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Familial Dystopia

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

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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...
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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...
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