I am quite hot but become too cold if you remove the first two letters. What am I?

Birbal was jester, counsellor, and fool to the great Moghul emperor, Akbar.
The villagers loved to talk of Birbal's wisdom and cleverness,
and the emperor loved to try to outsmart him.
One day Akbar (emperor) drew a line across the floor.
"Birbal," he ordered, "you must make this line shorter, but you cannot erase any bit of it."
Everyone present thought the emperor had finally outsmarted Birbal.
It was clearly an impossible task.
Yet within moments the emperor and everyone else present had to agree that Birbal had made the line shorter without erasing any of it.
How could this be?

Why did Navjot Singh Sidhu put the new January calendar in the freezer

Today is John's birthday.
A year ago, John had five candles and he lit all the candles except the one at the last.
Now he is going to light all the candles.

How old is John Today?

(He is not five today.....)

At the local model boat club, four friends were talking about their boats.

There were a total of eight boats, two in each colour, red, green, blue and yellow. Each friend owned two boats. No friend had two boats of the same colour.

Alan didn't have a yellow boat. Brian didn't have a red boat but did have a green one. One of the friends had a yellow boat and a blue boat and another friend had a green boat and a blue boat. Charles had a yellow boat. Darren had a blue boat, but didn't have a green one.

Can you work out which friend had which coloured boats?

What's the next in the series?

H, Be, F, S, Mn, Kr, In, Gd, Tl, ?

Can you complete the sequence?

192, 021, 222, 324, 252, 627, 2__, 9__?

How can one talk without saying a single word?

John went to a parrot shop in Mexico, and the parrot owner told him that his parrot is so unique that he repeats everything he hears. John got excited and immediately bought the parrot. John went home and spoke many words, but the parrot does not repeat anything.
He went again to the parrot shop and complaint to the shopkeeper, but the shopkeeper never lied. Explain?

Find the number of squares in the below-given picture.