Walls

You know. Things were different.

For one thing , before I was born , my folks went to the US to do graduate school in the very late 1940's, because the then Bombay government granted a scholarship. (And no , back then you didn't need an uncle in positions of power, just good academics.)  Which resulted in the acquisition (on return) then of a decent camera, and an 8 mm movie camera and what was then touted as a wire recorder.

Needless to say, we subsequently had several albums full of small prints showing us children in various stages of growth, posing in gardens (houses had them in those days), next to flowers, even pumpkin plants displaying our size relative to a super large pumpkin. I remember some kind of overexposed moving film showing me walking soon after becoming a biped, sometimes with a parent behind me, and a sibling kind of running across . Strangely these films had no sound. The wire recorder recorded such immortal things like lisping answers to questions, laughs and cries .  All these things were kept away in shelves and drawers to be displayed amidst visiting relatives and so on.

And the real photos that graced our walls were two large framed photos of my two late grandfathers, at an angle to the vertical, so that you always got the impression they were checking on you. Post her everyday morning puja, my mother would climb on a stool kept on a bed, and wipe the photographs clean, with her just washed and dried puja saree palloo; on special occasions there would be wonderful garlands for the grandpas, and we children  did our pranams to the photos at the onset of any wonderful venture, whether at school or home.

We had several sepia style photos with assorted serious types standing in gowns and holding scrolls, as well as some old photos with a senior citizen person sitting surrounded by folks in turbans/gandhi topis, and ladies in nine yards , holding kids . There was always some kid in a velvet embroiderd jacket sitting on a table top, and the table always had these curved legs. All these photos were hard mounted and covered with tissue paper and they remained in the cupboard recesses and never appeared on the wall.

Somewhere in college, folks started bringing cameras to picnics, wedding photography evolved, it became fashionable to click photos of folks being  felicitated for things, or standing next to eminent folks. People started displaying photos on walls , of themselves and family with folks of national eminence.   Families started travelling around the country, and photos in front of Tajmahal, various temples, waterfalls, native places and so on graced the various album pages , but yet , all in cupboards and drawers. 

By now, it was clear that you didn't have to die to have your photo on a wall. From an analogue version of a interconnected complete family, folks were moving places, setting up establishments and the digitisation, per se, of the family had begun.  Graduation pictures,  Wedding pictures and so on started gracing tabletops and walls.  Some grandparents proudly displayed photos of their grandkids in a frame next to the telephone on the table.  Very soon, wedding photography evolved and people specialised in maintaining entire albums .

Instamatic cameras , the precursors of the point-and-shoot cameras, soon flooded the market. Film cartridges happened.  When I went for grad school in the US in the early 70's, I returned with many photographs of various places I travelled to and visited, graduation,  my house, my friends and so on.  Even then , stuff remained in albums.  For example, a photograph of me drinking tea, was not sufficient  for a wall appearance and completely unacceptable.

A short period in which cameras got really complicated and the age of the digital camera dawned, parallel with the entry of the personal computer.  The absence of a physically loadable film was the biggest relief.

The digitisation of society was complete. People started carrying cameras in bags and purses. Folks graduating started carrying cameras themselves to convocations.  Cameras came and captured kids  barely a couple of hours old . Prices of hardware    
tumbled. Cameras started recording video.  Family events got captured in all their moving glory; tears could be seen falling, bangles tinkled, kids bawled, real applause got recorded with action and expressions.

Earlier it was about the message. Now it became about the medium.  Capturing something well became more important than what you captured.  Technology was making society adapt to it  rather that itself evolving for the society.

And then, inexplicably Facebook happened. You didn't need sepia photos in drawers, small black and white prints in thick albums, with photo corners.  Not only did people put photos of family events, complete with labels and comments, they also put photos of what they cooked for lunch, dinner, what they ate at someone's house, what they saw on some tree in their garden, what their dog ate. Also included were photos of some thing they made, constructed ,gifted or received,  sometimes even photos of their vehicles, all  washed and polished. The ordinary became special.

Sometimes something special became a bit less so, because of excessive appearance. 

Walls didn't exist solely in houses. Facebook itself had a wall, on which you put photos and people expressed their opinions.  If you didn't like something, you removed the photo. You even put up photos of others to tease someone.  You could control who could see whose photos. A single family had many individual walls. In more ways than one.

Not just the digitisation , but the discretization of a flowing old life was complete.

Today, along with photos of my late parents and late in laws on the wall, that look down at me as I sit typing away at this desktop,  I also have across the room , family photos of us with eminent folks we met, an unusual gathering of family several years ago. These conservative types mix seamlessly with photos of kids with milk moustaches , clicked as they finished up the hated glass of milk, photos of kids holding cricket bats, standing in half pants, dripping in the rain,  young cousins meeting after a long time, and the portrait of a young woman in a dressy saree in a permanent breathe-in posture  as she tries to manage a massive traditional  Maharashtrian nose ring  adorning her not so sharp nose.

The same young woman, lugs a DSLR everywhere, talks lenses, clicks insects  and bugs on walls and gardens, the insides of flowers, and outsides of monuments, jewellery, food, sunsets, sunrises, and flowing waters.

Sometimes we visit my old maternal house where the portraits of my late grandfathers still hang on a proper , now ancient wall.

And sometimes, just sometimes, I imagine a hint of a smile on their faces, as they see a young great grandchild, seriously fiddling with some settings, clicking and then with some alacrity uploading stuff , on what she thinks, is a wall of her own.  

