AK Vijay Kumar Many say, marriages are made in heaven. However, as a confirmed non-believer, I don’t seem to think that way. But if one were to believe that marriages are indeed made in heaven, would the guests who are invited in some of the high-profile weddings also decide the destiny of the newly weds? I don’t know. Yet, the fact is, the competition to invite guests at such weddings is something I noticed after I came to Ahmedabad in 1993 to join as assistant editor of the Times of India.

Neeraj Nanda In continuation of my previous blog , my friend in Melbourne, Neeraj Nanda, on reading it, tried to see if a Gujarat government site of the General Administration Department (GAD), which I opened sitting in Ahmedabad, is opening in Australia, too. Ironically, this site introduces itself as “Towards Smart Governance: Department’s main objectives lay strong foundations for citizens and fulfill their expectations and gain trust by finding measures through effective and responsive administration”.

Roshan Shah Recently, I got a message from an NRI friend settled in Canada, Roshan Shah. Himself a software engineer, he told me that several Gujarat government sites do not appear to be “accessible outside India.” He particularly cited the main state government site , referring to an IT tool , wondering, “When PM has touted Vibrant Gujarat for years, how would any investors trust a government which can't even get its main site, policies etc, accessible to outsiders?”

Last year, e-journal “Visual Capitalist” ranked about 36 countries on how they were doing insofar as providing pension to their population is concerned. The ranking suggested that India is the fifth worst country in providing pension to its aging population. Titled "Ranked: The best and worst pension plans, by country", and authored by Carmen Ang, other countries that rank worse than India are Mexico, the Philippines, Turkey and Argentina. The Netherlands ranks the best, followed by Denmark, Australia, Finland and Sweden.

A Facebook page, titled “Silk and Steel”, has revealed something astonishing: How a Nazi anthropologist went as far away as Tibet in order to find traces of Aryan civilisation! Introducing itself as “a podcast about China and Silk Road, history, culture and current events” with the web address https://www.patreon.com/silknsteel , this is what it says: *** Nazi anthropologist Bruno Berger on 1938-39 Nazi expedition to Tibet sponsored by Heinrich Himmler, measuring Tibetan skulls to find trace of ancient Aryans... They’re trying to verify Nazi theory that a group of pure blood Aryans had settled in Tibet. They believed that Tibetan aristocracy still retained ancient Aryan bloodline. Later Berger tried to get access to skulls of executed Soviet Jewish commissars on the Eastern Front but failed due to logistics. So he participated in selecting 100 Jewish prisoners of Auschwitz to be killed for Jewish skeleton collection. He was convicted in 1971 for being an accomplice in the murder of

A twitter handle, calling itself Indian Rwanda Radio, @IND_RwandaRadio, which claims to record evidence and examples of Indian professional media organizations allegedly engaged in what it calls "genocidal Rwanda Radio script”, has, in a series of tweets , pointed towards how nearly a year ago Muslims were sought to be blamed for spreading coronavirus. The tweets, shared on the social media, seek to expose prominent media houses for this, even as giving screenshots from electronic media which tried to send a communal message by blaming Tablighi Jamaat.

Mamata Banerjee is “injured”. The two main political opponents of Mamata, the Congress-Left combine, on one hand, and the BJP, on the other, challenging what so far seemed to be her indisputable rule in the poll-bound West Bengal, are stating that it was an “accident” and Mamata was trying to use it as to gain sympathy. On the other hand, as already reported, the Trinamool Congress, which she heads, says, she was “pushed” by four to five persons and was the result of “security lapse.”

Last table: Top 10 excluding US and China Visual Capitalist , in its latest survey in order to “visualize” the richest people in the world, has suggested that India’s billionnaire Mukesh Ambani is the 11th richest person the world with an accumulated wealth of $90.9 billion, failing to make in the top ten. Even singling out two countries China and India, to identify their richest persons, the commentary refuses to comment on Ambani's wealth.

Recently, I received an email from from a person who introduced himself as Ronny Krier, claiming to be an American cultural researcher. He said, he visits Counterview in a regular basis to read news about India, and thinks, “It's a great platform to break the information filter bubbles and hear different voice.” Then Kreir, who is on Twitter and Facebook , and calls himself “independent investigator, religion-politics researcher,” refers to a friend whom he does not name to point out how the Tibetan government in exile is failing to take care of refugees.