Jan

31

Meher baba from Pune

January 31, 2008 posted by indiatime | 2 Comments

Meher Baba of Pune, a spiritual guru to many in India and the west, died this day about 40 years ago. At the age of 34, Meher Baba took a vow of silence and never spoke again in his entire life. He communicated using an alphabet chart which was interpreted by his disciples or someone sitting next to him.

Here is a 1932 video of Avtar Meher Baba communicating in his unique style. In the video, he is interviewd by Charles Purdom, his biographer and disciple.

Jan

30

Citizen Khan

January 30, 2008 posted by indiatime | 2 Comments

Ambumani Ramadoss, India’s minister of health, recently made an appeal to Bollywood’s top dogs to stop smoking on screen. But he need not have looked farther than a neighboring ministry in the central government.

The minister for Youth and Sports Affairs (of course) told a Delhi University Students Union gathering yesterday that he has it all figured out. He said that years ago, he had smoked continuously for 14 years. Crediting his wife for helping him quit, he added that he has been smoke-free for last 32 years. He said his friends got him into smoking telling him that it would help him acquire a girlfriend. But now, he knew better he said, adding, “…today I know that manhood has nothing to do with smoking…”.

marlboro_manThat last part of Mani Shankar’s remarks is what’s holding me back from saying that he really has got it right. Remember the Marlboro Man impotence commercials? Science tells us that there is a close correlation between manhood and smoking and impotence has in fact become a potent weapon against smoking during the last decade.

Shah Rukh Khan has chimed in on the health minister’s appeal saying it’s a matter of creative liberties when it comes to smoking on-screen. “…I wish Ramadoss prays that I stop smoking in real life because that’s worse…”, quipped Bollywood’s most influental hero.

As much as I agree with Shah Rukh’s creative liberty theme, I also happen to think that the movie icon Khan, is more influential than citizen Khan. Shah Rukh is correct in saying that Bollywood is just a make-believe world that should have no effect on real world issues. But living far too long in the make-believe world has probably distanced Shah Rukh Khan from the realities of the off-screen world where millions of kids do idolize and emulate all his on-screen personas and habits.

Not because the health minister says so, but just because it’s the right thing to do, Shah Rukh Khan should again about taking a stand against smoking - whether in his off-screen life or on-screen life. There are many in the younger generation who are not mature enough to make that distinction and Shah Rukh may have to step forward and do a good deed by committing himself to becoming a no-smoking ambassador. If not for nothing else, then at least to shut up any other politicians who are trying to become no-smoking ambassadors.

Jan

29

A Chinese Walmiki

January 29, 2008 posted by indiatime | Leave a Comment

ji xianlinAmong the list of dignitaries who were honored with this year’s Republic Day awards, is Ji Xianlin, an academician who has been a life-long student of India and its ancient culture and languages. India, this year, honored Ji Xianlin with Padma Bhushan, one of its highest civilian honors, for Dr. Ji’s service to India’s ancient languages and culture.

Born in the eastern Chinese city of Linqing in 1911, Ji Xianlin left for Germany at the age of 24. He specialized in Sanskrit and Pali languages, and returned to China ten years later to found the department of Eastern Languages at the University of Beijing.

Ji Xianlin’s biggest accomplishments is his translation of the Hindu epic Ramayana into the Chinese language, an enormous task he dedicated 5 years of his life for. He also translated Shakuntal, Panchatantras, and was also instrumental in decoding the Sanskrit characters on the famous Yongle bell in the Big Bell Temple in Beijing.

Most Chinese experts agree that a lot of what China knows about ancient India, has come from the 97-year old erudite professor. While Dr. Xianlin was still in Germany, it was an Indian who bridged the cultural divide between the two great nations of the east. He was a doctor too, but of medicine, not literature - Dr. Dwarkanath Kotnis from Solapur, Maharashtra.

Jan

28

An Indian chief (yeah, not chef) at Oxford

January 28, 2008 posted by indiatime | 2 Comments

jack malhiHistory tells that us that, between 1850-1950, it wasn’t at all uncommon to find Englishmen running India’s police departments. In fact, that was the norm. Now, the tables have turned on with an Indian becoming a police chief in Britain.

