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Saturday,
February 16, 2002, Chandigarh, India  
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Market ruled petro prices Another false alert? Welcome, but... |
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Growing expansionism in Asia
The grass was greener
Mumbai in need of systemic change
1999, Physics: 'T HOOFT & VELTMAN
People who sleep less live longer: US study
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Market ruled petro prices Come April 1 the prices of petrol and diesel will come down, that of kerosene will remain the same and middle class consumers in the urban areas will have to pay a slightly higher price for their cooking gas cylinder. The Prime Minister endorsed the views of Finance Minister and overruled the Petroleum Minister in favour of the dismantling of the decades-old administrated pricing mechanism (APM) of the whole range of petroleum products. In last budget Mr Yashwant Sinha promised this radical step which would mean ending the old philosophy of taxing the rich – the car owners – to help the poor – the tractor and truck owners. A whole structure was built to implement this policy, the most important of this was the oil pool account. What this really meant was that the profits of selling petrol at a higher price was used to subsidise diesel, kerosene and cooking gas at a low price. This had two political benefits. One, it kept the urban middle class happy and the government’s socialist credentials intact. Economic liberalisation and globalisation and the overall economic policy of the BJP-led NDA government have made all this redundant. And the automobile and two-wheeler boom has mounted pressure on the government to align Indian prices of petrol to world market levels. The dismantling of APM is not so much a voluntary act but dictated by world reality. This happy decision has come after considerable wrangling between the Finance and Petroleum Ministries. It was essentially an ego clash between Mr Sinha and Mr Ram Naik. The later would have liked to make a suo motu decision and take the credit. But Mr Sinha stole the show by throwing a spoke in the Petroleum Ministry’s wheel and taking the case to the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister lent his ear to Mr Sinha and Mr Naik was left to making alibis. He has claimed credit that when international prices of crude come down ONGC will get much more than Rs 5570 per tonne it got last financial year. Further, the government has decided not to subsidise transportation cost since coal and steel do not enjoy a similar benefit. However, hilly areas and the North-East will enjoy freight stabalisation facilities; a prominent beneficiary will be Himachal Pradesh. |
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Another false alert? Once again the media is indulging in competitive scare-mongering by flashing on front pages and TV screens reports of deaths of three persons from the Rohru area of Shimla districts. While doctors are still analysing autopsy samples and no one has categorically described these deaths as cases of plague, some reporters have already started using explosive expressions like “suspected plague cases” and newspapers are already sensationalising “‘plague’ claims two more lives”, little realising the damage these can do to the country. Medical opinion is still divided on whether the disease that struck Surat in 1994 was plague and many international agencies have accused India of not coming clean with the facts. The Swiss Federal Office for Public Health, highly respected globally for its rigour and discipline in establishing facts, had made this scathing observation: the plague in India was an “epidemic in the media” which spread the story irresponsibly and without any foundation leading to $ 600 million losses to the Indian economy. It had called upon the health authorities, governments and journalists all over the world to draw important lessons”
from a false alert in India” called the plague. The Indian media, however, has not learnt any lessons because few cared to do a follow-up on the plague that was not. What has happened so far in Himachal Pradesh, as gathered from published reports, is this: one Randhir of Hatkoti village of Rohru tehsil went out for hunting in the nearby Keori forest and he killed and ate an animal, believed to be a wild cat. Thereafter, he died. His wife Salochna, who was admitted to the PGI, Chandigarh, died on Thursday. Another victim, Pushpa Devi from Ckakrata, died in the Rohru civil hospital. Eight more persons showing similar symptoms -- fever, muscle pain, cold and cough, vomiting, and blood in sputum -- are undergoing
treatment at the PGI. A team from the National Institute of Communicable Diseases, Delhi, is on a visit to the affected areas and has started a preliminary inquiry. The journalists will do the community a real service if they observe restraint, professional discipline and avoid spreading scare. The doctors and the
administration are seized of the issue. The disease is treatable, but any mass panic may add to the trouble as it did in
Surat. |
