FLEETING THOUGHTS THAT HAVE LONG BEEN UNPENNED

I'm not too good at watching and keeping up with series. It's not like I have an aversion towards it but, I don't know, it's just the way it is. But, I've just started watching the new miniseries, Chernobyl, well, because of my affinity for world historical events and just the horror associated with this one in particular. And holy shit! I have to tell you, I'm just two episodes down and it's intense as hell. I mean, obviously I can't even ever  come remotely close to apprehending what it was like on the night of April 26, 1986 and the years that followed. But it is bone chilling and ghastly, the sheer horror attached to the experiences of the victims that fell prey to mankind's probably biggest disaster ever is maniacal and unfathomable. Just trying to picture what was it like sends cold chills down my spine. Also, it does annoy me the dissonance that has always been there between politics and science. As the series show, the erstwhile S...

  This is a drain in front of my friend, Luri Das' house. The black thick sludge sort of stuff you see is crude oil exuding out from the ground, naturally. They even say they have a corner in their bedroom where the oil just seeps out on the floor battling the concrete on its way up from the soil. Just goes onto show, Digboi, which is a part of larger Dehing Patkai Elephant Reserve, was the perfect place for the Italian engineers to start drilling for oil. In 1867, the engineers were commissioned by the Assam Railways and Trading Company, to build a railway line from Dibrugarh to Margherita. Accidentally in the efforts of setting up railway lines, a part of Dalhousie's efforts of bringing railway to every corner of the country, oil was struck 10 miles from Margherita, which boasts of the repertoire of earning the moniker of 'Coal Queen of Assam'. And thus Asia's first and world's second oil refinery was set up here in my hometown in 1901. Digboi has lead the ma...

I have always been interested in the tribal and indigenous cultures and how they've forever been changed at the hands of the white man. I remember blowing my brains into smithereens back in the day, when it dawned on me that not all countries have been white since time immemorial. Countries like Australia, New Zealand were never white to begin with. They're made into what it looks like now, being fed to your world view by this white, global north based hypocrisy. And this is despite, the presence of minority (read: indigenous) however, low in quantitative terms but large enough to hear their histories, cultures through bloodshed at the hands of colonialism. And this is the same reason why I completely agree to Shashi Tharoor's marvellous speech at the Oxford Union Debate regarding Britain owning reparations to India, or its former colonies so to speak. The western white world needs to understand that there's a huge moral debt here in this debate intertwined ...