Weird questions? May be not.

Walk into one of these glassy and glossy malls which throng most of urban India and of the many things the one thing in particular that catches my attention are the abundant number of "couples" that I see moving there. Pairs of guys and girls in the age group of around 17 to 30.

(Disclaimer: I have no experience of having been to any place ever in my life with another girl. I have neither ever been on any date nor have I ever asked any girl out. My maximum experience in these directions is to have danced with some girl at a ball or parties or dandiya. So all that I am writing here stems from what I observe around me.

Further it will be apparent that all my discussions are biased towards the heterosexual relations since I don't have much understanding of the homosexual relations. Of course this bias is not because I am against homosexuality but simply because I have never interacted with any homosexual. Along the similar lines my discussions also completely exclude eunuchs since again I have no interaction with them and hence a lack of understanding of them. Of course homosexuals and eunuchs are very much part of the human society and ideally any human issue should also include them but somehow this wretchedly biased society has so surgically excluded them from the mainstream that so many people live all their life with no understanding of them but only filled with socially grown repulsion for them for no logical reason. )

These couples are seen hanging around in the Barista or the Cafe-Coffee Day or any of these kind of hangouts. Its such an amazing phenomenon that is happening around me that has always baffled me. How come these pairs of guys and girls happen to meet and like each other? How many of these pairs are in love? How many of these pairs are just bonded by sexual attraction for each other? How many of them are just having a casual time out with the other and how many of them will end up living together for a life time? Anyway to begin with it seems that an highly improbable statistics has worked in their favour that they found a person to go out with!

Let us focus on that section of these couples which plan to have children and set up a family in the conventional sense. From what I get to hear and see around me it seems that this section is pretty large. And what I also infer from what I hear from others is that the guys involved in the relationship are pretty keen to have children. (I am not aware as to what is the general feminine standpoint but I have heard some women say that for the stability of a relationship it is important to have children. For some reason beyond my comprehension many guys feel this instinct to have children and have a family. Note: this feeling goes much beyond just sexual drive. I somehow don't seem to comprehend why 2 people in love can't just be happy living together without having children.)

But somehow again by some weird statistics these things fit together and many of these couples marry and also have children and probably their children will also fit into these statistics and they will also feel the need to marry and have children and somehow this cycle keeps going on. And the weird thing is that this instinctive cycle is not just restricted to the section of people I started out with who had out in the malls but cuts right across all social, economic, linguistic or cultural divisions.

A large section of the people right from the people living in deadly poverty in the most terrible slums of India to the richest and the glamorous of the society...this one instinct equalizes them all...the instinct to have children and to set up a family..the instinct to have a next generation with a hope that my son/daughter will have a better life than mine and will live a better life than mine. The guy in the slum dreams that his son will have a good job and will have a house of his own and the guy leading a large business group dreams that his son will take the business to new heights.

{Why isn't it possible to explain to that poor guy living in the slums that if you don't have enough money to support yourself properly then how do you hope to bring up a one more child? I simply don't understand how these simple logic get washed by this weird instinct to pass on the genetic code! This instinct is unexplainable to say the least.}


{ I am deliberately using "son" here since I can't forget the extreme gender inequality that India has where the society is light-years away from looking at men and women on equal footing. Indian society commits a million crimes against women everyday germinating from the thousands of years old gender bias ingrained into it. Unless the women in every home actually start realizing and fighting for their independence and equality in their own family then this male chauvinistic society of India is never going to change and it will keep teaching in the books to children "Mother cooks food for the family". I just hated this statement in the books right since I was in kindergarten. My mother was first my teacher and given that she is a doctor she was also the first medical help. She taught me basic geometry (much before school taught me these things in class 6, my mother taught me to construct the incircle and circumcircle of a triangle when I was pretty young and all mathematics till I could start reading things on my own from class 3 or 4 and of course taught me a lot of biology. In no way can I imagine my mother as the one "who cooks food for the family". And of course she almost saved me from various things that were beyond my control and could have potentially completely jeopardized my life...things that I can't share here. And later in my life it was to my mother that I disclosed and cried when my fist serious love in life crashed...it is just amazing as to how much I could share with my mother that I could go and tell her of one of the biggest disasters in my life when I lost my first serious love.


How many of these girls that I see hanging around in the malls if they become mothers later in their life will be mothers like mine?


And coming back to that cycle that I was talking of. It seems to just go one without any rhyme or reason. And then this society will complaint that the world is getting polluted, that plastic is choking this earth, that there is less space to live etc. etc. Every generation comes in full of this instinct to pass on the genetic code and then what follows is simply a consequence. And definitely human beings haven't been built to adapt to nature but has a weird piece of brain attached on the top of the shoulders which comes up with all possible ways to bend nature to fit its needs and obviously nature back fires. And yet this society keeps producing new human beings who with every passing generation will live in more and more polluted earth and in smaller and smaller boxes that chequer the cities.