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Welcome, but... The setting up of a new panel to study vehicular pollution in New Delhi and bring about a qualitative improvement in the performance of vehicles is welcome even though it is doubtful to what extent it would succeed in its efforts and whether it would end up as yet another expert committee. The new panel, headed by Mr N.R.Krishnan, former Union Secretary for Environment and Forests, will be known as the sub-group of the R.A.Mashelkar Committee which is looking into the aspect of formulating an auto fuel policy for the entire country. The Krishnan committee will specifically look into the computerised emission check system, to set up specialised emission testing facilities and define fuel economy standards for new vehicles. Over the years, there has been an exponential growth of vehicles in Delhi as in other cities and towns. In the absence of an assured and convenient public transport system, people are forced to purchase vehicles. Added to this is the increasing number of official and commercial vehicles. Though all of them have contributed to the increasing pollution levels in the capital city, the measures taken to check vehicular pollution have been far from satisfactory. Little has been done to make vehicle owners conform to specific emission standards. As for CNG, Delhi has taken the lead in its use by having 46,000 vehicles running on this mode. But six incidents of gas explosions have raised doubts over its safety. The safety norms for CNG have not been prescribed by the Union Surface Transport Ministry and it has become difficult to maintain the technological standards and check spurious accessories. Also, Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit has voiced fears on depending too much on a single mode of fuel (CNG) whose availability is doubtful and distribution network not fully developed. Even as the CNG crisis has taken the dimension of a Centre-State issue with both governments blaming each other for the imbroglio mainly because of the Supreme Court’s keenness to check pollution, nearly 70 per cent of private vehicles in Delhi have been flouting the pollution norms with impunity. According to a recent survey by the Delhi Government’s Transport Department, a majority of these vehicles have not got their vehicles examined for the past many months. Nor have they obtained the Pollution Under Control Certificate (PUCC). There is a plan to computerise the PUCC system so that the emission check system can be made foolproof and the violators are also punished in accordance with the law. The Krishnan committee will look into this aspect and suggest remedial measures to plug the loopholes and streamline the system. The present warranty system in India has some drawbacks. In other countries, for vehicles manufactured abroad, a life-long warranty is offered on emission standards and maintenance. There are indications that the Delhi Government is veering round to introducing this practice in New Delhi. The Krishnan committee is expected to interact with the manufacturers to evolve a mechanism to ensure that the warranty for making the vehicles non-polluting is not limited to one year or a few months but is mandatory till the life of the vehicle. Whatever the government’s intentions, these plans will carry weight only if they are implemented with sincerity and earnestness for the larger goal of checking air and noise pollution. |
Growing expansionism in Asia Foreign and defence policy makers are throwing caution to the wind and unnecessarily becoming euphoric about the new levels of friendship between India and the USA. A few facts may be mentioned to substantiate the argument that the Vajpayee-led government should be highly concerned and worried about some of the policy decisions of the American policymakers because these decisions have an adverse impact on the security scenario of India. First, the USA has decided to settle down with its military might in South Asia, South-West Asia and Central Asia. Mr Robert D. Blackwell, the US Ambassador to India, was compelled to admit this fact. On January 24 at a “round table conference of Journalists” he said that “there are no permanent plans yet, but there will be long-term engagement. The US has an interest in the vast oil reserves there”. Second, on the pretext of overseeing “operations in Afghanistan, the US-led coalition troops” have been provided a military base at Karachi airport. The US Commander of Afghan war, Gen Tommy Franks, maintained that Americans “will stay put” in their allotted Pakistan bases. Third, Russia, China and Iran are all worried because of the above mentioned developments in American foreign policy. Mr Oleg Cherno of the Russian National Security Council expressed these fears on January 17 while stating that “the USA was establishing an airbase in the Central Asian republic of Kyrghzstan, Uzbekistan etc.” Instead of showing concern on these developments in the region, the Indian leadership is enthusiastic in entering into collaborations with the Americans. Indian and US intelligence officials have decided to set up a “Joint working Group on Terrorism”. The object of this bilateral relationship is that India and the USA will share “intelligence” on terrorism. Indians should be worried because “Intelligence on terrorism” is an extremely vague exercise and involvement of the CIA and the FBI with Indian agencies will lead to a complete “erosion of confidentiality” of intelligence meant for Indian national security. Indians will be creating great worries in China on this move for sharing of intelligence with the USA. Mr George Fernandes, Defence Minister, after his visit to the USA, declared on January 18 “that the revival of Indo-US defence relations is going to be strong and abiding”. It deserves to be mentioned that defence deals between India and the USA are extremely profitable to the arms exporters and defence industry of the USA. Defence sales are a lucrative business for every arms exporter, including the powerful defence industry of the USA. After all, the Vajpayee-led government is moving with a shopping list for defence equipment and Americans cannot ignore the rising defence budget of the Indian government. India has also sought US help on “vigil over our borders” and the US Coordinator for Counter Terrorism, Ambassador Francis Taylor maintained that “a key part of efforts is to enable nations to protect themselves” against terrorism and a “pilot project” has been launched in Jammu and Kashmir where Americans will “coordinate” with Indians on issues of cross-border terrorism”. All these developments in the “new year” have naturally gladdened the Americans and Blackwell expressed these feeling by saying that. “The Indo-US relationship, in most dimensions, is today unrecognisable from what it was a year back. But business