Straight from the heart

By Shevlin Sebastian

19th July 2013 08:07 AM 

 

The son of a Sikh priest, Ravinder was born at Kolkata, brought up in a small town, Burla, in Orissa, did his engineering studies from Bidar, Karnataka and MBA from Hyderabad, and began his career in the IT industry from Pune. 

At 4 am, on February 9, 2007, Khushi was in a happy mood. She had just completed her last day of work at the IT company that she worked for, in Noida, and was returning home in a cab. On Valentine’s Day, February 14, she would be getting engaged to IT professional Ravinder Singh. They had met through the matrimonial website, shaadi.com., and had been going steady for a few months.

While she was sunk in these pleasant thoughts, a truck came and hit the cab at full speed. The car was damaged beyond repair. A greviously wounded Khushi was rushed to the Intensive Care Unit of Escorts hospital, Faridabad, and later, to Apollo, Delhi, where she remained for a fortnight.

“During that time, I was telling God that this is the time I needed Him badly,” says Ravinder. Unfortunately, God did not hear his pleas and Khushi died of her injuries. Not surprisingly, Ravinder lost his faith and walked away from God.

Three months passed. Ravinder was unable to come to terms with what had happened. “I could feel this pressure growing inside me,” he says. “I wanted to do something. At times, I would cry at night.”
During this period, he was living with a friend, in Bhubaneshwar, who happened to be reading a book. Ravinder flipped a few pages, and decided that he would try some writing himself.

“The idea was to share my grief,” he says.

Ravinder started writing... and never stopped. The end result was a book called I Too Had a Love Story, which took the youngsters in the country by storm, and sold lakhs of copies.

Ravinder is perceptive about the success of his first book. “Most probably it was because of the honesty with which it was written,” he says. “Readers tell me that they felt an emotional connect with the hero. They also felt his pain. My fans told me they don’t read my books because of my literary skills or high standard of English. They like my writing because it is from the heart.”

His next two books - Can Love Happen Twice? and Love Stories that Touched my Heart (an anthology) did equally well.

His readership, which was initially young, has now moved to all age groups. “Lots of kids, who read my books, have made their parents read it,” says Ravinder. “I have received e-mails from grandmothers who told me that in this present world, a guy showing a commitment to somebody who is no longer alive touches them a lot. That pushed them to read the book.”

Amazingly, it has healed marital rifts. A woman, Snehalata Rajeev (name changed), said her husband, Surya, had gifted her, I Too Had A Love Story, but she never read it. She was having tensions with him, and was contemplating divorce. That was when a friend told her to read Ravinder’s book. Snehalata told her friend, “What is the connection between reading this book and saving my marriage?”

But eventually she read the book. “After I finished it, I imagined what if my better half was no more in this world,” says Snehalata. “You can never ever get in touch with him ever. By thinking about divorce, was I taking the right decision?” In the end, Snehalatha remained with Surya. And a gratified Ravinder says, “This is the best compliment that I have received. It is beyond the price of the book.”

Like Snehalatha, the fan base keeps growing. When Ravinder set up an e-mail id, itoohadalovestory@gmail.com, he received more than one lakh mails. He  also has 6 lakh fans and readers on Facebook.

One woman who read his first book was the Delhi-based Khushboo Chauhan. “She was probably crying after she read it,” says Ravinder. Thereafter, she went to the Bangla Sahib gurudwara and prayed to God. “This guy deserves a nice girl,” she said. “So please, God, find him a nice girl.” And Khushboo probably could not have imagined that it would be she who would be the ‘nice girl’, who got married to Ravinder, on September, 23, 2012.

Ravinder was in Kochi recently to promote his latest book, Like it Happened Yesterday. These are touching stories from his childhood, again written with intense feeling and sincerity. Asked why the move from romance to sentimental memories, Ravinder says, “I wanted to relive those childhood days one more time. Practically I can’t, so theoretically I did.”

Observing the excited reaction, among the audience, comprising many youngsters, there is a strong likelihood that Like it Happened Yesterday is also going to be a mega best-seller.

The son of a Sikh priest, Ravinder was born at Kolkata, brought up in a small town, Burla, in Orissa, did his engineering studies from Bidar, Karnataka and MBA from Hyderabad, and began his career in the IT industry from Pune.

From the IT industry to best-selling writer is a leap that Ravinder would never have dreamt he would be doing one day.

This article is taken from:  The New Indian Express

The Hut Where the Internet Began

When Douglas Engelbart read a Vannevar Bush essay on a Philippine island in the aftermath of World War II, he found the conceptual space to imagine what would become our Internet.

Alexis C. Madrigal Jul 7 2013, 11:18 PM ET

Let's start at the end point: what you're doing right now. You are pulling information from a network onto a screen, enhancing your embodied experience with a communication web filled with people and machines. You do this by pointing and clicking, tapping a few commands, organizing your thoughts into symbols that can be read and improved by your various correspondents.

There was a beginning to all this, long before it became technically possible.

Well, actually, there were many beginnings.

But one -- maybe the most important one -- traces back to Douglas Engelbart, who died last week, and his encounter with a 1945 article published here at The Atlantic, "As We May Think," by Vannevar Bush, an icon of mid-century science.

The essay is most famous for its description of a hypothetical information-retrieval system, the Memex, a kind of mechanical Evernote, in which a person's every "book, record, or communication" was microfilmed and cataloged.

