Year: 2009

By Amy Kazmin in Dhaka

The tiny 150-year-old Jagannath Temple in Old Dhaka’s narrow Tati Bazaar, or gold market, was a Victorian gem, with an ornate facade and a graceful cupola. But last year, temple elders decided to rebuild the Hindu shrine to add apartments – a lucrative proposition given the city’s chronic housing shortage.

Architects Taimur Islam and Homaira Zaman, a husband-and-wife team campaigning to preserve Old Dhaka’s heritage buildings, begged the temple’s managing committee to save the building’s unique facade. The elders agreed – if the couple provided funds to reinforce the structure. But during the scramble to secure donations – not a quick task in Muslim-majority Bangladesh – the facade was demolished overnight.

Today, the shrine’s bare exterior – which resembles a garage, with only a poster as adornment – stands as painful evidence that the odds are stacked against saving the eclectic, 400-year-old architectural history of Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital and the world’s most densely populated city.

“It’s now or never,” says Mr Islam. “In five years’ time, there will be nothing left.”

Conservationists have battled property developers across Asia for decades, as gracious old buildings and bustling neighbourhoods have been razed to make way for the glass-and-steel towers that define many modern Asian cities. These tensions are now roiling Dhaka, where population pressure and steady economic growth have sent property prices spiralling.

In their hunt for land, developers are eyeing Old Dhaka, which thrived as a commercial hub during the Moghul empire, flourished again during a late 19th-century revival, but which has been declining since the end of British colonial rule in 1947.

Bangladesh’s elites, ensconced in newer neighbourhoods, have traditionally paid little heed to Old Dhaka, with its mosques, temples, bazaars and ornate mansions originally built for wealthy Hindu families that later fled to India. Dhaka’s 1958 master-plan even spoke wistfully of the redevelopment potential if only authorities could “sweep away” the narrow lanes and ageing buildings.

“Old Dhaka had always been seen as a junkyard,” says Mr Islam.
But in 2004, an old building in Shakari Bazaar, famed for its traditional conch shell bangles, collapsed, killing 19 people. Criticised over the poor living conditions, officials proposed razing the entire bazaar to build 20-storey housing blocks. Mr Islam and Ms Zaman began a high-profile campaign to save architectural treasures slated for destruction.

“There is no contradiction between human safety and heritage preservation,” Mr Islam says. “Buildings like this have been preserved in every part of the world. Why can’t we do it?”

FT

(Submitted by reader)

By Heather Timmons

NEW DELHI — When 7-year-old Shiva Ayyadurai left Mumbai with his family nearly 40 years ago, he promised himself he would return to India someday to help his country.

In June, Mr. Ayyadurai, now 45, moved from Boston to New Delhi hoping to make good on that promise. An entrepreneur and lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a fistful of American degrees, he was the first recruit of an ambitious government program to lure talented scientists of the so-called desi diaspora back to their homeland.

“It seemed perfect,” he said recently of the job opportunity.
It wasn’t.

As Mr. Ayyadurai sees it now, his Western business education met India’s notoriously inefficient, opaque government, and things went downhill from there. Within weeks, he and his boss were at loggerheads. Last month, his job offer was withdrawn. Mr. Ayyadurai has moved back to Boston.

In recent years, Mother India has welcomed back tens of thousands of former emigrants and their offspring. When he visited the United States this week, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh personally extended an invitation “to all Indian-Americans and nonresident Indians who wish to return home.” But, like Mr. Ayyadurai, many Indians who spent most of their lives in North America and Europe are finding they can’t go home again.

About 100,000 “returnees” will move from the United States to India in the next five years, estimates Vivek Wadhwa, a research associate at Harvard University who has studied the topic. These repats, as they are known, are drawn by India’s booming economic growth, the chance to wrestle with complex problems and the opportunity to learn more about their heritage. They are joining multinational companies, starting new businesses and even becoming part of India’s sleepy government bureaucracy.

But a study by Mr. Wadhwa and other academics found that 34 percent of repats found it difficult to return to India — compared to just 13 percent of Indian immigrants who found it difficult to settle in the United States. The repats complained about traffic, lack of infrastructure, bureaucracy and pollution.

