How Can We Matter

The National Post Day of India is celebrated every year on October 10. Indian Postal Department is around 170 years old. It was Lord Dalhousie who founded India Post in the year 1854.   National Post Day 2023 The World Post Day is an international day that is celebrated each year on October 9, the anniversary of the Universal Postal Union (UPU), which started in 1874 in Switzerland. These early postal systems were the start of the global communications revolution, introducing the ability to send / receive letters to / from others all over the world.  My contemporaries belong to a generation that heavily depended on the Postal Department for our communication. Compared to the instant WhatsApp communication today, we belonged to a dinosaur era that had its own charm. In those bygone days we used to pen our thoughts carefully on paper using legible handwriting, go to a post office to buy an envelope, write the address of our friend or relative on it, insert our hand-crafted lett...

Who are Singaporeans? Singapore's indigenous population was originally Malay. As it was under British colonial rule since 1819, traders and workers came in from China, India, Sri Lanka, and other neighboring countries. Its multi-ethnic population has reflected this history ever since. Today Chinese, Malays, and Indians form the three largest ethnic groups. They constitute 77%, 14%, and 8% respectively of the population. The remaining 1% are Eurasians with a sprinkling of people of other descent.  President & Prime Minister of Singapore None of these major groups is homogeneous. Chinese community as a whole come from different provinces of mainland China and therefore speaks mutually incomprehensible dialects. Malay group includes Indonesians speaking Javanese, Boyanese, and other dialects. The most diverse Indian group consists of Tamilians (more than half), Malayalis, Sikhs, Sinhalese and Pakistanis. While Malay is the national language of the country, the four official langua...

Vivek Ramaswamy has already become the brightest shining star in the political landscape of America. Former President, Donald Trump, is reportedly considering Vivek as his running mate to be the VP. But Vivek is aiming for the Presidency himself and has claimed that he would offer pardon to the troubled Trump to help reunite the country. Photo: Facebook/Vivek Ramaswamy He is a self-described "outsider" who is challenging the status quo and offering a fresh perspective on the problems facing the country. However, he is unquestionably ascending in the world of politics and is rapidly outpacing all the other candidates in the presidential run. He is fully committed to cultivating and investing in future generations. Vivek is the only candidate who has offered clarity on several critical issues plaguing the country, while all the others, with years of political experience behind them, provide rather ambiguous, politically correct, stock answers to the questions put to them. His u...

It is truly gratifying to note that one of the strategic objectives outlined in the Strategic Plan   Enhancing Bhārat's Positivity, And the World's: A Strategic Plan  of August 01, 2022 is coming to fruition. 'Bharat, not India': Calls for renaming in Parliament’s special session I hope that the official writing of the name  Bhārat  will include the diacritical mark (a straight bar ¯ placed above the letter a) to indicate that it is a long vowel. I also wish that the Government will also utilize this opportunity to change the call sign  VT  on all civilian aircraft registered in India, as indicated below.  The Strategic Objective 5 in the  Strategic Plan  was elaborated in the following words. Strategy 5: Restore the culture of  Bhārat and the legendary name of the nation. The preservation and development of our  cultural heritage  should be an ongoing process as not much concerted efforts have been attempted at restoring...

This is yet another episode of my health saga; the previous ones are: Surgery On My Second Heart!   dated June 09, 2023 The Sky Gets Dark, SLOWLY!  dated May 14, 2023 On Wed 14-06-2023 I suddenly got pain in the left side of my chest at around 11pm. I was coming out of the toilet to go to bed. I started rubbing the chest aggressively in a rotating motion and simultaneously woke up Vasantha, who was sleeping in the adjacent bed room. I couldn't decide whether I should go to the MSMC hospital immediately, and if so, how? Vasantha immediately called our ever-helpful neighbor Nikhil. In the meantime, recalling a social media post on Cough CPR I forced myself to cough vigorously several times.   Since the chest pain seems to have subsided, I decided not to rush to the hospital. Nikhil told Vasantha to call him anytime if I got chest pain again and had to be rushed to the hospital. However, I wanted to know where exactly I should go to in the Narayana Health City, since i...

