Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur C. Clarke once wrote. So it is with stem cells and their almost miraculous potential to save our lives. Stem cells are so tiny that it would take a million of them clustered together to form a pin head. Yet as their name denotes all other cells 'stem' from them.
Ever since his second term as prime minister began in May, Manmohan Singh has been out on foreign tours so often that in South Block he is now jocularly known as the 'Flying Sikh'--a sobriquet reserved for India's most famous athlete of the 1960s.
For a species that is facing the gravest threat to its sole habitat we seem to be pretty casual about saving it as the recently concluded Climate Change Conference at Copenhagen demonstrated. You could forgive the dinosaurs--they didn't know that a meteorite was going to clobber the earth leading to catastrophic climate changes and their rapid extinction.
Jairam Ramesh was listening to jazz music on his iPod and staring at his laptop when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called on his mobile. It was a Saturday morning, just two days before the crucial Climate Change Conference at Copenhagen was to begin and Ramesh, India's environment minister, had come into his office to clear some pending work.
In 2012, the movie, the earth as we know it is destroyed because of a sudden burst of solar flares that heat the planet's core, causing major shifts in tectonic plates. The result is cataclysmic tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanoes that wipe out most of life except for a modern fleet of arks that the G8 countries have built to save a few. It's a gripping plot.
Who were the first Indians? Were they the chocolate-hued Dravidian southerners or the dark-skinned tribals that inhabit East India and the Andaman islands? Was the relatively fair Indo-European population of the North the original settler? Or did the Mongoloid-featured Tibetan-Burmans beat the rest to it? When and how did the pioneers reach India? What routes did they take?
After 12 days of talks among delegates from 182 countries at the UN Climate Conference in Bonn which ended on June 12, the world seemed no closer to staving off the threat of global warming and its catastrophic consequences.
As George W. Bush stepped briskly into the White House for the signing ceremony in the afternoon of October 8, the gathering that included Ronen Sen, India's ambassador to the US, was aware that they were witnessing a rare and historic moment.
Delhi 2020: They are already calling it the year without winter. From January itself, temperatures across northern India have soared to 35 degrees Celsius. Much of the Gangetic plain has been transformed into one vast dust bowl. The wheat crop has failed and farmers are committing suicide by the droves. Food riots have broken out as the government is no longer able to control the distribution.
