EDITORIALS

The ghost of Bofors

The Bofors case has taken many twists and turns ever since the scam came to light in 1986. Therefore, neither the Supreme Court's decision to stay the trial of the Hinduja brothers by a lower court nor the Malaysian court's rejection of the Indian request seeking Ottavio Quattrochi's extradition for trial in India has come as a surprise. It appears that the stage has come where the ends of justice would be best served by giving the case a quiet burial. If one were to work out the amount that was allegedly offered as bribe to Rajiv Gandhi and others by the Swedish arms supplier and the money spent on investigating the case the result would be revealing. It would show how the taxpayer has been made to pay a rather heavy price not for bringing the guilty to justice, but for serving the political interests of the late former Prime Minister's rivals. Ever since the Bofors deal was finalised in March, 1986, for Rs 1,437 crore political rivals of the Congress and Rajiv Gandhi spent sleepless hours promising speedy trial of the guilty and a clean government in future. What has happened since then is a sordid tale of the betrayal of the trust the people reposed in the anti-corruption promise of politicians. The deeds or rather misdeeds of other polticians would make the Bofors scam look like a case of petty larceny. The Bofors case was abused legally and politically for serving the interests of Rajiv Gandhi's political rivals.

The biggest beneficiary of the Bofors fallout was Mr V. P. Singh. He had fallen out with his political mentor and used the stink in the arms deal to settle scores. He promised justice within 15 days and won! But justice is nowhere in sight. Rajiv Gandhi is dead. And so is Win Chadha, who violated the terms of the contract by taking a huge amount of money as commission and used his clout for clinching the deal for the Swedish firm. Since then the size of the scams has grown. They involve politicians of all hues except the communists. But the rate of conviction? Nil. If one were to make a list of the politicians involved in acts of financial misdemeanour running into more crores of rupees than were given out as commission by Bofors, the chances of missing out the names of some tainted politicians are high. Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav, his family members and political colleagues were said to be involved in the fodder scam. What has happened? Nothing. The telecom scam involving Mr Sukh Ram has helped him grow indpendent political clout in Himachal Pradesh. Progress in the case? Nil. Some cases including the one against former Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao and Mr Buta Singh fell through because the prosecution had not done its homework. Whenever a case is thrown out by the court the CBI gets blamed. But all the fault does not lie at its door. It is true that it is not always as efficient as it ought to be in investigating cases. But the political class too must share part of the blame. The efficiency of the agency would certainly go up if it was allowed to concentrate its energy and resources only on important cases like the Bofors, fodder and telecom scams. Petty crimes should be investigated by the police. Is it an unfair suggestion?

Exercise in futility

It is in the fitness of things that the ongoing process of delimitation of Assembly and Parliamentary constituencies in Himachal Pradesh has been deferred, for the issue was messier than an open can of worms. The move was ill-advised in the first place, coming as it did so close to the elections scheduled for February next year. It became more complex because of the vertical division in the BJP. Although the agitation in Kangra over it did not evoke the expected response, but as we had mentioned, there was a growing feeling that the government had bitten more than it could chew. Not only was it bitterly criticised by Opposition parties, but there was dissension in its own ranks as well. Shanta Kumar backers saw in it a clever ploy to cut their leader to size. They perceived it as a “conspiracy” to lower the significance of Kangra district by reducing the number of Assembly segments from 16 to 15. Mr Virbhadra Singh also saw it as an attempt to harm him politically. Since delimitation was not being carried out in Gujarat before the polls, the dissenters felt further alienated. What precipitated the matter was the glaring discrepancies in the draft proposals for redrawing the boundaries of the constituencies. It was obvious that the haste was making waste and the vague and illogical proposals would only stoke the fire. With such sharp criticism emanating from so many different quarters, the final outcome of the high-level meetings involving the Election Commission and the Delimitation Commission must have come as a great relief to the BJP leadership.

Now that the government has been bitten badly, it is obvious that the next dispensation is not going to open the issue lightly. But the job has to be undertaken sooner or later because there has been no rationalisation of constituencies for about 30 years. Whenever the exercise is undertaken again, it will be necessary to do so with extreme care so that glaring discrepancies can be avoided. That may require a fresh look at the Delimitation Act itself, which is vague on several vital issues. A judicial review may be in order instead of a political exercise. And confining the delimitation process to the existing districts can be self-defeating because the problem of contiguity plaguing various constituencies like Ani, Pangi and Lahaul-Spiti will not be solved.