A woman in USA sued her parents for giving birth to her " without her permission! " They are charged with the serious crime that they contributed to conceiving her and giving birth to her, without getting her consent to "being here! " Image Courtesy: YouTube TikToker Sued Parents for Being Born - and Won? They didn’t try to contact her in any way before she was born to see if she actually wanted to be here! What a horrendous thing to do! Poor thing. She was completely unaware that she was going to have to face in her life journey the arduous task of having to grow up, go to school and then to university, get a job to support herself, find a partner of her liking, get married, and... ! In the light of her valuable experiences gained from the lessons of her life so far, she has now advised all the expecting mothers, who have not yet given birth, to hire a psychic medium and ask "if they actually want to be here." Aapne mujhe paida kyu kiya? According to my ...

We all know that no human is born with two hearts! So, where is the question of a second heart? We also know that our heart pumps blood to take it to all parts of our body, right? The point is that our body has a second blood pump, which is our calf muscles! The calf muscle is often considered the second heart because it plays a significant role within the circulatory system that is similar to the heart.  Calf blood circulation diagram (veinatlanta.com) The heart pumps oxygen-rich blood through arteries to reach every part of the body, providing oxygen and nourishment. The calf muscle pumps the oxygen-depleted blood back through the veins to reach the heart. Once we learn how the calf muscle assists the heart in circulating blood throughout our body, we’ll understand why keeping our calves strong is just as important as protecting our heart through good nutrition, exercise, and other healthy lifestyle choices. What happened to my legs and why an urgent surgery is required is explai...

Let me start with a simple pragmatic question - when do we cease to exist? The simple answer is, we cease to exist with our death. But, hang on, it is not that simple! I am not talking about the several theories and beliefs about whether death is the end of life. This is more about an alternative experience that the new artificial-intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, provides. Copyright Stock image Most of us are part of some social media groups like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, etc. These groups have helped us establish contacts with our long-lost school, college, and office mates. Though most members just forward texts, pictures, video messages, many are also active members commenting on others' posts, enriching the discussion...  But often, the members don't meet each other physically because the people are spread across different towns, cities, or even countries. This means we are basically interacting with our friends online using our devices, rarely meeting them in person....

In his book released in 2020 with the above title, on the pitfalls of ageing, Chinese author Zhou Daxin - the Mao Dun Literary Prize winner - provides a sensitive exploration of old age and the complex, hidden emotional worlds of the elderly.   Some Valuable Words of Wisdom from Daxin’s Latest Novel . He warns that, once you move to the other side of 60, the sky gets darker, and the light begins to wane until, one day, you are back to lying in bed like the baby you were born as. In the book he writes, …Many elderlies speak as though they know everything, but of old age they are in fact as ignorant as children. Many elderly people are in fact completely unprepared for what they are to face when it comes to getting old and the road that lies ahead of them.  My dream of leading a medicine-free life came crashing down with a silent thud when it stopped me dead on my track the other day during my regular evening walk. Suddenly, without any warning sign, there was excruciating ...

Deep fake images, videos, and news are creating zero-trust societies, using the latest Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) tools. Today, we just can't distinguish between true and false news. Consequently, we can't take trust for granted, we can't trust anyone, forcing us to assume that everyone and everything on the Internet is out to get us! AI-generated image (Eliot Higgins/Twitter)   Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative group Bellingcat , used an AI tool called Midjourney to imagine in pictures what the former president might look like being arrested. These pictures have been viewed millions of times. View this report .  On top of it, a new study by three MIT scholars has found that falsehood diffuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, in all categories of information, and in many cases by an order of magnitude. From communication and transport to healthcare and connectivity to blockchain and gene-editing t...