Dilip Simeon's blog

Aging, it turns out, is nothing but a cosmic mistake. Why? Because if you feel you are younger than your chronological age, then you actually are. And there’s a flood of new science to prove it. One study from the University of Virginia states that at least 70 percent of more than 30,000 subjects reported to feel significantly younger than their chronological age - a divergence so drastic that the scientists  invoked the red planet : “Past age 25 or so, subjective aging appears to occur on Mars, where one Earth decade equals only 5.3 Martian years.” The discrepancy becomes more pronounced the older we get. We look at our chronological age and know with absolute certainty that we’re not there yet. This cosmic wrongness causes ennui every time a birthday comes around. Friends offer platitudes -“Age is just a number”- that turn out to be the truth. We do suffer from a mass delusion. And it happens to be beneficial for us. After analyzing the mental and physical health of te...

The process of updating  Assam 's National Register of Citizens ( NRC ) has been a difficult and distressing test for the state's population. Over 40 lakh people were left out of the draft published in July, leading to chaos and confusion as those not included try to find documents that will prove that they are legal residents of the country. When the Supreme Court  said  in December 2014 that the NRC should be prepared in a time-bound manner, its order underlined the magnitude of Bangladeshi infiltration by quoting a vital piece of statistics: On 14th July, 2004, in response to an unstarred question pertaining to deportation of illegal Bangladeshi migrants, the Minister of State, Home Affairs, submitted a statement to Parliament indicating therein that the estimated number of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants into India as on 31st December, 2001 was 1.20 crores, out of which 50 lakhs were in Assam. However, a deeper dive into the numbers shows that the Supreme Co...

Every day before work, Kevin Lau stopped for breakfast at a restaurant in Sai Wan Ho, a residential area in eastern Hong Kong. It was a routine as ingrained in him as brushing his teeth, and it nearly cost him his life. On a morning in February 2014, Lau -- a senior editor at the popular, upmarket daily Ming Pao -- had parked his car on a street near the restaurant when two men, wearing motorcycle helmets and gloves, rushed up to him. One slashed at Lau with a meat cleaver, knocking him to the floor, where he lay bleeding with deep wounds in his back and legs as his assailants ran off. With what a court later described as "superhuman calm," Lau phoned for an ambulance, and was rushed to hospital. He survived, and two men with triad links -- Yip Kim-wah and Wong Chi-wah -- were arrested and charged with grievous bodily harm. While Yip and Wong were later jailed, they did not reveal who had commissioned and paid for the attack, one of several against journalists in Hong Kong ...

Kirill Serebrennikov entered court this week in a black T-shirt bearing a message for  Russia , a quote from Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls: “Rus’, what do you want from me?” It was an apt question from Russia’s leading avant-garde director, who faces a tortuous, months-long criminal trial seen as a bellwether for artistic freedom in the country. Serebrennikov has been charged with embezzlement and faces 10 years in prison. Supporters have compared his trial to the purge of directors during the Soviet Union and the censorship of leading writers under the Tsars. “People of culture have always held the most dangerous position in Russia,” Liya Akhedzhakova, a celebrated actor who starred in Soviet classics like Office Romance, told the Guardian   in court on Tuesday. “They are the first to be targeted.” Prosecutors claim that Serebrennikov and three co-defendants embezzled $1.2m (£937,000) from the Studio Seven theatre company from 2011-2014. The defence claims the money was s...

J. K. Rowling went full  1984  to bash White House press secretary  Sarah Huckabee Sanders  and President  Donald Trump’s  administration on Thursday. The  Harry Potter  author tweeted a sentence from George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel after Sanders circulated a doctored video that she falsely claimed showed CNN reporter Jim Acosta manhandling an intern during a fiery press conference exchange with Trump. "And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed - if all records told the same tale - then the lie passed into history and became truth” https://www.huffingtonpost.in/2018/11/09/j-k-rowling-roasts-sarah-huckabee-sanders-with-george-orwell-1984-quote_a_23584766/?utm_hp_ref=in-homepage See also A Final Warning by George Orwell Ignorance is Strength-Freedom is Slavery-War is Peace  (George Orwell, 1984) The Almond Trees by Albert Camus Michiko Kakutani - The death of truth: how we gave up on facts and end...

whatever the outcome of Mueller’s investigation, America is establishing new precedents. One precedent is that President Trump fired the FBI director - and Congress did nothing. Another is that Trump admitted the FBI’s investigation of his campaign motivated the firing - and Congress did  nothing. A third precedent is that Trump fired the AG after having railed against him publicly for refusing to intervene in the investigation - and Congress has done nothing. A fourth precedent is that Trump circumvented the Justice Department’s order of succession so he could replace the AG with an individual who has directed partisan attacks at the special counsel.. has had a personal and political relationship with an individual involved in the investigation, and has been associated with a company that is the focus of a separate FBI investigation. We’ll see what a new Congress does about that  If members of Congress or the American people fail to act, these precedents will become the gu...

Kuwaiti authorities have blacklisted nearly 1,000 books at a literature festival, including one by  Fyodor Dostoevsky .  Saad al-Anzi, who heads the  Kuwait  international literary festival, said the information ministry had banned 948 books including Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, a novel set in 19th-century Russia that explores morality, free will and the existence of God. Dostoevsky joins a growing list of writers banned in the relatively moderate Gulf state, where there is a growing conservative trend in politics and society.  The information ministry has blacklisted more than 4,000 books over the past five years, including Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and  One Hundred Years of Solitude  by Gabriel García Márquez. All titles on show at the 43rd edition of Kuwait’s book fair, which runs until 24 November, were screened in advance by a censorship committee as per Kuwaiti regulations. The committee works under a 2006 law on ...