Don’t silence me, bro!

There’s some more good news for those who have, by now, learnt to love bad news. Water cannons and tear gas shells are on their way out of the scene. TASERs and other stun guns will soon be antique pieces. Don’t get upset, or protest. I’ll tell you the good news I promised, for sure. It is about what they call the Silent Guardian. Even the much-celebrated Chinese torture techniques will look like squirt guns before the Grand Guardian.

The U.S. military equipment manufacturing giant Raytheon, the makers of Patriot missiles that got famous during Papa Bush’s Iraq war, has announced its new find. They are very particular about not calling it a ray gun. And as far as their claims go, this new Direct Energy Solution, which a layman would call a Direct Energy Weapon, is not designed to cause any permanent harm, but only to inflict pain and make people run away from places that the same people might want to walk to, or accidentally had stepped in to. The peace loving technological innovation is christened as Silent Guardian. But the message is quite vocal: Shut up and run.

In its final, field model, it will be a square transmitter that can be mounted on a defence vehicle. When activated, it’ll emit a microwave radiation that is tuned to the exact frequency to stimulate human nerve endings, to simulate the sensation of extreme pain. It can be effective up to half a mile of distance. According to Raytheon, the radiation penetrates only to the depth of 1/64^th of an inch, and thus wouldn’t leave any visible injuries on the victims. Don’t you think bloodless wars are going to be fun?

Daily Mail had a report on the equipment, a few weeks back. The reporter had seen, and experienced the effect, of a tabletop prototype of the weapon. He describes the sensation as equivalent to touching a red-hot wire, minus the burn injury. The field model mounted on a defence vehicle is potent to give the same pain all over the victim’s body. As per Raytheon experts the maximum a person can stand the pain is for a second. They didn’t tell whether the radiation will be emitted only for a second, or for an hour. The reporter humbly admits that he was not able to stand it even for a second. He had tried it only on the tip of one of his fingers.

The Silent Guardian is not that new an innovation. It’s only the latest, and one of the most potent inventions of the like. Dazzlers, that can cause temporary blindness to human eyes and electronic sensors were in use even at the time of WWII. The other direct energy weapons under development and production include particle beam weapons that can cause permanent damage, and laser and sonic weaponry with worse effects.

It’s not lethal, and absolutely harmless, asserts Raytheon. But that’s what TASER International claimed too. As per the count until 2006, there are over 150 deaths caused by the administration, often unnecessarily, of TASERs by the police in US alone. Just like TASER, Silent Guardian too is introduced as an alternative to lethal weaponry. But unlike TASER, the new weapon fixes its eyes on war fronts. But what I see is them being used by the police to handle protesters and mobs.

When thinking hypothetically, and with blind optimism, such an invention is a wonderful solution for peacekeepers. A Raytheon executive gives an example of a situation where it can be the only solution. He talks about a situation the US military faced in Iraq, where the combatants had taken media personnel as human shields. The invaders were left with the option of letting the combatants escape, or kill the non-combatants along with them. And it is in such situations a Silent Guardian can be of great, and only, help. And it could be the best possible ammunition against violent mobs. Or even peaceful protesters, like the one the world saw in Burma a week back. Well, Buddhist monks are a different matter all together. Remember the picture of a monk who torched himself and sat there like he was dreaming, during the Vietnam War protests?

Killing is unavoidable in wars. The amount of killing and destruction is the sole determinant of a victory. If victory could be accomplished without destruction, the war wouldn’t have happened in the first place. And that’s why machines like the Silent Guardian are of no great use. Or, of great use, where it is not necessary. Like in a prison as a torturing tool. With the police, where they can have some harmless, sweat-less fun.

Raytheon have no plans to sell its product to countries with questionable human rights records, informs the company executive. Except the United States of America, of course. The vast majority of the company’s US$ 20 bn revenue is contributed by US government’s defence purchases. That’s something they call the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Iron Triangle. Something, which was criticised and warned against by even Eisenhower. It was no surprise to anyone when the biggest contributors to the last Presidential campaign in US were Lockheed Martin, the top most military equipment supplier in the world, and Raytheon. They would most probably retain that status in the coming elections too.

The economics of war is not as complicated, when one looks in to the complete picture. In his 1961 masterpiece Catch 22, Joseph Heller simplifies it as simple as it can get – with the story of the character Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder. In a free economic system, which is the fuelling idea of the contemporary libertarian discourses, cluster bombs and chocolates are given equal rights. More rights to the one, which can make more profits, quite deservingly.

In the US, the country that spends more than half of the global military expenses every year, many organisations and individuals are frequently heard of denouncing the wastage of State money on unnecessary military movements and wars. For a taxpayer, that worry might have some weight. Not as much as they are told to be though, as war is only one of the major GDP contributors for that country. This country, the USA, is home to seven of the top ten defence contractors in the world. These seven, including Raytheon, together has the revenue of about US$ 150 bn, only from defence contracts in a year. It’s only the revenue of the seven companies of the 44 US companies in the list of top 100 global defence equipment suppliers. Procurement cost specified in the last US defence budget is a mere US$ 84.2 billion, and is just about half of revenue of the top seven companies. There are more than 150 such companies in the US with global businesses. The specified amount is not inclusive of the expenditure on the war on terror. But the same equation works there too. More than 95% of the spending of the government is paid to its own citizens – as salaries and procurement charges. And it opens up the market for its powerful GDP generators. That way the US dollar is not only staying safe inside the US, but also sowed and harvested from the fertile desserts of Iraq and Afghanistan. I’m not ignoring the cost of human lives, but that’s only worth the labour it can contribute, and is a cause of spending than earning, in a capitalist system.

While we are at it, let’s talk a thing about capitalism. It was on this day, in 1967, Ernesto Che Guevara was shot dead and buried under a runway in Bolivia. 40 years after his murder, that famous portrait of Guevara for which the photographer Alberto Korda never received any royalties, is merchandised on anything and everything imaginable. From vodka bottles to bikinis. Many Catholics in Bolivia pray to the legend that the call Saint Ernesto of La Higuera, and the Christ of Vellegrande. “Shoot me, coward you are only going to kill a man,” Guevara had told his executioner. This solider, Mario Teran, received a free cataract operation by Cuban doctors under Cuba-Venezuela Operation Miracle programme, last year. And the news of it is being now celebrated in Cuba as a great act of unconditional forgiveness of the revolutionaries. Guevara proved to be a failure not just in Congo and Bolivia. More than a man was killed. If not then, by now.

The White eclipse of the land of the red sun

OR, The territorial pissing over a 100-thousand year old civilisation

“Aussies have been on the piss, getting pissed, drinking piss, drinking more piss and, most definitely, taking the piss for the past two hundred years.”

– From the website of an Australian beer brewer

Pissed, as a slang meaning drunk, is quintessentially Australian. My search for the reasons of the origin of the term didn’t return any satisfying answers. A possible logical explanation is not a very difficult one. Alcohol is a diuretic, meaning, a substance that prevents the secretion of ADH that instruct kidneys to reabsorb excess water. Naturally, this effect causes kidneys to produce diluted amounts of urine. Alcohol relaxes muscles, and one of the first muscles to affect by it, is the sphincter muscles of the urethra – second only to the muscles of your eyelids. Now put one and one together and you will end up in the loo when you are drunk. This physiological trivia is not as trivial as most of us might think. It has an astounding effect on human civilisation and its explanations of evolvement.