Foeticide: end the deadlock

The continued stalemate in Parliament over the Bill on female foeticide is unfortunate. Even the special meeting of the members has failed to end the differences among them over some of its provisions. Clearly, there is no second opinion on the urgent need to check female foeticide as this has led to serious gender discrimination and adverse demographic implications in states like Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra. Amazingly, according to an estimate, parts of Haryana have witnessed a dip in sex ratio — 618 girls for 1,000 boys. On the whole, while the national sex ratio is 933 women per 1,000 men, in Haryana, Punjab, Chandigarh and Delhi, it is below 900. This shows that the menace has reached alarming proportions in urban areas even though the people here are expected to be educated, progressive, forward-looking and enlightened. As clinics in urban centres are mainly responsible for this malady, stringent legislation to tackle this problem has become necessary. The Bill in question envisages that all ultrasound clinics should be registered and that manufacturers of ultrasound equipment should sell their machines only to registered clinics. Close on the heels of objections from the Indian Radiologists Association, MPs have been demanding amendments on the grounds that the Bill, in its present form, is discriminatory in nature and scope. They say that the provisions are “too sweeping” as the Bill did not make any distinction between clinics, which were engaged in diagnosis for gynaecological purposes, and those for non-gynaecological purposes such as kidney and liver problems. The members, in principle, do not disagree with the objectives of the Bill, i.e. to check misuse of ultrasound to determine the sex of a foetus with a view to aborting the pregnancy if the womb carried a female foetus. What they want is that the clinics engaged in non-gynaecological diagnosis should not be put to avoidable hardship.

It is surprising why the government is not trying to evolve a consensus among the members on the issue. Apparently, the efforts of the Parliamentary Committee on Empowerment of Women and the Union Health Ministry in this direction seem to be inadequate. There is need to redouble their efforts with a sense of urgency so that a meeting ground can be reached between the government and the members opposed to some of the provisions in the Bill. Linked to this issue is the important question of the implementation of various orders passed by the Supreme Court since May, 2001, regarding the ban on the use of ultrasound scanners for conducting pre-natal diagnostic tests. The Supreme Court has now asked all states and Union Territories to submit status reports to it within six weeks. It would be interesting to watch their response as this would help create awareness among the people on the ban imposed by the court and the state governments’ compliance. The apex court has directed, among other things, the appointment of fully empowered authorities at the district and sub-divisional levels along with the advisory committees to aid and advice them on different crucial aspects. It is time the stalemate over the issue ends in Parliament in the larger interest of the country.

OPINION

Deceptive world of beauty business
The Nigerian fiasco and related issues
Sunanda K. Datta-Ray

It is just as well that this year’s Miss World contest is ultimately being held in London where the gulf between the glittering world of cosmetic beauty and the social, economic and political plight of a majority of the world’s women is less cruelly marked than in Nigeria, the original venue. Nor, in spite of protests by British feminists who regard such pageants as degrading to their sex, is the London event likely to be exploited by fiercely divisive groups.

Like the terrorist attacks in Mombasa, the tragic sequence of events in Nigeria also highlighted that contrasts do not make for harmony. It has been pointed out that the Israeli-owned Paradise hotel on the Kenya coast was an island of luxury in a sea of poverty and deprivation.

Thus, quite apart from religious and racial complications, it was bound to be a target of adverse local attention. In Bali, too, Paddy’s bar and the Sari night club which were bombed so devastatingly were the playgrounds of relatively rich, white, mainly Australian, tourists into which the locals ventured only to serve. Similarly, a pageant involving millions of dollars promoted by all the big names in the international world of high fashion could only mock conditions in strife-torn Nigeria.

This is not necessarily to decry beauty contests as such. Presumably, they appeal to a large number of people worldwide, and enhance the revenues of their multinational corporate sponsors. It is even claimed that far from promoting dumb dolls, they bestow recognition on a desirable blend of physical beauty, personal charm and intelligence and awareness. As its website says, “Every aspect of the contest will underline the ideals promoted by Miss World, reflecting the attributes of today’s woman; a woman who has her own goals and views of her role within society.”

But the violence and cancellation underlined that while such contests might be worthwhile ventures, there is a time and place for them. It’s a question of priorities. Just because an attractive and accomplished young Nigerian girl, Miss Agbani Darego, won the title last year does not mean that her entire country is ready for the contest. As events showed, the world’s most deprived continent, stricken by famine, teeming with HIV and AIDS and torn by searing religious and tribal conflicts, has more important things on its mind than an extravaganza of frivolous fantasy.

