was not enough, he sold property. His family lived with the consequences of that choice for 50 years. The collection is now housed in a purpose built building of about 1,500 square metres in Pandavapura, funded by a businessman named Hari Khoday after the books outgrew everything else. It is called Pustaka Mane. The House of Books. What is inside it is difficult to take in. More than 2 million volumes. Books in over 20 Indian and foreign languages. Rare editions going back to 1832, which is nearly 200 years of publishing history. Around 5,000 dictionaries. Science, technology, philosophy, mythology, religious texts, rare editions of the Bible. He knows where things are. Not a catalogue. Him. There is no membership fee. There is no membership. Schoolchildren walk in. So do researchers, teachers, farmers and students preparing for the civil services examination. Anke Gowda, his wife Vijayalakshmi and their son Sagar live inside the library. Not next to it. In a corner of it. In January 2026 the government of India gave him the Padma Shri, in the Unsung Heroes category. He was a conductor on a Karnataka state bus who noticed that most of the people getting on and off had no access to a book in their life. So he spent the next 50 years fixing that for them, one purchase at a time, out of a salary that was never meant to stretch that far.