For many returnees the cultural ties and chance to do good that drew them back are overshadowed by workplace cultures that feel unexpectedly foreign, and can be frustrating. Sometimes returnees discover that they share more in their attitudes and perspectives with other Americans or with the British than with other Indians. Some stay just a few months, some return to the West after a few years.

Returnees run into trouble when they “look Indian but think American,” said Anjali Bansal, managing partner in India for Spencer Stuart, the global executive search firm. People expect them to know the country because of how they look, but they may not be familiar with the way things run, she said. Similarly, when things don’t operate the way they do in the United States or Britain, the repats sometimes complain.
“India can seem to have a fairly ambiguous and chaotic way of working, but it works,” Ms. Bansal said. “I’ve heard people say things like ‘It is so inefficient or it is so unprofessional.’ ” She said it was more constructive to just accept customs as being different.

New York Times for more
(Submitted by Al Karim Amersi)

By B. R. Gowani

Human beings have always been fascinated by celestial bodies and have speculated their origin and composition. Similarly, people have always fantasized the existence of life in some form elsewhere in the Universe.

The Moon, our earth’s satellite, being the nearest celestial body was the first to be explored when the Soviet Union’s unmanned Luna 9 landed on it in 1966. Three years later the US astronaut declared his landing on the moon as a giant leap for humankind. Four decades later, a fortnight ago, one can say that another giant leap had been made with the discovery of water on the Moon.

It is great news but, like most technological advances, it is also sad news. The destructive and exploitative aspects of this discovery cannot be overlooked. It is foresight for instances like these, that had prompted some countries to draft the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 <1> which prohibits carrying of nuclear or other weapons of destruction in the space or on any celestial body. With similar purpose in mind, United Nations composed the Moon Treaty in 1979; but this document lacks signatures of key nations, i.e., Japan, United States, China, Russian Federation, India, and the European Union. <2>

Territorial ambitions of human beings have usually been beyond the reach of any ethical or moral principle. Although the Moon Treaty “Bans any state from claiming sovereignty over any territory of celestial bodies,” it is no guarantee that this and other articles of the treaty will get the respect they deserve as can be testified by the dozens of UN resolution violations.

When the new frontier is conquered, two things are to be dreaded the most:

1. One is the use of Moon by the United States or even Russia, China, European Union, Japan, or India as a launching pad for nuclear or laser weapons directed at their enemies on earth. (At this stage, India’s deformed Siamese twin, Pakistan, has to be excluded from this club.)

Current technology lacks the means to carry out such actions. Nevertheless, this grim scenario itself should not be dismissed as preposterous. It is hard to imagine that the users of one of the oldest weapons: the spear, which saw its introduction during the Stone Age with a range of a few yards aimed at a single target could foresee today’s reality. By contrast today’s ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missile) have a reach of thousands of miles and an unimaginable devastation capability. Besides, newer technological advances are being made at a super speed. However, the power of the smaller “enemies” on earth should not be underestimated either, even if it may be symbolic. (Remember September 2001?) You never know. The future “enemy/ies” may blow up the whole moon — fully aware that it may doom the future of the planet earth where they reside.

So it is in the interest of all countries that some kind of verifiable treaty be signed among all the nations of the world, under the auspices of the United Nations and backed by the International Court of Justice that restricts transportation or manufacture of any kind of weaponry on the Moon.

2. The other is the use of the moon as a place for the white ruling class or, perhaps, a mixture of white, black, and brown elites to reside while turning earth into a colony which satisfies their consumption needs and greed.

In this case, most of the people of the world will have to unite to stop this scenario. They should just ask the surviving Native Indians in the US whose land became frontier for the invading white Europeans how it feels to live in a Reservation for by then the whole earth will have become a Reservation.

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

In a speech at the Sydney Opera House to mark his award of Australia’s human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize, John Pilger describes the “unique features” of a political silence in Australia: how it affects the national life of his homeland and the way Australians see the world and are manipulated by great power “which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war – against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else’s country”.

Thank you all for coming tonight, and my thanks to the City of Sydney and especially to the Sydney Peace Foundation for awarding me the Peace Prize. It’s an honour I cherish, because it comes from where I come from.

