Feb

25

Fool Me Twice, Shame on Me

February 25, 2005 posted by indiatime | Leave a Comment

For the last few weeks, Indian media including major newspapers and television stations have been singing praises of one Saurabh Singh, a village lad who had supposedly topped NASA’s International Talent Discovery Exam. But the truth is now out. First of all, NASA gives no such exams. Secondly, Saurabh Singh hadn’t appeared for any such talent discovery exam. But the Indian media, hungry for a national hero, grabbed the story, made it into a headline and are now back-paddling fast to correct their storyline.

About 8 years ago, Ramar Pillai, another local lad from India had similarly managed to con the entire national media as well as India’s scientific community by claiming that he had manufactured liters of petrol from a plant. The herbal fuel story not only became a national headline, but also managed to make its way into the world’s most prestigious science journals. The department of science supposedly had even started to make plans to build a demo plant to manufacture petrol/gasoline out of this plant.

Little has changed over a span of 8 years. In this day and age, when it takes literally seconds to verify any information available on the internet, the Indian media dropped the ball yet again. Fiberoptic networks and satellite links can’t do much about stupidity. Can they?

Indian Express - How a village star hit NASA radar
Times of India - Elders’ Hats Off To Saurabh
Indian ‘whizkid’ bowls media with NASA googly

Feb

15

The Case of The Missing Tigers

February 15, 2005 posted by indiatime | Leave a Comment

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

- William Blake (1757-1827)

The official website of Project Tiger has a page where citizens can report a crime. Have people been reporting any tiger crimes back to the agency? The figures reported by the official website has only 8 reported poachings in 2003. But real damage seems to have been done already and the real numbers may be a lot higher. Something is seriously wrong with India’s famous wildlife preservation project that initially started in 1973.

After enacting a Wildlife Protection Act in 1972, India embarked on an ambitious tiger-saving venture with several tiger reserves backed with government funding and the support of the law. Within 27 years, India managed to build at least 27 Tiger reserves with a total area spanning 37 thousand square kilometers.

But a recent WWF (World Wildlife Fund) survey at one of the reserves should send shock waves across the environmental circles. It reveals that the WWF experts failed to locate a single tiger in this once famous reserve. The only logical conclusion has been that the tigers met an untimely death during the latter part of 2004. A large number of tigers have been missing in a few other reserves as well. Considering that India has almost the 60% tiger population of the planet, India must wake up to the fact that it may lose the majestic tiger altogether. What a shame that would be!

Is there any hope? Maybe. EIA, the investigation agency that had previously reported of a tiger being murdered in India every 18 hours, has hopes for India’s wildlife. Just last month, it reported that there were ‘encouraging signs of actions’ in India.

Project Tiger
The silenced roar
Tigers burn bright no more in Indian jungles
Sariska Tiger Reserve
eia - Environmental Investigation Agency

Feb

8

Monkeys and Vaccines

February 8, 2005 posted by indiatime | Leave a Comment

Today, India starts its first ever human testing of a vaccine against the AIDS virus. The first phase of the long awaited clinical trials starts in the city of Pune. With a 5 million AIDS population that is expected to at least triple in another 5 years, Indian scientists are hoping for an effective version of the vaccine within the next few years.

India’s first case of AIDS was detected in the southern city of Chennai in 1987. After 17 years, India is home to the second largest AIDS population in the world. A lot of factors including ignorance, apathy, socio-cultural stigma, hypocrisy, and above all, indecisive and inept leadership in the healthcare sector led to a series of misjudgements and denials.

India recently made a decision to comply with the World Trade Organisation laws regarding pharmaceutical patents. For last several years, India’s generic pharmaceutical industry had managed to bring the cost of the anti-retroviral regimen (for AIDS) to almost 150 dollars per year. This in comparison to about 15000 dollars per year in the west for the same therapy. But India’s compliance with the international laws will surely change the mathematics of AIDS treatment once again. And 150 dollar AIDS therapy may once again become a thing of the past.

Almost fifty years ago, another vaccine was being developed for a then deadly disease. Scientists in South Africa were developing oral polio vaccine using the kidney cells of monkeys. The original batches of these monkeys came exclusively from India and Philippines, as these were the only countries with a very large population of Macaca or Rhesus monkeys. India banned export of its monkeys in 1977. There have been speculations (yet unproved and challenged by the scientific community) though, that even before 1960s, the scientists in South Africa had started using chimpanzees instead of rhesus monkeys for the manufacture of the oral polio vaccine. Scientists today pretty much agree that AIDS came to humans from the chimpanzees. What is still debated is how. No matter what the answer to that question, India’s role in the vaccine trials of 1960s seems to have come a full circle.

India Changes Patent Laws
AIDS and The Polio Vaccine
Polio Vaccine and The Origin of AIDS

Feb

5

Lesser Known Indians

February 5, 2005 posted by indiatime | 2 Comments

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was born as Joseph Rudyard in Mumbai where his father was an art teacher at the J. J. School of Arts. At five, he was sent to England to live with a foster family, but came back to India (Lahore, then part of India) to work as a journalist. He wrote several famous poems and books including The Jungle Book and Just So Stories. His 1907 nobel prize for literature makes Rudyard Kipling the first Indian-born to win a nobel prize.

