
Video: Air India plane crash's lone survivor breaks down at brother's funeral
Ajay's funeral was held today in Diu, an Indian union territory. Heart-rending videos on social media show Ramesh at the funeral, carrying his brother's remains on his shoulders to the cremation ground. Vishwash is a British national — a native of Diu who is settled in the UK. The brothers had flown down to India to visit their family in Diu.
Vishwash, who had sustained burn wounds from the crash, was discharged from the Ahmedabad Civil Hospital late on Tuesday night, and is still recovering from injuries, as seen in the funeral videos.
#WATCH | Diu | Lone survivor of AI-171 flight crash, Vishwas Ramesh Kumar, mourns the death of his brother Ajay Ramesh, who was travelling on the same flight
Vishwas Ramesh Kumar is a native of Diu and is settled in the UK. pic.twitter.com/fSAsCNwGz5
— ANI (@ANI) June 18, 2025
'Can't believe how I survived'
Speaking from his hospital bed, the 40-year-old had told Indian media that he was travelling to Britain with his brother after visiting family in India.
"When I got up, there were bodies all around me. I was scared. I stood up and ran. There were pieces of the plane all around me. Someone grabbed hold of me and put me in an ambulance and brought me to the hospital," Viswashkumar told the Hindustan Times.
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"Everything happened in front of me, and even I couldn't believe how I managed to come out alive from that," Ramesh said from his hospital bed on Friday, speaking in Hindi to national broadcaster DD News.
"Within a minute after takeoff, suddenly... it felt like something got stuck... I realised something had happened, and then suddenly the plane's green and white lights turned on," Ramesh said.
"After that, the plane seemed to speed up, heading straight towards what turned out to be a hostel of a hospital. Everything was visible in front of my eyes when the crash happened."
Ramesh, aged 40, is from the British city of Leicester, according to Britain's Press Association news agency, which spoke with his family at home.
"Initially, I too thought that I was about to die, but then I opened my eyes and realised that I was still alive," he said.
"I saw the air hostess and aunties and uncles all in front of me," he said, his voice trailing off in emotion, using a term of respect used in India for older people.
"I unfastened my seatbelt and tried to escape, and I did," he said.
"I think the side I was on was not facing the hostel," he added. "Where I landed was closer to the ground and there was space too – and when my door broke -- I saw that there was space, and I thought I could try to slip out."
"My left hand got slightly burnt due to the fire, but an ambulance brought me to the hospital," he said. "The people here are taking good care of me."
Seat 11A of the aircraft
Social media footage shown on Indian news channels showed Ramesh in a bloodstained white t-shirt and dark pants limping on a street and being helped by a medic.
A photo of his boarding pass shown online by the Hindustan Times showed that he was seated in seat 11A of the plane bound for Gatwick Airport.
His brother Ajay had been seated in a different row on the plane and asked for help to find him.
"He was near the emergency exit and managed to escape by jumping out the emergency door," said Vidhi Chaudhary, a senior police officer in Ahmedabad.
On June 12, the Air India aircraft came down in a residential area, crashing onto a medical college hostel outside the airport during lunch hour, in the world's worst aviation disaster in a decade. More than 290 people were killed in the crash. The dead included some on the ground.