I am a seventh generation Australian. My great-great grandfather landed not far from here, on November 8th, 1821. He wore leg irons, each weighing four pounds. His name was Francis McCarty. He was an Irishman, convicted of the crime of insurrection and “uttering unlawful oaths”. In October of the same year, an 18 year old girl called Mary Palmer stood in the dock at Middlesex Gaol and was sentenced to be transported to New South Wales for the term of her natural life. Her crime was stealing in order to live. Only the fact that she was pregnant saved her from the gallows. She was my great-great grandmother. She was sent from the ship to the Female Factory at Parramatta, a notorious prison where every third Monday, male convicts were brought for a “courting day” – a rather desperate measure of social engineering. Mary and Francis met that way and were married on October 21st, 1823.

Growing up in Sydney, I knew nothing about this. My mother’s eight siblings used the word “stock” a great deal. You either came from “good stock” or “bad stock”. It was unmentionable that we came from bad stock – that we had what was called “the stain”.

One Christmas Day, with all of her family assembled, my mother broached the subject of our criminal origins, and one of my aunts almost swallowed her teeth. “Leave them dead and buried, Elsie!” she said. And we did – until many years later and my own research in Dublin and London led to a television film that revealed the full horror of our “bad stock”. There was outrage. “Your son,” my aunt Vera wrote to Elsie, “is no better than a damn communist”. She promised never to speak to us again.

The Australian silence has unique features.

Growing up, I would make illicit trips to La Perouse and stand on the sandhills and look at people who were said to have died off. I would gape at the children of my age, who were said to be dirty, and feckless. At high school, I read a text book by the celebrated historian, Russel Ward, who wrote: “We are civilized today and they are not.” “They”, of course, were the Aboriginal people.

My real Australian education began at the end of the 1960s when Charlie Perkins and his mother, Hetti, took me to the Aboriginal compound at Jay Creek in the Northern Territory. We had to smash down the gate to get in.

The shock at what I saw is unforgettable. The poverty. The sickness. The despair. The quiet anger. I began to recognise and understand the Australian silence.

Tonight, I would like to talk about this silence: about how it affects our national life, the way we see the world, and the way we are manipulated by great power which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war – against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else’s country.

Last July, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said this, and I quote: “It’s important for us all to remember here in Australia that Afghanistan has been a training ground for terrorists worldwide, a training ground also for terrorists in South-East-Asia, reminding us of the reasons that we are in the field of combat and reaffirming our resolve to remain committed to that cause.”

There is no truth in this statement. It is the equivalent of his predecessor John Howard’s lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Shortly before Kevin Rudd made that statement, American planes bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan. At least sixty people were blown to bits, including the bride and groom and many children. That’s the fifth wedding party attacked, in our name.

The prime minister was standing outside a church on a Sunday morning when he made his statement. No reporter challenged him. No one said the war was a fraud: that it began as an American vendetta following 9/11, in which not a single Afghan was involved. No one put it to Kevin Rudd that our perceived enemy in Afghanistan were introverted tribesmen who had no quarrel with Australia and didn’t give a damn about south-east Asia and just wanted the foreign soldiers out of their country. Above all, no one said: “Prime Minister, There is no war on terror. It’s a hoax. But there is a war of terror waged by governments, including the Australian government, in our name.” That wedding party, Prime Minister, was blown to bits by one the latest smart weapons, such as the Hellfire bomb that sucks the air out of the lungs. In our name.

John Pilger

Neuroscientists explore the mind’s sexual side and discover that desire is not quite what we thought it was.

by Carl Zimmer

On April 11, 1944, a doctor named T. C. Erickson addressed the Chicago Neurological Society about a patient he called Mrs. C. W. At age 43 she had started to wake up many nights feeling as if she were having sex—or as she put it to Erickson, feeling “hot all over.” As the years passed her hot spells struck more often, even in the daytime, and began to be followed by seizures that left her unable to speak. Erickson examined Mrs. C. W. when she was 54 and diagnosed her with nymphomania. He prescribed a treatment that was shockingly common at the time: He blasted her ovaries with X-rays.

Despite the X-rays, Mrs. C. W.’s seizures became worse, leaving her motionless and feeling as if an egg yolk were running down her throat. Erickson began to suspect that her sexual feelings were emanating not from her ovaries but from her head. Doctors opened up her skull and discovered a slow-growing tumor pressing against her brain. After the tumor was removed and Mrs. C. W. recovered, the seizures faded. “When asked if she still had any ‘passionate spells,’” Erickson recounted, “she said, ‘No, I haven’t had any; they were terrible things.’”

