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Showing posts from 2010

Women's Bill: Quality Vs Equality

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Yesterday Indian parliament has passed a bill enabling 30% reservation for women in the national parliament and state legislators, with overwhelming majority. My take on this issue is straightforward, do we need to jeopardize quality for the sake of equality? I always consider that academic institutions, medical firms, governments and business have their main obligation to promote quality, not equality.Here in India, we have quotas for nearly everything; religion, caste, financial status and so on, a strategy promoted by corrupt politicians in an attempt to fish votes and ruining the quality. Many bright students lose out to getting admissions in good universities because of reservations, many bright candidates do not get jobs because of reservations.. it is just getting sick day by day. We Indians call ours the largest democracy in the world. I wonder how you can call it democracy and yet dictate the kinds of people who should get elected? In a democracy, what's the point o

Physiotherapy, "Foot reflexology" and Ayurveda: Lots of Juju but Mostly Chicanery

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 Today New York Times published an interesting note on how increasing evidences argue that physical therapies do not work and more to it, it can actually aggravate injuries; such as "taping an ankle to immobilize it". Massages, including that uses ice and heat, ultrasound etc., are deemed utterly as waste of time and money by the evidence-based modern medicine. One of the largest study so far conducted for assessing efficacy of physiotherapy-as it also known as, researchers concluded that there are no convincing evidences that support this form of topical, alternative therapy relieves common heel pain . Known as marma-therapy, physical therapy are an integral part of Ayurveda and that are, like any forms of massages in general and elsewhere, absurdly expensive. Here in India, Ayurveda is highly subsidized business with some 100 government ayurvedic medical colleges around India; every municipalities having one government Ayurvedic hospital. In the light of increasing evi

Freedom of expression

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How much of it we really need? Kurt Westergaard, the Danish illustrator widely regarded (in West at least) as a defender of free expression, is again in news ; some religious fundamentalists have managed to broke into his heavily fortified house. For centuries, critics have been expressing their thoughts freely on the matters concerning arts in general. People start making political caricatures even in Russia-a country where very life is seemingly under the control of beaurocracy. Yet religion remains something so sensitive to millions of dogmatic followers.What makes it immune to any forms of criticism and scrutiny? Years of living in India-a country that boasts as secular with national holidays reserved for almost all religions in earth (Christianity, Hinduism, Islamism, Sikh, Buddism, Parsi...and so on), and in Japan where majority have no religious affiliations and has no national holidays reserved for religious holy-days; I honestly believe that religion is the stupidest inventio