BTS Members: Know The K-Pop Stars' Real Names, Net Worth And More
Whether you are a new fan or a longtime ARMY, here's everything you need to know about the members of BTS.
BTS members have gained significant prominence over the last few years, making K-pop, a global sensation. Since their debut in 2013, the K-pop brand has captured the hearts of millions with their music, powerful performances, and authentic personalities. Whether you are a new fan or a longtime ARMY, here's everything you need to know about the members of BTS.
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BTS RM: Kim Nam-joon (RM) is the leader of BTS. He is known for his intelligence, deep lyrics and fluent English. He recently got discharged from the compulsory military service in South Korea. His estimated net worth is around $20 million. (File Pic)
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Hindustan Times
4 hours ago
- Hindustan Times
Singer Victoria Canal accuses ‘powerful' man of sexual abuse in Instagram post: 'When I was 19...'
Victoria Canal, one of modern pop's most promising young voices, was born with a congenital condition. However, despite it all, the Spanish-American artist has been outspoken about rejecting labels and refuses to let her disability define her. Victoria Canal recently made an Instagram post talking about the grooming and abuse she faced early in her career.(Instagram) The artist recently hit the headlines for speaking about her career and disclosures about grooming and abuse, which even led to the cancellation of the Soulshine at Sea festival. According to a Prime Timer report, Canal, who was born without the lower half of her right arm, in interviews compares it to something as ordinary as having 'an unlucky-shaped nose'. She has insisted that she does not want to be boxed as 'the one-armed singer' like Stevie Wonder, who is not solely defined by blindness. Her perspective has been vital to the music she creates. Canal learned to play piano without her right hand and developed unique chord voicings and creative techniques, which are central to her songwriting, the Prime Timer report added. Also Read: BTS' V shares adorable unseen childhood photos flaunting his glow-up in 25 years; fans call him 'timeless and iconic' Victoria Canal's career in music Born in Munich and raised across the globe, Canal grew up communicating online the most due to her family's nomadic lifestyle. Her breakthrough, too, came through Instagram, where short clips of her performance caught the attention of artists like Michael Franti and Emily King, who later invited her on tour. Canal has since shared stages with major acts, fronted Nike's Jordan FlyEase campaign, and in 2024, she won the prestigious Ivor Novello Award in the UK for songwriting. Her music, known for its vulnerability and honesty, explores themes of body image, identity, and resilience, the Prime Timer added. Abuse allegations and industry fallout Earlier this month, Canal revealed in an Instagram post that early in her career, she was groomed and abused by a 'very powerful, decades-older man' who offered her first professional break. In the post, she described how she was manipulated into silence by the abuser, who made her believe that no one else wanted her. Canal revealed that she was told speaking about the abuse would end her career before it even began, a report in Music Ally stated. Victoria said the experience, which lasted a little over a year, has had a lasting effect on her intimate life and that sharing her truth was part of her healing journey. Although she did not name her alleged abuser, speculation online claimed that she was speaking about musician Michael Franti. However, the claims have not been verified, the Music Ally report added. The repercussions, the outlet added, were rather swift, with fellow band Dispatch announcing they were withdrawing from Soulshine at Sea, a music cruise organized by Franti's team. They cited "deeply disturbing public allegations involving another artist on the lineup.' Also Read: Universal Music CEO breaks silence on Drake's lawsuit over Kendrick Lamar's Not Like Us: 'Makes no sense' For Canal, speaking openly about abuse, like her previous disclosures about body image and mental health, is part of reclaiming her power. She said, 'Whatever you look like, whatever you are feeling, you are accepted, you are enough. You are more than enough." FAQs What happened to Victoria Canal's arm? She was born without the lower half of her right arm, a congenital condition she refuses to let define her identity. Who is Victoria Canal? She is a Spanish-American singer-songwriter, born in Munich and raised internationally, known for her emotive songwriting and advocacy. What recent allegations has she shared? In 2024, she revealed she had been groomed and abused early in her career by a much older, powerful man. Who has Victoria Canal accused? Victoria Canal has not named her alleged abuser. Online speculation has circulated, but no claims are confirmed.
