Isn't this better than sleeping pills?
If you are doing it faithfully with your partner, is it still sinful?
Will our ancestors hate us for it?

Will our deceased loved ones seek comfort in the fact that our grief has consumed every little joy we had in life? Do they really associate intimacy with being disrespected?

Walk into any neighbourhood shop in Dwarka early enough in the morning, and you'll catch the owner doing something that has nothing to do with commerce and everything to do with faith — lighting an agarbatti in front of a small framed photo tucked behind the counter, well before the first shutter fully lifts. It looks like a private ritual, and it is, but it's also strikingly ordinary once you realise almost every shopkeeper on earth is running some version of the same quiet ceremony. Strip away the specific gods, coins, and salt, and what you're left with is a global, remarkably consistent human habit: treating the first transaction of the day like it decides everything that follows.

Bohni in India and Pakistan: Why the First Sale of the Day Matters So Much

In India and Pakistan, this habit even has a name — bohni, the belief that the day's first sale sets the tone, in terms of luck, for every sale after it. Shopkeepers try to ensure the bohni transaction happens in cash, ideally at full price with no haggling, and customers are expected to be generous rather than difficult during it, since walking away from a genuine bohni buyer without a sale is considered inauspicious. In some regions, the first cash received gets spat upon lightly to ward off the evil eye, or touched reverently to each eye as a gesture of thanks. It's not unusual for a shopkeeper to chase a small loss on the first sale just to avoid an empty-handed opening.

Haal Khata in Bangladesh: Closing Old Ledgers to Start the Year Fresh

Bengali traders take this further once a year rather than once a day. On the first day of the Bengali calendar, shopkeepers close out their old ledgers entirely and open a fresh one in a custom called Haal Khata, inviting customers in to settle old debts and start clean. Hindu traders mark the occasion with a special puja, while Muslim shopkeepers write "Bismillah" at the top of the new ledger before a single entry goes in. Sweets and small gifts get handed out to customers as part of the ceremony — a shop essentially resetting its relationship with everyone who owes it money, once a year, on purpose.

Have you experienced days when, out of the blue, without any history of things, and with no medically substantiated diagnosis, your skin develops maroon, reddish patches all across your face? It is hard to explain exactly what happens here, but I have suffered from this problem since 2005. I finally nailed it down to extreme anxiety that causes these flare-ups, but read around- AI or Google search- you will not find a lot of convincing answers regarding the diagnosis. I think anxiety-induced skin eruptions are a real thing. Perhaps, by now, there should be a well-defined name for this condition, if not a disease. I recall getting these patches and then running to a neighborhood chemist to give me something to compress it and cool it down. Needless to say, nothing really worked. You have to just talk to yourself and stop hyperventilating, but the problem is that you are trying to calm yourself down when your body is already reacting to something you have been carrying in your mind. I even had a teammate about 12 years back who had the same symptomatology. In her case, the entire face would develop red spots, like pox or chronic acne, and by evening, when her nerves settled, they would vanish! Literally, vanish without a trace.

 

There is absolute truth in believing that the kettlebell is the true king of all body conditioning equipment!

This is to anyone who truly believes that kettlebell movement engages the whole body and that there is no other exercise that comes close - you were absolutely right! I am now about 8 months into kettlebell movements. I can say this with utter confidence - there is nothing out there in the form of fancy gym equipment that challenges, engages, and conditions the body like a weighted kettlebell. I use the word "kettlebell" because of another truth that my journey with the KB has uncovered - working out with light kettlebells is to just get used to the range of movement that swinging the kettlebell induces, but if you want to see real results, you have to get slightly uncomfortable. You have to choose kettlebells that are a bit beyond the realm of easily swinging them upwards or towards the size. A slightly heavier kettlebell really works out the entire body. Even those movements that are not intended to target the core do it anyway. This is why I truly believe that the love for kettlebell and its growing global credentials are not a passing phase - this is not an Instagram trend - this is here to stay. 

A bit of personal insight before we delve into the actual discussion - I chanced upon Rumali Curls via Instagram without really searching for this body movement. It has been a month, and I have progressed to just a 7.5 kg dumbbell in each hand while doing it. However, I don't use it as a means to grow muscles or build the biceps. For me, Rumali Curls are more about a whole-body movement, and something that warms up and works out the entire body before I get into heavy weights. I find them easy and without any major risks. You don't have to do 100 reps in the first week. You will feel it work the entire upper body with some strain on the upper arms...

There is something slightly amusing about the way the modern gym keeps rediscovering exercises that Indian wrestlers have been using for generations. The Rumali bicep curl, also described in some fitness circles as a Rumali dumbbell swing, looks quite different from the familiar bicep curls most people perform in front of a mirror. Instead of moving the dumbbell in a simple up-and-down line, the exercise uses a flowing circular path that brings the arms, shoulders, torso, and core into the movement. Its connection with traditional Indian kushti training also gives the exercise a story that goes beyond the current obsession with finding the “next” gym movement, because this is less a new fitness invention and more an old training idea being viewed through the lens of today’s strength and conditioning culture.

