HPV Vaccination
I got my ten-year-old daughter vaccinated against HPV yesterday. The vaccine is now also part of the Universal Immunization Programme of the Government of India. SII’s CERVAVAC is a four-strain vaccine...
View ArticleBecoming a ‘Sustainable Generation’
Sustainability is all about doing things in such a way that the impact on the environment is minimal so that future generations suffer less. Most well-meaning folks focus on the second aspect, about...
View ArticleDisease Eradication vs. Strengthening Health Systems
I’ve always been enamored of the power of modern medicine to stamp out diseases from the face of the earth. But when you think of it, we’ve only done that with one disease: smallpox. And therein lies a...
View ArticleComplex Adaptive Systems
While reading Brian Klaas’ Fluke, I came across the fascinating mental model of ‘Complex Adaptive Systems’. This post is going to be slightly jargon heavy. Please bear with me. A watch is a complicated...
View ArticleLuxury Beliefs
Rob Henderson, the psychologist and writer grew up in nine different homes before his eighth birthday. He was born to an unwed drug junkie who died when he was three. His childhood, as described in his...
View ArticleThe Door and Window Tax
In the 17th century, coins in England were regularly ‘clipped’ to siphon off the gold and silver. When penalties failed to curb the practice, the Crown decided to accept and demonetize all circulating...
View ArticleHikikomori
I read Jonathan Haidt’s ‘The Anxious Generation’ over the weekend. His work, which examines the impact of Social Media on Gen Z, didn’t have too many ideas that I wasn’t already familiar with. The rise...
View ArticleNational Treasures
Last week, a friend of mine who’s relocating abroad, shared a predicament of his. He has a Jamini Roy in his collection which cannot be shipped to his new residence. It was only then that I got to know...
View ArticleNuclear Armageddon
I’m the person who is generally unmoved when I read about the ‘looming climate apocalypse’, the probabilities of an asteroid collision with the earth or say, a future pandemic. I’ve always been a...
View ArticleThe SDGs & Best Things First
The SDG Index of India was published last week. If you’re curious about India, the report provides a fascinating peek into the progress that India has made across each goal. The report has an...
View ArticleParametric Insurance for Disasters
One of the professional hazards in my line of work is that I’m at times invited to speak on topics that are complex and in which I have limited expertise. Last week, I had to speak on Parametric...
View ArticleMental Model for Categorizing Intellectuals
An apocryphal story has it that Confucius once became separated from his students in a strange city. They were searching for him when a local informed them that he’d seen a man who appeared...
View ArticleChristianity in Europe Today
Over the weekend, I read the French political theorist Olivier Roy’s superb ‘Is Europe Christian?’ and was mighty impressed by his analysis and arguments. The transformations of Christianity since the...
View ArticleOur Refrigerated World
So many of the gastronomical delights of our modern life would be impossible without modern refrigeration. Cheeseburgers, chilled beer, ice cream and of course all the imported exotic items like...
View ArticleBalasore, Bhadrak Notes
The coastal districts of Odisha are often the Ground Zero of the ferocious cyclones that originate in the Bay of Bengal. But what was once a destructive phenomenon has now been tamed by the state...
View ArticleA ‘Brutal’ pic
Yesterday, I was at the Chandigarh Secretariat of the Government of Punjab. The structure, an iconic landmark of the city, is also one of the best representations of Brutalism - the minimalist...
View ArticleThe Three Languages of Politics
Arnold Kling’s ‘The Three Languages of Politics’ is a short, succinct and handy toolkit to categorize political communication. For Kling, the three dominant political groups – the Progressives (what we...
View ArticleThe Real Costs of Chernobyl and Fukushima
Jean-Marc Jancovici and Christophe Blain’s 'World Without End' – a comic about Climate Change that outsold Asterix in France in the year of its launch was a sharp, engaging introduction to Energy...
View ArticleOn Settler Colonialism
Just as including He/She/They in your bio was recently considered an ‘in’ thing (at least until a few months ago), the term ‘Settler’ is also laden with symbolism, solidarity, and wokeness. But like...
View ArticleSuperagency
In Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future, Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato celebrate the potential of AI to transform our lives. Hoffman was the co-founder of LinkedIn, was on the...
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