thought

time to give up dreams... and think abt life 'practically'

India and stem cell research

How India Reconciles Hindu Values and Biotech from NYtimes

"Just four years later, this seems to have occurred. According to Ernst & Young's Global Biotechnology Report in 2004, Indian biotechnology companies are expected to grow tenfold in the next five years, creating more than a million jobs. With more than 10,000 highly trained and cheaply available scientists, the country is one of the leading biotechnology powers along with Korea, Singapore, China, Japan, Sweden, Britain and Israel."
...
"Indeed, most evangelical Christians, who believe that the embryo is a person, may find more support in ancient Hindu texts than in the Bible. Many Hindus see the soul - the true Self (or atman) - as the spiritual and imperishable component of human personality. After death destroys the body, the soul soon finds a new temporal home. Thus, for Hindus as much as for Catholics, life begins at conception.
The ancient system of Indian medicine known as Ayurveda assumes that fetuses are alive and conscious when it prescribes a particular mental and spiritual regimen to pregnant women. This same assumption is implicit in "The Mahabharata," the Hindu epic about a fratricidal war apparently fought in the first millennium B.C. In one of its famous stories, the warrior Arjuna describes to his pregnant wife a seven-stage military strategy. His yet-to-born son Abhimanyu is listening, too. But as Arjuna describes the seventh and last stage, his wife falls asleep, presumably out of boredom. Years later, while fighting his father's cousins, the hundred Kaurava brothers, Abhimanyu uses well the military training he has learned in his mother's womb, until the seventh stage, where he falters and is killed.
But the religions and traditions we know as Hinduism are less monolithic and more diverse than Islam and Christianity; they can yield contradictory arguments. Early in "The Mahabharata," there is a story about how the hundred Kaurava brothers came into being. Their mother had produced a mass of flesh after two years of pregnancy. But then a sage divided the flesh into 100 parts, which were treated with herbs and ghee, and kept in pots for two years - from which the Kaurava brothers emerged.
Indian proponents of stem-cell research often offer this story as an early instance of human cloning through stem cells extracted from human embryos. They do not mention that "The Mahabharata" presents the birth of the hundred Kaurava brothers as an ominous event.
Other Asian scientists have also pressed myth and tradition into the service of modern science and nationalism. In South Korea, where a third of the population is Buddhist, a scientist who cloned human embryonic stem cell lines claimed that he was "recycling" life just as reincarnation does."

Accountability = Transfer

[via India Uncut ]

"Sessions judge Laxmi Rao was transferred from a sessions court to a civil court on Thursday. According to the notification dated August 17 issued by the registrar of the city civil and sessions courts, Rao has been transferred from court room number 32 to court room number 2 where she will deal with suits between private parties."

for handing out 'controversial'(i will call it insane) verdicts in various cases.

quote

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
-- Ernest Hemingway

colors colors... beautiful colors

now that is what i call realizing a dream

From America and Canada to India with a dream from hindu

" It is a story seemingly out of Bollywood. A group of non-resident Indians from America and Canada left their homes, careers and children to return to India with a dream to give back "a fraction" of what their country had given them. And what emerged out of this "dream" was a magical transformation of a decrepit, forgotten 150-year-old Jahangirabad Fort in Barabanki district of Uttar Pradesh into a world-class institute offering postgraduate courses in media and mass communication, bio-informatics, bio-technology, para-medicine, medicine and engineering.
The Jahangirabad Media Institute, now ready to admit its first batch of students from this coming October, has been conceived and built as a minority institute where 50 per cent of the seats in each discipline would be reserved for minorities and underprivileged sections of society. "

maybe one day some more of us can do that...

thought

sometimes even when we talk a lot, we are quiet.