Ripples In A Teacup

Should teenagers train with weights? I’ve come to realise that many folks think teenagers, especially girls, shouldn’t train with weights. And it’s no consolation to have found that even my parents felt the need to regale me with ballads of the irreversible damage weightlifting apparently inflicted on teens Fortunately, it’s been sorted. My parents have been re-educated and the gym supervisor has been “brought” around.  It panned out like this. I started using my dad’s dumbbells around six months ago and then, after we moved house three months ago, began to frequent the gym inside our new apartment complex. My dad and mom kept reiterating that lifting weights might not be a good idea, since I was get to ‘grow up’ fully and my muscles might not develop fully they way they should. I ignored them. Then the gym instructor started telling me and my dad quite loudly that I shouldn’t lift weights and should restrict myself to the treadmill. It was all very annoying. Thankfully, my parents...

Lately, I've been trying to cut down on my hours unproductivity (read: binge watching youtube), to focus on more rewarding pursuits.  The other day, while learning French, I came across the words “bazar”, meaning “mess”. C'est le bazar translates to ‘it’s a mess’ and “ mettre le bazar" would translate to  " make a mess” or “mess things up” Bazar or baazaar is a word I’m familiar with. In Hindi, a “bazaar” or “baajaar” means “market”, a word which has its roots in Persian .  Although the alternative meaning is foreign to me, a  baazar is usually a jumble of shops, and I can see where the French are coming from. This has got me thinking. Are there many more Persian or other Asian loanwords in French and other European languages? I searched on Google for Persian loanwords in French and didn’t find much, though I found a ton of French loanwords in Persian , which is only to be expected. Since European nations industrialised much ahead of Asian countries, it was natur...

  A nine-judge bench of the United States Supreme Court has ruled 6-3 in Dobbs v. Jackson that the right to abortion is not a constitutionally protected right. By overturning the ruling in Roe v Wade which had enshrined the right to abortion for nearly five decades in the United States, the Supreme Court gave back to individual states the freedom to legislate on abortion. It is expected that a number of states, especially those with Republican legislatures, will put in place or reinstate laws that either make abortion illegal or make the process of getting an abortion very difficult. This process had already begun in the form of trigger laws designed to be effective if Roe V. Wade is overturned. I am outraged by the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson . In a country where people have so much freedom to buy firearms, why don’t women have the right to have an abortion? Until the foetus is delivered, it is not a separate being and does not have rights that are distinct from the w...

Living in India, I consider Europe to be the ‘cold continent’, where summers are cool and winters frigid. This snowy vision of Europe melts away on hearing that temperatures in both Spain and France have broken records, hitting 35C and is expected to reach 40C in some areas. Firefighters have been battling wildfires across Spain as the country faces its warmest early summer in decades. In the UK, temperature records have been broken and it was more than 28C on Wednesday and 29.5C on Thursday. Climate change is real. Climate change is here. Let’s wake up and do something before it is too late. Or is it already too late? 

 Today is Juneteenth. Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865, when Union Army Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, and issued General Order No. 3, proclaiming that the enslaved African Americans there were free. "The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free," the order read. "This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor." Two months before Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3, Confederate General Robert E. Lee had surrendered to the Union Army at Appomattox Court House, Virginia which marked the end of the Civil War. Two-and-a-half years earlier, President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which expectedly didn’t have the desired effect in areas under Confederate control...

I just read this chilling BBC report of how Nepal is preparing to move its Everest base camp because global warming and human activity are making it unsafe. The base camp is located on the Khumbu glacier, which is rapidly thinning. The exposed ice is melting, causing rocky debris to fall, and destabilizing the glacier.  "We surprisingly see crevasses appearing overnight at places where we sleep," said Col Kishor Adhikari of the Nepali army, who was staying at base camp while leading a clean-up campaign "In the morning, many of us have this chilling experience that we could have fallen into them in the night. Cracks on the ground develop so often, it is quite risky."  This frightening change has been attributed to global warming.  A leading member of the committee that recommended the base camp move, Khimlal Gautam, said the presence of so many people at base camp was contributing to the problem. "For instance, we found that people urinate around 4,000 litres at...

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve felt outraged on hearing of yet another woman being attacked solely on account of her gender. However, each time I hear of ‘another’ incident, I resolve to do something about it and yet nothing happens. Will venting on my blog about this new incident in north-eastern China help anyone? Most probably not, but I can’t help myself and so please bear with me.  Three women share a meal at a restaurant in a restaurant in the Chinese city of Tangshan, which lies 180 kilometres to the east of Beijing. A random stranger (incidentally a “man”) walks up to them and seems to have a quick word with one of the women and also places his hand on her back. The woman pushes him away. The man strikes her immediately. His companions drag the woman outside and beat her up. Her companions are also brutally assaulted. You can watch the horrible video here. Why did that man attack that woman? I don’t know. Was he annoyed that she was an independent woman who see...