Bio rap!

Published in June 24th, 2009

What next? Now commercial companies are releasing music videos to sell their equipment. Here’s this one by BioRad trying to sell their thermocyclers. Enjoy the PCR song! And in case you want to sing along the lyrics are: There was a time when to amplify DNA, You had to grow tons and tons of tiny [...]

Indian bureaucracy ranked worst in Asia

Published in June 3rd, 2009

Posted by Anshu in India, Our life and times

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Why am I not surprised with the results of this survey? India’s babudom is under fire. A business survey showed that India’s ‘suffocating bureaucracy’ was the least efficient. The survey said working with the country’s civil servants was a “slow and painful” process. They are a power centre in their own right at both the [...]

Tweezed eyebrows are unreligious?

Published in June 2nd, 2009

Posted by Anshu in Our life and times, Viewpoint

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A young girl was barred admission into an MBBS course at the Sri Guru Ram Das Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, Amritsar, a Sikh minority institution, on grounds that she plucked her eyebrows. Endorsing a hardline stand by high priests of Sikhism that she violated a fundamental tenet of the religion by plucking her [...]

The globalization of racism and intolerance

Published in June 2nd, 2009

Posted by Anshu in Our life and times, Viewpoint

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Even as the news channels flood us with a surfeit of visuals, telling us about the abominable attacks of Indians in Australia, a new fashionable term ‘racism’ enters our jargon. Racism is not a recent phenomenon, nor is it confined to one country or region. Racism is a global attitude, which strangely seems to be [...]