A half-baked British media report has laid the 'blame' at the Indian High Commission's door for the assumed losses of the British tourists, who have en masse cancelled India trips for want of visas. In the first place, why one must book tour package and then look for visa in a busy season? Because that has been the practice with the tour operators and nothing new. They refund money if visa is not comimg. However, the article is silent on this and implicates the mission alleging it changed the visa rules, while that is contrary to the fact. The UK report, duplicated in India mindlessly, has defamed the Indian High Commission. However, there are some missing links!

A million visitors are queuing up to attend the longest-reigning Queen Elizabeth II Lying-in-State, making history; while a galaxy of world leaders land in London for the State funeral at Westminster Abbey at 11 am (3:30 pm IST) on Monday. It will be a huge gathering of world leaders never seen before. King Charles III hosted a reception at Buckingham Palace for them on Sunday evening. There were 500 dignitaries.

The queue from Southwark Park touches Tower bridge, London bridge, Southwark bridge, Millennium bridge, Blackfriars bridge, Waterloo bridge and Westminster bridge before crossing the Lambeth bridge to enter a zig-zag near the entrance.

The BBC gave a calculation of the length of the queue. The distance from Westminster to Southwark Park, the starting point of the queue, is 11 km. Then there is the zig-zag section of nearly 5 km to rough in. So the queue is meandering slowly up towards Westminster for a total of 16 km! (which in theory becomes a constant). Although, 16 km is quite a lot for standing and moving without any chance to cool your legs for a moment. "Very little opportunity to sit down as the queue will be continuously moving” - the Government itself cautioned a swelling stream of mourners pouring into London from across the kingdom day and night. The time taken can easily be 14 hours! Yet the determination keeps everyone fit as a fiddle.

The calculation doesn't take into account a queue to join the queue that has come up and the last-minute doubling of the official queue into a double lane.

The masses in the queues looked extremely solemn and serious too and displayed an amazing natural discipline that illustrated a national character evolved partly from a thousand years of democratic tradition.

ANALYSIS: Rishi Sunak, the man in a hurry, is alleged to have stabbed BoJo in the back by resigning at the most opportune moment, triggering about 60 more resignations out of coincidence or conspiracy, hitting the nail in Johnson's coffin. Much maligned by a series of scams for quite some time, the voluble, pretentious, hilarious BoJo's support base among the Conservative party MPs had already been crumbling fast, even leading to a no-confidence vote which he narrowly survived a while ago.

Now that he had lost his "best job in the world", BoJo was determined to take revenge on Sunak, and launched vicious underground campaigns like the green card scam to tarnish his image he had been assiduously building up for long in anticipation.

The PM might have played a role in putting up Truss who was not in the reckoning in the beginning when nearly a dozen names were floated for the prime ministerial race. It is said Johnson mobilised support for her from the background, putting to use all the resources at his disposal. Truss thus became the dark horse, gradually taking on the front-runner Sunak.

Assuming for a moment Sunak were not to be a candidate this time, his bringing down the disgraced Prime Minister would have had an enormously positive political advantage for him for future use. The immediate public perception would not have been one of betrayal of BoJo (Although the reality would not change).

He had done many a thing in the immediate past to carve out an artificial image to promote his ambition. Even the $18 billion package might one day be seen as a freebie. Then everything happened in the month of July in supernatural speed. Later he was even directly questioned at several of the hustings about the integrity in bringing down BoJo.

The long and short of it is that morality in public life and literature as an integral part of British culture and long democratic tradition is an invincible force in the kingdom but at times mistakenly taken for granted!

What is the fallout?

The spectacle was an engineering marvel that took India to the world club of demolitions, even as in less than ten seconds it created a gap up in the sky incomprehensible for the layman. Where has it gone!

Founded on compassion, the Amrita hospital will cater for all the economically underprivileged sections of Delhi National Capital Region and beyond. Equipped with cutting-edge technology, the poor will be able to access the latest in healthcare at India's largest hospital.

WHAT TO DO, WHEN... : IndiaTravelTimes does not guarantee the authenticity of the video (above) of the episode of the flight turbulence at Durgapur airport on May 1, yet this is being put out with a view to familiarising the ordinary fliers with such probabilities lest they are caught unawares and fail to react rationally to handle such terrible situations. The 'eternity' can last up to 15 minutes. Tighten your belts, believe in your pilot and shift your thoughts to reduce disabling anxieties! Rest assured, the aircraft can rock and fall but not more than a hundred feet anyway.

Whole localities are sent into quarantine in China using force if someone is symptomatic of covid. The quarantines are metal boxes set up in far away camps. The authoritarian regime is resorting to draconian methods to check a new wave of the epidemic in the country that has already locked down three cities currently. On the other hand, the US presents a contrasting scenario where in the name freedom large sections of people refuse vaccination and assault health workers who mandate the covid restrictions.

Marking a fierce but interesting competition among the billionaires, adventure specialist Richard Branson launched commercial space travel from his 'Spaceport America' on Sunday, pipping the world's richest man, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, to the post, becoming the early bird to fly to the edge of space as the first private space tourist nine days earlier than his rival. Although he did not cross the Karman line.

The Mars rover, a six-wheeled, SUV-sized robotic vehicle, sailed through space for seven months to land on a prime spot for geo-biological study of the red planet for signs of ancient extraterrestrial life. It takes radio waves 11 minutes to reach Earth. (Listen to:- DAVID BOWIE: Life On Mars?:)

After his reappearance, Alibaba's Hong Kong-listed shares went up by 8.5%. The Chinese billionaire made his public appearance on Wednesday. (SEE Video: Davos 2015 - An Insight An Idea with Jack Ma - A conversation with Jack Ma, Founder and the then Executive Chairman of Alibaba Group, on leadership, entrepreneurship and the future of commerce: Interviewed by Charlie Rose, Anchor, CBS News, USA)

"We were taught to see a world beyond just ourselves. To be conscious and compassionate about the struggles of all people." - Kamala Harris, Vice-President-elect, United States of America. She is releasing a series of her reminiscences of her early period, of people and events that had deep influence on the course of her life and thoughts, in the coming days leading up to her inauguration as the Vice-President of America, the first woman ever to occupy a position that high in the greatest democracy yet.