E D I T O R I A L   P A G E

EDITORIALS

Advani’s poll-eve “war”
ELECTION time is rhetoric time for every politician worth his name. The compulsion to exercise one’s vocal chords to the point of exhaustion is understandable, more so when the election in question is as prestigious as that in Gujarat. The Election Commission has ordained that Godhra is not to be made an election issue, but there is no dearth of other emotive topics. The next best one is Pakistan.

Fillip to Naga peace efforts
THE euphoria over the Union Government’s decision to lift the ban on the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah) is not entirely unexpected. It is acclaimed by the general public as this is expected to help restore peace through negotiations not only in Nagaland but in the entire North-East. A significant fallout is the fact that talks will be held between the Centre and the NSCN (I-M) leaders on the Indian soil for the first time in five decades.

OPINION

Factors in the Gujarat elections
Avoid communal propaganda in national interest
T. V. Rajeswar
MUCH significance is being attached to the outcome of the Gujarat elections. Are they really so important? After the defeat of BJP candidates in the Sabarmati and Sabarkanta byelections about a year ago, the party hierarchy sat up and took a hard look at the emerging scenario. The party had been consistently losing in the Assembly elections held in the previous two years with the exception of Goa and, therefore, the leadership decided that Gujarat should not go the same way.

MIDDLE

Inheritors, talents and fixers
V. K. Kapoor
HUMAN existence in the words of T. S. Eliot is made up of “undisciplined squads of emotions” and to articulate out “general mess” of imprecision of feelings. We turn to heroes and icons-the nearly sacred modules of humanity with which we parse and model our lives. Broadly the heroes and icons can be divided into three categories — Inheritors, Talents and Fixers.

A POINT OF VIEW

Settling territorial and water disputes
Satya Pal Dang
IT is high time that the issues which have been bedevilling the relations between quite a few neighbouring States, including Punjab and Haryana, are debated frankly. These issues are mainly (i) territorial disputes and (ii) river water disputes.

TRENDS & POINTERS

Depression hits elderly men more
DEPRESSION poses greater danger to elderly men than women, says a new long-term Australian study published in the November/December issue of Psychosomatic Medicine. “Depression may be an early sign of impending physical decline. Or it may incur a physiological response that predisposes individuals to cardiovascular disease or cancer,” says Dr Kaarin Anstey of the Centre for Mental Health Research at Australian National University in Canberra.

• Of multiple sclerosis in women

Worry can be beneficial — to a point
“WORRY” and “anxiety” are often used as synonyms, but a new study shows that worrying actually may shield people from the harmful effects of anxiety — at least in the short term. In preparing for an exam, for example, worry can generate some concrete strategies to give the student some sense of control and predictability over the outcome.

SPIRITUAL NUGGETS

EDITORIALS

Advani’s poll-eve “war”

ELECTION time is rhetoric time for every politician worth his name. The compulsion to exercise one’s vocal chords to the point of exhaustion is understandable, more so when the election in question is as prestigious as that in Gujarat. The Election Commission has ordained that Godhra is not to be made an election issue, but there is no dearth of other emotive topics. The next best one is Pakistan. Everyone from Mr Narendra Modi’s camp has been using the trump card to great effect. There is hardly a speech in which General Musharraf does not figure. But surprise of surprise, Mr L.K. Advani has surpassed them all by going to the extent of daring Pakistan to fight a fourth direct war with India instead of engaging in a proxy war, targeting innocent civilians and temples. While he is free to hold forth on these lines in his capacity as a twice-dyed soldier of the BJP, he also happens to be the Deputy Prime Minister of India and such talk coming from him does not sound too responsible. It may even project India as a war-monger. He for one should have been beyond the lure of poll-eve rhetoric. Such expressions may be all right for a Modi or a Madan Lal Khurana, but not for the Deputy Prime Minister. Perhaps he was trying to compensate for the disquiet that arose amidst the saffron parivar following his statement that India would never become a Hindu rashtra. But the war talk may not be the right panacea.

