Thoughts In A Wandering Mind

Imagine standing beneath a waterfall when all you need is a glass of water. The water is valuable, but its force makes drinking difficult. Information can overwhelm us similarly. News, videos, messages, advertisements and opinions arrive faster than we can examine them. We have extraordinary access to knowledge, yet finding clarity requires increasing effort. One dangerous form of the “problem of plenty” combines excessive information, compulsive consumption and unreliable content. What begins as a useful resource can gradually take control of our attention. The scale makes this a concern for humanity. The International Telecommunication Union estimated that six billion people, or 74% of the world’s population, were online in 2025 . Connectivity brings education, employment, friendship and essential services within reach. However, it also means that the quality of our information environment matters to billions of lives. Access is an achievement; learning to manage that access is an...

At 8:37 on the morning of August 26, 2026, seismographs around the world twitched. The signal — energy equivalent to a magnitude-5.2 earthquake — was not an earthquake. High on the Nepal–Tibet border, near the Langtang Lirung massif, an enormous chunk of glacier had sheared off the mountain, likely together with the slope beneath it, and plunged into the valley of the Lhende Khola, a small tributary that feeds the Bhote Koshi river as it knifes from Tibet into Nepal. The force of the fall melted ice on impact, tore up waterlogged sediment and boulders, and sent what one scientist called "liquid concrete" — a torrent estimated at half a million dump-truck loads of rock, ice and water — thundering down gorges toward sleeping valleys. In places, rivers rose nine metres in thirty minutes. Researchers suspect the debris briefly dammed the river before the impounded water burst through, magnifying the wave. What followed was one of the deadliest Himalayan disasters in living memor...

Sometime in 2025, India quietly crossed a milestone that would have seemed fantastical a generation ago: more than 1,000 kilometres of operational metro rail, the third-longest urban rail network on earth, behind only China and the United States. The speed of the build is genuinely historic. In 2014, India had just 248 km of metro across five cities; by 2026, it has over 1,070 km across some 21 systems, with daily ridership above 1.1 crore and annual central allocations that have grown five-fold to around ₹30,000 crore. Most of this happened after 2010 — Bengaluru opened in 2011, Mumbai in 2014, Chennai in 2015, Kochi and Hyderabad in 2017, followed by Lucknow, Nagpur, Pune, Ahmedabad, Kanpur and more. In infrastructure terms, the metro boom is one of modern India's great construction achievements. But construction is not the question anymore. The question of 2026 is harder: are these systems actually solving India's mass-transit problem at scale — and can they survive thei...