Going "console only "on GNU/Linux

Got frustrated with the time taken for the browser to load up and then dependency trap for installing other gui applications. Add to that the nuisance of gtk and qt quirks on a 4K monitor. The feeling is share by many. But as we shall see living in this place is not easy. The major difficult piece of the puzzle is the browser. All your banking, shopping options are ruled out in the terminal. 

 

What I did here was to disable even the start of the X server. I disabled sytemd unit which is supposed to reach the graphical login target. Disabled the graphical login manager, lightdm in my case. Disabled all the cloud stuff which ubuntu GNU/Linux starts with lot of difficulty. In fact, because of this the first boot of ubuntu after install is a hit or a miss. After boot do not try to login immediately. There are plenty of things ubuntu is doing in that phase. If you try to login, it will fail. Wait for 10 minutes, approx, it might be higher so that it spews many lines of information over the login prompt, then it will allow you to login and change the default password. 

 

Disabled ssh service, because the rpi 4 is connected to a 4K monitor. Even during login, ubuntu tries to plenty of things. It will try to check for updates and provide a notification once in the motd. It will also provide information from the ubuntu motd server which canonical wants you to see. It will also spew out certain information from your computer like memory usage, load on the cpu etc. All this will take plenty of time considering the rpi 4. Find the respective scripts and disable them to speed up the time required to reach the login prompt. So, we have reached the login prompt. The fonts are so tiny, you have to squint to type any commands. First thing is to first reconfigure the fonts. Get the biggest font available while running the re configuring tool. Yes, the size can be changed, but the fonts are horrible. They are not for your daily tasks. All the fonts which you had installed in your X is now out of reach. 

 

The console well, is a console. It will display fonts which are baked into the linux kernel. If anybody knows how to change the fonts on the default console, kindly advice or drop a link. But, as of now, we have a readable console and the font size is alright. The fonts are not. We have been pampered for the variety of fonts on X. It is a requirement that we should do something about it. Step in, fbterm. As the name suggests it is a terminal emulator designed to work with a framebuffer. The biggest advantage, supports all the fonts supported on X. There goes my first gripe about the console. So, we install fbterm and start and run it at the console. The console is taken over by fbterm and again we have micro-sized fonts, but nice looking fonts taken from the X environment you had installed earlier. Let us go ahead and fix the fonts by restarting fbterm with fbterm -s 24. This was for my monitor. Try experimenting with different sizes to get the optimum size. 

 

The config file for fbterm is in .fbtermrc. Well, I already see your smiling face and I have received your gratitude and in turn it is time to congratulate you for completing the first time required for living in the console. Whatever further tools we are planning to used depends on this success. The fonts are beautiful and they are your favorite ones. They look good and it is as though you are back on your terminal emulator on X, but without all its bells and whistles(another name for bloat). You now can clearly distinguish between l and 1, 0 and O, I and L. I would like to thank all the creators of fonts which can clearly distinguish the characters of the English language. It is an artists job and the creator of any font is an artist. 

 

You opened the fbterm man page and want to edit the configuration file by reading the manual, you are out of luck. You are on the console. There are no windowing systems. What d you do, you press C-A-F2 and switch to the next virtual console and login again. Then you can switch between the virtual consoles. Your are now flabbergasted. You have started hating yourself for moving away from X. But, fritter not, there are further goodies which come with fbterm. You can create multiple windows and switch to them using shortcuts as mentioned in the fbterm man page. This will give you a method of moving between multiple windows and then moving between them. 

 

 Let us go to the next step. Now, you would like to group certain windows and recognize them for a specific task group. You have a web page related, you have a manual page related and couple of windows concerned to the programming task related to the web page and the man page. You are out of luck. You cant see all the windows at once together on one single screen. Frustration. Enter terminal multiplexer. The first name which comes to he mind is tmux, if you are a year 2000 person and screen, if you are before that. These are excellent tools and are blind faith groups unto themselves. So, if you like a tool, silently use them. Do not compare them and publish your comparisons. This is because, if you have reached a position where you compare both these tools, that means you already "prefer" one among them. This will start a war. We already have the longest running war between Vi and GNU Emacs. These are the kitchen sinks of terminal multiplexers. 

