07 Nov 2006
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Just one month after having successfully completed the Raid De Himalaya in is Honda CRV, that he so lovingly calls ‘Mogli’, Mukul had to summon the courage to drive himself to medical help while he was bleeding profusely – he lost eight bottles of blood, I believe. Why? Because two thugs attacked him at a crossing just as the light turned green. Not one to give in easily, Mukul fought back and sustained a knife injury – eight cm wound the attending doctor said.
Continue reading →08 Oct 2006
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“Farm suicides have also been on for several years in Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh and elsewhere in India… Farm suicides have been on for a while in the cotton-growing West African nations too. As they have in many other parts of the world with farmers into other crops as well. (They occurred in the United States, too, during the Great Depression. And again, as corporate farming snuffed out small holder agriculture in the last quarter of the 20th century.)” - P. Sainath in The Hindu
Continue reading →12 Sep 2006
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Many trips just don’t happen because we’re perennially counting our pennies. Even if we can cough up the airfare, the thought of hotel tariffs in countries like Italy, Greece, France, Australia is enough to deter me. Till I discovered the wonderful world of hostels, and alongside, the wonderful world of the Internet, which allows you to scour the whole wide world in search of the cheapest digs. So, you have www.twizi.com which lists all hostels under USD25, or hostelbookers which lists everything under the sun from bed and breakfasts to dorm rooms. So, like a squirrel in summer, I’m saving my links, hoarding all the nuggets of information I can find on cheap travel. Hopefully, by next year, I should be posting blogs from a room in Venice!
Continue reading →11 Sep 2006
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Finally, something I’ve known all along gets the expert stamp. Children belonging to families that eat together have a much lower chance of slipping into addictions and trouble. For proof check out Columbia University’s National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse(which, incidentally has designated Sept 25 as Family Day).
Their research has found that children who have a regular family mealtime are less likely to smoke, drink, use illegal drugs, experiment with sex at a young age, and get into fights. Further, these children are at lower risk for suicidal thoughts and are more likely to do better in school. Teens that have frequent family dinners are more likely to be emotionally content, to work harder, to have positive peer relationships, and to have healthier eating habits. Family mealtime is the single strongest predictor of academic achievement scores and low rates of behavioral problems, regardless of race, gender, education, age of parents, income, or family size.
Continue reading →03 Sep 2006
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I’m surrounded by the cadences of Bangla in the wordy wonderful world of writer Amitava Ghosh. In the middle of a finally-arrived Delhi monsoon, I’ve emerged from the cyclonic chaos of the Sunderbans in The Hungry Tide, with names like Moyna and Rakhal humming along with places like Gorjontola and Morichhjhapi. It’s pouring outside my concrete home, but I am still sitting inside the thatched hut in Lalpukur in The Circle of Reason. And somehow I feel at home. More…It reminds me of my childhood holidays in my grandfather’s grand 100-room, two-well haveli along the ghats of the Yamuna in Vrindavan, listening to him tell all us kids of a grand migration from Murshidabad which led this Bania family to set up an appropriately grand home in Vrindavan. Of Badi-Ma’s and Chhoti-Ma’s, of food cooked inexplicably in mustard oil, of chorchori being served with rice. Then, of course, of my mother’s remarkable fluency with the language, having grown up in Calcutta, of us calling all her friends “Mashi” and not “Auntie” as would have been more appropriate given our technically north Indian, Delhi setting. Bengal was never too far away, just pushed back a bit, and dug into now and then, like sticking a finger into a pickle bottle. The pickle bottle is open and all poured out, sitting on my bedside in the form of all that I can lay my hands on that has been penned by this remarkable writer who has such a gift with entering a geography, a mindscape. Top of my agenda is to corner him somehow, somewhere, and ask: how do you do it?
Continue reading →25 Aug 2006
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Pluto’s gone! In one day, the ring of planets stuck on the ceiling of my kids’ room has become outdated. I need to reach up and yank out little Pluto. What’s the big deal, you might ask? It’s just another lump of celestial stuff zipping in a higgledy piggledy path around the sun. One less, no big deal.
Well, to my kids it is. They can rattle off the nine planets from memory. Now, ending that recitation at Neptune seems a tad incomplete. And obviously they aren’t the only ones. An ABC Newsonline report quotes Michael Shara, the American Museum of Natural History in New York’s astrophysics curator, “We had enormous numbers of telephone calls and I would say things that verged on hate mail from second-graders - very angry children who said, ‘What have you done? This is the cutest, most Disney-esque of the planets. How could you possibly demote it?”
Continue reading →08 Jul 2006
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I like people, suspect technology. If I pick up the phone, I’d prefer talking to an inept operator than an efficient machine. Till a year ago, if I wanted a train ticket, I’d prefer wading through the mass of humanity straggling outside the booking counter than “outsourcing” the task to a travel agent. I’ve been accused of enjoying this particular form of torture. And it’s probably true. I mean, what can be so uplifting about standing around for two hours in a line of sweaty, irritable people all waiting for the booking clerk to get his act together?
Continue reading →06 Jul 2006
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How do films get rated nowadays? The new and “improved” Superman is just out and everyone is making a beeline to see it. Especially kids. All hell broke loose when my six-year-old daughter Damini discovered that my son Siddharth had gone off to see the film with a friend of his. More importantly, without her. He sauntered back and informed me that I would be crazy to take her for the film. It is VIOLENT, he stressed, speaking out each syllable slowly as if I was some dim-witted creature. More tantrums. My daughter wailed, “He’s saying that because he doesn’t want me to go.”
Continue reading →04 May 2006
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“So now we are outsourcing the jobs of lab animals to India? I shudder to think what the ‘No Indian testing’ label will be in Europe…" reads a post by nizo at [] at slashdot. An anonymous post at the same site reads, “Are you kidding? The unemployment rate for lab rats will skyrocket! How are the poor rats supposed to feed their kids? Won’t somebody think of the rat children?”
Given the poor regulation systems, low levels of literacy, proclivity to accept free medicines (rather than buying them) and an almost blind and unquestioning faith in doctor ‘sahib’, this new industry poses some very tricky ‘challenges’ for the regulators, pharmaceutical companies, doctors, hospitals and research organizations. It is not difficult to replace the word ‘challenges’ with ‘opportunities’ if you are part of those organizations or ‘disasters waiting to happen’ if you are part of the thinking civil society.
Continue reading →03 May 2006
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Beautiful women, designer clothes, opulent settings, flashy cars and celebrity film stars come together to make a very heady cocktail. Way more seductive than the story of some poor cotton farmer. For the producers as well as the consumers of media, sex and money always triumphs over almost everything else. Karan Johar, Shobha De and TOI rule!
Is it any surprise, then, that skimpily clad women walking the ramps of the Lakme India Fashion Week were all over the media - in newspapers, magazines, TV, radio and on the internet. You could not have missed, nor the Sensex hitting 11,000 mark. However, you were very likely to have missed the news of the 400th farmer committing suicide in Vidarbha (in the western Indian state of Maharashtra) which happened during the same week as these other two events. According to the Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti, there have been more than 450 suicides among farmers since June 2005.
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