Fol­low­ing up on last week’s col­umn on Christo­pher Boodoos­ingh’s pro­posed “pur­ple” hy­dro­gen patent, this week more of the in­dus­try jar­gon around hy­dro­gen is ex­plained. As dis­cussed last week, T&T’s down­stream en­er­gy in­dus­try us­es nat­ur­al gas to pro­duce hy­dro­gen, which is the ba­sis for am­mo­nia, methanol, and urea pro­duc­tion—im­por­tant ex­port prod­ucts.

As the world pre­pares to ob­serve In­ter­na­tion­al Men’s Day to­mor­row, it is an op­por­tune mo­ment for re­flec­tion—es­pe­cial­ly in T&T and across the Caribbean, where men face a com­plex ar­ray of so­cial, eco­nom­ic, and cul­tur­al chal­lenges that of­ten go un­ac­knowl­edged.

Some­times it seems as if tech­nol­o­gy is tak­ing over hu­man func­tions—usu­al­ly, in my ex­pe­ri­ence, with dire con­se­quences. Every month I at­tempt to pay my bills on­line, and every month I end up vexed with some lo­cal agency. This month the sys­tem works; next month you can’t get in and have to call some­one, which means wait­ing end­less­ly. The op­er­a­tors are help­ful and pa­tient, though—their job must be a thank­less one. Or, you pay reg­u­lar­ly for three months with no prob­lem, and sud­den­ly get a bill say­ing you haven’t paid for two months and your phone or in­ter­net is about to be cut off. Then you have to go down­town, usu­al­ly los­ing half a day, and if you’ve mis­placed a bill, it be­comes even more dif­fi­cult to fix the prob­lem.

An­cient Hin­du seers of In­dia have at­tempt­ed to de­fine who is a Hin­du and what the prac­tices of such a per­son are. These an­cient ex­perts on Hin­duism al­so sought to lo­cate the Hin­du with­in a spe­cif­ic ge­o­graph­i­cal space on the In­di­an sub­con­ti­nent, re­ferred to as Sap­ta Sind­hu Bhoo­mi. This is of­ten trans­lat­ed to mean the area where the sev­en sa­cred rivers of In­dia flow – the Gan­ga, Ya­mu­na, Sa­davari, Saraswati, Nar­ma­da, Sind­hu and the Kaveri.