आइसब्रेकर / Icebreaker

Kaushal Kishore

बड़े छोटों से बात करने में
अपनी तौहीन समझते हैं,
छोटे बड़ों से बात करने से
संकोच करते हैं,
और समकक्ष सोचते रहते हैं
कि शुरुआत कौन करे,
आइसब्रेकर की जरूरत
है सभी को,
लेकिन किसी को भी
यह अंदाजा ही नहीं
कि इतनी बर्फ
जमा हुई तो कैसे…

❄️❄️❄️

Elders consider it
below dignity
to talk to younger ones,
younger ones hesitate
to talk to elders,
and peer ones
keep wondering
who should start,
everyone needs Icebreakers,
but no one has any idea
how so much ice
got accumulated…

–Kaushal Kishore

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Bring a smile to your enemy’s face! — Silent Songs of Sonsnow

“To achieve peace of mind it’s important to have patience and it’s people who are hostile and antagonistic rather than our friends who teach us patience. It’s not difficult to make your friends smile, but bringing a smile to your enemy’s face is a real achievement.” His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

Bring a smile to your enemy’s face! — Silent Songs of Sonsnow

The controversy over the Cochrane review on Covid masks, explained – Vox

Here’s what we know: It takes a lot to get people to wear masks. Information campaigns have a fairly limited effect. Mandates have a much larger one. “A general stylized fact in behavioral economics,” Abaluck told me, is that “it is very hard to get people to do anything differently than they were doing beforehand.”

Increases in mask-wearing do appear to reduce disease transmission during a pandemic, though it’s hard to extrapolate how large that increase would be if everyone wore masks.

 

Source: The controversy over the Cochrane review on Covid masks, explained – Vox

the moment I greeted my mother to say goodbye

Nguyễn Thị Phương Trâm

A poem in Vietnamese by Lê Vĩnh Tài
Translator: Nguyễn Thị Phương Trâm
Photography: Nguyễn Thị Phương Trâm

oh dear love
if only you were as crazy
losing as much sleep as my eyes

your love might
give life like death to my night

I will be a faithful
do as I’m ordered
by the prophet

love
introduce surprise to women
introducing women to men
hence I could barely
catch a breath

your body is the vernacular
hence the poem is one word
like “dance”

pitter-patter “raindrops”
sleepy “moon”
sad “cloud”
aching “leaf”

the poem turns green
within me
seeing you
breasts dancing in the air

the poem, changing again
into another word, poetry is a bit rushed chasing after it
hence no one could read it
I will have to buy wine
for everyone

the joy of being high
intimate like birds
in harmony with…

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US intel chief: Agencies ‘divided’ over COVID origins — Radio Free Asia

The U.S. intelligence community is “divided” over whether COVID-19 originated from a lab in Wuhan or from natural exposure to an infected animal, and is only sure it wasn’t a deliberate bioweapon, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told the Senate on Wednesday.

Asked by Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, why she would not say categorically that COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese virology lab, Haines said the intelligence community “remains divided on this issue,” with different agencies offering different analyses.

“Basically, there’s a broad consensus in the intelligence community that the outbreak is not the result of a bioweapon or genetic engineering,” Haines said. “What there isn’t a consensus on is whether or not it’s a lab leak, essentially … or natural exposure to an infected animal.”

Source: US intel chief: Agencies ‘divided’ over COVID origins — Radio Free Asia