The Onco Society

I have often thought of the similarities between our human body processes and our country/society as it exists today.  It very uncanny, but you may mentally superimpose one on the other and see.

We have  an entire set of rivers flowing from the mountains into the oceans. Some big, others small. Most of them being subject to, as they say in medical parlance, environmental insult.  The Ganga, of my younger days, is now  a troubled flow, replete with the silts of progress, industrial  effluents, and sewage of a shameless humanity.

What can you expect of a people, who gave up sensible seasonal organic eating, a daily high-movement lifetsyle and avidly pursued food studded with trans fats, additives, banned chemicals , heavy sugar, heavy salt and phosphoric acid, and messed up their own Ganga , the Aorta , the main artery in the body; with blobs of sticky plaque all over, and sometimes, even stretching encroachment outside its 3 layered banks, in the form of blooming aneurysms.

Of course there are rivers like the Brahmaputra , that are cursed for changing courses, and creating new channels of flow. Maybe, like collateral flows (compensating alternative blood flow  paths ) that happen in our body when faced with blocks in the normal flow, the river too, took corrective action. 

A sense of intense greed makes us reclaim land from what is normally a free wavy sea, and  we show off smooth and posh constructions unconcerned about the fact, that somewhere else,  the sea will have to make up for being driven out. And so you watch, ladies traumatised by age , using Botox fillers to reclaim youth and beauty, unaware that this is going to show up at some point , problematically somewhere in the body, which has a fixed capacity to throw out junk.  In various places , we artificially try and flatten, raise, and sculpt the body parts, just like we flatten entire forests and hillocks in the interests of landgrabbing and progress.

And then there is the business of the genes.

These are in the nucleus of the cells, millions of which make us what we are. These genes, basically contain the operative instructions for the growth, maintenance and running our body systems. Some of these genes we inherit from our parents/ancestors and we call them traits/predispositions. Others we are born with. 

While we need to be aware and knowledgeable on what genes we have inherited, turns out that some of the other genes get affected by things like environmental insult (smoking, unnecessary scans, UV radiation), and the coded operative instructions inside them get smudged. 

The understanding between the cells and the genes is lost and the cells go wild replicating themselves, and the gene is said to have mutated. Of course, there are also other genes which specialize in various repairs, and they try to right the situation.   When it's a lost battle, we realize that we have an unnecessary proliferation of rogue cells, thanks to some terribly messed up , misguided genes, and we say that it is cancer.

Can anything be more different in the country ? 

There was a time when the entire country was united; education was still taken seriously, and educators were greatly respected. Money had quality, and not just  quantity. There was an  ethos, a predictability and sense of balance about society, a graceful seamless taking over by the young of the old. 

But at some point, there were disruptions , of standards. How you got money became unimportant, how much you got made you great. Lying and indulging was considered OK, so long as you achieved your ambition.  The killing gene in society was rampant. Someone didn't respond to your overtures, throw acid on her; someone blocked your path from thieving, push them out of a train; don't like your election opponent, bump him off.

So many rogue genes in society, forcing some many other hesitant genes to change for the worse. Cheating in exams, in diagnosis, in following rules, and even in living, became rampant. Even those who were supposed  to save society from the bad folks, became evil themselves, as in the recent news about the Haryana Women's Homes, and ruthless female infanticide by doctors and ill educated husbands in Beed, Maharashtra.

It is as if a cancer is growing wild and rampant all around us.

While our bodies get subject to extremely invasive treatments for the management of detected cancers, with outrageously expensive treatments and medications being the norm, all this at a huge other cost to the human body, I often wonder what we do to eradicate or even fight these mutating  goonda genes in our society.  For some, it is simpler to turn Goonda themselves.....

Like in actual cancer, there are , in society, some repair-gene like folks, who work towards trying the stop the wild multiplication of the societal cancer cells.

That is where the similarity between the cancer in our body and that in society ends. 

Current cancer research focuses on identifying the defiant gene(s) in the cell, that are responsible for a particular cancer, and creating medication to straighten out the undisciplined tendencies of that gene, so that orderly cell activities can take place.

A simple look at a newspaper on any given day,  shows more and more innovative wild proliferation of society cancers. With so many genes  in society giving in and  mutating to take the easy way out, i shudder to think of the world that lies in store for the Generation Next.

Welcome to the Mutating Onco Society......

The Big C

The papers are full of cricketer Yuvraj Singh and his fight with the Big C. I have also known many folks who have battled the same scourge, and come out successful, because of the amazing specific treatments that are available today, across a range of impressive technologies and pharmaceuticals.

One of the reasons, that we have reached this stage, is because , we have a perfectly detailed map of how things are functioning  inside our bodies . Not only that,  but whenever , there have been new advances in the body maps,  pharmaceutics, or even diagnostic tools,  concerned people have made exhaustive documentation, and made it  freely available.

It was not always so. (You can tell I am reading Emperor of Maladies.....).