What Exactly Are Rumali Bicep Curls?

The first thing to understand is that Rumali curls are not simply regular bicep curls performed more quickly. The movement is built around a circular or semicircular path in which the dumbbell travels across the front of the body, moves down and outward, and then comes back toward the shoulder. The arm still performs elbow flexion, so the biceps remain involved, but the exercise asks the shoulder, forearm, torso, and hips to help control the movement as well.

The Night Around Us (2026): looking forward to what seems like a different version of Dracula!

A Man Who Has Lost His Faith

Chris Schwab's Dracula: The Night Around Us moves Bram Stoker's vampire story out of Victorian Transylvania and into contemporary America. At its centre is Dr. John Seward, now a psychologist working at a state mental-health facility. Seward is not introduced as the commanding Van Helsing-type hero familiar from many Dracula adaptations. He is an ordinary, somewhat disillusioned man whose faith in other people has been badly worn down. Seward meets Mina, a wary single mother who has moved into the apartment building with her young daughter, Lucy. Lucy is open, funny, and immediately more trusting than her mother. Seward develops an easy affection for the child, and his relationship with Mina gradually gives him something he had been missing: a reason to believe that human connection is still possible. The film deliberately compresses Stoker's enormous cast. Schwab combines elements of Jonathan Harker and Van Helsing into Seward, while altering Lucy and Mina from their roles in the novel. It makes the story depend on Seward's emotional investment in this little family.

What Is Genetic Trauma? A Concept That Went Mainstream Through TV

The HBO series Watchmen introduced a lot of people to a phrase that sounds almost like science fiction: genetic trauma, the idea that whatever your ancestors lived through might still be sitting somewhere inside you, encoded rather than just remembered. It's a striking idea for a superhero show to drop casually into dialogue, and it stuck with viewers for good reason — most of us already suspect, in some vague unscientific way, that we're carrying more from our families than just their eye colour and their taste in food. The question worth actually answering is whether that suspicion holds up to scrutiny, or whether it's just a good line dressed up as biology.

Genetic Trauma vs Generational Trauma: Why the Terms Get Confused

These two phrases get used interchangeably online, which muddies the water considerably. Generational trauma — sometimes called intergenerational or transgenerational trauma — is a well-established concept in psychology describing how the emotional and behavioural aftermath of trauma gets passed down through families: parenting styles shaped by fear, silence around painful history, anxiety absorbed by children who never lived through the original event at all. Genetic trauma is a much narrower, far more contested claim — that trauma can leave an actual biological mark on your DNA's packaging, one inheritable through eggs or sperm. One is broadly accepted in family psychology. The other is a genuinely fascinating, still-unsettled area of science called epigenetics.

Delhi Traffic Congestion: Why the City Finally Needs a Health Checkup

Every driver in this city has, at some point, treated a traffic jam the way you'd treat a stubborn cough — annoying, familiar, something you just push through without asking what's actually causing it. I've spent enough hours crawling along the Dwarka Expressway during construction phases to know that instinct well. But somewhere in the last two years, that instinct has started changing, quietly, in the background. Delhi's traffic is finally being treated less like an unavoidable mood and more like a patient whose vitals are worth measuring properly — pulse, pressure, the works — instead of just being complained about at dinner.

Traffic Management System India: How Bad Is the Congestion, Really?

The numbers, once you actually go looking for them, are sobering rather than surprising. India ranked as the fifth most traffic-congested country globally and second in Asia in 2025, with commuters facing an average congestion level of 37.4 percent, and Delhi placed seventh among Asia's ten most congested cities that year. A Boston Consulting Group estimate found that congestion across Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kolkata alone costs the Indian economy roughly 22 billion dollars annually. That's not a number you feel while sitting at a red light, but it's the number that eventually justifies why three separate, serious traffic-intelligence systems have all decided Delhi is worth diagnosing properly.

Relationship Compatibility: What Your Body Decides Before Your Mind Does

Office Anxiety: When a Colleague's Gaze Becomes a Workplace Problem

The Mouth Keeps Score Even When the Mind Won't Admit It

There is something disturbingly deep that connects apartment owners in Delhi like me with their walls...

Every Dwarka monsoon, my wall and I have the same argument. It shows up as a patch. I paint over it. It comes back a few months later, slightly bigger, slightly smugger. This time I decided to actually think it through instead of just reaching for the roller — and it turned into a much longer, much more useful rabbit hole than I expected. Sharing the whole thing here, because if your apartment has a "problem wall" too, you've probably had some version of this exact conversation with yourself. While you read this, please note that you will need lots of patience, oodles of DIY enterprising spirit, the will-try-again composure, and defiance of raiding Afghan armies that plundered our nation to be an apartment-owner with moisture-free apartment walls in Delhi.

