ISSUES AND CONCERNS

Friends, We are well and truly into 2016. As usual, February is the month of union budgets, as is the custom. We have two national budgets, one being Railway Budget and the other General Budget. While the General Budget is presented usually on the last day of the month, Railway Ministry presents its Revenue & Expenditure Budget some 2/3 days before the General Budget. We are in the leap year and hence February has 29 days. This shall be the second full budget of ‘Abki baar Modi Sarcar’. The 2014/15 budget, although lot of expectations were there, only the corporate sector appeared to have been happy. But social investment had remained disappointing. Whether, it was Agriculture, Health, Education or Malnutrition. There has been less than needed allocation and in some cases even reduced allocation. How do you have an improved and better human capital if you do not spend on social sector? Besides, Agriculture, accounting for over 15% of the GDP is employing almost 50% of our popula...

Jammu & Kashmir: All of us have to die some day, so did Mufti Mohd. Sayeed, the Chief Minister of J & K. 79 years old PDP leader died on Thursday, the 7th Jan., at AIIMS, New Delhi, after a brief but serious illness. A politician since 1950 with Democratic National Conference. Since then he changed his political affiliations 3 times, before launching his current political outfit Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the death of Mufti Mohd. Sayeed had called him a “Statesman”, may be because of his alliance with BJP, or else he is known as a crafty politician. As the Home Minister in the VP Singh government at the centre in 1989, he is the one who introduced as the Union Home Minister, the controversial AFSP Act in J & K for the first time. It was during this time that his daughter Rubaiya was kidnapped by JKLF militants and was released only after releasing the arrested militants. Since then J & K scenario did not remain same and worsened o...

15 year old runs bare feet for 5000 mtrs  Very little could have gone right for 15-year-old Baksho Devi, poor and fatherless, and with a stone in her gall bladder.  And very little has, actually, but for her courage and determination that have made her a hero on the social media, and in sports arena. This Class 9 girl from Ispur village in Una district of Himachal Pradesh won a 5,000-metre race on December 22 to bag a gold medal in the district-level school athletics organised last week by the government, her coach Bagirath Chaudhry told IANS. Baksho Devi won the race despite running barefoot – for her family couldn’t afford to buy her running shoes.  The youngest among the four sisters, Baksho participated in the race for the first time and won it despite a severe gallstone pain at the last minute, Chaudhry said.  She has now been shortlisted by the youth and sports department to participate in the state-level athletics meet.  “For me, P.T. Usha is a r...

I refer to your second ‘Open letter to Prime Minister Modi,’ published in the latest issue of "Issues & Concerns". (Jan ’16) As is your wont, you wield your pen with great aplomb and to great effect. But I am afraid I do not agree with the issues raised or judgments drawn therein. Well, I do concede that you have fairly and objectively pointed out his positive qualities and statements as also his statesmen like conduct on many occasions. I also appreciate the fact that Issues & Concerns has no hidden agenda and is entirely motivated by a desire to raise issues relevant to the society we live in. But at the end of the day the question that needs to be answered is, whether the prime minister of a country (that too of the world’s largest constitutional democracy) should be judged by the electorate, the constitution and the judiciary, on the one hand or, by media and sundry disgruntled elements raising a cacophony in search of vote banks, on the other.  Mr Modi is one...

NATIONAL HERALD & DDCA QUESTION OF ANSWERS There is this proverb in Kannada, “Irulu kanda baavige hagalu bidda haage”, which means, ‘to fall into a well in the day time, that can be clearly seen in the night’. Or so, it appears, the imbroglio involving National Herald and Sonia Gandhi & her son Rahul Gandhi , the President & Vice President of Indian National Congress. It was way back in the 1930s, during the freedom struggle, a need for a newspaper, was greatly felt by the Indian leadership of those days. Good number of them, were exposed to English education, either in England or in India. Hence they were aware of the need for a newspaper to articulate their thoughts on the freedom movement and related issues concerning India and its people. With the idea of starting a newspaper, a group of people, (details not available) got to-gether to form an Indian Non-government Company, was planned. According to available information The Associated Journals Ltd., was incor...

