A few days back, after taking a round of beautiful hills surrounding Salt Lake City (SLC), we drove down to a popular, somewhat fashionable spot -- Harvey Milk Blvd -- not very far from the Down Town. We visited a few shops, where mainly souvenirs were being sold, and also a few sex toys! Finally, we visited an ice cream parlour, where we tasted Italian ice cream. It is a well decorated parlour, with different coloured lovely goodies  hanging across the restaurant. I took a lemon flavoured ice cream -- really liked it. The parlour is called Dolcetti Gelato.

One of the most interesting things I noticed in Salt Lake City where I right now, is the prevalence of gun culture. Anecdotes take a round on how someone fired at an xyz person, and yet got way with it. Nothing new, as we in India also keep reading about how guns are commonly used in the US leading to fatalities even in schools.

Even as rains lashed Salt Lake City, the capital of the US state Utah, where I live now, I was a little surprised to read a story  in a local website. The story says, "When it comes to per capita water use in the US, Utah ranks second at 169 gallons per day. That's only slightly behind Idaho's 184 gallons per person each day."

I was a little surprised to read a picture story in DNA news website, which includes Ahmedabad as the first city among seven where non-vegetarian consumption is banned. 

After watching the Pioneer Day parade, a week later, I walked into a top University of Utah institute in the Salt Lake City, and on the very entrance I found copies of the Salt Lake City Weekly freely available. I picked up one of them. Containing mostly ads, scanning through, I found an article titled Pioneer Day, which interested me.

Currently in Salt Lake City, which hosted Winter Olympics 2002, and will again host them in 2934, it quite a spectacle to watch the Pioneer Day parade just about half a mile from where we currently live.  The parade marks the foundation day of Utah State of the US, and the city happens to be its capital. 

Even as we visited the Great Salt Lake, the saltiest lake of the Western Hemisphere, as part of our effort to see different places around Salt Lake City, better known for hosting winter Olympics in 2002, I was surprised two read two articles first in New York Times and then the website of the National Public Radio (NPR), an American public broadcasting organization, both of whom quoted a study to say the lake is "drying" and is "becoming a significant contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions that are causing the climate to warm." 

At that time I was working in the Communist Party of India (CPI)-supported People’s Publishing House (PPH) as assistant editor, doing the job of book editing. The year was 1977. A year earlier I was picked up by Mohit Sen, a CPI Central Committee member, from National Herald, where I was working as trainee proof reader, getting a stipend of Rs 250.

No. This is not Rann of Kutch, or the much propagated Road to Heaven which was lately constructed to connect Dholavira with the tent city off the huge expanse of the White Rann, which we visited last winter. Both sides of the road are White Rann, which is propagated as a tourist attraction.

I was a little awestruck: The news had already spread that Astrazeneca – whose Indian variant Covishield was delivered to nearly 80% of Indian vaccine recipients during the Covid-19 era – has been withdrawn by the manufacturers following the  admission  by its UK pharma giant that its Covid-19 vector-based vaccine in “rare” instances cause TTS, or “thrombocytopenia thrombosis syndrome”, which lead to the blood to clump and form clots. The vaccine  reportedly  led to at least 81 deaths in the UK.