It was in The Songlines, by Bruce Chatwin, I first read about the native Australians, and amazed by their superior, almost parapsychological, mental faculties. About their abilities to read land like a book. About their abilities to code and decode geographical information in the form of musical notes. Songlines are songs that describe the journeys of a Totemic Spirit. Sometimes spread across hundreds of miles, with each community singing only the part that crosses their region. Astonishingly, an experienced singer of one community is able to identify the geography when someone else sings another part of his Songline, without understanding a word of it. I have never been to Australia, or have met any of these native Australians in person. Most of the things I know about them is from this book, The Songlines, which I read eight or nine years back. After that I sure have read more about their life and culture, including the much celebrated, almost amateurishly written, novel Walkabout. The Songlines is widely criticised for being colonialist and thus unreliable as a source of information. Nevertheless, it sure has told me many untold stories about the world’s oldest living culture, and I have found his narrative neutral and detached in most parts of the book. In the book, Chatwin describes the following conversation with a policeman he met in a bar:

“[…] ‘So why do you bother with them?’ The policeman jerked his thumb at the Aboriginals.

‘Because I like them.’

‘And I like them,’ he said. ‘I like them! I like to do what’s right by them. But they’re different.’

‘In what way different?’

The policeman moistened his lips again, and sucked the air between his teeth.

‘Made differently,’ he said at last. ‘They’ve got different urinary tracts to the white man. Different waterworks! That’s why they can’t hold their booze!’

‘How do you know?’

‘It’s been proved,’ said the policeman. ‘Scientifically.’

[…]

From having different waterworks was an easy step to having different grey-matter. An Aboriginal brain, he said, was different to that of Caucasians. The frontal lobes were flatter.

‘I like them,’ the policeman repeated. ‘I never said I didn’t like them. But they’re like children. They’ve got a childish mentality.’ […]”

That’s what you can derive, when you think with your piss-mechanism. The native people were living in the land for about hundred thousand years when the Europeans landed on their coast in the late 18^th century. In the next 100 years, by the time the nation christened as Australia was established, the native population was reduced to about ninety thousand from over a million. Of the 750 native groups, currently there are about 200 that survived the hospitality of the guests, constituting 2.3% of the current population with about 90% Europeans. Majority of these native Australians today live in the urban areas – bearing the mark of misfit, uncivilised, inferior race.

The Northern Territory Land Rights Act, 1976, is one of the most important legislations made in Australia after the founding of the nation. The Act was made to give back some rights, mainly ownership of their sacred land, back to the natives. Northern Territory has about 1% of Australia’s population, and is the least densely populated area in the country. Nearly half the geographical area belongs to the four Land Councils under the 1976 Act, though the native population is hardly 29% of the total in the Territory. The native population in NT is hardly 12% them in the country. It’s not that only NT is aboriginal land, or the rest 88% belongs to nowhere. It’s just that the Whites had already taken over all of the other regions except the desserts by then. And then, they found enticing deposits of minerals in the Northern Territory. And then, they found the most suitable land for nuclear waste dumping. And then, last year, the John Howard Government amended the 1976 Act. The effects were not as fast paced as the White man’s calculations, though they had managed to sign a deal for a 200-year lease of land for nuclear waste dumping.

In this time of trouble, Howard gets an inquiry report – tastefully titled, Little Children are Sacred – on child abuse among aboriginal children in the Northern Territory. The 320-page report reveals some shocking facts. Like, the miners widely engage in prostitution with children as young as 12 years. The report clearly states that it’s not just aboriginal men who commit the crimes; and the widely believed view that aboriginal culture and laws protect the abusers is a plain myth. The report strongly says, “The Inquiry believes there needs to be a radical change in the way government and non-government organizations consult, engage with and support Aboriginal people. A different approach is urgently needed.” It very clearly says that the government service provision is pathetically inadequate, and there should be an urgent need to take the aboriginal ‘world view’ seriously, instead of imposing the European ‘world view’ on them. Howard flips all these pages too quickly and stops at where it says, “The Inquiry was not told many stories concerning intra-familial child sexual abuse. However, given the experiences of the community mentioned above, and noting the findings in other Australian jurisdictions, it is safe to assume that it is more prevalent than was identified in consultations.” Howard found what he was looking for, and his government decided to ban alcohol in the region and take over the communities slashing the aboriginal rights.

If you have failed to grasp the connection between the report and action, that’s only because, there’s no apparent connection at all. “"Let me say there is not a single action that the commonwealth has taken so far that corresponds with a single recommendation,'' Ms Pat Anderson, one of the authors of the report that suggested 97 recommendations for the problem, tells us. “The Government is treating aborigines like children,” a fuming Ms. Anderson, who headed the inquiry team, told the reporters. Seems like Prime Minister Howard’s attitude towards the aborigines is not any different than that of the drunken policeman Chatwin describes in his book. But there’s much more to the conspiracy.

The 2006 amendment of the Land Rights Act, 1976, allows individuals to own land, and enables them to get loans on a subsidised interest rate on that land. It’s a pretty old trick. Someone who’s not happy with the community elders decides to own his own land and approaches the bank. The bank, happily gives the loan, taking the documents. And the owner will most probably lose the land to the bank in a few years. The region, with 29% of people with ‘inferior waterworks’ has the highest per capita alcohol consumption in the world. Alcoholism has been a major concern for the communities for years, and the elders are obviously against the drinking behaviour of their people. Howard thought, an alcohol ban would be welcomed by the elders and ‘piss off’ the drunkards. That would naturally increase the chances of the drunkards wanting to be ‘independent’ and go to the banks. Exactly the kind of people they wanted to come to the banks with land. The exaggerated publicity on the grounds of alcoholism and child abuse will prevent leading socio-political agencies from opposing Howard’s move strongly. Anyone opposing the new legislation can be portrayed as ‘supporters’ of alcoholism and child abuse. Something, any organisation that needs public support will be wary of risking.

The new legislation is ready to be put before the parliament. It will scrap off almost all the rights aborigines were granted. The permit system will be removed, and any non-indigenous person can go to the aboriginal areas without any prior permission. The customary laws or cultural practices will be stripped off from their validity in courts, while all other ethnic groups in the country will continue enjoying the privilege. The Government will take over the aboriginal lands for next five years. It proposes to completely stop the funding of Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP), through which over 30% of the aboriginal adult population earns their and their families’ living. The sole income for majority of the families will be stopped that way. This means, they will be more vulnerable and completely dependent on the federal government forces, which will be taking over their lands for the next five years. That’s the wisdom of the highly evolved Caucasian brain.

Let me quote a passage from the very popular novel Walkabout by James Vance Marshall. It’s a small novel the describes the story of two American school children stranded on the desert plains of Australia by a plain wreck, who then meets an aborigine boy on his walkabout – the six month solitary journey on foot across his ancestral land as his test of manhood. The passage that describes their first meeting reads like this: “The three children stood looking at one another in the middle of the Australian dessert. Motionless as the outcrops of granite they stared, and stared, and stared. Between them the distance was less than the spread of an outstretched arm, but more than 100,000 years.” The rest of the book tells a few things humankind learnt to forget in the100,000 years.

