From the budget 2021 one interesting information was that states with the most reported growth was Sikkim and Highest Capita Income is Goa. What parameters made Sikkim the state with highest growth would be one interesting aspect specially in Covid times where tourism is non existent. Bihar comes as the state with lowest capita income. No surprises there.
Another infographic compares India's performance with various countries on human indices. Still a long way to go!
Year 2020 gave me one last shake when suddenly after running around hospitals thrice a day on 28th Dec2020, in the evening I suddenly developed high fever (101 deg C). I was sure that I had contracted Corona, would most likely give it to Ma and Baba as I was in their house, and would have to spend new year in isolation if not in the hospital. I took crocin, and fever subsided, once more it came in the morning. Once more I took crocin and then took a taxi to come to newtown after breakfast. We were supposed to go to Bangalore on the 30th. Hearing of my fever, Sum decided to cancel our tickets (lot of money got deducted) and tied up with Sona so she could come to Kolkata on 1st by herself.
Thankfully my fever had subsided by 30th, I had no other symptoms so it was decided that the fever was possibly due to overstrain and I need not isolate. On 1st Jan 2021 I made a special lunch
Basanti pulao, shukto, cholar dal, beguni
In the evening we went to receive Sona at the airport. There was a huge traffic jam near Eco park, so a trip of 20mins took more than an hour. Thankfully we were just in time to receive Sona. She looked very dull and listless and the return trip took more than one hour again. After coming home, having dinner, Sona cried a lot due to PMS and some hassles at her apartment with her friend. We talked for a long time and I tried to console her as best I could. Hopefully this year will be a bright one for her and for us and corona will be delegated to the back of our minds with the arrival of the vaccines.
1. Jane Austen - All books, all time favourite
2. Agatha Christie
3. Bill Bryson
4. Thomas Friedman
5. P. G Wodehouse
6. Daphne du Maurier
7. Michael Crichton
8. Sidney Sheldon- Formula Books
9. Dan Brown
10. Wilbur Smith
Amazing video below of dancing uncle on Govinda song. His dancing style is so spot on that it even beats Govinda in the original song. This video became viral. It would be instructive to study it and find the reason why.
The lockdown days in Pune were difficult as we were afraid to go out much to get food and vegetables so meals were sort of short cut types with not much variety. Some of the dishes I cooked with unfailing regularity were as follows:
Breakfast: Uttapa for Sona or oats with milk, Bread and cheese or Bread cheese omlette for us
Lunch: One out of Lauki ki sabzi, Karela alu sabzi, Drumstick brinjal alu sabzi in rotation
Masoor or Toor Dal on most days, Rice (Sona has 1 spoon of rice)
Sometimes (Once or twice a week) Chicken nuggets or Basa fish or egg curry
Dinner : Chapatti,
One sabzi out of Bhindi alu sabzi, Mushroom subzi, Alu Mutter, Alu gobhi, Baigan fry
Curd
Very rarely I would make Veg Biriyani, Lemon Rice, Cakes or Noodles
Cakes made on gas oven for her Baba's birthday by Sona
We ate a lot of seasonal fruits: Grapes, Mango, Pomegranate, even Litchi was available for one or two weeks in June and then Guava
New activities learned: Lockdown was a lesson as it taught us to manage without maids or even the services of barbers/ or laundry services. Had to do sweeping, mopping, washing dishes, hair cutting.
I even tried my hand at painting the bathroom door
One definite advantage of the worldwide lockdown was decrease in pollution levels. We had a good view of the faraway hills from our balcony which used to be hazy earlier.
Hope this lockdown ends so that we are able to go to Kolkata soon to celebrate Durga Puja there this time.
Recently after an update of Windows 10 in Sona's laptop , her laptop camera suddenly started behaving erratically. In video mode the camera would start turning off after every 2secs and then turn on again. This caused problems in taking online tests with digital proctoring. Since we were in lockdown, getting laptop to HP service shop was also ruled out. Then I decided to troubleshoot it myself from help articles in the internet.
First I tried updating the driver for the camera, so I uninstalled and then again reinstalled the drivers. This did not work. I thought that Kaspersky must be hampering access to camera, so went to privacy settings and disabled the web cam protection. This did not work. Then disabled Kaspersky from running and all firewalls switched off which did not help. The problem persisted irritatingly. Then I tried to remove the Camera app from Microsoft, but it could not be uninstalled. It had to be done from Power Shell command. Following the online commands from Microsoft help I uninstalled and then again reinstalled the Camera app. No luck the problem still persisted. I then thought that the last resort would be to try to restore Windows 10 operating system to an earlier date when the camera had been working properly. But I would loose a lot of work which I had done in the intervening period. From the internet another thing I tried was altering the registry editor to enter a new key 'EnableFrameServerMode' in the Windows given path. But this solution too did not work.
Then lastly in one of the posts I read that changing the name of the driver folders slightly had helped many people facing the same issue as I was having with the camera. I did the change and Eureka!!
the camera started working properly. Eternally thankful to the program developers who can go through the code and find solutions to such problems and then publish it online so others can benefit.
The hack
Go to C:\ProgramFiles\Realtek
Change RsProviders folder name to RsProviders_ (as backup)