The Hindu
5 hours ago
- The Hindu
'Writing was never an ambition, only an accident': Sumana Roy on her favourite books and authors, and reading life
Published : Aug 17, 2025 10:17 IST - 13 MINS READ Sumana Roy is the author of two works of nonfiction, How I Became a Tree (Aleph Book Company) and Provincials; Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (Oxford University Press), a work of literary criticism; Missing: A Novel and My Mother's Lover and Other Stories, works of fiction; and two collections of poems, Out of Syllabus and VIP: Very Important Plant. Her poems, essays, and stories have been published in The Paris Review, Orion, Lit Hub, The Point, Granta, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Minnesota Review, Emergence Magazine, The Common, The White Review, Berfrois, The Journal of South Asian Studies, American Book Review, among other places. She is now Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University, India. Growing up in Siliguri at the foothills of the Eastern Himalayas, Sumana had access to fewer books and no bookstores except for some textbooks. She was formed, as she says, by the everyday—more by life than books and libraries. Drawn to reading through the kindness of others—books borrowed from teachers, books purchased by her father at his bank job—she also scavenged some magazines like Reader's Digest, National Geographic, and Sportsworld from the kabadiwala (scrap collector). More than reading and being immersed in the world of books, she was learning to listen to the way people spoke around her, and 'the way they spoke about their everyday lives, with humour, anger, joy, affection, and distance'. In her later reading life, she was especially drawn to poetry and essays, which remain central to her reading and writing. Writing, she emphasises, was an accident, a byproduct of circumstance rather than a sole ambition. From How I Became a Tree to Out of Syllabus, her books show her desire and fascination with the 'background': plants, animals, clouds, the architecture of houses and cities. In this interview, Sumana Roy reflects on growing up amid a scarcity of books during her provincial childhood, the joy of serendipitous reading, the books and poems she returns to again and again, staying true to imaginative instincts, and why writers should not follow market-driven literary trends. Excerpts: Also Read | I was writing unwritten history: Easterine Kire Tell us about your relationship with books and reading while growing up in Siliguri. How did your roots in the Himalayan foothills influence your imagination? There were almost no 'storybooks' in our house. There were two reasons for this: my parents had an extremely meagre income; there were no bookstores, none besides the two bookshops called Popular Book Depot and Educational Book Corner, from which our school textbooks were bought. The few books that my brother and I read over and over again came from Mrs Nora Bansal, our English teacher in the second grade, and Kamalesh Jethu, my father's friend, who, when he visited us from Calcutta, carried books in Bangla and music cassettes for us. Occasionally, during the library period in school, we were allowed to borrow a book. Mrs Bansal's children let us borrow the Famous Five and Nancy Drew from their collection. When the Rabindra Rachanabali became available to buy, my father, who worked at United Bank of India—the bank through which one had to buy them—bought the set for us. I began reading them after my ICSE—alone at home, with nothing to do, I first read the stories, which, at that time, I didn't like very much, then the poems and songs and essays. The Sarat Rachanabali had arrived before that, when I was in middle school. It was a very fat book, impossible for children to hold. My father read us the stories of Lalu on Sunday afternoons, after a lunch of rice and mutton curry. I remember another set of books—Tell Me Why, a series of sturdy hardbacks answering questions about the universe. My brother and I read one page over and over again: 'Why does the moon travel with us wherever we go?' That question has stayed with us, as I discovered recently when we were in Kashmir, and both of us looked at the full moon in the Pahalgam sky and then at each other. I was, like most hungry people in such a situation, an omnivore. I'd read everything that came to me. And much of this reading material was foraged from the kabadiwala—old copies of National Geographic, Reader's Digest, Sportsworld, anything affluent families had once read and then sold to him. Having nothing more than my neighbourhood and my town, fringed by the Himalayas, I was formed by the everyday in a way I would come to recognise only much later. I suppose I was formed more by life, its contingency, than I was by books and libraries. How have your reading tastes and preferences evolved over the years—from moving out of Siliguri after college and studying at the University of North Bengal to becoming a writer and academic? I'm sure I've discovered writers and provinces of thought and taste as I've become older. It might have to do with changes in place, friendships, and a recognition—and even coming to terms with—one's self as a thing beyond redemption. The poem and the essay continue to be my favourite homes, both as a reader and a writer. As a teacher—I'm not sure I want to be identified as an 'academic'; the word carries a weight which makes me feel like a fraud—I am now able to teach courses on aesthetic practice that I couldn't before, when I was teaching in Bengal's government colleges, where one has to teach a centralised syllabus. That has given me the freedom to experiment with thought systems through pedagogy. I'm