CrystallizingViews

    Courtesy- The Indian Wire D o you get a good price for any product of horticulture in India? Yes, I said 'any crop'. There are few crops which offer a reasonable price, but all others don’t. An almost negligible amount of horticulture produce is sold to the government and covered under the hailed MSP scheme.  Then where do our marginal farmers sell it? The answer is- anywhere in open mandis, to any random private player ( Dalal ) and at any trivial price with no security in place. If this was not the case, farmers from our very own ‘protesting Punjab and Haryana’ would have never thrown their capsicum and cauliflower on roads and it was more visible when farmers in Maharashtra protested against extremely low prices of tomato and onions. If these were open for free trade, without the restriction of district and state boundaries, probably these events might not have occurred. Open markets lead to greater prices in case of good quality produce. MSP (Minimum Support Price) is

   Yup, deadline to submit the project is lurking around the corner and you are still fiddling with your emails, chats and social media. But you still believe you have just twenty-three hours a day while your best friend has twenty-four of them. Damn it! There lies the problem. Procrastination has stuck with you and there you risk missing something big in life. Don’t want to, right? Of course not! Nobody wants to, not me even, and for that you ought to follow a set of hacks to escape from such blunders.  1. Hook your timetable in front of your eyes-  One of the best ways to avoid procrastination is to prepare a detailed timetable of all deadlines and hang it in front of your table. The morning should be well oriented, and targets should be charted to head-on. Tech savvies should utilise smartphones & gizmos which can drastically help them keep track of their work.  2. Don’t over-react but avoid trivialising too- Guesstimating targets poses a threat to work. You need to break it

    A large wooden box of around a kilo and a half, with several big glass cylinders inside, and a six-volt battery to power is more valued than a treasure box. A black plate on its front-face has the name of the company ‘Labele’ imprinted on it in golden font, along with details of frequencies and the names of radio stations in undivided India. This is ‘ radio-la’ (Singh). That is what the radio my great grandfather got in his wedding was lovingly called in our village. This radio is the subject of my enquiry. Seeing the names of cities in pre-Partition India – Bombay, Calcutta, Karachi, Peshawar – embossed on its body, I feel a sense of nostalgia, even a spurt of nationalistic fervour. I turn to my grandmother, Ms Krishna Kumari Singh, and Mrs Nirmala Singh, my grand aunt, both witnesses to the successful political career of Thakur Parwan Singh, her father-in-law and the owner of radiola, to get an insight into his life.  As a young man in his mid-twenties, Thakur Parwan Singh,

"Send me your work by tonight.”, said my teacher. The opening thought that struck my mind was, I have to WhatsApp him. WhatsApp has become a common word with ‘Signal’ indicating to dethrone it soon. With Elon Musk and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey endorsing Signal and recommending people to use it instead of Facebook escorted by a noticeable surge of over 30 per cent users since then, the rise of Signal is certain. As lots of reality on the new updates is buzzing along with a tone of rumours there is a wave against the latest version of the popular and most used instant messaging app, WhatsApp. I myself am hooked on this platform for most of my chats, be it personal or other stuff, I have a reason to worry and beware myself. The company website does accept that it stores our data in its data centres located across the continents and shares the data of its users internally and externally, within the Facebook group of companies and with their partners and service providers. The rapidly

Photo credit - www.shutterstock.com   D ear Self@2020,  What’s up? I hope you are keeping up well. It is indeed great to tell you that I have completed my post-graduation and am presently working in a firm dealing in Automated Vehicles. Yes, you read it right, automated vehicles. Nobody controls them and they think and operate on their own. Here I am going to share my experiences of 2030. That’s really fantastic, just wait and work.  When I look back, I find you there, standing with a smartphone all the time to do very general activities. Today, I don’t find any smartphones here rather all have a piece of smart glass and that is a master device for everything. I use details stored on Cloud and do everything from that glass as there exist almost three trillion such devices connected in a network called the Internet of Things. A small chip is installed in my body which acts as a transmitter and all my devices are connected to it, including my home. What I think of is done. Just when I th

The historic judgement of the Supreme Court of India declaring women as coparceners of their father’s property is welcome. I hope for a smile of satisfaction on your face.  Yes, you might have read about the decision and would have appreciated it as well. I too did and one must do if wants to see a progressive society. It comes as an addition to the earlier decision of 2005 but it takes into its effect a large chunk of people who were otherwise left out. The law is not changing much of the system but will surely change the minds and thus it is crucial. It will pave the way in turning the direction of Indian society into a more open, equal and developed one. In this article, I am not going to tell you what that order provides or not rather I will present before you some observations that might cause a trouble with this system and can throw that satisfaction into doubts.  India is in a pathetic condition when it comes to female foeticides , murders of female infants and even variou