Questions are likely to be raised as to why words should be uttered which you cannot back by deeds. What was it that held his government back when the Army was right there on the border for those long months? Things today are only as good or bad as they were then. Even earlier, Mr Advani had spoken of being proactive in Jammu and Kashmir. But this sentiment was hardly translated into action. It is high time the yawning difference between the two was narrowed down. As a character in a hit Hollywood western once said, “when you have to shoot, shoot; don’t talk”. Now that Mr Advani has caused tremendous ripples, the utterances of the Prime Minister during his campaigning in Gujarat will be heard with great attention. Will Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee too take recourse to the war bogey or will he confine himself to the bread and butter issues of development and rehabilitation which are closer to the hearts of the people of Gujarat? Watch this space.

Fillip to Naga peace efforts

THE euphoria over the Union Government’s decision to lift the ban on the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah) is not entirely unexpected. It is acclaimed by the general public as this is expected to help restore peace through negotiations not only in Nagaland but in the entire North-East. A significant fallout is the fact that talks will be held between the Centre and the NSCN (I-M) leaders on the Indian soil for the first time in five decades. It also suggests that the Centre’s peace initiative, started in 1997, has been making progress through bilateral talks between its interlocutor, former Union Home Secretary K. Padmanabhaiah and the Naga leaders — NSCN (I-M) General Secretary Thuingaleng Muivah and Chairman Isak Chisi Swu. These were held at Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Amsterdam and Paris as the two leaders have been on self-imposed exile. Now that the NSCN (I-M) has been deproscribed, decks are cleared for their visit to India for negotiations with the Centre, sometime around second week of this month. What is more, as suggested by the Naga leaders, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Home Minister L.K. Advani seem to have agreed to closely involve themselves in the negotiation process. This is bound to give the peace process a measure of credibility and legitimacy. Though the ceasefire between the NSCN (I-M) faction and the Centre is now in its fifth year, no negotiations have taken place with the other groups such as the NSCN (Khaplang), the Naga National Council and the Naga Ho Ho. It will be interesting to watch whether the Centre enlarges the scope of talks by including other Naga factions in the peace process.

Linked to the Naga issue is the larger question of its impact on the North-East. Apparently, the various insurgent groups in the region seem to be treading with caution. For instance, the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) has said that it is “monitoring” the developments. It is reported to have said that the Centre-Naga talks will have to be the “acid test of Indian sincerity” and that it has the “patience to wait till the resolution of the Naga conflict”. The groups fighting for independence in Manipur and all political parties among the majority Meitei community feel that the main aim of the NSCN (I-M) is “Greater Nagaland” which should be thwarted at any cost. NSCN (I-M) supremo Muivah hails from the Naga-dominated hills of Manipur. Will he come down on this demand and, if not, to what extent the Centre would be able to convince him and the other groups on the issue? There is also the Bodoland problem. Will the talks between the Naga leaders and the Bodo Liberation Tigers (BLT) “weaken” groups such as the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB)? The Centre requires all the skills and tact to rope them in if negotiations are to succeed. Of course, there are problems like involving Mr Khaplang in the talks as he is a Myanmarese national or the Manipur Government’s stand on the two Naga leaders. But these can be sorted out in due course of time. Ultimately, these groups should realise that there is no substitute for peace and, to achieve this objective, reconciliation and adjustments will have to be made. Any attempt to derail the ongoing peace initiative would only trigger the cycle of violence, selective killing and bloodletting which must be avoided at any cost. The people of the region want peace, development and better standards of living. These feelings must not be lost sight of by the various warring groups in the region.

OPINION

Factors in the Gujarat elections
Avoid communal propaganda in national interest
T. V. Rajeswar

MUCH significance is being attached to the outcome of the Gujarat elections. Are they really so important?

After the defeat of BJP candidates in the Sabarmati and Sabarkanta byelections about a year ago, the party hierarchy sat up and took a hard look at the emerging scenario. The party had been consistently losing in the Assembly elections held in the previous two years with the exception of Goa and, therefore, the leadership decided that Gujarat should not go the same way. Mr Keshubhai Patel, the then Chief Minister, was eased out and Mr Narendra Modi nominated as his successor in October, 2001.

Mr Modi is a quintessential RSS swayamsevak. He knows the political chemistry of the state very well. He remembered that the Rath Yatra under the then BJP President, Mr L.K. Advani, commenced in Gujarat in 1989 and brought about a windfall in the Assembly elections in 1990. Then came the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December, 1992, and the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, all of which saw the BJP fortunes in Gujarat soar with a record number of seats — 121 — in the 1995 Assembly elections. Mr Modi deduced that Hindu communal politics was of considerable value in electoral propaganda in Gujarat.