"It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory," Bush wrote. "It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk."

Bush did not describe the screens, keyboard, buttons, and levers as a "user interface" because the concept did not exist. Neither did semiconductors or almost any other piece of the world's computing and networking infrastructure except a handful of military computers and some automatic telephone switches (the latter were, in fact, one of Bush's favorite examples).

A crucial component of the Memex was that it helped the brain's natural "associative indexing," so "any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another." The Memex storehouse was made usable by the "trails" that the user (another word that did not have this meaning at the time) cut through all the information, paths that could later be refollowed or passed onto a friend.

("There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record," Bush predicted. Consider for a moment that these processes -- at scale -- are exactly what makes Google a good search engine or Reddit a good social news site.)

Bush's essay was a groundbreaking ceremony for the information age. In Bush's own terms, the complexity of the world and its problems required a better system, lest our memories and minds become overwhelmed by all there was to know. And this was not merely a personal, lifestyle problem. The worst war the world had ever known was finally coming to a close, and to a man like Bush, it had begun because of a lack of human wisdom. This is how his essay ends:

The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house, and are teaching him to live healthily therein. They have enabled him to throw masses of people against one another with cruel weapons. They may yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good. Yet, in the application of science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to lose hope as to the outcome.

What Bush knew when he wrote these words in the months leading up to July 1945 was that the most cruel weapon had been invented: American atomic bombs would not fall on Japan for two more months, but Bush had been intimately involved in their creation and certainly knew their use was a possibility. With that knowledge in his pocket, his answer to the prospective (and then real) horrors of science-enabled nuclear war -- odd as it may seem -- was to imagine a contraption to aid human knowledge acquisition.

For Bush, humans were racing against themselves: understand the complex world or face extinction through war. Those were the stakes at the outset of the information age.

Bush's article went far and wide, and if I can brag for our magazine a little, is considered one of the most influential magazine articles ever published about technology, and perhaps in any field. It even landed inside LIFE Magazine in a condensed format in September of 1945.

The Memex as imagined by a LIFE illustrator.

Millions of copies of the September 10 issue were printed and distributed around the world. LIFE had established itself as the preeminent photo chronicler of World War II and the Red Cross habitually kept reading materials like it around for soldiers. And so it was that a copy of that issue, containing most of Bush's article -- including the whole Memex section and conclusion quoted here -- made its way to a Red Cross library on the (even now, still remote) island of Leyte in the Philippines.

Meanwhile, young Doug Engelbart, a radar technician in the Navy who never saw combat (the war ended as his boat pulled out of the San Francisco Bay), was on his way to the Philippines, too. He was transferred to Leyte, the island, and though the record is not precisely clear on this point, perhaps to the little village called Leyte, too, at the end of a long inlet. It was here that, in the words of John Markoff, Engelbart "stumbled across a Red Cross reading library in a native hut set on stilts, complete with thatched roof and plentiful bamboo." Five years ago, a visitor to Leyte snapped this photograph of the the town of Leyte.



In a hut like this -- and maybe even one of these huts specifically -- Engelbart opened up that issue of LIFE and read Bush's Atlantic article. The ideas in the story plowed new intellectual terrain for Engelbart, and the seeds that he planted and nurtured there over the next twenty years grew, with the help of millions of others, into the Internet you see today.

The Los Angeles Times obituary succinctly summed up his impact on the world: "Douglas Engelbart, whose work inspired generations of scientists, demonstrated in the 1960s what could happen when computers talk to one another." Steve Wozniak went further, crediting Engelbart's 1960s research "for everything we have in the way computers work today." Yes, he invented the mouse, but he also laid out the concepts we'd need to understand the networked world.

So, in one tangible and real sense, the Internet we know now began in that hut across the world. As Bush made new thoughts possible for Engelbart, Engelbart made it possible for us to imagine the rest of it.

Engelbart wrote Bush a letter describing how profoundly he'd been affected by the latter's work. "I might add that this article of yours has probably influenced me quite basically. I remember finding it and avidly reading it in a Red Cross library on the edge of the jungle on Leyte, one of the Philippine Islands, in the fall of 1945," he wrote. "I rediscovered your article about three years ago, and was rather startled to realized how much I had aligned my sights along the vector you had described. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the reading of this article sixteen and a half years ago hadn't had a real influence on my thoughts and actions."

What's fascinating is that Engelbart adopted Bush's frame for the key problems and solutions of modern life. Bush worried that the world had gotten too big to understand, and so did Engelbart. "The complexity/urgency factor had transcended what humans can cope with," he recalled in a 1996 oral history interview. "I suddenly flashed that if you could do something to improve human capability with that, then you'd really contribute something basic."

The problem framed in this way helped Engelbart stay away from the artificial intelligence researchers like JCR Licklider. Instead, he developed a framework for helping human minds to come together to improve themselves. He did not think the machines could or should do the thinking for us. Markoff, a long-time chronicler of computing, sees Engelbart as one pole in a decades-long competition "between artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation -- A.I. versus I.A." That's because Engelbart's view of computing development retained a privileged place for humans. His academic biographer Thierry Bardini summed up his importance like this:

Many still credit him only with technological innovations like the mouse, the outline processor, the electronic-mail system, or sometimes, the windowed user interface. These indeed are major innovations, and today they have become pervasive in the environments in which people work and play. But Douglas Engelbart never really gets credit for the larger contribution that he worked to create: an integrative and comprehensive framework that ties together the technological and social aspects of personal computing technology. Engelbart articulated a vision of the world in which these pervasive innovations are supposed to find their proper place. He and other innovators of this new technology defined its future on the basis of their own aspirations and ideologies. Those aspirations included nothing less than the development via the interface between computers and their users, of a new kind of person, one better equipped to deal with the increasing complexities of the modern world.