 Hippocrates, who postulated stuff around 400 BC, defined the human body to be composed of 4 humors or fluids. Blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. In balance, they defined good health. Out of balance , you were sick.   Claudius Galen, a Greek doctor (AD 160) who treated Romans, defined various illnesses specifically ; like inflammations were related to blood, pus stuff was  related to phlegm, jaundice was related to yellow bile.  Dr Galen specifically  dedicated "trapped" black bile to define cancer, and depression, a perceptive combination. Till about 1533, cancer treatment was all about gory surgeries, hacking of infected body parts, deaths by infection and so on.  Andreas Vesalius , a medical student ,came to Paris from Brussels to study anatomy in the steps of Galen, was aghast at the absence of a "body" map to guide those doctors performing these surgeries, and set about actually "mapping the human body, muscles, nerves, bones, blood vessels et al. He sourced bodies from graveyards, prisons, and such places, and exhaustively mapped and publish his detailed drawings of normal anatomy. More than 200 years later, Matthew Bailie in London, created a similar atlas of a diseased body. Somewhere between 1846 and 1875 anesthesia came into the picture, along with an ability to control wound infections (sepsis), and this formed a very sturdy base on which all kinds of cancer surgeries were done.

Today , amazing nano technologies and pharmaceutical treatment at the genetic marker level are at the forefront of cancer treatment, and many cancers, hitherto considered uncurable,  are now treatable. At the root of all these advances, is clearly, the landmark mapping work done by people like Vesalius and Bailie. You no longer did approximate cuts and hacks.  They laid down the rules of how you approached the body and the diseased section.

Our society today, is afflicted buy one of the biggest cancers one can think of.

Corruption. 

It was not always so.

About 50 years ago,  corruption, like cancer was  not so common or prevalent; possibly , it existed, but was not recognized. Unlike cancer, it was never a matter of life and death, and so it progressed,  step by shameless step,  eating into minds weakened by lack of idols, lack of morals and lack of scruples, but dazzled by prospects, like cancer, of limitless expansion.  Money and power was an excellent DNA.

There has never been an effort to seriously eradicate this cancer; simply because  system maps created to handle this, always have left a loophole. There has been an effort at piecemeal eradication, like in a specific office or department or ministry or section.  It's like concentrating only or eradicating , say breast cancer, without worrying about its possible spread elsewhere.

There has been no  Hippocrates, no Dr Galen, no  Andreas Vesalius, no Matthew Bailie.  The anesthesia has been all about deadening and  repressing the opinions of a discerning and angry public,  under the guise of appointed committees. , whose reports are summarily dismissed. The sepsis continues unabated in society, infecting all sections.  The cancers in society not only spread in numbers, but they have an uncanny ability to pull towards them, sections of society, at higher and higher levels.

We desperately need to have an overall map for handling this, and a set of surgeons and doctors, who will ruthlessly perform radical surgeries, unconcerned with the presumed importance of a particular organ in society. 

Until then, welcome to a world where, society cancers puffed in their malignant selves, proudly move around, destroying a small brave muscle here, an unwilling-to-lie nerve there.   Watch them, hoodwinking powers of "law" radiation,  and countering the chemotherapy discomfort with some "anticipatory "  arrangements.  

Sometimes,  the proverbial  "shoe" thrown by fate,   hits in the form  of a temporary arrest in a jail.  But this "arrest"  of this cancer, is more in the nature of covering it up, malignancies and all, so as to hopefully fade from the public eye.

We keep hearing of candidates in elections having criminal antecedents. Parties have hundreds of such candidates.

If and when they get elected, can we  ever expect them to make rules for the eradication of the Corruption Cancer ?

Can a surgeon with a diseased hand ever operate on a  cancer  and remove it ?   Can money ever rain from the skies ?  Will Mumbai ever be free of potholes, and flooded monsoon roads ?  Will we ever get over our craze for fairness of skin ?    Will money meant for child welfare ever reach those it is meant for ?   Will we ever learn to provide for storage of grains, that currently rot in the rains, while the centre and states point their carcinomic fingers at each other ?

There are no answers. For the above. One may only hope.

....

But I am glad that real cancer research progresses by leaps and bounds; that we have excellent doctors who practice and  translate that into individual therapy regimens for patients,  and that folks like Yuvraj Singh and many other folks of various ages ,  can now have a good prognosis, and return to their active useful lives again ....



 





 

His Mother's Son.....reloaded

One has had occasion, over the last half a century, to observe sons, at various levels.  One has also had occasion to observe the level of "education " in the mothers, and wonder about the various attitudes they displayed.

Only to come to the conclusion, that education, as we know it today,  has nothing to do with anything.

Three true stories.

T was born in the very early part of the 20th century, and married off at 13 to a widower, whose children were almost her age. She later had 2 children.  This was the time, many educated folks retired and came to settle down in Pune around the time India got her independence.  Her family and another family who they were friends with, thought it was a good idea to link to the two with a matrimonial alliance, and her son was married off to the friend's daughter, who was, unusual for those days, a graduate, and even more unusual, quite independent minded. Grandchildren happened and T lived for many years after her husband passed away, in a huge house with both her sons and their families, in separate households, respecting each others religious and other sentiments.  When her eldest grandson went abroad to do his post graduation, naturally he became a prized catch in the eyes of folks with eligible daughters, a few years later.   

Mind you, T was someone who still followed some very old customs. She was totally untouchable when she was wearing a "sowla" or her puja/worship clothes. You could do what you wanted in your own house, but in her house, you didn't participate in anything on what were considered monthly impure days.  However, she, with hardly any education, a restrictive controlled married life, and an early life where she was neither seen nor heard,  was quick to see how girls were getting a great benefit from school, sports, and participation in many activities , and never stopped her grandchildren from anything. Many years later, when someone ribbed her about whether her grandson in the US would possibly return with a "white"  (read golden hair and wearing a frock)  bride,  she told them she had complete confidence in her grandson and the values he had imbibed from his mother and father, and she would welcome , such a wife, if needed, with an aarti, and present her with a typical wedding silk sari. I blogged about it here in a post that questioned culture and moral policing.  Hardly any education, very very conservative behaviour patterns in her husband's house,  and she still learned, how to move judiciously with the times.