 

If you are a person believing in the *nix philosophy of "One tool that does one thing and does it best", then you have an alternate option. Many a times I had tried to pull myself together and learn tmux, but since I was using the i3 wm, I thought that it is not worth the effort. I could open as many windows and all would be started side by side preparing a huge canvas for exchanging information. I am in love with i3 wm for its simplicity and doing what it is supposed to do and doesnt do anything more. A huge shoutout to all the devs and users of this fantastic wm. Now, once again my terminal multiplexer flames were re-kindled by Mr. Bronie Robertson on his youtube channel. I like his videos. They are short and to the point with excellent examples and use case scenarios. 

 

Plentiful thanks to him for introducing me to abduco. Such a strange name. If there are explanations for the name kindly enlighten me. A session management tool with such a strange and difficult to pronounce name. However, what caught my attention was the ease with which Bronie did the session management. No obscure keystrokes to remember. Just session management and nothing else. In fact, I understood session management in that under 10 minutes video, than I had tried for a good 10 years. So, Thank you Bronie. Yes, there might be plenty other things required for complex setups, but for a desktop use and a home network user, that is exactly what the doctor would prescribe. 

 

 So, three main things which a session manager has to do. Create a session. Detach a session. Re-connect to a session. abduco does all the three with elan. All technicalities, I would redirect you to Mr. Bronie. So to create a session, let us understand what is a session. A session is a group of tasks related to one another. It is a method of grouping applications and open files related to a task on hand. Let us say the session you have created contains a compile task which will take another hour. Now, you are free to let us say, listen to some music, read a novel, well, things like that. What we now do is, detach the task on hand. And now, the compiling and all other windows are moved to the background and keep running. We will now create another session and do the relaxing stuff related to music and reading. You now want to continue listening to music and then you would like to check your online accounts like your email, your toots etc. You detach the multimedia session and start a new session with these applications. Its been an hour and you would like check on your compile session, You detach the online session and re-connect to compiling session and so on. That is session management for dummies. 

 

But in a session, if you have to have multiple windows grouped together, it is all good in an X environment. If you remember we are at a console running fbterm. We were very happy with good fonts but a bit sad about moving between windows as every window occupied the complete screen making it very difficult to share information between windows. Enter dvtm. The expansion will be dynamic virtual terminal manager. The name tells everything. It is there to manage windows. It will create, position, delete windows. It is an equivalent to i3 wm and more close to dwm wm but for terminals. When we create a new window in dvtm, we are starting a new terminal waiting for our input. dvtm does exactly what i3 does. It just arranges windows side by side in many different ways. But all your window contents are there for you to see and transfer between windows in the same screen. For our case it is a window manager for the console. 

 

I hated the console because if you wanted to refer to a man page and return back to the editor, you had to suspend the editor read up and remember the man page and then suspend the man page and bring back the editor to the foreground and dump whatever you remembered from the man page. This is no way ideal. For the optimal setup, we combine a session manager with a terminal manager and you have Window management for the console. How do we do it? Well just run both the commands in unison as so.

 

abduco -c session_name dvtm -m ^x 

 

What we are doing is asking our session manager abduco to create(-c) a new session and name that session "session-name" and the application it has to run is dvtm. The next option is for the MOD key. The default key for the MOD key is ^g. Yes, you are a bit confused here. For i3 users, the MOD key used to be a single key like the super key or the ALT key. But, these keys are not recognized by the console. So keep the default or change it to the value which I use, since x is close to the control key than the g key. Once you run this command, a session is created and control is handed over to dvtm. Now here you can start using the keybindings as suggested in the man page of dvtm. MOD-c will create a window in the tiled mode. Another MOD-c press will create another terminal window and so on. MOD-j and MOD-k will move between the windows and all windows are available in one single screen. 