The Godhra tragedy in February 26, 2002, came as a shock to the whole nation, and in Gujarat it evoked raw passions among large sections of Hindus. Mr Modi’s government and his officers should have anticipated the fallout and taken steps to ensure that the situation did not go out of control. According to the Citizens Tribunal, consisting of three retired judges of the Supreme Court, civil servants and some of the NGOs which enquired into the Gujarat events, concluded that there was enough evidence to establish that a decision was taken at the highest level in the state government to use the attack on the Sabarmati Express at Godhra for a 72-hour programme of violence. The panel went ahead to say that the carnage in Gujarat was a “genocide” and “not a communal riot” since it was “systematically planned and executed by the state” and targeted a particular community.

Communal riots had taken place in the past in almost every state, and in Gujarat itself Hindu-Muslim disturbances were a regular feature. Ahmedabad has a few localities which are pre-dominantly Muslim where unruly and rowdy elements had made certain areas communal fortresses. Localities like Kalupur and Daryapur are notorious and they had figured prominently in every communal riot which had taken place in Gujarat in the past. Yet Mr Narendra Modi and his ministers should not have taken a deliberate decision to teach the Muslim community as a whole a lesson which they would never forget. In this terrible genocidal pursuit they undermined the integrity of civil servants, most of whom spinelessly carried out the illegal orders. The result was horrendous and the anti-Muslim riots of Ahmedabad city had become an international topic of condemnation.

Mr Modi’s diabolic manoeuvre came out in the open as he opted for early elections when the riots had hardly died down. He wanted the elections to be held by April-May on the plea that the Assembly was already dissolved and constitutional provisions prescribed the elections to be held within six months. This was not to be, as the CEC took a firm stand that unless the situation in Gujarat became normal, elections would not be held and his stand was upheld by the Supreme Court.

Mr Modi is not be easily put off by this setback as he had his own ideas: He concentrated on attacking the Muslim community and on its alleged urge to procreate more. He often referred to President Musharraf of Pakistan and called him Mian Musharraf. He also attacked Chief Election Commissioner Lyngdoh and Congress President Sonia Gandhi and these two were often referred to as Christians, the implication being that they were anti-Hindu. Mr Modi was joined by VHP rabble-rousers. His “Gaurav Yatra: become a march of hatred-mongering.

In any case, the message after the Gujarat elections may be that crass communalism pays. The nation has to wait and see if the BJP hierarchy would try to repeat the formula in the other states which have to go for assembly elections within the next 12 months. Whether the Gujarat formula will work next year remains to be seen. It is unlikely to happen unless communal riots erupt on an extraordinary scale in some of the sensitive areas in states like Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan which have to face the elections. Mostly communal riots are deliberately provoked, organised and carried out. It will be a big worrying question if it indeed happens for making political gains.

What is the message for India as a whole? The Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister had to apologise for the communal holocaust in Ahmedabad during their foreign visits. This apart, we have Pakistan which has been promoting cross-border terrorism for the last 10 years and its ISI cells are said to be active at various centres throughout the country. The jehadi organisations in Pakistan and elsewhere are bound to exploit the findings of the Citizens Tribunal in their assertion. One of the attackers on the Akshardham temple in Ahmedabad who was killed had a paper on his person which spoke of revenge for the attacks on Muslims in February. There was a recent attack on the Raghunath Temple in Jammu and also an attack on the Sai Baba Temple in Hyderabad. All these events foretell a deteriorating law and order situation in general and Hindu-Muslim relations in particular.

At the international level the re-emergence of Osama bin Laden with his chilly message of vengeance and serious attacks on Americans and allies carry a reference to Kashmir. “As you kill, you will be killed” was the threat of Osama, and that he is alive and his Al-Qaeda is regrouping has sent a wave of alarm in the USA. There has been a series of attacks on foreigners by Islamic extremists, believed to be adherents of Al-Qaeda, in the Philippines, Bali in Indonesia and Thailand. Similar threats were neutralised by prompt action in Singapore and Malaysia. Let not India come into the focus of these international Islamic terrorists who are known to carry out spectacularly cruel attacks on innocent people.

