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Wednesday,
February 27, 2002, Chandigarh, India  
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Mixed fare A balanced address
Creditable electoral show |
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The Cuttack experience
‘A global village on two legs’
Cancer may never be eliminated: Nobel laureate
‘Let's bring harmony to animals' lives’
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Mixed fare At a time when the government is in a tight corner, the Railway Budget offers a golden opportunity to do some populist propitiation. However, Railway Minister Nitish Kumar seems to have stood his ground and has not hesitated to take some hard measures which may not go down well with the public, but had perhaps become inevitable. Among the most discussed will be the hike in passenger fares. Second class passengers will have to pay between 6 and 14 per cent more on express trains, depending on the distance. The hike appears substantial, but only if one ignores the detail that the fares had remained more or less unchanged during the past two years. Much has been made of the fact that there is no increase in the fare of Rajdhani and Shatabdi trains. It is not as if the elite passengers have been spared. Fares were revised only in October last year to create the Railway Safety Fund and the premium travel category was the most hit. While the most subsidised lower classes (sleeper and second class) had to pay a token sum of Rs 2, the burden on the higher classes was as much as Rs 100. To that extent, the increase has now been rationalised. Even otherwise, the AC first class is attracting very few customers because of the numerous flights started by private airlines. In any case, the travelling public today is willing to pay a little bit extra provided it is assured of good service. To placate the public, Mr Nitish Kumar has declared 2002-2003 the Passenger Amenity Year. How far that slogan changes the situation on the ground remains to be seen. The Railways is to introduce a new inter-city service called Jan Shatabdi Express. Sixteen such trains, including one between Chandigarh and New Delhi, are to be introduced this year. A pilot project for the computer-based unreserved ticketing system is to be taken up. Twentyfive additional express trains and seven new passenger trains are to be introduced. The frequency of 14 pairs of trains is being increased. The Rajdhani train between Guwahati and New Delhi is to run every day. The increase in freight charges is relatively modest and will fetch Rs 450 crore. But even this will have considerable influence on the monthly household budget. Commodities of common use like edible salt, fruits, vegetables, gur, foodgrains, edible oil, pulses, organic fertiliser, urea, fodder and dry grasses are to carry the lowest freight tag. While it has been proposed to carry out a marginal increase in the rates for coal, iron ore and raw material to steel plants, there will be a marginal reduction in freight charges for iron and steel, pig iron, cement and most of the petroleum products. The impulse to increase freight charges substantially in the past has seen a shrinkage in loading. Last year, it fell 11 million tones short of the target of 500 million tonnes. The Railways is expecting to woo back revenue earning originating traffic and carry 510 million tonnes during 2002-2003. But that will be possible only if the economic slowdown does not cast its shadow. Not many new projects are proposed to be taken up. The ministry is in a fix on that count. A mind-boggling sum of Rs 1,25,000 crore is needed if it is to begin work on all the projects where a preliminary survey has taken place so far. So, it cannot help being frugal and selective. The criticism made by the Congress Deputy Leader in the Lok Sabha, Mr Shivraj Patil, is right: it is an exercise to make both ends meet. Marking 150 years of operation, the stress is more on the expansion of the network with 214 route km to be added, and implementation of safety aspects. Besides, 542 route km of gauge conversion, 250 km of doubling and 375 route km of railway electrification is to be completed in 2002-03. The Railway Minister has tried to strike a regional balance and attempted equitable distribution of railway projects. Ironically, he has come in for criticism from MPs from Bihar for not offering anything to his home State. Railway Ministers in the past have indeed pampered their own constituencies like nobody's business. The Railways has proposed to cut down capital expenditure marginally to Rs 5,142 crore as compared to the previous year's Rs 5,390 crore, even as the total works expenditure is slated to go up by Rs 1,605.09 crore to Rs 10,413.9 crore in the next fiscal as compared to Rs 8,808.81 crore, mainly due to increased provisions for the Special Railway Safety Fund (SRSF), and depreciation reserve fund. Over the next six years, the project will clear the backlog of replacement of over-aged assets. This includes renewal of nearly 17,000 km of track, rebuilding of over 3000 bridges, replacement of signalling gears at almost 950 