In Chandigarh, 'AK-47' sells for Rs 3.10 lakh

This 'AK-47' finally sold in an open auction for Rs.3.10 lakh against a reserve price of just Rs.10,000! And it has nothing to do with the Kalashnikov automatic weapons.

A Punjab-based religious sect Friday picked up the 'AK-47' as registration number for a luxury car.

It is the latest number series launched in Chandigarh. The actual number reads 'CH01-AK-0047'. The idea of having the 'AK-47' for a high-end luxury car has again shown the Punjabi fetish for fancy numbers.

In fact, the same sect head also picked up the number 'AK-56', the code for another Kalashnikov series automatic weapon. This number however went for the reserve price of just Rs 10,000.

The registration and licensing authority (RLA) in Chandigarh which auctions fancy numbers for vehicles, ended up with cash of over Rs 48 lakh as 93 of these numbers were auctioned Friday.

The number 0007 went for Rs 4.21 lakh, while 0005 went for Rs 3.25 lakh. Number 0001 went for a lower Rs 3.1 lakh.

In the auction for the 'CH01-AH' series, the number 0001 went for a whopping Rs 7 lakh. The numbers 0009 and 0007 went for Rs 4.5 lakh and Rs 4.25 lakh, respectively. Other fancy numbers went for prices ranging from Rs 2 lakh to Rs 3.8 lakh.

The AH series generated a revenue of Rs 53 lakh for the RLA.

The previous auction of the series 'CH01-AJ' had earned nearly Rs 40 lakh for the RLA. The number 0001 went for Rs 7.5 lakh, picked up by the owner of a BMW car.

"People have a craze for these VIP and fancy numbers. The RLA earns a lot of revenue every 2-3 months from the auction of these numbers," an RLA official said.

Chandigarh resident Narinder Singh Shergill became the first one in the region in May last year to break the Rs 10 lakh barrier to get the vehicle registration number of his choice - 0001.

Shergill's adventure in picking up the expensive number cost him half the price of the Toyota Fortuner sports utility vehicle that he bought for around Rs 20 lakh. He picked up the number in the 'CH01-AC' series.

"I was shocked, initially, when I learnt that he (Shergill) had bought the 0001 number at such a high cost. At this price, we could have bought another luxury car or two mid-segment cars," Shergill's wife Jaskaran Kaur had said at that time.

In recent years, nearly half a dozen people have paid up to half a million rupees to pick up the '0001' series number in Chandigarh.

In Punjab's Jalandhar city, 150 km from here, a Delhi-based businessman had bought the '0001' series number for his luxury Rs 2 crore Bentley car for a whopping Rs 7.25 lakh in August 2008.

Britain-based non-resident Indian Santokh Singh got the better of nine other bidders to get the 'CH-04-0001' number in April 2007.

The reserve price for the '0001' number is Rs 25,000. Any number of choice comes for a reserve price of Rs 5,000-15,000, if it does not have more than one bidder.

"The vehicle registration authorities in Chandigarh are having a good time in the last 6-7 years ever since the number auctions started. They have earned millions and car owners are happy too. Earlier, the VIP numbers were only available to influential people. Now it is an open game for anyone with moneybags," property consultant Shamsher Singh said.

Chandigarh has the distinction of having one of the highest densities of motor vehicles in the country. For a population of just over 1.05 million there are nearly 700,000 registered vehicles here.

First prize for a child in Somalia: An AK-47

A typical prize for a children's contest might be a backpack, a lunchbox or maybe some toys.

Over the weekend, a Somali radio station run by the Shabab, the most powerful Islamist militant group in the war-ravaged country, held an awards ceremony to honor children who were experts at Shabab trivia and at reciting the Koran. The prizes? Fully automatic assault rifles and live hand grenades.

The contest itself was held during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting, and featured questions that the Shabab seemed to think every child should know, like which war was Sheik Timajilic (a famous Shabab warrior) killed in?

Without a functioning central government, Somalia has some of the lowest schooling rates in the world, and many Somali children are more familiar with rifles than rulers. Contestants in the Shabab quiz included children from all across Shabab-controlled areas of Somalia, most of the southern third of the country. The children competed live on air from the many radio stations nationwide that the Shabab control.

On Sunday, the awards were handed out at a ceremony held at the Andalus radio station in Elasha Biyaha, a small town near Mogadishu, the capital. (Andalus was the part of Spain seized by the Arabs in the Middle Ages.) The first- and second-place winners won AK-47 assault rifles, some money and Islamic books. The third-place winner was given two hand grenades. The contestants were 10 to 17 years old.

It was not clear how exactly the sponsors determined the winners - or the choice of prizes. But at the awards ceremony, Sheik Muktar Robow Abu Monsur, who is widely considered a moderate Shabab leader, proudly said, "Children should use one hand for education and the other for a gun to defend Islam," according to Somali accounts of the event.

The Shabab and other militant Islamist groups in Somalia have become famous for their zeal in enforcing their strict interpretation of Islamic purity. Last year, the Shabab outlawed school bells in a southern Somalia town after deciding that they sounded too much like church bells. The Shabab have also banned bras, gold teeth, dancing and soccer, deeming them un-Islamic, and barred many Western aid groups, even though Somalia is suffering from a famine and tens of thousands of people have already starved to death.

Another militant Somali group, Hizbul Islam, ordered radio stations to stop playing music, which forced broadcasters to eliminate even the faintest suggestion of harmonious sounds from their daily programming. Some stations substituted the musical introductions to news broadcasts with the sounds of gunshots, engine roars, car horns and animal grunts.

Somalia has subsisted without a functioning central government for two decades. The country is now fragmented into various zones of loose control, with Islamist groups, clan militias, regional administrations and a very weak, internationally supported central government battling one another.