And then given this unstoppable cycle of reproduction, the society goes in search of producing more life sources from lesser and lesser raw material and will keep growing more and more sophisticated industries and more and more genetically engineered seeds to grow more crops out of less land. And then this cycle gets to the limit of its recursive stupidity when we keep expanding the cities and keep eating into the the crop lands and convert them into industries and keep complaining that resources are going down.

On one hand we keep reducing the available land to cultivate and on the other hand we come up with weirdly engineered seeds to grow more out of less land. Isn't it obvious that this process of indiscriminate expansion will only backfire.

Every generation will see pairs of couples populating the glossy malls and using up watts of energy to run these huge AC malls and guzzling gallons of coke in plastic bottles without any thought as to what will happen to the plastic. And these couples in the malls give birth to another generation of couples who will again populate the newer and probably bigger malls in the next generation and will drink more gallons of coke and will throw the plastic bottles.

Why are we as a society collectively failing to prevent this stupid recursive cycle of reproducing purely driven by illogical instincts and then producing more plastic waste and reducing crop land and increasing industries and then eating genetically grown food.

Why can't we stop this mindless circle?

Why does falling in love and sexual attraction have to lead to increasing the population?
Why do these fundamental emotions have to lead to self-destruction of the society?

Just an imagination...

Just a few random thoughts. Apologies for the lack of grammatical correction or organization or attempt at coherence.

Imagine:

a cold day with snow all around and frost on the window panes and the mellow dew sunlight filtering into the room through that..and sleeping on a soft white bed under large white quilts the entire day...and green meadows outside over which a black stallion is riding by.

and far away is faintly visible in the fog a series of blue mountains with moss green vegetation on it..and far away one can see some houses where people are cooking porridge and the smoke is rising through the chimneys into the blue sky shadowed with cotton like clouds...and sleeping in the wooden room while thats what the world outside is.

and the only thing that disturbs this melancholic silence is the quaint tune of the flute of the shepherd who has taken his flock of sheep to graze on the pastures on the hills and somewhere far away there is a water fall...the faint sound of water falling onto the hard rocks and frothing up in its desperation to break the rocks...and you sleeping in the bed happily disturbed by these sounds

something exists because humanity strongly believes that it is true

sheer force of imagination can make abstract things tangible reality.

its just like the concept of God. like love, like the end of the universe .. people just believe in these things strongly without any proof of their existence

and these look real to many people.

Its just like suddenly believing that one particular man can change the world. Just like falling in love hoping this lady will change life.
Its temporary insanity and yet we continue to imagine and err.

Today are we really all Mumbaikers? (Part 3) {Characater of terror and what money can and cannot buy.}

{This article has also been put up here: Reform Our Democracy blog }



A naive question that sometimes rises in my mind is if let us say India were a nation where everyone is well-fed and every person has a happy life and everyone is well-educated then will India become completely resistant to all sorts of terror activities? Will such an India be a land which doesn't even become the breeding ground for terrorism? If everyone in this world has sufficient resources to survive then will that world be devoid of terrorism?

I deeply feel that the face of terror has changed a lot and the modern form of terrorism CAN NOT be checked by access to good life to everyone. Osama comes from a very rich family and his top men are well-educated professionals who are doctors, engineers etc.

We should realize that terrorists are no Robin Hoods who are fighting to acquire resources for some deprived people. They are basically thinkers who are motivated by some idealism beyond measure and are not coming from any economically deprived background.

Of course one is aware of how many poor families are exploited by these terror groups. They get threatened to pay either a large sum of money to these outfits or send some of their young men in the family to join the group. Obviously the poor people choose the later alternative. The poor section of the people are very vulnerable to exploitation and they eventually act as feeding centers of these groups.

But even then the question rises if there were no such poor people to exploit will terror groups get crippled?

Again I feel that the answer is NO. There are thousands of intellectuals across the world who are brain-running these organizations. They are well educated people with specific ideological motives. They are sharper diplomats than most governments have and are fine thinkers. They have propaganda running all around to motivate the young and educated to join their outfits and become vehicles in their way to attain those political and ideological goals. There is a huge section of these terror groups who are joining these outfits not out of any need or force but by sheer motivation of ideology.

A world where resources are available to everyone is not going to prevent the rise of this educated and motivated section of the terror groups.

One must realize that not every lay man can be converted into a terrorist. It is not easy to motivate a person to go on a kill and have him kill thousands. It takes a lot of awareness and understanding (or probably mis-understanding!) of the history and political complications that exist in this world to feel motivated for a reason and motivated enough to lay down one's life and kill thousands for it. It is a very different level of inspiration than what we can off-hand imagine. Many feel inspired by the words of some great orators like say Vivekananda or by the words of some public figure or politicians but these inspirations are far less than what is required to lay down one's life for it or kill thousands for it.

There is probably no one in India who is motivated by any politician or spiritual leader in India to the extent to which the terrorists are motivated by their intellectual gurus running these organizations from far away.