George Orwell (1903-1950), the author of Animal Farm and 1984 was born as Eric Blair in Motihari (then Bengal, now Bihar). His family left for England when he was little, but at the age of 22, he came back to work in India (actually in Burma, then part of India) as an Assistant Superintendent of Police. After spending almost 5 years in India, he went back to England again.

Vivian Leigh (1913-1967), the Scarlet O’Hara of Gone With The Wind and Blanche DuBois of A Streetcar Named Desire was born in Darjeeling. She moved to England at the age of 6, and later moved to America. Incidentally she was also the wife of the famous actor Laurence Olivier. Her Oscar award for best actress (for ‘Gone With The Wind’ in 1939) makes her the first Indian-born to win an Oscar award.

Kim Philby (1912-1988), the infamous British Intelligence Officer who worked as a Russian spy was born in Ambala, India. His father, a magistrate in India, named him Kim after a Rudyard Kipling book character. Though never officially charged by the British for his espionage activities, he Defected to Russia in 1963, and died there in 1988. He was awarded the ‘Order of Lenin’ - the highest civilian honor in the Sovier Union. He was the first Indian-born to achieve that distinction.

Indiaman - Genealogical & History Magazine About the British in India
Rudyard Kipling
George Orwell
Vivian Leigh
Kim Philby

Feb

3

Perspectives

February 3, 2005 posted by indiatime | Leave a Comment

The Head Waggle

“…..I love the Indian head waggle. It’s a fantastic bit of body language, and I’m trying to add it to my repertoire. The head waggle says, in a uniquely unenthusiastic way, “OK, that’s fine.” In terms of Western gestures, its meaning is somewhere between the nod (though less affirmative) and the shrug (though not quite as neutral).

To perform the head waggle, keep your shoulders perfectly still, hold your face completely expressionless, and tilt your head side-to-side, metronome style. Make it smooth—like you’re a bobble-head doll. It’s not easy. Believe me, I’ve been practicing…..”

Spitting

“….Spitting in India is a universal phenomenon. In virtually every locality, at almost every corner, someone is spitting at any given time. There are very few public places, where evidence of spittle, especially red “paan-juice” is absent. It would therefore be safe enough to say that this one act of volition, which the majority of Indians participate in most of the times, has elevated spitting to the level of a national sport or past-time. It is important therefore to study the concept of spitting in detail…..”

The Noisiest Country

“….Indian workers use pneumatic drills without ear protection, because ear protection costs more than a replacement worker. Indian voices manage to slice through conversation without needing to shout: the men selling chai on the trains can be heard advertising their wares from three carriages off, and are guaranteed to wake you up every time you pull into a station. Horns don’t just shake the earth; they come in a number of different tunes that will indelibly scar your eardrums. The buses come complete with deafening Hindi music played at full volume, drowning out even the grind of the gears and the smash of the ruined shock absorbers….”

Trying Really Hard To Like India - by Seth Stevenson
The Art of Spitting : A PhD Proposal - by Man From Matunga
Surviving India - by Mark Moxon

Feb

1

A Temple and A Nightclub

February 1, 2005 posted by indiatime | Leave a Comment

One of the main charitable organisations involved in the Tsunami Relief Efforts is BAPS. About a hundred years ago, BAPS was established in the western state of Gujarat, India. Within a hundred years, this organisation has established more than 8000 centers worldwide performing social, charitable, medical, environmental, tribal and spiritual activities.

The story of BAPS and its fight against the town of Bergen (in New Jersey, USA) began in 1998. BAPS had bought a piece of bankrupt property which was being used a nightclub. BAPS intended to use the property as a house of worship. The town had to approve the adjustment of property status to a temple. But systematic delaying tactics by the town and its eventual refusal to grant a change of status to a temple landed BAPS in the US Court of Appeals.

The town had argued that there was inadequate parking in the property and that the number of visitors to the temple would have disrupted the local traffic. To resolve the matter, BAPS had proposed limiting its occupancy to 500 and even limiting the prayer hall dimensions. BAPS engineers and architects had proved that any traffic disruption, if at all, would be minimal, and the BAPS volunteers could easily coordinate and direct the traffic on the weekends.

The Court of Appeals, in its final decision, voted against the town’s board and for BAPS. It suggested that the town had acted with bias and unfairness aginst BAPS. Though there was one dissenting opinion, the majority ruled on the side of BAPS.

One of the most contested points in the case was the number of occupants. The Town of Bergen had said it believed 500 occupants praying in the temple would create hazardous conditions. Interestingly, the same Town of Bergen had approved 700 occupants for the nightclub on the same property. The town board members somehow believed that 500 worshippers in a temple were more hazardous to the town’s health than 700 nightclub visitors enjoying alcoholic beverages.

BAPS Tsunami Relief Work Update
About BAPS
Town of North Bergen Vs BAPS in the US Court of Appeals, 3rd Circuit

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