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DailyOh! A tractor’s supreme sacrifice over Farm Bills, to why SSR’s family is losing faith in CBI

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Vandana
VandanaSep 28, 2020 | 18:57

DailyOh! A tractor’s supreme sacrifice over Farm Bills, to why SSR’s family is losing faith in CBI

A tractor was burnt. But what did the tractor do to deserve the burning.

Burning has a special place in protests that mere breaking cannot match. Breaking creates noise, it leaves the target destroyed. Burning creates sound, and also light. Of course, burning too leaves the object destroyed. It was light, sound, camera and destruction at India Gate today when a tractor was set afire as part of the farmers’ protest over Farm Bills.

The tractor was brought to India Gate reportedly in a trolley at around 7.15 this morning. The tractor was offloaded and burnt. With the burning helping to register a protest against Farm Bills, the Delhi Police, on their part, registered a case in the incident and held five people who came with the tractor.

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A tractor set afire at India Gate this morning. (Photo: PTI)

Police said the men on the tractor-burning mission also raised pro-Congress slogans. Earlier reports of tractors being burnt in some parts of India and Haryana too came to light.

Anger against the government is understandable but what has the poor tractor done to deserve being burnt? The tractor has been silently ploughing fields, tilling, disking, harrowing, carrying people for weddings and also political rallies, in short, serving as one of the most multipurpose vehicles ever. People in villages, who have tractors parked outside their houses, also earn an extra oomph factor. There is no way they would be loading their vehicles on another vehicle to be sent for burning in the national capital.

Tractor, the Word Of The Day, comes from the Latin word trahere. Trahere meant ‘to pull’. Around 1859, the word used for the vehicle in English was traction engine. The use of tractor to describe the multi-purpose farm vehicle was around 1896. Before tractors got to the pulling part, in India, bulls did the job. Before bulls, humans did it.

The first tractors in India came only in the mid-1940s from the wars. In 1949, Eicher GoodEarth, was set up in India with technical collaboration with Gebr. The German unit of Eicher imported and sold about 1,500 tractors in India, in 1949. About 10 years later, on April 24, 1959, Eicher came out with the first locally assembled tractor from its Faridabad factory.

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The farmers’ stir however intensified today because yesterday President Ram Nath Kovind gave his assent to the Farm Bills.

So the Farm Bills are in but FarmVille is out, not immediately though. FarmVille will not be playable on Facebook from December 31 onwards and that is happening because Adobe is ending support for Flash Player. Adobe has decided to stop distributing and updating Flash Player for all web browsers. So your farms are soon going to just vanish along with all the animals, poultry and tractors you owned. The Farm Bills can do nothing to protect them.

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FarmVille has been one of the most successful games with a straight run of about 11 years. People played it for so long but did you ever wonder why it never got called out for being addictive like Candy Crush was? That is because FarmVille worked in moderation. You planted crops and then you had to wait up to 24 hours to a couple of days to harvest them. So you were not always required to be working on the virtual field. You could go and do some real work. We are not undermining your work on FarmVille. But we ain’t glorifying it either.

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While Facebook won’t be able to give the farms back, Google says it may not be able to give free Google Meet from as early as October. And you have reason to thank Google. The free version of Meet will be limited to meetings no longer than 60 minutes. So if you can finish a meeting within 60 minutes, you don’t have to pay. Also, Google had informed in April that what was coming from October 1. It gave the extension because more people were working from home in April. Less time spent on meeting is more spent on work. What is there to discuss in a meeting beyond an hour? The agenda for the next meeting, perhaps.

Not being allowed to meet people freely is what DGP rank officer Purushottam Sharma says led him to launch a brutal assault on his wife of 22 years. Sharma owned up to the act because a video of him in the act left no choice for him to disown. He has been relieved of his charges.

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While two other men in the video appear to be trying to save Sharma’s wife from Sharma passively, a dog tries to do the same actively. This makes a case for dogs training humans in human behaviour.

Sharma being discharged of his duties is some justice for Sharma’s wife, but what about justice for Sushant Singh Rajput? In a probe linked to the main probe of Sushant’s death, which has now itself become the main probe and is being called the Bollywood drug nexus probe, Kshitij Prasad has said that he was subjected to third-degree torture in the case and was being forced to implicate filmmaker Karan Johar in the case by the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB). The claim was made on behalf of Prasad by his laywer Satish Maneshinde, who is also the lawyer of Rhea Chakraborty.

In its response, NCB has claimed, “NCB is a professional agency.”

The lawyer of Sushant Singh Rajput’s family Vikash Singh has, on the other hand, blamed the CBI for conducting a slow probe in Sushant’s death case. The CBI in its response has claimed, “CBI is a professional agency.”

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The CBI says it is probing Sushant Singh Rajput's death case from all angles. (Photo: PTI)

Two agencies, both professional – by their own admission.

Forget the professionals, let’s talk travel. Come October 1, and flights will resume operations from Delhi airport's Terminal 2 after a six-month closure. Since the frequency was low so far, flights were only taking off and landing at Terminal 3.

The Delhi International Airport Limited (DIAL) has said the resumption from T2 will be with 96 air traffic movements - 48 departures and 48 arrivals - daily. The movements are likely to rise to 180 by October-end.

What about T1? The terminal remains closed for expansion work.

You can take a flight to where you want but we have news from Jharkhand where leaves from the Jurassic period have been found by geologists. The leaves are believed to be 150-200 million years old. Imagine being that leaf. What would a 150-million-year-old human be like? Set your imaginative horses free. They can go galloping around without the mask, but not you.

The country that forced the masks and the virus on the world is set to send the world’s first mining robot into space by November this year. The robot is not going to actually be mining. The robot will check the feasibility of asteroid mining. If it succeeds, then real mining robots would be sent. Can the robots take coronavirus to asteroids? The answer hardly matters because the virus would have no one to infect there.

On Earth, we can get infected because infections are spreading. Do what you can to avoid the spread.

Stay at home if don’t really have to go out. And if you don’t know what to do sitting at home, watch Kumbalangi Nights.

On that note, we will take your leave for today. Be back tomorrow.

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Last updated: September 28, 2020 | 19:15
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