c u on top - satyabrata dam

  The other day while talking to a friend, I am not sure how our conversation turned to polar bears and Arctic. My friend wanted to know if I had any close calls with a polar bear, which we often refer as the most dangerous predator on planet. I have had several, I mumbled, but she insisted if any of them were funny. I wondered, funny for whom, me or the bear! That’s a million dollar question. And then it came to me, a really silly wild encounter on a very commonplace evening, what made it funny for me that I wasn’t even trying anything remotely adventurous or risky. It was just the place and the timing and I happened to be at the right place at the wrong time. Here is the story that I related to my friend.   The year might have been 2008 in the middle of January I found myself in a place that only an insane would venture at that time of the year. No need to explain why, to me it seemed rather natural. The place was the capital of Svalbard, Longyearbyen. The northernmost a...

I get innumerable requests to feature global warming (GW) issues in my blog. While it is heartening to know that so many of my readers and friends are aware of GW it is also a difficult task to write about this complex phenomenon along with its vast and highly debatable data for normal readers. Any GW expert is more likely to use jargons and scientific formulas, historical data, pie-charts, etc to drive his point home, to the complete befuddlement of his audience at large notwithstanding. My idea here is to break it down into digestible and delectable morsels for all of you, any of you in a manner that even a child who is not a prodigy can grasp and understand and act upon in any manner possible. GW issues are vast and involve each of us, including the mute animals, insects, fishes, all our geological features, landscapes… anything and everything that resides within the geo-magnetic influence of the Earth and in the cryosphere in particular. Which could tantamount to say that even you ...