War against terrorism is not a fight against a few hundred men with sophisticated rifles but a fight against some ideologies which are far more stronger than anything else when it comes to motivate people.



To summarize we should realize the following character of the terrorists:


1. They are NOT a bunch of irrational people creating havoc. They are decisive thinkers with immense education behind them, who have a very specific interpretation of history and politics of this world. They are cool thinkers working with definite purpose and methods. They are people working with definite organization and discipline.

One can put it this way that if someday India concedes Kashmir to Pakistan then Masoor Azad and such men will be hailed as "freedom fighters" by many people and whose lives will be taught in history books in some parts of the world just as we teach about the lives of Bhagat Singh to Indian school children. Reciprocally British considered Bhagat Singh to be a terrorist and life of Bhagat Singh is not taught to British school children.

In our war against terrorism we should keep in mind that against whom we are fighting are glorified as "freedom fighters" among large sections of the people.


2. They are NOT people "without return address" (as US believed them to be some-time ago). They have specific shelters and refuge centers across the world. They have powerful patrons. Whenever they see themselves getting cornered by some government they have specific places to return to and hibernate, regroup and then again attack back when the time is ripe.

3. They are NOT people who are working out of deprivation. They are well-off people fighting for their ideological goals. One cannot hope to bargain with terrorists by offering in exchange money or other resources.



Terrorists have enough of anything that money can buy.




So any plan to counter terrorists have to keep the following in mind:

1. The immediate aim of the war has to be to try to eliminate the intellectual sources of terrorism with as much urgency as governments try to eliminate the financial and other material sources of terrorism.

With the thinkers and philosophers gone what shall be left of the terrorists is just clusters of men trained to shoot. Indian army can take care of them with ease. What the army will not be able to fight with ease are the thousands of strategists and political thinkers across the world who are motivating people across the world to fight for their ideals.


2. Talk to the vulnerable youth before the terrorist propaganda talks to them!
This I think is the most important thing to do now as an extension of the education system of India.

This shall have to be an extensive outreach form of the education system which goes knocking door to door across India and neighbouring countries to teach the youth about the ideas of nationhood and ways to practical realization of it. To teach them use their skills to directly solve the problems that their nation faces and do these BEFORE the sophisticated thinkers behind terror outfits go picking these youngsters and brainwashing them into their ideas of killing.


3. Try to eliminate poverty in specific places where terror groups are active. They are most vulnerable. If poverty elimination looks like a long plan then at least immediately hike up the security of these economically backward regions.


4. Have an extreme level of control of who and what enters through the borders of India. A definitive form of identification of every resident of India, like say a number that shall identify every Indian. And every person in India should be able to prove his identity of being an Indian by that number whenever and wherever demanded of. You might be sitting in the cafe with your girlfriend but if demanded suddenly in the cafe by some passing by army person, you should be able to prove that you are an Indian by that unique number. And if the person fails to do so she/he should be immediately taken into custody.

This may sound harsh but given the situation in India this is time for strict measures.

It shall be a very difficult thing to implement in a country of 1 billion where so many people are homeless and where there are million remote areas where no transport goes. But still I think this is an effort worth trying.\

Apart from the security aspect this numerical identification has the chance of unifying India through a common means rising beyond all other local identities.

We have too large and rough a boundary with Himalayas on one side and ocean on the other. Our borders are too porous and it is too difficult to control what goes on there. But we have to have very strict control of what goes in and goes out of it. Such high security at the borders will mean a sharp decline in the trade that occurs there but I suppose when national security is at stake it is a very small cost to pay.

The above control at the boundary and control over identification will definitely need to be supported by a strong drive across the nation to curb the population growth drastically. Today it is time we look at no child per family rule. 1 child per family also looks to be too costly given the devastatingly large burden of 1 billion.




Today standing in these times let us all Indians exchange all our personal freedoms and choices if the need comes for the sake of national security and to fight terrorism.

It is not the time to be politically correct.
It is not the time to preach ideas of a liberal world and democracy.

Today are we really all Mumbaikers? (Part 2) {Is the "Indian" fighting terrorism?}

{This article has also been put up here: Reform Our Democracy blog }


It is simple mathematics that the sum of a randomly chosen set of vectors will tend to 0 as we keep increasing the number of vectors. Precisely the situation with India. The huge diversity that exists in India rarely ever seems to work in favour of the nation since this diversity has through out history prevented any coherence between the thoughts of people across India to develop. The random phase differences has always led to destructive interference and whenever our Indian identity is suddenly under attack, like by Kasab and his men, the entire set of 1 billion people are unable to immediately respond with any unanimous voice or action. Aptly reflected in the dilapidated and confused response of the government to the issue.

How many more attacks on this land will it take for this nation to feel united?