teaching a course on the relationship between the rasas and the elements in the coming term, a subject that has come to preoccupy my thoughts for more than a decade now. Is there a particular memory from your childhood reading life in Siliguri that had a lasting impression on you? That I was always short of reading material, that I read the same things over and over again because of that deprivation—this is my strongest memory of my reading life as a child. To flatter myself, I could say that this made me pay attention to language. I don't know whether that's true. As a teenager, entering college—and its library—would turn that deprivation into gluttony. I read whatever I could find. By accident, I discovered the shelves of literary criticism first, and I took that to be literature. I read these books as one did novels and thrillers. I've stayed addicted to reading about the articulation of the reader or viewer's experience of being immersed in a text. Tell us about the books and authors from your early years of reading and how they influenced you as an aspiring writer? I must clarify that I had absolutely no ambition to be a writer. Like most things in my life—studying literature, coming to love, growing gardens, teaching—writing too was an accident, a byproduct of the circumstances I found myself in, rather than a roaring ambition that had set me on a path. I read everything as literature—all my school textbooks, including, say, mathematics. I wish I could say—like my students often do—that I read a lot as a child. I didn't, and I'm therefore not a good example for writers who've discovered themselves through reading. Also, reading has taken on a moral life today—it's not just the simplistic arithmetic that feeds our understanding of what makes a 'good reader', the assumption that a 'voracious reader' must be, by some kind of alchemy brought about by the reading experience, transformed into an empathetic citizen. My writing has been influenced by the way people around me spoke, the lives they led, and, more importantly, the way they spoke about their everyday lives, with humour, anger, joy, affection, and distance. You write about the natural environment, plant life, and how we interact with our natural world. What draws you to these ideas? I write about the world I live in or want to live in. In this world, the human—a person such as myself—is not at the centre. I'm a minor figure there—it is populated by plants and animals, not as they are in a fantasy novel, but as I see them. When I watch a film, quite often, my eyes are taking in a tree without leaves or, as they did last night, a nasturtium plant outside a house that hasn't been watered for some time. I am drawn to what has come to be called the 'background'—in art, in manuscripts, in public policy, in the architecture of our houses and cities, in everything. This comes from a natural instinct, by which I mean this manner of experiencing the world, noticing walls, doormats, earthworms, flies, clouds, and the shape of the wind. In writing about them, I'm only following my instinct, my curiosity about them. In a world where everyone must be a 'follower', I am a follower of what you're, in shorthand, calling the natural world. As someone who also teaches literature and creative writing, what advice would you give to aspiring writers, especially from small towns and villages who may not have easy access to quality literature or literary mentors and may not be writing in English? I am uneasy about giving and taking advice, and so I can only share what I have tried to live by. It is this—that we should not be bullied by 'literary trends', by what the market wants us to produce. We should give ourselves the freedom to write what we want to, irrespective of the discouragement and neglect we might receive from publishers. Honesty to one's aesthetic, to write what one likes to read, to remain an artist instead of turning into content creators in the demand-and-supply routine—it might be hard to live by this, to survive as a writer in a culture where one is bullied by marketing teams telling you what to write and sales teams telling you that your books don't sell. But it'll be worth it—for yourself. Which books or writers, Indian or international, do you find yourself returning to? What draws you to their work? I re-read my favourite books and poems often. One book that I've been mesmerised by ever since I was four years old is Sahaj Path. I have a soft copy of the first edition on my phone, and I still look at it in wonder when I'm exhausted—the form of the book, of the page in particular, the distribution of word and image on it, and the rhythm of everyday provincial life caught in it by Rabindranath Tagore and Nandalal Basu. It's a primary school primer, and it would inaugurate a way of thinking about life—and art—in four-year-olds that has now been lost. Who are your comfort reads—books and authors that help at difficult moments? I like to laugh. In the last few years, I've found myself reading two writers who happen to have begun life as provincials. Rajshekhar Basu and Shibram Chakraborty still make me laugh a lot. Could you name a few books you've gifted recently? Two books that I've gifted a few times recently are The Five Senses by Michel Serres and Love's Work by Gillian Rose. I gave a copy of Nandalal Bose's Vision and Creation to my closest friend a few months ago. Have you discovered any lesser-known or overlooked authors or books later in life that you wish you had read earlier? What was unique about their writings? Like many, I did not grow up reading writers around me. In my case, it has been poets writing from northern Bengal. Growing up isolated from any