Watch: Indian tricolour hoisted at Seattle's iconic Space Needle on 79th Independence Day
Consul General of India in Seattle, along with the Mayor of Seattle, Bruce Harrell, and other select dignitaries from Seattle city leadership, attended the event, news agency ANI reported.
Taking to X, Consulate General of India, Seattle, posted about the event along with a video showing India's flag held high in the air as people gather to celebrate Independence Day.
Along with the video the Indian consulate wrote,'a historic first in Seattle! India's tricolour soars over the Seattle skyline. Happy 79th Independence Day of India.'
The Consulate General of India, Seattle, hosted the 79th Independence Day celebrations with the official flag hoisting ceremony at the Consulate premises. Several dignitaries attended the inaugural ceremony, which featured a vibrant cultural segment, including a Bharatanatyam performance, soulful renditions of patriotic songs, and a graceful dance performance showcasing India's diverse traditions.
Defining symbol of Seattle's skyline, the Space Needle is one of the most famous landmarks in Seattle with an observation deck atop the tower that was built for the 1962 World's Fair. With a height of 605 feet, it features a round observation deck which gives a 360-degree view of downtown Seattle, Mount Rainier and Puget Sound.
Meanwhile, another iconic landmark, the World Trade Centre, was also illuminated in the colours of the Indian flag, celebrating India's Independence. In a post on X, India in New York said, 'India's Independence Day was celebrated as iconic New York landmarks -- One World Trade Centre, Grand Central Terminal, Niagara Falls, and Kosciuszko Bridge -- lit up in the colours of the Indian Tricolour. A vibrant tribute to the deep bonds of friendship between India and the United States.'
The landmark displays came after the Indian Embassy in the US hosted the 79th Independence Day celebrations on 15 August, with Indian Ambassador to the US Vinay Kwatra hoisting the tricolour at India House, marking the official commencement of the day's festivities.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Scroll.in
an hour ago
- Scroll.in
From the memoir: How a boy born in a courtesan's quarters became a writer
My mother entertained the thought of killing me. A few hours before I was born. In the hierarchy of noble thoughts, I ranked second in priority. Her own life claimed the top spot – and with good reason: She had to survive before any of this, whether my story or even hers, was possible. Bachcha jaane do, mujhe bachaao, she cried. Let go of the baby, save me. To her credit, she did not use the more actionable words bachcha maar do. Kill the (damn) baby. She could not have possibly said that. Was her God testing her? Let go, as in let it slip away. Jaane do. A first-time mother – but a murderess? Oh no, she was incapable of that. No gestating mother wants to be a baby killer. But what if it involves a deliver-and-die scenario? Mujhe bachcha nahi chahiye, she frantically repeated, trying to make herself heard loud and clear to the nurses treating her. I don't want the baby. She was pleading mercy to the surgeon gods. She did not mean to kill the foetus. But in this dire situation, she did not want it, especially if saving it meant her own life would be exterminated. She was being wheeled into the operation theatre for a messy delivery. She had overheard the lady doctor Bohra confide to a nurse that they would have to do a Caesarean. Cut her stomach into two and piece her back again, like an illusionist's trick. A normal delivery was ruled out. There was a high probability of losing one of us. Her pelvis was too fragile to push the baby out, her vagina too small to yawn or regurgitate it like a food disagreeable with her sensitive stomach. I had turtled and turned my face away inside her womb, unwilling to leave the comfort of the warm amniotic fluid I was floating in. She was in great pain – a scrawny young woman who was in the hospital for six months, carrying a foetus her body could not bear the weight of. My najayaz, illegitimate, father, Rehmat Khan, used to visit her infrequently. His chamchas, sycophant friends, visited my mother, filling her ears with gossip about how he frequented the kothas of other tawaifs in her long absence. Woh Meena ke kothe pe hain. Woh Geeta ke kothe pe hain. Woh Malka ke kothe pe hain. Rehmat Khan had quite the appetite for entertainment. Mother had not married him. Khan Saab, as she called him, was her patron in the kotha where she worked as a tawaif, performing mujras. They had quarrelled about the baby. She wanted it. He agreed for her to have it. But he wanted no other responsibility. He was already a family man with a wife in