relations are lagging behind. There is a lot of promise, but most of it is unrealised”. The growing dependence of India on the USA is a matter of great concern because America is the sole hyper-super power of the present century, and Americans will get a new capacity to push their interests in India because the Indians are putting all their eggs in American basket. If Indian policymakers are not able to maintain an appropriate “distance” from the dominant American global interests, India will lose not only its “autonomy” of foreign policy, it may also complicate its relationship with Russia and China. A new tension between India and Russia has already developed because the Vajpayee government has welcomed George W. Bush Jr.’s Nuclear Defence Missile programme and Russia feels threatened by this new development in American strategic thinking. George W. Bush has not only talked about the abrogation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, he has made India a party to “his programme of the “nuclearisation of the space”. While Indians were in agreement with American Nuclear Missile programme, the Russian Parliament (Duna) passed a resolution on January 16, 2002 that on ABM Treaty of 1972 the US move is not only “mistaken and destabilising”, it could create “real conditions for a new round of the arms race”. India and Russia have very deep relationship and any strain between these two countries on account of Indian policy making lapses will be not only unfortunate, it will further push us into the American camp. India, China and Russia are a “countervailing” force in the present unipolar world, and India will be ejected both by China and Russia if India accepts American Nuclear Defence Missile programme. The Chinese Premier, Zhu Rongji, gave a clear message on January 15 that while China and Pakistan have an “all-weather friendship’ as far as India is concerned, Zhu stated that “as the two largest developing countries in the world, China and India have on their shoulders the important responsibility for maintaining peace, stability and prosperity in Asia. We should strengthen our cooperation in international affairs and work together to promote the establishment of a just and equitable international, new political and economic order”. The goals of Chinese foreign policy as stated by Zhu Rongji, should be precisely our goals because the present global order has no checks and balances and everything depends on the Americans. A telling example of the pre-eminent status of American global agenda is provided by the Black Friday of September 11, 2001, when Americans declared a war against terrorism because they themselves were targeted. Not only this. It is becoming an unending war for the Americans and under the pretext of fighting anti-terrorist global war, Americans have fully coopted the Indians and also put their armed forces permanently in our region. Will Americans stop here or put gentle pressures on coopted India for a “dialogue” on Kashmir? What is the explanation for the Vajpayee government’s fascination with the Americans? Atal Behari Vajpayee and the Jan Sangh were always critical of Nehru-Indira Gandhi foreign policy framework of non-alignment because it was perceived by them as ‘tilted’ towards erstwhile Soviet Russia. The Jan Sangh ideologically has been consistent anti-Communist and their anti-communism was logically extended to erstwhile Soviet Russia and China. Foreign policy of the Jan Sangh was based on anti-Russia and anti-China plank and Mr Vajpayee as a Foreign Minister in the Morarji Desai’s government of 1977-79 projected himself as a practitioner of “genuine non-alignment”, which was without any “tilt” towards any super power. In the present BJP-led government, Mr George Fernandes as Defence Minister is ideologically against China and pro-Dalai Tibet and thus Sangh Parivar and Fernandes are a stumbling block between the growth of healthy trilateral relationship among India, Russia and China. It also deserves to be mentioned that the Vajpayee-led government had informed President Clinton that Pokhran II test of May, 1998, was undertaken because India had hostile “China and Pakistan” as nuclear countries. Thus an ideological baggage of the 20th Century is carried by Sangh Parivar and Mr Fernandes while pursuing foreign and defence policies in a new global unipolar world. Is Mr Jaswant Singh, the Foreign Minister of India, able to reconcile actual policies of the government and his own rhetoric of global change? Mr Jaswant Singh, while addressing an elite group on January 21, stated: “The world has moved from the glacial immobility of the cold war to the present. But the present has neither perseverance nor permanence. A constantly new frontier of diplomacy is the territory of change.” Unfortunately, this sentiment is not translated into foreign and defence policy making because India has set its goal to reach only to the frontiers set by Americans policies. If Americans are bringing Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Karachi airport under their military presence,
Indians will have no option but to stand as a mute spectator to America’s presence in our region. But there is another option available to the Indian policy makers if they believe in the principle of “autonomy of national policy”. While Putin’s Russia has been always supportive of India, the Chinese Prime Minister has also been open to good relationship when he said that “we have border disputes, which are subject of discussion. But there is no conflict on the ground for over four years.” Why not build on “correct and friendly relations” between India and China in the light of new American expansionism in South and Central Asia? The foreign policy framework of the Vajpayee government is very restrictive because it has accepted the logic of existing America-led unipolar world. India’s national interests cannot be served by accepting American hegemony. Indian policymakers have to explore every possibility and potentiality of opening new chapters of relationship with Russia and China. Russia and China are also wary of American presence in Asia and a convergence of interests should bring India-Russia-China around a trilateral cooperative agenda of dealing with the new global situation. The upshot of above description is that the first month of 2002 has brought great cheers to Indians who want very close relationship with the sole super power but it has created anxieties in the minds of those who think that one power domination is a dangerous thing in world affairs. Hence there is a need for counter-strategies to limit the expanding military control of the Americans. |
