Category Archives: Science and Technology

Give me a ring sometime

Posted on by

[Cue crabby uncle voice] The crazy things that kids do these days! They’re glued to their mobile handsets. They eat, sleep, and even go to the bathroom while jabbering away. Why, just the other day, a Pakistani man in Italy even got married over the phone:

In Milan, the man told a court that he feared losing his job in Italy if he had flown to Pakistan to get married. Instead, he got married over the phone and had an official Pakistani marriage certificate to prove it. He even showed the court a video of relatives celebrating the wedding – without the happy couple.

The groom is legally resident in Italy and had won the approval of the local police chief for his plans to marry over the phone and then bring his bride to his new hometown in northern Italy… All that mattered, the judge said, was that a telephone wedding was recognised by law in the two spouses’ home country. [Link]

Of course, Italian immigration wasn’t too happy about it, but the judge had no problem with the idea. And who would expect less from a judge in the city of … Milan.

Is this idea so strange? If you can get divorced via text message [Exhibit A, Exhibit B*] , and if you can (ahem) perform “marital activities” over the phone [topic NSFW, but link OK], then why not get married over the phone too? I have friends whose entire LDRs seem to be over the phone these days anyway, so why not include the wedding as well?

Before you think that this is just modern technology run amuck, there was actually a similar event close to 160 years ago, on the “Victorian Internet” i.e. the telegraph:

… with the bride in Boston and the groom in New York… the bride’s father had sent the young groom away for being unworthy to marry his daughter, but on a stop-over on his way to England, he managed to get a magistrate and telegraph operator to arrange the wedding. The marriage was deemed to be legally binding. [Link]

There truly is nothing new under the sun.

*Yes, I know in K-Fed’s case he was just being informed not talaqed, but I couldn’t resist

Continue reading →

Zen and the Art of Painful Clichés

Posted on by

religionandethics-bluefluteplayer.jpg

Two Sundays ago, the PBS program, Religion and Ethics, decided to ask the question: “Why are Hinduism and Buddhism capturing the attention of business and management circles?”

The show profiled Professor Srikumar S. Rao, of the enormously popular Columbia University class Creativity and Personal Mastery, and Gautam Jain, of the Vedanta Cultural Foundation.

So the answer to the PBS question? The usual hodgepodge: happiness is elusive, the material world is illusory, one must not be possessed by one’s possessions… Since the 80s proved to business people that greed is not necessarily good, satisfying, or even lucrative in the long run, people are searching for another peg to hang a slogan upon.

I have a reflexive gag reaction to anything that smells of Deepak Chopra and the “pot of gold at the end of the spiritual rainbow” school of thought. While Prof. Rao and Gautamji came across as sincere, thoughtful and genuine (at least in the 5 mins alloted to each), I wonder if, despite their best efforts to explode the If/Then model of happiness, their students listen selectively. After all, these are people willing to pay $1,000 over the cost of the class to listen to Prof. Rao. His website, Are You Ready to Succeed? opens with this passage:

Life is short. And uncertain. It is like a drop of water skittering around on a lotus leaf. You never know when it will drop off the edge and disappear. So each day is far too precious to waste. And each day that you are not radiantly alive and brimming with cheer is a day wasted.

Which, frankly, leaves me lost (lotus, skittering, radiant cheer -what?) and slightly thirsty. Continue reading →

The hand that rocks the cradle

Posted on by

Our site administrator Paul tips us off to an article over at the BBC today that highlights a unique new program launched by the government of India:

The Indian government is planning to set up a network of cradles around the country where parents can leave unwanted baby girls.

The minister for women and child development, Renuka Chowdhury, told BBC News the cradles would be “everywhere”.

It is the latest initiative to try to wipe out the practice of female foeticide and female infanticide. [Link]

In my opinion anything that will help mitigate the foeticide and infanticide scourge is a good thing, but the imagery of little cradles set up around the country is kind of bittersweet.

“We will have cradles strategically placed all over the place so that people who don’t want their babies can leave them there,” Ms Chowdhury told the BBC News website.

The cradles could be in places as diverse as the local tax collector’s office, or where local councils meet.

Ms Chowdhury said parents would be able to leave their babies secretly. The important thing was to save their lives…

“They will be collected and put into homes,” she said. “There are plenty of existing homes and we will be adding some more also…” [Link]

Apparently there is actually a precedent for this type of program (in Japan):

The drop-off at Jikei Hospital in southern Japan will consist of a small window in an outside wall, which opens on to an incubator bed, officials say.

Once a baby has been placed inside, an alarm bell will alert staff. [Link]

Continue reading →

White Parents, Indian Baby

Posted on by

Bizarre and strange were the words that came to mind when I first started reading this article…

Wendy Duncan and her husband Brian are white. Nineteen months ago, the Lincolnshire housewife gave birth to a beautiful, healthy, Indian daughter. Freya, brown-skinned and dark-eyed, is not a medical miracle after a long and fruitless quest through IVF and adoption, but the product of a booming industry in India that is offering embryos for adoption.

