Trucks Highways India and AIDS

On India's Roads, Cargo and a Deadly Passenger from NYTimes

Some 80 percent of truckers' wives who came in for voluntary testing and counseling tested positive, she said, usually because by the time they came in their husbands were on their deathbeds, and denial could no longer be sustained.

G. Karuna, 24, was another woman who fell prey to the peregrinations of her husband, a long-distance driver from a family of truckers. When they both sought treatment for tuberculosis or opportunistic infections at hospitals, they hid his occupation, since many private hospitals now turn truckers away.

After her husband died, his family blamed her, a cruel vengeance some in-laws inflict on the widows. They have made treatment and prevention that much harder.

She was forced to sleep on the path outside; the family refused to share even a loaf of bread that she had touched. Soon their whole village had ostracized her.

Ms. Karuna cried as she told her story, but that story also conveyed an uncommon
strength. She had left her husband's family and her village to start a new life on her own. She became an activist with the Social Educational and Economic evelopment Society, an advocacy group in Guntur, trying to save other truckers'
wives.

She showed women pictures of her handsome husband before he sickened, and after.

She told the wives to know what their husbands were doing outside the home, to negotiate the use of condoms with them, to get treated for sexually transmitted diseases. Her husband's relatives still teased her: "Why are you working so hard? You also will die."

thought

What is achievement?

quote

Sleep is a symptom of caffeine deprivation.
-- Author Unknown

A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

Let each become all that he was created capable of being.
-- Thomas Carlyle

Indian view on HWYs

Impoverishing roads from The Hindu

Analysis of Indian HWYs

Mile by Mile, India Paves a Smoother Road to Its Future from NYTimes

It is tooo long (7 pages) but then it covers all bases of what happens when we have to construct highways in india. Really complete analysis and I found it unbiased though I would have prefered to have read in an Indian newspaper. Good read with how moving the temples or mosques could be an issue or cutting pipal trees etc. and lots more.

Science

The changing identity of the scientist from The Hindu

I always felt that science and a scientist was pure persuit of knowledge where other "benifits" were just by products of the process.
Point to ponder about--- has such kind of thought bought about theories like ID in the scientifice domain? Surely it does "benifit" some people. Has science become business much like everything else?

The individual has slowly become part of a collective. "A single instrument is replaced by an orchestra, with each individual striving towards the same goal. Of course, in science, as in any respectable orchestra, there will always be a couple of virtuoso soloists". It is these that the Nobel, Lasker, Dan David, Fields and such prizes go to.

Such shifts in science policy by governments and international communities, has led to a new model — that science should ultimately serve society. Industry wants science to make money. Governments want science to enable development. Citizens want science to clean the air, the water and make life healthier, safer and enjoyable.

All of these are possible only through ideas — ideas that need to be thought of, that need to be tested, found working and then applied to achieve the ends. And ideas come from individuals; this cannot change. Therefore the individual scientist cannot be replaced. It is him that we need to make more and more of.

And a sure way to do so is through schools, colleges and universities. It is these that we need to sow, nourish and multiply.

:(

It looks like the rain Gods don't want cricket in chennai!!
On second thoughts it might be that they might be taking the lead away from the moral police for being the disruptive force.