stations, replacement of rolling stock and investment in safety enhancement aids. The problem is that far too much remains to be done to put the Railways back on the rails. As the Economic Survey has pointed out, the government should corporatise the Railways to ensure viable commercial operations while restricting its role to policy formulation. It has underlined that the financial crisis of the transport monolith is mainly due to high freight rates to benefit passengers. The survey has said that the root cause of financial problems confronting the Indian Railways included lack of adequate productivity that is commensurate with exorbitant wage bills. It has suggested that cross-subsidisation at the expense of freight services should be addressed immediately. For that to happen, we will have to wait for the next Budget, or perhaps next to next! |
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A balanced address President K.R. Narayanan’s customary address to the joint session of Parliament at the beginning of the Budget session covered most of the points that are likely to come up for debate in the two Houses. In the global context the reference to the double standards that Pakistan has adopted for supporting the USA-sponsored campaign against international terrorism was significant. He reiterated India’s condition for restarting the process of dialogue with Pakistan for settling bilateral disputes. Of course, President Pervez Musharraf will have to give up his Kashmir obsession for restarting the process that his undiplomatic gestures had derailed at Agra. Once bitten is twice shy. President Musharraf may think that he was being smart when he turned the Agra Summit into an occasion for embarrassing India. But what did he gain out of it, except a few laughs at the expense of a trusting Indian media? The famous handshake with Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee during the SAARC Summit too was a meaningless gesture. He has refused to hand over the Pak-trained terrorists wanted in connection with the December 13 attack on Indian Parliament and other incidents. Instead Pakistan is preparing its own list. Be that as it may, General Musharraf will have nowhere to hide when US investigators land on Pakistani soil for arresting the killers of American journalist Daniel Pearl. He must be made to understand that increased American presence is not good for the security of the region. Pakistan’s support to the Taliban resulted in the indirect US takeover of Afghanistan. His attempt to draw a distinction between “their terrorists” and “our terrorists” has now allowed America to upgrade its interest in what would normally have been treated as the “internal affairs of Pakistan”. President Narayanan’s reference to the Ayodhya dispute was evidently meant to prepare the ground for the all-party meeting that Mr Vajpayee has called for evolving a consensus on the issue. The Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition could not have taken a different stand on the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s demand for an out-of-court settlement of the dispute. The all-party meeting is not likely to accept any change in the existing position. The dispute has been referred to the Supreme Court. The pro-Babri Masjid lobby has said that it would accept the apex court’s verdict. However, the VHP has hardened its stand and has even threatened to start the construction of the Ram Temple at the disputed site without waiting for the verdict of the judiciary. The President reiterated that the government was duty-bound to maintain status quo on Ayodhya. However, a question that can be answered only on March 15 concerns the attitude of the Centre to the request for help from the state government for dealing with the VHP’s threat to start temple construction in Ayodhya. Will Mr Vajpayee do what Mr P.V. Narasimha Rao did when the Babri Masjid was pulled down in December, 1992, or remain as firm as he is today in rejecting the VHP’s demand for the handing over of the disputed site to it? |
Creditable electoral show Party managers and bosses will spend many days in ruminating over what the voter has done to their hopes and plans as a result of the state-level elections which have just ended. But the voter has done his own job very well. He has asserted his preferences through the very legitimate process of free elections, and the poorer and more “backward” voter has done so even more than the better off. He has not allowed the frequency of elections to dampen his faith in the ballot box. He has neither yielded to intimidation nor to the temptation of divisive or extremist slogans. As a result, many a gun-totting candidate has been defeated, though not all. Political parties have shown a broader outlook. The party system is now healthier because fewer votes have gone to splinter parties and more states now have a two or three-front if not a two or three-party polity. Most votes have been polled by moderate views. There is some evidence of a shift to bread and butter issues from religious shibboleths, and lack of performance has been punished, as it deserved to