Kriky's Blogopedia

At 7.8 on the Richter scale, this was a powerful quake – and its source was only 11km below ground Several factors combined to make Saturday’s earthquake in Nepal  such a devastating event. The first was its basic magnitude. At 7.8 on the Richter scale, this was one of the most powerful earthquakes to strike the region in the past 80 years. In addition, it was a shallow event with a source that was only 11km below ground. Nepal earthquake: rescue continues as death toll exceeds 2,500 – the day's updates That has special consequences, according to David Rothery, professor of planetary geosciences at the Open University. “The shallowness of the source made the ground-shaking at the surface worse than it would have been for a deeper earthquake,” he explained. “I’ve seen pictures of poorly constructed old buildings destroyed in Kathmandu, and I’m concerned that in this mountainous region there could have been landslides that might have destroyed or cut off various remote villages.

Ours is a big country. And we have got a lot of people here. 17.5% of all humans on the planet live here. It’s no joke. There are dozens of languages, hundreds of dialects, and countless sane-insane customs woven around some common string of cultural values, religious beliefs, and history. Differences are bound to be there. But, some generalizations are so much in bad taste that they need to be dissected well and at regular intervals. The fact is that Biharis are among the most misunderstood people in India. This post is a humble attempt to cut apart some lame generalizations about the people who come from Bihar, once the most prosperous and culturally-philosophically-spiritually rich area in the Indian sub-continent. Ironically, even those who never met a single Bihari assume them to be lawbreakers, narrow-minded, and ill-mannered people. They are decreed to be the Jacks-of-all-ills prevailing in North India, the ripples of which they wrongly believe and tirelessly retell others on