A new kind of person. The words appear unseemly in a reactionary age that reifies the "real world," but consider the root of the desire for a new humanity: Tracing Engelbart back through Bush, we find the horror of World War II and the nuclear weapons that put nearly instant human extinction on the table for the first time in human history. Mere tinkering around the edges of humanity would not have seemed up to the task.

What emerged for Engelbart as a real answer to Bush's statement of the problem was the co-evolution of humans and technology. Knowing that machines could do some thing well, and humans others, Engelbart imagined creating interfaces that would allow both to continue improving. It is an optimistic and hopeful outlook, one that is less brittle than hoping Watson will cure disease or that humans are deracinated by our contact with the digital realm.

It seems to me that we may be sitting at a similar moment in history to the one that Bush considered. Through the first half of the 20th century, physics was generally lauded and assumed to produce societal goods. Then came the bomb, and the field had a lot of questions to answer about what its purpose was, and what its relationship should be to the military-industrial complex.

And, perhaps I'm reaching here, but networked computing technology has had a similar privileged spot in American life for at least 30 years. Networked computers democratized! Anyone could have a voice! They delivered information, increased the variety of human experience, allowed new capabilities, and helped the world become more open and connected. Computers and the Internet were forces for good in the world, which is why technology was so readily attached to complex, revolutionary processes like the Arab Spring, for example.

But a broad skepticism about technology has crept into (at least) American life. We find ourselves a part of a "war on terror" that is being perpetually, secretly fought across the very network that Engelbart sought to build. Every interaction we have with an Internet service generates a "business record" that can be seized by the NSA through a secretive process that does not require a warrant or an adversarial legal proceeding.

The disclosure of the NSA's surveillance program is not Hiroshima, but it does reveal the latent dark power of the Internet to record communication data at an unprecedented scale, data that can be used by a single nation to detriment of the rest. The narrative of the networked age will never be as simple as it once was.

If you're inclined to see the trails of information Bush imagined future scholars blazing as (meta)data to be hoovered up, if you're inclined to see PRISM as a societal Memex concentrated in the hands of the surveillance state, then perhaps, we're seeing the end of the era Bush's article heralded.

At the very least, those with the lofty goal of improving humanity are going to have to explain  why they've chosen networked computing as their augmentation platform of choice, given the costs that we now know explicitly exist. The con side of the ledger can no longer be ignored.

Yet, it seems possible that we have not yet fulfilled the Engelbart's vision. Bush and Engelbart did have distinct visions. For Bush, scientific knowledge itself provided salvation, as if units of wisdom could be manufactured for the preservation of the human race. Engelbart's view was, befitting its time, more cybernetic: people and technology fed one into the other in a spiral of improvement. The Internet is still young, the web younger still. We do not know what form they will take. The current externalities -- now that they are known -- are a new feedback piping into the system, which means they can be accounted for in law or code or both. The co-evolution continues.

And I hope that someone, somewhere heard Engelbart died and found his extensive archive and found her mind aflame with new ideas for how humans, working together, can improve themselves. It's been a rough couple of years for technology, but to quote Bush, "It would seem to be a singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to lose hope as to the outcome."

This article is from: The Atlantic

శ్రీ కౌముది జూలై 2013

Warped in caste conundrum

Jun 11, 2013 - Surendra Kumar | Age Correspondent

In early 1960s, at my college, Syed Mubarak Ali, the Art teacher, and Devi Singh, physical training teacher, used to be served food in white porcelain plates at teachers’ lunches while others ate in brass thalis. I thought it must be a reward for their meritorious services; they were two of the most popular teachers. Years later, the retired principal let out the secret: it was an action in pollution control rather than recognition of their talent! According to him, the brass/copper was good conductor not only for transmitting electric current but also for pollution related to caste and religion. If Ali, a Muslim (Mleksha) and Singh a Scheduled Caste (Shudra) were served food in thalis, pollution of a Mleksha and a Shudra would have passed on to other teachers; they could have resigned. So, introduction of porcelain plate was a diplomatic solution: it avoided offending other teachers and also retained the much needed two teachers. I was left speechless at the genius of the scion of a family of Chaturvedis (who had mastered all the four Vedas!)

In late 1960s, at one of Allahabad University’s hostels named after a great Indian educationist, there was no ban on admission of the Muslim/SC students if their marks met the criterion but the students of these two categories seldom opted for this hostel. Once, a Muslim student got admitted. On the very first night, during the harrowing ragging session, the seniors set fire to his pubic hair; he ran for his life without collecting his meagre possessions, never to return again!

An additional secretary in the MEA, on a trip to Hong Kong in late 1980s, won’t initiate a conversation with the first secretary as he couldn’t figure out correctly what caste he belonged to. He rose to become the foreign secretary and died in harness as the governor of an important state!

A former young Turk of the Congress party, while serving as the governor didn’t know what to talk to when he couldn’t make out the caste of the Indian ambassador designate from his name. When his repeated insistence on the full name failed to elicit the most vital information, an exasperated Rajyapal Ji blurted out “OK, then, what is your caste?” He rose to become the vice-president of India!