be. The election machinery has worked well, delivering results very quickly despite the vastness of numbers and distances in a state like UP. Electoral voting has been proved a success even in constituencies which had never seen these machines before. Some problems continue : that a small shift in a party’s share of the votes makes a disproportionate difference in its share of seats, thus making the legislature a less true reflection of the electorate. Similarly, the way a legislature forms and changes governments promotes instability. But these are not faults of the voter or political parties. Much more to blame is the fact that we are sticking to voting systems which served us well for a time but now need a change, both in the way the country elects its legislature and the way the legislatures form or change governments. Parliament must consider some changes in both. But as elections held under the given systems, the round which has just ended has been more creditable than many earlier ones. Unfortunately, they have also cast an ominous shadow, to which I will come later. But first the brighter spots. The best among them is that the bitter gulf which had persisted for more than a quarter century between the Sikhs and the Congress appears to have ended. The gulf had been opening since the early 1980s but widened dangerously with the attack on the Golden Temple and the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and Sant Longowal. An earlier success of the Congress in winning a substantial share of Sikh votes was undone by the assassination of Congress Chief Minister Beant Singh because the after-shocks of Operation Bluestar were continuing at that time. Who was primarily responsible for those tragedies, the Sikh Congress leaders who sowed the seeds of Sikh militancy in the early 1980s or those militants who converted it into an armed mutiny against the country can be debated for another quarter century. But its ghosts began to be laid by a very welcome political partnership during much of the past decade between the BJP, a party strong among the Hindus of Punjab, and the Shromani Akal Dal, which was even stronger among the Sikhs. It is not certain how well that partnership will continue to thrive at the Centre after its defeat in Punjab. But for the present it now exists on both sides of the new Punjab legislature, on the Opposition benches as an open coalition between the Akali Dal and the BJP, and on the Treasury Benches as an internal coalition within the victorious Congress, which has resumed the role it had played for 30 years after independence as a party representing both Hindus and Sikhs, and now under the robustly secular, moderate, and modernist leadership of Mr Amarinder Singh. Its high share of the total vote in this election shows it has polled well among both communities. If the message received by Akali leaders is that reputation for corruption invites retribution then this is good for everyone, whether the reputation was justified or not. It is also a welcome feature of the process that the polity is now a lot more bipolar than in earlier elections, and the splinter groups are much less in evidence than they were in some of the earlier elections. There is an unfortunate imbalance between the share of seats and of votes between the two sides. But that only reinforces the case for a reconsideration of the first past the post electoral system. In a similar way, if not to the same extent, societal gulfs have been narrowed a little in Uttar Pradesh because of the nature of the choices made by some of the political parties, and by the campaigns accordingly run by them. The best example of that, but not the only one, is the Bahujan Samaj Party. In earlier elections it used to raise its Dalit appeal to the highest pitch, presumably in a hyper effort to mobilise them as its base, and it has been very successful in this effort. It is also the main reason why it has been able to perform better than either of the two other main contestants, the BJP alliance and the Samajwadi Party. But having got what it could out of its exclusivist campaigns earlier, it has this time tried to reach out to upper castes more boldly than it had ever done before, and this is bound to soften its earlier and more aggressive image and might also widen its options at the state level and perhaps also in New Delhi. In the meantime, the same clearing up of the clutter has happened in UP as in Punjab, the same softening of the lines dividing parties, and the same moving away from yesterday’s slogans. Most of the vote has gone to the three main contenders and very little to splinters and “rebel candidates” fighting as “independents”. Mr Mulayam Singh has by and large stuck to his Muslim and Yadav platform, perhaps believing it to be such a winning ticket that he would rather not tamper with it. How this might affect his post-election manoeuvrability is a riddle which will unfold only with time but some adjustments might be forced upon him by two changes in the base of his support. First, in an effort to defeat BJP candidates, some among his Muslim supporters are reported to have shifted