One of the very basic beliefs of the native Australians is people don’t own land, but the land owns everything that it allows to grow on it. One of many things the ‘highly evolved’ Europeans can never understand. The European idea of evolution and advancement of civilisation is pretty much skewed. And with their industrious colonisation efforts across the globe, they have successfully established their notion and standard about being civilised and advanced, in all modern communities. This allusion of evolutional advancement is the very foundation of their assumed superiority. Educated people all over the world are blinded with the belief that equality means rising to the levels of European standards of human development. I am too uneducated to understand how a society that can go helpless and paralysed, if all the electrical fuses burn simultaneously, can be called evolved and superior. Call it a highly optimistic society, if you want. A society that survives only on the hope of having every fuse intact. Or, one that is too dumb to think of such a high possibility of a few fuses burning together.

Ridwan Laher has initiated a campaign that calls for a global tourist boycott as a message of protest against Australian government’s move to take over the aboriginal lands. The campaign plan is to collect signatures of all the people around the world who think Howard Government’s move is insanely racist, and against basic human rights. More than an attack on human rights, it’s an effort to destroy a superior civilisation by a pathetically crippled one. Go and add your name to the list of people who supports the campaign. You can do it either by going to Ridwan’s blog, or by clicking on the banner you see on the right hand side of this page. Don’t support the campaign thinking you are helping the aborigines; they don’t need yours or anyone else’s help. Their way of life has survived a hundred thousand years, and will survive even after yours and mine bite the dust. Add your name, only if you think, you, the Australian government, or anyone else has no right to endanger their life and their 100-thousand years’ wisdom of land and life. The petition is open only till October 17^th, 2007. If you have a blog, and if you support the campaign, you can get the banner to display in your blog from Tom.

You can download and read the inquiry report, Little Children are Sacred.
You can also read more about:
The report authors' reaction to Howard's move
Withdrawing the plans of existing government funding
Plans to nullify the validity of customary aboriginal laws

State of the art

Exactly at 12:58 p.m, on October 25, 1999, Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi had the greatest performance of their life. They had named the performance Two Naked Men Jump into Tracy’s Bed. It took fifteen minutes for the artless guards at the art gallery to realise that the performance is not part of the installation, while the enlightened crowd was applauding to their highly artistic minds’ content, who realised the fact only when they read the next day’s newspaper. Much to the disappointment of the audience, the guards had to withdraw the unfortunate men from the scene before they reached the climax of their performance. It was not moral policing, but only coitus interruptus, in the most profound, artistic, figurative sense.

The act was performed at the occasion of that year’s Turner Prize, United Kingdom’s most publicised art award that amounts to £25,000, which is organised by, and at, the Tate Gallery, London. And the installation, which these performers had volunteered to improve by their ingenuous concept, was the famous, and/or infamous, My Bed by Tracy Emin. This artistic piece is the artist’s own double bed, unmade, with soiled clothes and assorted objects lying around. Once it was almost destroyed by a gallery keeper, who tried to clean up the mess. It failed to win the Turner Prize that year. Turner Prize, after all, is not an easy catch. It’s named after J. M. W. Turner, said to be the first of Impressionist painters, and is awarded annually to a British visual artist under the age of 50. One of the earlier winners was a film called 60 Minutes of Silence, which is an hour long shot of a group of people in police uniforms standing still. Every single winner has the art quality that has outdone this particular one, in some conceptual way or other. The 2001 award was given to a work, which was an empty room with its lights going off and on. Presenting the award to the winner that year, Madonna said, “At a time when political correctness is valued over honesty I would also like to say right on motherfuckers!” A statement that would provoke anyone to doubt whether her breasts are real!

My Bed has almost a milestone-ish importance in my own meagre art knowledge; it was the first ever installation art piece I came to know about, though later I read that the first piece of its kind was Fountain, a urinal turned 90 degrees from its normal position with the name R. Mutt written on it, which Marcel Duchamp installed in 1917. The genre became one of the most important expressions of art as concept art started gaining popularity in the 60s. When Charles Saatchi, impressed by the work of a group of artists, and opened a show with their work in 1992, and called it Young British Artists (YBAs), it was a new beginning. A beginning of the end of old means of art.

Saatchi bought Emin’s My Bed for £1,50,000, which provoked one of her former boyfriends to offer another bed of hers, which he owned, for just £20,000. He was not very serious, but Saatchi was. Tracy Emin was one of the founding members of the Stuckist movement along with this former boyfriend, Billy Childish, and few others. And the Stuckists’ fame is all about demonstrating against Charles Saatchi, YBAs, Tate Gallery, and the Turner Prize. Another of her boyfriends was an art curator who had worked with Damien Hirst, the most prominent of concept artists alive today. Soon after meeting him Emin shot to fame with her definitive work titled Everyone I Have Slept With 1963-1995, a blue tent with many names on the inside of its flaps. And that was how one of the founder Stuckists became one of the prominent YBAs.

Of all the YBAs, no one has got the fame that matches Damien Hirst. In 1991 Saatchi offered Damien whatever amount he requires to create a new work. Damien ordered a 14-feet tiger shark from Australia, and put it in a glass tank filled with formaldehyde. Damien called it The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, and billed Saatchi £50,000. Twelve years later Saatchi sold this invaluable piece of art, which by the time had turned into a rotten piece of shark meat in murky formaldehyde solution, for £6.25 million to an American art enthusiast. Generous Damien Hirst offered help to the new buyer, by allowing a replacement of the rotten shark with another. The cost of restoration is undisclosed, but the formaldehyde injection procedure, which ensures that it will last for another 200 years, alone had cost a million USD. In 1995 Hirst had won the Turner Prize, and the award winning piece, Two Fucking and Two Watching, featuring a rotting cow and bull, was banned by public health officials from exhibiting in New York for the fears of ‘vomiting among the visitors’. Possibly, the reason that inspired Hirst to offer the help to restore his rotting shark.

It was only a few of days back I read about the latest work by Damien Hirst called For the Love of God, prompting me to write this piece. His latest work is an 18^th century human skull, in a platinum cast and studded with 8,601 diamonds, created at the cost of £8-10 million, and is priced for sale at £50 million, qualifying it to be the costliest piece of art ever been created. I am not attempting to be an art critique, for I believed to have a highly underdeveloped right brain that doesn’t allow me to appreciate anything modern than the surrealistic art. Nevertheless, I’m quite amused by some simple facts about the people I was talking about, especially Charles Saatchi and Damien Hirst.

The YBAs are children of the 60s, grown up in the turbulent Liberal revival era and influenced greatly by it. It was the powerful ‘Labour is not working’ campaign designed by Charles Saatchi’s advertising agency that brought Margaret Thatcher to the Downing Street office, and it was the oppressive measures of her junta that kept the rebellion alive among the artists in that country. I won’t blame the prevalent mediocrity for this state of affairs of art. Mediocrity, after all, is the sticky glue of civilisation that keeps societies from falling apart. And people like Saatchi or Hirst are the microbes inside the colon of the same society we constitute. And the moist pieces that come out of that colon are the product of the society, not the microbes. The microbes are well aware of it, and it’d be better, if we too are aware of the same fact.

