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Monday,
February 3, 2003, Chandigarh, India  
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Up among stars now! Heritage of Golden Temple
A flawed development model |
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The other side of Gandhi-bashing
Anupam Gupta
Exercise acts like a drug
in heart disease
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Up among stars now! At a time when India was witnessing a distressing dearth of role models and real-life heroes, Kalpana Chawla emerged on the horizon like an uncharted star. Who was to know that she was to vanish quickly like an asteroid! But what a glorious legacy she has left behind! During those heart-stopping moments on Sunday when space shuttle Columbia burst into flames just a little while before touch-down, the whole of India turned into a huge joint family. Why only India, the tragedy brought together the whole world, because it was a truly international space venture. The anguish felt by every citizen was only slightly less heart-rending than that suffered by her immediate family. And in a display of true grit and valour, her brother did not shed tears, but only said that the family of everyone opting for a high-risk responsibility must steel itself for coping with such nightmares bravely. That was a reaction worthy of the sibling of a girl who taught us that if your dreams reach out all the way to the stars and you put your heart and soul into achieving them, you can make them come true sooner or later. Who would have thought that the girl from Karnal would one day join the distinguished band of astronauts who defy the gravity of their home planet not once but twice. The competition for such a high-profile job is unbelievably tough and only the very finest make the final grade. Once the full extent of the tragedy sinks in, the logical question as to what went wrong will wreck everyone’s mind. Till a few hours ago, one nagging apprehension was whether sabotage had something to do with it. Fortunately, that possibility has been ruled out for now. It emerges from preliminary reports that the oft-delayed STS-107 science mission was dogged by problems right from the very start. But what must not be lost sight of is the fact that such a space mission is the fructification of the labour of thousands of persons and despite a concerted effort to minimise the margin of error, it is well nigh impossible to keep it down at zero forever. And although space forays have become quite routine of late, they are a miracle of cutting-edge technology. These are not exactly kamikaze attempts, but the risks involved are considerably high nevertheless. The crash occurred just days after the 17th anniversary of the Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986, in which seven US astronauts lost their lives. That explosion had proved to be a big blow to space exploration. One hopes the latest tragedy would not derail the endeavour that these brave men and women lived and died for. Kalpana Chawla and her colleagues were in a way pioneers who laid down their lives in the service of mankind. The best tribute to them would be to try with renewed vigour to make space exploration safer and easier. From the Indian point of view, what matters most is that she taught everyone two invaluable lessons. One, how to pursue one’s goals with single-minded devotion while defying seemingly insurmountable odds stacked against you, and two, how to remain quintessentially Indian even on becoming a world citizen. Perhaps, her glorious exploits would motivate many youngsters, sitting teary-eyed in remote corners of India mourning her death, to emulate her. |
Heritage of Golden Temple The Golden Temple at Amritsar represents the quintessence of Punjab. It is, indeed, a living monument that symbolises the spiritual and historical traditions of the Sikhs. Given its importance and the unique place it has in the hearts of millions of people across the globe, it is only fitting that it should be considered by Unesco as a World Heritage Site. Nominations for such recognition always emanate from the owners of the site. They go from them, through the national government, to
Unesco. Various organisations have joined hands for quickly preparing the necessary documentation and forwarding it to the Centre for onward journey to
Unesco. It was the SGPC that prepared the papers for the nomination with the involvement of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage
(Intach), and Cultural Resource Conservation Initiative. Scholars from Punjabi University, Patiala, and Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, examined the reports and the Government of Punjab played a crucial role in clearing it and forwarding it to the Centre. This is a rare and laudable example of disparate groups cutting across party and other lines for a common and worthy cause. This shows that people can rise up to the occasion when necessary. The concept of the Golden Temple and its architecture are unique. It is open from all sides, and has numerous features that show both a distinctive architectural heritage as also an interesting synthesis of extant styles. It is expected that the nomination of the Golden Temple as a World Heritage Site will come through by next year, which also marks the 400th anniversary of the installation of Guru Granth Sahib at the Golden Temple. Indeed, Harmandar Sahib has been a source of inspiration to the community ever since it was founded. The recent statement by Akal Takht Jathedar Joginder Singh Vedanti that women should be allowed to perform kirtan at Harmandar Sahib is also to be seen as preserving the spirit of the heritage of the most important Sikh institution. At present, women do not perform kirtan at Harmandar Sahib. The egalitarianism that is so essential to the teachings of Guru Granth Sahib should be reflected in the living traditions of Sikh religious institutions. The Golden Temple’s nomination as a World Heritage Site would be important for this institution, but even before it happens the SGPC and the local administrative authorities must take steps to preserve its heritage. |