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The National
a day ago
- The National
Banu Mushtaq: Why my Booker Prize is a victory for women and secular Muslims
Banu Mushtaq, the trailblazing Indian author who made history in May by winning the International Booker Prize for her novel Heart Lamp, says the award marks a collective victory – for literature, for women and for her secular Muslim identity in a country she sees as increasingly divided. Mushtaq, 77, has spun the tales of everyday lives of Muslim women and girls, their rights and treatment under the patriarchal system in India. Originally written in Kannada language, spoken predominantly in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, Heart Lamp is the first collection of short stories to be awarded by the prestigious prize. The stories explore women and their different phases of life – from teenage years, to marriage, motherhood and even death. There are stories of grandmothers and aunts, sisters-in-law and neighbours, divorced women or those who have been abandoned by their husbands. There is a heart-rending story of a mother who fails to save her infant daughter who dies of hunger, and another story of a woman who dies in childbirth after pushing out eight children. There is a story of power dynamics between a woman and her daughter-in-law and a satirical take on an ignorant mutawalli, the manager of an Islamic trust who is caught between his sisters' demand of their rightful share in ancestral property and his religious duties of burying an unidentified body for respect in the community. As a Muslim woman, Mushtaq, who often calls herself a 'critical insider', says it is important for her to tell the stories of women's rights and religious injustice. 'I cannot tolerate injustice. When I see such a situation, I become so furious but helpless at the same time. I don't want to shout so I start writing about them directly,' she tells The National. Post-partum depression and activism Mushtaq is the eldest of the nine children, seven daughters and two sons, born to a progressive father and a teenage mother in Hassan in Karnataka. Being the oldest, she was fierce from a young age, she says. It's a quality that shaped her life as an activist, a lawyer and a progressive writer. Muslims were supposed to study in Urdu, a language originated in India inspired from Persian and Arabic, and spoken mostly by the community. However, her father wanted her to study in the Kannada-language missionary school. She wrote her first story at the age of nine and her first book published in 1974. 'My father was a secular person and wanted us to study in the regional language spoken in the state. I was given admission on the condition that I pick up the grammar in six months,' she says. In contrast to community expectations, she studied science, attended university and worked as a teacher at a school and married a man of her choice at the age of 25, considered radical for the times. Despite being a strong-willed woman, Mushtaq chose to become a housewife as expected by her in-laws. But the decision almost cost her life when she tried to kill herself due to post-partum depression after giving birth to her first child. 'It was a precondition that I should not continue the job,' she recalls. 'It was a large family. We used to cook for 20 people three times a day. It was a shock for me because I always wanted to do something better but the circumstances restricted me to four walls. 'Within a year, I gave birth to a daughter. I already had unrest within me but may have post-partum depression. One day, I quarrelled with my husband. When he was sleeping, I got my hands on white petrol and poured it all over me. I was wild and about to light myself up. My husband got up and saved me,' she says. The horrific incident left her husband, Mohiyuddin, who worked with his family business, shocked. He decided to move out of the large family house so his wife could live life on her own terms. 'It was a big thing 50 years back. A son was not expected to rebel against the family,' Mushtaq says. 'We went to my father's home without a penny and within six months, I was pregnant with our second child.' Mushtaq started stitching clothes to help run her family but she wanted more. In 1983, she fought and won local municipal elections. This eventually paved a way for her to get into social work and activism. She was associated with the revolutionary Bandaya literature movement in Kannada literature that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s with a focus on social and economic justice, and it provided a platform for marginalised voices, including Muslims and Dalits or former untouchables. 'I started writing articles about Dalits and Muslims for newspapers as I was involved with the movement. People liked my writing and some of the major newspapers and weeklies requested me to send articles,' she says. Fatwa and knife attack A prolific writer, she kept writing from the 1980s but her focus changed when she realised the Muslim representation in books was missing. 'There is a particular reason. There were no women writers, only male writers, and they used to write about Muslim families but not Muslim women,' Mushtaq says. 'They would write about Muslim men, a rickshaw-wala or somebody doing menial jobs and write as if they were the most vicious character. I used to wonder 'Muslim men were like everyone else, not all were bad.' 'I wanted to write about my neighbours, sorrows, happiness, feasts and particularly the Muslim world in India which was still an unexposed world, nobody had seen a glimpse so it will clear an understanding and bridge a gap between the society.' Mushtaq has written 65 stories over three decades. But her fierce writing also upset many people in the community. In 2000, she was slapped with a fatwa for her advocacy of the right of Muslim women to enter mosques. Indian Muslim women are not traditionally allowed to offer prayers in mosques unlike their counterparts in the Middle East. She also survived a knife attack that year. 'In Islam, there is no such restriction but in South Asian countries because patriarchal politics restrict women,' she says. 'But this irritated people. They said who am I? Why am I offering my views on this issue? They haunted me for three months,' Mushtaq recalls. 'People took the opportunity and one day, a person entered my office with a knife. Some of them started accusing me of bringing all the negative and exposing things in Muslim community.' Mushtaq survived the knife incident after running to her home adjacent to the office and hiding in a bathroom. Her International Booker Prize win is crucial for her, not only as a writer but also as a Muslim voice in India where majoritarian politics and communal polarisation is increasingly rising. The political climate means Muslims in general, and Muslim women in particular, often face underrepresentation and are stereotyped. Mushtaq's writing brings authenticity, nuance, and complexity to what it means to be Muslim in India today. She was recently called a 'terrorist'. A usual trope used by right-wing fundamentalists against Muslims in India. She says she is writing about the incident in her upcoming autobiography. 'My subjects have changed after the Babri Masjid demolition. Even though there is patriarchy in Muslim society, now Muslims as a whole and the prejudices that are levelled against them is important for me,' she says. 'Somebody called me a 'terrorist' because I, as Muslim, won the Booker. I am not a cool person and thought of slapping the fellow, but I restrained myself. It haunted me for days. 'Booker Prize is a recognition for me that I am a woman, a writer and that I am a secular Muslim.'