towards whichever party appeared to them to be a better bet in this game; and second, a section of the Kurmi vote, a caste next lower to Mr Mulaym Singh’s most loyal supporters, the Yadavs, has branched out into a party of its own and has thus weakened him in several constituencies. These developments might modify the profile and prospects of his Samajwadi Party and in the meantime demonstrate to him and others that certain games do not pay because others can play them too. But a change more pregnant with possibilities has been made by his main opponent, the BJP. It has been clear for some time that Prime Minister Vajpayee’s main strategy in dealing with the Masjid-Mandir controversy has been to cool the issue even if he cannot resolve it through negotiations, so that there may be less fanatical opposition, whether by the Muslims or sadhus, to whatever decision might come out of the Supreme Court, which is now the only route left for some decision. For this reason it was of the utmost importance for him that his own party at least should not add fuel to this fire even if it meant some loss of enthusiasm among the party’s cadres. This message went home, though not well in time. As soon as he took charge as Chief Minister Mr Rajnath Singh began to distance himself, his party and his government from the Ram Temple platform of some of the more vociferous members of the Sangh Parivar. He spoke much more about issues of development than of communal divides, much more than any BJP leader of that standing had done in UP. This had a corresponding effect on the other side, and therefore not much was heard about the Babri Masjid either. In no election since the mid-1990s has less been heard about the temple-masjid controversy, nor have more voters said so candidly and on camera that their daily problems matter more to them and demands for this or that place of worship are only the pastime of politicians. Closely related is the fact that though many circumstances had converged to arouse communal sentiments they caused much less disturbance than might have been expected. There was for example the vastly accentuated awareness of terrorism by organisations openly claiming to be or accused of being Islamic jehadis, there were vivid reports about their brutalities on behalf of what they called their Islam, there was still smouldering anger about their attack on Parliament House in New Delhi, suspicion about terrorists defeated in Afghanistan infiltrating into India, evidence of Pakistan aiding the process, the greatly heightened tension and military preparedness on both sides of the Indo-Pakistan border. But in all parts of Uttar Pradesh they disturbed the electoral process much less than feared and much less than in some elections held in less heated time. But before closing this comment one must not fail to say more about the “ominous shadow” to which reference was made earlier. Its effects could be insidious even if its manifestations were inconspicuous. It had been reported before the elections, rumoured even more widely, and confirmed by some of the election results, that Muslim voters had been quietly directed by their leaders or had decided spontaneously to focus on defeating BJP candidates no matter who they had to support for ensuring that. In the event such voting played a part in the electoral humbling of the BJP. This can have three consequences, each worse than the others. First, it can discourage other BJP leaders from following in the footsteps of Mr Rajnath Singh, and that can squash the beginning he made towards secularising his party’s electoral politics. Second, it can lend respectability to a communalist response from the other side. Third, it can widen the gulf between political activists on both sides. The mixture can be inflammatory. |
The Cuttack experience Daddy’s “fauji” posting from Yol near Dharamsala in Himachal, to Cuttack in Orissa resulted in travelling from western Himalayas via Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, UP, Bihar, Bengal to finally end at Cuttack, not far from Bay of Bengal. We were housed in a sprawling bungalow, lurking with snakes, with the Mahanadi river flowing behind and a gardenful of custard apples, plantains, tamarind, hibiscus and the eye-catching foliage of coleus. Life in Cuttack was a mixture of sights, sounds and sighs of swaying Odissi dance, rustling Tussar silk, intricate silver filigree, sensuous Konarak sculptures, Jaganath Puri’s rath-yatra, Udaygiri and Khandgiri caves near Bhubaneshwar. But there were experiences of a different kind, still etched in my mind. The jackfruit experience was a unique one. An army camp was held at Jatni. The temporary loos were roofless, four feet high canvas enclosures, ours being near a jackfruit tree. The area abounded in these trees with their branches being weighed down by dangling miniature hippo-like jackfruits. One fine day a huge jackfruit landed at my feet with a loud thud, making me jump out of my skin. Since then I became wary of loos near jackfruit trees! A horrifying and shameful experience was when our national anthem “Jana gana mana...” was played on a gramophone (His Master’s Voice) record during celebration of our national day in a State-level public function! Studying in an American school, I was one of the five girls in a class, outnumbered by 25 boys. Education was a different kettle of fish there. The school had Indian teachers who taught us English, geography and history of Great Britain, arithmetic sums in pounds, shillings and pence and scripture (Bible). Our “Miss” (as school ma’ams were then addressed), was a “pucca” Indian but considered herself to be more “angrez” than the real “gora” ones and whom I doubt had ever stepped beyond Cuttack. She taught us in lofty and quite disdainful, manner that Indian natives were dark and dirty! She pronounced Himayun as He-may-you while Baber was akin to paper with ‘B’ being substituted for ‘P’. All went on well till one day my horrified parents corrected me, but I persisted because, like for all kids, the teacher is always right. The Miss was also a casual newsreader in AIR. Good Heavens! The less said (or heard), the better. “Operation Mosquito” was heralded by the ringing of school bell at 3 p.m. sharp. My best friend Amy Johnston, a Calcuttan along with other boarders, would dash to their hostel dorms, to pull down mosquito nets slung over their beds and tuck their ends under mattresses. As the sun went down, we daily took the “mosquito drill” at home. We smeared anti-mosquito oil on our bare arms and legs while orderlies charged with flit pumps — rather guns — at every nook and corner to ward off menacing mosquitoes. How they still hummed unconcerned in our ears! One of the most awful sights was of helpless souls who sat on pavements all over Cuttack with huge swollen legs, suffering from elephantiasis. A tropical disease, it’s a complication of filariasis induced by culex mosquito bite. In Orissa were also found flying snakes, biting right on one’s forehead. Cuttack is situated on a confluence. Invariably monsoons made the Mahanadi and the Kathjori rise annually, overflowing their embankments and threatening to flood Cuttack. The Mahanadi flooded our lawns, forcing us to roll up our carpets lest it entered our house. I often saw thatched roofs, umbrellas, utensils, etc. being swept away on muddy, fast-flowing river. Neelima, my “ayah”, often borrowed my foot-ruler to whisk away croaking frogs from wet lawns, into an empty Ovaltine tin to make a delicious curry (ugh!). Brinjal is the Oriya’s favourite vegetable, so much so that they even have a variety of mango named
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‘A global village on two legs’ He is a self-confessed “global village on two legs,” a fitting description for a person who was born in England to Indian parents, migrated to California as a boy, but still studied at Eton and Oxford, and is now based in Japan. In New Delhi for the first International Festival of Indian Literature, Pico Iyer said India, surprisingly, still remains unexplored for him. When he does come here it is usually to spend time with family, not travel. Iyer does, however, hope to visit Kerala and Varanasi one day. The theme of the festival, “At Home in the World,” seemed particularly relevant to Iyer, a person for whom taking planes is as natural as picking up the phone or going to school. “I fold up myself and carry it around as if it were an overnight bag,” he laughed and said. One of the finest travel writers in the world, Iyer describes himself as a “multinational soul on a multinational globe on which more and more countries are as polyglot and restless as airports.” During a three-day writers’ retreat at the Neemrana Fort-Palace in Rajasthan as part of the festival, Iyer moderated a panel discussion titled “Ideas of India.” The author believes that you can go all around the world and feel alienated and displaced from wherever you are or you can treat every place as home. “Because I’m not fully English, Indian, or American, when I go to China or Ethiopia or Peru I’m no more displaced really than when I’m in India and can’t speak a word of Hindi, or when I’m in England and don’t look like an Englishman, or when I’m in California and speak with this accent that sounds so bizarre and incomprehensible to people,” Iyer told IANS in an interview. Claiming to feel equally unsettled everywhere, the gentle travel writer said that it is hard to lay down roots. “I still don’t have a place I can really call home. I just move between temporary base camps. I know that the very notion of home, of having a family or community, is a hard one for me to embrace.” Iyer said he began travelling when he was 17. After finishing school in England he journeyed off on “my first extended trip in the Third World and kept notes on it. So I was a travel writer in the sense that many of us are — just writing about my holidays.” Next, he went to graduate school at Harvard, which publishes the “Let’s Go” series of guidebooks, aimed at helping American students on a tight budget travel around Europe. That was his summer job for two years, travelling to England, France, Italy and Greece. “It was a wonderful training. They give you almost no money, so you have to cut