A flawed development model The Planning Commission has sought to follow the upper middle income countries like Argentina, Chile, Hungary, Malaysia, Mexico and South Africa to develop its vision of India-2020. Surely, these countries have higher levels of income than India today. But according to the World Development Report-2003, the average rate of growth of the upper middle income countries was negative at (-) 0.5 per cent in 2000-01. Three of the six countries mentioned by the Planning Commission — Argentina, Mexico and Malaysia — have faced a severe economic crisis in the recent past. South Africa continues to face severe social problems and is unable to bring the benefits of economic growth to its people. It seems the Planning Commission seeks to emulate the losers. Instead of following these losers, India should chart its own development strategy to become a developed country in 2020. These countries have followed the surrogate-economy development model. They have accepted to be second to the advanced countries. In doing so they have initially made quick advances but then they have got stuck there. Their growth is predicated upon the growth in the high income countries. They can never overtake the high income countries. This model was described by UNCTAD in its Trade and Development Report-1996 as the “flying geese development paradigm”: The “lead” countries make technological advances. They exit from the production of intermediate technology goods. They introduce the intermediate goods in the “follower” countries, which get capital and technology from the leaders. Their lower cost of labour enables them to produce these goods at lower costs. The leaders import these intermediate technology goods from the follower countries. They move on to “higher-skill, higher-technology products”, where they now enjoy a comparative advantage. The process continues down the line. For example the USA has transferred the production of cars to Thailand and China. China, in turn, can transfer the production of garments to Bangladesh. Thus the poor countries will follow the middle income countries and they will follow the leaders. In this process all the countries grow together. The upper middle income countries have followed precisely this approach. They have received high levels of FDI at $ 175 per capita in 2000 against $ 3 for low income countries. They have made high levels of exports at $1,233 per capita in 2001 against $ 87 for low income countries. Such integration with the high income countries makes it possible to have quick progress. A developing country does not have to save and invest its own money. It does not have to struggle to build its own technological capacities. These are obtained readymade from the high income countries and economic development takes place right away. This explains their having reached “middle income” levels while countries like India have been stuck at a “Low Income” level. What is the catch then? The catch is that the flying geese model is based upon the continued lead of the high income countries. It is assumed that the high income countries will be able to ever generate new high-technology products. The middle income countries will remain perpetual followers. There is no chance for the Middle Income countries to become “developed” or equal to the high income countries in this model. If, therefore, Vision-2020 is that of becoming a developed country and equal to the high income countries of today, then this model fails to deliver. The flying geese paradigm delivers quick second-grade results. It condemns the follower countries to be perpetual followers. This model is like the local Thakur building his castle under the tutelage of the king. He can never become the king himself unless he breaks from that tutelage. No wonder that the fortunes of the middle income countries rise and fall with the high income countries. The growth rate of the high income countries declined from 2.6 per cent in 1998-99 to 0.6 per cent in 2000-01. That of the upper middle income countries declined in tandem from 2 per cent to (-) 0.5 per cent. The Planning Commission follows this surrogate development paradigm. It says, “The economic growth rates of other regions will influence the demand for exports and foreign capital flows...” In other words, the fortunes of the Indian economy are assumed to depend upon that of the presently high income countries. Implicit in this is the belief that the present levels of income of the high income countries are not only stable but also slated for further growth. However, there are reasons to believe that the high income countries may be in for a decline in their incomes. Their present economic prowess is dependent upon technological innovation. The motor car, atom bomb, jet airplanes and Internet are all innovations of the high income countries. It is precisely this technological lead that India can hit at by developing its knowledge-based exports. The Vision-2020 document indeed recognises this fact. It says that knowledge-based products and services will drive future economic growth. But it fails to take it to its logical conclusion. If India can excel in knowledge-based exports then wherefrom will the high income countries maintain their technological lead? Why is it not possible for India to lead instead? Twenty per cent people of the high income countries consume 80 per cent of the world’s resources today. They are able to do so because they excel in technological innovations. They are able to sell their airplanes at high prices and import our iron ore and tea and jute at low prices. We are “poor” because we transfer our resources at low prices to buy advanced technology products from them. But, in the absence of such a technological lead, how will they sell their goods dear and buy our resources cheap? In other words India can herald the decline of the high income countries by hitting at the root of their incomes, namely knowledge. The Vision-2020 document fails to recognise this. In fact it is self-contradictory. If India’s potential is in knowledge-based exports, as it says, then the high income countries will lose their cutting edge and the flying geese paradigm