ISSUES AND CONCERNS

EDITOR'S COLUMN Friends Summer which had already peaked last month continued the mercury spiral. That was only to show that monsoon could be round the corner. Yes rain god didn’t disappoint, at least in some pockets. The perched land was waiting for the heaven to open up. But it was too little to quench the thirst of drought stricken land scape in the interiors of India, especially in Maharashtra and Karnataka. Rain needs to come early and in abundance. Some time early April, we were rather pleasantly surprised to find a letter from the British Isles. We have a passionate reader from Isle of Wight, an Indian from Kerala, Katyayini Subash. For the last three years she has been reading I & C, and have been regularly renewing it. Two years ago when she sent her renewal for 2 years she also sent a cheque for Rs: 5000/- for our reach out activities, with a note saying ‘Your I & C is a journalism of conscience’. We were bucked up by her generosity. The latest letter cam...

An Open letter to Narendra Modi Shri Narendra Bhai Jai Shree Krishna, Khemcho? Majaama! Hope this finds you hale, hearty and in good spirits amidst all your multifarious socio-development activities and those issues of statecraft occupying the media space. I am not sure if this is the first open letter that has come your way. Surely, it will not be the last, as in our Mera Bharath Mahaan nobody, I mean nobody, has been written about with such endearing verbose as well as hatred, like you have been. How much of these writings are right or wrong, is not very easy to conclude. Public opinion, like media hyperbole is never even-handed. They are mostly subjective since the vision is stymied by the prism with which we try to see things, and prism is never the same. Most of India, outside Gujarat, did not know you or about you until you catapulted into the seat of Chief Minister of Gujarat. From then on, there was no choice for media viewers or readers of the print media, to know ...

The stethoscope song! “No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.” Mark Twain Every new technology has been a great money spinner in medicine and excited lots of doctors and patients alike. Look at the story this week in the British Medical Journal of the “Proton beam therapy might once have seemed like the magic bullet to zap cancer, the state of the art treatment we have all been waiting for. The technology is big and expensive—the world’s “most costly and complicated medical devices; looks and sounds as if a Star Trek scriptwriter might have dreamt it up. England’s health secretary, Andrew Lansley, clearly believes it represents the future of cancer services—his department announced earlier this month that it would spend £250m on two National Health Service centres for proton beam therapy. But where did he get his evidence? The treatment hasn’t been appraised by the Na...

TUKAARAM………….Who! Travelling in a train from Hyderabad to Bangalore, got to know a young and very learned lady. While conversing on many issues, I happened to ask her “if she has heard the name of Tukaram Ombaley”. She was blank. “No I haven’t heard any such name”, she blurted. “Do you know Kasab, Ajmal Kasab?” was another question that I asked her. “Yes, he is some kind of a terrorist.” “Is he an Indian?” was my another take wanting to check her update. It was incredulous, she blurted “I think he is Indian”. She sounded just dumb. She had earlier told me that she is an MA from London. I asked a teacher in a government school back in Mangalore, the same question. “Have you heard of any body by name Tukaram Ombale?” Answer was a blank ‘No’. You heard of Ajmal Kasab? Was the question that followed. “Yes, he is that Pakistani terrorist”. She was certainly better informed. Yet she didn’t know who was this Tukaram Ombale. In umpteen places, highly literate to semiliterate to illiter...

Toilets given to schools that do not need them Bangalore: “Our school has three toilets. But the Education Department is giving us money to build three more, which we don’t want,” said Putte Gowda, a member of the School Development and Monitoring Committee from K.R. Nagar, pointing the mismatch between school’s needs and the facilities thrust upon the school by the authorities. He was one of the several SDMC members who spoke to an event organized here by Civic and Karnataka Child Rights Observatory to review the SDMC functioning. Political interference in the functioning of SDMCs figured in the discussion. Revenue & police competing for top corruption honours Mumbai: You may think it’s the Police and the Municipal Corporation officials that are most corrupt. But if statistics complied by the state Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) are to be believed, it’s the Revenue department that saw the most cases of corruption in 2011, while the Police department followed a close sec...

Death for bribe A 60-year-old former political adviser in a Chinese province was sentenced to death for taking around $2 million in bribes and sanctioning projects in return. This was the second death sentence for taking bribes in the country announced in a week. Song Chenguang, former senior political advisor of eastern Jiangxi province, was sentenced to death with two years of probation by a people’s court in Tai’an city of Shandong province, Xinhua reported. Song, the former vice chairman of the Jiangxi Provincial Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), was convicted of taking over 12 million Yuan (around $ 2 million) in bribes from 1998 to 2010. In exchange, he favoured 18 companies and individuals in getting projects, gaining sales permission and getting promotions, the court said. Given the amount of money he accepted as bribe, Song must receive severe punishment, the court said. But the two-year probation was granted because he ...

16 million Chinese women married to gay men Beijing: Sixteen million women in China are married to homosexual men, an expert claimed. Due to traditional family values in China, about 90 percent of homosexual men get married to women, said Zhang Bei-chuan, an HIV/AIDS expert at Qingdao University. “Their wives are struggling to cope and their plight should be recognized,” ‘China Daily’ quoted Zhang as saying. Twenty-nine-year-old Xiao Yao, a magazine editor in Xi’an, Shaanxi province divorced her gay husband in 2008. “Most gay men’s wives I’ve known are silently suffering at the hands of husbands who could never love them, and like me, some even got abused by husbands who were also under great pressure,” Xiao said. She now runs a website called “Homeland of gays’ wives”, which has 1,200 registered users and provides support and advice. Pills for teens: Britain Pilot programmes are being launched across Britain where teenaged girls – as young as 13 – are being given contrace...

Any hope for Indo-Pak good relations? Now that Pakistan President Asaf Ali Zardari and his team of officials have come and gone, there is widespread speculation as to whether Indo-Pak relations will take a new turn. Questions are being asked: Can zardari really make policy for Pakistan? Is he free to do so, even if he wants to? What would be the role of the Pakistan Army leadership in any future talks between Zardari and India’s Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh who has said in so many plain words that for any durable peace between India and Pakistan, the latter must clean out its own stables. Dr Singh’s expected reciprocal visit to Pakistan is almost conditional. Islam must remove the shadow of Hafiz Saeed from falling on any future talks and that, he surely must be knowing, is not likely to happen, considering that Saeed is the Pakistan Army’s front man, who it can hardly afford to betray, notwithstanding the $ 10 million bounty that the U.S. has laid on Saeed’s life. That would me...