 

I cannot express my joy, when I saw my console splitting into multiple windows. For everything else there is MasterCard. You did plenty of work by moving between windows and your program is now copiling. Time to relax. Detach the session by pressing MOD-\. You now land back at your console. Now run another command as so abduco -c relax dvtm -m ^x You get a fresh canvas. Create multiple windows again for playing your music with lyrics, reading a book by the next window. 

 

Enough of recreation, back to work. But, you want the music continue to play and want the book you were reading to be at the same place. Detach this session again by pressing MOD-\. Run without any arguments, abduco, will list all the live sessions. Run this command with the session name abduco -a session_name Now you are connected back to your compiling and editing session with all the windows as you left them when you detached from this session. The compiling is not complete, detach again and then re-connect to your relax session and continue reading your book. 

 

You are smiling. Your low spec PC is so responsive. But, But, We are living in a modern world and it is very difficult to survive without a pdf viewer, an image viewer, a video player, an ebook reader, a music player, a text reader(should we talk about it), web browser, a spread sheet, a document writer, a presentation tool and what not........ 

 

Let us try and resolve these applications one by one.

1. Let us start with a pdf viewer. This was rather easy. I was happy that the less command is more than capable of displaying text based pdfs. It will display pdfs with images, but the images are ignored.

2. An image viewer. For this the framebuffer image viewer, fbi is upto the task and is enough for viewing images and also includes the capability to perform a slideshow of the images supplied to the command.

3. For a Text reader/editor we are spoilt for choice and I would rather not talk about the options here. Whatever I talk about would be less.

4. If we come to the web browser, we do have choices, but none capable of handling 2 - 4GB of modern websites. We have applications for displaying true html. Blogs written with text only are a joy to read. I would recommend w3m. It also has support for images(I have not tried out this feature). If you access gopher holes or the modern avatar, the gemini space, then you are in luck and there are plenty of options. With the gopher and gemini protocol, you are at home in the console. Want to access your banking site, forget it.

5. If you are on the fediverse, there are clients for the mastodon network. There are clients for reddit.

6. For reading ebooks like epubs and mobis, I would recommend epy.

7. For searching the web we have the duckduckgo client ddgr and surfraw. Both are powerful and meet all the web searching requirements. 

8. Playing music has always been easy on the console with plenty of applications. My personal favorite is the mpd and mpc combination with ncmcpp added into the mix. 

9. For playing video, mpv is my default goto. The framebuffer device plays most of the videos thrown at it. 

This has already been a very long post. If you made it this far, then you are definitely a console junkie. If I could give you a hint of the entrance to the rabbit hole, then I would be most happy. Dont forget to buy yourself a mechanical keyboard. Thanks to all the devs and users who wrote all those wonderful applications and of course GNU/Linux. The journey with the tux and the beastie and the puffer since the year 2000 has been nothing but joy. I would like to end the post with the tagline of distrowatch. "Put the fun back into computing. Use GNU/Linux, Freebsd, Openbsd, Netbsd, Plan9, templeos, Haiku, Minix, GNU ..."

Buffers, Windows and tabs in vim/neovim

There are three concepts when it comes to viewing/editing files in vim.

Buffer:

When you open a file in vim the contents are loaded to RAM. This portion of the ram which has the contents of the file is the buffer. Now, this loading happens behind the scenes. It is no good if the file contents are in the buffer. We have to view it. That is what visual editors like vim are for. There are ways and means of editing files without having the contents of the file displayed on the screen. For that you can combine the power of ed and then the later front ends like grep and sed. So, now we are still at a stage where vim has loaded the file into memory and named that block of memory with a name taken from the file name itself. This buffer name can be used in moving around buffers when we have multiple buffers.

When you create an empty buffer, vim allocates a certain amount of the RAM for the buffer. If you write this content to a file then the contents are saved. If you delete the buffer without saving it then all your content created in this buffer is out in the ether.

For playing with buffers vim provides commands starting with :buffer. It follows the object, action on the object philosophy of the other vim commands.

When you shift from one buffer to another using the buffer next command or similar, vim prompts you to save the present buffer to file. This can be overridden with settings in the vim config file.

