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Thursday,
March 21, 2002, Chandigarh, India  
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Investment in future Internet telephony Cricket's young turks |
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Ayodhya’s unending challenge
Former PMs’ club gets active
Of love and attaining nirvana
Emotions influence mental abilities
A papier mache artiste quietly at work
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Investment in future The Union Cabinet’s decision to hike the basic pay of the school teachers, even if marginally, should be welcomed, considering the precarious state of the government finances and the neglect of education over the years. The revised senior scale, to be effective from January1, 1996, will substitute the existing pay scales and put an annual recurring burden of Rs 20 crore and a non-recurring one of Rs 105 crore on the exchequer. Actually, it should not be called a “burden” since any money spent on education and educators, particularly at the primary level, is an investment in the future well-being of the country. Education still does not get the deserved attention of the policy-makers. The Finance Ministry too holds the purse tightly when it comes to releasing funds for education. A larger part of the education budget is cornered by institutions of higher learning where a lot of money is spent on raising palatial buildings based on western models of architecture catering to the needs of the privileged few in a country where education is still a luxury. Many children have not yet heard of school despite the Constitution making it
obligatory on the state to provide them free primary education. There are schools in rural areas which operate from one room and classes are held under trees. The focus has to be on removing illiteracy and providing functional education to all. Although Kerala has won the distinction of being the first to achieve 100 per cent literacy and a state like Bihar undertook a commendable project to make education available to cow grazers and shepherds, most states continue to neglect education. While Haryana is making visible efforts, albeit with limited success, to end the scourge of illiteracy, Punjab presents a picture of benign neglect. Despite being number one in terms of per capita income, the so-called progressive state is way behind other states in education. Mr I.K.Gujral made it known recently how he as the Prime Minister of the country had made an offer to Mr Parkash Singh Badal and Mr Gurcharan Singh Tohra to accept all their demands provided they banished illiteracy from the state in five years. But the Akali Dal-BJP government had other priorities. Leave alone promoting literacy, the coalition government incurred the public wrath for allegedly putting on sale the posts of primary teacher. Education Minister Tota Singh did introduce the teaching of English in primary schools, but that became a controversial issue. Instead of wasting time and resources on petty controversies and scandals, the need is to make education available to all and improve its quality. Funds should not come in the way. |
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Internet telephony A brave new world may become a reality for the consumers if they are allowed to utilise the full potential of internet telephony from April 1 as promised. Calls to the USA may cost as little as Rs 5 per minute once the new regime becomes functional. Better still, the service may be easily available through the STD kiosks which already dot almost all cities, towns and even villages. Naturally, there are many misgivings in the minds of telecom operators who pay licence fees to the government (whereas internet service providers don't). Their apprehension is that the new service may drive them out of business. But there are several inherent limitations due to which internet telephony may not be a competition but only a supplement to the conventional telephony at best. First of all, the quality of internet telephony leaves much to be desired. Most of the time, the voice is garbled. Occasionally, several seconds of voice message is simply lost. All this was an acceptable risk as long as internet telephony was only a novelty. But if one is paying for it, even if the cost is only about 20 per cent of the conventional service, one would expect reasonable reception, which is hardly available as of now. That is why the share of internet telephony in domestic calls is less than 1 per cent even in the USA and Europe. Second, ISPs have been restricted to providing PC-to-PC calls for domestic long distance and PC-to-phone calls for overseas calls. The penetration of PCs is woefully low in the country. And as far as overseas calls are concerned, most of them originate in foreign countries. The new service is being