Many Indian readers will disagree. First, we resent the suggestion of any qualitative difference between East and West. Second, with half a dozen titles ever since Miss Reita Faria was crowned Miss World in London in 1966, we are now old hands at the beauty game. India has become blasé. There is now even a Miss India Worldwide competition in which Non-Resident Indian beauties from 20 countries took part this year, and whose inaugural won praise from President George W. Bush. But an objective assessment demands that such contests should be held only in places where all basic urges have been satisfied. They must harmonise culturally with the setting and not offer scope for further conflict.

That was not so in Nigeria where the contestants flew in during the holy month of Ramazan when Muslim Nigerians were fasting. From the very beginning, too, Muslim clerics objected to what they called a flaunting of nudity. Whatever one might think of their views, they should not have been overlooked in a land whose Islamic courts have condemned a young woman, Miss Amina Lawal, to be stoned to death for having a child out of wedlock. A similar sentence against another young woman, Miss Safiyah Husaini, was lifted only on appeal.

To make matters worse, a 22-year-old Nigerian journalist, Miss Isioma Daniel, wrote an article about the contest in This Day newspaper referring in a light tone to Prophet Mohammed and deeply offending many of the faithful. So much so that some Muslim organisations issued a fatwa calling for her death. Again, no purpose is served by people who live in a totally different environment taking a judgemental view of the controversy. It is more to the point that elements within Nigeria’s Islamic community have opposed the fatwa on the grounds that only the Jama’atu organisation and the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, both headed by the titular Sultan of Sokoto, can pass such a sentence.

Nigeria’s 120 million people are already sharply divided on religious lines. The 12 states that follow sharia law are at odds with the rest of the country. More than 2,000 people were killed in rioting when the sharia law decision was taken two years ago.

In a sense, the violence over the Miss World contest in which 215 people were killed and 22 churches and eight mosques were destroyed was a recrudescence of this earlier conflict. Mr Ahmed Mohammad Makarfi, the Governor of Kaduna, an impoverished town with a 70 per cent unemployment rate where the rioting was at its most fierce, admitted that the outbreak had little to do with the Miss World contest. Some of the sharp strictures attributed to President Olusegun Obasanjo also implied as much.

They suggested that other forces — social, economic and political — exploited the argument. It is tempting to link some of them with hardline Islamists who supported Afghanistan’s Taliban movement and who help the Al-Qaida and similar militant organisations. There is a secessionist agenda within the local context. Some European lobbies that were sympathetic to the Biafran breakaways in the seventies might still be active. The Americans suspect a militant group in nearby Somalia.

One wonders if these complexities were explained to the courageous Miss Belgium (Miss Ann Van Elsen) who burst into tears when Miss Sweden and Miss Italy refused to join her boycott in support of the hapless Miss Lawal. “Every year, contestants say they are for world peace,” Miss Van Elsen declared, “but I’m not sure if it has any effect. The chance that I can really say something during the pageant is really small. I think I will have a much more powerful effect if I boycott the contest.”

Beauty queens from France, Denmark, the Ivory Coast, Kenya, Norway and Togo agreed with her. Korea’s Miss Jang Yu Kyong and a few colleagues went a step further and decided to wash their hands of what they denounced as the hollow ideals of the pageant and go back home. In the end the choice was taken out of their hands. First, Miss Lawal obligingly forgot her own anxieties so far as to generously plead that the contest should continue. Then, the upsurge of violence forced cancellation and the shift to London.

But have any lessons been learnt from this costly fiasco? The organisers must realise that they cannot yet expect to extend their commercial tentacles to large areas of the Third World which have far more pressing needs. The Third World, too, must accept that there is no shame in not following the West in all its indulgences. To be different is not to be inferior. Instead of blindly emulating Europe and America, the civilisations of Africa and Asia must remain true to value systems rooted in indigenous culture. This was the message of the Bengal Renaissance. The quest to be modern without being Western, as relevant today as it was in the 19th century, must not allow commerce to dominate culture.

MIDDLE

Of life and death
I.M. Soni

“Master Henry, it’s your bedtime.” The words were spoken by H.G. Wells’ nurse. He recalled them on his 70th birthday at a party given by friends.

