Make Sense of the world
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For every reader who bothers to write to the author, there must be a hundred others. One reader, Paritosh, wrote to Fair Observer regarding one of my articles that invoked well-understood principles of neuroplasticity to explain how any learning system, child or artificial intelligence (AI) can be...
At the start of the coronavirus pandemic and the associated lockdowns, it seemed like things would never wholly go back to how they were. We discovered that people could work efficiently from home without being monitored in the office. Students, some of whom had previously moved across the world...
If the current pandemic is a test of the global emergency response system, the international community is flunking big time. It has done just about everything wrong, from the failure to contain the coronavirus early on to the lack of effective coordination thereafter. As the predicted second wave...
In 1994, the United Nations coordinated the first International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), which resulted in the Programme of Action that formally recognized the right to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights (SRHR), including the right to safe abortion...
Research amidst the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that the virus is transmitted through wastewater. This makes it crucial to revisit the goals of India’s ambitious Swachh Bharat Mission (Clean India Mission, or SBM) that came to a close almost exactly a year ago. While there were substantial...
In a matter of months, the novel coronavirus has swept across the globe and entirely up-ended our understanding of normality. Now, as the virus continues to rage and signs of a second surge are emerging even before the first has ended, we’re rethinking everything we’d assumed and hoped for at...
The global COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the unpreparedness and inability of many countries to effectively manage complex risks and ensure community resilience. An important dimension of this dangerous flaw is the sharp divide between those who rely on science to shape policies and actions, and...
For many years, even decades, before the current global pandemic, environmental advocates have waged a war against single-use plastic. We’ve been winning that war. More and more consumers are carrying reusable bags for groceries and other shopping items, asking restaurants to use more...
Ever since the “most unlikely” Dutch scientist and pioneering microbiologist Anton van Leeuwenhoek scraped scum from his teeth and observed tiny “animalcules,” or germs, in the plaque samples beneath the first-ever microscope he invented, it bid fair to the presence of the microbial world...
As the world continues to endure the uncertainty and anguish bought by the invisible threat both to individual lives and the global economy, many politicians cling to the idea that once a vaccine against the COVID-19 disease is found, the return to normalcy will at last become possible....
Some news items manage to sum up in a simple and succinct narrative the entire madness of a phase of human history. We are now living in the era of hyperreality, in which everything that appears superficially ordered by logical principles is in reality structured by forces we have been trained not...