Jack Malhi, a 52-year old British citizen of Indian origin, has become the chief of police at Oxford. After a 25-year service in the police department, Malhi got an offer to run the Oxford police, an offer he couldn’t refuse. Malhi has previously been a chairman of the Bedfordshire Black Policemen Association for almost 8 years. The most satisfying part of his career, he says, has been where he gets justice for the victims of crime.

Malhi’s achievement comes almost a 150 years after an Indian rose to the rank of a police officer in the British India police. British Governor Aungier founded the first police force in India in Mumbai around 1669. That and the police forces in other metros evolved independently until the first common police law came into existence in 1856. The British shaped the modern Indian police in India with the India act 13 of 1856, which was superceded by the Indian police at of 1861, the same act that governs the police administrations in India as of today. Khan Bahadur Shaikh Ibrahim Shaikh Imam became in the first Indian police officer in the then British India police in the year 1864.

Seems the Europeans have a special affinity for Malhis, the clan of rich and brave landlords from the land of Punjab. Alexander the Great had a taste of the courage of the Malhis during the famous battle of Multan in which Alexander himself was wounded by a Malhi arrow.

Jan

27

Invasion of kidney snatchers

January 27, 2008 posted by indiatime | 2 Comments

India’s health ministry has decided launch an organ transplant initiative that will open up the banned organ transplant business, though in a much more regulated and supervised way. With yet another kidney transplant scandal in the news, the government, it seems is promising to pay some more attention to the issue that most everyone else knows about already.

For now, the mastermind behind the Gurgaon kidney tansplant scandal remains absconding. And he may never be found, thanks to a well-compensated network of law enforcement operatives and legal eagles who have helped this Dr Amit Kumar (aka Santosh Raut) evade the law. So far, no political connections have been spoken about, but that cannot be ruled out as well.

Kidney donation scandals aren’t new to India. A few years ago, several villages, ‘Tsunami-town’ (villages affected by the Tsunami) turned into ‘Kidney-towns’ after most adults in such villages ended up illegally donating kidneys, when they failed to get any financial aid packages from the government.

For the organized crime gangs that run illegal organ donation operations, the financial incentives are staggering, almost rivalling cocaine trade. e.g. An interested party in a middle eastern country is willing to pay anywhere upwards of 5000 dollars for a healthy kidney. The actual kidney donor is promised about 1000 dollars for his or her sacrifice. But that 1000 dollars is often never paid, or is cut into by middle brokers, making the actual payment to the end party close to about 500 dollars. Between those two extremes of 5000 at one end and 500 at the other, lie a gang of intermediaries that help run the logistics of this illegal marketplace.

India’s current organ transplant law is, in reality, a joke. Purporting to ban the ‘buy-sell and cash-for-kidney’ transactions, it leaves behind a large backdoor loophole for those kidney transplants where the donation is by reason of affection or attachment towards the recipient or for any other special reasons. Yeah, the special reason is dollars-for-kidney..haha!

What if you found out that your family doctor or your local hospital is involved in such organ donation scams? Don’t worry…your family doctor is safe. India’s 1994 Transplantation act prevents anyone to find a public interest litigation in a court of law against such crimes. According to section 22 of the act,

…No court shall take cognizance of an offence under this Act except on a complaint made by the Appropriate Authority…

You and me, we just aren’t the ‘appropriate authorities’ who can complain about ‘inappropriate activities’.

Jan

26

A scenario for many of today’s Christians and Muslims in India is that their forefathers and ancestors left Hinduism, and converted to their current religions to avoid persecution, discrimination and neglect from the so-called higher caste Hindus. By converting into their new religions, they basically tried to get out of that caste-based identity that Hinduism, they believed, would not let them out of. Fair enough. A new generation of Christians and Muslims is now saying that those caste-based identities that their forefathers so despised need to be recognized and rewarded, now that the tables have turned for yesteryear’s backward classes which now have become the great entitlement class of India’s society today.

The government of India, for the next 2 months, will be formulating ways to introduce caste-based reservations for lower-caste Christians and lower-caste Muslims. The argument being made is that those who converted to other religions such as Sikhism and Buddhism can avail of the reservation quotas, but why not have the same rules for those who converted to Islam and Christianity?