Window:

This is the area where the contents of the buffer is displayed to the user. After loading the file into the buffer, vim then reads the contents of the buffer and displays it on the screen for the user's viewing pleasure. A full screen of content, which was a big deal in the good old days. To display the file vim creates a window. The file contents are displayed within this window. Okay, you have been editing a single file for many days. Now, you want to refer another file. So you now go ahead and open it up with :e file2

You are in for a shocker, the screen is now showing only the contents of file2. As we have already clarified, a window is the place where vim displays the contents of the file. In the present case we have only one window. So, when you requested vim to open a second file, vim agreed and showed the contents on the solitary windows. To show that vim had to clear the screen and load up the buffer which was the contents read in from file2.

The situation here is we are having one window and two buffers, as such vim can display only one buffer while the other is still loaded and available with vim read to be displayed when asked for. You can ask to bring the buffer contents of file1 to the fore by using appropriate :buffer command. But, instead a more elegant way of viewing both files side by side would be to create another window. This will reduce the screen estate available for each windows. if you open two windows then both share 50% of the screen and so forth.

Ctrl-W v    opens a new window and splits the screen into half vertically. Now you can open file1 in the left window and file2 in the right window. Now there are two buffers and two windows displaying the respective buffer. What if I open the same file in both the windows, well all your editing activities in one window will reflect in the second window also. try it. Because you are editing the same buffer.

To end the discussion about windows, when you close a window, the buffer is not offloaded from memory. It is still there within vim. You have to delete the buffer using the respective command to instruct vim to offload the buffer from memory.

Tab:

Tabs are the masters of vim windows. Every tab has access to the full screen. Withing tabs you create windows as explained above. In the above example there was only one tab which is started by default. Every tab can have multiple windows. When you close a tab you close all the windows in that tab. tabs are good when you want all your files to use the complete screen of your monitor. Whenever a new tab is created it is started with exactly one window. If you want to view file1 and file2 using the full screen estate of your monitor and move between them then, the :tab command is the way to go. The disadvantage is that you cant see the file side by side.

When you close a tab, all the windows within that tab are closed. But all the buffers you were viewing in that tab within their respective windows are still in memory. You have to delete the buffers to remove them from memory.

 Of course, when you quit vim, all the buffers are closed and any changes which you have done to the buffers, will be queried for saving.

In summary, we see that there is no one single strategy which works for and individual. And for every individual, the strategy depends on the task/s at hand. So, dont be very harsh on your preferences. You will be losing out on the most important aspect of vim, ie, "situational editing"

HoCl, the forgotten sanitizer

Disclaimer: Whatever follows is my observations and experiments with HoCl. I am no way advising the use of HoCl nor recommending that it replace whatever you believe and have been using. Use the information mentioned below at your own risk. I am no way responsible for any harm caused by using the information below.

Thanks to all the independent researchers and particularly, the public network, which made the activities mentioned below possible in the first place.

This post is not about belittling any company/organization, but when a product is released in the time of a pandemic and is marketed using the situation, the customer should be given enough knowledge not only about theory but also the practical data points. It is the responsibility of the company. If there is anything wrong in the post, Kindly post it in the comments and I will take it up in the right spirit and if found wrong will update the post.

Ok. after the Disclaimer, let me bring out the experiments and research carried out to arrive on a sanitizer which is not alcohol based.

Alcohol based sanitizers are new entrants to our country. When their advertising started, the ads showed where you could spray the sanitizer on your hands when you are at a hotel/fast food joint, wherein you cannot waste some time to wash your hands. Later the ads vanished as it was proved that the alcohol based sanitizers are not safe and there will be residual from the usage and will get mixed with your food. The details and the homework to do the same is left to the reader and the various search engines are your friends.But, be aware that the time you search for sanitizers all your feeds/social networks will start bombarding you with ads and ads disguised as articles down your throat. Kindly use ad-blockers and script blockers while doing general purpose web browsing and allowing ads on websites/blogs whom you know well and are ethical and depend on ad revenue.