The nation should pause and ponder to ensure that events like Gujarat’s communal riots are never repeated in any part of the country. This is the responsibility of the Centre and the states. The Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Sangh Parivar as a whole have a particular responsibility in this regard. It has to be ensured that no propaganda, electoral or otherwise, is carried out against any community. Unruly elements like Mr Pravin Togadia and Mr Ashok Singhal should be proceeded against under POTA if they continue with their dangerous utterances. If Mr Vaiko (V. Gopalaswamy of the MDMK, a constituent of the NDA) could be imprisoned for months under POTA for his pro-LTTE speech, there is much more material against Mr Togadia and Mr Singhal for action under POTA.

The writer is a former Governor of West Bengal and Sikkim.

MIDDLE

Inheritors, talents and fixers
V. K. Kapoor

HUMAN existence in the words of T.S. Eliot is made up of “undisciplined squads of emotions” and to articulate out “general mess” of imprecision of feelings. We turn to heroes and icons-the nearly sacred modules of humanity with which we parse and model our lives. Broadly the heroes and icons can be divided into three categories — Inheritors, Talents and Fixers.

Inheritors remain undisturbed in their life of cocooned splendour. Their lifestyle satisfies people’s hunger for spectacle. People use them to fill a vacuum in their lives. They head up a collective wish list. Children of affluent loneliness and products of accidents of birth and heredity, they generally float on the surface of life. They are the privileged ones. Privilege breed’s boredom breeds empty people. Life’s slow bland routines can’t yield a fantasia of ecstasy and sensation for them. Their need to thrill becomes a drab addiction. They want narcotic thrill of the forbidden.

Infidelity is a way of life for them. In their world, next thing to a virgin is a faithful husband. The wages of sin is sheer physical delight. They love at first sight and divorce at hindsight. The cluster around them consists of yes men, silent consenters, and passive dissenters. Their permanent companions are bottle, pills and a needle. In the evening of their lives, they find that it is a chronicle of sins, shadows and sadness.

Most talented people are indifferent to their gifts and infact try consciously, or unconsciously to destroy it. Their work speaks for them. Talents are generally an idealistic, emotional and an innocent lot. Innocence is a sister of stupidity, ignorance, and naivete and other things we would be rather without. Their neon lit eyes keep on searching for big breaks. They have inflated dreams.

Khawabon ke aasre pe kati hai tamam umr. Zulfon ke khwab, Honton ke khwab, aur badan ke khwab

Most of them are messed up inside. Driven by unruly impulses they are junkies by prescription, hedonists by inclination and profligates by longings. Talented one yearn for celebrity- hood. Once it is attained they like to creep back to their shells. Fred Allens says.” A celebrity is one who works hard all his life to become famous, and then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognised.” Picasso said that most of the talented people have a “passion” for living. Passion has two ends, delightful and deranged. They oscillate between the two. Their character suggests two halves of an incoherent whole. Legend has it that the 6th century Chinese poet Le Po drunk with wine tried to embrace the moon reflected in the lake. Life for them is one role succeeding another unconnected, soon spent.

Fixers know that the world is neither round nor flat but crooked. They possess a 360-degree networking ability. Most of them are part Rasputin, part Machiavelli and part leering adolescents. Words have no fixed meaning. Treachery comes easy, and truth is so slippery that it can’t be seized. These power vendors and influence peddlers have an uncanny knack of percolating into the political and administrative arteries of power. They are all-weather people.

Corridors of power are familiar with women fixers. For them sex is neither taboo nor sacred. Deals are most important. Relationships are social strategies with specific aims. They know that every moment is the right moment for something. They are easy glow women in a state of perpetual tumescence. With husky bedroom manners they purr soft nothings into powerful ears. These princesses of porn have a sharp eye for an opportunity. Like heat-seeking missiles they hone on to their chosen target.

Fixers have an unerring sense of time and place. In daytime the crow kills the owl, at night the owl kills the crow. The time of the fight is important. A dog on land drags a crocodile, a crocodile in water drags a dog. The place of the fight is important. Marketing is their forte. Marketing is that powerful alchemy that turns doubts into certainty. The illusion of eminent paradise. Their open looks frequently hide devious hearts. Pleasant smiles are the smooth doors behind which villainy waits.