So, for those who converted to these religions to avoid the caste-system, the idea would be to use that same caste system from their ancestors’ religion to pursue their careers and life-goals. This is the classic incompatibility of eating your cake and then having it later. That is happenng because India’s politicians have been inciting various groups within the society to basically screw the constitution, trample all over it and reworing it until it fits everybody’s political agenda.

That the dimwit politicians are able to do this, is an indication that the original presidential order of 1950 was flawed. Flawed, not because it excluded certain groups and included others. Flawed, because it opened the to include/exclude Pandora’s box in the first place. Flawed, because it is tantamount to the government dicriminating based on one’s caste. Flawed, because it promises never to eliminate the caste system from any aspect of India’s life.

It is an irony that after almost a hundred years of Dr. Ambedkar’s studying at Columbia University, few others who pretend to follow him, have shown that kind of class, brilliance, and intellect. By making the caste-based quotas a permanent feature of constitution, India made sure that Ambedkar’s idea of ‘annihilation of castes’ would always remain a pipe dream.

The great reservation paradox

My Top 10 reservation strategies

Jan

25

Stuck in Nigerian hotel - email scam

January 25, 2008 posted by indiatime | 3 Comments

My friend, a well-respected doctor in an American city, opened his email account the other day and found the following email seemingly sent by one of his longtime friends who works for an NGO (non-governmental/non-profit organization). The email described the tragic situation that had befallen upon this friend on his visit to Nigeria. There was an urgent request to wire money asap as this was a ‘life and death matter’. Here’s the complete text of the email :

Hi ,How are you doing today? I am sorry i didn’t inform you about my traveling to Africa for a program called “Empowering Youth to Fight against Racism,HIV/AIDS, Poverty and Lack of Education”, the program is taking place in three major countries in Africa which is Ghana , South Africa and Nigeria . It has been a very sad and bad moment for me, the present condition that i found myself is very hard for me to explain.

I am really stranded in Nigeria because I forgot my little bag in the Taxi where my money, passport,documents and other valuable things were kept on my way to the Hotel am staying, I am facing a hard time here because i have no money on me. I am now owning a hotel bill of $ 1550 and they wanted me to pay the bill soon else they will have to seize my bag and hand me over to the Hotel Management., I need this help from you urgently to help me back home, I need you to help me with the hotel bill and i will also need $1600 to feed and help myself back home so please can you help me with a sum of $3500 to sort out my problems here?

I need this help so much and on time because i am in a terrible and tight situation here, I don’t even have money to feed myself for a day which means i had been starving so please understand how urgent i needed your help.

I am sending you this e-mail from the city Library and I only have 30 min, I will appreciate what so ever you can afford to send me for now and I promise to pay back your money as soon as i return home so please let me know on time so that i can forward you the details you need to transfer the money through Money Gram or Western Union.

When my friend reached his hospital, he found that several other Indian doctors had also received similar emails. Since the sender was someone they all knew, they had opened up the email which seemed to come from his email account. It turned out that the friend was indeed traveling, but not to Africa. And of course he wasn’t stuck in a hotel or anything. He was visiting his family in India.

What to do when you receive such emails:

1. Typically, your webmail (gmail/hotmail/yahoo) will have an option to mark the email as spam. Mark it as spam, delete it, junk it.

2. Do not reply to such emails, no matter how heart-rendering the situation. If it’s worrying you a lot, call up the friend whose name appears as the sender, ask him/her if they really sent the email. But do not ever contact the sender in such cases. Even if you have received the email, the sender (the fraud artist) has no idea where you live. But if you send a reply, they can start getting clues to your identity.

3. If you get such emails in your work email, alert the IT administrator.

What to do if someone sent such an email in your name:

1. Did you recently reply to an email from Yahoo or Hotmail or Gmail asking you to confirm your password? Guess what. That email came from an organized cyber-crime syndicate in Nigeria. Remember, Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, or your banks for that matter will never, I repeat, NEVER, n..e..v..e..r… ask for your password in email.