India as it stands today is a land where one can get anything from life to love with money or muscle power. It is a nation where everything is a commodity and anything can be sold and acquired by force be it life or sex or body organs or seats in the parliament or seats in the train or marks in the examination. It is a nation where even the best of students in the elite institutes of India can be seen dancing to the tunes of the professors and buttering them to keep them happy so that they can get good grades and good recommendation letters so that they can get a seat in some US university. (Leave alone the fact that many professors are vulnerable to such lowly behaviours!). When I was in school in St.Xavier's Collegiate School, Kolkata, in class 8 I had seen my Hindi teacher "selling" marks in the examination. I didn't feel even slightly disappointed at failing in that exam when after the exam I saw one student go to the teacher after the class and telling him "Sir, Is 100Rs for every mark okay with you?". Over the next few days that teacher got gifts of various kinds. Since today I have no way to prove this incident in court, I can't write here the name of the teacher.

This nation CAN NOT fight terrorism.

We as a nation have been completely unable to build in some basic civic sense and environment consciousness. We have been unable to prevent people from spitting and throwing garbage in the streets and have been unable to ensure that people don't get into the trains without a reservation ticket. Leave alone the fact that most train ticket checkers in India can be bribed to get a place to sit in the train even if it is by the toilet! India as a nation has failed to imbibe within its people the basic ideas of honesty and correctness. It is a nation that lacks sincerity with anything it does and we unashamedly keep taking pride in some great men who have been from India whereas the rest of the country is completely disjoint from these handful of great Indians. It is a nation that has never seen a renaissance or a revolution that affected the common man. The common man has historically been kept away from all sorts of intellectual reforms or political upheavals.

And obviously in this strain one should mention our shameful failure to check the population growth. Its a time-bomb that has blasted and the repercussions continue to thrash us in day to day life. Various reasons rising from mainly vote-bank politics has corrupted the politicians and have prevented them from talking about this issue bravely and facing the population expansion problem. It seems completely ridiculous that this country in 50 years post independence can't control its population!

This failure is a collective failure of the Indian education system resulting from politically driven education system where every thing is done with the aim of ensuring a win in the elections than what is good for the country. We have compromised to the extent of not teaching some basic ideas to the students in fear that this might conflict other social and religious teachings and might result in the mass angered against the government.

This inability of India to follow logic and look beyond social customs and religious teachings has resulted in a jeopardized large population. A large population immediately becomes a breeding ground for hideous activities (could be terrorism ) since it is so easy to hide oneself in this large population.

India faces a complete internal security failure in form of loss of accountability of the people.

This nation CAN NOT fight terrorism.

What India lacks in general today is a sense of honesty at every level apart from the most tangible loss in the form of being prone to bribes and corruptions. Most professors in even the elite institutes of India simply come and go having taught nothing useful in the classes or having made any effort to be correct or having made any efforts to ensure that the student has learnt anything correct. Most of them simply hand-wave arbitrary things knowing that most students fearing back-reaction from the prof. in terms of bad marks and grades will not question. They produce students who have grown up listening to such hollow lectures full of erroneous ideas and they become teachers for the next generation and the cycle continues. There is no feed-back mechanism where things get corrected just as there is no check on a minister for those 5 years he is power. In the end what India is left with is a completely dilapidated education system in which it is solely a good student's credit if she/he has been able to learn something correct. And it is only best that we don't talk of the state of primary education in India...I wonder whether it "educates" anyone.

As a by-product we have a huge section of the youth in the colleges of India given to drugs and alcohol. Millions of potential thinkers and workers for India drowning their talents in narcotics. Unemployment in India is not just a result of growing population of India but is very much growing from the fact that the Indian youth is today devoid of thoughts and creativity but soaked in alcohol.

This nation with a corrupt education system and a lost youth CAN NOT fight terrorism.

We as Indians have weakened ourselves in every way we could have morally, physically and intellectually. We have built a nation where the youth neither thinks nor speaks the truth. We have created a nation where each and every person is in some way or the other afraid of falling out of favour with someone, student from the teacher and teacher from the head of the department or employee from the boss and the companies from the ruling party and the politicians from the part leader and so on the chain continues.


India is a nation built on favouritism going back to the times when the rajas and maharajs gave privileges or the Britishers bribed Nawabs etc with titles of "Rai Bahadur". We as a nation have never thought of attaining anything without favouritism and what hence we have a nation which never speaks the truth but only continues to try to be diplomatically correct so that she/he is socially well-off.

What better state than this could a nation be to be a soft target for the terrorists! With this factious state of affairs we have made ourselves extremely penetrable to all sorts of foreign designs. It is pretty trivial to play one section of the Indian population against another and generate local support. I am pretty sure that without generating local shelters a foreign force can't operate so efficiently. Further it is not just direct support in terms of resources and information but also to some extent there has to be presence of elements who render moral support.

Its only surprising that not all the terrorist groups across the world don't have their head quarters in India!