The grass was greener This worrisome feeling about what’s going to happen to our country in the days or weeks to come and the lack of communication and easy travel lately enjoyed by the common people on either side of the border brings to mind the happy days I used to spend in Lahore whenever I got the chance to go there nearly 70 years ago. Like others of my age I believed that Delhi was as dull as ditchwater compared to the gaiety and sophistication of the erstwhile capital of undivided Punjab. The tailors were more stylish, we thought, than those in Delhi. The restaurants offered a more varied fare. The cinemas showed the latest films. And to cap it all, the girls were more “advanced” than their “behans” in Delhi. True, we had about half a dozen girls in my college, but we rarely saw them outside the classrooms and for all the social contact we had with them, they might as well have lived on the moon. Travelling to and from Lahore presented no problem. All one did was to buy a second class ticket and board the Frontier Mail for the overnight journey. The evening “round” with lads of my own age usually consisted of a cinema show, a bottle or two of imported beer at Stiffles on the Mall and dinner at one of the eateries, now known as “dhabbas”, in Anarkali, which served such delicacies as “rogan-josh”, “burra” kababs and kulfi with “faluda”. It was in Lahore, too that I suffered a few of the most uncomfortable moments of my life. I had just done my B.A. and was waiting to sail for the UK for “further studies” which, I regret to say, were never completed. To kill time, I planned a farewell visit to Lahore. Before I left home my grandmother made me promise that I would call on some old friends of her who lived on Ferozepore Road, of all places, next to the Central Jail! Dutifully, I accepted a tea invitation from the family. After filling me up with sandwitches and pastries, the old couple retired, leaving me with their son and their daughter, a pretty girl about a year younger than I. A few minutes later the son mumbled some excuses about his I.A exam and left the room. The girl moved closer to me on the sofa and said: “Now that you’re going to England I suppose that you’ll fall in love with some girl and marry her?” At last, the penny dropped. I said that I had no intentions of marrying anyone for many years to come. First, I had to get myself a job. It was now my turn to mumble an excuse and the next moment I was out of the house, mounting my borrowed bicycle and pedalling home as fast as an escaped convict from the nearby jail if he got a chance. What I didn’t know until much later was that prior to my departure for Lahore there had been an exchange of letters between my grandmother and her old friends on the subject of arranging a “suitable” match between their daughter and myself. |
Mumbai in need of systemic change Just before Mumbai’s municipal elections last week a flyer arrived in my mail. It asked the question: “Happy with your city Mumbaikars?” against a black and white collage of typical Mumbai images: slums, queues for drinking water, traffic congestion, flooded streets, homeless people, pot-holed roads. It was sent by a group that calls itself AGNI, the acronym for Action for good Governance and Networking for India, which represents a conglomerate of citizens’ organisations. The flyer urged citizens to vote in the election because “A good Municipal Corporation can transform Mumbai. You can transform the corporation by electing good corporators on Sunday, February 10”. The paradox of Mumbai is that it has more civic consciousness, more groups of concerned, angry citizens than any other Indian city and yet is probably the worst governed of any major city in the world. AGNI’s flyer had for me a special poignancy since I saw it on the morning that I returned from New York which under the extraordinary leadership of its recent Mayor, Rudolph Guiliani, has become one of the best run cities imaginable. So to arrive in Mumbai in the early morning hours to an airport so chaotic that the worst Indian railway platforms seem calm by comparison came as a double shock. A harassed airport official explained that six flights had landed within 10 minutes of each other so they could not cope. Quite the wrong explanation but most Indians are unaware that modern airports almost anywhere else in the world are built to handle a flight arrival or departure every sixty seconds or so. What is interesting about Mumbai airport is that it is relatively new. It was built only a few years ago but because of the myopic vision of whoever was in charge of having it built the city was bequeathed an airport that was outdated almost before it opened. This is the story told to me by a Mumbai architect of considerable repute and respectability. I have told it before in this column but it is worthy of repetition. This particular architect was interested in winning the contract to build the airport so he put in a bid that he believed was as low as possible. His offer, he told me, would just about have covered his costs but it was such a prestigious contract that he was more interested in the honour of building Mumbai’s new airport than in profit. Imagine his shock when the bids were opened and he found that someone had offered to build the airport for even less than him. Inevitably, the airport Mumbai got lacked