Justice delayed but a ton of bricks await
From 'SC declines Ramdev, Patanjali apology; expresses concern over FMCGs taking gullible consumers ‘up and down the garden path’', The Hindu, April 10, 2024: The Supreme Court has refused to…
COVID-19 pandemic
33 posts
Hot in Ballia
More than half of the deaths reported during the heatwave in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar this week were reported from just one district in the former, called Ballia. On (or around) June 17, the medical su…
Real heat
In the aftermath of Chicago's infamous week-long heatwave in July 1995, the city's residents, but including the mayor Richard Daley and his administration, couldn't believe that so many ha…
The omicron variant and scicomm
Somewhere between the middle of India’s second major COVID-19 outbreak in March-May this year and today, a lot of us appear to have lost sight of a fact that was central to our understanding of COVID-…
Panicking about omicron
The new omicron variant of the novel coronavirus has got everyone alarmed – which is darkly ironic. This variant has reportedly racked up more mutations than previous variants of concern, including th…
On the lab-leak hypothesis
One problem with the debate over the novel coronavirus's "lab leak" origin hypothesis is a problem I'm starting to see in quite a few other areas of pandemic-related analysis and dis…
Broken clocks during the pandemic
Proponents of conspiracy theories during the pandemic, at least in India, appear to be like broken clocks: they are right by coincidence, without the right body of evidence to back their claims. Two o…
The problems with one-shot Covishield
NDTV quoted unnamed sources in the Indian government saying it will be conducting a study to assess the feasibility of deploying the Covishield vaccine in a single-dose regimen instead of continuing t…
On The Lancet editorial
On May 8, The Lancet published an editorial criticising the Narendra Modi government's response to India's second COVID-19 outbreak, which has been redefining the meaning of 'snafu'. A…
Courts and COVID
India's courts have played a prominent in helping (or not) the country manage its COVID-19 epidemic, especially during the second wave this year – from asking the government to explain which proof…
Being apolitical doesn't mean politics doesn't exist
A few years ago, we had a writer who would constantly pitch articles to us about how the Indian government should be doing X, Y or Z in the fight against this or that disease. Their submissions grew q…
The constructionist hypothesis and expertise during the pandemic
Now that COVID-19 cases are rising again in the country, the trash talk against journalists has been rising in tandem. The Indian government was unprepared and hapless last year, and it is this year a…