Date/Time stamp: 2025-08-15, 14:03 — this is when the test was run. (Worth noting as a teaching aside: this date was actually wrong on the device — a good example that a machine's internal clock is a separate, trivial setting from its actual measurement accuracy. Don't let a wrong timestamp make you distrust the electrical readings themselves.)

TEST REPORT / BATTERY TEST / REPLACE BATTERY — this is the tester's final verdict, printed in bold as the headline result. Everything below is the data that led to this conclusion.

Now the core readings, explained one by one:

1. SOC: 98% (State of Charge) — how full the battery is right now, like a fuel gauge. This just means it was charged at the time of testing. This number alone tells you almost nothing about the battery's actual health.
2. Voltage: 12.70V — the resting voltage across the terminals. A healthy, fully-charged 12V battery normally sits around 12.6-12.8V, so this looks completely normal on its own — another number that can mislead you if you stop here.
3. SOH: 38% (State of Health) — this is the real headline number. It measures how much usable capacity remains compared to when the battery was new. At 38%, the battery has lost roughly two-thirds of its original ability to perform, even though it's currently charged.

The Complete Guide to the Alien & Predator Cinematic Universe

A fact-checked, deep-dive viewing order and connections guide

If you're new to sci-fi horror, the Alien and Predator franchises can feel intimidating — over 45 years of movies, prequels, crossovers, and reboots, with connections buried in background props and single lines of dialogue. Here's the full timeline, the props and quotes that actually tie it together, and which connections are confirmed on-screen versus confirmed later by the filmmakers themselves.

Phase 1: Earth and the Hunters

Long before humans built starships, alien hunters were already visiting Earth, using our ancestors and our wildlife as target practice.

Prey (2022) — set 1719, North American Great Plains

A young Comanche warrior named Naru defends her tribe from a technologically advanced alien hunter. Late in the film, a wounded French fur trader named Raphael Adolini gives Naru a flintlock pistol in exchange for medical help, engraved "Raphael Adolini 1715." That same engraved pistol is what a Predator gifts Danny Glover's character as a trophy of respect at the end of Predator 2 (1990), nearly 280 years later in the story's internal chronology. It's the single clearest confirmed prop connection anchoring the whole modern Predator timeline together, and it's genuinely on-screen, not just fan theory.

The Crucible, in Five Chapters | An abridged retelling of Arthur Miller's play

You don't need to have sat through a full production or reread it since tenth grade. Here's everything you need to hold your own when someone brings up "The Crucible" at a party or in a meeting. This piece paraphrases and contextualizes publicly documented history and criticism about The Crucible; direct quotations are limited to one line from the play itself and one line from Arthur Miller's own later reflection on it.

Chapter 1: Fits and Whispers

In the small Puritan town of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, the Reverend Parris discovers his daughter, Betty, lying strangely unresponsive after he catches a group of girls dancing in the forest with his enslaved servant, Tituba. Rumors of witchcraft spread instantly through the deeply religious, fearful community. The girls, led by the manipulative Abigail Williams, panic about being punished for dancing and secretly conjuring spirits. Rather than confess to simple mischief, Abigail seizes on a darker, more useful lie: she claims the girls were victims of witchcraft themselves, and begins naming townspeople as witches to deflect blame entirely onto others.

Chapter 1: A Strange Friendship, A Stranger Captain

A restless young sailor calling himself Ishmael, weary of life on land, decides to ship out on a whaling voyage. In New Bedford, waiting for his ship, he's forced to share a bed at a crowded inn with a stranger — Queequeg, a heavily tattooed harpooner from a South Pacific island, who worships a small wooden idol and carries a tomahawk. Ishmael's initial fear turns quickly into deep respect and friendship once he sees Queequeg's quiet dignity and skill. The two sign on together aboard the Pequod, a whaling ship out of Nantucket, owned in part by two shrewd Quaker merchants. Before departure, a ragged stranger on the docks warns Ishmael ominously about the ship's captain, hinting at some unspoken doom awaiting anyone who sails under him.

*An original abridged retelling of Homer's epic*

You must have a general idea about this global classic before watching The Odyssey, the movie, which is releasing July 17, 2026, starring Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, and Tom Holland as Telemachus.

Chapter 1: A House Under Siege

Twenty years had passed since Odysseus, king of Ithaca, sailed off to fight in the Trojan War. Ten of those years were spent at Troy itself, and ten more had vanished on the voyage home — a voyage that should have taken weeks. Now his palace stood overrun by more than a hundred suitors, arrogant young noblemen from Ithaca and the surrounding islands, all camped in his halls, eating his livestock, drinking his wine, and pressing his wife Penelope to give up hope and choose one of them to marry. Penelope had held them off for years with a clever trick: she promised to choose a husband once she finished weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus's aging father, then secretly unraveled each night's work before dawn. But the suitors had caught on, and her excuses were running out. Meanwhile, Odysseus's son Telemachus was no longer a child but not yet a man, caught in an impossible position — too young to challenge a hall full of grown warriors, too old to simply watch his inheritance be devoured. He had no idea whether his father was alive or dead.