Rima Singh, an executive with an Indian outsourcing company, smokes, drinks and dates boyfriends in New Delhi --- but doesn't tell her parents back home in small-town India.

Three years ago, the 24-year-old left what she described as a mundane life full of strict social conventions in the town of Mathura in northern India and headed for the bright lights of New Delhi.

India and Pakistan held talks on peace and security issues in Islamabad on Thursday, part of efforts to stabilize South Asia as the United States prepares to draw down troops from Afghanistan.

Concerns over terrorism are likely to dominate India's agenda since U.S. troops killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and since a four-year peace process collapsed when Islamist gunmen killed 166 people in Mumbai in November 2008.

Former Miss World turned actress Aishwarya Rai Bachchan is pregnant, her father-in-law and veteran Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan has revealed.

"NEWS NEWS NEWS !! I AM GOING TO BECOME A GRANDFATHER .. AISHWARYA EXPECTING .. SO HAPPY AND THRILLED !!!," Bachchan wrote on his Twitter page late Tuesday.

Top Bollywood actor Imran Khan said Friday he would challenge in court a decision to raise the age for buying alcohol in India's entertainment capital, slamming the new law as double standards.

Khan, who is teetotal, said he planned to file a case in the Bombay High Court against the state government of Maharashtra, which earlier this month upped the minimum age for buying beer from 18 to 21 and spirits from 21 to 25.

The Indian state of Gujarat has invited global tenders to help build the world's tallest statue -- a 182-meter memorial to an independence hero that will cost $300 million.

The towering 597-feet figure, which would reach almost halfway up New York's Empire State Building, will bear the likeness of Vallabhbhai Patel, the freedom fighter who guided India's integration into a united, independent nation.

Organizers of India's first "Slut Walk" have changed the name of the event and toned down its dress code because of concern the protest is too provocative, reports said Friday.

"Slut Walks," which have become a global phenomenon to protest sexual violence, see women dress in skimpy clothing to challenge the mindset that victims of sexual assault should be blamed for the crime against them.

Indian security forces defused a powerful bomb found on a train carrying about 1,000 passengers in the northeastern state of Assam on Friday, a police official told Agence France Presse.

"Security forces were conducting a routine search when they found an unattended small but heavy bag and on suspicion they checked and detected the bomb neatly concealed," Assam's inspector general Bhaskarjyoti Mahanta said.

The president of the Asian Development Bank on Thursday backed French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde to take over as head of the IMF global lender.

"Personally I think she is a perfect candidate," said the ADB's president, Haruhiko Kuroda of Japan, hailing "her capacity and talent" which he said had impressed Asian ministers and bank governors at an ADB meeting in May.

A pair of round-framed spectacles belonging to India's independence icon Mahatma Gandhi have gone missing from a museum in western India, officials said.

Staff at the Sevagram Ashram, a religious retreat some 75 kilometers (47 miles) from the city of Nagpur, noticed that the glasses had disappeared as they made preparations to mark the anniversary of its founding.

Suspected Maoist guerrillas, including some female fighters, killed ten Indian policemen during a landmine ambush in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, police said Friday.

The overnight attack came less than a day after another Maoist assault in the state killed five other officers in a gunfight when the rebels raided a police camp.