Damien Hirst creates all his works with the help of his assistants, and was never hesitant to acknowledge that. In his opinion the real creative act is conception, not execution, and the progenitor is therefore the artist. Once, one of his assistances who was leaving asked for one of the pieces she had painted for him. Hirst told her to make one of her own and keep. As she insisted on having one the works she had done for him, he said, “ The only difference between one of mine and yours is money.”

I see Damien Hirst in his deathbed, with all sorts of tubes going in and out of his body, making one of the finest installations possible. And I see him conceiving his last work lying down there – A huge glass tank filled with formaldehyde, in which a larger than life human hand with all its fingers folded, except for the longest one, is kept suspended. That big finger will be made of inflated phalli of dead donkeys from Africa, and faces of major art collectors will be imprinted on each. This incredible piece will be named The Virtual Possibility of Life, in the Mind of Someone Dying.

Check out Damien Hirst's White Cube profile, and some of his works.
Read the Guardian blog, on his latest work For the Love of God.
You can also read extracts from an interview of Damien Hirst by writer Gordon Burn.

The great bank robbery

“Hello! I’m Sweet Mouth, from Cut Throat Inc. Do you like to have a credit card, sir?”

“Of course! I would love to have one!”

“Sir, we have silver, gold, platinum…”

“Wait! I’ll tell you my requirements, and probably you can choose the best one for me.”

“Sure, sir.”

“I don’t have a job.”

“That’s absolutely fine, sir. All you need is three month’s bank statement.”

“I don’t have a bank account, either.”

“Don’t worry sir. You can open an account with us.”

“I don’t have any address proof, I stay in a small room that has no documents.”

“It’s ok sir. You can give me your telephone bill, that would be enough.”

“I use a pre-paid connection. You were lucky to get me, it will get expired by midnight”

“I’m sorry, sir… I don’t think…”

“Don’t say it. I need a credit card. Nobody would need a credit card as much as I do now!”

“But, sir…”

“I’m ok with a copper, or wood, or plastic… or even a paper one”

“I’m sorry, sir. I can’t help you, sir. You don’t have a salary slip or bank statement…”

“That’s exactly why I need a credit card! If I have money in the bank, why would I want a credit card?

“You are right, sir. But…”

“Alright Sweet Mouth, please let me know if you come up with any plan that suits people like me.”

“Sure sir. Thank you for talking sir. Bye, and have a nice day!”

That particular kind of ‘nice day’ she wished me about four years back is yet to arrive. A nice day, with one or more credit card bills, a 3-year personal loan, a 5-year vehicle loan, and 20-year old housing loan to pay off. This sort of mortgaged life is one of the most desirable options one is left with these days. And it is pretty difficult to choose the easier way of living.

Today, one can’t live without banks. I still can keep my money stuffed inside my bed, and it will give almost the same amount of interest any bank would. But to do that, I’ll have to take the money out of the bank first, that’s the catch. No one pays in hard cash. Even bearer cheques are hard to get. That’s the second catch, or the catch on the catch – you can’t survive without a bank account.

Fifteen years back, when I opened my first bank account, all needed was two signatures from my father and three from me. And two passport size photographs and fifty rupees. With another fifty rupees I would have got a chequebook too! Opening a bank account was not that easy once I moved out of the little town where everyone in the bank from the peon to the manager knew not just me, but even my forefathers. But then, I had the sweet option to live without a bank account. Salaries were given in hard cash, or bearer cheques as you demand. And then came the new age banks. Banks with carpeted floors, flower vases with fresh flowers, and couches to sit and wait. And when I entered in one such bank for the first time, about six years back, I was offered a comfortable chair, coffee and a bank account. All they had asked for was three of four of my signatures. The sweet chap with a tasteless brown necktie didn’t even ask for my photographs; he shot me instead, with a Polaroid camera. And if you see that photograph, you won’t fail to notice the puzzled wonderment in my half-popped out eyes. And in three or four days, the magic card and its secret code reached me in separate mails. The world had really changed; I had no other option, but to believe.

The traditional banking used to be one of the simplest businesses on earth. With an easier logistics than a teashop. You take money from people giving them an interest, and then you give it to other people for a higher interest. But with this simple way of business it’s almost impossible for banks to have cozy couches and coffee for their customers. And just for the comfort and convenience of their customers, these poor new age banks are pushed to adopt dubious methods, departing from their simple business model.

For a person like me an offer like allowing zero balance was the most comforting of all thoughts. There were innumerable instances the thought of my-hundred rupees-that-I-can’t-have came tormenting, while coughing-up for the cheapest, yet precious, bottle of alcohol. The new banks only demanded an average quarterly balance of five thousand rupees, and I can withdraw to the last paise. It took exactly three months for me to figure out the new business model of these generous banks. Average quarterly balance means I have to keep at least five thousand rupees in the bank, just like a lifetime fixed deposit! Not exactly like a fixed deposit, because they wouldn’t be giving me the 16-20% interest on my deposit as the old, grumpy banks. And if I didn’t keep the balance they will charge 40% interest on the amount as a fine! Not at all fine with me. Still I can have zero balance, only if the amount is a multiple of hundred, because ATMs keep only hundred rupees notes. And if try to withdraw the amount less than hundred from their cash counter, they will charge hundred rupees as the service charge. That means, the banks can keep the change. When was the last time, you tipped like that while being sober?

It’s not just an almost interest free, lifetime fixed deposit, and free change I’m giving to the bank. Just for my added convenience of cozy couches and one time coffee. I’ll pay hundred rupees every year for my ATM card; and I’ll pay usage charges if I access the ATM more than thrice a day when I’m in town, or more than twice in a month when I’m outstation. If I use my card to make a purchase, I’ll pay a service charge for that convenience too. Cheques are more profitable, especially if they bounce. If a cheque is bounced, the bank doesn’t have to pay anyone. Not just that, they will charge fine from the one who issued the cheque, and from the one who presented it!

At this point, I’m more than tempted to tell an anecdote. One Mr. Nice Guy opened a bank account to help his MNC-bank-executive friend, who had a tough time with the necktie and the sales target around his neck. Mr. Nice Guy gave five thousand rupees, and three days later his ATM card and secret code came in different mails. A couple days later the code for telebanking came by another mail. And a few days later another mail came with the codes for Internet banking. Mr. Nice Guy didn’t bother to open any of these mails, because his only good intention was to help his friend to reach closer to his target, not to use the account. About two years later, Mr. Nice Guy went to the bank to close his account and collect his five thousand rupees and its nominal interest, and found his account has hardly two thousand rupees. A sweet bank employee explained it very sweetly to the furious Mr. Nice Guy. He was charged hundred rupees for his Internet banking facility, making his balance in the account to rupees four thousand and nine hundred only. And every quarter, he was paying the fine for not keeping his average quarterly balance of five thousand rupees, like a very comfortable customer.

Since I had learnt the secret behind the cozy couches and stories under the carpets the hardest way, I was not very surprised to read the news that in US alone banks make 40-50 billion USD through unexplained service charges. Service charges for giving you back your own hard earned money, which you had lent to the bank! And this figure is only for personal banking. I couldn’t find the corresponding figure for India, even after googling for hours for it. But, I’m sure, even if the amount they make in profits would be less in India, the percentage wouldn’t be much less. And I believe, even the ones who will explode with anger at a rickshaw driver for two extra rupees are more than comfortable with these glossy banks’ grand robbery. Now I understand what they exactly meant by zero balance.