When we are told this, we protest but we know that the time for “bedtime” has come. This applies especially when we are on the edge of entering the world of eternity.

The protest is uncalled for because life is like a river which runs and leaps over rough rocks near the source, but its waters become tranquil as it nears the sea.

Symbolically, the time for turbulence is over. Repose is at hand. Thus, misfortunes should lose their stabbing. It is time to accept “bedtime” with serenity and self-renunciation, sans futile defiance.

However, there is another way, too. Simmer with discontent which is reflected in grabbing and grasping at what cannot be grabbed and grasped.

The fable titled “The Tree that Wanted to keep its Leaves” shows the way. It tried to hold on them, fasten them to its branches but the autumn gales blew hard and turned it into a leaveless skeleton.

This is tellingly effective and applicable in life, too. Tottering elders refuse to delegate power to their children. The latter would love and respect them if they had the wisdom to share their responsibility.

There are misers who convert their coffins into coffers, live half-a-life so that they may cling with their own palsied hands to pleasures they can no longer enjoy. They leave a fortune which brings misfortune to their inheritors!

“The mind,” says Montaigue, “must thrive upon the old age as the mistletoe upon a dead oak.” But do we care?

It is a sheer joy to watch children living their own lives, enjoying their pleasures, suffer in suffering, and take part in their struggles, suggesting (not advising) so that they may benefit from wisdom and experience of age.

Grandparents are more congenial with their grandchildren than with their own children because an old man, having retired from active life, regains the gaiety and “irresponsibility” of his own childhood.

No doubt, life gets empty and dreary. Old friends and relatives go the way of all flesh. The desert of life becomes larger.

Yet, it should be borne in the mind that age is indicated not by the calendar or birth certificate, but by the condition of our mind and body. One who has lived like misery personified, will die like that. And, one who has smiled in all misfortunes is likely to have a good end. A clean conscience makes a clean cremation!

There ought to be no stinging regrets as we have experienced love, its fulfilment as well as its frustration. Ambition and its emptiness. We have tasted religiosity and its shallowness. In short, we have seen how deep is our hollowness and how shallow is our wisdom.

A fool thinks himself to be a wise man whereas a wise man knows that he is a fool!

No wonder we become incapable of taking up new ideas because we lack the ability to assimilate. So, we cling, with crabbed tenacity, to the opinions of the dead past, darkening our present horizon.

The dead time clings to us like a burr. We repeat stories of the past. These are so boring to the young that they begin to avoid us. Our jokes evoke no laughter. They do not laugh with us. They laugh at us.

The art of growing old is epitomised in regarding the oncoming generations as a support, and not as a stumbling block, as a confidant, not as a rival.

Love torments. Women are tormented by hearing the young ones say: “She was once very beautiful.” Men, even in old age, continue to love women. That is their self-inflicted torment.

To escape the torment, we should go by what Leibnitz says: “To love is to place our happiness in the hands of another.”

Finally, there is no death while we live and we cease to live after death.

FOCUS: The Union Carbide gas tragedy took place on December 5, 1984.
Gas tragedy victims’ unending ordeal
Ervell E. Menezes

Ompal Sharma or O.P. Sharma as he is better known is 42, has a slight limp but would pass for a normal man. He has worked his way up from a typist in General Accurate Transformers Ltd to General Manager. Clad in a cream safari suit with rimless Gandhi-type spectacles, he has that Uttar Pradesh bhaiya look about him. But what few can tell is that he was a victim of the infamous Union Carbide gas tragedy of December 5, 1984.

Travelling with him in the August Kranti Rajdhani Express from New Delhi to Mumbai, Mr Sharma was pleasant company, a man who seems to have come up in life by sheer dint of hard work. “I started as a clerk on Rs 1,000 a month,” he says humbly and then with an iota of pride he goes on, “now I earn Rs 40,000 with perks to travel and other facilities.” He lives a normal life, has a wife and three children, two daughters and a son. He was on his mobile to his family soon after the train moved out of the Nizamuddin station.

“I have two drinks at home every evening and when I travel or am out of station I like to drink in company, not alone,” he goes on matter-of-factly. But most important is the fact that he is still alive. “The doctors gave me first five years and then another five years which means by the end of 1994, but I’m still around,” he adds, his face beaming in a smile. Apparently, that brush with death has changed his life.