The pandemic on our hand has brought back the alcohol based sanitizer on our hands. My skin is very dry and all my efforts at moisturizing them have failed terribly. Now, I rub the sanitizer on my hands, I know what is going to happen. My hands are akin to to a dried up tree branch and leads to other skin complications. You are now telling me to buy sanitizers with moisturizers. Yes, the alcohol has to do its bit, then the other contents of the concoction comes into play. Once I understood that there is no other option than to start using the sanitizers, I started a hunt for alternatives. It is in my blood that I always look for alternatives. The alternatives cannot stand on their feet just being clones, there should be something which makes them stand apart. This process of differentiation is a blessing in disguise for the customer. When the alternate is suggested by nature itself, then you have to standup and take notice. That is what I did.


Let us talk about the things against HoCl and why it is not being mentioned/produced by the capitalist companies

1. The viral killing power of the solution decreases over its storage time.
2. The solution has to be avoided from direct sunlight.
3. The solution has to be kept in opaque containers.
4. The active life is varied based on varied studies from 04 weeks to 04 months.

The effectiveness of the HoCl solution is left to the reader to find it out for himself by going through the research articles on the public network.

After all this, it is now time to generate HoCl. After searching for generators, zeroed in on Cuckoo generator, from a Korean company, available in our country. This can be ordered on the company website as well as on amazon.

Read through the website and without going into depth of the technicalities ordered the unit. Started using it and replaced the sanitizer used by me and my family. This continued for a couple of weeks. The reliability of the solution was questioned by one of my colleague. Came back home and hit the public network for data. Because data speaks.

Now, there are three data points for a HoCl solution.

1. The Ph of the solution
2. The free chlorine available in the solution in ppm.
3. Percentage HoCl

The points 1 & 3 are connected. The Ph of the solution is what tells us about the "acidity" of the solution. Pure water has Ph of 7.0. Less than that is classified as acidic and more than that will be basic. Further prodding can be taken up on the public network or turn back your pre-university chemistry books.

When the Ph of the solution is at 5 to 5.5 99% of the free chlorine available in the solution is in the form of HoCl. This is the most desirable end result. This will be the perfect solution. Perfect for sanitizing and cleaning of fruits, vegetables and meat. Solutions within this range are corrosive and cannot be used on rusting surfaces. It can be used on other surfaces but has to be cleaned off after its application. It can be used as a sanitizer, but after spraying on to the hands, it is better to wash it off after 10 -15 seconds. Solutions with Ph less than 5 will react with the sprayed surfaces and produce chlorine gases, totally undesirable.  But, when the Ph of the solution is around 6 then 90% of the freely available chlorine is in the form of HoCl. Solutions at this Ph have a lesser degree of corrosion. It is still better to clean off the solution from the surface after 10 -15 seconds.

The action of HoCl in the range of 5 - 6 is that the solution kills the virus almost immediately. If the solution is left to linger, it will not have any effect on the further virus which might come and settle on the solution. The summary is the solution will kill the virus on the surface which was there before the spraying started. This is the reason that in hospitals this process of spraying and cleaning happens at regular intervals.

Now let us come to the other parameter, free chlorine available in the solution. The amount of free chlorine available in any solution is measure by ppm. 1ppm will be 1mg of chlorine/litre. For an effective sanitizer this measure should be a minimum of 200ppm. Th studies have shown that the solution with a Ph between 5 to 6 an ppm between 100 to 200 will kill the virus almost immediately on application. With the same Ph range and a ppm of 80, it would take 0.5 to 1.0 minute for killing all the virus on the surface. A ppm of 50 would take 10 minutes. Many commercial generators with proprietary procedures produce a ppm of around 400 - 500 ppm, Just to be on the safer side.

So, now we know the final properties of our solution. The Ph should be in the range of 5 - 6 and should have a ppm of around 200 - 300 ppm, the safest bet.

Well now we know the data points. How about measuring them. This was the most trickiest task.

