ISSUES AND CONCERNS

Friends  We are at the end of the year month. They say ‘all good things come to an end’ so shall be the bad ones. Anything that begins has to end. What the last month had in store for India and Indians has to be seen. Among the major events of the month has been the election of Barack Obama as the President of U.S. for the 2nd time. Death of Bal Thackeray brought to an end the life of one of the most charismatic parochial politician of the country. How politics of Mumbai shall change after the exit of Tiger shall be a matter of interest. Hanging of terrorist Kasab is another sad development that probably had to happen, whether right or wrong. Month-in-Perspective has covered events that happened during the month, across India. As usual space constraints are limiting the coverage, of all happenings of relevance, to India and to the world at large. Two events that took place during the month have been covered under Focus for its larger relevance. The attack on Malala Yousafa...

KARNATAKA: There was this book by Michael Lobo “Is Christianity a flawless religion?” released in Mangalore, the other day. He is a former physicist at IISc Bangalore. Book is expected to generate lot of debate since it seems to have favoured liberal over literal. Opinions are likely to be polarised, informs a source. However, clergy in Mangalore is confident, that since Christianity is a religion that believed in continuous corrections, if any, there will only be healthy debate with an open mind. Hope and wish that it remains so. The important thing is, all those who are practitioners of any organised religion, be it Christianity, Islam or Hinduism, should always remain open for its own sake. In a continuously evolving world there should be continuous and participative debate among the opinion makers within the faithfuls without any fear of diktats or fatwas. It is the diktats and fatwas which normally vitiate an open atmosphere especially in a country like India where we have at ...

MALALA YOUSAFZAI –  THE UNLIKELY HEROINE 9th Oct. 2012, can go down as the most-memorable date in the history of movements for EMPOWERMENT OF WOMEN, the world over, especially those among the Muslim fraternity. On that fateful day, two gunmen stopped an open-backed van carrying a dozen girls to school in Mingora, the largest town of Swat region in Pakistan. The gunmen asked for Malala by name, ‘Where is Malala? Who is Malala?’But she was the only one who never covered her face unlike the rest of girls in the vehicle, and she said, as if to challenge the gunman, ‘I am Malala’, and the world around, for those school going girls, came crashing down. Gunmen shot Malala twice, at point blank range. It was mayhem. This attack was carried out by TNSM which is an Urdu acronym of Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Sharia (Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi). Stories of fundamentalism, many time violent, is as old as Pakistan. It has always been there in different forms...

GANG LEADER FOR A DAY The Stay-Together Gang The breakdown of the gang affected Ms. Bailey as well. When the gang didn’t make money, Ms. Bailey didn’t make much money either. And with demolition so near, she needed all the money she could get to help the tenants she wanted to help. She paid for day care so single mothers could go look for new apartments. She hired a car service to take tenants on their housing searches. She helped others settle their outstanding electricity bills so they’d be able to get service once they entered the private market. But as the money ran out, some tenants began to turn on her. Even though the CHA was supposed to provide relocation services, it was Ms. Bailey who had stepped into the breach, for a fee, and so she was the one who now caught the blame. She was widely accused of pocketing the gang’s money instead of using it for the tenants. I had never seen Ms. Bailey cry until the moment she told me about these accusations. “I have lived here...

Sickness sells Prof. B. M. Hegde, hegdebm@gmail.com “When I see some of the people who are glorified in magazines these days - who are so thin it's bordering on sickness - I just feel exhausted.”  Katherine Heigl  And, sells very well. Every hour in the US the TV adverts for drugs runs around 80 drugs! Many of them who see these do discuss the drug with their doctors as most drugs are advertised as if they are tailor made for you hypochondriasis. Nearly half of all those that see their doctors get to take the drug, some for the rest of their lives. Sickness sales are the highest in the world today from the commercial point of view. The Pharmaceutical companies laugh all their way to their banks! What is the result? Every symptom, however trivial it might be, gets blown out of proportion. Many of life’s normal physiological processes like menarche, menopause, pregnancy, child birth, sexuality, sorrow, old age maladies and death have all become medicalised today, ...

A hospital where doctors have TB Mumbai : This year’s civic health budget is Rs 2,345 crores but resident medical officers live in such squalor in Sion Hospital that 11 of them have contracted tuberculosis. Confirming this, dean Dr Suleman Merchant said, “Funds have not been sanctioned to house the resident medical officers (RMOs) properly.’’  Two of the RMOs, the backbone of civic hospitals, tested positive for multi drug resistant TB, which is lethal. RMOs, however, claim that this could just be the tip of the iceberg as several of them are hesitant to admit that they have contacted this airborne disease because of social stigma. Health activist Ravi Duggal said this was the result of the BMC’s apathy towards the health sector. “With the middle class opting for private hospitals and the unions of doctors and nurses growing weaker, there is no one to raise concerns about the deteriorating state of public hospitals,’’ he said. In the old RMO quarters of the hospital, f...

Russian vessel carrying 700 tonnes of gold ore missing Moscow: A Russian cargo vessel, the Amurskaya, went missing in the Sea of Okhotsk with 700 metric tonnes of gold ore, the Far Eastern transportation supervising department said in a statement. “The bulk freighter was en route from the port Kiran to the port of Okhotsk with a cargo of gold ore weighing 700 tonnes. There supposedly was a crew of nine people,” the statement said. The number of people on board of the missing vessel differs according to various sources as earlier media reports said there were 11 crew members, while the emergencies ministry puts the number at eight. An emergency beacon sent a call of distress at 8.15 a.m. near the Shantar islands in the southwestern portion of the Sea of Okhotsk. The tanker Novik, which arrived at the scene of the beacon’s distress call, did not discover the vessel. The Novik, accompanied by an amphibious Beriev Be-200 aircraft, continued the search operation, which is compl...

Five die over a goat  Islamabad - Five people, including four members of a family, were gunned down in a feud over a stolen goat in Pakistan's northwest, police said. The exchange of firing took place between two groups in Dogdara area, reported Online news agency. Members of Sherbaz group proceeded to Haya Gul Gujar's residence to inquire into the theft of their goat. But they were fired upon following which a shootout took place. During the firing, Gujar and three members of his family were killed on the spot while Badar Munir from Sherbaz group was shot dead. Two people, Umar Muhammad and Jumma, have been arrested.  No more ‘mother’ and ‘father' in France London: France is set to ban the words 'mother' and 'father' from all official documents under its controversial plans to legalize gay marriage. The move, that has outraged certain sections, means only the word 'parents' would be used in identical marriage ceremonies for all he...

UPA-IIs DISMAL RECORD Dr. M. V. Kamath With the UPA government now still in power after six long years of turbulence, is it not time to assess some of its “achievements” – such as they are? As The Times of India rightly noted, all these months it has only been raining scams. It started with 2G spectrum allocation and Commonwealth Games, continuing to Adarsh Housing allotments, coal allocation bungling, misuse of discretionary quotas….and the list is endless. But what has largely gone unnoticed is the collapse of law and order and the delay in delivering justice. As of December 2011 as many as 4.322 million cases have been pending before the country’s High Courts. The situation in the lower courts is truly horrifying with pending of 26.8 million cases of which 19 million are criminal cases and 7.8 million civil. It may take over 300 years to dispose of all the pending cases, presuming that no further cases are filed in any of the courts. Even as things are, the ratio of convictio...