Today are we really all Mumbaikers? (Part 1) {Is it a nation of 1 billion people called "India" that is fighting terrorism together? }

{This article has also been put up here: Reform Our Democracy blog }



Recently it was reported that the ninth child, a girl, of a certain poor family in Bihar was sold by their parents to someone in exchange for a few square meals a day. I am sure it is one of the millions of such incidents in India which got reported. Its a country where poor daily wage labourers sell their blood for 500 or 1000Rs per bottle to earn a living and many people sell one of their kidneys for 50,000 to 1lakh rupees to stay alive.

This is my India that hopes to fight cross-border terrorism!

I find it ridiculous to say the least and obviously the only thing that comes from the prime-minister and the defence minister post 26/11 are a few hollow shouts at Pakistan. Isn't there a fat chance that the Indian government acted meekly against Pakistan sponsored terrorism simply to preserve their Muslim vote bank in India?Can't forget that the elections are knocking at their door!

Pakistan almost making a joke of India's calls by showing the world that it is trying to curb state sponsored terrorism by putting a few locks on the offices of some of the terrorists!

India as it stands has a completely hollowed society split under innumerable factions and it is too fragile a society in terms of unanimous thinking and this society CAN NOT fight terrorism. How is Ajmal Kasab and his men different from those doing business in India by selling kidneys, blood and doing pre-birth sex determination to kill the girl child? (whom Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen called the "Missing Women"...I wrote a blog about this some time ago )

An army fights as a group so that its organization is not infiltrated by the enemies. How can that army win a battle when its own organization is itself infiltrated by the enemies or its organization is itself crumbling due to corruption?

Let us not fool ourselves in taking pride in the elusive concept of "United Republic of India" and rusting statements about "Unity in Diversity"! "India" is just a concept that exists in pen and paper and has never existed in reality. People of this "nation" have never really thought in any unanimous way and have never thought of themselves as part of the same nation. The idea of "nationhood" has never been a part of the Indian psyche. A typical person from Kerala or West Bengal is very likely to give his first identity as a Keralite or Bengali rather than as an Indian. State identity is only one of the million possible identities that can get pre-dominance over their national identity. In some social or religious occasion, this Keralite or the Bengali might again get united under their identity of being a "Brahmin"! but even by mistake they might not unite as "Indian".

The nation called "India" is only an abstract idealization of a factious reality and the "Indian" is some fictional character.

We teach the school children very proudly about the "Revolt of 1857" and give them the idea that this supposedly "great Indian uprising" was the first organized revolt India launched against the British. I have found all these sugar-coated statements to be extremely erroneous and anyone who has read history even a little more carefully would have realized how completely disjoint the 1857 revolt was from common Indian. (not to mention the surgical door to door butchering of lakhs of Indians by the British post-revolt of those families who took part in the revolt)

1857 revolt came no where close to the French Revolution where the common man took up arms. 1857 revolt was purely a meek attempt by some local provincial kings to join forces to regain their authority over their lands. It was purely a fight by the local rulers to regain power and no one had any idea of "India" in them and they were not fighting for liberation of India.

The reality as I see today is that we still are split along the same lines as the armies in 1857 were split. Regional division is so deeply ingrained by those 200 dark years of British Rule in India that even today it takes only a little bit of spark to set one region on a blood-hunt of the other...recent example being the attack of the MNS against the candidates from Bihar!

This piece of land called "India" which is so deeply split along all sorts of local identities of caste, region, family (gharana and biradiri!), language etc is extremely vulnerable to the evil designs of any foreign power. It is trivial for foreign powers to take advantage of these local splits to infiltrate the society and create their shelters within India. Wars at the borders of India are pointless when such a split society further made desperate by killing poverty has been hacked into by the terrorists.

No wonder Al-Qaeda's recruitment advertisement tapes were found being circulated in Bihar.


And this issue of one particular identity of a person being hiked up is extremely generic to the way India works. "Those are Muslims. They are foreigners. They are terrorists" can be enough to raise many Hindus to kill Muslims in India irrespective of their profession whether she/he had another identity as a scientist or farmer or a clerk in a bank. Similarly many Christians in Orissa can probably now be made to kill Hindus by properly instigating their religious identity and telling them that "These Hindus have burnt your churches and priests". Indians have become extremely vulnerable to let any one of her/his identities being used as a crank to turn her/him into an instrument of terror.

At the end we have a completely divided India which is one nation only for a show and a cluster of provinces in reality with provincial heads working for personal gains. No wonder we still see politicians going to vote with their manifesto supporting a further split in India, the so called "Telengana"! And these splits have over the years given birth to numerous guerrilla warfare expert POWs (People War Groups), all of them fighting for local interests and indeed some of them have genuine reasons since various remote areas of India have always been forgotten by the government of India.

Imagine the situation if all these POWs could be motivated by the foreign terrorist groups to join them against a common enemy the "government in Delhi". It would be a severe collapse of the already fragile nation.




As soon as Mumbai was attacked I could hear voices around me suddenly preaching 2 ideas:

1. All Muslims be removed from India. It is impossible to live with them. They are anyway culturally so disjoint from us.