Am I missing something? Why would you want to adopt an Indian embryo when there’s plenty of Indian children to adopt?

Embryo adoption was the culmination of an 18-year journey for the Duncans during which their attempts to become parents were frustrated by nature and bureaucracy. Being white and already having a mixed-race child (from Mrs DuncanÂ’s previous relationship) meant that they failed the criteria for a normal adoption.

Seriously? Having a mixed-race child limits your chances of adopting in the UK? That’s racist!

IVF was unsuccessful and expensive for a family relying on Mr DuncanÂ’s income as a lorry driver. The older Mrs Duncan got, the less the chance there was of any fertility treatment working. Their options were running out until they stumbled upon a website for the Bombay clinic. It was an easy choice.

Continue reading →

World of Apu

Posted on by

Bipin_02.jpgLavina Melwani, who seems to write three-quarters of the articles in the monthly Little India, has an informative piece on desis in the convenience store industry in the current issue. It’s the first focused treatment I’ve seen of the South Asian presence in that business that provides numbers, even if some are estimates, along with anecdotal information and personal stories. A few of the facts:

  • According to trade associations, 50,000 to 70,000 of the 140,000 convenience stores in the United States are owned by South Asians. South Asian owned stores do an estimated $100bn annual business.

  • Over 50 percent of US 7-Elevens are owned by South Asians.

  • 60 percent of South Asian owned stores are independent properties, as opposed to chain franchises – a similar pattern to the motel business, where desis began with independent properties before gradually acquiring brand-name franchises.

In addition to the National Association of Convenience Stores, several desi trade groups have sprung up: the Asian American Convenience Store Association, the Asian American Retailers Association, and the National Alliance of Trade Associations, which is based in the Ismaili community. The AACSA held its second convention in December and a third is scheduled for late May in Florida.

The article profiles a number of desi convenience store owners. It is pretty much the basic immigrant hard-work-make-good story. The risks of the profession are alluded to in passing. One point that stands out is that the convenience store business isn’t just an intermediate stop on the way up to more lucrative or prestigious activities:

[A profiled c-store owner] says the strength of the industry is in its ability to withstand economic downturns. He recalls, “When my son graduated from the University of Texas in 2000 the computer industry was booming. The first job was very good, but then in 2003 he was laid off. So he joined me in the business. The convenience store business is recession proof, because everyone needs bread and beer and lottery tickets. I always felt safe in the convenience store industry.”

Apu from The Simpsons earns a mention, and it’s a positive one:

For long, the only South Asian on TV was Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the owner of the Quik-E-Mart in the TV show The Simpsons. He is known for having worked for 96 hours straight, taken so many bullets that bullets ricochet off the bullets already lodged in his body! He is savvy, brainy and a one-man dynamo of energy. And a Ph.D to boot.

The stereotype has a sliver of truth, as hard work, family solidarity and resourcefulness are at the root of South Asian success in the C-store business. Many owners have professional degrees and include some physicians.

As a side note, the convenience store industry has at least once tried to embrace Apu. Here’s a straight-faced press release from the NACS in 2003. It’s entertaining to see how they twist and turn to explain why Apu may be good for industry image (“Apu encapsulates a number of positive traits found in the convenience store industry”) while never referring to Apu’s ethnicity. Continue reading →

Maximum absorbancy

Posted on by

Quite predictably, my inbox was blowing up this morning and the news of a bizarre love triangle at the workplace was the only thing people wanted to talk about. It was the first item at our weekly office meet-up (under the heading “safety”). At my workplace safety always comes first. So THIS is what they mean by a “water cooler topic”:

This is the story everyone’s talking about at the water cooler today. (Fortunately, I sit right next to the water cooler.) NASA astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak has been charged with attempted murder of another astronaut, who was in a astronaut love triangle with another astronaut. She also had on diapers so she wouldn’t have to stop on the drive. Okay, so attempted murder and kidnapping aren’t cool, but if they have to happen, I’m pretty happy that astronauts are involved. [Link]

First of all, if I was a rockstar I would totally name my band “astronaut love triangle.” It’s so edgy. If you click on my first link it will lead you to the arrest report which provides details about the steel mallet, rubber tubing, knife, pepper spray, large trash bags, wigs, and trench coat involved. I will spare you re-hashing the details that have been replayed on the news all day. This far into my post I am SURE you are all wondering “where is the desi angle?” Stay with me a moment.

Earlier this week Indian American astronaut Sunita Williams (see previous posts 1,2,3) set the spacewalking record for a woman. This is an amazing achievement that took many long hours of hard work in a dangerous environment!:

U.S. astronaut Sunita Williams has now spent more time in space [outside of a vehicle] than any other woman, setting the record on Sunday.