Once at a funeral a senior civil servant asked me about the identity of a scrawny young man standing in a corner. I pleaded ignorance. “Intelligence failure”, he muttered under his breath and walked to the young man. I found him talking very animatedly to him and telling him that the future of the country lay on the shoulders of talented young men like him. Later on I discovered that he was due to be engaged to the daughter of an important minister. In due course the young man became an important son-in-law and the civil servant managed to get a cushy job after retirement due to the good offices of the son-in-law. Changez Khan had remarked: “Flattery is often better than gifts and a smooth tongue makes friends faster than all the virtues.”

A POINT OF VIEW

Settling territorial and water disputes
Satya Pal Dang

IT is high time that the issues which have been bedevilling the relations between quite a few neighbouring States, including Punjab and Haryana, are debated frankly. These issues are mainly (i) territorial disputes and (ii) river water disputes.

I. Chandigarh and some said-to-be Punjabi-speaking areas as in Sirsa (Haryana) and some said-to-be Hindi-speaking areas in Punjab e.g. Dera Bassi have been the bones of contention. I remember a massive all-party demonstration in Chandigarh the main slogan of which was: “Khirea phul Gulab da, Chandigarh Punjab da”. Chandigarh saw an equally massive demonstration of people of Haryana shouting equally catchy slogans, claiming Chandigarh for their state. Sentiments had also been worked up about other territorial claims. Much water has flowed in the “Punjab rivers” since then. Life has made people wiser but not the leaders of most political parties, guided solely by vote-bank politics.

An overwhelming majority of the people of Chandigarh, including Sikhs, want the City Beautiful to remain a Union Territory. Punjabi-speaking people in Sirsa etc don’t want to be taken into Punjab. Many will tell you: “If our area goes into Punjab now. We will be at the tail of the irrigation system and our agriculture will be ruined”. In Haryana many will tell you: “What does it matter if a village which we think is ours goes to Punjab. After all it will not be going to Pakistan.

No demonstrations and counter-demonstrations are possible now regarding these matters. Even those who may be very much in disagreement with the Communists will/should agree with Lenin’s view that “leaders should not only teach people but should also learn from them”. All political parties — national as well as regional — should agree that in relation to Chandigarh and the territorial disputes between Punjab and Haryana, the status quo should prevail.

II. River water disputes are more difficult to resolve. Let us discuss disputes in this respect between Punjab and Haryana (and Rajasthan).

The Punjab Reorganisation Act, 1946, provided that all assets (except unused waters of rivers) will be divided between Punjab and Haryana in the ratio of 60:40. The waters’ division was to be decided mutually and, failing that, by the Government of India.

The first award given by the Indian Government did not do justice to Punjab. Even the second one did not do full justice, though injustice was less. The award of the Eradi Commission too failed to resolve the problem. Efforts are now being made to rouse Punjabi chauvinism which can lead to a dangerous situation as has developed between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. That must be avoided as that will do immense harm both to Punjab and Haryana and also to India’s unity-in-diversity and integrity.

There are slogans like: “Punjab has no river water to spare”, “If we have any, we will sell it”,. “These are Punjab rivers and no one else has any right over their water”, “only riperian States can claim water of any river and neither Haryana nor Rajasthan are riperian States”, etc.

To the best of my knowledge and belief, not any of these slogans were raised by the Akali party or anyone else till the rise of terrorism in the state. These slogans were first raised by those who came to be known as “militants” or as terrorists. These were then taken up by the Akalis and also by some intellectuals. In any case, they are not correct. Many Himachalis ask: “How can Punjab claim these rivers exclusively? Logically, Himachal can claim those rivers as exclusively belonging to it because they originate in Himachal. And we have the right to stop their water flowing to any other state, if and when we need and can do it”. Obviously no Punjabi will accept this position and rightly so.

As regards the riperian principle, in my opinion it applies to sovereign countries and not to states within one country. No doubt, India is federal and needs to be more federal. However, it is one country and not a federation of 25 or so countries even though some states can have greater autonomy than the general pattern. River water disputes have to be and must be resolved on some principle other than the riperian principle e.g. the river basin principle.