purdah and three happy children. They were clueless about his secret life in the kothas, or helpless, as most Indian households are when they discover their hostile dependency on a serial adulterer. Main apna naam nahi de sakta, he said. How could he give his name to a tawaif's child? La haul bila kuat! Ironic for a man whose name, Rehmat, means compassion, kindness, mercy. His double standards aggravated her labour pain to a dirge she was singing at her own funeral. My mother had conceived a baby because she wanted to get back at the sniggering tawaifs in the kotha who mocked her, calling her baanjh, infertile – a woman who would have no legacy. So she demanded a child when my father was courting her. Mujhe bachcha chahiye, she tempestuously said to him one day. It was an order, not a request. She knew he was married. She had spent enough time in her profession to understand that no bachelor was going to arrive at her kotha with a colourful, noisily musical baraat. That is a rather early plug for the funereal but hopeful climax of Pakeezah, where Allama Iqbal's sher is aptly read aloud: Hazāroñ saal nargis apnī be-nūrī pe rotī hai Baḍī mushkil se hotā hai chaman meñ dīda-var paidā. Unadmired, the narcissus weeps a thousand years For an aesthete to cherish its inimitable beauty Miles from being an aesthete, my illegitimate father was only too happy to serve a challenge and perhaps prove his own worth. Patrons love flaunting their virility in a kotha where only a few get the opportunity of intimacy with a tawaif. It is unlike a brothel, where they can pay and have a limitless choice of sex workers to pick from. A kotha is for entertainment. And to tawaifs, sex work is not entertaining. It is never part of their performance. Their mujra of song and dance is conducted in a mehfil, a gathering of several patrons. The patrons go back home to their wife and children, after kite-flying crisp currency notes for the tawaif's special attention – where they get a thenga, a wiggly thumb, for nothing in return. The tawaif chooses a patron she likes. Flashing money will not get her attention – as they say, tawaifs see more money falling at their feet each night than they see morals in the eyes of men truly valuing them. The lucky patron she picks can be her only one for as long as she wishes him to be – for a night, a week, months, years or even a lifetime, in some cases. Who am I fooling? No patron returns the loyalty as favourably. The tawaif can choose to have a child or not with her favoured patron. She is fortunate if that child is a girl, who can carry forward her name in the trade. But what about a boy? Turn him into a tabalchi, a tabla player, or any other musician—a baajawala or a sarangiwala. What use would such a child be in the world, my mother thought, if the foetus could not have its father's name in the likely event that its mother died in childbirth? Was there a more cursed life than to be born an orphan? She knew perfectly well how difficult it would be for me. She had seen a worse fate – as a child, she had been used to pay off a debt to a Bedia family, dressed as a child bride, raped by her husband and then sold to a kotha. When a family offered no guarantees, could one be better off without it? No mother wants to give birth to an orphan. The Caesarean was a success. Dr Bohra dangled me by an ankle after cutting the bloody umbilical cord of uncertainty and said to my mother, Dekho Rekha, ladka hua hai! See, Rekha, you have a boy! My mother looked at me and fainted. She could not believe I was stubbornly alive. Like her. She had no energy left in her to remain conscious. She had prayed for a girl. Maybe the disappointment made her collapse. I was immediately put into an incubator. When she woke up after two days, she asked the daiyya, midwife Pushpa, Mera bachcha kahaan hai? Where is my child? Pushpa told her that I, a premature baby, was weak and had been kept under watch. A week passed. I was not shown to my mother. She panicked. She had a vision in her dream. The Sufi saint of Ajmer, Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti, and Goddess Kali instructed her to take her child away, or Yamraj, the God of Death, would do so. Yep, that sounds like the dance-off of the thunder-clapping gods. Apparently, according to my mother, the morning I was born, there was a violent hurricane in Calcutta. Bahut badaa toofan aaya tha, she said with astounded eyes. As it so happens in every thunder and lightning oral story, which sounds as hokey as a Hindi-film flashback. Achanak se kaale badal hatey aur tu subah ki pehli kiran jaise nikla. You shot out like the first ray of dawn as the sun emerged from the dark clouds. Her ignoble thoughts may have been those nebulous clouds. Her