Let’s all hope that over the next few months as we start getting vaccinated, we wouldn’t need to visit hospitals for Covid treatment. And if vaccination is going to happen via syringes, I hope the doctor / nurse who administers me one (am I even eligible?) is as good as the guy below.

Talking about vaccines, the following news started trending in India yesterday.

News like these create an unnecessary loss of confidence in vaccines because the fact is that, in a Randomzied Control Trial (RCT), some volunteers are given potent vaccines while others are merely given placebo (something that looks like vaccine but is as good as water). It’s important to do this to truly test the efficacy of a vaccine (same logic applies to medicine trials too). Now when a trial is blind (which most trials for vaccines are), the volunteers don’t know if they got the real vaccine or the placebo! And that means any volunteer can always catch the infection! It was a “trial” for a reason!

The answer is yes to both and to understand how you could still infect others (if they are not vaccinated), check out the below brilliant Twitter thread.

Alright enough of Covid. Let’s move on to something a little positive - how about slaves, sugar, honey and tea?

The above illustration is part of a new blog that I wrote. Some of you may have come across the news this week about honey being adulterated with sugar by most leading Indian brands (sugar is cheaper). But was sugar always cheaper than honey? Find it out in my blog. The insights / trivia that I share in there are based on a book on the history of sugar.

Nobody can tell, you say? Well, I stumbled upon this paper which shows that plants emit frequencies when in extreme distress. Translated to a catchy headline - “Science shows plants feel pain”!

We humans often cry when we are in pain. We also cry when we get super emotionally happy. That’s exactly what the below video of an Indian teacher winning a million dollar prize will do to you.

What teacher Ranjit did after winning the prize sort of tells us why he of all the 12,000 nominees (from 140 countries) deserved to win! He announced that he would share half his prize money with all the top ten finalists! What a man, what a man!

Would you say Ranjit is a nice person or is he a kind person? Are they the same thing or do you see niceness and kindness as two distinct things? Someone asked this question on Twitter (without Ranjit’s context) and it made me think.

You can click on the above Twitter snapshot to read all the interesting answers and thoughts this seemingly straightforward question has been generating. Incidentally, a day or two back, one of my subscribers (and a good friend) told me that I used ‘nice’ a lot in my newsletters (and blogs). This was a good feeback and I am glad he was kind enough to share it with me! :D Do you have any feedback too? Share na? Be nice. Or kind. Whatever works for you!

I started this newsletter with a video. Let me end with another one. This one is even shorter at just 1 minute in length.

Although it was published last week itself, I saw the post only yesterday. I had shot and created this 1 minuter last year. It was ‘nice’ to visit my own department for this one.

Alright, that’s about it. See you in a week’s time. Keep learning and stay safe. Be nice and kind of course.