B,  someone closer to my age, who came from an upwardly mobile, hardworking, educated  family,  was himself encouraged to attend high school in the US for a year on an exchange program and made many lifelong friends.  He returned to help his father expand their business,  acquired a doctorate, had an arranged marriage with a very nice , well educated girl from the same community, and they had a son.  Naturally, he paid great attention to is son's education (like his father before him), and his son too went overseas , and excelled at his given field of study, with a doctorate and returned home.  He started working outside to acquire some actual expertise  and met a very nice girl, and decided to marry her.  The problem was that she was of another caste, although a Hindu.  The parents were fairly upset. This wasn't about just the bride and groom, but two families being linked. The father poured his heart out to his great friend in the US ( an American who had lived in India) , because he had to talk to someone he considered close.  Email after email.

But they never lost communication with their son. One fine day, they sat him down , told him their misgivings and feelings about his intended   bride, and asked him to think it over seriously for a few days, and  get back to them.  The son respected their wishes. All conversations and discussions happened , with no acrimony, accusations, whatever.  A few days later, he got back to them. He understood where they were coming from, he respected their thinking, but he was very very firm about who he would marry, and it was the girl he worked with.

What happened next was amazing. The parents had come to a conclusion after weeks of agonizing. They implicitly trusted their son and he respected them.  On hearing his decision, his parents looked at each other, and his mother got up to say, that , "OK. We welcome a new daughter into our house !"   .....The wedding took place with great celebration and fanfare a few years ago.

R, someone I know,  has a daughter of marriageable age.  As is the custom in a society, where systems for social interactions like dating etc are yet to become customary,  most folks become a data entry point in a portal where  eligible girls and boys with all the relevant family career et al details are mentioned.    There isn't anything that you could point fingers at, in R's daughter's case;  except that she is an adopted child, and most folks who intellectually applaud that, simply runaway when personally faced with it.

One fine day, she (R's daughter) , gets a message on a social networking site from someone who has searched her on a portal, and taken the trouble to contact her because he found her interesting.  They communicate, they exchange numbers, Skype each other. There appeared to be a lot of laughter, which R thought was an encouraging sign.

Then one day he mentioned about a horoscope. R's daughter doesn't have one , because her birth time isn't known for obvious reasons, and she tells him so. For some reason he asks her blood group. Turns out they both have the same.  He continues to call and talk about his future plans, his family and so on and   so forth. Then one day he asks to speak to R.  He says he will be showing R's daughter's profile to his folks, and they would get back to him.  R has a decent conversation with him, is impressed . 

One night, R is watching some music program on TV, when her daughter comes in, wildly gesticulating saying she is wanted on the phone.   Intrigued, R goes in to answer the phone. It's the guy.  He is very polite, very civil, calls her aunty and everything, and says he has just heard from his folks, and his mother objects because, believe it or not, these two, R's daughter and this fellow have the same blood group !  He apologizes, and asks he if and the  daughter can still be friends. R says its up to her daughter.

A travesty of education, this.  The mother rules the roost in his house. Either all of them are completely confused about blood groups , or they think R is stupid.  A family which prides itself on well educated sons, an educated father, possibly a not so educated mother.  The mother decrees what is clearly a fake reason, and the son, a science student, in an analytical well paying job,  blindly, gutlessly passes it on, without thinking.

Similar blood groups are never a problem. Rh factors being different sometimes cause problems at the time of childbearing, for which medical solutions exist.  But who cares.  The matriarch has decreed in the year 2011, that "matching blood groups is a no-no and the devoted son , stands to attention, and passes on the message.

R  counts till 10.  Idiomatically.  Takes a deep breath, and tells the guy, "Thank you for informing us. Appreciate that you took the time to call.  But you know what, we people are guided by our blood groups too. My daughter and I are both B +ve.   And we follow that tenet. We always tell each other, "Be positive"......Interesting na ?"

There is no reply.

So many sons of so many  mothers. Through the ages.  The older ones  never went to school, but imbibed and absorbed "education", as their sons went out into the world.  And then this mother is 2011. And a son, who, despite his degrees, and stuff,  makes a mockery of the word, "education", preferring to propagate untruths.

To people, who he thinks are as "uneducated" as he is.

And incidentally, to hell, with a young girl's mind.... 

And then I sit down and wonder, whether we as a society are actually improving .....

The Importance of helmets.....

Manisha Devi, one of this country's National kabaddi players, who played for India, was returning home from practice, one evening, in Patna, Bihar. She never reached home. She was shot dead by a Central Reserve Police Force(CRPF) jawan, who shot her with his AK47 rifle. Why ? Because he had been asking for her phone number, and she had refused.

Two young girls from Jaipur, studying in college, and returning home from classes one evening, walking home together. Two guys riding by on a motorcycle, threw acid on their faces, and escaped. Why ? They had rejected their marriage proposal. The girls were critical, and scarred for life. The fellows lived, and were later arrested.

300 kilometres away from Lucknow, some 6 members of a family got infuriated, because the village Panchayat decided to construct a Community Hall in an open space in front of their house. They threw acid on the 12 village Panchayat members, who all suffered burns and 3 of them critically.