2. Immediately change your email password. Make sure to include a number and a combination of capital and small letters in the passwords. It’s better if you can throw in a special character like a ‘^’ or a ‘!’.

3. Change your email passwords regularly.

4. Use caution when using wireless connections at public places or using email accounts at internet cafes. Remember, the internet cafes can easily put keystroke logging softwares on their machines and each of your keystrokes may be getting logged.

Jan

25

Can India hide the stinking statistics

January 25, 2008 posted by indiatime | Leave a Comment

A recent UNICEF report, in a stunning indictment of India’s healthcare system, has revealed that out of all the babies in the world who die during their first month of life, a staggering 25% are Indians. That translates to 1 million (10 lakh) Indian babies dying in the first 3 to 4 weeks of their life. That also translates into one baby dying every 3 seconds.

1. India, the figures show, allocates only 2% of all its government expenditure to health, as against 24% and 15% by US and UK. Almost a third of India’s population (34%) make less than one American dollar per day. Only a handful of African countries are doing worse on that score.

2. India has the highest number of orphans in the world.

3. India’s adult literacy rate is 61% - as against 69% for Guatemala, 82% for Iran, 74% for Kenya, 92% for Mexico, 89% for Brazil.

4. Only 33% of India’s population has adequate sanitation facilities - as against 43% for Kenya, 94% for Malaysia, 79% for Mexico, 77% for Burma, 80% for Paraguay.

5. The chances that Indian mothers will die during childbirth are 5 times more than in Jamaica, 10 times more than in Mexico, 40 times more than in Italy, and 70 times more than in Ireland.

So, on the eve of tomorrow’s Republic day, some introspection and some humility are in order for the so-called superpower of tomorrow. Forgive me for saying so, but that little slice of the hugely miserable statistic should be sufficient to fire the asses of every politician and every bureaucrat and every member of parliament in this country.

Jan

24

Dr. Abhijit Mahato, PhD (1979-2008)

January 24, 2008 posted by indiatime | 6 Comments

…This webpage has not reached its final stage. I am trying to improve it as and when I get the time and idea. I have not yet found a proper subject for the page. Till then, allow me to be the subject, and introduce myself, and my research interest….

abhijit mahatoThat webpage will now remain incomplete for ever, as Abhijit Mahato, the PhD student who had recently set out on a path to his American dream, was found murdered by multiple gunshots, in his Duke University apartment in Durham, North Carolina.

The Durham police do not yet know why Abhijit was targetted or who killed him. The Durham campus is not one of the safest ones in the USA, and the school is located in an area of the town which is not among the best areas in the vicinity, either, unlike the safer cities nearby - cities like Raleigh, Chapel Hill, or Cary.

Abhijit’s murder comes barely a few weeks after two Louisiana State University Indian PhD students were murdered while at one of the victims’ home. And less than a year after the brutal killing of an Indian professor and an Indian student at the Virginia Tech campus.

Says Abhijit on his web page,

…This is indeed a very lame introduction. But what else can I say about myself, except that I am the son of my parents, brother of my sister and brother-in-law of her husband?! And I have a cute and naughty nephew. Even that would be equally lame introduction….

As his parents mourn the loss of their bright and brilliant son, here’s a heartfelt wish that this grieving family find peace and comfort in the thought that this promising young soul is now embraced by the compassionate almighty. Rest In Peace, dear friend.

Jan

23

Nano ki tang!

January 23, 2008 posted by indiatime | Leave a Comment

Nano may not have been a 21st century Tata invention for India. Chemistry Nobel Laureate Robert Curl Jr, recently reminded his Indian audienceat the 95th Indian Science Congress, that India’s craftsmen, swordsmiths, and artists were using nanotechnology almost 2000 years ago. The research by a German group (Reibold et al) was originally published in the scientific publication Nature, in July of 2006.

Scientists, said Curl, had found carbon nanotubes on the edges of ancient swords made in India, the swords used by Tipu Sultan and the likes. Around 300 BC, Indian craftsmen perfected a technique to create a special form of steel called wootz steel, a type of steel that has sheets of micro carbides on a templated matrix. It is said that the word wootz itself came from the Telugu word ukku. That Indian steel was the metal used by the famous Damascus swords, known for their sharpest edges and extraordinary strengths.

