Even as we visited the Great Salt Lake, the saltiest lake of the Western Hemisphere, as part of our effort to see different places around Salt Lake City, better known for hosting winter Olympics in 2002, I was surprised two read two articles first in New York Times and then the website of the National Public Radio (NPR), an American public broadcasting organization, both of whom quoted a study to say the lake is "drying" and is "becoming a significant contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions that are causing the climate to warm."  Stating that "due largely to water diversions by farmers and Utah’s booming population growth, the Great Salt Lake has shrunk by almost half in recent years", the NPR news story quotes one of the authors, a scientist, as saying, "Human-caused desiccation of Great Salt Lake is exposing huge areas of lake bed and releasing massive quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere."  "The researchers found tha...

At that time I was working in the Communist Party of India (CPI)-supported People’s Publishing House (PPH) as assistant editor, doing the job of book editing. The year was 1977. A year earlier I was picked up by Mohit Sen, a CPI Central Committee member, from National Herald, where I was working as trainee proof reader, getting a stipend of Rs 250. In the Congress-owned Herald, I was supposed to be learning the “trade of proof reading”, though I would publish articles in the paper. One of my articles – to my utter surprise – was also published as the main article on the editorial page in Patriot, a prestigious left-of-centre daily run by one of the top-notch journalists of those times, Edatata Narayanan, and well known freedom fighter Aruna Asaf Ali. None in the proof reading department, not even the chief proof reader, could ever think of writing in any newspaper. I knew Mohit from my college days, when he spotted me as a CPI (Marxist)-backed Students Federation of India (SFI) cadre. ...

  Rating India's civic space as  repressed , Civicus, a global civil society alliance, in its new  report  submitted to the UN Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) on the state of civic space in the country has said that the use of sedition law against the Modi government’s critics continues. "Under the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, sedition cases have increased by 28 per cent with over 500 cases against more than 7,000 people", it says.

  In a surprise move, the Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, has cancelled the foreign funding license of the well-known advocacy group, Centre for Financial Accountability (CFA), known for critically examining India's finance and banking sectors from human rights and environmental angle.

No. This is not Rann of Kutch, or the much propagated Road to Heaven which was lately constructed to connect Dholavira with the tent city off the huge expanse of the White Rann, which we visited last winter. Both sides of the road are White Rann, which is propagated as a tourist attraction. Like the Road to Heaven, this is a similar white desert, driving down from Salt Lake City towards Nevada as we proceeded to San Francisco.  The huge white desert on  both sides of the road for several miles gives a similar impression as that of the Road to Heaven, but except for a short stopover (it's called Rest Area), where few people were seen moving around in the white expanse, it was hardly a tourist attraction. The white desert, ironically, is called "private property", and those wanting to roam around are warned in a notice board, they can go there on their own risk!