Not shocked enough ?

Arokia John, of Nagercoil, Tamil Nadu, was 75, and had a medical problem, which made him cough a lot. Despite the medication he was advised , there was no observable change and he continued to cough continuously. Unable to tolerate this, his son, picked a boulder, hit his father, and killed him, to stop the coughing from disturbing his sleep.

Seventeen year old Salman Asifullah Khan, was waiting at Mumbai's suburban Matunga Station, to catch a train. A fast non-stopping train sped by. Someone from the speeding train, on a dare from his friends, kicked Salman in his abdomen. While the sick minded fellows congratulated each other on their aim, Salman ruptured his liver, bled hugely, and was declared dead by the hospital 75 minutes later.

What makes people behave like this ? Did these kind of events happen earlier ? Or do we just hear more because of more mediums of communication ? Newspapers 40-50- years ago, only occasionally came up with news of gory deaths like this. One didn't hear so much in the daily course of one's life, and certainly not, say, on a busy road while going to school or work. There were violent people, serial killers, and so on, and investigations happened. But violence wasn't casually done as it is today .

Is it a function of societal evolution causing pressures ? Do some people have an unthinking automatic response to these pressures? Do people feel threatened ?

So has something unpleasant evolved in us ? Does our environment have anything to do with it ?

We need to understand how our brains have evolved.

The earliest and simplest brain, called the Reptilian brain is what we share with the birds and reptiles, and it controls the basic stuff like, hunger, temperature control, fight-or-flight fear responses, defending territory, maintaining a sense of safety, obsessions etc.

The next part to evolve was around this central 'Reptilian ' part, and is called the Limbic system.We humans share this part of the brain with cats, dogs, horses, rats etc. Their brains, and this part of our brains, are extremely similar. This mammalian brain allows us to have feelings., and has something to do with moods, memories and hormone control.

Finally, the next level of evolution has to do with what is called the cortex. This allows us humans to do things like complex social interactions, advance planning of activities, reasoning out things, learning languages and so on. Our cousins , the Chimpanzees, cannot do some of these things, as their cortexes are much smaller.

It would seem like those who perform violent acts as indicated above might have a severely badly evolved cortex, thus allowing them to base their reactions , more on the limbic part of their brain, like the cats and dogs. It might even be appropriate to say, that they do not use their reasoning systems enough in the cortex, and are given to what we call knee jerk reactions to events.

While intrinsic developmental levels of the complicated anatomy of the brain may be a factor, does the environment matter ? Does it make a difference if you grow up with saintly folks, or maybe, a house where drinking, and abuse is the norm?

Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center’s Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Research Center have shown that in a person who watched violent programs, say on TV, those parts of the brain that suppressed aggressive behaviours, simply became less active. This is not a conjecture, but there is neurological proof. People who were repeatedly shown violent activities on TV, and their brain activity studied, were also later on given personality tests , which ended up confirming their reduced ability to controlling aggressive behavior.

Think of the onslaught of films that glamorize violence, and horror. In my childhood, we had films, but along with strict parental standards, that decided whether we needed to see a particular film in the first place, the violence in the actual films was a bit controlled. Then there was also, no television for us, bombarding us with the stuff 24 x 7.


Today, no film is complete unless it shows mindless violence (the gorier the better) and demeaning treatment of women. In the big rush to keep up with the Joneses, it has become imperative to earn more and more, and children are growing up, almost on auto-pilot with wrong settings. And this is further complicated by an attitude that applauds a male destructive child and calls him macho.

Parents are unable to give time to children in the big rush to be able to afford "more and bigger" everything.

Except possibly their brains. And the cortex.

Sometimes it is fashionable to attribute an attitude to a similar parent. Implying it is in the gene or the DNA. But even this has been proved invalid. We all carry all kinds of genes. What matters is whether a particular gene is "expressed" or in simple words ,"activated" .

Scientists at the University of Virginia, did experiments with water fleas, which are actually eaten up by fish. They bred some water fleas in an aquarium where chemicals were added to the water to simulate a fish environment in smell, feel etc. Another bunch of water fleas were bred in normal water, having nothing to do with fish. All these fleas had the same genes/DNA. It turned out that those that were habituated to the fishy smelly aquarium, developed a kind of "helmet" system , that made it difficult for fish predators to swallow them. The other flies, of course , were a meal for the fish.

Which goes to prove that environment really decides which of our genes will be "expressed" and which will lie quietly beneath.

And so, on an individual level, the importance of providing our children with the right environment , the ability to evaluate and judge the good, bad, whatever, and the guts to take an important, even possibly unpopular decision.

Sometimes I think this water fly theory even works for us as a society. Corruption and Greed has inordinately increased in our society and much of it has to do with those in power. They are the Big Fish, and we are the water flies.

But skimming around in a water body teeming with corrupt, lying, and cheating powerful predators, has allowed us , as a society, to developed "helmet" systems like the Right to Information Act (RTI), Public Interest Litigations (PIL's), informed mass protests, and so on. True, some of us water fleas get sacrificed at the alter of excessive population sizes, but by and large these are the "helmets" we have developed, from our basic gene , which is that of a learning society with empathy .

I dont really know if there is any further evolution possible in our brains. But I do know, that there is a "plasticity" that our brain has. The ability to train parts of our brain meant for a given purpose, so that they can also do something else. And that requires us to learn.

Like, we as a society , have so many abilities in innovation and manipulation of things, but we need to have enough plasticity to realize how to use it for our own good.