There is additional corroboration to India’s famous propietary steelmaking techniques, from dating of the steel mines in the regions in southern India and Sri Lanka, mining regions that integrated nature’s forces (such as the monsoon winds) in their steel-making ideas. Those same techniques powered the powerful swords of India’s bravest heroes over hundreds of years. Heroes whose names are often forgotten and become mere buzzwords in the hands of our powerful politicians.

Jan

22

Ten people who the Bharat Ratna should not go to

January 22, 2008 posted by indiatime | Leave a Comment

India’s highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna (the Jewel of India), is in the news as January 26th, India’s Republic day inches closer. Every political party including the left, the right, the extreme right and the extreme left, is vociferously campaigning to get their leader’s name on the coveted roster. Their dissonant noise has now cast a dark, unsightly and ugly shadow on a select scroll that this nation choses to salute every now and then.

Over the years, from 1954 to date, India’s top honor has been bestowed upon about 40. Of those, more than 10 got that honor posthumously. Half of those 10 got that award the year following their death (Shastri, Kamraj, Vinoba, MGR, Aruna Asaf Ali and Rajiv Gandhi) and the remaining got it several years after their death (Ambedkar, JP, Patel, Maulana Azad, Bordoloi). Two of the honorees were non-Indians (Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan and Mandela) and Mother Teresa was a naturalized Indian.

So Bharat Ratna does not follow any set rules or conditions based upon whether someone is living, is an Indian citizen, etc. I think there should be some basic ground rules that the award should follow, and I want to put forth a short list.

1. Bharat Ratna should not go to any active or inactive politician (this should bring the honor back to these awards)

2. Bhara Ratna should not go to anyone ever convicted of any crime in India or abroad (this should additionally preclude several politicians, movie stars, and several celebrities)

3. Bharat Ratna should not go to any living person (that should focus the attention on those we tend to forget quickly - the soldiers on the frontlines, freedom fighters, reformers, and so many forgotten gems from the past)

4. Bharat Ratna should not go to anyone who has ever cheated on income tax or customs duties (this should prevent any Bollywood and sports stars whose true colors might be forgotten by their fake patriotism)

5. Bharat Ratna should not go to anyone based upon caste or religion-based quotas (trust me, this is coming…)

6. Bharat Ratna should not go to prime ministers, presidents, chief ministers, members of parliament or leaders of political parties (come on, these guys are already getting rewarded big time)

7. Bharat Ratna should not go to anyone who plays ball for a living (I’d rather have the award go to teachers, soldiers, farmers, hard-working tax-paying industrious workers, entrepreneurs, inventors, visionaries)

8. Bharat Ratna should not go to anyone who hasn’t lived in India for more than a year (precludes foreign dignitaries fom getting the award - I still don’t understand why Mandela is the Jewel of India and Gandhi is not, Subhash Chandra is not, Savarkar is not, Bhagat Singh is not, Shivaji is not). I mean, what’s the point?

9. Bhata Ratna should not go to those who have already won Nobel awards (that is basically admitting that we did not know someone was a good Indian until the world community said so. Remember, Nobel awards are usually given after a lifetime of work though some specific work is cited. Plus if you give it to two Nobel laureates, why not give it to other Indians who got Nobel? Why leave Khorana out? Why leave Chandra out? Aren’t they jewels of India, too?)

10. Bharat Ratna should not go to anyone who has died in the last 50 years (That should discourage any ass-kising, back-scratching sycophants out there). If Indian history remembers someone fondly and with respect 50 years after their death, those good souls do deserve to be called the jewels of this great land. Nobody else does.

Jan

21

India launches Israeli spy satellite

January 21, 2008 posted by indiatime | Leave a Comment

In what is sure to be hailed as a major boost to the Indian Space program, India, early this morning, successfully launched an Israeli spy satellite into orbit from its southern space station at Sriharikota. The TecSar spy satellite is capable of providing high-resolution SAR imagery, regardless of time of day and weather conditions, at affordable costs. It will remain in low-earth polar orbit at a height of a few hundred km from the earth’s surface.