{I would rather kill myself than see people like A.P.J Abdul Kalam, Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah, Gulzar, Amjad Ali and Zakeer Hussain thrown out of India because they are muslims!}

2. Let all Hindus assemble themselves into Hindu terror outfits which shall counter Muslim terrorism. Let the hard liners of Hinduism motivate all Hindus in India to form such military organizations. Even one former MP seemed to preach such similar ideas in an article in the newspaper Indian Express.

{I can't remember hearing more stupid ideas. Seems to me to be the perfect idea for Hindus to create a Frankenstein for themselves. I would like to put this very strongly that Hindu hard lined organization is NOT an answer to Muslim terror groups. It would be suicidal to say the least.}

But obviously one can't deny that most terror outfits in India are Islamic groups and clearly claim religion to be one of their main motivating factors. It is definitely necessary that the India government does a crackdown on all possible places and means through which such Islamic terrorist groups could be operating. Such an operation should definitely include all Mosques and Madrasas which have at various times been used as bases for terror groups. And we every now and then hear that many Madrasas are being used by terror groups as their training centers.

But now this would be extremely stupid if such a combing action gets interpreted by someone as an attack by Indian government against Muslims. One should be ready to look beyond every human emotion for the sake of national security.

But welcome to India! I am sure that many in the government would immediately oppose such a combing action since they would be afraid to lose their Muslim vote bank! This nation built on the lines of cheap politics can never hope to fight terrorism.


And then we hear further weird propaganda being carried on by various Muslim clerics outside India and there have been reports in the news papers that there are secret pamphlets getting circulated in various mosques in the Middle East which seem to say that the even though Muslims ruled India for about 800 years (Mughal Empire) it managed to convert only about 20% of India to Islam. What a shameful situation for Islam! They look at this as a great failure on the part of Islam and this is the time when this historic error needs to be corrected. Hence let us spensor terrorist groups and capture India and convert it to Islam.

Wonderful! If ever one needs an example to skewed ways of thinking then this is it!

And then from some of my friends in South India who are deeply religious about Hinduism I have heard statement like we should not count only the 200 years of British Rule as the only period of Indian history as being enslaved by a foreign power but we should count it has 1000 years including the Mughal period. They were equally foreign powers having enslaved India.


With such philosophies doing rounds in India I find it impossible to think how this nation can ever fight terrorism!

Birth of a Child-II

Contd..from the last article

As I was stating earlier the time of 36 weeks inside the mother's womb is very crucial. As I experienced recently that even if the baby comes out after 34-35 weeks it is a considerably immature baby! These babies are very likely to have breathing troubles and in the baby that I am observing off-late he had to be put into an incubator in a ICU immediately after birth. Even after 34 to 35 weeks the lungs can be highly immature and unable to supply enough pure blood to the body. The alveoli in the lungs may simply be unable to expand enough and the baby might have to put into artificial breathing machines. Contrary to prevalent ideas and very surprisingly recent research has shown that these artificial breathing machines when used on new-born babies can affect brain development! So the situation is really complicated.

If the lungs seem to be maturing fast and the situation is not very bad then doctors can try to do some chemical treatment where they use chemicals called "surfactants" which little that I understand from the viewpoint of a physics student is that they reduce the surface tension of the alveolar bags and hence help them expand to full capacity.

The point is that birth just 2 weeks earlier than the typical 36 weeks can lead to pretty complicated situations. Over and above these lung problems another very common problem with pre-mature babies is that they may be born with holes in their heart! If the hole is large then chances of survival can be very slim given that already the lungs are under performing. If the hole is small then gradually the correct tissues grow and the holes get filled but if this does not happen then pretty complicated and risky operation might be required.

The baby I am observing now and whose situation has prompted this blog seems to have both the troubles of a under-developed lungs and has 2 holes in the heart!

Further if the premature baby is not of a good mass and is not physically very healthy then he/she might not be in a position to even survive these complicated medical treatments.
If the baby is very pre-mature then even after birth she/he needs to be kept in similar humidity and temperature conditions after birth like she/he was inside the womb. That is maintained these days by artificially creating such conditions inside glass chambers in which the baby is put.

Obviously these processes are very very expensive and not every family will be able to afford these treatments. And in these treatments there is no guarantee of success, further with things like late crying and convulsions the baby is likely to grow up to be a spastic child which no treatment can cure. Then why should the parents keep trying to save their child when it is sure that there is no cure and the fatal damage has been done within the first few minutes of birth!


Isn't it better for them and the world that in such a situation the parents decide to opt for mercy-killing of the baby?
Isn't euthanasia for the new born baby a much better thing in such situations than let her/him grow up to be a mentally handicapped person?
Shouldn't parents in such situations let hard sense of logic dominate human emotional instincts and take the bold step?


