S Roy Chowdhury

Whatever is left of late summer flowers will all be gone after this nor’easter.

This Little-Known Appeal Could Force Your Insurer to Pay for Lifesaving Care. Here’s How to File It. When a health insurer refuses to pay for your treatment, you may have the right to have the denial reviewed — and potentially overturned — by an independent provider. Here are six steps experts sugges...

Insurance companies can often be aggressive with their denials because “they don’t expect people to come back,” one health care advocate said.

The lesson is simple, another expert told us: “Appeal, appeal, appeal, appeal. That’s all you have.”

By @deldeib.bsky.social

I find the official rigidity in France about laïcité annoying. Unless you are in an engineering lab or doing military training (in which case your garb does have to be modified, not discarded), what you have on your head is no obstacle to learning or doing.

Indiana isn’t the most topographically interesting place but the northern part has Indiana Dunes State Park. Gorgeous!

"What's it like, being the UK's first Black woman professor of history?"

I miss random things about India - Indo-Greek coins at the Indian Museum in Kolkata (here Alexander and Porus fighting), a glimpse of Humayun’s Tomb from the flyover in Delhi, an old kawariya just walking quietly on his pilgrimage.

The first steam-powered passenger rail trip was on 27th Sept 1825 (200th bday is nuanced - regular passenger steam slightly later). Here's transport carbon footprint today - Eurostar easily cleanest cos fully electrified. I hope the next 200 yrs has even more (electric) trains! With lower prices...

Yet another thing to watch out for in the never ending economy of endless grift.

Given how much of "high quality" investment chatter - from stuff like this article to the briefs Jamie Dimon gets – is based on rumor, wishes, and misapprehension of sources, I think it's likely having an accurate, rigorous understanding of economic history would be a real market disadvantage.

The rapture didn’t happen and now I’m stuck at home annotating primary sources for class discussion.

"Neither pity, nor allurement, nor religion, nor attachment to any idea whatsoever, could turn him aside from his principal direction. He is for his self-interest what the just man should be for virtue..."

"He regards a human being as an action or a thing, not as a fellow creature. He does not hate more than he loves; for him nothing exists but himself; all other creatures are cyphers."

Uncomfortable era to be re-reading Madame de Staël (for class prep).

Status anxiety and a lurch right wards has been a historic pattern since the early twentieth century.

“I recall during my PhD seeing a meme template of a man calmly mowing his lawn as an approaching tornado raged in the distance. The man was captioned with ‘me finishing my PhD’, and the tornado with ‘the academic jobs market’.”

It’s a disheartening situation out there in French History Higher Ed.

Even his apology is trite and perfunctory: www.tribuneindia.com/news/delhi/e...

Also, “I will rename myself as Mohammed Deepak, that would allow me to have four wives, so that I can marry your principal because she is beautiful and I am handsome." The college leadership must have died of embarrassment at these so-called "quips."

My alma mater LSR, Delhi, had to endure a disrespectful guest speaker who was a peculiar combination of bigot & misogynist (among other gaffes, he had the gumption to tell the students and faculty of an all-women's college their roles were to be mothers).

I don’t think Albuquerque is picture postcard pretty but it’s still an interesting place. And I loved _Better Call Saul _ so much that I half expected to see Saul or Kim or Gus Fring driving around town or dumping someone in the scrubby desert or picking up tacos from a food truck.

Weekly photo: I drove across from New England to New Mexico & back this summer. Lots of windmills, some giant crosses & the occasional surprise of a Punjabi Dhaba/truck stop in the empty scrubland. The flat landscape makes the sky huge in the west. It’s always an interesting place, this country.

Useful reminder that nobody born after 1939 has any direct, personal experience of what conscription in the UK was like.

enshittification | noun | when a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits

Speaking of 1996 (see previous post), the digital toy Tamagotchi is back. I never quite understood the attraction even back then and I certainly don’t get it now. Then it was the novelty factor but now?

Musical Concert by America’s Legendary Folk Singer Mr. Pete Seeger (Vol. I) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive AdministrativeSourceIndian Council for Cultural Relations, Delhi ( ICCR )Identifier900TitleMusical Concert by America’s Legendary Folk Singer Mr. Pete Seeger...

A post on the other site mentioned Pete Seeger, creating a rush of memories. I was so lucky I got to hear him on his last visit to India, c. 1996. Luckily, the Indian Council of Cultural Relations, the organizer, recorded the grand old man, accompanied by his grandson.
archive.org/details/dni....

The regimental veterans of the 1965 war are very few in number now, a sprinkling of old men with memories of a long ago war. My dad recalls his Commanding Officer Col OP Suri with admiration, a commander leading the regiment from the front.

Unfortunately, my father cannot travel for his regiment 20 Lancers’ Battle Honors Day (diamond jubilee Sept 1). What a good looking bunch they were, the “Saviors of Akhnoor.” Capt Bhaskar Roy (not in pic) was awarded an MVC for leadership against oncoming Patton tanks at Chhamb.

A rainy monsoon day at the Gujari Mahal Museum in Gwalior, #India . A peacock in the rain, camel guns with long muzzles, Jain sculptures and some antique coins. An eclectic place. Had the place almost entirely to myself because of the rain. The open courtyard was delightful in the rain.

Summer travel vignettes. A photo a week (I hope).
Looking at a very intricately carved boar in Gwalior, in July.

Been seeing a lot of these kinds of videos lately. Wonder if it’s a temporary blip or a slide towards a winter of discontent.

I had a good meal there a few years ago. Nice place.

Tagore wrote a similar thing about the humble open courtyard. Some empty spaces are an infinite treasure.