Posts

Showing posts from August, 2024

5023

-
Image
  photo source: susted.com On an ordinary day. On the sidewalk of an empty highway. Zora stood thinking of her home in a remote village in Africa.  Compared to the city she was in, her village and her home were crowded; richly, she thought.  Her family had cows, sheep, chickens, dogs, and cats.  The mornings like these were never silent there. The cacophony of meows, coos, clucks, bow-wows and moos; thinking of which, a smile appeared on her face. Ah, the smell of those mornings! She mused. She tried to picture in her mind, her favourite dog, Abiba, chasing a chicken. In the car that passed Zora on the highway, was a girl, Chunhua, from China, a medical student, who sat thinking of her forthcoming vacation in Africa.  She closed her eyes and saw a dog chasing a chicken and a girl running after the dog, calling out loud, ‘Abiba, Abiba!”  She was surprised, "I never used to have such strange yet specific thoughts before. Something odd is happening to me."...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Kitten

-
Image
  photo source: publicdomainpictures.net The kitten was feeling lonely.  Soon after her mother gave birth, she and her two siblings were thrown away.  The family was averse to animals living inside their home.  The mother cat had chosen a cardboard box below the staircase as its labour room.  The house owners took the 3 kittens immediately after they opened their eyes and saw the world, and put them in the narrow lane that led to another house nearby.  The kittens soon landed in their second home.  They did not have the skill to drink milk from a plate or bowl, and trying to do that, two of the kittens caught a severe chest infection and died in two days.  The third one, a beautiful black female, survived. She looked around.  A dog, just beyond the age of being called a puppy, was sleeping nearby.  She decided to play with him and poked his nose with her little claws.  The puppy woke up and also seemed to be pleased by the invitatio...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Life of Women in India: Gender Chronicles: Part 1

-
Image
photo source: flickr.com Domesticated and Powerless These are sketches of the lives of Indian women, how their lives still are not their own and how they navigate the man’s world. Irrespective of religion, caste or regional differences, an average housewife in India wakes up very early and makes tea or coffee for the entire family first.  If she is a housewife, she must cook for the children and the adults in the family.  Husbands and other male adults in the family would be seen sipping their morning tea or coffee sitting in a chair on the front verandah and reading the newspaper in perfect reverie.  The wife never gets a chance to sit like that, relax, or read a newspaper, as the first thing in the morning.  She could be seen running around in the house, scolding children and being scolded by her husband.  The gender division is deep-rooted and woven into the fabric of domestic life.  It is so naturalised that no one finds anything odd about it. Often, ma...
Post a Comment
Read more

When the Trees Walked

-
Image
photo source: flickr.com “Please, come back. We will take good care of you. We always have..,” I am pleading to the sprawling Mahogany tree that had walked away from our plot. Now, it is standing about 5 kilometres from our place.  Wait; did I forget to tell you I live on a planet where trees walk? Yes, that is true.  The Mahogany tree is not listening to me. He just stands there waving his branches in defiance. It is quite understandable that he is angry. One of his strong branches was cut off and taken away by a thief in the night and now he thinks we did not take good care of him.  “You are not supposed to be illogical like us, humans,” I try to reason with him, “we had this fence built around our farm more to protect you people than us.” I think he understands. His leaves, which were perking up till then, drooped a little.   Of course, you might have understood by now that they do not speak. Yet I am sure they can understand our language. They just seem hard...
Post a Comment
Read more

Popular posts from this blog

How Far Away Is a Cancer Vaccine?

-
Image
(image source: Pixabay) A cancer vaccine has always remained elusive for medicine and science. Is this situation changing? Is hope rising over the horizon? The Ovarian Cancer Vaccine According to the latest news , Oxford University scientists have developed a vaccine for ovarian cancer . This vaccine, OvarianVax, when available for use, will be able to teach the immune cells in our body to detect and attack ovarian cancer cells in the early stages of this disease. Prof. Ahmed Ahmed is the leading scientist behind this research.  The trial for this vaccine has started. The importance of this development is that when it is ready, this vaccine might wipe out ovarian cancer. Yet, this vaccine is still years away.  Why Is a Cancer Vaccine Still a Mirage? What is Happening on the Research Front? Catherine J Wu, a cancer scientist, was awarded the prestigious Sjöberg Prize for her contribution to cancer research  in February 2024 . She is a professor of medicine at Harvard...
Read more

Paraman, The Street Violinist: Memory of a Man

-
Image
  (The folk violin of Pulluvas; image source:  Kannanshanmugam,shanmugamstudio, Kollam , Wikipedia) The Village Visitors  Those were times when things were less complex than they now are. We lived in a bucolic countryside where everyone knew everyone else. The only outsiders who frequented the place were visiting relatives, a bunch of regularly appearing street vendors, the postman, the Gurkha (a man from Nepal who would be paid Rs 10 per month by each family for keeping vigil in the village during nights*), and our very own exclusive beggars. We knew them as they made rounds on almost expected dates and times. Paraman’s Song Paraman, the street violinist, had positioned himself between an artist and a beggar. In our culture, the members of the Pulluva community, who made exquisite music using two delightful musical instruments- a single-string local fiddle and a round mud pot with a tight wire wound across it- were the official local musicians. They would come to sing in...
Read more

Travel Plan: A Trip to Understand The Bermuda Triangle

-
Image
  (Image source: grammidistoria.wordpress.com Hi Traveler,  You are a fan of mystery, the inexplicable, and you would love to go probing the geographies, home to such mysteries. For someone like you, the Bermuda Triangle is now not an intangible puzzle. You can visit this region of the sea by entering it from three land masses, which form the three endpoints to the triangle.  The Bermuda Triangle: Basic History and Facts An imaginary triangle drawn connecting Florida, the Bermuda Islands, and Puerto Rico in the North Atlantic Ocean will give you the Bermuda Triangle. The area of this sea stretch is around 1.3 to 3.9 million square kilometres. The exact boundaries of the triangle are not demarcated. Different people at different times set vague definitions of the area under the triangle.    In December 1945, five Navy training aeroplanes navigating the sky above the Bermuda Triangle in the Atlantic Ocean, with 14 men on board, disappeared. A rescue mission was la...
Read more