introduced at the same time as the privatisation of the VSNL and induction of private companies. The resultant competition will cut the rates of telephony through conventional methods and rob the internet telephony of much of the price advantage. Even otherwise, making computers ready for using voice transfer will entail considerable additional expenditure. Moreover, PCs are just not designed for voice communication and will remain a poor cousin of the standard service, at least in the foreseeable future. These are the difficulties that it faces even in the best-case scenario. If one also takes into consideration the perennial congestion of bandwidth, the service appears even less attractive. Having said all that, one must add that internet telephony is an idea whose time has come. It can be a boon for a poor country like India. The government must back it fully so that the common man can draw the maximum benefit out of it. |
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Cricket's young turks You can love Indian cricket. You can hate Indian cricket. But you cannot ignore it. After the heart-warming victory in the best-of-five one-day series against Zimbabwe at Guwahati cricket fans are bound to go overboard in their praise of the Indian cricket team. And why not? In a manner of speaking Guwahati helped the Indian team break the jinx of being the losing finalist in nine consecutive series before the one played against Zimbabwe. With both the teams level at 2-all it was important for India to shrug off the past to clinch the series. India not only won the final game, but did so in style. The sceptics did not give India a chance. Why? Because in the earlier series against England it had frittered away a 3-1 lead and allowed Nasser Hussain to make it 3-3 and in the process exposed the unpredictable face of Indian cricket. The die-hard critics are still not happy. They point out that Zimbabwe came close to levelling the two-Test series when they made India sweat for every run while chasing a modest total of 120 for victory at the Ferozeshah Kotla in Delhi. And the havoc that two Douglas' caused in the Indian camp! Douglas Marillier gave the game an unusual shot in the process of turning certain defeat into a satisfying win for Zimbabwe at Faridabad. Douglas Hondo then went on to expose the soft underbelly of Indian batting in the Kochi game. But the return of a young lad from Punjab who is very much a Yuvraj in name and temperament saw Indian batting rise to great heights. Of course, it would be unfair to ignore the contribution of two other players from Punjab, Harbhajan Singh and Dinesh Mongia, in giving the Indian cricket team an aura of invincibility. India were trailing 2-1 when Yuvraj came out to bat in the fourth game at Hyderabad. The run-rate had become impossible. Yet, he in the company of another youngster Mohammad Kaif from UP, made the daunting task look easy. And in the end easy it was. At Guwahati he teamed up with Mongia to help India set an impossible target of 334 for Zimbabwe. The most important point to note is that victory in the one-day series was made possible without the services of Sachin Tendulkar, Virendra Sehwag, Javagal Srinath and Anil Kumble (who opted out in the middle of the series due to injury). What is equally significant is the fact that after a long time even the senior players can no longer take their place in the team for granted. After Tendulkar, Sehwag,Srinath and Kumble return who are the players that will have to make place for them. Yuvraj Singh, Mongia, Kaif, Harbhajan, Ajit Agarkar, Zaheer Khan? No. The players who are really nervous are V. V. S. Laxman and Rahul Dravid. The young turks are certainly fitter, more agile on the field and motivated. And if the selectors do not start messing around with them, the future of Indian cricket appears to be bright. |
Ayodhya’s unending challenge All things considered, the Prime Minister, Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee, has coped with the menacing crisis at Ayodhya coinciding with the Ides of March as best he could. The sigh of relief, audible across the country on the evening of Friday last, underscored this. To be sure, he has also invited a lot of criticism from various sides for what can only be called his policy of playing both sides of the street. Not even his admirers — leave along those accusing him of a “humongous fraud” — are buying the claim that the Attorney-General acted entirely on his own while making a conspicuously detailed request to the Supreme Court to allow at least a token ceremony. On this the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) was insistent. But the apex court, for good reasons, as stated by it in the course of the hearing, firmly refused to do so. This enabled the Vajpayee government to take shelter behind the judges’ black gowns and