sentiments, however, sweeten the comical. Mother fought with the hospital staff, signed a patient's risk form and dashed out of the compound, hailing a taxi to take me home. She was an emotional heroine on the run from her well-wishers. The hospital staff was almost certain she was going to kill her baby. Her mother, Gullo, the tobacco-chewing hard nut of a woman who carried a sarota, a nutcracker, in her ghagra, which doubled as a self-defence weapon, was waiting for her at the kotha. The staff had informed Gullo that Rekha would recover soon, but that the child's future was uncertain. Rekha would now have to dodge and survive the weaponised sarota flying through the kotha doors, risking even the newborn. She pressed her infant tightly to her chest. Both of us breathless. A Tawaif Smothers Her Newborn with Love. Killer headline in The Telegraph. I can rewrite my beginning as my end. As thrilling as all of this sounds, I would have preferred to remain incubated in the hospital. She acted rashly in blind faith – no, actually, blinded by faith. I could have died. She almost killed me. Twice. But she gave me life instead. Twice as much. Hers and mine. Our resilient lives. How did she intuit? Probably grasped from her own early experiences when life pushed her off the cliff. She found the courage and the derring-do to endure its twists and turns, like a fledgling songbird falling from its nest learns to soar before it touches the ground. No training, no practice, just killer instinct.
Hans India
an hour ago
- Hans India
Classes in Sanatana Dharma begins
Ongole: The Chinmaya Mission and Srigiri Srivenkateswara Swamy Devasthanam have launched Chinmaya Bala Vihar training classes aimed at imparting Sanatana Dharma values to children at Srigiri Gokshetram here on Sunday. The Sunday classes focus on developing cultural knowledge, moral values, and Indian identity among young participants. During the inauguration ceremony, Chinmaya Mission organiser Swamiji Satyatmananda praised Dr Aluru Srinivasa Charan Rajiv for initiating the programme, emphasising that these classes would foster a positive outlook, discipline, and patriotism in students. Executive Trustee CV Ramakrishna Rao discussed the temple's construction and pledged necessary supplies for training programmes. Board Chairperson Aluru Jhansi Rani expressed satisfaction with the partnership, while Brahmachari Harish Chaitanya outlined curriculum plans, including Bhagavad Gita teachings and competitive exam preparation. The organisers announced that the programme aims to enhance students' communication skills under trustee supervision. The inaugural session featured students reciting Gita verses, with organisational support from Vedic scholar P Bhanu Prakasha Sharma and chief priest Pradhyumna Kumar. Students, parents, and teachers attended the event, where organisers distributed Prasadam from Sri Venkateswara Swamy to all participants, marking the successful launch of this educational initiative.
Hindustan Times
5 hours ago
- Hindustan Times
Metro overhead wire tripping cases fall in Delhi
The city has reported a decline in the number of Overhead Equipment (OHE) tripping incidents due to kite flying around Independence Day, with 11 such instances recorded in 2025 -- down from 23 in 2024, the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) said on Sunday. DMRC said the disruptions occur when metallic-coated manjha becomes entangled with the metro's overhead wires. (HT Archive) DMRC said the decline in numbers was down to preventive measures taken over the years, which included deployment of maintenance teams across all lines, the installation of insulation sleeves on catenary wires and shifting of return conductors, it said. The number of tripping incidents were 102 in 2021, 90 in 2022, 33 in 2023, 23 in 2024 and 11 in 2025. 'DMRC has established a dedicated response system to manage such incidents. Maintenance teams comprising of five to seven members are deployed across all lines during these occasions which immediately rush to any affected location to remove entangled strings, ensuring restoration and maintaining punctuality of metro services,' said Anuj Dayal, Principal Executive Director, Corporate Communications at DMRC. DMRC said the disruptions occur when metallic-coated manjha becomes entangled with the metro's overhead wires, causing tripping and subsequent delays. in services. 'In addition, we have also carried out installation of insulation sleeves on catenary wires at elevated stations with heavy bird and kite activity to prevent short circuits from tangled strings. So far, sleeves have been installed at 20 elevated stations, with further coverage provided beneath portal structures and cantilever locations in Phase-3 stations,' Dayal added.