She and a crew mate upgraded the international space station’s cooling system.

Williams broke the previous female spacewalking record of more than 21 hours when she and Michael Lopez-Alegria completed the second of what could be a precedent-setting three spacewalks in nine days. The new record is 22 hours and 27 minutes. [Link]

So what do these two seemingly unrelated news stories have in common besides the fact that they both involve astronauts? Three words: Maximum Absorption Garment (MAG). Continue reading →

Sugar and the City

Posted on by

New York City has just released preliminary results of a health study that shows that more than one in eight adult New Yorkers have diabetes, while twice as many have abnormally high blood sugar that could be a sign of conditions leading to diabetes. Moreover, of the city’s diabetes sufferers, at least one-third do not know that they have the disease, while many of those who know they have it are not managing to treat it properly. Here’s the NYC health commissioner quoted in the New York Times today:

“This confirms that we as a society are doing a rotten job both preventing and controlling diabetes,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city health commissioner. “We can do a much better job helping people with diabetes get their condition under better control. The fact that there are over 100,000 New Yorkers with seriously out-of-control diabetes, and over 200,000 who don’t even know they have diabetes, is a real indictment of our health care system.”

As disturbing as the overall figures are, he said, they were not unexpected. They resemble estimates made by public health officials, who expected that the disease would be more common in New York City than nationally; diabetes is less prevalent among whites than among most other groups, and New York is a mostly nonwhite city.

Which brings us to the Desi Angle (TM), and it’s a deadly serious one:

But Dr. Frieden said he was startled by some of the specific findings, including the very high numbers among Asian-Americans, especially those from South Asia. The study indicates that more than half of the New Yorkers whose families are from the Indian subcontinent have either diabetes or prediabetes.

Here’s more:

Asians have the highest rates in the city, 16 percent diabetic and 32 percent prediabetic. The cityÂ’s report does not differentiate Asians by region, but officials said that the data in their study and others show that East Asians have below-average rates of diabetes, while South Asians have by far the highest of any large group.

Diabetes afflicts about 14 percent of the cityÂ’s non-Hispanic black population, 12 percent of Hispanics and 11 percent of whites.

If I can get a hold of more details I’ll update this post accordingly. Tomorrow the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC (93.9 FM in New York, and live and archived online) will be discussing this topic including the specific case of the South Asian community. Continue reading →

17 Year Old Desi Girl Makes Scientific Breakthrough

Posted on by

Madhavi Gavini is a student at a math/science high school in Mississippi, the Mississippi Institute of Math and Science. mahdavi-scope.jpg At age 14 she got interested in cystic fibrosis, especially the lung infections that kill many people suffering from CF:

It was that thirst for knowledge that drove Madhavi to search for a way to help a friend with cystic fibrosis. “I found out that most people who have CF die of pseudomonas infections,” she recalls, “so I wanted to see if there was anything I could do to help.” She was 14 at the time. “I guess the thought that a 14-year-old can’t really do much to help, didn’t really occur to me,” she says with a shrug.

Pseudomonas bacteria — in addition to killing people with cystic fibrosis — can cause deadly secondary infections in people with immune-suppressing conditions such as AIDS, cancer and severe burns. This opportunistic pathogen forms a thick, protective layer around itself, making it nearly impossible for antibiotics to penetrate and destroy it. (link)

That’s the background. Interestingly, the technique she used to find a way to kill the Pseudomonas bacteria started with Ayurvedic medicine:

With an herb book from her grandparents as her guide, Madhavi sampled common grocery store and green houseplants, such as cinnamon, ginger and aloe. She obtained a strain of pseudomonas bacteria from the local university and began subjecting the germs to various plant extracts.

One of the common tropical plant extracts penetrated the bacterium’s protective layer. Next, Madhavi isolated the specific molecule in the extract that was able to inhibit bacterial growth. She found that the molecule was heat resistant, and resistant to pressure. “It kills the cell,” she explains, “by preventing the transcription of the genes involved in energy, metabolism, adaptation, membrane transport, and toxin secretion.” (link)

The herb she started with, incidentally, is Terminalia Chebula, known in Sanskrit as Haritaki. As for which molecule exactly kills the biofilm that protects the Pseudomonas, the coverage I’ve read doesn’t say.

Wow. Continue reading →

Vultures At Risk

Posted on by

vulture_branch.jpgI’ve had a warm feeling toward vultures, buzzards and other scavenger birds since the time I attended a wedding in Burkina Faso, the arid, land-locked West African country, back in the early 1990s, and looked up to see clusters of big, bad-lookin’ buzzards hanging around on trees, waiting for the event to be over so they could swoop in for the remnants of the dozen or so sheep that had been slaughtered for the occasion. It was one of those “hey, what’s up?” moments humans can have with animals, when you realize that we’re all in this together, that each creature serves its function, and that the social and cultural practices of one species have significant effects on the well-being of others. I want to say it “humanized” the buzzards for me, which obviously isn’t the right word, but it demystified them and made me appreciate them. Nuff respect to the scavenger birds.

