Ujjawal Mishra

  The Government dropped a bombshell right in the hearts of millions of gamers with the freshly imposed ban on 118 Apps of Chinese origin. But it wasn’t ban on apps like Camscanner or VideoByte that mattered to those who let out the loudest moans of despair upon hearing the news. PubG was the sole drug of those addicts and the ban forcefully snatched the one solitary escapade they had.   Once the cries of   these PubG addicts had   subsided, a question arose - expectedly so. WHY ???   Why Indeed !   WHY THE BAN?! The Government in its notification cited threats to sovereignty and integrity of India as grounds for the ban. They also   claimed that these apps   were illegally transmitting data of   Indian users to   servers located abroad, without the permission of their users. But all of this   sounds like common bureaucratic jargon. Right? So lets ease it up a bit and try to understand what was really going on.   USA ...

  The ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic has changed us and the way we lead our lives is beyond comprehension. What once used to be a normal life- one that we called 'monotonous' and 'uneventful' at best, has now become something that the society yearns for - badly . I'M A REPORTER TOO !!  Phrases like ‘ flattening the curve’ , ‘bringing down the graphs’ , ‘community spread’ , ‘stages of the pandemic’, - All of which If would have been uttered in as late as March would have solicited unkind remarks involving the speaker being blamed for making the   conversation boring - have now become household terminologies. Suffice to say, the virus has turned us all into armchair epidemiologists , and aren’t we thrilled about it !   The pleasure of sharing some random pedestrian information in family groups or with classmates over WhatsApp isn’t something which can be put into words. And once some information reaches our ears, who exactly cares about assessing its authent...

You don’t have to be a political scientist to gauge the mood of people around you vis-à-vis politics. You don’t even need to carry out lengthy surveys and dial numbers to reach an informed opinion about what the community’s youth thinks when it comes to the contemporary politics. A plain and simple one to one conversation on matters pertaining to politics are enough to draw the conclusion that a large chunk of India’s youth - a section of the society that every political revolution counts upon - is today distant from the Indian polity to the extent that the spill over effects are now in the open. What was until now an implicit 'Rule' has - in this generation of increased social media presence and voicing of facts - become explicit – that politicians can get away with anything if the youth chooses to stay silent on the matter. The very same politicians would also run for cover if the bottled up anger/support of India’s young were to spill onto the streets. What's with th...