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Showing posts from September, 2024

A Too Familiar Story to Remember

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(Image source: publicdomainspictures.net)   They lived in the same house on an island of history.  It was just about the same feeling of being out in the sea. Normal days preceded and succeeded days with storms and rough waves. When it was calm, everything was blue.  During the night, they knew all the darkness of the world. They clung to each other, despising it.  There was no lifeboat, no escape, but a canoe that looked like death. The holes in the canoe could swallow the entire sea. “I shall swim away one day, I shall take the canoe to another shore,” they would think, each of them, not once but for many galactic years.  They never knew there were millions of islands in the sea like theirs. The daily drudgery of life was a breath of fresh air. The lively sheep, the scent of corn, and decadence- the right distraction to stop them from killing each other the next moment.  Fishing in shallow waters, they dreamed of a day when a guest arrived. A stranger sen...
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Travel Plan: The Pellworm- Suderoog Islands, Germany

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 (Pellworm Island; image source: de.wikipedia.org) Hello Traveller, You are someone eager to walk unbeaten tracks. You wonder how people live in remote corners of the world where time seems to stand still, and life flows forever without much change. This is why you must visit Pellworm and Suderoog in Germany. These places might teach you an entirely new philosophy of life if you are the listening type.    Suderoog Island can be described in two phrases- one, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the North Frisian Wadden Sea, and two, called by many a floating dream. This island is on the mudflats of Germany. To benefit those uninitiated in geography and its weird diversity, I must explain that a mudflat is a tidal flat, a slob, as the Irish call it. It amounts to a coastal wetland formed by silt deposits in an intertidal area.  They are similar to bays, estuaries, lagoons, and bayous. The mudflats are alternatively submerged and exposed. Even when submerged, the water...
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Travel Plan: A Trip to Understand The Bermuda Triangle

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  (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...
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The Song of the People

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  (Image source: teilzethelden.de) The song danced on many lips in the crowded stadium. The song no longer felt sad; it was a forgotten song, rediscovered by a dictator. Rather reinvented. “Whoever is taking me back to the limelight, I will not complain. I do not judge because I have wanted this for more than half a century,” sighed the song when there was a pause.  It was a song that a freedom fighter wrote. It was everywhere throughout the 1930s and 1940s, even on every child's lips. “It is more difficult to make a child like a song unless it is honest,” the song picked up her train of thought from where she left it when the pause ended. This was a longer pause. The dictator was about to speak, and the silence spread like a blue silk cloth falling slowly above the crowd.   “This song is in our blood and our ancestor’s souls. I want to bring you those days of valour and honesty. When I hear this song, my heart is full of joy,” he said. The song felt a pang of guilt ...
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The Shepherd of the Mountains

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(Image source: flickr.com) A shepherd lived with his family on a Himalayan mountain stretch on its foothill. He owned a house and a Tibetan Mastiff dog. Buddhist by birth, he often wondered about the mysteries of life, looking at the white mountains.  A cairn stood near his house on the path leading to distant lands of Tibet and Nepal through forlorn villages hidden by snow. Each stone on the pile would remind him of the unknown passers-by. He would try to remember the faces of a few with whom he had chatted. There were villagers, mountaineers, scientists, and traders treading that trail for who knows how many centuries.  The shepherd would give water to his yaks and sheep in the corral every morning and go to the village prayer hall. The Buddha idol there, with half-closed eyes, seemed to be fast asleep.  “Where are the answers?” he asked the marble statue when no one was around.  His teenage son had moved to Kathmandu to work there as a driver. His wife was ailing...
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Travel Plan: Vanavara, Siberia: The Heart of the Tangushka Mystery Event

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(Vanavara town. Image source:  Traveling Dunia) Hi Traveller! You are fascinated by remote and isolated destinations and not the type to shy away from the hardships of exploring distant terrains and cultures. This is the first travel note for you, in a series of travel plans you will surely want to read before you go off that beaten track.  A Trip to Vanavara Vanavara is the nearest human habitation to what was known as the Tunguska event. Now, what was the Tunguska event? Know your history or google it up.  The incident happened in 1908. A meteor fell into the Taiga and burned and flattened a little above 2000 square kilometres of the spruces and birches growing there. This was the largest recorded meteor impact in history. And there are a hundred and some conspiracy theories about the event, a few even claiming that the explosion was supernatural.  In the Subarctic climate of Vanavara, everything is white when it is winter. This place is home to the Evenk people, t...
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The Room With A Fireplace

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(Image source: freepik.com)  “Are we dreaming about this or are we doing this?” was the first question I wanted to ask Ismael. The wind kept lashing at our windows and it sniffled and gave out a low moan now and then. A window had gone loose on its hinges. It is shut but continues to clatter in the wind.    “This is no dream, we are awake, can’t you see the sea through that crack in the window?  I looked. The sea felt on its feet today; a clumsy shapeshifting monster warming up to the moon and waking from its slumber. The room was green from mould and a diluted, airy darkness filled it. The faint light squeezed itself in by twisting its body along the edges of the crack.   We had decided to shut ourselves inside the abandoned house near the sea for a night. A lot of thought had gone into it. Was it because we were two world-weary professionals trying to compensate by finding meaning in each other? I have found no clear answer yet. We needed to do this and i...
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How Far Away Is a Cancer Vaccine?

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(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...
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Paraman, The Street Violinist: Memory of a Man

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  (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...
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Travel Plan: A Trip to Understand The Bermuda Triangle

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  (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