Mrs. C. W.’s experience was rare but not unique. In 1969 two Florida doctors wrote to the journal Neurology about a patient who experienced similar spells of passion. She would beat both hands on her chest and order her husband to satisfy her. Usually the woman would come to with no memory of what had just happened, but sometimes she would fall to the floor in a seizure. Her doctors diagnosed her with epilepsy, probably brought on by the damage done to parts of her brain by a case of syphilis. More recently, in 2004, doctors in Taiwan described a woman who complained of orgasms that swept over her when she brushed her teeth. Shame kept her silent for years, until her episodes also caused her to lose consciousness. When the doctors examined her, they diagnosed her with epilepsy as well, caused by a small patch of damaged brain tissue.

Each of these stories contains a small clue about the enigmatic neuroscience of sex. A hundred years ago Sigmund Freud argued that sexual desire was the primary motivating energy in human life. Psychologists and sociologists have since mapped the vast variations in human sexuality. Today pharmaceutical companies make billions bringing new life to old sex organs. But for all the attention that these fields of research have lavished on sex, neuroscientists have lagged far behind. What little they knew came from rare cases such as Mrs. C. W.’s.

The case studies do make a couple of things clear. For starters, they demonstrate that sexual pleasure is not just a simple set of reflexes in the body. After all, epileptic bursts of electricity in the brain alone can trigger everything from desire to ecstasy. The clinical examples also point to the parts of the brain that may be involved in sexual experiences. In 2007 cognitive neuroscientist Stephanie Ortigue of Syracuse University and psychiatrist Francesco Bianchi-Demicheli of the Geneva University Psychiatric Center reviewed the case of Mrs. C. W. and 19 other instances of spontaneous orgasms. In 80 percent of them, doctors pinpointed epilepsy in the temporal lobe.

Discover

In this diary of mental illness, John Sterns describes a day spent battling schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, chronic depression and chronic anxiety …

Paranoia makes me sweat. I am drenched as I walk up the small campus hill on an unusually clear, warm day. I must reach the safety of my basement office so that the satellite can no longer track my thoughts and transmit them to the central command.

The waves cannot penetrate the concrete of the building’s basement. The controllers know almost all of my movements and thoughts. I need a break to plan my next moves. I keep my head down to avoid making eye contact. Every encounter is an attack, with teeth that are razors ready to rip my flesh. I must please everyone or they will take out a whistle, blow on it and call the attack squad to surround me. They will put a hood over my head, subdue me and then take me to a cabin and kill me.

In my office I sit immobile at my desk, doing no work and trying not to fight my pounding voices. I am helpless against the paranoid delusions and suicidal voices that swirl inside my aching head. My vision blurs. The walls and windows close in and I breathe in rasps. The voices are telling me to die. The air is charged with anxiety. Everything and everyone is overwhelming to me. My body tenses, ready for an ambush at any time. I cower, expecting three men in black snow caps to attack me and beat me to death with wooden clubs. Capture is imminent. Giving in is inevitable.

The afternoon turns to evening and my co-workers leave the building until I am alone. Spies walk the campus ready to report on my movements. I call my wife (though the phones are tapped) and tell her I will be home late. This is a typical evening for us. I will be home in time to play with our son and help put him to bed. Home is separate from work, safe from the satellite. In both places, however, I must have everything in order, everything in its place, neat stacks of papers and no clutter. Nothing can be on the floors. No hiding places for a surprise assault.

I open a drawer and take out the receipts for dinners that I have had during the past month. Most of the meals were eaten alone at local restaurants. A few are legitimate business meals, which I mix in my expense reports to confuse my would-be captors. The satellite is just one part of a campus-wide plot to kidnap my wife and son, take them to a remote cabin in the Trinity Mountains and brainwash them until they forget about me. I will be kidnapped, too, and taken to an underground bunker in Alabama and killed by lethal injection. This plot has been in place since we arrived here more than two years ago. My predecessor killed himself (something I learned after I started the job) and I am convinced that death looms for me as well.

I try to confuse my enemies by committing crimes. I submit false expense claims so that they believe I am working, are fooled into thinking that I have value for them, thereby delaying their plot. I savagely demean and berate my co-workers to drive them away, so they won’t spy on my activities. Work is the centre of the conspiracy.