will come to a halt. The negative rates of growth of the upper middle income countries in 2000-01 appear to be an indicator of the things to come. We have to choose between two strategies. We can follow the upper middle income countries as the Vision-2020 document suggests. Alternatively, we should focus on knowledge-based exports — IT, biotechnology, education, health care, entertainment and R&D — and hit at the root of the high income countries and bring them down. Their levels of consumption of energy, telephones, Internet, etc may reduce. In such a scenario the surrogate upper middle income countries will get decimated while we shall emerge stronger. My vision of 2020 is India being the number one economy of the world. The presently high income countries will decline as their knowledge-based exports are hit. The present middle income economies will neither get foreign capital nor markets for their exports. They will get decimated. India, on the other hand, would be built with its own savings. Its knowledge-based exports will not decline. And it will emerge as number one. The writer, a well-known economic commentator, was earlier associated with the
IIM, Kolkata. |
The other side of Gandhi-bashing Gandhi-bashing did always give me a “pleasure” of sorts but this time, the “kick” I got is unbeatable in the face of “Maxim” beating its own trumpet, particularly against the Asian “pacifists”. Like the muscleman protagonist of the 21 pictorials, kicking, punting, dribbling, boxing and bundling Gandhi, I drew a similar sadistic satisfaction of vicariously making the dead pacifists turn in their graves for the grave concern concerning their life and times. Given the fact that some souls are destined to bother the minds of men even after severing all terrestrial linkages — bonds wouldn’t fit in here for it is a sentimental expression — I want to be a trifle tough with this proven “G-Man” who tried to wipe every tear from every eye and sought to make people happy. That he was a “rotten father” is absolutely undebatable since why of all his contemporaries of sound health, the people of India adopted this frail frame only, as being trusted with the tenacity to hold the title of the “Father of the Nation.” This “lousy husband” was a husband of issues not only relating to the largest democracy of the world but also the weakest and the downtrodden residing in any part of the globe. This man thinking too much of himself and counting on his strength to prove himself larger than life, by his principles of Ahimsa and plain-speak, could surely be accused of not being able to differentiate between equatorial distinctions of the colour of the skin, and poked his nose, in purely earthly matters, concerning northern and southern hemispheres, thus becoming a “horrible role model” to follow. A person of ordinary intelligence knows that monkeys trained or untrained, cannot be trusted, not to speak, see or hear evil, since they are not loyal even to themselves, not to talk of others. So I don’t think there is any harm in writing off such an unwise creature that once walked on earth, so unchallenged. An imprudent man like him deserves the fate reserved for the Aristotles and Merra-Bais, their knowledge of philosophy and uncorrupted devotion in their respective case nothwithstanding. The offer of the cup of poison did not spare them, and look, so endearingly, at that. I, with all honest intentions and no pretensions of being a Gandhian, am imagining how this man, if alive, would have reacted to his being so vandalised and smashed up. Well, he would have offered not only his other cheek but chest also to Uncle Sam’s muscleman to be punched and pierced, making his heart jump out of him, to ask the offender, if he had got hurt by the involuntary resistance offered by his chest? I am reminded of my grandfather who offered his full-blown balloon-like cheeks to me, to be punched with my tiny fists, thus making, an airy explosion of release and relief, followed by our hearty laughter in chorus, when at my impish and elfish indiscretion, my mother called out to me not to trouble grandpa. In a similar vein, I see Mother India calling out to the rest of the world to spare the naked fakir, the Father of the Nation — our own Mahatma Gandhi. |
Kidney racket: medicine as commerce and crime “In the hands of the discoverer,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, “medicine becomes a heroic art.” And in the hands of the racketeer, one may add, looking to Punjab’s kidneys-for-cash scam, a commercial enterprise of tragic proportions verging on the worst offence against society: trafficking in human beings. For whether it is the kidneys, heart, pancreas, liver or lungs, what else is trafficking in human organs if not a technology-rich, greed-driven mode of trafficking in human beings in the 21st century? “He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it,” observed the Supreme Court of the United States in 1857 in Dred Scott vs Sandford, the case that led to the Civil War. It was referring to the position of the negro slave, who was bought and sold like any other property and was the object of suits in tort, contract, property and insurance law. To trafficking in human beings, that is. “(T)he right of property in a slave,” the court added, “is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution (and) the right to traffic in it, like an ordinary article of merchandise and property, ..guaranteed to the citizens of the United States...” The conversion of billions of dollars’ worth of slave property into millions of free citizens, to borrow from the work of Profs Hall, Wiecek and Finkelman on American legal history, was an achievement of the Civil War equal in significance to the French and Russian revolutions and the liberation of Third World nations from colonial bondage. No less than the traffic in human beings, the traffic in human organs is a crime against man that no man can condone. How then can the medical community, the community which delivers us into this world and which, second only to the community of mothers, has a claim upon our gratitude, even think of defending those in its midst who are guilty of