In 1980s, the vice-president of India (he later became the President) who had graduated from the prestigious Cambridge University of UK felt terribly uncomfortable in talking to the head of the Hindi Service of BBC’s World Service during his visit to London when the Press Counsellor couldn’t tell him in advance the caste of the interviewer!

On the auspicious day of Holi this year, after the time for throwing colour and besmirching faces with gulal was over, one of the retired ambassadors residing in the IFS apartments requested us to drop by for a drink in the evening. Another ambassador, retired recently, had also joined with his wife. While we were chatting about increasing cases of rapes in Delhi, this ambassador turned to me and asked, “So, what is full name?”

Forty years after joining the IFS, I was puzzled by such a question from a fellow ambassador. But to satisfy him, I told him my name as mentioned in my passport.

Not contented, he said, “Let me rephrase my question, if you were to give your full name, what it would be?” I replied, “This is all what it will be; there is nothing more to add or subtract!”

Not to give up his single-minded quest, he added, “Then let me ask you directly: what is your caste?” I couldn’t resist telling him tersely that he reminded me of that AS (AD), the governor, the vice-president & the President of India who were lost for words unless they knew the caste of an individual and that I was wrong in imagining that 38 years in IFS with several postings abroad and the tolerant faith he followed might have made him lose interest in the phenomenon of caste. “Well, I wanted to know out of curiosity’, he responded.

Surprisingly, like that governor 20 years back, he showed no curiosity about the fact that I was India’s ambassador in Libya for five years and had met Col. Gaddafi more than 20 times!

After listening to thumris, dadras and kajris in soulful voice of matchless Girija Devi ji at Azad Bhavan last month, I and my wife were having dinner on the lawns with the renowned art critic, Shanta Sarabjeet Singh. Another lady whose face looked familiar turned towards me and remarked that she had attended some of IAFA events at the IIC including the memorial for late Dr Abid Hussain. Then I realised, she was the wife of a highly respected civil cervant who had spent nearly three decades in the US with an international organisation. Suddenly, this lady turned to my wife and whispered, “Is your husband’s last name Kohli?” “No, it’s Kumar” my wife whispered back. “Kumar? So, what is he?” she couldn’t suppress her curiosity!

Since India took the plunge in favour of economic liberalisation in 1991-92, a lot has changed in India for the better, contrary to the claims of cynics and naysayers. We have a middle class bigger than the total population of the US; cellphone owners number three times the number in the US. From the stage of having to mortgage gold, the outflow of investment from Indian firms today is higher than the annual inflow of FDI. Though industrial production and economic growth have slowed down, India is still one of the fastest growing economies. India’s IT industry, especially software sector, is a force to reckon. With demographic dividend on her side, India is tipped to be a major global player in the knowledge society of tomorrow.

But what might trip India? Near total collapse of moral and ethical values in day-to-day life, governance and management; insatiable obsession with caste (those who claim that caste doesn’t matter to them are simply being hypocrite and dishonest) and rampant corruption at all levels of life. In the US and UK if you told your co-passenger in the metro that you were from a business firm or a university, your introduction was complete; conversation veered around the business firm or the academics of that university. But in India, the mother of all curiosities is the curiosity about one’s caste! Just have a look at the matrimonial columns, some of the brightest young men and women coming from IITs/IIMs and serving in lucrative positions are looking for suitable matches from their respective castes! The sage who said: jati na poochho sadh ki.. was wrong! He should have urged: jati hi poochho sadh ki ...!!

Mera Bharat Mahaan!

Jai ho!

The writer is a former secretary in the ministry of external affairs

This article is from: The Asian Age

Déjà Vu | Lapham’s Quarterly

Déjà Vu | Lapham’s Quarterly


2013: India has joined the U.S. and other Western nations in conscripting the telegram to the pages of history. Later this summer, the nation’s state-run telegram agency will send its last missive, bringing an end to the telegram’s longstanding importance in Indian life. 

Read Blog Déjà Vu | Lapham’s Quarterly full article

New 'Delhi belly' vaccine shows promise, U.K. researchers say

06/10/2013

For some western travellers, "Delhi belly" is an inconvenience, an uncomfortable malady that can cloud the memory of an otherwise perfect vacation to the developing world.

But in Asia, Africa and Latin America, "Delhi belly" -- severe diarrhea -- is far more serious. 

The World Health Organization says: "Diarrhea is one of the leading causes of death among children under five globally. More than one in ten child deaths – about 800,000 each year – is due to diarrhea. Today, only 44 per cent of children with diarrhoea in low-income countries receive the recommended treatment, and limited trend data suggest that there has been little progress since 2000."

Nearly every child in the third world will have "Delhi belly" at least once in his or her lifetime. Sometimes, a child can die in a day from the affliction because of severe and rapid dehydration.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge say they have developed a new vaccine that targets both E. Coli bacteria and salmonella. The vaccine comes in pill form and also promises protection against typhoid.

"The stakes are incredibly high," researcher Krishnaa Mahbubani told the Star in an interview. "Delhi belly is quite dangerous. Several million children under the age of six come down with this. this will be a huge. This isn't just about stopping discomfort for travellers for a few weeks."

Prof. Nigel Slater, who leads a team of scientists at University of Cambridge’s department of biochemical engineering and biotechnology, said trials on mice have yielded positive results.