Intelligent Life

In Liberia rape survivors are increasingly speaking up and seeking help as awareness of rights increases, but social taboos persist and seeking justice does not always mean that justice is served.

Sexual violence consistently comes first or second (after armed robbery) in monthly police crime listings in the capital Monrovia. The majority of rape victims are children, according to treatment centre statistics. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Monrovia reports their youngest survivor at 21 months old.

“The civil war is over,” said Monrovia resident Tupee Kiadi. “But the new war is rape, especially targeting teenagers and babies. During the war we had peacekeepers to prevent further violence…but women do not have peacekeepers to stop rape.”

During the war women and girls were subjected to rape (commonly gang rape) and sexual slavery, many becoming pregnant from rape. Since peace was sealed in 2003, sex crimes – and impunity – have persisted throughout the country.

Awareness up

MSF launched a campaign on 26 October with the message “Rape is a hospital and clinical business”, to bring rape out into the open and to educate Liberians about the free MSF-run medical and psychological services at Island Hospital in Tweh Farm, western Monrovia.

Clinic visits are up over recent years, said MSF psychologist Elias Abi-aad, who hopes further awareness has been raised by the campaign.

Elizabeth Zro, a social worker and counsellor at the clinic, told IRIN, “Rape is a huge problem here, but people are more open about it now than they used to be a few years ago.”

The MSF clinic takes in on average 70 patients per month, 80 percent of whom are girls under 18; just under half of those aged 12 and under.

In addition to a medical examination, survivors are given protection from sexually transmitted infection, means to block HIV infection and pregnancy if it is within 72 hours of the crime, a medical certificate that can be used in court and several rounds of counselling.

Deweh Gray, president of the Association of Female Lawyers in Liberia (AFELL), told IRIN: “The changing attitude we see is the increased reporting of these cases by people who want to access the system.”

IRIN

Canadian First Nations internationalize their struggle against the most destructive project on earth

Canadian indigenous activist Clayton Thomas-Muller (right) leads the tar sands protest through London’s Trafalgar Square with a traditional song. Lionel Lepine (left) carries the banner. Photo by Mike Russell.

The extraction of oil from tar sands is perhaps the most ecologically insane idea on the planet. As traditional wells begin to run dry, the oil transnationals are turning to sources that are much more expensive to extract and exponentially more polluting.

Canada’s tar sands are by far the biggest of these, containing almost as much oil as Saudi Arabia. Millions of barrels a day are already being extracted in Alberta, creating lakes of toxic waste so huge that they are visible from space.

Outside of Canada, very few people have heard of the tar sands. But in August four First Nations representatives from Canada travelled to Britain to participate in the London climate camp – the country’s biggest annual gathering of climate activists. Organized by the Indigenous Environmental Network and supported by the New Internationalist, the group’s aim was to internationalize the campaign for a complete tar sands moratorium.

Lionel Lepine, a young father from Fort Chipewyan, the indigenous community known as ‘ground zero’ because of its location downstream from this toxic timebomb, left Canada for the first time to make the trip. ‘I’m here because the tar sands are having such devastating effects on our environment and communities,’ he explained. ‘This project is destroying our ancient forests, spreading open-pit mining across our territories, contaminating our food and water, disrupting local wildlife and threatening our entire way of life.’

Another of the visitors was George Poitras, former chief of Mikisew Cree First Nation. ‘We are seeing a terrifyingly high rate of cancer in Fort Chipewyan,’ he revealed. ‘We are convinced that these cancers are linked to the tar sands development on our doorstep. It is shortening our lives. That’s why we no longer call it “dirty oil” but “bloody oil”.’

But the tar sands are also a global problem. The largest industrial project in the world is also the dirtiest. Tar sands produce more than three times as much CO2 per barrel as conventional oil, and the extraction process uses as much natural gas in a day as could heat 3.2 million Canadian homes for a year. And there’s enough of this filthy stuff to push us over the edge into climate disaster. As a result, the delegation argued, it should be everyone’s concern.

The trip highlighted the fact that tar sands exploitation, although happening in Canada, is largely being driven from London’s financial Square Mile. Shell is heavily committed, and BP took a significant stake in 2007. Both are financially backed by British pension funds and investment banks such as Royal Bank of Scotland, prompting this new partnership between First Nations and British campaigners.

New Internationalist