First of all, let's clarify one thing. It was not a nuclear weapon that was lost. It was a nuclear-powered device that contained a specific isotope of plutonium. Not the isotope that is used in nuclear weapons but its plutonium-238 that were contained in this device. North of Nanda Devi you have Chinese occupied Tibet and further north you have Chinese occupied Xinjiang. Now in Xinjiang, present day China, there is a place called Lop Nur, which is where the Chinese in the 20th century tested their nuclear weapons. It is about 1500 Km far away from Nanda Devi. In 1964, China tested its first nuclear device in Lop Nur in the Chinese occupied Xinjiang and that was a matter of concern for the United States. The Americans then convinced India to set up a signals intelligence station in northern India on the Nanda Devi peak or near the peak of the mountain from which we can look far into China. We can see that the Nanda Devi mountain is about 8 km sea level and from that vantage p...
I’ve been thinking about this for a while — why do we talk about littering in India like it’s only a behavior problem? Every time the topic comes up, people say things like “we need awareness” or “we need better technology.” But when I look around, it doesn’t feel like a lack of awareness. It feels like something deeper, something that runs through the system itself. The solution to India's littering problem is not fancy technology. You can introduce as much technology as you want in India, but you will not solve the littering problem unless you solve the deeper issue, the root cause of the problem. See, in India there's a huge gigantic problem. What is that problem? It's what nobody wants to speak about. You will have government servants with a salary of 30,000-40,000 rupees a month, 3-4 lakhs rupees a year who own huge bungalows. Everyone knows that right? You have all these public works t...