Editorial:March 2014


“The only thing that is constant”, said Heraclitus, “is change”. It is in its very consistency that inconsistency finds meaning, stays alive. The enigma of life, then, is entwined with the inevitability of its end, rescuing us from the trap of timelessness, from the twilight of a dusk that knows neither the thrill of the dawn, nor the lure of the dark. After much deliberation, this month, ReNews goes online – marking, perhaps, the beginning of an end. The digital shift ushers in many hopes indeed. It muses over the prospect of conquering hitherto unchartered readership territories, of reaching out to unsuspecting scores in the warmth of their social networking homes who are, perhaps, otherwise absorbed in typing their way to glory. All roads, they say, lead to Rome. Or do they? ………………..Continue reading

‘Out of my Mind’ –“OM2” #Ep. 1


The thunder and the clouds are not palatable to all the people – especially to the ones staring at the view from the glass window of the Mumbai Airport. The whole airport was extremely crowded with most of the people trying to get their flights readjusted, rescheduled or refunded. Amongst all this turmoil, there was one guy too busy to even look up from his iPad. Sitting comfortably against the couch in the waiting lounge, Aryan was flicking the screen of his ipad with his index finger in all possible directions. Suddenly his finger stopped with a female voice coming right above his head.

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Innovations towards self-sufficiency in daily life.


All the metropolitan cities in India get their water supply from sources 100s of kilometers away. They get their perishable food supplies like vegetables, fruits from sources 10s of kilometers away. Per person power consumption for domestic uses like lighting, ventilation is showing a continuous increase. Do things have to be like this only? “No”- say a couple of individuals who with simple innovations have achieved self sufficiency in one or more of the above aspects and have become role models for sustainability initiatives. Some examples of individuals and their innovations that were acclaimed by media were discussed by Asha Kranthi Nandigam- a PhD research scholar working in Computational Neuroscience, in this talk.

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Inbox: March 2014


Dear Editor,

Through January 2014’s “Experiences from Exchange”, I came to realize that failure and apparent futility of experiments and “hero experiments” is not unique to me; and that it happens to a lot of people in lots of places.