such a crime? Like the crores that tumbled out of the lockers of the former Punjab Public Service Chairman, Mr Ravi Sidhu, and his cohorts, the statistics of Punjab’s kidney racket — the staggering number of renal transplants carried out in the State, especially in Amritsar, in recent years — tell their own tale. And yet, the medical profession would have us believe that there is nothing wrong at all with the cyclosporin of corruption except for the conscience of those who cannot stand it and that the Satyapal Dangs and Laxmi Kanta Chawlas, rather than the P.K. Sareens and O.P. Mahajans, are the real culprits! Mercifully, not everywhere in the world do responsible people abdicate their responsibility. “In no circumstances may doctors participate in or encourage in any way the trade in human organs from live donors,” ruled the British General Medical Council, the equivalent of the Medical Council of India, in 1992. “They must not,” it warned, “advertise for donors nor make financial or medical arrangements for people who wish to sell or buy organs.” Doctors must also satisfy themselves, said the council, in its guidelines on the transplantation of organs from live donors, that consent to a donation has been given without undue influence of any kind, including the offer of a financial or material benefit. That was just three years after the Human Organ Transplants Act of 1989 was adopted in England, an Act that sought to “prohibit commercial dealings in human organs intended for transplanting (and) to restrict the transplanting of such organs between persons who are not genetically related”, as its preamble declared. The problem may have existed in England even before 1989, write J.K. Mason, Professor Emeritus of Forensic Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, and his colleague R.A. McCall Smith in their book, Law and Medical Ethics, “but it was then that it presented acutely”. That is an allusion to the kidney scandal that erupted in England in 1989 and resulted in the enactment — in record time — of the Human Organ Transplants Act, besides disciplinary action by the General Medical Council against the four doctors involved, including the removal of the name of one of them from the medical register. Impoverished Turkish nationals lured by monetary payment to come to London, where they “donated” a kidney each for transplantation into wealthy donees, one of the “donors” being not even aware that the operation (conducted at a private hospital) involved the removal of his kidney — the 1989 overseas scandal bears a close resemblance to the macabre kidney racket under investigation in Punjab today. Based on the two related British statutes — the 1989 Act, covering live-donor transplants, and the earlier Human Tissue Act of 1961, dealing with cadaver transplants — the Transplantation of Human Organs Act passed by our Parliament in 1994 has been rendered totally nugatory by the avarice of the medical profession (and their lawyer-touts specialising in the preparation of false affidavits). The “life-and-death excitement of transplants”, remarks Roy Porter in his massive medical history of humanity published in 1997, brings out a ruthless edge, a belief that medical progress is an end which justifies almost any means. By adding corruption to ruthlessness, and practising corruption with impunity, Messrs Sareen, Mahajan & Co have damaged beyond repair the very ideal of medical progress. |
Exercise acts like a drug in heart disease Exercise can act like a drug on the blood vessels, reducing the risk of heart disease by literally getting the blood flowing, US researchers have said. It works in a surprising way, reducing inflammation, which has recently joined high blood pressure and high cholesterol as a leading known cause of heart disease. The blood stresses the walls of blood vessels as it passes over them, reducing inflammation in a way similar to high doses of steroids, the researchers report in the latest issue of Circulation Research. “Inflammation in blood vessels has been linked to atherosclerosis, a hardening of the arteries, and here we see how the physical force of blood flow can cause cells to produce their own anti-inflammatory response,” says Scott Diamond of the university of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Medicine and Engineering. “Conceivably, exercise provides the localised benefits of glucocorticoids — just as potent as high doses of steroids, yet without all the systemic side effects of taking the drugs themselves,” adds Diamond, who led the study. “Perhaps this is a natural way in which exercise helps protect the vessels, by stimulating as anti-inflammatory programme when the vessels are exposed to elevated blood flow.” The findings could help explain why exercise works so well to educe the risk of heart disease. “We’re not talking about running a marathon here. We’re just talking about getting the blood moving at high arterial levels,” he said. Studies in recent years have found that cells and chemicals linked with inflammation can be found in arterial clogs, and much research is now focusing on ways to reduce this inflammation. For instance, teams are investigating whether giving patients antibiotics or anti-inflammatory drugs lowers their risk of heart disease.
Reuters |
The purchaser of flesh performs himsa (violence) by his wealth; he who eats flesh does so by enjoying its taste; the killer does himsa by actually trying and killing the animal. Thus, there are three forms of killing: he who brings flesh or sends for it; he who cuts off the limbs of an animal, and he who purchases, sells or cooks flesh and eats it—all of these are to be considered meat-eaters. — The Mahabharata *** The bhakti practised with the thought of injuring another, or out of hypocrisy, jealousy, anger and pride and for the satisfaction of selfish desires is the tamasa type of bhakti. — Bhagavata Purana, III. xxix .8
*** The bhakti practied for gaining wordly objects, fame and power, with the notion of difference, and in the form of worship of idols and other symbols, is the rajas type of bhakti. — Bhagvata Purana, III. xxix. 9 |
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