Life & Education Braves Pandemic

Continuing the thread from my last blog wondering how world will change during the pandemic times. Well, We all adapted to the situation. That quality is the one which allows continuation of life forms through evolution. There might not have been evolution in physiological or anatomical features of humans during the Covid - 19 pandemic but we have managed to discover to circumvent inconveniences caused by pandemic. Education is one sector which saw brilliant innovations. Teachers and students together made progress to engage one another and keep engaged. In fact students managed to beat teachers in use technology to one's advantage. Though a lot of aspects of education especially the social & physical ones got a back seat, show DID continue.... Many sectors especially tourism & transport got very badly affected. Companies lost much income while coughing up committed expenditure. Some of them even had to close their shutters. Certain sectors such as communication services amazed us in scaling up despite harsh environments. Online meeting platforms & social media thrived on the additional time men and women have in hand. Governments around the world are still having a tough time in managing the spread, gathering resources to keep peoples needs met & saving the economy from collapsing. Its an irony that stock markets are soaring, possibily due to inherent leaning of humen towards gambling. Moreover opportunites for sensible investments are dwindling. World lost around 50 lakh human lives & the clock is still ticking. Long term effects of COVID - 19 are yet to be ascertained. Some of the countries has started third booster dose where as majority of nations are struggling to complete administering first dose of vaccine. It is to the credit of software prowness of India that CoWin application served as rugged platform for vaccine administration and management. Aadhaar card rolled out earlier has been put to rigorous use to pave way for applications such as CoWin. I too got transferred in the midst of pandemic from Kerala to Telangana. Got vaccinated fully with a gap of 84 days in between the jabs. Going by the reported trend world over, we are nearing the end of pandemic. May life be back to normal as it used to be in the past. Loka samastha Sukhino Bhavanthu

India & America

After the announcement of next president of USA, there were a hue and cry in Indian media that Indian Premier did not talk to him and vice versa. It was construed in the anti-Indian line. I guess it will be premature to get into such hypothetical conclusions. The fact is that Dr.Manmohan Singh was on a foreign trip at the time when US election results were declared. After Prime Minister returned, there was indeed a dialogue. Obviously foreign policy evolves very slowly & there are no discontinuities simply because of a power change at the helm. This is under normal circumstances & I am not considering abrupt changes such as coup etc. Hence I feel there is nothing to worry either for India or for America. Since there are not much juicy news at this point of time, media made up a hill out of a mole. Some statements were found in the US media about restrictions in the outsourcing industry which can adversely affect Indian Industry. Already the recession in US has affected profits of IT industry. I am stressing the word profit because no firm has gone to red owing to that. I guess every industry will find alternate avenues for coping up. In fact the outsourcing is clearly a win-win situation and i can't see why status quo needs to be disturbed. America is defenitely one of the biggest capitalistic countries and excessive governmental restrictions will alter the whole nature of economy. India on the other hand is less capitalistic in nature. Financial sector can be taken as one example. There are many restrictions on pension funds as to where they can park the money. After all government has got the responsibility of ensuring growth of accumulated money. On one hand this looks bit strange since profits would have been enormous if funds were allowed to invest in stock especially secondary market. On the brighter side, the funds remain unaffected by the recent plunges in market. Here also i feel status quo will continue. Neither US will try to reign business houses too much nor India will allow certain sectors to play way ward.
"Loka Samastha
Sukhino Bhavanthu"