“But – you see, a bank or a company can’t do that, because those creatures don’t breath air, don’t eat side-meat. They breathe profits; they eat interest on money. If they don’t get it, they die the way you die without air, without side-meat. It’s a bad thing, but it’s so. It’s just so.”

– From The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck.

What do you know about who do you know?

“Thank God! You didn’t name it after your family name!” Scraped Sig. Luca Venzella, who’s a 40-year old single, who knows there’s no such thing as an ideal match (neither in a matchbox nor on a football field), in Orkut Buyukkokten’s scrap book on February 27^th 2004. That was just about a month after orkut.com was officially launched. That wisecrack will go down on the pages of world history one day, if it hasn’t already.

The Young Turk, Buyukkokten came to USA in 1997, to do a Ph. D programme in Computer Science from Stanford. He modified the first sentence of Moby Dick, by changing the name and omitting ‘having little or no money in my purse’ part, to use as the first lines of his personal page in the University website. By completing the course by 2001, his visa had expired and he joined Google for a valid reason to continue living in the waterside of life where money floated and flowed.

Apart from giving massages to its employees (Buyukkokten has self-scraped about it in his scrapbook), Google also asks their employees to devote 20% of the paid working time on their personal projects. Using this one-day-a-week to work, Buyukkokten with his friend and fellow graduate Tyler Ziemann built a social network program called Club Nexus for the undergraduates in Stanford. Seeing its success the duo formed the company called Affinity Engines, and developed InCircle, a similar program for the Stanford Alumni Association. About a year later, Google declared to buy a program developed by its in-house engineers, and launched orkut.com on January 22^nd 2004. The site was just ‘in affiliation’ with Google at that time. And nobody then thought Google will want to become Yahoo, or MSN, but will stay what they are, enjoying their leading position in search engine business. Though it has later integrated to the Google portal along with Gmail, Gtalk and Blogger, even after 3 years, orkut.com is still its beta version. That’s about not ‘wasting’ any more money on development unnecessary.

Four months later Affinity Engines sued Orkut Buyukkokten and Google for breaking the contract and stealing their source code. According to them, they have uncovered nine software bugs in orkut.com, identical to InCircle, and indicative of a common source code. AEI claims that Buyukkokten had given written and verbal agreement that he won’t work on any other social network programs, as a commitment to support his project with them – InCircle. To promote orkut.com as a trustworthy site, the membership was only on invitation, a method that was proved a huge success for Gmail. And there were 100,000 members by 48 hours of its launch, and it crossed the million mark in 6 months. Proving their initial tagline – expand the circumference. That’s exactly what Google did with orkut.com – expanding its circumference.

The registration process demands 5 or 6 pages of personal information to be filled in. And more than 50 percentage of over 43 million registered users provided their personal information in detail. More than generating revenue directly from the new tool, it was this invaluable user data – the kind of demographic data any marketing machine would need, that Google was aiming for.

Another method they used to fuel the site’s popularity was the user-friendly public message board, instead of a private one. Though everyone knows that it’s a public message board and anybody can access it, people tend to use it like a private message service. That’s easy to understand from the psychological state of the user, because he or she is seeing their message board only after signing in, and it creates the same impression of reading your mails or private messages. And it successfully reduces the number of aliases, and profile of anybody belongs to a friend list has more chances to be authentic than fake. There’s also a private messaging facility, almost similar to the public one. But it purposely involves you more steps to reply to a message, and none of the users I know uses it.

Though, you should be 18 years or older to be eligible to be a member, there are millions who are much younger in the network. It had created a huge issue in Brasil, where over 90% people who have Internet access at home are registered users of orkut.com. Even now, over 60% of the users are from Brasil, and about 20% from India, and about10% from USA. “The people in Brasil are very friendly”, commented Buyukkokten, “and that’s the only reason I can think of its huge success in Brasil”. I can think of a few more. Because, sooner, Brasil and India will have an equal share in the network. Yes, the two havens newly opened up for global marketers.

I have also found on net, from unreliable sources, that Orkut Buyukkokten earns from every single profile registered, every single friend added, every single photograph uploaded, every single scrap and for each of its replies, etc. Though, I’m not sure about the amounts, I’m sure that Google pays to Buyukkokten. Why would they pay? By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us [Google] a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials. That’s one of the terms every single orkut.com user had agreed upon while registering. I don’t know what they will do with your photographs, or stupid scarps.

There’s a possibility that I can think of. Some more rambling before coming to that.

Some 12 years back, one of my friends who was more interested in textbooks than the usual philosophical bullshitting rebellious teenagers like me were aimlessly indulging, told me one small secret of life.

“There are no secrets as such,” he told me, “only that the people who know your secrets won’t meet the people who don’t know your secrets.”

“That’s my concept of God, the one who knows everything. Till that date when all the information is split and kept, we all will stay as humans ,” I quipped.

It sounded really funny then, and sounds somewhat scary now. It might take some more time before Google becomes God, but it can soon be a power Orwell, Burgess, Bradbury, and the other dystopians were warning us about. You very well know what it’s like if your bank’s server is down for a day. Once the filthy old currencies stop being around, you will be worth only a few digits in some remote storage device. And it will be a Google or Yahoo or MSN who will be having that device at their command. What do I know?

“By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.”

- The last sentence of Chapter One, Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

Dumb enough? Act smart now!

Buy the pill; that’s all you have to do. And you will be smart overnight, though you might still remember that you were dumb once!

It could possibly be misleading. Let me put it straight. It’s not the content of one of many, rejected advertising copy that I had written over the past years. It’s about a piece of pretty old news that assures me, in near future medical science will be successful in restoring the part of the brain that stores long-term memories. Or more clearly, you can grow your brains, if that’s needed.

I came to know about it a month back or so, when one of my friends forwarded the link to an archived article in The New York Times, dated back to March 17, 1998. It reads about a path-breaking discovery that brain cells can, and do, grow back in adults. It is contrary to the wide-held belief that we, animals or humans, may lose, but never can grow back the brain cells, once they reach adulthood. Though, it was known that rats can do it, but the experts believed humans might not follow the same pattern as in the case of nicotine using rats. Now, they too can believe, because they have found the same phenomenon in monkeys too. And now they say, it is amazing.

Amazing. Well, it could really be. Plastic surgery was not invented to sell odd-shaped and oversized undergarments either. However, scientists working in neuropsychopharmacology are aiming towards a possible cure for diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and injuries caused by strokes and trauma. It’s almost decade-old news now. I searched on net to find further developments that might have happened over the course of time, but couldn’t find any. But, I’m pretty much optimistic about our brilliant scientists. They must have gone further ahead, and most probably are testing the drugs in some African village after finding favourable results in many monkeys.

Even if the drugs come to the market in near future, there’s nothing much to be too hopeful. They are going to be as expensive as they are supposed to be. They have spent Himalayan amounts on research and drug development, and they would need their ROI. Not many patients are going to get the benefit either. Because, both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are evening life ailments, and the caretakers of the patients can rarely expect an ROI. By the time euthanasia will be legal, and more importantly cheaper, anyway. But, there’s a real positive side to the story as well. That is the unlimited possibilities it will open to today’s limited scope of cosmetic surgeries. What’s beauty without brains, after all!