then enter into an uneasy compromise with the fire-eating leaders of the mandir movement that resulted in the rather bizarre “shila daan” with all its disturbing ramifications. However, the bottom line is that a major catastrophe that had seemed dangerously close was averted. March 15 did not turn into a repeat of December 6 a decade earlier. For this the Prime Minister deserves all the credit he is being given though perhaps not the overblown spin some of his publicists are putting on the episode. But this is neither here nor there because the prevention of a disaster on March 15 has already passed into history. Ayodhya’s enduring challenge to Mr Vajpayee’s leadership, to the survival of the coalition he presides over and, above all, to the country’s future, instead of being blunted, has become much sharper — a process that could escalate in the coming days and months. The evidence of this gloomy spiral, manifest to the naked eye and even an empty mind, can be summed up easily and briefly. On March 15 itself there could be no mistaking the rage of the Rambhaktas, now calling themselves Ramsevaks, who had managed to reach Ayodhya despite elaborate restrictions on the entry into the besieged town. Their number consequently was relatively small. But there was no limit to their fury. They blamed their leaders, including the colourful and belligerent Mahant Ramchandradas Paramhans, of a “sell-out”, “surrender” and “betrayal” and vowed to build the Ram temple regardless of what the court, the government or even the VHP might say or do. The insults traded by various akhadas in Ayodhya are even more remarkable. Several votaries of the temple have accused Mr Paramhans of “corruption” and “defalcation of funds”. To conclude from this that the mandir movement might dissipate itself because of disunity and discord within its ranks would be not only a triumph of hope over experience but also an act of folly. In every sectarian and emotive movement divisions have almost always been to the advantage of those willing to take the most extreme position, the LTTE in Sri Lanka and the Taliban in Afghanistan being instructive instances in point. And so it seems to be turning out in the present case here. Mahant Paramhans has already declared that the construction of the temple would start this year, and has even indicated that this might happen on June 2. As if this was not enough, he has added that if the government did not hand over to him the “undisputed land”, he would “take it over by force”. Those who see a parallel between the BJP-led government’s indulgence to him and Indira Gandhi’s encouragement to Bhindranwale in the late seventies cannot have a point. The VHP’s international president, Mr Ashok Singhal, was humiliated by his infuriated followers. He has responded by going on a hunger strike to demand “security” for Ramsevaks visiting Ayodhya to take part in ceremonies that are scheduled to go on until Mr Paramhans’ June-2 deadline. A more ominous straw in the wind is the wanton attack by VHP and Bajrang Dal hoodlums on the Assembly in Orissa, a state ruled by the BJP’s coalition partner at the Centre, the Biju Janata Dal. It is no less revealing that senior BJP leaders in New Delhi have objected to comparisons being drawn between the wanton assault at Bhubaneshwar and the earlier attacks on the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly and Parliament. Nor can it be overlooked that the somewhat farcical but potentially provocative drama staged at Ayodhya had come against the bleak backdrop of the Godhra outrage on Ramsevaks, followed by the massacre of innocent Muslims in various parts of Gujarat. During these, the BJP government in the state, headed by Mr Narendra Modi, a hardcore RSS pracharak, was guilty of grave dereliction of duty, to say the least. To nobody’s surprise, the Ayodhya goings-on have rekindled communal violence in Gujarat that has indeed spread to the previously unaffected adivasi areas. No less painfully, communal tensions, initially confined to Gujarat, are spreading elsewhere, too, from Hyderabad in Andhra to Bhiwani in Haryana. The crying need of the hour is to put an end to any kind of activity or rhetoric that can drive the situation out of hand, as had last happened in 1992-93. But, sadly, what is actually happening instead is just the reverse. There is no dearth of extremists in either of the two communities. But at present those in the majority community seem to be more active. They are holding the entire Muslim community responsible for the atrocity at Godhra and unabashedly justifying the horrific violence in Ahmedabad, Vadodra and elsewhere as “natural and understandable”. With the welcome support of the Samata leader, Ms Jaya Jaitly, they are also targeting the “secularists” and “pseudo-secularists” among the Hindus for failing to condemn adequately