Mind of my Stroked Brain

In the past decade more than anytime earlier, our media (print, traditional tv, internet, social media, OTT, etc) they have all evolved and become more and more complex with more choices. While these categories of content have existed in the past also, they have increasingly got merged (amalgamated) making it hard to distinguish them with hard boundaries. There might be many more, but I broadly bucket them into 3 categories: 1. Entertainment 2. Information 3. Noise/ Disinformation 4. Purposeful time  Even news, which is supposed to be only information, depending on the channel, has various percentages of disinformation and entertainment. Of them #3 is the hardest thing to identify. Usually it is very difficult to identify it in isolation. We can Only recognise that it is mostly noise and disinformation when we consume similar content from different sources for a period of time and are able to recognise the patterns in them and be able to contrast them. The first two categories howe...

Today, during having an intense conversation, my nurses turned to me and asked whether I agree on a very controversial topic, which is political, religious and also probably quite regionally important. This is the first time I have been dragged into their conversation and asked to offer an opinion. They regularly have very animated debates on varied topics ranging from current policies, political parties, political leaders, religious matters to movie stars. Basically anything that constitutes a juicy topic for conversation. They talk freely with the comfort that I don't understand the language. True, I don't understand the language, but they don't realise how many english words are peppered all over, how many words mean similarly in other regional languages which i can get, there are some words I do get due to constant usage and most importantly the actions and body language. So, sure, I don't understand the language fully, but most often I get what they are talking abo...