Secondly, when there is drought and shortage of water in a river, an upper State (e.g. Karnataka in case of Kaveri) must not act as if the lower state (Tamil Nadu in this case) has no right to water of the river at all. Water must be shared on some mutually agreed principle never forgetting that as Indians, as brothers/sisters and even as human beings we must share scarcity and prosperity in that spirit and not through unjust methods which may lead to mutual animosity and even destruction. Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan must avoid what has recently happened between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Thanks to the Supreme Court and possibly the advice given by the Congress High Command to the Chief Minister of Karnataka, good sense has prevailed.

Coming back to Punjab, the following conclusions emerge:

1. Share of the river waters between Punjab and Haryana must be mutually decided. If that proves impossible, let it be decided by a Bench of the Supreme Court in which no judge is either Punjabi or Haryanvi.

2. The question of the SYL Canal has already been decided by the Supreme Court. Also, Punjab has no moral or legal right to go back on its commitment made more than once by its leaders. Even then, this matter too may be gone into by the Supreme Court bench which may be constituted to decide the shares of waters.

3. The late Beant Singh, Chief Minister of Punjab, contended that Punjab should have a share in the waters of the Yamuna if Haryana is to have shares of the surplus waters of the Beas and the Sutlej. The Supreme Court bench can decide this question also.

It has to be ensured that the decisions of the apex court are accepted by all and that there would be no agitation against these. Towards this end, it is necessary for all national parties and also the regional parties to go to the people and convince them why this course is necessary for the very future of our country, for its unity and integrity. All national parties must ensure that their state units are not allowed to take different and opposite stands on the same issue. The interests of the country as a whole demand no vote-bank politics, but principled politics.

TRENDS & POINTERS

Depression hits elderly men more

DEPRESSION poses greater danger to elderly men than women, says a new long-term Australian study published in the November/December issue of Psychosomatic Medicine.

“Depression may be an early sign of impending physical decline. Or it may incur a physiological response that predisposes individuals to cardiovascular disease or cancer,” says Dr Kaarin Anstey of the Centre for Mental Health Research at Australian National University in Canberra. Dr Anstey analysed data from the Australian Longitudinal Study of Aging. More than 1,900 participants in the 70 and above age-group completed a questionnaire measuring depression in 1992; a subset of these participants completed it in 1994. The researchers tracked the health of the participants until 2000.

Participants were classified as having “incident depression” if their questionnaire scores indicated they were depressed the second time they took the test but not the first time. They received a classification of “remitted depression” if their depression had relented the second time they took the test and “chronic depression” if their scores were high on both occasions.

The researchers found that after taking into account factors such as smoking, alcohol and medical conditions, depression was associated with mortality for men but not women. “Our findings confirm previous studies showing that late-life depression occurs more often in women, but has greater negative outcomes for men,” says Dr Anstey.

According to the study, the significant effect of depression on male mortality was small but “robust,” suggesting that depression may play a role in causing health changes in men. Incident depression had the strongest association with death for men. The effects of chronic and remitted depression were not statistically significant when the researchers took medical conditions into account.

The finding that remitted depression was not associated with mortality “suggests that treating depression in very old adults may reduce the risk of mortality,” says Dr Anstey. The researchers suggest that depression may be a precursor of cardiovascular disease or dementia, or may occur in concert with these conditions. ANI

Of multiple sclerosis in women

Avoiding stressful life events and learning effective coping skills may help avert flare-ups of multiple sclerosis (MS) in women with the disease, new findings suggest. Researchers recruited 23 women with MS from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and followed them for a year. Each week, the women completed questionnaires asking about MS symptoms and life events, such as starting a new job, finding out that a child is doing poorly in school, having a motor vehicle accident and being physically assaulted.

Every four weeks, the women were interviewed about the nature and timing of life events they had experience. The life events data were later analysed with the MS exacerbation data.

“A controversial issue in multiple sclerosis research concerns the extent to which psychological stress contributes to the development and progression of the disorder”, wrote researcher Kurt D. Ackerman.

“This study contributes to a growing body of evidence that stressful life events are potent triggers of disease activity in women with relapsing-remitting MS”, they added.

The results also showed that stress from different sources and of different levels of severity were equally associated with exacerbations. The researchers further suggest that preventive strategies such as coping skills training and early interventions for symptoms of anxiety and depression, could help women avoid stress-induced MS flare-ups.