the Godhra outrage by the Muslim mob. Moreover, they are denouncing the “liberal” section of the English-language media for being “anti-Hindu”. It needs to be recognised that this kind of sentiment does find wider acceptance among sections of the Hindu society than is generally realised, and this makes the situation more inflammable rather than less. And it is in this worrying context that the RSS, the virtual karta of the Sangh Parivar, has passed a resolution that cannot but widen and deepen the communal divide. For, besides condemning the Godhra attack but justifying the subsequent massacres as “spontaneous and natural”, it has magisterially told the Muslims to “understand that their real safety lies in the goodwill of the majority”. Interestingly, in another resolution, the RSS has condemned the Bangladesh government for failing to protect the Hindu minority there and called upon the Vajpayee government to stop the export of essential goods to the neighbouring country. RSS leaders have also made it clear that one way for the Muslims to win the goodwill of the Hindu majority would be to concede to it three disputed places of worship - at Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura. In other words, even if resolved somehow, the Ayodhya issue would not be the end of the matter. By an interesting coincidence, just when the RSS resolution was being passed in Bangalore, the VHP leader, Mr Vishnu Hari Dalmia, was telling a TV channel in New Delhi exactly the same thing. Cutting out the cackle, it is crystal clear that the RSS — with full-throated support of the VHP, Bajrang Dal and others of the same ilk — has decided to put “hot Hindutva” back at the centre of its agenda. Thus, it and the Prime Minister are at variance with each other. One of the BJP’s top leaders enjoying the Prime Minister’s confidence is quoted as having said, on condition of anonymity, “it would be a mistake for us to ride the Hindutva tiger again, unless we decide that we want to remain in the Opposition permanently”. Apparently, it does not matter to the RSS whether the Vajpayee government stays or goes. But those occupying the gilded seats of power or otherwise exercising clout or influence are in no hurry to leave. How many of the BJP MPs would go along with the RSS and how many will stand by Mr Vajpayee is one of the two imponderables. The other is the likely attitude of the “secular allies” of the BJP in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). The consensus on this point, one must report regretfully, is that no matter what their posturing from time to time, none of them wants to give up power and the lovely perks that go with it. |
Former PMs’ club gets active The acquittal of former Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao in the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) bribery case along with his the then Cabinet colleague Buta Singh has thrown up the prospects of ex-Heads of Government coming together for what they believe to be in the larger interests of the country. No sooner than the Delhi High Court set aside the trial court judgement sentencing Mr Rao and Mr Buta Singh on March 15, there was a beeline of former Prime Ministers at the “Telegu Bidda’s (Telegu pride)” desolate residence. Chandra Shekhar, I K Gujral, HD Deve Gowda were among the prominent former Prime Ministers who wasted no time in felicitating Mr Rao. In brief exchanged with him, these leaders appeared keen to work in close concert aimed at blunting the machinations of the Sangh Parivar to disturb communal amity along with attempts to ressurect the Hindutva agenda by putting the mandir issue in Ayodhya in the vanguard. It is obvious all the ex-Prime Ministers are itching to get their political act right. And it is generally believed Mr Rao as the former chief of the Congress party can now step out of the shadows with the JMM case behind him and be counted as a force to reckon with in the political firmament. The million-dollar question is whether Congressmen, who had dumped him like a hot potato, will back Mr Rao in the changed environment with Sonia Gandhi calling the shots in her capacity as the numero uno of the Congress party. Mr Rao appears determined to contribute his bit having set the ball rolling in the 90s ushering in direly needed economic reforms. From Bihar to Ayodhya The Ayodhya face-off has ended in a whimper with a “shila daan” on March 15. But one man who kept the entire nation on tenterhooks with his political histrionics was Mahant Ramchander Das Paramhans, Chief of the Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas (RJN). Seeing the kind of commitment being shown by the self-claimed 92-year-old Sadhu, many would easily take him to be an original inhabitant of Ayodhya. However, Paramhans, who has been right at the heart of every battle over Ayodhya inside or