Don’t worry about your new hairdo, or the newly transplanted hair. The pill they are developing is not to be implanted in your brain. You can consume it orally, like any other pill. Initially, you may need a nurse to remind you of the pills, but as the pills start working you can fire the nurse and remember to take the pills by yourself! And this improved memory will work not just for this pill, but for any pill you want to take. How better can it get?

Now, don’t get too excited, and start feeling stressed thinking how long more you have to wait to put your mouth on the pill. Because, the scientists have also observed the fact that stress can diminish the speed of growth of new cells. They have noticed rats who are allowed to run around and play with toys grow the cells faster than the ones who are kept caged. Buy new toys and play with them more often. I’m not very sure about the effect of video games, because rats don’t play video games. And relax. Take your yoga classes, and/or take up a course in Art of Living for the time being. It’s cheaper, and will save a lot of your money later. Do not worry, if you are not rich and dumb enough.

And I’m dreaming a new world so beautiful and brilliant! Where people will remember all the names at least, if not birthdays, and office meetings. And will laugh to wisecracks, without demanding explanations that will only help to conclude that the joker has a very weird sense of humour. You will no longer need to say that the pun was not intended, just to suggest that there really was a pun.

There’s no need to be so euphoric about it. Because, if it’s an allopathic drug, there will of course be some side effects. And I can see the side effects too very clearly. From LKG admissions to beauty pageants, drug testing will be mandatory. We have to respect only the natural, whatever are our advancements in science. And if you couldn’t control the number of intelligent jokes at your friend’s party, you are going to get more suspicious looks than desired laughter. One of those really arrogant ones will come up and ask, “So, you are on pills, huh?” But with the pills, it’ll be easier to remember the fact that you will have to keep your cool, or your cells will grow slower and you will have to eat more pills. And who knows! You might even be able to give back a smarter reply too, if you have completed the essential first few courses.

The wise had once said, ignorance is bliss. Remember?

What a show, uff!!!

“We've become bored with watching actors give us phony emotions. We are tired of pyrotechnics and special effects. While the world he inhabits is, in some respects, counterfeit, there's nothing fake about Truman himself.”

- Christof, the character in the film, The Truman Show.

Reality, at times, is pretty hard to swallow. Especially, when it comes sandwiched between prime commercial airtime. Roughly about half of commercial TV programmes available on the box today are reality shows of one nature or other, not including the News.

If you are one who lives in this silly small world, you know what I am about to talk. It’s about the leggy lass, Ms. Shetty and the hullabaloo. For the last 15 years or so the needle on her weighing scale stayed stuck where it was. And we fondly called her a dumb damsel. And today, she stands tall, figuratively too for a change, as the courageous survivor of merciless racial discrimination. The Big Brother was watching; and the world was watching the Big Brother. It happens not in India, but in Blair’s land. No, not Eric Arthur Blair, the other one.

Fortunately, I don’t have access to cable TV. So I didn’t have to suffer the torture of listening to the panel discussions during News on the issue. I don’t read newspapers daily either, and I was saved from reading those silly news just below the dateline. Still, me too had to have my share. I heard people talking about it. I saw the headline while walking past one of the newpaper offices, on the display boad in front of their building. I read blogs with numerous outgoing links, and embedded streamed videos. And that presses open my big mouth.

The show, is claimed to be Britain’s most popular reality show, and is on for a few years now. The participants are auditioned months before, and are selected for the show with a fee that approximately amounts to Rs. 3 crore. I have no idea, whether each participant gets a fixed fee, or whether it’s negotiable as per one's celebrity quotient. The amount I specified, is what our Shetty girl was offered. Apart from the fee, housemates will be given shopping tickets, treats, and such. And the winners will win more money, of course.

Those were some simple reasons for a person, who thinks he or she is a celebrity, to appear for the audition. Now the winner of the show is the last person remains in the house after individual evictions that happen every week. Now, a participant cannot wish to have the other housemates around for long, if he or she wants to win. And arguably, this encouraged bitching with garnishes of style and fame is what keeps the viewers keep glued to the screen.

Now, the remarks which were celebrated as examples of racial abuse were really hilarious. One of them was the slang for female genitals, and I wonder since when it has become a racist remark! Of course, no one said of one shade is better than the other during the abuse. The next one was even more interesting. She was also called a dog! That was sexist, if not racist. Our poor girl was asked to go back to the slums she came from! How cruel was that!!!! Expecting a bollywood heroine who survived in the industry for nearly 15 years, and is known to do every trick to get her pay on time, to call a slum dweller!!! How can a celebrity in India live like million others in the country, in slums or mud huts? It’s beyond any sane person’s imagination. And we are talking about a reality show.

But I have found more interesting stuff about the show. It’s about the show, not about the participants. This year, the Big Brother’s house has a disorientating theme! The garden comes with otherwise interior furnishings like wallpaper, carpets, dining table, and even a chandelier. And there is faux grass in the kitchen, and garden chairs in the living room! Not disoriating enough? Don’t worry. There are 14 basic rules that every inmate should follow. And the first one is there shouldn’t any contact with the outside world. I assume they are talking about not having a TV. Housemates are allowed to carry a suitcase full of stuff, but that should not include books, or any writing material. So, if you are illiterate the chances to clear the auditions could be easier. One is not allowed to carry any personal medication as well. I think, that is meant to prevent the participants from sneaking in glycerine. The list of banned paraphernalia includes sane things like a musical instruments, radios, music players, calenders, clock or watches. And aslo mobile phones and gismos of same genre. That’s to avoid a fight over the features one has on the mobile telephony equipment they own, which might trigger violence in a mass scale. And if you didn’t get disoriented by these carefully designed evironment, Big Brother might use his reserved rights to expel you from his house.

At this point, I’m wondering what’s the job of a director, many associate directors, script writers and assistants in a reality show. If they have nothing to do, I would like to chose one of those careers. It seems pretty interesting. And rewarding too, I hope.

But why an innocent Indian girl? Because, there are nearly 2 million Indians, and almost same number of asians among the target audience, in UK alone. And I’m sure some audience survey agency have coned the makers of the programme with the report that the show doesn’t have right mindshare of this high potential retail customers. Yes, reality sucks. And at times, bites.

Of a reason why I can’t afford a marriage

When it comes to economics, I’m more at lost than Ms. Sawant is in elegance. What I know about the subject are some simple facts. Like it’s stupid to pay a bottle’s price for an ounce of drink in a pub. Or, that you can’t buy something when you can’t afford it. Complex things like why a credit card is being offered only when you have more than enough debit, flies fast over my head. And I am very well amused when I hear or read about funny amateur theories of economics.

Since the day my country got a crush on global economic development and started embracing so-called progressive liberal economic policies; amateur economic experts have been spawning up here and there. Almost every one who has more money than enough to make the ends to meet became a self-proclaimed authority in economics. Just like almost every literate belongs to proletariat assume of being a profound communist thinker in Kerala.

It was one report about a assembly discussion happened in Kerala, and a self-proclaimed freakenomist’s comment on it that provoked me to think of my ignorance in economics now. I was entertained by the same economist’s observation that increasing prices actually helps to fight and to a certain extend eliminate individual greed, on one earlier occasion, and had mentioned it in my last post.