On the little brighter side...one of my grandmother's elder brothers was born a very pre-mature baby and in those days about 75 years ago there was no such technology as talked of earlier. He was supposedly kept inside wet-cotton inside a shoe box and the room was covered with wet-clothes which were constantly kept wet! I feel a sense of extreme scientific thrill that they could save the baby in those days! Even one of my childhood friends was also born a very pre-mature baby. She is very much alive today and very much running around with her life.

And to top it all I had read that even Newton was born a pre-mature baby! I feel completely excited at the idea that in the early 17th century, some 300 years ago they could save a pre-mature baby!

In fact various research works have shown that pre-mature babies if are free from any other health complication at birth like lung dis-functioning etc then are likely to grow up to be very intelligent people!

The point of this article was to share from my almost non-technical viewpoint (that of a student of science with formal training in mathematics and physics but nothing formal in biology after class 10) some of the various non-preventable factors at birth that determine the health of the baby and have an irreversible effect on the person.

The point is that all these scary things can happen at birth and the couple has almost no control over it and can do nothing to prevent it. And if they can't go for hard options like euthanasia at birth then they have a very very painful life ahead, further society has collectively a terribly difficult task of bringing up a mentally handicapped child.

This reminds me of a Spartan custom. During the times of the roman empire the Spartans were supposed to be the most skilled warriors and probably the first civilization to have election and a democratic government and they supposedly had greater women-men equality in the society than it exists even today. Already in those days they supposedly had elected women representatives in the parliament! These Spartans had some specification about the minimum health standards of a child at birth and if the baby was below it then it was immediately killed.

What they did definitely does not seem appropriate today since today we need not have an entire society of warriors. I don't see why to do mathematics one needs to have a herculean figure. But the point is that given their needs Spartans did have the courage to overcome normal human instincts and use hard logic.

Given all this huge gamble that exists with the health and intelligence of the child, is this entire adventure of having a child worth it?

Couples unable to conceive naturally take all sorts of expensive and sophisticated help from medical professionals to be able to have a child.

Why?

What justifies all this effort and emotion and expenditure when on the bare minimum one can't ensure that the child will not be mentally handicapped?

(especially in India where the nation is already crippled by this luggage of 6 billion people!)

reminds me of the lines of a famous hindi song:

"...Tujhse naraz nahin zindagi se, Hairan hoon main..."

Birth of a Child-I

I have been planning to write about the idea of "Single Parent" for a long time but almost every time something or the other happens that distracts me to some other topic. Single parenthood is a concept that has been very close to me ever since I have memories of and I have experience of almost single parenthood from pretty dangerous proximity. Today when I have some sort of a standing in life I have the courage to write about this issue...it took me 21 years to build enough courage to do it. But probably not enough to get into personal details. That might have to wait for more years.


But this time round, again there is some other topic boiling around me that seems to have a greater immediate force on me. The issue is of a newly married couple and them having the idea of having a child.

With due apologies to all the people who think that I am inexperienced, I have a simple question to ask. Why?

Why most newly married couples are so eager to have a child? Given the phenomenal development that has happened in the science of contraceptives and abortion, there is no reason why people can't have a happy sex-life without conceiving.

I am still waiting to hear a convincing argument from anyone as to why they would want to have a child of their own. I have of course heard of a lot of flimsy arguments like the need to have an heir to carry forward the family and things like who will carry on the family business? and then things like it is somehow the necessary completion of a marriage. Some people seem to be more driven by the social stigma that a marriage is successful only when the couple has conceived. Then there are arguments that the child is the essential bonding in the marriage and that without a child the marriage is unstable and is likely break down.

I simply can't buy all these arguments. I am sure that a very compatible pair of people in love with each other can remain happily together whether they have or don't have a child. At some point it seems that the stigma of not having a child is created by the society to back up its reservations about love-marriages. It seems that getting the couple to have a child was a way to seal an arranged marriage forced on the couple.

Why am I suddenly perturbed by this idea? The immediate reason is that I am currently seeing from a very close distance the troubles of child birth. I am seeing on a day to day level how complicated the birth of a child can be and how very subtle factors at birth can determine the health of the child and how easy it is for a potentially healthy baby to suddenly become a spastic and become a burden for his/her family and the society at large. {Of course one can say that a spastic child is million times better than a healthy baby growing up to be a criminal or a terrorist.}

Last few days have been very revealing to me in terms of medical knowledge about the complications of child birth thanks to such a situation having risen around me.
It seems to be so much of a risk to me and so much about the health of the baby is in the hands of probability! The couple has so little or practically no control over it.

Given this huge gamble why would a couple want to have a child when they can't even at least prevent the new born child from being a spastic?

I never studied biology officially after class 10 but given that my mother is a doctor I always keep hearing of the details of the human life processes from the million discussions at home. I suppose I can be excused if I am not technically very correct but let me try to get the basic idea that I can understand as a science student although with no formal training in biology.

Probably because of my lack of formal training I can communicate the essential idea to people who have very little idea of biology. I think these are issues that everybody should appreciate.
Let me talk of some of the subtle risks that are involved. Of course I am not counting the obvious risks that are involved if say the mother is very young or malnourished or suffers some accident during the period of pregnancy or is HIV positive.