almost every corner and really count your pennies just to make the salary stretch across 10 weeks of travel,” he said. Iyer then started working for Time magazine, where he would write about exotic locales, insurgency in remote countries, articles on the Philippines, the Andes or war in South Africa. And all this while sitting in an office in New York. This experience is what made him decide to become a travel writer. Iyer admitted that writing about world affairs for Time was very good discipline, it required a lot of research and he learnt to write clearly and concretely. But he finally decided to hit the road and see these places for himself. He has not stopped travelling since. “What has always interested me is the crossing of cultures when people are travelling,” he said. Calling himself “one of those perverse people who likes being alone,” Iyer said that travel, in some sort of superficial sense, is a good cure for loneliness. “When you travel, you quickly find that you get more friends than you know what to do with. You can hardly walk down the street before some woman is proposing marriage and somebody else just wants to practice his English with you. Travelling opens you up to many more possibilities than you would have elsewhere.” The wandering writer said while he might want to consolidate his roots at some point, right now, the world is conspiring to help him be rootless — with e-mail, fax and a modem he can get connected from anywhere. Iyer’s next novel, “Abandon,” is about an Englishman studying Sufism in California. “When I told my friends that I was writing this, they wondered who would read it. Now things have changed completely,” he said, referring to a post-9/11 world.
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Cancer may never be eliminated: Nobel laureate London Expect any magic bullets. Forget miracle cures. Cancer is not one but more than 200 different types of disease and far too complicated for any quick fixes. "Our generation will make significant progress. I really do believe that. I don’t believe we will eliminate cancer,’’ the co-director of Cancer Research UK, Europe’s largest research organisation, told Reuters in an interview. Nurse should know. The 53-year-old motorcycle enthusiast who has the look and boyish charm of American comedian Robin Williams has been delving into the secrets of cells for more than two decades. He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize for identifying essential components that control how cells replicate. Faults in the controls of cell division are what causes cancer. Instead of dying the mutated cell keeps dividing and eventually forms a tumour. "It is an immensely complex disease. Much more complex than most other (diseases) we have to deal with," said Nurse. "Because of the complexity there aren’t going to be easy quick hits. There may be some but essentially we have to understand fully one of the most complicated diseases known to mankind," he told Reuters. Nurse, who celebrated his award with a new Kawasaki GPZ 500 motorcycle, is confident that new findings about the genetic and environmental components that cause cancer will lead to better treatments and improved prevention strategies. But he said the one component that could have the biggest impact on cancer has nothing to do with a miracle drug. "The single most major hit we can get for short-term cancer rates is to eliminate the use of tobacco. We have to try to do that." It is an old message but one which Nurse said people are failing to heed. If smokers quit and adolescents don’t start fewer people would die from lung and other cancers linked to tobacco. Lung cancer kills about a million people each year. Avoiding known causes of cancer such as tobacco and over-exposure to the sun, coupled with a better understanding of the genetic components that promote cancer, is the two-prong attack that Nurse said will make a difference. "If you understand the genetic makeup better we will be able to sort out the environment more easily. That is a new type of approach that we will be able to increasingly use over the next 10-20 years and I think that could lead to significant improvements in prevention,’’ according to Nurse. Of the estimated 30,000-40,000 genes in humans, scientists suspect perhaps a few hundred are involved in cancer. Each particular cancer, be it breast, colon or skin, is probably defective in a subset of those genes. "We now understand cancer much better. We have the conceptual tools and we have the scientific tools to dissect it and it is that understanding that will lead to better treatments," said Nurse. Nurse likens some of the cruder cancer treatments to shaking a broken radio. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t but it is better than doing nothing. "If we really understand how the radio works we should tailor treatment to make it work better. That’s the state we’re in (with cancer) and that’s why I’m optimistic,’’ he explained. "We will always have cancer with us because of natural mistakes in the natural body so it will never be eliminated but I think we can do much better than we are doing now."
