poetry

AFTER the events of March 11th 2011, when an earthquake and tsunami led to a meltdown of three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant in Japan, you might be forgiven for concluding that atomic power and seawater don’t mix. Many engineers, though, do not agree. They would like to see more seawater involved, not less. In fact, they have plans to site nuclear power plants in the ocean rather than on land—either floating on the surface or moored beneath it. At first, this sounds a mad idea. It is not. Land-based power stations are bespoke structures, built by the techniques of civil engineering, in which each is slightly different and teams of specialists come and go according to the phase of the project. Marine stations, by contrast, could be mass-produced in factories using, if not the techniques of the assembly line, then at least those of the shipyard, with crews constantly employed

A WISE driver keeps an eye on the fuel gauge, to make timely stops at filling stations. For drivers of electric cars, though, those stations are few and far between. The infrastructure needed for refilling batteries has yet to be developed, and the technology which that infrastructure will use is still up for grabs. Most electric cars are fitted with plugs. But plugs and their associated cables and charging points bring problems. The cables are trip hazards. The charging points add to street clutter. And the copper wire involved is an invitation to thieves. Many engineers would therefore like to develop a second way of charging electric vehicles—one that is wireless and can thus be buried underground. Electrical induction, the underlying principle behind wireless charging, was discovered by Michael Faraday in 1831, and is widely used in things such as electric motors and generators. Faraday observed that moving a conductor through a magnetic field induced a current in that conducto...

Bus khatam kar ye Bazi Ishq Ghalib Mukadar k hare labi jeta nhi karte

Mera Name hi kafi he teri mehfil mein Ham khod agay to Diwane ho jao Ge tum.

       Fresh out of the icebox, this brain looks the wrong way from time to time, and misses the cat stepping by, Gerry on the screen laboring to tell the nuances his pink matter almost notices, he’s not my brother, not really my close friend, just my necessary neighbor on a bicycle going by like a whistle from the lips of someone I trust. He has a peculiar skeleton arranged his own way in the mind’s pasture. We were as they say “of an age” and so inter- twine somehow, though I wanted to work when he wanted to play. That long nose is in my life and in my writing and so is the Okanagan River. I sometimes get to the river when I am at work, the sun on my back not the ink in my pen. There was, when I was last in the Okanagan Valley, a cat with big paws in the neighborhood, I was told, fires I could see along the hillside, stunning heat from the sky, enough to thaw any brain.

 Being in a coma can play havoc with your sense of time. It can turn your eyes from brown to blue. It can grow hair on your belly, it can get you lost between bedroom and office. If you are to live in extra innings, you’ll have to watch the corners, step around bad things, ignore insults and welcome loving hands that sculpt you in your chair. Being refrigerated and put to sleep, dropping out of time, you have to save your humor and guard it, a precious trove to bring out as needed, white strips on the road flying beneath your vehicle, eat them up, wake to a busy underground world, where people in body bags keep passing by, tilted toward you know where. Where half the people in your life have gone, dissolving your sense of time, which was never supposed to have an end.

Imagine that — my last words might have been spoken to the dog, she who saved my life, it has been said, spoken with no thought of reply nor of understanding, a genial insult maybe, a philosophical conundrum posed aeons before any household pet ever turned an ear. In the ambulance I made no remark about trees nor how tired I was of them, and in the second ambulance our dog’s heart beat hard with terror.