even the most basic needs like sufficient parking space, sufficient facilities to handle minimal modern air traffic and halfway sufficient terminal buildings. The interesting thing is that despite Mumbai’s many citizens groups nobody has made a fuss over the unforgivable mistakes made in the handling of the airport contract. The process was wrong from start to finish. To begin with when a major public building is being built the criteria should be to find the best architect not the one who bids the lowest. Secondly, before the contract was given out there should have been some comparisons made with other international airports to ensure that the architect was not wasting time and taxpayers’ money reinventing the wheel. There are standard specifications to which international airports are built these days and information about them is freely available. But those who rule Mumbai specialise in reinventing the wheel time and time again from the smallest of things to the biggest. So although most cities in the world have standardised litter bins Mumbai has in the past few years tried several home-grown models, including, in a moment of special lunacy, plastic penguins. None of them have worked so far and neither has the city’s garbage collection mechanism, so in addition to being badly governed it is also one of the dirtiest cities in the world. Again the city’s very vocal citizens groups appear to be unable to do anything about this despite other Indian cities experimenting with such schemes as privatised garbage collection. What is even more puzzling about these citizens groups is that they seem completely unable to ensure even that Marine Drive is not in a permanent state of disrepair. Mumbai’s municipal authorities work in mysterious ways so one department rarely knows what the next one is doing. The result is that someone or other is constantly ripping up Marine Drive to repair something or
other and Mumbai’s most prominent street looks for most of the time like a construction site. Only when the Prime Minister or some other VIP rolls into town does anyone bother to clean things up and usually it is only temporary measures that get taken. If this is the condition of Marine Drive — arguably the most famous street in the country — you need little imagination to know how appalling are living conditions in the slums in which this city’s half population lives. There are slums in this city in which people live on the edge of sewage drains with sewage waste lining the mud floods of their huts. Even villages in our poorest states have better living conditions. The Shiv Sena is the only prominent political party to emerge out of the chaos and filth of Mumbai’s streets and slums and you would think that during their rule living conditions would have improved. They did not. All that the Shiv Sena managed to do was change in city’s name from Bombay to Mumbai but last week’s municipal election saw it emerge once more as the single largest party. Why? Possibly because its control over the municipal government was wrongly snatched from it by Maharashtra’s Congress government and in this really lies the roots of the problem. If Indian cities look more slums than cities it is mainly because they are ruined not by elected city governments, headed by elected Mayors, but by state governments who have more important things to think about like the rural vote. Mumbai is the richest city in India but its wealth is routinely siphoned off by Chief Ministers who use it to develop rural Maharashtra. Again, it remains a puzzle why Mumbai’s many citizens groups do nothing about this. They should demand that the city has the right to be governed by an elected city government instead of through a convoluted, colonial network of authorities set up in the British Raj times to control the natives. Why do you need a Municipal Commissioner if you can have an elected Mayor? And, why should unelected officials have power over elected representatives? If AGNI wants to make a difference, it needs to do much more than urge people to vote. It should be saying that voting will make little difference until there is systemic change. This is needed urgently. Mumbai is already an urban nightmare and if it continues to be governed in present fashion we can be sure that this nightmare will turn into a horror story in the next 10 years. |
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People who sleep less live longer: US study Sleeping longer — eight hours or more a night — could shorten your life, according to a study of the nighttime habits of more than a million Americans. Researchers from the University of California at San Diego found in a study of adults aged 30 to 102 that people who slept eight hours a night were 12 per cent more likely to die within the study’s six-year period compared to those sleeping seven hours. The increased risk rose to 15 per cent for participants reporting more than eight hours or less than 4-1/2. “People who sleep five, six or seven hours have nothing to worry about. There is no evidence that people need eight hours of sleep ... The only basis for that is it’s what grandma used to say,’’ Dr Daniel
Kripke, a UCSD Professor of Psychiatry and the study’s lead author, said in an interview. He said the study shows that longer sleep is a risk factor for cancer as well as heart disease and stroke, but more research is needed to determine whether sleeping longer should be added to the growing list of one-time pleasures — like smoking and alcohol — now deemed hazardous to your health. Other researchers also cautioned against strict interpretation of the findings. “Many studies show that if people don’t get adequate sleep they are very sleepy during the day. Their ability to perform tasks is impaired, the risk of accident is higher and people are crabby,’’ said James Walsh, a sleep scientist and President of the National Sleep Foundation. He also said the San Diego study was not a true random sampling of the population and more studies are needed.