outside courts for the past 50 years, belongs to Chapra District in Bihar. He stresses he has known Ayodhya right from his childhood. At the age of 12, the Mahant claims he had left home with his guru and become a “wanderer”. At 42, he approached courts over the issue of “uninterrupted puja” at the disputed Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid site. The commitment shown by Paramhans and his growing popularity among the supporters of Ram Temple movement saw him taking over as the President of Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas (RJN) after the death of Shivramacharya. Subsequently, he was also elected as the President of Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir Nirman Samiti. Whether it was the shilanyas in 1989, the first Kar Seva in 1990 or the second one in 1992 when the Babri Masjid was brought down, the Mahant was always there. His is one of the most powerful Akharas in Ayodhya — Digambar Akhara. During the Shila Daan movement, Paramhans stole the show in his inimitable style, much to the chagrin of Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) International working President Ashok Singhal. |
Of love and attaining nirvana Since the beauty of love and sex which we find apotheocised in works of art since the dawn of civilisation has, in the modern world, become merely business, the vulgarisation only shows what the worship of money and power can do to an experience which in its highest reaches touches divinity itself. Compare them, the erotic motifs worked out in the superb temples of Madurai and Rameshwaram in Tamil Nadu of Konark in Orissa and of Mahabaleshwar in Maharashtra or in the paintings of the Ajanta caves with the naked sex sold in glossies, and reduced to oblique whoredom as in the bunny and night clubs etc to see how the use and abuse of sex have done dirt upon an essentially beautiful bonding. God made Adam and Eve to make sex a thing of poetry, but their offspring have, down the ages, made it a commodity on sale. In the process, Freud has replaced God, so to speak. The distempers of our ‘fallen’ generations are explained now on the psychiatrist’s couch generally. However, if we ponder the problem of healthful sexuality, we come to understand the purpose of life, of its meaning and reason. In fact, the idea is powerfully expressed in some religious scriptures, and the union of man and woman is seen as a question of God’s design. It’s a meeting of the Lord with His Bride, a congress of flesh and the spirit. I shall take up the issue later when I touch upon the poetry of Guru Nanak, and of the great Sikh poet, Professor Puran Singh, amongst others, to emphasise the sanctity of spousal love. Though in some extremist sects of Christianity, sex has been regarded as “dirty”, the cause of man’s “fall”, this perverted Puritan idea has lost its power and urgency since the 15th century Renaissance and the Industrial revolution later. But normalcy in thought has not, however, given the Western nations that insight which treats sex with deep reverence. The Renaissance paintings — Michelangelo, Rubens and others — glorified the flesh through which the spirit shone, giving to their work an ambience of mystic awe. Similarly, in some of the mystic poets of England and the USA (William Blake, Walt Whitman) the deep mystery and glory of sex has been rendered in soulful numbers. Walt Whitman, for instance, openly exults in deifying sex — a thing that his Punjabi Sikh disciple, Professor Puran Singh, recognised fully, and linked it to the Sikh scriptural thought in that regard. In sum, the sexual experience enables man and woman to sound the deepest depths of their beings. Professor Puran Singh endorsed his American master’s query: And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul, And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul? Before I turn to some of these contexts in detail, it may be interesting to know that the word “die” has been used by the Christian divines as an experience of sexual union. This sangham of Eros and Thanatos is the essence of the concept in question. One ‘dies’ as one dips into, and merges with the other —