“I don’t believe in Hindus or Muslims but I believe in good and bad; one must live a good life and that’s all. It’s the politicians who do all this like it was the politicians who allowed Union Carbide to set up its factory and manufacture forbidden chemicals,” he goes on and mentions the names of some of the ministers he feels are responsible for the greatest chemical tragedy in history. “And they have all got away unpunished,” he said but then that was the way things go on in our country, calling New Delhi the centre of corruption and flaying most of the present leaders.

It was after a good deal of conversation that one came upon his date with destiny on December 5, 1984. He does not flaunt that tragedy on his sleeve. “I entered my hotel, Mahhuvan Hotel in the Ghoranakhas area around 11 p.m. on December 4, had a couple of drinks and went to sleep. It was 1.40 a.m. that I was awakened by the noise of people running in the streets and shouting. I knew something big had happened,” he adds with retrospective fear in those rimless glasses covering his eyes.

There was chaos everywhere. Mr Sharma opened the door and came down into the street which by then was deserted except for some people lying on the ground. There were cries of help and yelps of pain, suffocation. His eyes burned but he managed to get a three-wheeler and asked the driver to take him out of the city. They drove for 12 km and there the scene was better. Stunned by the enormity of the tragedy, which was yet to fully unfurl itself, he waited there along with the tempo driver. It was only at 3.30 a.m. that the military, which had moved in by then, had asked all the people to come back to Bhopal as things had improved.

“I was then working for Mayur Home Appliances Ltd, a sister company of Accurate Transformers Ltd. At around 6 a.m. we got the news that 26,000 people had died and lakhs were injured. It was a nightmare,” he says with a dazed expression. “It was a black night for India,” he says and recalls how he had left a big amount of money in his hotel room and how when he returned the money was still intact. The gas he claims was methyl isocyanide and it was lethal. The rest is now history.

Why did filmmaker Mahesh Matthai make a film “Bhopal Express” and did all he could do to muster support for the gas victims? But as is often the case in India, little seems to have come out of it. It is 18 years now and like Mr O.P. Sharma there are thousands who have gone without any succour. “Mafia gangs moved in and made money,” Mr Sharma says and we know of the hordes of lawyers who descended on Bhopal from the USA but little seems to have materialised, at least for those innocent victims.

Why does Union Carbide itself seem to have abrogated its responsibility? Where the money went, few people know but then that’s the usual story. When there is a tragedy, very little of the money reaches the deserving. It is siphoned off in between. But that dark night had taken its toll on Mr Sharma. He had no sensation in the lower half of his body. Also when he drank liquor it had no effect on him, it was like drinking water. He also became impotent and was not able to enjoy sex. He was not the same man. Doctors tried to console him but in vain. He was newly married which meant that the tragedy was even greater. Doctors gave him a few years, first five and then another five, but fortunately he managed to overcome this dark disaster.

But there is a look of contentment on his face. Mr Sharma may have gone through hell, but he is now a man at peace with himself. His elder daughter is in college, his son and younger daughter are in school. His father, now retired, stays with his three sons by turns. “Yes, we must look after our old,” he says philosophically. Life goes on happily for Mr Sharma and just as well, but how it must have ended abruptly for so many thousands, in extreme pain! And what’s more most of them have gone uncompensated, which sadly, is even a greater tragedy.

The writer is a veteran journalist.

Coming to terms with loneliness
Humra Quraishi

That lone sentence — man is a social being — is pushed a little too much into our psyche making us sit agog with expectations and then cry out in sheer disappointment! For who stands or sits by you!

It’s you alone experience those highs and lows and the destined turns of life. And you wouldn’t know about those painful truths till you actually undergo turmoil for as a rule, realities are rarely discussed in an Indian home they are bypassed or simply pushed under those hand-woven carpets (mind you, woven by wrecked fingers of our children).

It is still taboo to talk about that emptiness that could be simmering in you, rebelling and seeking an outlet. In fact, the irony is that in accordance with the prevailing social dictates, you aren’t supposed to be all alone — as a child your parents, siblings and “ayahs” sit around you, as an adult you’re supposed to be equipped with a spouse and children and not to overlook that extended family hovering around you, but then how would you explain that they can be of no consequence to you, no answer for your loneliness, no solution for your emotional wants... And what happens when they begin to fade away in to that oblivion, into that frightful nothingness. Circumstances or your own stances begin to pull away people from you or you move away from them.