1. Measuring Ph with strips was not intuitive. I tried with a variety of strips and I found it very difficult to compare the colors. This was compounded by the fact that I am not that good with colors. But, again, I am not color blind. I then went ahead an purchased a digital Ph meter for the task. It is very easy to read and very handy.
2. Measuring the ppm was more tricky. We dont have any companies which make any apparatus to measure a ppm of above 10 which is normally used to test the amount of free chlorine in the swimming pools. After a through search ordered a set of strip on amazon from an Indian company which imports it from US. Tragedy. The color map on the box and the colors the strips produced never matched except for 10 ppm. So search started again and then it ended at desertcart.in. Here I was able to purchase the best in the business. The strips were capable of showing a ppm of 50 to 1000!!!. The wait took exactly 1.5 months after placing the order. The strips were awesome and the colors after testing were very intuitive.

Ok. So now we have the measuring apparatus. Let us now get the ingredients to prepare the solution

1. Tap water
2. Kosher salt(Rock salt)- Un-iodized
3. Vinegar (Distilled white, 5% acidity)
4. Distilled water( for cleaning the digital Ph meter and also the generator at regular intervals to keep the electrodes carrying out the electrolysis. More about this later)
5. Weighing scale to measure a minimum of 0.01gm

The generator from cuckoo does not mention anything regarding all these technicalities. Which is a big fail. And a very risky proposition. The solution generated was at 10 ppm. I really dont know what can that be used for. After a couple of months there was a call from a customer care exec and once I started belting out ppm's and Ph's, the call was cut. That was that. I am on my own.

The cuckooo generator is capable of producing 250ml of the solution at one go.

1. Fill up the generator with 250ml of tap water
2. Fire up the weighing machine and measure 0.8 gms of kosher salt and 1.3 gms of vinegar and add it to the 250ml of water. Mix it thoroughly so that the salt is completely dissolved. Lumps of salt can damage the electrodes of the generator
3. Check the Ph of this water. It should be around 4.5 - 4.6
4. Run the generator for 3 cycles(9 minutes)
5. Check the Ph of the final solution. It should be around 5.5 to 6.0
6. Check the free chlorine ppm. It should be around 250 - 300 ppm


Thats it. you now have one of the safest to use sanitizer. Pour it to spray bottles and share it with your loved ones. The effectiveness of the solution decreases based on its exposure to sunlight. Pour the solution in opaque spray bottles. Anyhow, it will not last beyond a week because of the present usage. So, we have not crossed the threshold. You can always keep a bottle of the solution for a week and check the Ph and the ppm to ensure that it definitely lasts a week.

The proportions of the salt and vinegar was arrived at after a lot of permutations and combinations. Try your combinations. It is better to use less salt and run more cycles(Just my hunch. I dont have anything to back this claim).

The applications are numerous. No smell when you spray it in your office premises. The solution can be use on clothes, gloves, sofas, tables, door knobs, toilet seats, car, office, handles, drawers, refrigerators, washing machines, kitchen gadgets, floors, walls, windows and of course cleaning veggies and meats. Use it to deodorize your trash can, kitchen sinks and what not. Jump on to the public network for more applications.

I also use it to disinfect my masks and can be easily used on the N95 masks and the hang them to dry(Again, I dont know the effectiveness. But, I have believed in the process)

Adeventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

What a delight of a book! What writing! No doubt that the author amassed wealth and fame. No doubt he spent it all. It is all in there. It is as though the author time travelled. It is as though the author knew that the grown up part of his story will be failure. But the growing up phase or to use the commercial parlance "coming of age" has never been more beautifully brought out than with the adventures of Tom Sawyer. It is a book to be read up whenever you are down. 

 Whenever consumerism has consumed you. Whenever you think mother earth cannot give you more. Whenever you feel you have seen it all. The book removes all the dejavu feelings you might be having about life. What energy, what adventure, what characters! Wow. Every line is painstakingly written to have the utmost effect on the reader. The reader is the king. Very few books makes the reader feel that way. Plenty of the philosophical side involved. The author brings out the consumerist attitude of the young and the men. It brings out the young in the men. It talks about the men in men. 