stasis, a moment’s death and then regeneration, recovery and richness. This is the point where the East meets the West despite Kipling, for in the domain of sex and high art, there are no frontiers, no divisions. Its universality negates all other contradictions. The dialectic of this union resolves the polarities of sex, making the experience whole. Since Hinduism is perhaps the world’s oldest religion, and has a unique metaphysic of its own — a point recognised by some great Western writers and scholars — I take up some aspects to show how the celebration of sex, of lingham worship, of sexual iconography in their art and temple architecture has had a profound effect on the Indian sensibility. We do not yet know if the Lord Krishna — Radha and the Krishna — Gopis songs are a fact of history, or the poetic flights of a seer in ecstasy, but the fact remains that Hindu life is pervaded by this paean — in temples, in homes and in hamlets. Prof Puran Singh while pursuing the Gita Govinda writes evocatively about the figure of Radha ... She is “celestial, luminous, iridescent, trance — dazzled with no body consciousness”. The Gita Govinda stands out as a most remarkable long salute to “the Krishna Consciousness”. The blue Krishna cult was, then, acquiring a mystic character, and this had a far-reaching effect on the later sufi poets of India. Mira Bai’s songs, undoubtedly, came out of such a brimful consciousness, and became soon enough a staple diet for the Krishna bhaktas and the Vaishnavas. Guru Nanak’s bani, breathlessly beautiful and wide-ranging, again, connects with the mystic concept of the sufis, and discards ritualism, sacradotalism and other priestly ceremonies. In chaste classical ragas, he renders the themes of separation and vairag. The spousal metaphor runs like a white thread in the colourful tapestry of his divine songs. I quote a few lines from Rag Wadhans to show how the Guru, having been united with the Lord in his dreams, wakes up to feel acutely the pangs of separation. “He came to me in my dreams and again vanished upon which I wept my fill. I cannot go to Thee, O Beloved, or send someone to Thee”. In Guru Nanak’s visionary verse, that’s the burden of one song after another. The sublime, then, is the highest point man or woman can achieve in the quest for nirvana or moksha. And it may not be confused with good morals; it’s beyond ethics, for the sublime subsumes the ethical. |
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Emotions influence mental abilities Your emotional state has a direct effect on your mental abilities. This was proved in a breakthrough research when brain activity of candidates was screened in different emotional states and it was found that there was a short-term influence on areas of the brain critical for reasoning, intelligence and other types of higher cognition. Using a sophisticated technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging, Jeremy Gray, a research scientist in Washington University in St Louis, and colleagues recorded brain activity as people performed difficult cognitive tasks just after watching short, emotional videos. They found that the lingering effects of the videos had remarkably specific influences on the levels of brain activity. In the study, 14 college-aged men and women were shown a series of short video clips, which elicited one of three emotional states: pleasant, neutral or anxious. Pleasant moods were induced by viewing television comedies, such as "Candid Camera" (1985); and anxious moods followed the viewing of cult horror classics, namely the movies "Halloween" (1978, 1989) and "Scream" (1996). After a particular series of clips, participants were asked to perform a difficult cognitive task requiring the active retention of information in short-term or "working" memory. Essentially, participants were shown a series of either words or unfamiliar faces on a computer screen, and had to indicate whether the current word (or face, in the face task) was the same as the one they had just seen three times back in the series. The experiment studied the influence of relatively mild emotions on higher-level cognitive functions. FMRI scans showed that participants had more activity in the prefrontal cortex when doing either a word-based task in an anxious mood, or when doing a face-based task in a pleasant mood. In these conditions, which the participants found more difficult, the two brain areas shown in yellow appeared to be working harder, as shown by greater activity. The same regions were less active — and possibly more efficient — during either the word task in a pleasant mood or the face task in an anxious mood. "To have the best mental performance and the most efficient pattern of brain activity, you need a match between the type of mood you are in and the type of task you are doing," said Gray. "This is one of the first studies to really show that performance and brain activity are a product of an equal partnership or marriage between our emotional states and higher cognition." "Our results suggest that emotion is not a second-class citizen in the world of the brain," Gray said. "The findings surprise people. Mild anxiety actually improved performance on some kinds of difficult tasks, but hurt performance on others. Being in a pleasant mood boosted some kinds of performance but impaired other kinds. To understand how a particular emotion or mood will influence performance, you have to take into account the type of task. Our results show that the brain takes it into account."