Turmoil takes charge. Intruding into that vacuum. You look around for all those hovering figures. There is nobody out there. They have been pulled far away by the nexus and political powers at play. Leaving you alone, to stare and wonder. And cry out, for all along you hadn’t ever visualised the situation of being all by yourself.

Tell me how many of us visit the burial or cremation ground or even talk to our children about partings?

Why is it that we shy away from talking about parting and the pain it heaps on us, the vacuum it creates, the hollowness it spreads around as though determined to consume our being? Mother Teresa was one of the few to state aloud that after cancer the biggest scourge of this century is loneliness. But do our texts, lectures or even discourses equip us to cope with this reality of life? Or with just about any other reality — be it the death of a relationship or the death of a phase or even the death of wants?

Most of us are left trying to battle with loneliness, too wary of making new friends or entering into new relationships. The fear of hurt overtakes all wants.

Though there are some amongst us who make a distinction between being alone and being lonely, but then they are those fortunate ones who have managed and mastered the art of being content by themselves. Probably they have battled single-handed at so many fronts and reached the truth, that is, if at the time of birth and death you are alone, so why not survive (those in between years) by yourself? It’s perhaps then, in that solitude, that you finally understand yourself and those others, out there.

Read and re-read these lines of Khalil Gibran. I quote: “Some of you have called me aloof, and drunk with my own aloneness,/And you have said, ‘he holds council with the trees of the forest, but not with men/He sits alone on hill-tops and looks down upon our city’/True it is that I have climbed the hills and walked in remote places/How could I have seen you save from a great height or a great distance?/How can one be indeed near unless he be far?”

Japan ‘discovers’ child abuse

Forced to kneel motionless for hours on a plastic sheet each day, the small boy was forbidden to go to the toilet and fed only leftover scraps.

More than two decades later it takes little to bring back painful memories of abuse by a mother who took out the frustrations of an unhappy marriage on the son who resembled her husband.

‘’I knelt on that polka dot sheet every single day. Even now, if I catch sight of a pattern like that, it sends a shudder through me,’’ said the slim 25-year-old factory worker from an area southwest of Tokyo, who declined to be identified.

Sent to live in a children’s home near Tokyo from the age of three, he is clearly scarred by his experiences, but nonetheless luckier than the many tiny children whose suffering is not discovered until it is too late.

Reports of parents starving or beating their children to death have become an everyday staple of Japanese news, all the more horrifying in a country that until recently boasted that its stable family structure made child abuse inconceivable.

Official figures on cruelty to children are soaring — the number of cases reported to local Child Guidance Centres across the country reached 23,274 in 2001, compared with just over 1,000 a decade earlier. That is still a drop in the ocean compared with the three million cases reported in 2000 in the USA, which has twice the population, but the trend is worrying. Reuters

TRENDS & POINTERS

Yoga new ‘mantra’ for pilots

Yoga may soon become the new “mantra” for Indian Air Force (IAF) pilots to cope with the stress of flying fighter planes.

He also wanted that the research being done in the field of aviation medicine should not only cover the pilots but also Air Traffic Controllers, Radar Controllers and others involved in flying the fighting machines. The research ought to be translated at the field level to achieve the desired results. UNI

Dandruff is a global problem

Dandruff is a global problem with 50 per cent of the consumers of health and beauty products suffering from itching and flaking, according to dermatologists.

Dr M. Faergemann, a leading dermatologist and Professor of the Department of Dermatology in Suhigrensk University hospital at Gothenburg, Sweden, speaking at a seminar on dermatology in Mumbai last week, said dandruff is a health and beauty problem that affects the lives of people and is a key consumer problem in this area.

Despite this, there is a limited understanding of the underlying biochemical mechanism that contributes to dandruff which can be regarded as a complex multifactoral disorder. UNI

Insemination to make top dogs

The Hong Kong police plans to save the sperm of top police dogs to father a new generation of canine crime-fighters after they die. The force’s artificial insemination programme for police dogs is believed to be the first of its kind. A breeding programme was started six years ago, and by next year, the Hong Kong police dog unit plans to store sperm from its best dogs to use after they die and monitor bitches to check when they are ovulating. The force currently has 170 dogs, including German shepherds, Rottweilers and Labradors, and spends 2,000 to 3,000 U.S. dollars a time to buy well-bred puppies from overseas. DPA

SPIRITUAL NUGGETS

If anyone takes the life of any other creature,

That person goes to hell; I tell you

the truth, there is no doubt about it,

sayeth Dadu.

***

— Fragments Tahmuras