News

Last week was an excruciatingly tough one. The onus for which lies at the doors of Kavi Arasu, my friend and colleague at Founding Fuel. Now, Kavi is a professionally certified coach. He insisted that all of us on the team take three days out for a quarterly review to reflect, align and plan. The only caveats he had was that no matter what our obligations be, we complete some pre-work he had circulated, our phones be kept away, all prejudices be kept out at the door and we stay engaged with everybody else in the room. As is his wont, what his intent was remained mysterious. I work in an extremely interesting environment. For lack of a better phrase, allow me to call it a “coalition of the willing”. The in-house team is tight and lean. All of us come from different backgrounds. And the various layers to the business are built on the back of collaborations. It rests on one pillar—trust. On a more pragmatic note, Kavi had one more pressing reason to insist on the retreat. Data sugges...

New Delhi: The levels of PM 2.5 and PM 10, most dominant pollutants in Delhi’s air, have consistently violated the prescribed standards by about four times each over the last ten days, official data shows. The average levels of PM 2.5 and PM 10 over an eleven-day period from 21 November to 1 December were 194 and 438 micrograms per cubic metre, as against the corresponding safe limits of 60 and 100 respectively. Although, these readings show no major difference when compared to the data collated over the same period last year, the city government said. In fact, the average level of these ultrafine particulates over the same period were higher at 264 and 518 last year. This year the situation has marginally improved riding on the back of strong wind movement for about a fortnight. Meanwhile, the Central Pollution Control Board’s (CPCB) air quality index (24-hour average) was in the ‘very poor’ category on Friday, with a reading of 378. on Thursday, it was ‘severe’ at 403. The 24-hour-a...

Meanwhile on Saturn, they have found a hexagon. Yes, I mean a six-sided shape like you would find plenty of if you peered into the nearest beehive. Not to my knowledge do these pop up in too many other places in nature, but there’s one on Saturn. Though let’s be clear: There are no bees on the ringed planet. Even if there were, and if for a moment we thought this was part of a beehive, those saturnine bees would have to be enormous. For this hexagon is—hold your breath—about 32,000km wide. How big is that? Well, you would have to place three planet Earths in a row to stretch across the roiling expanse of this thing. Not your average hexagon. Not that they found it recently, either. When Nasa’s Voyager spacecraft flew past Saturn in 1980, it sent home images of its experience. In 1988, scientists noticed, while sifting through Voyager data, that there was a massive hexagon at the planet’s north pole. In 1997, Nasa launched the Cassini spacecraft on a mission to Saturn. It started orbit...