THE MERCURIAN TIMES

THE GREAT SMOG OF DELHI -Ojus S indwani The capital of this country has been shrouded by smog in recent days and has become no less than a gas chamber.  It has been reported as one of the worst levels of air quality in Delhi since 1999. The U.S. embassy in the city, which routinely tweets air pollution levels in the city, recorded the air quality index (AQI) to be at 1,010 at 4 p.m. local time (5:30 a.m. ET) on Wednesday.  According to the embassy’s website , a score of between 301 and 500 is deemed "hazardous." We recently witnessed a firecracker ban in the city due to the already increased amount of pollution in the air and the reducing quality of air. But we were not even able to cope with that when to top it all of, farmers started burning crop stubble to clear their fields. This, in combination with current weather conditions of cool temperatures and low wind speeds, resulted in smog festering in the city. Delhi, home to nearly 19 million people, is among...

Dark... No it ain't scared her But their concern did. Manifestly there was light,  Big big lights, Yet uncertainty for the bright. She lay there in white, And entrusted those emeralds with all her might. It was a pounding heart in the throat, But she had to feign for her beloved. A drop was naughty and tried to escape the eye, But her eye lashes played the spy. Knives and cuts, stitches and threads, Seems like her new acquaintance. Time ticked, and hours passed... When senses came, Pain ran in. Though she trembled and suffered She had won the battle  And defying all laws of nature, She is now a beautiful daffodil! -Devyanshi Agarwal 

The colour of the blood flowing in the veins : red, the number of bones in the body: 365, the air necessary for survival: oxygen, the liquid of revival: water, when all the basics needed for survival   is same and plain ,why does the distinction made by man make such a big ruckus ?? the distinction on the basis of birth, the distinction on the basis of the purity of the blood?? What blood? The red liquid made up of cells and fibro gens and coagulants ,the basic of every body yet differentiated on the basis of the family into which the infant is born into?  A dalit, a low born, an untouchable   should these words actually exist in the human dictionary? Last week a 9 month pregnant lady was murdered by Brahmin son and mother solely on the reason that she was a dalit who while loosing her balance in order   to prevent her fall took support of the bucket which was lying there at a convenient   spot to break her fall, the mother who according to the caste sy...

-Devyanshi Agarwal I might not have wings today, but evolution in technology gives birth to a hope of having them one day. The term ‘ Digital’ has penetrated in our lives so swiftly that the growing use of cryptocurrency today does not sound bizarre to us.  It is a decentralized form of digital currency which uses encryption techniques in generation and regulation of units of currency. If internet would have been a country, then cryptocurrency might have been its national currency. Cryptocurrency is a peer-to-peer cash exchange system, free from any bank and government intervention. It uses blockchain technology to record all the transactions and the programmer needs to solve a mathematical puzzle to keep it secure. Currently, there are 3000 cryptocurrencies in circulation in the world.The first ever digital currency that came into existence on 3 rd Janaury 2009, Bitcoin, was developed by an unknown programmer Satoshi Nakamoto. His aim was not to invent a currenc...

-by Edith Newton The Indian subcontinent is home to multifarious sports with one being predominant, the game of Cricket! To be honest, and to do full justice to its ardent followers and diehard fans of great cricketers namely Sachin, MS Dhoni or Virat, Cricket has become just another religion in the nation! The Indian Cricketers today, are among those few people, for whom just the first name is enough to imply the scale of everything else, also making some of them having the highest brand and marketable value! Desperation of the nation to follow Cricket is touching such heights that it has become genuinely hard for the Indian nationals to believe and even remember that the National Sport of India is Hockey (let’s not forget that our national sport failed to qualify to the Beijing Olympics), and not Cricket! Except for Cricket and a little bit of Badminton (all thanks to PV Sindhu’s Olympic Silver and Saina Nehwal’s Commonwealth Gold apart from being former World No. 1),...

Never come to DU with expectations! Because it’s magical and beyond your imagination! Being in a co-ed school and then landing up in convent college like JMC was no less than a shock for me. Yes I was scared, scared to be able to fit in. What if I just want to run away? Leaving the comfort of my home and coming to an all new city where you knew no one, it requires guts, and I’m glad that I did. Living away has a charm of it’s own. For once, all of us lazy kids get to do the adult stuff, stuff that helps us change, grow, develop, that actually gives us the feeling that we’ve grown up. But all of this has it’s own perks. The freedom, I will never trade that for anything in this world. Coming to a girls college, people threw all kinds of opinions and stereotypes at me. But I’m proud to say that I didn’t let any of those things get to me, I experienced it myself and yes I’m glad I came here. All my friends in other co-ed colleges still mock me, say things, stereotype a g...

The ‘ESC’ key sighed                                                                                               As the index moved aside.                                                                 ...