 Every scenario is beautifully contrasted. Mother earth is in her full glory. All her presents to mankind are kindled and remembered, explained, reveled. You very easily become the protagonist. You can easily replace the others with similar characters in your life. But, with the present generation and the looming pandemic might just change the whole world wherein the children would never understand the joy the book can provide. 

How can you enjoy the book, if you have not lived a part of it. How can you enjoy a book, if you feel that you have not done certain activity in the book. How can you enjoy the book when you know the activities mentioned in the book happened in a lifetime that does not happen now. Oh, the playing in the sand, jumping in puddles of rain, getting wet in the rain, getting caught for trifles, Oh yes, we have live a life. But, what about our children, they wont understand a thing.....

Brideshead revisited aka Aristocracy revisited aka WWII revisited aka religion revisited aka innocence revisited

After reading orlando, I wanted an easy go book. Brideshead revisited has been consistently recommended by seasoned as well as young readers. So I took it up and let me be frank that I was a tad surprised by the breadth of coverage in the book. The writing is easy paced and the vocabulary requirements are standard.

The book starts interestingly in world war 2 and goes back and forth. Reliving the nostalgic memories brings in the book brings back your own as you go through the book. The characters are relatable. Yes, we dont have as many aristocratic families as in the good old time. We still do have pretty rich families wherein a similar pattern is observed. The camaraderie between two friends is brought out beautifully. In fact this is the portion I like immensely. The character build up of the two friends is fantastic and this makes all the situations which will be shown to us in the future believable and rooted in human relationships.

The expectation of a family from your near and dear friends is one more aspect which is brought out nicely. Each family is selfish in the fact that they see what the friend can bring or do to make their sibling better at the expense of not understanding the friend and his needs. The other thing is as the characters grow up, we see the maturity and the different views they have on life get concrete and they run after worldly pursuits. Only when the characters pause in their life and think about their experiences do they feel the right or wrong they did.

Alcoholism is again shown as it should be. When you are drunk you might feel better but when you wake up you are deeper in sorrow and you go so deep that nobody can dig you out. Religion is queried enough. The right questions asked with no right answers.

Love is complicated.

Orlando by Virginal Woolf

 Orlando is a mind bending, time bending, beliefs bending saga. There is no stone un-turned which questions traditions, the societal setup. The entire societal setup from the way the poor static people, to poor nomads, to rich static people, to rich nomads the books attempt at gathering the entire gamut of the societal setup is unprecedented in all the books I have read to date. Time flies in seconds and at times it does not move at all. Time is tamed by the author. She moves it at her own will. The poor and the rich are contrasted. None are spared. Orlando gets bored with the lives of the poor as much as the lives of the rich. Yes, there are times that the author finds it difficult to move along and in that situation she move the character to the ancestral home. It is like a launchpad to launch the character to the next chapter/level.

Gender is played with. Gender which plays a main character in our societal setup is toyed with. The chairs, the tables, the animals, wild and domesticated all find their place in the novel. All find their place and time. Man, woman, boy, girl, animals, plants all are living beings. The human societal setup with the clear distinction between the male and female functions are made fun of. The stereotypes are made fun of. The various issues in the stereotypes are brought out beautifully. How the male dominated society has bound the female capabilities are elucidated beautifully by just comparing the dress each one wears.

Sometimes it appears that she wants the answers to many of her queries very fast. Sometimes she answers but does not explain further. Sometimes she explains many of the situations a bit more. This might be intentional. The evolution of the society in over 300 years is also a character in the novel. There are places of rapid ascent and reaching a crescendo. But, she does not loosen the grip on the reader. She gradually loosens her grip as any musician would do after reaching a crescendo.

A recommended read when the reader wants his time to go slow. Not recommended for speed reading.