Today tipster Sakshi brings to our attention a fascinating article from Smithsonian magazine on vultures in the subcontinent, which not only offers an interesting glimpse into the lives of these birds but, more importantly, shows how closely we and they — and other species — lead interwoven lives and how fragile that balance can be. It turns out that scientists, picking up on the observations of cattle herders and others in the field, have noticed a substantial decline in the long-billed vulture population in the subcontinent for some years. The disappearance of the lead scavenger has resulted in the accumulation of un-scavenged cattle corpses as well as the growth of packs of feral dogs, in ways that you can read about in the article. It has also placed a new burden on secondary scavenger birds that used to only come in after the larger, more powerful vultures. Those birds in turn have become vulnerable to whatever it is that has decimated the vultures:

… across the subcontinent all three species of Gyps vultures are disappearing. Dead livestock lie uneaten and rotting. These carcasses are fueling a population boom in feral dogs and defeating the government’s efforts to combat rabies. Vultures have become so rare that the Parsi in Mumbai have resorted to placing solar reflectors atop the Towers of Silence to hasten the decomposition of bodies. International conservation groups now advocate the capture of long-billed, white-backed and slender-billed vultures for conservation breeding.

So what’s the cause? After initially speculating it was some kind of virus, scientists now have strong proof that it’s a particular medication that herders give cattle that is toxic to the vultures. This brings into the story the Indian pharmaceutical industry and its history of reverse-engineering cheap drugs, which arguably has done a lot to save human lives but has also resulted in a proliferation of drugs on the market without necessarily sufficient regulation or understanding of appropriate use. The chain of effects goes on:

Public health officials say it’s likely that India’s rat population is growing too, sharing the bounty of abandoned carcasses with feral dogs, and raising the probability of outbreaks of bubonic plague and other rodent-transmitted human diseases. Livestock diseases may increase too. Vultures are resistant to anthrax, brucellosis and other livestock diseases, and helped control them by consuming contaminated flesh, thus removing reservoirs of infectious organisms. Some municipalities are now resorting to burying or burning carcasses, expending precious land, firewood and fossil fuels to replace what Rahmani calls “the beautiful system nature gave us.”

In all, this is a powerful story of interdependence and one that, just possibly, might have a happy ending, as the governments of India, Pakistan and Nepal have grown aware of the problem and taken remedial action. Read the article for that story as well as a rich perspective on the interconnectedness of all things, one that might, at a minimum, help us step back from some of the ridiculous disputes over trivial matters that we humans, including those of us who hang out at this site, sometimes so enjoy wallowing in. There’s also a nice sidebar interview with the article’s writer, Susan McGrath:

Well, I knew that my trip to India was going to be different than most people’s trips to India. All my friends were saying, “Oh you’re so lucky! The crafts! The clothing! The wildlife!” And I spent half my time in India in carcass dumps.

Glad you did, Ms. McGrath. And to the vultures: keep ya ugly heads up, my avian brothers and sisters, stay strong! Continue reading →

Who nose the secrets of the stars?

Posted on by

Since we have been talking about California doctors I thought I would share a news item that just came to my attention. Do you knows which desi male is in such high demand in Hollywood for his magic hands? He’s not a yoga instructor or a masseur, instead he’s Dr. Raj Kanodia, surgeon to the stars!

What do Jennifer Aniston, Ashlee Simpson and Cameron Diaz have in common? When Aniston recently underwent rhinoplasty, she turned to Dr. Raj Kanodia, the plastic surgeon behind Simpson’s and Diaz’s new noses. [Link]

Would you trust a bald barber?

Not only is this a major nose job, but (surprisingly) it’s confirmed by Aniston’s own people:

Aniston’s rep confirms the operation. “Jennifer had a procedure done to correct a deviated septum that was incorrectly done over 12 years ago,” [Link]

While the official story is that she hated her original nose job and came to Kanodia for correction, nosy parkers insist that that a broken nose is just balm for a broken heart.

Am I the only one who finds it ironic that all these famous actresses are coming to a desi doctor to get demure little noses? I imagine him doing these operations with an cartoon angel on one shoulder and a cartoon devil on the other. The angel tells him to just do what the client wants, and the devil tells him to go ahead and do what he really wants – to give these women beautiful, majestic desi schnozzes instead. The poor doctor’s hands twitch, caught by conflicting impulses, until he leaves the room crying and his associates finish the surgery instead.

More on Kanodia: Champa And Tulsi Go to Hollywood

Our earlier post on him: Of Course…A Desi Doc on Dr. 90210

Continue reading →