The toxic affair between Covaxin and The Lancet
That Covaxin has been leading a ceaselessly beleaguered life is no mystery – but The Lancet journal may not know that it has been pressed into the questionable service of saving the vaccine's repu…
VM
1664 posts
The names of our dragons
3 min read
The first piece of very-popular epic fantasy fiction I read was J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth saga, which, among many things, reminded me how much the American and British writers of ‘high fantasy’ ow…
Dirty power
4 min read
Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced at the COP26 summit in Glasgow that India will install 500 GW of non-fossil-fuel energy generation capacity by 2030. In his analysis of Modi’s speech for The Wir…
60 years of 'Tsar Bomba', history's most powerful nuke
6 min read
This post was originally published on October 31, 2018. I republished it once in 2020 after Rosatom, the Russian nuclear energy corporation, released 40 minutes of previously classified footage of RDS…
Is Covaxin's WHO approval guaranteed?
3 min read
I suspect after reading this PTI report that the WHO is practically helping Bharat Biotech put together a better application to have its COVID-19 vaccine, Covaxin, get the body's approval for inte…
It's great that the WHO isn't just 'not cutting corners'
1 min read
Call me anti-national (and I'm sure many will) but I'm glad that the WHO isn't just "not cutting corners" in the process of considering Bharat Biotech's application for the U…
Dream11: How hard should we work to play cricket for India?
3 min read
The TV ads for the fantasy cricket app Dream11 seem objectionable, to my mind. Thus far, I've seen three high-profile players of the Indian men's cricket team in these ads: Rohit Sharma, Shikh…
Where the atmanirbharta in spine?
2 min read
Truth be told, I didn't expect CSIR chief Shekhar Mande could be so disingenuous. "India didn't have to depend on western countries," he says. What is this abject refusal to thank ot…
The 'one billion doses' hype
2 min read
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has addressed India's people 10 times during the country's COVID-19 epidemic. This is fairly regular but also not frequent – that is, Modi's addresses are some…
He is never wrong
2 min read
Akshay Deshmane reported for The Morning Context on October 20 that the Union environment ministry has reversed two important decisions it made earlier this year: (a) to invite private law firms to he…
Why you should care about the Uttarakhand floods
There is a complex interplay of factors at work, and it's important to understand each one for a few reasons.…
A new way to harass editors?
5 min read
There’s a new way to harass editors – or perhaps it’s an old way that we’re just finding out about, first-hand. We know that repressive governments have started using the US’s infamous Digital Millenn…