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The Vaccine Conundrum

A vaccine developed and ready to be injected in less than one year is a miracle that no research laboratory or pharmaceutical company would have dreamed of before 2020 began. Their track record has been that Jonas Salk’s lightning-fast development of polio vaccine in less than 4 years, and Ebola vaccine was approved in December 2019 after the first Ebola incidence was found in 1976, i.e. more than 40 years after.  From discovery to approved vaccination is a 10-year long process involving 2-5 years of discovery research, 2 years of pre-clinical period, 5 years of clinical development at its very best, 1-2 years of regulatory approval, and then of course comes in the manufacturer. The clinical development period has its 3 phases that is creating the buzz we hear day in and day out these days. Phase I is when researchers concentrate on the question, “Is it safe?” Phase II tries to establish whether the vaccine is activating an immune response or not. Then comes Phase III when they ans...
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Kohli and Smith, a la Tharoor

Now that Virat Kohli and Steve Smith are once again facing each other down under, a friend asked me to compare them—batting prowess and all. It was pretty late in the evening, and it would be a fair guess that I had guzzled quite a few shots more than what I should have. I cannot explain it, but somehow on such occasions a bit of Shashi Tharoor seeps into me.   The comparison, as a result, went like hereunder; Kohli is all brio prior to steadying himself to face the ball. Thereafter, an uncanny blend of organization and destruction, fricassees a delectable stew. Smith appears antsier with his outre and wacky routine at the crease. You agonize whether that is an idiosyncratic boondoggle or an act of some substance. For some recondite reason though that prefatory drouks quietude in him, and readies him to lacerate the bowler: the final product a non sequitur to what was transpiring when the bowler was readying himself for the run up to the crease. Or, is it a carefully woven pha...
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Trump’s Hierarchy of Needs

Abraham Maslow, in his Theory of Human Motivation, presented a hierarchy of needs. In there he drew a pyramid divided into five levels of ascending importance. At the very top—the apex of the pyramid—he had the need for self-actualization and transcendence. That, he said, was the last and ultimate human need.  To the western world, the revelation was nothing short of what Archimedes found in his bathtub and thereafter ran out naked yelling, “Eureka, Eureka”.  That precisely is the reason that a paper written in 1943 is considered relevant and by and large cannot brook any challenge. I mean a lot more profound versions vis-a-vis this hierarchy of needs were figured out and propounded by hundreds of our thinkers since 3000BCE. But then, west is west. It reinvents, rediscovers, and repackages what is by then common knowledge in India. And gets it patented too.  For now, however, let’s go with this Maslow pyramid.  One would expect that a man who is the President of the ...
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Howdy Kamala—The Goddess Lakshmi!

Kamala—The Goddess Lakshmi—has timed it to near perfection. Here comes Diwali, and here comes Kamala, the Lakshmi. What more could Indians have wanted? Now the wealth and prosperity would rain in torrents. No question about it. Couple that with Joe Biden claiming to have family links with Indians, we are well on our way to be a world power second to none, the only possible exception being the US itself. Yes, I am not kidding you. In 2013, when he visited India as Obama’s VP he said he has distant relatives in Mumbai. He reasserted that in 2015 to dispel any lingering doubts that anybody may have had on that score. One of our industrious genealogy experts—bless our country for we have hordes of them—has figured out that Biden is a westernized miss-spelling of Bhide. So there. With Bhide-Lakshmi team holding the steering wheel and the key to Fort Knox, things are looking up for us Indians like never before.  Lockheed Martin is already shifting its F-16 manufacturing line to India and...
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Dealing with Rejection

  At the very outset, I need to say that I am not going to offer a quick-fix solution to you faring badly at job interviews. If you repeatedly get rejected, very simply, the problem is within you: not in the whole wide world around you. And the problem is more deep-seated than the correct posture when facing the interviewer, not looking into her eyes, or whatever. If I were to cover the entire wide canvas of unemployment, there are a whole lot of elements in the issue. One can talk about, (i) our youth looking for government jobs and governments don’t have that many jobs for them, in spite of their current focus on infrastructure development; (ii) private jobs are directly related to more investments from the entrepreneurs, which means established businesses should set up more and more businesses in various industry sectors; (iii) first-time investors creating more and more business units; call them startups if you so want; and the (iv) possibility of looking at self-employment, me...
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Gloves off, eh, Monsieur Macron

The French presidential election is only a year and a half away. It has to be won. France’s centre-right government wants to win it again, like any government would.  Immigration being the issue on the top of the agenda, President Macron’s strategy looks like taking the well-proven path of screaming disapproval of immigrants, and then softening it after willing the elections. This is not new. Let’s go back some years in France’s recent history. In April 2013, Harris Interactive reported that in a poll conducted across the country, 73 per cent of people said they viewed Islam negatively. Yet, 10 per cent of French population today is Muslim. In November 2009, Nicolas Sarkozy was at the helm. He was unpopular. He was running out of time for he had already completed more than half of his term in office. The major concern ahead was that the voters were expected to give a bloody nose to Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling right wing party in the regional elections. He launched a 3-month long debat...
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Dussehra: A Day for Introspection

Dussehra is a great day to repose your faith in all that is just and ethical. It also makes you rethink your prevarication for aggressive retribution to those who may have truly deserved it. It makes you realise as to how a man of incredible knowledge and immense physical strength can sink into horrendously immoral acts. Ravan had read all Shastra(s) around and developed immense concentration to invoke celestial forces to come to his help. None on Earth was wiser than him.      But then, what to do with a man like that if he displays that he doesn’t know right from wrong? I mean what does Ram Bhagwan do if the ruffian—or, super-pundit, if you so like to describe him—chooses to kidnap his wife? Should he go into a conference with his brother, Laxman, bring the kidnapper’s well-known knowledge, wisdom and certifications from Adiyogi Shiva—no less—into consideration, and thereupon feel sympathetic towards him? Is a wife lost in the deal to be treated as just some collateral ...
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