Human trials are set to begin later this year on a few dozen subjects. Consumers won't be able to buy the pill for at least four or five years, Slater said.

The vaccine's technology is owned by the university and Prokarium, a pharmaceutical company. The British government helped finance the research, which has been in the works for about eight years, he said.

"The trick really was getting this vaccine into tablet form," Slater said. "these bacteria in the vaccine have to pass through walls of intestine to get to lymph nodes where they create the immmunity. There's an issue of cold chain in hot countries like India. 

"So we had to develop a pill form where the bacteria would be rehydrated with water, but wouldn't be killed by the bile in the stomach. It was tricky."

News of the vaccine's promise was first reported by The Telegraph.

Rick Westhead is a foreign affairs writer at the Star. He was based in India as the Star’s South Asia bureau chief from 2008 until 2011 and reports on international aid and development. Follow him on Twitter @rwesthead

Excerpted from: http://thestar.blogs.com/worlddaily/2013/06/new-delhi-belly-vaccine-shows-promise-uk-researchers-say.html

Lives Lived: Krishna Kumari Sharma, 78 

 

Parnesh Sharma

The Globe and Mail

Published Friday, Jun. 07 2013, 12:00 AM EDT
 

Grandmother, short-story writer, gardener, gentle soul. Born Jan. 12, 1935, in Labasa, Fiji, died April 22, 2013, in North Vancouver of heart failure, aged 78.

Born in a tiny village in Fiji, the only child of a former indentured labourer, Krishna often marvelled at the detours of life that took her from that village to Auckland, NZ, in the late 1960s, back to Fiji, and then to North Vancouver in 1975.

No more improbable than her journey was that of her father, Tribhuwan Dutt Maharaj. His history is dimmer. It is believed that he came from Uttar Pradesh in northern India – but it is known that at the age of 12 he ran away from home to seek his fortune on what he thought would be a grand adventure. Little did he know he had been tricked into servitude to British masters.

Five years of back-breaking bonded labour on sugar plantations in Fiji left him with few kind words for the English. But he emerged with the determination to forge a new life. He refused passage back to India, not wanting to face his family without having realized his fortune.

He struggled at first, but credited the birth of Krishna, his only child and his good-luck charm, with a change in his fortunes that saw him eventually running two thriving general stores and owning several properties – including a sugar plantation.

He instilled in Krishna the value of education. Unusually for that time, she was sent away to boarding school. Later, after her arranged marriage to schoolteacher Rishi Deo Sharma, her father gifted her a two-storey brick house in the Fijian capital of Suva. Later, with a growing family, Krishna adapted to a peripatetic lifestyle – to various postings throughout Fiji when Rishi took a job with the government.

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Fiji was an idyllic British colony, but the winds of change – an emerging call for independence – had begun to stir, and with them a growing concern about the future of the Indian community, the descendents of indentured labourers – British subjects in name, but lacking substantive rights in reality.

And so it was that in 1975, Krishna, her husband and six young children left a comfortable middle-class life in Fiji to start anew in Canada. In doing so she joined the pantheon of classic immigrant stories of sacrifice and hard work in search of a better future for her children.

For a person who had never worked outside the home, Canada was a new experience. Krishna and Rishi worked various jobs – sometimes two jobs at a time – just to pay the bills before becoming established.

In 1996, within a year of his retirement, Rishi was diagnosed with a terminal illness and died shortly after. Krishna withdrew into a shell. But with the encouragement of her family she emerged stronger and discovered a talent for gardening. She took great pride in it, and just a week before suffering a heart attack she had a plan in place for spring planting. Of her other talents (her short stories were published in Hindi-language papers) she rarely spoke.

Not one for ostentation, she rarely mentioned the successes of her children – among them a university professor, a doctor and a Cambridge and Oxford-educated scholar – or her grandchildren, who include a schoolteacher and an Ivy League-educated lawyer.

What of her garden, now awash with spring flowers? It blooms, as does Krishna’s legacy.

Parnesh Sharma is Krishna’s son.

In Turkey: Days of Anti-Government Protests and Harsh Crackdowns

Jun 2, 2013 | 

 

A protest in Istanbul, Turkey, that began as a relatively small event earlier in the week, erupted into massive anti-government demonstrations across the country following a harsh crackdown by riot police. People had gathered in Gezi Park to prevent the demolition of the last remaining green public space in the center of Istanbul as part of a major renewal project. Pent-up anger against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party flared up after the violent breakup of the Gezi Park protest, fueling the fiercest anti-government demonstrations in years. Yesterday, more than a thousand protesters were arrested in 90 different demonstrations across Turkey. Prime Minister Erdogan has issued several defiant and dismissive messages, urging demonstrators to go home -- which they appear to be ignoring, as thousands have gathered once again in Taksim Square today, starting a third day of protest. [36 photos]

Story and photos: In Focus (The Atlantic)

శ్రీ కౌముది జూన్ 2013

Arvind Mahankali, 13, Wins National Spelling Bee

by The Associated Press

May 30, 201311:47 PM

OXON HILL, Md. (AP) — After years of heartbreakingly close calls, Arvind Mahankali conquered his nemesis, German, to become the champion speller in the English language.

The 13-year-old from Bayside Hills, N.Y., correctly spelled "knaidel," a word for a small mass of leavened dough, to win the 86th Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday night. The bee tested brain power, composure and, for the first time, knowledge of vocabulary.

