Browsing through page after page, one advertisement caught my eye : without resorting to any image or eye-catching graphics, a message was written in blue colour on white background : ‘Sangliana for President’. I scorned — “Huh, few days back, you wrote ‘Advani for Prime Minister’! Now that it is certain that Modi would be the prime-ministerial candidate from BJP, you have taken up this new campaign. King makers, eh? Now who is this Sangliana? Whoever!” And I continued with my browsing, the advertisement kept showing up with due perseverance, perhaps hoping that someday I would show mercy and pay attention to it. Finally, I gave in. I opened Google, and typed this name just out of curiosity. The result on right panel showed photograph of a man, possibly hailing from Mizoram, with a broad smile. Continue reading
My laboratory is situated in an isolated corner of the institute campus. Whenever I have to stay there in night time for some work, one or the other of the security guards turns up to check if everything is fine. That routine visit starts a scientific discussion and I find myself talking to him about lidar, sunphotometer, aerosols, dust, smoke and so on. 
I learnt C programming from the book by Yashwant Kanetkar. Hence, I have a sort of emotional attachment with that writer. While explaining how a particular computer language works, he often compares it with human languages, utilizes the concepts of thoughts, words, sentences, and draws parallels with syntax, compilers and so on. 
I do not remember the exact title and date when that article was published; the only detail I can recall is that it appeared in The Hindu, and that it examined the role of cinema in violence and other crimes. It made an interesting observation that although people may not be immediately motivated to subscribe to violent behaviour after watching action movies, watching it played repeatedly on screen does make them callous and apathetic. No arguments; yes, we do not seem to be appalled any more while witnessing the aftermath of violence of any type in society. 
Pradyot 