Thinning Bones and thick heads...

The country and I belong to the same generation. Folks in their sizzling sixties. Been there , done that, kind of people. And so I am always looking out for similarities on what occurs in my life as well as in the country's , and try to ascertain recognizable patterns.

One of the things that one has undergone in the last year or so, is complete onslaught on the Bone system of the body, and its connective stuff.

Which would really surprise you if you knew, that ever since I was born, assorted folks who came by to hold and coo to me as a baby, were known to have remarked on how heavy I was. Later in school, the PT teacher who supervised our physicals, would check my weight twice, because it didn't fit in , and was high, compared with my normal build and agility in sports then.

Many years later, in my fifties, a friend who was a well respected scientist and researcher involved in doing some research on bone densities of urban Indian women announced that she was looking for cases to check bone densities and do followups and so on, and she had a big laugh when I offered myself as a candidate.


My sole interest was a free bone density test . Her sole interest was helping those with low bone densities .

And so it goes without saying that I kind of sailed into my sixties, dense in bone as well as , as it turned out, thinking.

Its very fashionable these days to be aware of menopause. While its fashionable to talk about wrinkles, cranky/cribbing/anxious behaviour, and estrogen making a graceful withdrawal causing hot flushes or whatever, what caught my attention was this business of thinning bones.

I thought I had such a built in advantage, that thinning would never be a part of my skeletal life.

Life has a way of teaching you. And the Internet has a way of explaining things to you.

In the last 2 years, most of my bones /ligaments etc , barring the skull, pelvis, and the big limb bones , have started showing their evil side.

It started with the left little toe which fractured itself banging somewhere, followed by the right little toe a fortnight later in the US of A. Then a few months later, the left shoulder (resulted in an MRI blog post), cervical vertebra (neck level), then the lower back (another post), then the right shoulder (resulting in a sling and another blog post ), again the lower back (and a philosophical post).


The latest is another small toe fracture, which has ended up cracking up some other support structures, and the entire thing is now bound firmly for 3 weeks, making it impossible to limp across the newly widened arterial road outside in the allocated time while shopping for veggies and stuff. Skates as an idea was rejected firmly by some folks, who were concerned about creating potholes on the new road , if I fell.

Turns out that our blood always contains some "mediators" called chemokines or chemoattractants. These things arrange for various signals and stuff, which tell various receptors to go sit in various tissues of the body, like our bones.

The same blood also contains cells that help bone regeneration (osteoblasts), and cells that destroy bone (osteoclasts). Typically, the osteoclasts are yet immature, but are "recruited" by these chemokines, and made to go sit on the bone tissue and mature. After maturity, they start chipping away at your bones, thinning them.

This has an amazing parallel with immature , easily impressionable folks with evil intentions lurking in our society, and they being recruited by appointed messenger types steeped in politics, corruption and violence. The messenger types get these types well established somewhere where they do their destruction work.

You see, as a young girl, these things were not so prevalent in the society around me. Quite simply, the percentage of folks who worried about scruples was fairly large . You trusted people to behave in a certain way. The majority of folks had similar ethical and moral standards, regardless of their economic situation in life.

Like me, the country is now in the 60's and suffering from violence flashes, thinning of its august institutions, where assorted unscrupulous and shameless messenger types have installed , what can only be called "People-clasts", or folks who can be bought for a price.

A national menopause.


Right from the ticket counter clerk at the railway reservation window, to the so called peoples' leaders, , everyone has become a "peopleclast ", eating away at the fabric of the country's life. We have more and more accidents thanks to blind eyes being turned to things, more lives destroyed, more wastage , wild consumption and so on.

It turns out that Ronald Germain, M.D., Ph.D., at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health. and Masaru Ishii, M.D., Ph.D., a Visiting Fellow from Japan, have researched this .

They homed in on a blood messenger called S1P, which was the instigator of the recruitment of immature osteoclasts. And they did experiments to show that if you had receptor cells on your bones that recognized this blood messenger S1P , then you could blindly draw away into the blood, those immature osteoclasts accumulating at your bones, and save the bones, from future destruction.

They ,of course, did experiments with live mice, and using a unique imaging technique, the researchers could see immature osteoclasts migrating away from the bones of the mice in response to S1P in the blood. Mice with functional S1P receptors had denser bones than mice lacking functional S1P receptors.

We need similar S1P types in society. To give hope, to the misguided young and old destroyers, of decent society. The above experimenters even tested a synthetic version of the S1P and found it worked.

Maybe at an age of 63, it is not too late for us as a country, to come up with some inspired well trained S1P's to build up the confidence and good standards in the way we function in this country, and stop our great institutions from being eaten away by the corrupt people-clasts.

But the real puzzle comes later.

The researchers say that they tested a mouse model of postmenopausal osteoporosis (thinning of the bones), to see if adding a synthetic S1P activator, could help preserve bone. Postmenopausal mice who were given that, had fewer immature osteoclasts on their bones and greater bone density when compared with untreated postmenopausal mice.


I know why my bones are behaving the way they do in my menopausal age.

I realize how physiology can teach so much to us as a menopausal nation. And that we need to look for S1P's of our own to change. Be the change we want to be.....

But Yikes ! I didn't realize the mice could have menopause ............

Learning from within

There is a lot of discussion about creation.

