UPDATED NEWS: The siege of India's financial, commercial and entertainment capital, Mumbai, continues. The city is likely to be shut down for the second consecutive day. A set of eight or nine coordinated attacks on the city's landmarks  -- including the Taj and Trident-Oberoi hotels, a Jewish center (Nariman House), a train station, an upmarket restaurant and a hospital for women and children -- has claimed over 125 lives and injured over 300. The final toll is likely to rise.

When I posted about sexual minorities in India few weeks back, I didn't imagine India's gay community would take this leap so soon: On June 29, hundreds of gays, lesbians and transgenders marched on the streets of the country's capital city, New Delhi, tech hub Bangalore (Bengaluru), and culture-conscious Kolkata (Calcutta), making it India's first multiple-city gay pride parade.

In my post last week about Aruna Shanbaug -- the young nurse who was sodomized and strangulated in 1973 in a Mumbai (Bombay) hospital basement, and continues to live in a vegetative state -- I promised an interview with journalist Pinki Virani, who has written perhaps the most authoritative account of the case in her book Aruna's Story.

This is one New Year revelry that two women would want -- probably in vain -- to forget quickly. They were teased, pounced upon, had their clothes ripped, and molested by a throng of men on a main street outside a five-star hotel, chock-a-block with the New Year crowd, in the upscale Juhu area of the western Indian city of Mumbai (formerly Bombay), home to Bollywood and the country's financial capital.