Money matters. But is that all?

Recently, Bayer, a pharmaceuticals and chemicals behemoth, agreed to pay $10 billion to settle with thousands of claimants who had filed in court against the role of Roundup (a weedkiller product of the company) in inducing cancer. One would believe that if a company is shelling out such a huge sum, it reflects an obvious admission of the claims. But the company has maintained that the product is safe and better than alternatives.

The only reasons behind the settlement seem to be that the company wishes to do away with the negative publicity and the battering the stock price has taken. Purely transactional, one might say.

The Big Bang comes to an End

The Big Bang theory is a theory (no need to sigh now) in Physics that seeks to explain the origins of the universe. How the universe, as we know it today (maybe without the hole in the Ozone), came to exist. And that pretty much concludes everything I know about the cosmological theory.

A search on - of course Google, what else – presents us with fifteen or so results that come up, out of which just one talks of the theory (dear Wikipedia). All other links and media point to The Big Bang Theory- the sitcom.

With Great Power comes Great Responsibility

Spread of misinformation and fake news is rampant today. On one hand, social media platforms are becoming mainstay as a source of news and announcements from political leaders and on the other they are (inadvertently?) acting as sources of unverified and ill-researched opinion that tend to be construed as news/facts.

In the aftermath of the 2016 USA Presidential elections, alleged Russian interference by means of Twitter and Facebook triggered multiple Congressional hearings on the issue of the companies’ platforms being used as a means to spread misinformation.

The not-so-noticeable side of the covid epidemic

A set of phrases are commonplace today, you see it in the news, the print media, social networks, everywhere: unprecedented crisis, mounting death toll, economic impact and accelerated vaccine development to name a few.

With this “unprecedented crisis”, we, as a global community are advised to follow some guidelines. The most important of which is to avoid contact as far as possible. Given the characteristics of the virus, this is a no brainer.

While the battle against the virus rages in the world under the spotlight of global media, there is an undertone to the whole exercise: the”unprecedented” increase in hours spent in front of digital screens.

Envisioning a Post Pandemic Nation

A recent article in the Guardian raises important questions about how governments across the globe re-imagine the post SARS-CoV2 Without a definitive treatment and hopes of vaccines still at least a year away, we need to acclimatize to the virus; lockdowns cannot span months together. The debilitating effects of shutting down the economy, especially in a country like India where there are crores of daily wage workers and an even higher number in the informal sector, is a glaring reason why we need to start thinking about how to "live with the virus".

While the article focuses on issues that seem to be endemic to the developed world, there are big parallels for India. With the 20 lakh crore economic package announcements underway by Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, the parallels are thrust right in the spotlight.