How the human body was created, did it evolve, or did it get a head start due to what could be called divine interventions. While this may be a subject for intense debate in theological, scientific and Darwinian circles, sometimes the advent of old age and a lifetime of observing the body and your environment , has some lessons in living. For us as a society.

This has been a season of extremes. In health, as well as climate. As well as our attitudes. "Our", includes those who purport to "manage " life for us. Inside and outside our bodies.

And so I was delighted to hear about "cytokines". Which are really what can be called cell-cell messengers. The original SMS system before Nokia, Blackberry, Ericsson, and Samsung types started claiming credit.

Whenever you get, say, hurt somewhere, or face an infection (bacteria, virus, etc), the white blood cells in your blood mobilize for handling it with the help of macrophages which are like security guards. Some doing local fighting, some wandering around in the body tackling possible infiltration. As part of this procedure they create conditions whereby messages are relayed , about this impending invader, through protein messengers throughout your body. While all this causes, swellings, and fluid collections, and war situations at the point of hurt/infection, these white cells also do the very important work of sending messages out to the rest of the body, and the various defending armies (in the form of various types of fighter cells). This very important work is done by these protein messengers , or cytokines.

(watch this for an animation of capturing invaders and release of cytokines)


The cytokines are very intelligent in the way they convey stuff. Sometimes its a local skirmish with an invading thing, complete with scratches, fluid swellings, pains, followed by some new skin, winning the whole war.

Sometimes the human body responds by producing antibodies, that latch on to these invader items, and traipsing through the bloodstream, signal to the various fighting entities in your organs saying, "Attack now, I've identified the crooks" .

Sometimes, they even arrange to remember these things , so that should the same invader attack the body again, something goes , "Aha ! I know you guys....bad news..bring on the army !" and the antibodies do their stuff.

The question arises as to whether this business of getting excited about fighting the invaders can get out of control. I mean, sometimes, the cytokines may travel far and wide into the body's nervous system, may go around so strongly as to affect the body's thermostat and you get fevers, sometimes out of control. Occasionally, aided by certain conditions, the normal cells may get destroyed along with the diseased, in an uncontrolled fashion. Leading to health catastrophes.

And so, it is not always true, that the more cytokines the merrier. There appears to be a kind of optimum kind of messaging done by an optimum amount of cytokines, which keeps the body in fine fettle and keeps things less wayward . And we have had some old technologies through the ages for that, which we unfortunately do not follow, or look at, today, with only a cosmetic emphasis.

There are techniques that help achieve this. Researchers in Los Angeles' Cedars-Sinai's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences recently studied the effect of massage on the immune system of adults, and found that massaging resulted notable decrease in most cytokines produced by stimulated white blood cells. The idea is to have sufficient number of well trained cytokines as opposed to an automatic flooding where a few may just be wayward and mess things up.

Babies have been massaged daily before bath, since time immemorial in India, and in 2006, the University of Warwick (the researcher had the intriguing name of Dr Underdown) announced research results where they found that massaging infants, made them less stressed, sleep better, and cry less. This was of course supported by confirming that they then had reduced levels of the stress hormone cortisol, as well as a decent release of Melatonin, that aided sleep. Of course reduced levels of stress make for better handling of danger by our bodies .

The correspondence with our daily lives is amazing.

We have our daily urban and rural lives. We have invaders, and trouble makers. We have defense mechanisms.

Some places have huge numbers of law enforcement types, with an amazing lack of communication . These cities always keep complaining of inability to recruit more, while ignoring levels of training for their existing members. The problem always, is of timely and intelligent communication between sections. Whether it is sections of police, sections of an alarmed populace, sections of the government, and even the Press. Large quantities do not always imply better checking and action. In fact it always leads to misuse of scarce resources, and uncontrolled increase of panic. Totally innocent citizenry often pays the price.

We need to figure out ways of having meaningful communication between the government, citizens, and law enforcers. Like the white cells, the body organs, and the cytokines, we need to have high levels of understanding amongst us. The government, like the white cells, sends the cytokines out to relay the danger message. But it errs in depending on the huge number of unmonitored staff it sends. A more reasonable number, armed intelligently would be more sensible, than a large population without adequate intelligence, training and arms, as happened in 26/11.

The body has lots of checks an balances, and in the rare cases that the cytokines lose control of themselves, we suffer something like a "cytokine storm", uncontrolled fevers, pandemics, severe symptoms, unpredictable events.

Today, we , as people , are similarly placed. Money, recession, inflation, resources, false assurances, anger, killings, corruption, are invading our lives. We treat everything with a knee jerk reaction, and the powers that be continue to handle each thing with a new committee, a new agency, , new rules, unconcerned that it may actually be the responsibility of an existing set up . Vote bank politics, instead of development, has taken precedence in a multi religious country. Those who purport to be social cytokines, have actually created a "cytokine storm".


And so we need something similar to a "massage" for our living. Something that shakes up the wayward rampant cytokines into orderly socially useful entities, doing meaningful messaging in society. Maybe it is something like looking out for our immediate environment, protecting it opposing bad personal habits, refusing to pay for things out of turn, respecting the value of hard earned money, prioritising education over grabbing of luxuries, having the guts to be unpopular in the process of sticking to ones principles when it benefits society in the long run, and understanding, that every celebration of something good happening to you, must make you think and share it with those not so fortunate and /or differently abled.

