ISSUES AND CONCERNS

Friends In trying to evolve, to improve the quality of the periodical, we have decided on a major departure. We have travelled 11 long years and had our share of accolades and brickbats. Most of our readers did approve our long editorial and have been generous in their approbation. However, there have been those who felt, it is too long, and that nowhere in the world, one can find such long editorial. Perhaps that is the uniqueness of I & C. Thus, from this month we shall make two parts to the editorial take, on the current and the recurrent events of the month that we just left behind. We will have a half page of a general nature with the raison d’être of the Focus and other as ‘Month in Perspective’, with distinctive highlights. Hope all will find this an interesting departure. As usual do revert with your inputs. The media has been under attack from different quarters. With Supreme Court retired Justice Markandey Katju taking over as new Press Council Chairman debate on the 4th ...

SOCIAL ISSUES & MEDIA CONCERNS The other day in Mangalore, we had the pleasure or do we say, displeasure or plainly, an occasion to meet a senior journalist, or at least that is what he claimed non-challently. He had whole lot of complaints against everything Indian. He even said, that Pakistan had motorways and that both Pakistan and Bangladesh are above that of India in Human Development Index (HDI) compiled by United Nations Development Programme. He also told about the problems that he is having with the ‘state BJP and RSS’, but wasn’t clear how and why. Since he had whole lot of complaints, we didn’t bother to know why and how of the Sangh Parivar’s alleged pin pricks. But he appeared very emphatic that secularism in the country is in danger and that Christians are under continuous attack. Of course, just the other day, to be specific on 4th Nov., print media carried a news item that some miscreants had attacked the St. Alphonsa church in Mangalore. As usual Sangh Pariwar outf...

He who hath, shall be given Prof. B. M. Hegde, hegdebm@gmail.com "If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion." The Dalai Lama India has millions starving. Our food stock has been all time high. Most of that precious food is rotting in open storage places, if already not been stolen by greedy business people because the Governments have no storage space. The godowns that they had rented had been returned to their owners. One of the MNC consultants appointed by GOI recently advised that they are not economically viable any more! India has the largest number of Nutritional Immune Deficiency Syndromes (NIDS) among children- more than 67 million in all. This is much higher than all the Sub-Saharan countries put together-their total is about 42 million. Our children die almost daily in thousands. Hardly 50 kilometers away from India’s commercial capital city of Mumbai, in a small Adivasi village of Jamsar, children die every da...

GANG LEADER FOR A DAY Black and Blue Every so often J.T. sent out an entourage to buy food for people in the building. A few tenants carried on us usual, paying little attention to the Black Kings’ dramatic show of security in the lobby. But except for a couple of stereos and some shouting in the stairwells, the building was eerily quiet. We all baked in the still, hot air. Occasionally one of J.T.’s more senior members would throw out a plan for retaliation. J.T. listened to every proposal but was non -committal. "We got time for all that," he kept saying. "Let’s just see what happens tonight." Every half hour Cherise called from the hospital to report on Price’s condition. J.T. looked tense as he took these reports. Price was a friend since high school, one of the few people J.T. allowed in his inner circle. I was just nodding off to sleep on the floor when J.T. walked over. "Thanks, man," he said quietly. "For what?" "You didn’t have to g...

Legs - vital clues in heart failure London: Doctors tend to treat heart muscles when the organ reels under an attack, over-looking the condition of the legs, which could provide vital clues in treating the condition, new research says. Heart failure causes breathlessness and fatigue that severely limits normal daily activities such as walking. A University of Leeds research team, shown that leg muscle dysfunction is related to the severity of symptoms in heart failure patients, the Journal of Applied Physiology reports. "Many chronic heart failure patients complain of leg fatigue during exercise and this can prevent them from being active," says Harry Rossiter, of the Faculty of Biological Sciences at the University. "Our study shows that by warming up properly, patients can improve the oxygenation and performance of their leg muscles, which is beneficial in promoting exercise tolerance," he adds. In a series of experiments with chronic heart failure patients, the r...

Can this be called another kind of looting !! Mumbai: The probe into the multicrore Adarsh housing scam might have visibly slowed down but the lawyers assigned to assist the commission unearth the various aspects of the scam and bring out the truth are making merry. Fees charged by the lawyers is one of the single largest expense incurred by the costly inquiry commission that is still a long way away from any conclusive report on the scam. An RTI query has revealed that the commission’s senior counsel Dipan Merchant is richer by more than Rs 35 lakh since the commission began proceedings on April 18, earlier this year. Merchant charges Rs 40,000 per day for his services. His junior advocate Bharat Zaveri has charged nearly Rs 5 lakh so far. His daily fee is Rs 5,000. The state government’s legal team charges even more. Senior council for the state Anil Sakhare Charges Rs 1.15 lakh for a day’s hearing. He is assisted by two juniors --R M Vasudev and U B Nigot -- who are paid Rs 25,000 e...

Liberal Pakistan! Islamabad: The latest Pakistani song to have gone viral on the internet pokes fun at Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving Mumbai attacker, being treated like a "hero" in his home country and slain Governor Salmaan Taseer’s assassin being treated like a "nawab," PTI reports. Over the weekend, Lahore-based band Beyghirat Brigade (The Dishonor Brigade) unveiled its first single "Aloo Anday"- a sad commentary on Pakistani politics and the Pakistani psyche. The song’s vedeo starts on an unassuming note with three boys in school uniforms complaining over their mother packing ‘’Aloo Anday" for lunch, but in the following three minutes, the band takes on everyone from Sharif brothers of the PML-N to the "good-looking fundamentalist" Imran Khan. Sung in Punjabi with subtitles in English, the video features singer Ali Aftab Saeed grumbling about Nobel Prize- wining Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam being forgotten by most while Taseer’s ass...

Witch craft gone crazy Doctors in eastern Indonesia have removed the last of 28 nails found embedded in a three-year-old girl’s legs and back in a horrific case some residents and officials blamed on witchcraft. Doctors in Makassar on Sulawesi island had already removed more than two dozen 10-centimetere (four-inch) rusty nails, broken syringe needles and aluminium rods from the girl’s legs before removing a nail lodged dangerously close to her spine. "The girl is recovering from the operation and is generally in good condition. She is already playing again," the girl’s surgeon Kamaruddin said. X-rays in September revealed the foreign objects in the girl’s legs and back, prompting suspicions among local residents that they had been inserted magically. The governor of South Sulawesi province, Syahrul Yasin Limpo, visited the victim and said he believed witchcraft was to blame. "Believe it or not, in South Sulawesi it is possible for these sorts of things to happen," ...

Finding new sources of energy Dr. M. V. Kamath Following the controversy over the Kudankulam nuclear plant and the mess it has needlessly created, thoughts flow towards prospects of using alternative sources of energies. In the past it has been India’s compulsion to import oil, gas and coal for its energy requirements and roughly they cost over $ 100 billion a year of which imports of coal alone cost $ 5 billion. This it is claimed, may rise to $ 45 billion by 2020, no small amount for a fast-growing economy. Surely, there are alternate sources of energy that India can tap? It is not India alone that is facing this problem. Practically all industrial nations face the same predicament. Indeed, the use of wind power all over the world is growing at the rate of 30 per cent annually with a world-wide installed capacity of 198 Gigawatts (GW) in 2010. In India, the development of wind power began in 1990 and it has significantly increased in the last few years. It may come as a surprise to m...