Covid 19 Non immune have the same rights of a human life

 All this herd immunity thing cannot be digested. So the world has decided that there will be casualties. So, a person dies in the present pandemic, it is because of weak immunity. That will become a count the next day. Now, why should a person die because of a lack of immunity to a mistake done by a state/company/individual. The person who is dead is in no way connected to the mistake done by the source. We have totally forgotten to question the source. Why because the source seems to be more powerful. 

Is a common man powerful enough to change this thought. No. Not in democracy, not in any other setup of modern governance. Let us take the example of sweden. One of the doctor in sweden's biggest hospital put out his thoughts on the way the country handled the pandemic. There were no lockdowns. All in all around 6K people have passed away in the past four months due to the pandemic. That is a very measly figure considering the yearly deaths of the country in question. Just because it is measly does it mean that those 6K people were so easily expendable. How was it decided that some people were expendable. 

The doctor is very happy with how it has turned out and he believes that all this occurred because of herd immunity. But what about the people who died and will continue to do so for lack of immunity. Who is responsible for their lives. Everybody who passed is a father, brother, sister, friend and most of all a human being. How any other human being is expendable is a big question. This is real war. It is fought silently by all the governments on its own people. 

Even in the times of the pandemic, while the doctors and scientists are struggling for funds, majority of the countries are on an arms race. Defense equipment still takes the major chunk of all the countries expenses. When will the health of the citizens take priority over borders. We are in a demo of the dooms day setup. When there is a real dooms day and all the 1% escape to safety, and all the 99% are washed away or zombied. The only difference is we are allowing a human activated virus, resulting from a human mistake, which could have been culled at the source, to simulate a dooms day. Even at the expense of the people's death, hospitals are making money, extravagant money, again enriching the 1%. Destroying the environment. 

All the items banned are on the main page of all the stores. Alcohol based sanitizers, banned at one time, now share the same space in bags as drinking water. Just before the pandemic there was a huge drive against plastic use. We are now choking the Planet with masks, PPE, and related things which will be a much bigger problem and would result in a bigger issue which the mask and PPE cant stop.

Why cant the economy of the worlds stop for a moment. It cant stop because we are in an economy of Just in time. The supply chain is just in time. It is not relaxed. Stop the arms race, stop all the cross border issues. Join hands with the doctors and the scientists. Just pause the economy for a few months. Dont tell me it cant be done. We have seen it done in all the countries, albeit for a varied amount of time. This calls for a collective effort from all the countries/individuals. All the laboratories/scientific establishments working in tandem sharing data in an open way to reduce re-invention of the wheel. 

All the laboratories/scientists/doctors belonging to the 1% should be allowed to work in a global way, without the intervention from the owners and under a universal governing body, again, made of doctors/scientists/engineers and all the professional people required in assisting and testing the output. Can the consumerist world pause itself so that all the 1% companies have nothing to sell. Buy local groceries. Support the local producers. So that the world when it gets back has an alternate setup for consumption. Well, dont the 1% know this can happen. They know it can happen. If the lockdown had extended for another 06 months throughout the world, humans would have setup an alternate setup for meeting the consumerist attitude of the individual & it would definitely be local. 

Humans are basically restless. This 06 months all the funds available for defense from all the countries should be diverted to identify test and release the requisite medicines. Well, medicines are required for that portion of people who dont have immunity. So, now the medicine is out and the non-immune portion of humanity also will survive. Husbands, wives, sons, daughters, friends, humans live. No human life is expendable. If a tea sellers life was long ago deemed as not important and expendable a country wouldn't have had one of the longest serving state head.

All of a sudden deaths of people around the world has become a mere count. A tech company head comments on medicines. A traditional dancer assures that vaccines if available will be provided to one and all. The thing is doctors and scientists are the only people talking sense. This is their job. They know their job. Let them be. Let them talk. For once, I request all the 1% to be quiet and allow the podium to the doctors and scientists. Let us give them the stage and the mic. This is their time to be in the spotlight. Turn the spotlights on them.

Let us save the Non-immune humanity not by treating them and torturing them on ventilators but by prevention. And, No, the logic of death of a few for the survival of the largesse is totally flawed. Since the largesse surviving might be the worst of the lot.