Serendipity : Musings of an Islander

Breaking the Tyranny of Distance: How twelve years of connectivity, infrastructure and institutional expansion brought India’s farthest islands closer to the national mainstream By Debkumar Bhadra For decades, many regions, located far from India's political and administrative centres, including North Eastern States and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, quietly lived under what Hon'ble Union Minister of Parliamentary Affairs and Minority Affairs Shri Kiren Rijiju described as the "tyranny of distance," speaking at the Andaman Ideas Summit 2026, organised by The Wave Andaman, at Sri Vijaya Puram (earlier Port Blair) on the evening of June 20. I watched him say it live on YouTube, from thousands of kilometres away in Nagpur. That I could watch it in real time is itself a telling marker of how far the islands have come. A live broadcast out of Sri Vijaya Puram, watched anywhere in the country as it happened, would have been a near impossibility before the Chennai-Anda...

Emergency Helpline 100 and 112 Temporarily Down: Alternative Police Helpline Numbers Released   By Debkumar Bhadra   Most of us, have grown up with one number to call in crisis. Whether it was 100 or recently, 112, the reflex was the same — dial that number, help will come. It did not matter whether you were in a crowded Mumbai street or in a quiet lane in Sri Vijaya Puram, the emergency helpline number was the same. That assumption was quietly shaken here in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands on June 14, 2026, when the A&N Police through a social media post in X (formerly twitter) issued a public advisory informing residents that both emergency helpline numbers 100 and 112 are presently not functioning due to what they described as "unforeseen technical snags."  Many of you have probably already seen it. Many may have seen it, scrolled past it. By evening, other forwards push it down. By next week, it is gone. And when one actually need that number, you are scrolling ...