The Kerala Assembly recently had got together to condemn ostentatious weddings in the state and came out with suggestions to curb wedding expenses. The leftist state government believes it should intervene to curb extravagance in marriages, wants to come out with a law to limit marriage expenses. The opposition is too in favour of this, but not the above-mentioned economist. This very funny economist states that the motivation for such a move is pure jealousy than sensible economics. Sensible, arguably, is the funniest adjective that I know of, and it can make almost every noun look oxymoronic.

The theory presented is not new, but the same ghost of the ugly liberalisation fairy. If the state promotes lavish weddings instead, it will pump more money into the economy, and will provide employment to related industries. It sure does pump money into the economy, but pumps from where? And why does this economist call it stupid populism when it actually cuts down employment of economically lower classes? Just another accidental paradox? Or the legendary lack of human insight natural to people who are too comfortable in their chairs?

A middle class wedding in Kerala is not as extravagant as the adjective suggests. It doesn’t last for a week, but only a few hours; and it costs only about Rs. 1-5 lakhs. And this amount is only a part of the expenses for the bride’s family, irrespective of cast or religion. In Hindu communities, the bride’s family organises the wedding; in other communities, the dowry is handed over in advance. And the expenses for the marriage ceremony is a percentage proportional to the dowry offered.

There of course are laws against dowry; and it has been surpassed by the legitimate will of the parent to ‘gift’. If the government comes up with another law to put restrictions on wedding expenses, that too might be surpassed with some other logic. But that doesn’t mean the government should encourage it, if it can’t eliminate it. And if the law is enforced, it’ll be easier for the parents to ‘marry off’ their daughters, but could be bad on banks and in turn, the thriving economy.

Now it triggers the freakenomist hormones in me. If the government brings up a law to make it mandatory that every wedding should be lavish for the noble purpose of pumping more money into the economy, there would be lesser marriages arranged and excecuted by parents in the state. That may not help the economy much, but might force people think a little more sensibly, and humanly, when it comes to a marriage. But then that is not populism or sensible economics. And therefore won’t be having any takers.

Still, “it’s incredibly encouraging,” said Dr. Helene Gayle

Whoever said, prevention is better than cure, was, with no doubt, a white man or woman. Now, you have a good news and a bad news, if I put it in the classical American way of breaking a bad news. The good news here is that the tests of an HIV-preventive pill is announced as a near success. The scientists are not really too happy about it, as what they really want is a single dose vaccine, not a daily dose of oral pills. Oh! I forgot it in my effort to sound elegantly dramatic. No. There’s no bad news, for those who will be benefited by this breakthrough. Others are out the context (and the continent, of course).

The little piece of two-column news appeared on the back page of last Sunday’s (August 13, 2006) Hindu, credited to AP. It filled the gap above the Su Do Ku, and beside Gunter Grass’s much belated confession, made right in time for the next-month release of his memoirs.

The article carefully edited to fit the unsold space for advertisements, read like this:

MILWAUKEE: The first test of a daily pill to prevent HIV infection gave a tantalising hint of success, but a real answer must await a larger study due out next year.

The experiment, done in Africa, mainly showed that the drug Viread is safe when used for prevention. Fewer people given the drug caught the AIDS virus than those given dummy pills, but so few in either group became infected that valid comparisons cannot be made, scientists said.

Still, "it's incredibly encouraging," said Dr. Helene Gayle, co-chair of the International AIDS Conference in Toronto, where the results were released on Saturday.

The experiment was conceived in centrally air-conditioned laboratories in Northern America, and is done in the streets of Africa. On a special species, generally referred in other parts of the world as people. I am sure that it has been done in accordance with international guidelines applicable to the testing of clinical drugs. So, I must agree with Dr. Helene Gayle. It’s incredibly encouraging. And, yes. There were some 400 participants were planned to include from two US cities, apart from nearly 5,000 from Africa, Thailand and Peru. A little more elaborated version of this AP news piece is found in The Washington Times site. It explains the test procedure, little more specifically.

A study by Family Health International, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, tested it on women in Africa at high risk because of multiple sex partners. None had HIV at the start of the study. They were randomly assigned to get either daily Viread or placebos, and all were counseled and given condoms.

No safety problems emerged – an important first step, said Leigh Peterson, project manager for Family Health International. After an average of six months, only two HIV cases developed among the 427 women on Viread, compared with six infections among the 432 given the fake drug.

"We really would be irresponsible to draw conclusions at this time," because those are too few cases to make judgments on, said Dr. Ward Cates of Family Health ternational, "but it does underscore the importance of moving forward very quickly now on the other studies on the drawing board."

I agree completely, Dr. Ward. It was very irresponisble; and it’s the African gods that played the spoilsport. All the 432 who were exposed with the protection of fake drug were supposed to be get infected, like dependable guinea pigs. Those who received the actual drug, also received its side effects. FDA has approved the drug, which is already in use to treat the HIV infected, as an effective preventive pill. Statistics has nothing to do with commonsense, if you already don’t know. The article also assures that no safety problems had emerged, and it was an important first step. Yes, no body threw an infected needle at Leigh Peterson, the project manager.

Meanwhile, Institute of Medicine, another offshoot of National Academy of Medicine as the FDA, has submitted a proposal to restart the practice of using jail inmates for clinical trials of developing drugs. With a humanitarian clause, of course. It is proposed where the experimental medication ‘could benefit’ the participants. The practice was ‘almost’ discontinued after the notorious 40-year research titled ‘Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male’ that began in the 1930s. In 1972, 400 of the ‘participants’ were diagnosed with syphilis but never told them of their illness or provided any treatment for it – even after a cure was discovered. Instead, the researchers used the men to study the progress of the disease. They all eventually died from syphilis. What could, at times, is might not.

Now, I shouldn’t be a non-progressive, self-centric, idealist. I should look at the big white picture. And understand the good of the cause. ‘Good of the cause’, never was an exclusive excuse of the Communists. Africa is the one continent worst affected by the HIV. And it’s a fight people of the world should fight together to survive, with each one in his and her own mite. Now, you can’t expect brilliant scientist from Africa. And one should understand, patient research endeavours are too much to ask from them. For that we have shiploads of philanthropic white men and women. And the Africans can at least help the cause by being the test partners. Let me remind you, it’s for the good of the cause, and it’s a fight we have to fight together. “It is incredibly encouraging,” Dr. Gayle had said.

NGOs in many parts of the world have done routine, well-organised protests against using animals for drug testing. Some have protested against using humans too. We can’t forget that development of new, more effective, life saving drugs are not just the necessity of pharmaceutical companies, but are important to each one of us too, who are prone to deadly deceases. What the world now need is not groups of people with any other intentions than blocking the progress of human kind; but a more pro-human, pro-progressive, and incredibly encouraging society.

Why can’t the nations of the world deal it with the same stupid, yet effective, method they adopt to fight against each other? After all, drugs are ammunition to fight against deadly microorganisms. And it’s too a fight human kind has to fight to survive. Wouldn’t it be great to have an army exclusively to test new drugs up on?

