Anupam Jha | अनुपम झा | 阿努潘.杰哈

Have you ever heard about "going down the rabbit hole"? Doomscrolling or Doomsurfing is the internet lingo used to describe the process of chasing bad news and reading about it obsessively. Merriam Websters defines doomscrolling as "Tendency to continue to surf or scroll through bad news, even though that news is saddening, disheartening, or depressing." Bad news isn't in short supply right now. We can find tons of bad news, like people getting infected from coronavirus, many of them dying, economy going into a recession, people losing their jobs, and so on. All the bad news tends to surface into our news feed in the age of social media on a daily basis. We start to read any of the bad news and then gets sucked up into a pool of depressing news, before we know it, negativity creeps in, not to mention the time that gets wasted. With people staying home most of the time due to coronavirus, screen time has increased sharply and the tendency to doomscroll as well. S...

Birthday as an event is highly overrated and people usually get overly enthusiastic about it. More than individuals, parents and other family members celebrate this day as an accomplishment, for they helped pull the dude into this universe, not realizing the dude competed with several million sperms to secure this feat. Let's get some things clear. First of all, I am not anti-social, nor am I against anybody celebrating their birthday. I am just trying to clarify my perspective on this bizarre event.  Being born and getting a ticket to lead a life in this rather dubious world isn't a glorifying achievement. If anything, this should be worrying people, while humanity tends to believe in fairy tales, science doesn't. According to science, humans have brought about their own peril and nothing seems to suggest of even a hint of course correction. This doesn't mean we are at the cusp of doomsday, but are slowly and steadily approaching it. While majority of the existing popu...

The supreme court of the United States in a historical decision ruled that Donald Trump cannot block access to his Financial records sought by New York prosecutor, this puts the United States president into the same bracket as a normal US citizen and he is not immune from the criminal justice system. The judge of the Supreme court "John Roberts" wrote for the 7-2 majority, "Article II and the supremacy clause do not categorically preclude, or require a heightened standard for, the instance of a state criminal subpoena to a sitting president." This is a major win for the liberals and their quest for putting the US president into public scrutiny with regards to his financial malpractices. Donald Trump has earlier sought immunity from any proceedings or criminal investigations against him. The court overruled Donald Trump's plea 7-2, making a point that no citizen, not even the president of the United States is above the rule of law and the common duty to come up w...

One of the biggest and important industry in terms of jobs and livelihood is facing immense challenges in the wake of coronavirus crisis. Will it be able to survive the pandemic and evolve? Coronavirus has disrupted many industries with its social distancing and no travel rule. This no travel rule is directly impacting the travel and tourism industry since mobility is an important aspect of tourism. The concept of virtual tourism isn't very common yet. While the world economy is set to witness its challenger to the great depression, almost every industry is looking at a prolonged period of pain, they are faced with two options, either evolve or perish. Travel and tourism are no different, the sector has been one of the worst affected by the coronavirus pandemic and its aftereffects, many of the airlines are already shutting down and economies relying heavily on tourism are finding alternate ways to generate revenue. The UN World Tourism Organisation has estimated that earnings from...

India and China are facing off in the Himalayas at the line of actual control (LAC) from the last two months and the conflict seems to be escalating with the death of twenty Indian soldiers. Indians called for a boycott of "Made in China" products. There seems to be some retaliation on the Chinese side as well. India and China having been non-confrontational neighbours since many decades have come to blows in the Himalayas. Recently both armies came to blows and India lost twenty of their brave soldiers. China did not mention the casualties on their side. This sparked a national outrage in India and Indian nationalists called for a total boycott of "Made in China" products. They burned effigies of the Chinese president 'Xi Jinping', threw Chinese goods on the streets and called for not buying anything from China. Such behaviour is not new in India and there have been calls for Boycotting "Made in China" products several times in the past. But in th...

When coronavirus started to spread, it was more a disease that the elderly had to be worried about, but in the recent past, infected age has reduced drastically showing an increasing number of youngsters getting infected . In most places in America, median age of all coronavirus infected people have gone down from 65 to mid-30s. This drop in age of the ones getting infected is a cause of worry as younger people have shown tendency to be asymptomatic carriers, posing a threat to elderly, in their homes and communities. This drop in median age is also due to the fact that when infection started, testing was limited to those who were hospitalized, testing has since been increased to others as well. This realization has led to authorities getting active and trying to close down all those places where younger age population hangs out like bars, night clubs, party hot spots etc.  Most of the youngsters started coming out in the wake of the George Floyd's death due to choking by a white p...

While the coronavirus pandemic forced people to sit at home and prohibited them from venturing out, looking for entertainment, the streaming services came to the rescue, serving content right where they are, at home on the channel they most prefer, the internet. With most of the world's population under lockdown due to coronavirus pandemic, online streaming companies like Netflix and Amazon prime etc, have had a huge surge in their content consumption. In fact, some analysts believe the pandemic has catapulted the consumption two years ahead of its time. In a study conducted by a think tank recently suggests the major chunk of internet consumption during lockdown was into porn, streaming entertainment and gaming . It is no surprise that companies have realized that data is the new oil and they want their piece by providing content via streaming platforms, also known as over the top (OTT) platforms. This has led to many new OTT platforms mushrooming up backed by major technology and...

Humans do all kinds of tests on animals as research. They think for a greater good of humanity it is imperative that animals should be treated as subjects for drug tests. Is this morally correct? We have been testing almost all kinds of drugs on various kinds of animals ranging from rats, rabbits, cats, monkeys and so on. While these tests are sometimes harmless but most of the times turns fatal as well, killing the respective animal. Such deaths due to the introduction of lethal drugs into the bloodstream of subject animals isn't the only animal abuse there is, these are also kept in rather pathetic conditions in laboratories. Several animal rights agencies have been constantly pushing for alternate ways to be considered by the big medical and pharma companies. Though there are laws in almost every country for protection and habitation of animals but there is not yet a specific law related to the drug test abuse of animals. This leads to widespread flouting of animal's protect...

Women have been the better part of men since humanity exists but can they be better leaders in the times of crisis? Well coronavirus certainly throws some very interesting facts and figures in support of women leadership during the time of unprecedented crisis. The motherly instincts become a cherry on the cake. While we have always read about women being born leaders, their caring instincts, calm head and patience makes them a perfect leadership choice. While this remains a reality the participation of women in political leadership has been all too low. It is still dominated by Men, specially Strongmen in today's scenario who have miserably failed in managing the coronavirus crisis.  New Zealand and Germany have been commended for their approach in tackling coronavirus pandemic, incidentally both are led by compassionate female leaders. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern have been flexible yet firm in dealing with this unprecedented crisi...

India recently banned many mobile apps developed by Chinese firms from use in India. While this might sound frivolous and will not have much effect on India, it might have some serious repercussions on China's perception as a global technology provider. For many years China has been an outlier in the world of integrated technology. It has banned most of the big American technology companies to operate in China examples include Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. The main reason they think it was necessary was to control the dissipation of information and they can only control what they created themselves domestically. This gave rise to all kinds of homegrown technology companies providing all kinds of applications and services using internet as a platform. China basically created an ecosystem of technology which ran parallel to the technology of the outside world but never met. This parallel technology ecosystem was designed keeping in mind what was successful in the west e.g. WeChat wa...