If you've been with me in this blog for any length of time, you know that I just don't like to go to India.  The people themselves are fine, but the government is a mess. Let me start with something almost trivial, but typical.  All of India has the same time, but at  UTC +5:30.   You'd think that a ship going east would lose an hour every time it passes a certain zone.  But no....one night we had to advance an hour, then the next half and hour, and tonight we gain half an hour when we leave India. The bureaucracy is both a joke and total pain.  Try getting a visa, especially when you're in some countries.  We had problems in the U.S., but if you're from the U.K., India penalizes them a lot more by having to go through all kinds of hoops.  This is payback for the country making in migration difficult.  For example, after you get the India visa, you end up with two pieces of paper that you need to show three times leaving and returning to the ship.  Or six times, p

Yesterday I brought you up to date on our current COVID-19 pandemic.  As much as this virus is waning, what about the combined impact this Fall and Winter when you add the seasonal flu and that Respiratory Syncytial Virus ( RSV ) that infects mostly children and infants?  Is a  TRIPLEDEMIC  coming? About world news, from the  New York Times  this morning: Boris Johnson   pulled out of the race   to become Britain’s prime minister, making his former finance minister, Rishi Sunak, the next PM. Xi Jinping, China’s leader, appointed loyalists to top government jobs,   giving him nearly absolute power .  Will he be president for life? A   solar eclipse will be visible tomorrow   across Europe and Asia. U.S. students recorded   deep declines in math and a dip in reading   on a national exam, the clearest picture yet of the pandemic’s impact on education. The World Series is set to begin on Friday:   Both the   Astros   and   Phillies   clinched spots yesterday, setting up a battle between ju