I am continually amazed at the thoughtfulness with which whosoever/whatever has designed our bodies. Intricate sensing and relaying of information, varied responses in varied sequences by different parts and organs, built-in defense mechanisms, manifestation of symptoms, and all the while, the body doesn't need to , say, shut down, for repairs, like we need to for ordinary man-made machines. The crowning glory , if I may refer to it as such, is the brilliantly designed , moderately sized, neuroplastic brain, which manages all this, all the while "learning" and storing away what it has learnt for appropriate timely use.


We are so busy keeping up with each other in a material world, that we continue to be blind to something that has so many answers for our problems, concept wise and otherwise. We refuse to look within ourselves.

At something that we have had since birth.

Our bodies.

Praising the dark, and looking for light, sportingly..... मना तुझा रंग कसा ?

At first they lived in an old house by the lake. Just four flats. Lots of places to explore, chasing cows bent on destroying the garden,and monkeys on trees, hissing at her with teeth bared. But, careening down the two-wheeler entry ramp to the building, wearing shorts, and a blue chaddar representing a superman cape, was then the supreme activity of choice.

There was a sloping entry into the lake close by, which was restricted by a bunch of bars, designed to stop cars , unwittingly left in neutral gear, from quietly sliding into the lake. When she was 4, she was convinced that the bars were actually her personal preserve , for doing tumbles and turns across the top horizontal bar. Folks out for a walk in the evening would stop by and have serious conversations with her, as she swung , feet up and head down; some would occasionally offer to give the quick short shove required to turn across the bar, applaud , and carry on.

Cycling was another trial. The road there , was reasonably clear of traffic, but had an alarming unpredictable bovine population that would emerge in dark lumbering glory , from the woods, on to the paved road. And so she learned to cycle , always at a hurried speed, with one shoulder raised, as a result of trying to look for emerging cows from the corner of her eye.

By and by, they shifted to a semi high rise ; well, semi by today's standards. 6 floors. When she was little, she would dash up the stairs to see if she could defeat her parents coming up in the elevator. Her school shared a wall with the building, and the admired thing was to enter the school by the wall, instead of the school gate.

She joined dance classes, and karate, and her folks delighted in seeing the karate class doing their fitness practice on the school grounds. Early morning table tennis classes introduced her to the concept of warm-ups. Her persistent cough , earlier attributed to imbibing secret quantities of tamarinds and ice creams , miraculously went away.

Then she joined swimming. Today, 13 years later, has remained with it. Lots of workouts, several competitions, moderate successes, moderate disappointments, but behind it all is the great enjoyment she gets out of the training of swimming.

Many times, it is a case of either or both parents being in that sport. In her case, although both her parents were in sports when young, it was never swimming, but more like racket and bat sports.

There are two ways people take interest in sports. Serious sports.

They simply love the sport.

Or its a cool calculated move a la BCCI , designed to optimize returns of more types than one.

Some parents have unlimited resources. Some have unlimited imagination. Some more, are highly resourceful in an unlimited way. Some parents have unlimited time. Some make , unlimited time for their child, when it is a question of training.

And so we have Bindra who had it all laid out for him, but he did his part 200%. Then there is Sania, who has reached great heights, with dedicated help from both her parents and assorted sponsorships. Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi had fathers who pointed them into the path, and stayed to guide them through. Saina Nehwal, who showed a lot of spunk, and Anjali Bhagwat whose folks gave them so much support . Then there are the Bhiwani Boxers.

There are so many, whose parents had nothing to give but mental support. Difficult travel, unsatisfactory arrangements, irregular scheduling, lack of sponsorships, lack of a semblance of support from associations purporting to support their particular sport. An alarming amount of officials, who miraculously appear at international meets, and disappear into babudom later. Selection systems based on criteria that have nothing to do with the sport.

This cannot go on....

Our communities are not sensitized to sports. The Times of India on its sports page will desist from giving news about a local state level swimming meet, or a schools table-tennis tournament; but the pride of place will be given to the questionable exploits of the girlfriend of one of UK's professional footballers, complete with photos in missing clothes. It is there every single day .

Captains of industry, who open up their profit laden treasuries to support something like Mood Indigo, hesitate, when requested to consider sponsoring a sports meet at the same educational institute, for a fraction of the cost. They want visibility for their brand, but not while the hard work is in progress. Like all those who hanker after power, they want it easy......

And the strange thing is, as the aforementioned girl realized, that status and/or education really has nothing to do with people's attitudes. Towards sports, and the practice of it.

Late one summer evening, she is back from swimming practice, full of beans, trailing her paraphernalia, running ahead of her mother , to stop the elevator which is about to take off.

There is a couple inside . Both doctorates. Middle aged. 2 kids. With each child more academically brilliant than the other. They move and make place for the girl and her mother. Smile indulgently. (Some folks think "patronizingly" is the word that really fits). At the girl, who is busy fixing the sipper bottle that has just fallen out of her bag; swimming paraphernalia, speedos, and the like are very expensive, and this nice automatically-closing-sipper-bottle has been sent by an indulgent uncle from the land of Michael Phelps.

They look up at the girl's mother. And bring forth the question which they have been wanting to ask all along, ever since they started noticing this girl doing her swimming , since several years.

"Why do you send your daughter for swimming ? Ap ko nahi lagta ki wo kali ho jayegi? (Dont you realize that she will turn black/dark ?)"

Speechlessly, I rested my case then.

I helplessly, rest my case now.

And you really wanted to know why we have only ******one individual medal at the Olympics in the last so many years ? 

****** Attaboy Vijendar,  prove me wrong....(august 21, 12:50 pm)