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A papier mache artiste quietly at work One is likely come across a number of brilliant artisans, craftsmen and performers in remote areas of Punjab who remain unsung. Take Satwinder Bitto. an auto-parts mechanic, and also a papier mache artiste. He lives a low key life in Moga district. When engaged in creative activity, the young man seems to be miles away from his surroundings. Waste paper and gum form Bitto's tools, out of which brilliant models are made. He said, "I started by making models of huts and housing units in the hilly areas in which I showed car models and grassy areas. I then went on to make gurdwara models: the Hemkunt Sahib and Darbar Sahib. This took me more than two months of hard work. For this I visited Amritsar to carry out a detailed study of the Golden Temple - the number of windows, carvings etc." Each dome, each tower, window and door of the magnificent Golden Temple was studied and measured to create a masterpiece in papier mache exactly to scale. This was certainly among the most astounding of his works. There is also a papier mache miniature of Gurdwara Hemkunt Sahib: "When I returned home, my father used to ask me to go to sleep, asking why I was up so late. I used to tell him it was a favourite hobby and I should not be forced to give it up. Later, when he saw some of the models I had created, he appreciated my work," Bitto added. But when creativity has its way, there are no limits. Bitto has created a whole range of images from the mythological to the traditional, and going through them one sees images of Punjab's past and present. He wants to use them in turn as tools of education and awareness for the locals. "Many people in Punjab do not really know of the World Trade Center attack, the type of building it was and so on. I'd like to make a model of the World Trade Center for the people to come and see and know all about it. Specially for the sake of children's awareness," the artist emphasised. Satwinder Bitto, not particularly academically qualified, runs a medium-scale motor parts workshop in Moga city. He has plans to hold an exhibition of his works in Punjab and rest of India.
ANI Genetic causes of hypertension Researchers from the University of Virginia and Georgetown University have identified a leading cause of hypertension, the most common class of high blood pressure. According to them, three abnormalities in a single gene increases one’s likelihood of developing the disease. Hypertension affects 25 per cent of adults and constitutes a major risk factor for stroke, heart attack, heart failure and kidney failure. About 50 per cent of hypertension is thought to be hereditary. According to researchers, the presence of these gene variations, also called polymorphisms, can be determined by a simple genetic test that they have developed. This test assesses an individual's risk of developing high blood pressure based on detection of inherited gene variations that encode for a protein called G protein coupled receptor kinase type 4 (GRK4). GRK4 variations are associated with an inability to normally eliminate sodium from the body. "Patients with even a single GRK4 variation have a significant lifetime risk for developing hypertension. We have now identified the genetic abnormalities that cause this error and so we have a better idea of the impact of these gene variations in the development of hypertension," said Pedro A Jose, MD, PhD, Professor of Pediatrics and of Physiology and Biophysics at Georgetown.
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No - stands for Not B - Bound by L - Lust E - Evil * Lust is the mother of evil. * The one who is not bound by lust is free from evil too. * Such a one is Noble A - alpha (beginning) R - remains Y - yet A - alpha The one who has realised that alpha remains yet alpha which means that the path of eternity is endles; yet it always seems to have a new beginning; is an Arya. — From Shashvata Shanti, July-August 1998 *** With a view to controlling the mind, its reins should be tightened. It should be kept tightly in the grip like the ends of a churning rope. — Sri Guru Granth Sahib,
Suhi M1, page 728 *** Learn that there is no cure for desire No cure for the love of reward, No cure for the misery of longing, save in the fixing of the sight and hearing on that which is invisible and soundless. A man must believe in his innate power of progress. A man must refuse to be terrified by his greater nature, and must not be drawn back by his lesser or material self. All the past shows that difficulty is no excuse for dejection, much less for despair, else the world would have been without the many wonders of civilisation. — H.P. Blavatsky, Practical Occultism: “Some practical Suggestions for daily life” *** O mind, you are light, realise your source. The conquest of mind is the conquest of the whole world. — Sri Guru Granth Sahib |
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