This new army of proud, philanthropic men and women can have immaculate white uniforms with blood-red epaulettes. They can have distinctive decorations for victories over viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens. The existing red ribbons and yellow wristbands too can be made exclusive, with specific regiment monograms on them. The selection procedure should be scientifically designed; and there should be ample advertising budget to promote it as the noblest of the careers, which demands physical, psychological and intellectual superiority.

The selected candidates should be rigorously trained to walk with synchronised steps in mirror-polished boots, preferably with some medical equipment in their hands. Higher-grade personnel should also be trained to play golf, use cutlery, and dance in ballrooms. Surgical masks could be made mandatory in the dress code for ceremonial balls. Mortality rates can be expected only as good as the regular fighting forces. So that it shouldn’t affect the image of the existing forces. In due course, Bacteria Crosses and Viral Chakras too can be introduced. And in non-testing times, they can be of great help to the nation on occasions of gas leakage tragedies and the like.

Isn’t the thought incredibly encouraging?

This proposal cannot be implemented immediately. It might take more time than my remaining lifetime. I am not being prudishly ethical. I don’t want this to happen to me, my family, or friends. If a preventive pill or vaccine is made available in the market for a terminal decease, like AIDS, me too will be standing in the queue to buy it. But, I wish that wouldn’t happen at the cost of thousands of guinea humans. I would rather be alright with contracting a deadly virus, if it’s not from a blood bag, through a needle, or at a razor’s edge.

You can read here the article appeared in Hindu. And here is the one seen in The Washington Times site. And when you are comfortably numb, you can click here and it will take you to the news item about a proposal to make better use of jail inmates as drug testing personnel. You can read more about Viread and its side effects here. Here is the news about FDA approval for the drug. And read this blog, posted when the drug trials began a year ago.

Me too have some reservations…

Remember the street plays titled pro-reservation and anti-reservation strikes that used to run full house (and empty classrooms) all over my country? I’m not trying to remember the similar, and much more dramatic one that was staged fifteen years back. I’m asking about the recent one. The Medicos stir. Now you remember.

Me too had forgotten about it. I don’t know any of those protests are still on. It’s media that controls collective public memory. And it is another newspaper report unintentionally brightened up my memory of medical students in their not-so-white housecoats holding candles in an early night protest. This one came up yesterday, about thousands of engineering seats in colleges in Karnataka being left unfilled.

I am not yet able to figure out the present admission procedures in Karnataka. Those are defined and controlled by two or more governing bodies, and few more in the case of institutes controlled by autonomous boards. This particular report gives me the figures about the engineering colleges that have to follow CET procedures for admissions. I had failed almost all my mathematics papers before successfully dropping out the college. But I had cleared my statistics paper. Statistics is fun for people with an average intelligent quotient. Here’s a sample. In the last academic year there were more than 9,000 vacancies in these engineering that remained vacant. This year it is about 3,200. That is after cutting the offered seats by more than 3000. In private unaided colleges, 40% of the seats are ‘reserved’ under management quota, which are duly filled (sold?) every year. 40% are under concessional-fee, and the rest 20% are under higher-fee scheme. The concession fee is Rs. 15,000 and higher-fee is around Rs. 80,000. And these fees are almost half or lesser compared to those for medical studies. The fees for last year’s admissions were higher. Now, you have all the figures, and no way to know the situation is a better one or not! If you score brilliantly in the entrance test, you will rightly be entitled to have the option: pay it, or leave it. I would like to know the number of students who are eligible for admissions, but are not. Statistics sometimes is really mean.

Exactly here is where I want to bring in the flashback: the Medicos Stir. Was it only me who wondered why the anti-reservation agitation was called the Medicos Stir, when the proposed reservations are applicable to all fields of higher education? That was because most of the organised protesters were from medical institutes. The reason is obvious; it is in medical studies the reservations will make the most impact. Is there a ‘healthcare gene’ in uppercast individuals, similar to the American discovery of ‘starvation gene’ in Asians and Africans? It is something only our medical professionals can answer.

The reservation bill is of course motivated by political ambitions. So are the protests against it. The later enabled a panwala to wear a medical professional's attire before burning himself up with it. It looks like a classic example of natural double negation to me. Those who shout for equality surely know some are more equal than others. If one has to worry about the right of learning lost by reservations, he or she has to be that rich. And the reservations are applicable only for the admissions, not the marks one should secure to pass. In our educational system you can pass most of the exams by answering up to 60% questions wrong. To add to that, we have a very healthy unemployment percentage that would ensure only the best can actually use their academic qualifications. Then, what more brain damage reservations could possibly make?

What is there inside the football?

The school I went for my basic education had very different ideas than the ones I learnt there. Academic excellence was the prime goal of an educational institution in those days. There were, of course, weekly hours, and annual days dedicated for nurturing extra-curricular activities – arts and sports. Among these castaways of the academic system, arts were given a deserving superiority over sports. The reason for this is obvious. Unlike sports, arts are more sophisticated and deal with ones intellectual abilities. Civilised man’s attitude towards the primitive and instinctive human nature is not much different from that of the nouveau riche towards the less privileged. The most one can expect is sympathy, and on a fortunate day, charity. It has not changed much during the last 25 years, except for a slight growth in the chances of building a career in one of those extra-curricular activities. This won’t change much, as long as development and progress are interpreted as synonyms.

Efforts of educational systems around the world have been very successful in nipping our primitive intelligence in the very bud. This of course managed to keep individuals excel in non-academic professions a minority, but couldn’t do much damage to the popularity. The danger popularity could bring up is efficiently kept under control by awarding the entertainment status, something for the few hours after work, to arts and sports. Human spirit can be crippled with some constant effort, but I’m not sure whether it can be eliminated or not.

According to some recent market research, in India alone, the FIFA World Cup final matches will be watched by 70-100 million people on television. And in countries who are playing the finals, 95% TVs are estimated to be tuned to the game. The authenticity of the figures is of course questionable, but a few millions added or subtracted cannot make any substantial difference to the point I am raising here. India doesn’t have representation in the competition, and all those millions of Indians are supporting some other country with an almost equal feverishness that the playing countries have. This is not a fact only for India. As there are only 32 finalists, and half of them are already eliminated after the first round of matches, that’s a similar situation in most parts of the globe.

One argument I could think of is that when you don’t belong to any of the two teams competing in a match, you naturally possess the position of neutrality. I agree. But that privilege naturally ends at the moment you decide to take sides.

The FIFA World Cup is arguably the most commercialised sports event on our planet. It is miles ahead of the divine Olympic Games in that aspect. And unlike Olympic Games, the FIFA World Cup doesn’t pretend having the noble cause of uniting and celebrating humankind. Ironically, and defying intentions, this professional football extravaganza is much closer to the goal of the Olympic Games of amateur roots. My fellow countrymen, including the fanatically patriotic ones, are supporting Brasil, Argentina and Germany. Many go a few miles ahead in the idea of universal brotherhood by supporting the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese, and behold, the English. There’s a logical difficulty in buying the argument of the spirit of sports breaking political and cultural boundaries, especially when each team represents a political entity and not any neutral community or geographical area. And because of its clearly expressed political identity, it cannot ask for the privileges that art, literature and music enjoy.

We live in a small world that is getting smaller by day. And most of it now fits into a football. Does this disprove the biggest universal myth we are taught to call country? Or it just emphasises the power of economical realities over political realities?