One of the mysteries TecStar will shed more light on is the progress of Iran’s nucelar program. The head of Israel’s spy agency, in an interview last year, made clear what Israel was interested in looking at - the construction progress of Iran’s centrifuges, use of any concrete, its thickness, and several such small details.

For India, the significance is more commercial than military, at least for now. With this second successful launch of a foreign country’s satellite (first was an Italian astronomy-studying satellite AGILE, last year), Indian space program is proving its agility, flexibility, improved capacity to take heavier payloads (Italian satellite was 185 Kg, the Israeli one was about 300 Kg), and an ability to handle a variety of payloads whether commercial, military or scientific.

For Israel, there are several additional advantages for launching the satellite from India. Apart from obvious cost benefits, the launch from India allows Israel a new point of view in space, allowing image angles that were not available so far. The eastern launch also allows coverage of additional sites in the mideast.

How is the TecStar able to get better optical imagery in spite of the weather and time of day? Because it uses a special camera known as SAR (synthetic aperture system). SAR uses its own illumination, like a camera with a flash. But instead of using regular light, it uses microwave radiation that can look through clouds or haze. The illumination on the SAR is coherent, in phase, so it doesn’t matter if it’s daytime or night.

Jan

20

How will India cope with the new gay disease

January 20, 2008 posted by indiatime | 1 Comment

In an article published last week in the Annals of Internal Medicine, scientists sounded off an alarm about the Multidrug-Resistant, Community-Associated disease, the MRSA USA300, the new scourge that devours human flesh. The new ‘gay disease’ as some have characterized it, is not considered epidemic by anyone yet, but it is serious enough, widespread enough, and has the potential to cause a healthcare crisis if not paid enough attention to.

MRSA (Methicillin-Resistant Staph aureus) USA300, a clone of the community-associated MRSA disease, was practically unknown before the year 2000. But it has already spread to North America, Europe, and can cause an unusually severe group of conditions including necrotizing fascitis, a dreaded flesh-devouring condition. Researchers, after studying the gay population of San Francisco and Boston, found that the disease is 13 times more prevalent in the gay population as compared to the rest.

Now, let’s focus on India. It is widely known that drug-resistant bacterial infections such as the XDR-TB and the enteric fever (typhoid) are already a big problem in India ( The prevalence of drug-reststant tuberculosis is known to be twice in India as compared to that in the USA). Recent reports indicate that about 10% of India’s AIDS population are drug-resistant. So even if the government has downplayed the HIV and AIDS numbers, it can be safely assumed that there are at least 2.5-3 million AIDS sufferer in India. That would put the drug-resistant population number at about 3 lakhs (300,000). Many amongst those would be 13 times more likely to catch the MRSA-USA300.

Combine that with the social stigma, India’s consistent denial of its healthcare crises, poor hygiene, poverty, overcrowding in public places. Combine that with the spider-bite-like looking nature of MRSA’s initial symptoms, lack of enough drug-susceptibility testing labs, and most of all, ignorance at virtually every level of government and bureaucracy. Assuming a 5% of the overall Indian population to be gay, and about 8-10% of them afflicted with HIV/AIDS, the new gay disease poses new and significant challenges to India’s public health system. Challenges that could make the past epidemics look like a walk in the park.

Jan

19

The coward bystanders

January 19, 2008 posted by indiatime | 1 Comment

pu·sil·lan·i·mous
- lacking courage or resolution; cowardly

The recent string of molestation news in India, starting with the new year eve’s public molestation incidence to the everyday news of tourists being molested here and there, belies the statistical fact that this has always been a problem for Indian women. The statistic from the National Crime Reporting Bureau shows that there isn’t even any data for such crimes before 1994, and during recent years, the nuber of officially reported molestation cases have ballooned to about 36000 per year. That translates to about 100 reported or known molestation cases in the country every single day.

Now, for every such reported case of molestation, there are surely many more that go unreported. And even for those that are reported, a ridiculously low number actually gets seriously pursued by the police and even a lesser number fetch any convictions. The new year eve’s public molestation of two non-resident Indian women by 60-70 people, caught everyone’s attention, made headline news, seemingly woke up the sleeping politicians and the police, and became the talk of India’s tinseltown for days. Now, only a few weeks later, all seems to have been forgotten and the perpetrators are free and busy ogling the rest of Mumbai’s womenfolk.