Arvind finished in third place in both 2011 and 2012, and both times, he was eliminated on German-derived words. This time, he got one German word in the finals, and the winning word was from German-derived Yiddish, eliciting groans and laughter from the crowd. He spelled both with ease.

"The German curse has turned into a German blessing," he said.

Arvind outlasted 11 other finalists, all but one of whom had been to the National Spelling Bee before, in nearly 2 ½ hours of tense, grueling competition that was televised nationally. In one round, all nine participants spelled their words correctly.

When he was announced as the winner, Arvind looked upward at the confetti falling upon him and cracked his knuckles, his signature gesture during his bee appearances. He'll take home $30,000 in cash and prizes along with a huge cup-shaped trophy. The skinny teen, clad in a white polo shirt and wire-rimmed glasses pushed down his nose, was joined on stage at the Washington-area hall by his parents and his beaming younger brother.

An aspiring physicist who admires Albert Einstein, Arvind said he would spend more time studying physics this summer now that he's "retired" from the spelling bee.

Arvind becomes the sixth consecutive Indian-American winner and the 11th in the past 15 years, a run that began in 1999 when Nupur Lala captured the title in 1999 and was later featured in the documentary "Spellbound."

Arvind's family is originally from Hyderabad in southern India, and relatives who live there were watching live on television.

"At home, my dad used to chant Telegu poems from forward to backward and backward to forward, that kind of thing," said Arvind's father, Srinivas. "So language affinity, we value language a lot. And I love language, I love English."

Pranav Sivakumar, who like Arvind rarely appeared flustered onstage, finished second. The 13-year-old from Tower Lakes, Ill., was tripped up by "cyanophycean," a word for a blue-green alga. Sriram Hathwar, 13, of Painted Post, N.Y., finished third, and Amber Born, 14, of Marblehead, Mass., was fourth.

The field was whittled down from 42 semifinalists Thursday afternoon, with spellers advancing based on a formula that combined their scores from a computerized spelling and vocabulary test with their performance in two onstage rounds.

The vocabulary test was new. Some of the spellers liked it, some didn't, and many were in-between, praising the concept but wondering why it wasn't announced at the beginning of the school year instead of seven weeks before the national bee.

"It was kind of a different challenge," said Vismaya Kharkar, 14, of Bountiful, Utah, who finished tied for 5th place. "I've been focusing my studying on the spelling for years and years."

There were two multiple-choice vocabulary tests — one in the preliminaries and one in the semifinals — and they were administered in a quiet room away from the glare of the onstage parts of the bee. The finals were the same as always: no vocabulary, just spellers trying to avoid the doomsday bell.

There was a huge groan from the crowd when Arvind got his first German-derived word, "dehnstufe," an Indo-European long-grade vowel.

Milking the moment, he asked, "Can I have the language of origin?" before throwing his hands in the air with a wry smile.

"I had begun to be a little wary of German words, but this year I prepared German words and I studied them, so when I got German words this year, I wasn't worried," Arvind said.

He appeared to have more trouble with "galere," a word for a group of people having a marked common quality or relationship. He asked for the etymology twice — French and old Catalan — shifted his body back and forth and stroked his chin before getting it right with seconds to spare.

Amber, an aspiring comedy writer and crowd favorite, bowed out on "hallali," a huntsman's bugle call. She said, "I know, I know," when the clock told her time was running out, and she knew she had missed it, saying "That's not right" as she finished her effort.

The bee's growing popularity is reflected in an ESPN broadcast that gets more sophisticated each year. In the semifinals, Amber got to watch herself featured on a televised promo that also aired on the jumbo screen inside the auditorium.

She then approached the microphone and, referring to herself, deadpanned: "She seemed nice."

Vanya Shivashankar, at 11 the youngest of the finalists, fell short in her bid to become the first sibling of a previous winner to triumph. Her sister, Kavya, won in 2009. Vanya finished tied for 5th after misspelling "zenaida," which means a type of pigeon.

With Money at Risk, Hospitals Push Staff to Wash Hands

 

Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
A staff member at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan using a hand sanitizer.

By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS  
Published: May 28, 2013 

At North Shore University Hospital on Long Island, motion sensors, like those used for burglar alarms, go off every time someone enters an intensive care room. The sensor triggers a video camera, which transmits its images halfway around the world to India, where workers are checking to see if doctors and nurses are performing a critical procedure: washing their hands.

This Big Brother-ish approach is one of a panoply of efforts to promote a basic tenet of infection prevention, hand-washing, or as it is more clinically known in the hospital industry, hand-hygiene. With drug-resistant superbugs on the rise, according to a recent report by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and with hospital-acquired infections costing $30 billion and leading to nearly 100,000 patient deaths a year, hospitals are willing to try almost anything to reduce the risk of transmission.

Studies have shown that without encouragement, hospital workers wash their hands as little as 30 percent of the time that they interact with patients. So in addition to the video snooping, hospitals across the country are training hand-washing coaches, handing out rewards like free pizza and coffee coupons, and admonishing with “red cards.” They are using radio-frequency ID chips that note when a doctor has passed by a sink, and undercover monitors, who blend in with the other white coats, to watch whether their colleagues are washing their hands for the requisite 15 seconds, as long as it takes to sing the “Happy Birthday” song.

All this effort is to coax workers into using more soap and water, or alcohol-based sanitizers like Purell.

“This is not a quick fix; this is a war,” said Dr. Bruce Farber, chief of infectious disease at North Shore.

