I AND MY WORDS

In the midst of a sea of the strangers He stands Alone, unmoved, silent, all alone There is none that recognizes Him, or Knows Who He is Those who do, loathe him more and more And yet, He is Real, the One that marks this land His presence the glimmer of long lost hope The flag above him, flutters silently in the breeze Giving a sense that change will resume once more It was a nightmare that happened many moons back That seems to have no end in sight to it And yet, His presence there, His presence elsewhere Makes one wonder, has the movie ended, or is there more? It was a dark, desperate moment when his dearest fled And yet, He decided to sit this one out yet again For it wasn't the first, but was hopefully the last And his dearest would return to their homes once more Many a harrowing times did He viewed from atop Many a times He had to see bodies float ashore And yet, while they damaged His Body, His Shrine They could not damage that Spirit, That Soul That Soul that resided in eve...

Akali Dal-BSP 'Pankhi' Protest Against Power Cuts in Punjab (courtesy: The Tribune ) It is election season in Punjab, and as usual, the power cuts stretching for hours in a day are becoming a source of much-heated debate among political parties. From claims of most expensive power to faulty agreements signed by previous governments and some innovative methods of protest, everything is up for grabs. However, lost in the din are several peculiarities and problems of the state’s ailing power sector that are not being resolved in the right manner. Peculiar Demand Curve Punjab has an extremely varied demand curve through the year. Power demand of the state in the summers is exactly double the winter’s power demand. As Bhupinder Singh and Malkit Singh pointed out in 2017: One of the reasons for the low utilisation of state plants is the peculiar load curve of Punjab, which varies from 5000-6000 MW in the winter to 10000-11500 MW in the summer. The state plants come into operation on...

  As they walked in, Saurabh felt a strange burst of uncomfortable heaviness all around him. It was as if the air in the unfinished tunnel had become extremely heavy, almost to the point of being suffocated. And yet it was not suffocation; rather it felt that the body was all of a sudden wrapped, somewhat embalmed in something invisible. The light of the mobile phones doubling as torches also seemed to be somewhat bent, or was this a trick being played by the mind? Saurabh could not decipher this eerie feeling all around him. All of a sudden Adhir spoke up. “Why are we standing here? Let’s go back!” The three started to tread backwards, and soon, they were out of the tunnel. It was only now that they could see each other clearly, and there they spotted the same cloud of unease over the faces of the other two that perhaps was also present on their own. “What the hell was that!?” Ranjan was perhaps the most freaked out, having nearly screamed out the question in a fit of anger. “Dare...

Saurabh was standing with his friends at the tunnel of Barog station. The train was yet to come. Having come prepared with every detail on the phone, he had decided for sure that he would walk through the haunted tunnel. The long drawn summer and the brief monsoon in Shimla had given way to the autumn spell, bringing a nip in the air while the afternoon sun’s languid nature had made his small roadside resort residence’s lawns become an ideal spot to lull around.  But lull he would not. It was his mission to explore the history, as he drove around to visit the various places like the Dagshai cantonment that had housed Mahatma Gandhi and had been a theater to the mutiny of the Irish soldiers during the Home Rule movement of 1914 in an encore, albeit a much smaller one, of the Curragh incident. Even more was his interest to check up on the remnants of the Gurkha forts, a testimony to the theatre of war the region had been for nearly fifty years in the 19th century between the various ...

No small matter, this Much noise is being made on the rising petrol and diesel prices in India. Is it worth the shouting matches that are being indulged in? When one looks at the petrol and diesel prices data from the Petroleum Pricing and Analysis Cell under the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Government of India, and starts doing some basic analysis, interesting trends start to emerge. As against the petrol price increments that were taking place between April 2007 and April 2014, the price of petrol has been under control, lower than what it could have been if the trends had continued. This can be understood when one sees the trendline based on prices for this period versus the actual prices for the subsequent period till 1 June 2021. It must be noted though that the anomaly could very well be a result of suppression of fuel prices under the UPA for the longest time. Interestingly, the UPA government had removed the market flexibility policy that the previous Vajpayee regime...

The Circus Called Indian Media (courtesy: Mint) The latest advisory of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on treating COVID-19 gains praise from a wide spectrum of the medical and scientific community for its evidence-based approach towards COVID management . Also, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi went on record to laud India’s scientific community for their invaluable contribution to the nation’s fight against the COVID pandemic. However, given the utterly deplorable and false propaganda of a section of India’s liberal community, it is time to ask a few tough questions of the eminent liberals of our country who think they know more than scientists. Modi Government’s Multiple Steps in Sync with Science That the oh so liberal liberati of India was bereft of any cranial abilities was well known. What has been on demonstration for more than a year and a half however account for nothing less than plagiarism. The word plagiarism is used because the model templates that their ...

Source: Wikimedia Commons The consensual comity of scientists have failed the world on the COVID pandemic, and the strike down is not on just one count alone. Why do I say so, many would ask? Just look at all the evidence piling up since last year, finally being accepted with great reluctance regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, the world, driven by its science based policy making systems, has been forced to accept the possibility of a laboratory leakage. This, when there has always been evidence to suggest that the COVID-19 virus pandemic was likely triggered by a leakage from a virology lab in China, where it was perhaps being studied. Accidental or not, what is certainly known to us is that the global comity of scientists has shamed itself by covering up through herd consensus and attempting to discredit alternative views, and raises serious questions on how the public can believe them anymore. What is even more problematic is the fact that ‘gain of function’ research has been...