Posts

Showing posts with the label dystopia

The Song of the People

-
Image
  (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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Familial Dystopia

-
Image
Image: Zauther, deviantart.com The women around me whom I first met as girls. They were brave and full of positivity. They were so much into beauty and the future. I even envied them. My parents had strong ideologies and limited aspirations. These girls seemed to be free from such overpowering paradigms. All these women, except a few, excelled in education. They got jobs and married. Their education and jobs ranked high in the marriage choices they were offered. During the first few years, the star-eyed couples went on vacations, built houses and had kids filling their homes with laughter.  Then they settled down like coffee shreds in a pot. The clear coffee poured from the pot but they did not.  The light went drab in their eyes. Their shoulders sagged and their gait changed.  Somewhere on the road they took, they entered a contract to serve the dystopia, family.     I see them withering away. They became obese, eating all the leftovers from the meals...
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