The Third Slip - the weekly newsletter that’s like your Christmas tree at home. Each time you pull it out, it looks less impressive than before, but it periodically cheers you up once you’re invested in it. Does that ring a jingle bell to you?
No? We will ask Santa to put you on the naughty list okay?
Russia became the first to release a vaccine for Covid. And if you thought they were mucking around, Putin’s daughter got a shot of it and better still it’s called Sputnik V. That’s right, it has V Putin in it.
Dr. Andrea Ghez became the fourth woman to win a Physics Nobel, while Dr. Jennifer Doudna and Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier became the first all women team to share the Chemistry Nobel.
Rihanna made a 6 word tweet that shook the chefs at Taste of India. This was followed by tweets from Greta Thunberg amongst others and the MEA decided to go into overdrive with a centre-aligned clarification that only made things much worse.
Gyaancat : PM Modi hinted that the next phase of lockdown will be "very different" from the previous phase.
Regifting our money in the red folder as economic reform.
Poor Vision : Nothing with the current dispensation is complete without doing dumb things like avoiding English till class VI, and focussing on Sanskar and Sanskrit etc
So what if the GDP has dropped a record 23.9%? It only means that the growth numbers from here on will appear phenomenal even though we’ve lost at least two years of economic growth. Also, if you’re following the stock market, get ready for a K shaped recovery.
Gangster Vikas Dubey killed by UP Police - shady encounter. Which raises too many questions, especially as Adityanath’s ‘war on terror’ excluded politically connected dacoits like him. Yes, all the “BJP removes any vikas in its way” jokes have been made.
Saket Gokhale has been exemplary in showing us how to take on the establishment. He has single-handedly filed ballsy RTIs that are inconvenient to the establishment (pssst BJP).
In the most farcical Agatha Christie novel of all time, Poirot needs to find out who developed the mandatory, harmless app. One that is supposed to do contact tracing, but no contract tracing.
Brown Shorts Not a reference to fascists, but probably what happens when Wall Street giants shit their pants when amateur anti-establishment investors enter the market, coordinate using Reddit threads and buy en masse via a “steal from the rich and give to the poor” platform
All the atmanirbharism rhetoric won’t compensate for the hard fact that we still depend on countries for raw materials / manufacture / exports. Still, nothing an IT Cell hashtag can’t solve, eh ?
Meanwhile, the unemployment rate keeps rising in India and should be a big headache for the government. How bad is it? Well, so bad that Chetan Bhagat is asking the youth to focus on the economy.