Khaleej Times
2 days ago
- Khaleej Times
Forgotten files: How a visa form sparked a journey into the past
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She would come back a little later after checking Dad's imperial passport and his white blazers, still safe in a tin trunk under the wooden bed that had been a witness to many a birth and death in the family, and would say, 'In 1919, to be precise.' So, when I called her over the weekend to ask for 'parents' dates of birth and places of residence' to fill in the Schengen visa form, she said she is no more as eidetic as in the past. 'Suresh, I'm not sure I too have the stamina to rummage through the colonial relics.' It was a straight no that launched me into the day-night search and rescue operation, Monday being the visa application interview day. I remembered a copy of dad's passport that had several entries stamped at Dhanushkodi port, his usual exit point to Sri Lanka, or old Ceylon, in my age-old collections. It was a Herculean task to hunch around on a bed and turn every leaf of dozens of files that had been gathering dust in cupboards, chests of drawers, and old briefs and suitcases. I was aghast at the kind of stuff the search churned out: From children's funny scrap books and personal diaries with critical observations about childhood, menarche and marriage to my first driving test file, warranty papers of the audio system, fridge, washing machine, first personal computer bought from Al Fahidi street in Bur Dubai, first remittance receipt in 1989, school autograph books filled with heartbreaking messages, London Tube and bus tickets, passbooks of Singapore's OCBC and Postbank accounts, dozens of certificates of excellence in sports and cultural events at school and college levels, best bayonet and sharpshooting medals from the Indian army, et al. Going by the number of remittance receipts that were unearthed, I would have been a multi-millionaire sitting pretty on a stunning bank balance. I sat there and wondered where have all the monies disappeared. Amma's white paper, written on red-lined sheets and dispatched by snail mail, on my financial mismanagement and her budgetary requirements stared me in the eye. Piles and piles of pay slips from my Bombay days to Dubai-Singapore-Dubai years, notifications of promotions, increments and bonuses, credit card payment delays, fines to etisalat and Dewa, delivery bills from Karachi Darbar, Ravi, Sindh Punjab and Woodlands restaurants, receipts of deposits at video rentals, boarding passes at DXB, counterfoils of Dubai Shopping Festival and Summer Surprises raffles and much more dropped out of suit cases shedding scales. Dad's imperial passport and mum's school certificates were still missing after two days of search. 'They cannot go anywhere. I had lived with them in the three dozen houses we had lived in in our lifetime, so I will be the last to throw them away,' wifey argued. Simultaneously, wifey's own search for her parental data drew a blank. 'You are talking about people from the black-and-white, pre-digital era. They lived before Aadhaar and PAN card came into existence so there's no way I can help you.' Her brother was curt in his reply. But the biggest blast from the past was the original copy of an international wire, or telegram, I received in 1989 from my then and present employer, Galadari Printing and Publishing, intimating me about my visa and travel status for my first overseas job in the UAE. The yellowing piece of paper has more than singular significance. One, the pre-Internet communication service no more exists in India. Two, it opened up a whole new world for me, holding a mirror to a wider spectrum of culture and philosophy and societal values. Eyes welled up in joy and gratitude as I read the content of the wire: 'YR VISA IS READY. PTA HAS BEEN ARRANGED. YR PTA NO. 0984020554832. PLS CONTACT AIR INDIA OFFICE AND INFORM US THE FLIGHT DETAILS OF YOUR ARRIVAL. TO ENABLE US TO PRODUCE THE VISA AT DUBAI AIRPORT. REGARDS S.D DASTOOR MGR (FINANCE AND ADMIN) KHALEEJ TIMES, DUBAI. While emotions choked me to silence, my thoughts were about who would take care of these treasures after my time. While sis and I safeguard our parents' legacy that smells of their sweat and blood, will the new-gen children ever bother to carry along the unwanted baggage from the past? I recollect my conversations with my uncle who called Sri Lanka his home during my last visit before he passed. 'These are valuable books and my communications with the literati in India. I'm not sure if my children, brought up away from the Indian culture, will be interested in preserving them? Why don't you take them to India?' I did not give a word as I thought it wasn't politically correct to do so without asking his family, spread across the globe. Today, facing the same dilemma, I am asking the same question myself. Relics, anyone?


Khaleej Times
2 days ago
- Khaleej Times
'35 people in a room': Dubai families battle noise, overcrowding from illegal sharing
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