MS is a life-long neurological disease that is usually diagnosed in young adults. ANI

Worry can be beneficial — to a point

“WORRY” and “anxiety” are often used as synonyms, but a new study shows that worrying actually may shield people from the harmful effects of anxiety — at least in the short term.

In preparing for an exam, for example, worry can generate some concrete strategies to give the student some sense of control and predictability over the outcome.

Anxiety is more of an emotional process, and worry is more of a cognitive mechanism one uses to fend off the negative emotion, Nathan Williams, Assistant Professor of psychology at the University of Arkansas, told UPI.

While anxiety tends to arise from fearful imagery, worry manifests in the form of words, Williams said. This difference is not just a matter of form, but it represents a difference in the way the brain interprets, processes and responds to information. Mental images have more instantaneous power to evoke emotional reaction, and this can lead to less logical less effective responses to threatening information.

“Anxiety is driven by imagery, and that imagery leads to pure, raw emotion — often fear,” Williams said. Engaging in worry allows people to translate those images into words, which can reduce the raw, negative emotion associated with the imagery.

But doesn’t excessive worry lead to depression or a negative outlook on life?

“That’s certainly true,” Williams replied. “That’s part of the commonality between anxious and depressive symptoms. Usually on the depression side, we talk about it in terms of rumination. But the cognitive processes — dwelling on negative events — are very similar.”

How much worry, then, is OK?

Williams said worry can be useful in mentally forecasting possible problems and rehearsing solutions. And in the short term, some worry might help one move past the fear and anxiety evoked by a severe stressor.

But worry also comes with a price. It becomes a problem when it is used rigidly and pervasively across situations. And it can cut people off from their feelings, leading to what psychotherapists call “intellectualising.”

“Part of our hypothesis is that worry, because it does function as a cognitive avoidance of emotion, prevents people from engaging in emotional processing of negative things that happen to them,” Williams explained.

“If the goal of worry is to help someone to put distance between themselves and fearful, anxiety-provoking negative imagery, the downside of that is by putting that distance there, it doesn’t let the person emotionally process what’s happening.” So an imbalance of thought over feeling develops.

Williams said the more a person worries, the more abstract and distant the actual problem becomes. So worry can become problem solving gone awry. As the problem becomes more abstract, it becomes less linked to negative emotion. But the downside is it’s hard to figure out a solution to an abstract problem.

And in our society, many of the problems that prompt the most worry are relatively abstract. Professional success, for example, is both an abstract and a subjective concept.

“We tend to find with worriers the more abstract the worry, the more difficult for the person to generate some kind of pathway toward accomplishing their goals,” Williams said.

Other examples of “abstract” worries are the effects of aging and physical attractiveness. “Any personal qualities that are subjective by definition and aren’t linked to easily definable objective criteria lend themselves to the abstract worry process,” Williams told UPI.

Asked about the emotional skills slighted by an excess of worry and intellectualisation, Williams referred to the work of Viktor Frankl (1905-1997), the Austrian physician whose Holocaust testament “Man’s Search for Meaning” has inspired millions. Frankl’s “logotherapy” views suffering not as an obstacle to happiness but often the necessary means to it. “Everything can be taken away from man but one thing — to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances,” Frankl wrote.

Williams said if one is engaging only in “what if?” — i.e., thinking and cognitive abstractions — in many ways this prevents “meaning-making” in Frankl’s terms. “Even when bad things happen to us, when we can make meaning out of them, then they can be integrated into one’s life. When all we do is deal with them through avoidance and distancing and abstraction, they can’t be integrated,” the psychologist said. UPI

SPIRITUAL NUGGETS

There is only one sin;

That is unawareness.

And you are being punished every moment for it.

There is no other punishment.

Each moment of unawareness carries its own punishment, and each moment of awareness carries its own reward. They are intrinsic to each other. You cannot divide them.

— From the Rajneesh Bible

***

Man’s greatest need is to be needed.

Otherwise he feels shaken.

The trees, the clouds, the sun, the moon, the stars, the mountains, nobody seems to be concerned with you.

The real religion will try in every way to help you drop this need, so that you see there is no need for anybody to need you; that asking for it, you are asking for a fiction.

***

— Chuang Tzu, 33