sense of literary culture, pestered by an education system that turned Bangla into a 'second language', I read almost exclusively in the English language. I had no idea about the rich body of literature around me. Only a couple of hundred kilometres away was Amiya Bhushan Majumdar. But I wouldn't begin reading him until my early thirties. There's an elastic intelligence in the experiments he makes as a prose writer. I wish I'd discovered his work before, as I wish I had Manindra Gupta. How does one write such sensuous prose, like he does in Akshay Mulberry? What are you currently reading and enjoying? Are there any contemporary books—fiction, nonfiction, or poetry—you would recommend to others? I've been reading Saswati Sarkar's poetry in Bangla, The World According to David Hockney, and finishing Rob MacFarlane's Is A River Alive? Adil Jussawalla's Soliloquies (Thayil Editions), written when he was eighteen, has just been published. I don't recommend reading lists to anyone, but this book might be of interest to your readers, particularly those who are curious about our literary history—along with Jussawalla's poem/play, there's also an interview with him, and photos I hadn't seen before. Which Indian writers are, in your opinion, brilliantly exploring the inner lives of small towns and provincial life? Any such books recently or previously published that deserve a wider readership and recognition? It's my belief that most of our literature, whether modern or pre-modern, emerged from a provincial temperament. I have not had the opportunity to read literature in languages besides Bangla, Hindi, Nepali, and English. Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Adwaita Mallabarman, Manik Bandopadhyay, Indra Bahadur Rai, Amiya Bhushan Majumdar, to begin with. Contemporary Bengali poets writing from the provinces, in northern Bengal, Purulia and Midnapore, have been writing some extraordinary poetry. Also Read | I started writing to challenge patriarchy: Banu Mushtaq In the current literary culture of India, what would you like to see change or get more attention, such as more quality translations of literature originally written in regional languages? I would like 'literature' to get more attention. Any kind of literature that comes with an adjective to announce its distinctiveness, from the need to blurb itself, alienates me at the beginning. It is quite wonderful that our literatures are being translated into English. I wish there was more translation between our languages. And even more than that I wish that the characterisation of translation as a kind of religion, an act of purification, with Anglophone Indians often saying 'I only read Indian literature in translation now' would stop. Literature's been hijacked for various agendas, both by the Right and the Left. I wish for us to be able to read for pleasure alone. Where there is joy, conversion will happen easily. We will no longer have to be spoon-fed worldviews. Imagine if you could invite three Indian writers—living or dead—to a dinner or tea party at your home. Who would you choose and why? And what conversations would you like to have with them? No one. I feel nervous and awkward among writers and academics. I have now become used to eating most of my meals by myself. I listen to music or watch baby videos on Instagram while eating. I think that has helped my digestion in a way I imagine eating with writers might not. Majid Maqbool is an independent journalist and writer based in Kashmir. Bookmarks is a fortnightly column where writers reflect on the books that shaped their ideas, work, and ways of seeing the world.
Time of India
6 hours ago
- Time of India
Rs 90L in subsidies, but artisans still struggle with rising costs
New Delhi: An artist decorates an idol of Lord Ganesha ahead of Ganesh Chaturthi festival, in New Delhi. (PTI Photo)(PTI08_13_2025_000314B) Karad: An artist gives finishing touches to an idol of Lord Ganesha ahead of Ganesh Chaturthi festival, in Karad, Maharashtra. (PTI Photo) (PTI08_08_2025_000137B) Despite the corporation's subsidy scheme, traditional idol makers struggle with rising costs, insufficient aid, and labour shortages. Morajkar said the survey to identify PoP idol sales began on Aug 8, and so far, GHRSSIDC's inspection has flagged none. He said that the inspection will continue until Aug 24. 'Local mud clay idols are the customer's first choice, due to our awareness campaigns. The Shadu Mati and coconut fibre idols from Maharashtra are in demand, but not as much as the local clay ones,' Morajkar told TOI . GHRSSIDC offers a subsidy of Rs 250 per idol for up to 250 idols to the local idol makers. As of July 2025, GHRSSIDC received 367 local vendor applications for registration. In 2024, 475 vendors received subsidies totalling Rs 90.5 lakh on the sale of 45,248 idols, Morajkar said. Pernem, Sattari, and Bicholim talukas have the highest concentration of traditional idol makers in Goa. 'Earlier, we used to get the Chikal Mati at Rs 20,000 for a 10m truck. Now, the prices have risen to Rs 25,000,' said Bicholim sculptor Durgaram Shet. Local artisans allege the PoP idol ban is not strictly enforced. The clay idols are heavier, with rich colours being another distinguishing feature. Umakant Poke, a third-generation sculptor from Morjim, said that because certain vendors sell PoP idols, local sculptors catch negative attention from handicraft officials. 'They think we are selling PoP idols. We are trying to earn money with our honest efforts,' Poke said. Stay updated with the latest local news from your city on Times of India (TOI). Check upcoming bank holidays , public holidays , and current gold rates and silver prices in your area.