Pain-man’s greatest enemy. Pain has been man’s greatest enemy from time immemorial and shall be so for all times to come. Pain is also the best method the body can convey that all is not well with the owner to urge him/her to take some remedial action. The physiology of pain is still not fully understood although from time to time people discover something new to evolve a drug treatment method. Pain killers, as they are called, are the real killers. Aspirin, the first pain killer to the latest complicated pain killers that the greedy drug industry has researched are making a big business, but are the leading killers in the adverse drug reactions (ADR) list. Some of them had to be withdrawn from the market as they led to heart attacks and heart failure even up to five years after their administration! The dark side of pain killer research is that the most powerful pain killer, morphia, has recently been shown to act through its placebo effect ONLY! (Sc. Transl. Med 2011; 3:70) Af...

Unsung Public Cleanliness Workers They are the ‘foot soldiers’ of public cleanliness in the Silicon Valley of India. Unseen and unsung, they work tirelessly to clear the streets and the sidewalks of garbage, and keep other public amenities, including washrooms, clean. They impinge on public consciousness only when some lapse is noticed, but even then, those who complain little realize that the onus of responsible use of public amenities rests on the user first and foremost. Yet, Kanakamma and her ilk soldier on with determination. “I came to Bengalooru from Villupuram in Neighbouring Tamil Nadu over 33 years ago, along with my parents and four younger siblings, recalls 47-year-old Kanakamma. “My mother fell ill and passed away, my father, a worker in the unorganized sector, became an alcoholic, and it was left to my maternal grandmother to raise us. As money was extremely scarce, my sister Maryamma and I did not get to go to school. Instead, we swept roads, collected and sold bi...

Climate change impact may be worse than thought: study London : The global land surface temperatures may rise by an average of almost eight degrees Celsius by 2100, if significant efforts are not made to counteract climate change, a new study has warned.Such a rise would have a devastating impact on life on Earth. It would place billions of people at risk from extreme temperatures, flooding, regional drought, and food shortages, researchers said. The study conducted by researchers at the University of Edinburgh in UK calculated the likely effect of increasing atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases above pre-industrialisation amounts. It found that if emissions continue to grow at current rates, with no significant action taken by society, then by 2100 global land temperatures will have increased by 7.9 degrees Celsius compared with 1750 as the base year. This finding lies at the very uppermost range of temperature rise as calculated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Chan...

INDIAN IN COWBOY COUNTRY THE HUNT They saw themselves as being very different from the Brown Baggers, their thrifty colleagues at the outplacement office who brought predictable sack lunches: a sandwich, some chips, and a piece of fruit or a yogurt. However, Satish had a different point of view. The Lunch Bunchers were senior executives, while the Brown Baggers were mid-level managers. He fell somewhere in between, but preferred to hang around with the Lunch Bunch, who treated him like an equal. Dan was Jewish and had served in the Israeli Air Force as a fighter pilot. He was lanky yet muscular, and the nattily dressed aviator had that-in-your face, go-for-the-jugular attitude of a good “closer”. He was outspoken and easy to read, sharing with Satish that he was a superb salesman but a lousy manager. He preferred to close huge, complex deals and not be bothered with “pissassed” administrative details. “I began closing my salesmen’s deals myself, rather than managing them,” he sh...

A SOLDIER’S FATHER The helicopter appeared over the late morning horizon. We were to receive Mr Lachhman Singh Rathore who was visiting our Flight Unit to perform the last rites of his son, Flying Officer Vikram Singh.  Only the day before, I had sent the telegram, “Deeply regret to inform that your son Flying Officer Vikram Singh lost his life in a flying accident early this morning. Death was instantaneous.” It was the first time for me- tomeet and manage the bereaved next of kin, in this case the Father of the brave officer. While most of the desolate family members insist on seeing the body, many a time there isn’t a body to show!! Flying Officer Vikram Singh’s remains were only a few kilos –scrapped from what was left in the cockpit. We had to weigh the wooden coffin with wood and earth. The pilot brought the helicopter to a perfect touchdown. Soon Mr Lachhman Singh Rathor was helped down the ladder.A small and frail man he was, maybe of 80 years, clad in an immacul...