But the incentive to do something is strong: under new federal rules, hospitals will lose Medicare money when patients get preventable infections.

One puzzle is why health care workers are so bad at it. Among the explanations studies have offered are complaints about dry skin, the pressures of an emergency environment, the tedium of hand washing and resistance to authority (doctors, who have the most authority, tend to be the most resistant, studies have found).

“There are still staff out there who say, ‘How dare they!’ ” said Elaine Larson, a professor in Columbia University’s school of nursing who has made a career out of studying hand-washing.

Philip Liang, who founded a company, General Sensing, that outfits hospital workers with electronic badges that track hand-washing, attributes low compliance to “high cognitive load.”

“Nurses have to remember hundreds — thousands — of procedures,” Mr. Liang said. “Take out the catheter; change four medications. It’s really easy to forget the basic tasks. You’re really concentrating on what’s difficult, not on what’s simple.”

His company uses a technology similar to Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. The badge communicates with a sensor on every sanitizer and soap dispenser, and with a beacon behind the patient’s bed. If the wearer’s hands are not cleaned, the badge vibrates, like a cellphone, so that the health care worker is reminded but not humiliated in front of the patient.

Just waving one’s hands under the dispenser is not enough. “We know if you took a swig of soap,” Mr. Liang said.

The program uses a frequent-flier model to reward workers with incentives, sometimes cash bonuses, the more they wash their hands.

Gojo Industries, which manufactures the ubiquitous Purell, has also developed technology that can be snapped into any of its soap or sanitizer dispensers to track hand-hygiene.

At North Shore, the video monitoring program, run by a company called Arrowsight, has been adapted from the meat industry, where cameras track whether workers who skin animals — the hide can contaminate the meat — wash their hands, knives and electric cutters.

Adam Aronson, the chief executive of Arrowsight, said he was inspired to go from slaughterhouses to hospitals by his father, Dr. Mark Aronson, vice chairman for quality at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and a professor at Harvard Medical School.

“Nobody would do a free test — they talked about Big Brother, patient privacy — nobody wanted to touch it,” Mr. Aronson said.

He finally got a trial at a small surgery center in Macon, Ga., and in 2008, North Shore also agreed to a trial in its intensive care unit. The medical center at the University of California, San Francisco, is also using Arrowsight’s video system, and Mr. Aronson said eight more hospitals in the United States, Britain, the Netherlands and Pakistan had agreed to test the cameras.

North Shore’s study, published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, found that during a 16-week preliminary period when workers were being filmed but were not informed of the results, hand-hygiene rates were less than 10 percent. When they started getting reports on their filmed behavior, through electronic scoreboards and e-mails, the rates rose to 88 percent. The hospital kept the system, but because of the expense, it has limited it to the intensive care unit, where the payoff is greatest because the patients are sickest. 

To get a passing score, workers have to wash their hands within 10 seconds of entering a patient’s room. Only workers who stay in the room for at least a minute are counted, and the quality of their washing is not rated. Scores for each shift are broadcast on hallway scoreboards, which read “Great Shift” for those that top 90 percent compliance.

Technology is not the only means of coercion. The Greater New York Hospital Association, a trade group, and the health care workers union, 1199 S.E.I.U., train employees to be “infection coaches” for other employees.

In a technique borrowed from soccer, hospital workers hand red cards to colleagues who do not wash, said Dr. Brian Koll, chief of infection prevention for Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan, who trains coaches. (Unlike soccer players, however, workers do not have to leave.) “It’s a way to communicate in a nonconfrontational way that also builds teamwork,” Dr. Koll said.

“You do not want to say, ‘You did not wash your hands.’ ”

Doctors, nurses and others at Beth Israel who consistently refuse to wash their hands may be forced to take a four-hour remedial infection prevention course, Dr. Koll said. But to turn that into something positive, they are then asked to teach infection prevention to others.

Dr. Koll said that he was not aware of malpractice suits based on hand-washing, but that hand-washing compliance rates often become part of the information used when suing hospitals for infections.

A hospital in the Bronx gave out tickets — sort of like traffic tickets — to workers who did not wash their hands, he said. “That did not work in our institution,” he said. “People made it a negative connotation.” Beth Israel finds that positive reinforcement works better, Dr. Koll said.

Like other hospitals, Beth Israel also uses what it calls secret shoppers — staff members, often medical students, in white coats whose job is to observe whether people are washing their hands. Beth Israel gives high-scoring workers gold stars to wear on their lapels, “hokey as this sounds,” he said; after five gold stars they get a platinum star, or perhaps a coupon for free coffee. “Health care workers like caffeine,” Dr. Koll said.

There are buttons saying, “Ask me if I’ve washed my hands,” and Dr. Koll said that patients’ families did ask because they understood the risks. Especially in pediatrics, he said, “parents do not have a problem at all asking.”

To avoid slogan fatigue, Beth Israel has at least five buttons, including “Got Gel?” and “Hand Hygiene First.”

Dr. Larson, the hand-washing expert, supports the electronic systems being developed, but says none are perfect yet. “People learn to game the system,” she said. “There was one system where the monitoring was waist high, and they learned to crawl under that. Or there are people who will swipe their badges and turn on the water, but not wash their hands. It’s just amazing.”