Even if the mother is healthy there are these 3 very subtle factors determining the health of the baby:

{There are a million other almost non-controllable factors that can affect crucially but these are the 3 that I am seeing closely during the experience that has inspired this blog post.}

a) The time elapsed between when the baby first cries and when he/she first comes out of the mother's womb.
b) The number of weeks the baby has spent in the mother's womb. The typical time is 36 weeks but I recently came to realize how important that number is. If say the baby comes out after 34 or 35 weeks even then there is considerable risk.
c) A large baby might happen to gulp in some of the amniotic fluid and that can complicate matters a lot.
{something that I am told that I did as a foetus!}


The idea is that the foetus when in the mothers' womb is floating inside a fluid bag. The fluid being called the amniotic fluid. So this baby is not breathing when inside this fluid and his/her lungs are collapsed and non-working. It nourishes itself completely by diffusing in oxygen and nutrients and diffusing out carbon-di-oxide from her/his mother's blood through the vessel, umbilical chord that connects from his/her navel to an organ called placenta on the mother's womb.

Even though it is slightly off-point here, I would like to note that the general practice has been to cut the umbilical chord at birth. One should remember that for other mammals there is no doctor around to cut the umbilical chord and the baby is born with that. It gradually dries up and falls off. So it is not clear why we humans have devised this artificial method of cutting the umbilical chord! In fact some recent research has shown that this process of cutting the chord gives considerable mental shock to the baby at birth and this is completely preventable. More and more doctors are of the opinion that like other mammals human babies should also be let born with the chord and let it naturally fall off.

Further inside the mother's womb the baby is in a fluid environment and when she/he is coming out he/she is having an environment shock from fluid to atmosphere. For quite a few years it has been shown that this environment shock is bad. Hence the concept of "Water Birth" has been going on for quite some time. In this process the mother gives birth to the baby under-water and the child doesn't have this shock. The baby is cleaned inside the water and is then brought out. Statistics has shown that this process is much more pleasant for both the mother and the child. In fact most doctors are of the opinion that water born babies are much more peaceful and intelligent. It is becoming increasingly popular in the west but somehow India doesn't seem to adopt this process. I don't understand the reasons.

{In the same strain one might note that many researches are pointing to the fact that use of diapers (Huggies kind of thing) might be harmful. The idea is that these diapers seem to inhibit urination and hence suppress the micturating center in the brain and the speech center is very close to it. Scientists more and more have the feeling that this harms speech development in the child. This is not very well established conjecture enough of a warning.}

Now when the baby comes out he/she breathes for the first time and air gushes into his/her lungs for the first time. Now the fact that we all have to live with is that the human brain requires the maximum amount of oxygen and it can't tolerate even the least of oxygen deficiency. When inside the womb the baby's brain has no oxygen deficiency but if the baby cries after a long time then the brain remains devoid of oxygen for that time and this can crucially ruin the baby forever.

But how long is a "long-time"? Its just a minute! If the baby cries after 1 minute of coming out then probably already some damage has been done to the baby' brain and if he/she cries after 5 minutes then the damage might be severe and the child is very likely to be highly mentally challenged.

In general it is expected that the baby will cry immediately as he/she comes out.
Now during the operation given that the mother is not very conscious she can't know exactly as to how soon the baby cried and hence this information is solely present with the doctor doing the delivery. It seems that there are corrupt doctors who try to suppress this number if the baby did cry late! But this data becomes a very crucial information in the process of diagnosis if the baby has breathing troubles after birth or shows mental disability as he/she grows up.

{It seems that I cried immediately :) I started speaking very early too. By 1 year I could speak fluently complete sentences and I used to talk a lot and ask a lot of questions. Apparently I asked "Why?" and "How?" for everything that I was told or saw. People tell me that they got tired completely of they had to baby sit me since that effectively involved answering the million questions I would ask}

Now there is this further risk that the baby might be very large in size compared to the mother's womb and if the delivery is getting delayed somehow then the mother's body might find it increasingly difficult to keep with the oxygen demands of the baby and the baby might run into oxygen deficiency. Then this triggers the breathing reflex of the baby even when she/he is floating inside the amniotic fluid. Then it is a very risky situation. The baby might just gulp in some of the fluid and get choked to death or some of the fluid might get trapped in the lungs or somewhere in the trachea. In someway one can say that the baby is getting drowned inside the mother's womb.

Now even if the baby comes out safe and healthy as soon as it starts breathing in the atmosphere this trapped fluid will cause it to choke and again the brain runs into oxygen deficiency. Now very commonly the baby runs into convulsions and if the convulsions happen for a long time it can severely affect the brain.

This precisely what happened to me at birth. I was a pretty large baby at birth. I had those convulsions but somehow due to the prompt action of the nurse it was stopped very soon.

Continued into the next writing.....