The catalyst that is absent from this extinguishing fire is the public’s interest. With all the news about Cricket and Bollywood and politics and Bharat Ratna awards, women’s molestations is sure to take a backseat. But what is even more alarming is the complete apathy shown by witnesses, onlookers and passers-by who passing on a chance to become good samaritans, proactively choose to turn their heads away.

In one of his earlier Socratic dialogs known as ‘Laches’, Plato, the famous Greek philosopher discusses the virtue of courage. He illustrates the thinking pattern of an individual soldier when that soldier stands on the frontlines of the battle, facing an enemy line. If the enemy forces appear too strong, the soldier might choose to flee, since there is no point in fighting a big enemy and one would surely lose the battle. If the enemy forces appear to be too weak, the soldier still chooses to walk away, thinking that his colleagues can easily take care of such a weak enemy and his help is really unnecessary. If all the soldiers on one side think like this and walk away from the battle, the enemy has already won.

India’s public, in the matter of crimes against women, seems to taken after that Plato-Socratic soldier. Often times, many of us witness crimes that we could report and register and help the justice system. But thinking that there are others who will do it anyways, we walk away from doing that one right thing which could bring much-needed justice to a battered soul.

Jan

18

A bird-flu-free nation? Not!

January 18, 2008 posted by indiatime | 4 Comments

The World Health Organization (WHO) is warning that India’s current bird flu outbreak is much more serious than the ones from previous years. This time, not only is the afflicted area much larger than before, that area is right along India’s national border with Bangladesh, which means India alone would not be able to completely control this outbreak.

Worse than that, the real issue with the bird flu outbreaks in India is the lack of attention to the issue from those who should be paying more attention. The West Bengal state government, initially, lost previous time by delaying or suppressing the news of the outbreak by not setting the alarm off earlier. Though the state knew about the poultry deaths on January 4th, there were no alerts sounded until a week later, losing precious time.

To make matters worse, just a few months ago, India recently declared itself bird-flu free. This last November, the World Orgnization of Animal Health (OIE) said India had achieved a victory over bird flu. Now, less than 2 months later, India has a bird flu crisis, which this time, is even worse than the one before.

That India is in denial of several such health crises should by now be considered an undeniable fact. But India’s denial continues even now, from top of the bureaucratic ladder all the way to the local poultry farmers. Sharad Pawar, India’s agriculture minister, has continued to assert that Indian poultry market is unaffected, and the disease has not had any impact on humans at all. That kind of political talk without a factual forensic fact-finding of such outbreaks, is a hallmark of Indian politicians who instead of setting a vision and leading a solution-based strategy to such crises, would rather indulge in cheap poppy-talk to soothe public anxieties.

At the other extreme are India’s poultry farmers, often ignorant of health and hygiene issues about their poultry. How is it that within less than weeks after being declared a bird-flu-free country, there are many, many villages in India with more than ten-thousand birds dying in each of those villages? Why the hurry to declare India a bird-flu-free nation? Somebody did drop the ball on all this bird-flu issue by ignoring serious warnings and early signs. That kind of carelessness and a consistent criminal under-reporting of health-crisis alerts, massively underscores the entire spectrum of public health issues in India, ranging from bird flu to HIV infections to malaraia to tainted blood transfusions.

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Translations




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Hollywood’s first Indian star
Meeting Raj Kapoor at the barbershop
Madhubala on a postal stamp
Why I’m happier than Mukesh Ambani
An inconvenient truth about India’s intellectual property
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Dr Singh is no Dr King
Lesser Known Indians
The Most ‘Nobel’ Teacher of Them All
The third Indian revered in China
A little Poland in India
The vanishing of Indian languages
The looting of Chandigarh’s treasures
Bharat, Pakistan and Hindustan, Indiana
Welcome to India, Steve!
Top 5 explanations for the president’s gesture
An IIT on every street, an IIM on every block
Pakistan, Jinnah, Wadias and the American anthem
An IAS officer’s nightmare of lustful, lascivious stares comes true