 Excerpt from: The New York Times

Plants revived after 400 years in ice

Resilience could make them ideal pioneers on Mars

The Canadian Press

Posted: May 28, 2013 3:28 PM ET

Last Updated: May 28, 2013 4:02 PM ET

The plant samples from the glacier were sprinkled onto Petri dishes and stuck in a growth chamber. Eleven of them grew. (Catherine La Farge/University of Alberta)

Plants that managed to re-grow after centuries buried under Arctic glaciers could prove useful for would-be pioneers hoping to explore life on other planets, research from a team of Canadian scientists has found.

The results of the study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest the land plants that form the foundations of many ecosystems are surprisingly resilient and may be a useful tool for the people who have already announced plans to set up a human colony on Mars, researchers said.

A team of biologists from the University of Alberta travelled to Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic in order to survey plant life exposed by the retreat of the Teardrop Glacier.

Lead researcher Catherine La Farge said the giant ice mass has been shrinking by between three and four metres a year since 2004, exposing larger swaths of plant life for scientists to analyze.

La Farge and her team focused their research on bryophytes, a general term given to ecological building blocks like mosses and other non-vascular plants.

Almost perfectly preserved

La Farge said researchers were first struck by the fact that bryophytes had been almost perfectly preserved despite the vast quantities of ice that settled over them centuries earlier.

 

The plants had been buried during the Little Ice Age under the Ellesmere Island's Teardrop Glacier, shown with graduate student David Wilkie for scale. (Catherine La Farge/University of Alberta)

"We were sort of blown away by the biomass of intact communities being exhumed from the rapidly retreating glaciers," La Farge said in a telephone interview from Edmonton.

Those intact communities — which were entombed by the glacier some time between 1550 and 1850 — showed early signs of being dormant rather than dead, La Farge said. Many of the plants that surfaced still had a greenish tinge despite their time below the ice.

It wasn't long, however, before the team observed bright green stems emerging from the recently exposed samples.

Such signs suggested the plants had the potential to begin re-growing, but La Farge and her team required more evidence.

They collected 140 samples from the island and brought them back to Edmonton in 2009 to see if they could thrive outside their natural environment.

"All we did was we took the material, we ground it up, sprinkled it onto a Petri dish and stuck it in the growth chamber to see what would happen," she said. "We had no idea if it would work, we just wanted to make sure that what we were seeing in the samples coming out from under the glacier . . . was that possible."

The tests yielded 11 cultures from seven specimens, La Farge said, adding the results hold intriguing implications for those interested in survival under harsh conditions.

Bryophytes are one of the most basic forms of land plants, she said, adding mosses and similar species are essential for the growth of more advanced types of plant life.

Ideal Mars pioneers

The resilience of bryophytes suggests they may be ideal as trial balloons for researchers exploring the prospect of survival beyond earth, she said. The notion — once the foundation for science fiction plots — has gained popular traction since a Dutch entrepreneur launched the Mars One project. The privately funded initiative aims to send a handful of people on a one-way trip to Mars by 2023. At least 35 Canadians have expressed interest in being among the first to try to colonize the Red Planet.

La Farge said sending bryophyte samples ahead of time may be an effective way to test the viability of the plan.

"We're not really dealing with a moonscape on the Arctic, but we're definitely under pretty extreme conditions," she said. "We now talk about people . . . wanting to go to Mars and starting a whole new world out there. If you were going to send any kind of plant up there to see whether it could survive, bryophytes would probably be one of your key systems to try."

Excerpt from: CBC News Technology & Science

Madrasi heart for Pakistani Madrassa teacher

By Daniel Thimmayya | ENS - CHENNAI

24th May 2013 08:08 AM 

Md Zubair Ashmi, who underwent a transplant at Malar Hospital, with surgeon Dr K R Balakrishnan on Thursday | R Satish Babu

The heart of a 36-year-old accident victim from Chennai now beats in the chest of a Pakistani, who narrowly escaped the claws of death. In a rare occurrence, the Pakistani managed to fly across, get admitted to a hospital in Chennai and receive a donor heart a day or two before doctors at Fortis Malar Hospital would have given up on his ailing body.

Moulana Mohammed Zubair Ashmi (41), a teacher at a madrassa in the small town of Tehsil Kharian (Gujarat district of Pakistan), had a heart that was pumping blood with only 10 per cent efficiency — well below the average 60 per cent required. In addition, his kidneys were shutting down and his urine output was minimal, apart from which his liver was ravaged by Hepatitis C.

“I don’t think I would have made it, really,” admits the thin, bearded man candidly, looking back on his near-death experience.

“Inshallah, I am here now,” he adds in Urdu-tinted Hindi. Though his doctors in Lahore agreed they could do little for him surgically, they made the long-distance call to Dr K R Balakrishnan, in Chennai, that saved his life.A long process ensued to get Zubair to Chennai, after which several medical obstacles were overcome to give him his new heart.

Zubair is recovering remarkably fast. Expected to return to Pakistan in a month, he says he feels just as much at home here in Chennai. “There is no difference between India and Pakistan... They love me a lot more here, since I am Pakistani,” he says.

Excerpt from: The New Indian Express

Photos of Tornado Damage in Moore, Oklahoma

May 21, 2013 | 

 

Yesterday afternoon, a monster tornado struck Moore, Oklahoma, near Oklahoma City. The twister, with winds of at least 200 mph, traveled for 20 miles, leaving a two-mile-wide path of destruction, flattening homes, smashing vehicles, and killing at least 24 people, including nine children.

శ్రీ కౌముది మే 2012