Reuters “Therapeutic cooling” a lifesaver for heart patients? For people who have suffered a heart attack, a technique called “therapeutic cooling”, that helps cool the body, can do wonders, according to researchers at Stanford University Medical Centre. The researchers, who believe that this cooling technique may help to minimise the damaging effects of a heart attack, are now testing the technique in patients. “This is a promising procedure that could revolutionise the way we treat heart attacks. I have great hope that therapeutic cooling can preserve heart muscle and significantly improve a patient’s long-term prospects,” said David Lee, MD, a Stanford interventional cardiologist. The technique involves inducing hypothermia — or subnormal body temperature — in heart-attack patients to preserve and protect cells that can become damaged during an attack. “It’s an attractive concept — you can cool a patient down and lower the metabolism of the cells,” Lee said. A doctor’s goal is to prevent or minimise the irreversible damage caused to the heart muscle during a heart attack, and Lee said researchers have long known that cooling has protective qualities.
ANI Fatty acids benefit children with behavioural problems A research in the behavioural problems of children has revealed that children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) benefited significantly when certain fatty acids were included in their diet. The findings lend weight to claims made last December when scientists suggested a newborn baby’s diet can affect its mental agility at school. Dr Peter Willatts of the University of Dundee said children fed infant milk with long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids
(LCPs) found in breast milk had faster mental agility and were more efficient in understanding and solving problems. The acids are found in oily fish such as mackerel, sardine, salmon and tuna, nuts and green leaf vegetables such as cabbage and spinach. ADHD — which is characterised by hyperactivity and an inability to concentrate — is estimated to affect up to 4 percent of the US school population. Researcher Dr Alexandra Richardson said, “Abundant evidence points to the importance of specific fatty acids in brain development and function. “These fatty acids are often under consumed or under produced in children with behavioural and learning challenges.” “Our study reinforces the assertion that in some children, learning difficulties and ADHD- related symptoms are responsive to dietary supplements providing the appropriate fatty acids.”
ANI |
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The opposite of song and
laughter is seriousness. Seriousness is illness. I have not seen a serious tree.... a serious bird. I have not seen a serious sunrise. I have not seen a serious starry night. Laughter is prayer. If you can laugh, you have learnt how to pray. A serious person can never be religious. Only a person who can laugh, not only at others but at himself also, can be religious. You do not see donkeys laughing, You do not see buffaloes enjoying a joke. It is only man who can enjoy a joke, who can laugh. Make up your mind to laugh at your cares and worries and your stress will disappear. Laughter is life, is love, is light. It is a dance of all your energies. It is not a part of mind or of the heart. When the laughter happens — belly laughter, as it is called — then it comes from your very core.... It is almost like an earthquake! Each single cell of your body, each fiber dances in tune. — Promod Batra amd Vijay Batra, Management
Thought Starters. *** In one stroke one can destroy a rock but not a pillow, even so a humble man can never be destroyed, though the man with ego can be. — Swami Sadananda Saraswati *** Oh God, thank you! I have what I need — I do not need What I do not have. Give me health, wisdom and the ability to serve. — From Management Thought Stress *** The riches that are in the heart cannot be stolen. — Russian proverb *** Bad men live to eat and drink, where as God men eat And drink in order to live. — Socrates |
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