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‘Let's bring harmony to animals' lives’ Dressed in a cream kurta-pyjama, 82-year-old sitar maestro Ravi Shankar sat in a rose garden here, holding a sitar, accompanied by daughter Anoushka, playing with black and white goats. The two were posing for a 30-second social message on television for the animal rights group -- People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) -- condemning cruelty to animals in India. They sat on a mattress, covered with a sunflower yellow bed-sheet with sky blue flowers; all around them were marigolds, sprinkled liberally. "The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act was written in 1960, and has never been updated. People who intentionally hurt animals are not punished," said Shankar, a Grammy nominee. "Let's bring harmony to animals' lives. Let's pass the amendment to the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act today." Anoushka wore a cream salwar-kameez, with a black, printed drape. "The act needs to be modernised. Fines and penalties need to be brought up to date," she said. "We urge the Prime Minister to put politics aside and pass amendments that will put teeth in the act. If we fail to take action, animals will continue to suffer needlessly." Renowned photographer Prabuddha Dasgupta also shot them. PETA representative Jason Baker told IANS: "The law still has a fine of Rs.50 for any abuse against animals, which is crazy because it costs the police more to initiate proceedings against criminals." PETA has been in India for two-and-a-half years now, and they have throughout vehemently protested animal rights abuses in India, especially during cattle transfer.
IANS Operation on fetus’s heart valve Doctors in Boston corrected a deadly heart defect in a fetus for the first time in the USA last November, according to a report in The New York Times. Soon after he was born last November at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a baby named Jack was wheeled through a passageway to Children’s Hospital, where cardiologists stood by, ready to perform a procedure to open a narrowed valve in his heart. To the doctors’ surprise and delight, Jack did not need their help. His aortic valve, though a bit narrow, was wide enough to do its job, and the chambers of his heart looked healthy. Even though he had been delivered six weeks early, he was robust and breathing on his own. The medical team had already widened the valve once, in a daring procedure months before, while Jack was in his mother’s womb. But the doctors were not sure the valve would stay open. Now, examining the baby, they realised that their repair job had worked even better than expected. They had, for the first time in the USA, corrected a deadly heart defect in a fetus.
DPA |
If by going about naked One could obtain unity With the Supreme Lord, All the beasts of the wild wood Would be among the saved. What does it matter Whether a man goes naked Or wraps himself in skins, So long as the spirit of God Is not realised within him? If merely by shaving one's head one could become perfect, when the sheep are shorn Why should they not be saved? If one could obtain salvation Merely by remaining content, Eunuchs should automatically Reach the Supreme State! Saith Kabir: Listen my brothers. None has obtained salvation But through God's Holy Name. — Sri Guru Granth Sahib, Rag Gauri, page 324 Kabir, why O Mullah, climbest thou up to thy minaret? Thinkest thou that the Lord is hard of hearing? Seek in thy heart for Him for whose sake Thou so loudly callest to prayer! — Sri Guru Granth Sahib, Slok 184, page 1374 Kabir, where there is divine knowledge there is righteousness; Where there is falsehood, there is sin. Where there is covetousness, there is death; Where there is forgiveness, there the Lord is. — Sri Guru Granth Sahib, Slok 155, page 1372 Lord, help me live from day to day In such a self-forgetful way, That even when I kneel to pray, My prayer shall be for others. "Others". Lord, yes, "Others"! Let this my motto be. Help me to live for others That I may live for Thee. — From "Life is Yoga", a Divine Life Society publication. |
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