The activity of genes in men’s brains begins to change sooner than it does in women’s brains, a new study shows.

By Tina Hesman Saey

Men and women’s brains age differently, a new study demonstrates.
Researchers led by Carl Cotman and Nicole Berchtold at the University of California, Irvine, find that the activity of genes in men’s brains begins to change earlier than it does in women’s brains. The types of genes that change with age also differ between the sexes.
The study, which appears online September 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also found that in both genders, each part of the brain examined had its own pattern of aging.
“This is a very interesting study in what is, curiously, an under-studied area, normal aging,” says Etienne Sibille, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the study. “You have a combination of expected and surprises in each finding.” For instance, the fact that men and women’s brains age differently could be predicted based on women’s increased longevity, but the type and scope of the differences were unexpected, he says.
Cotman and Berchtold and their colleagues collected brains from people who had died of various causes between ages 20 and 99. The researchers isolated messenger RNA, or mRNA, from the people’s brains. Messenger RNA is a courier molecule that carries instructions encoded in genes to the cellular machinery that will build proteins using those instructions. Genes that produce higher levels of mRNA are more active.
The researchers examined gene activity in four parts of the brain: the hippocampus, the entorhinal cortex, the postcentral gyrus and the superior frontal gyrus.
Brain scientists expect changes in gene activity as the brain ages, and previous studies have demonstrated some changes in other parts of the brain. Cotman and his colleagues thought the parts of the brain that would have the most change in gene activity would be the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex, because they are most vulnerable to diseases of aging, such as Alzheimer’s.
But the team discovered that these disease-susceptible parts of the brain in older people have the least amount of change in gene activity when compared to younger people. In contrast, the postcentral gyrus, a part of the brain dedicated to perception, changes most. Scientists had expected that region to have the least change, if any.
“This is one of those fun head-scratchers, which is what science is all about,” Cotman says.
Overall gene activity was similar in people aged 20 to 59. And people aged 60 to 99 showed similar patterns of overall gene activity. But the team detected variability in their data. Cotman and Berchtold sat down to discuss the source of the variability and decided to see whether gender differences might explain it. “She thought it was the men, and I said it was the women,” Cotman laughs.
Read More

India’s Muslims are prominent in Bollywood but still struggle with their identity. In the wake of the Mumbai attacks, tensions have mounted and loyalties have been tested. Ramachandra Guha on the path forward for India and its Muslim minority.
In October 1947, a bare six weeks after India and Pakistan achieved their independence from British rule, the Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote a remarkable letter to the Chief Ministers of the different provinces. Here Nehru pointed out that despite the creation of Pakistan as a Muslim homeland, there remained, within India, “a Muslim minority who are so large in numbers that they cannot, even if they want, go anywhere else. That is a basic fact about which there can be no argument. Whatever the provocation from Pakistan and whatever the indignities and horrors inflicted on non-Muslims there, we have got to deal with this minority in a civilized manner. We must give them security and the rights of citizens in a democratic State.”
In the wake of the recent incidents in Mumbai, these words make salutary reading. It seems quite certain that the terrorists who attacked the financial capital were trained in Pakistan. The outrages have sparked a wave of indignation among the middle class. Demonstrations have been held in the major cities, calling for revenge, in particular for strikes against training camps in Pakistan. The models held up here are Israel and the United States; if they can “take out” individual terrorists and invade whole countries, ask some Indians, why not we?

Other commentators have called for a more measured response. They note that the civilian government in Islamabad is not in control of the army, the army not in control of the notorious Inter Services Intelligence agency, the ISI not in control of the extremists it has funded. They point out that Pakistan has itself been a victim of massive terror attacks. India, they say, should make its disapproval manifest in other ways, such as canceling sporting tours and recalling diplomats. At the same time, the United States should be asked to demand of Pakistan, its erratically reliable ally, that it act more decisively against the terrorists who operate from its soil.
One short-term consequence of the terror in Mumbai is a sharpening of hostility between India and Pakistan. And, as is always the case when relations between these two countries deteriorate, right-wing Hindus have begun to scapegoat those Muslims who live in India. They have begun to speculate as to whether the attackers were aided by their Indian co-religionists, and to demand oaths of loyalty from Muslim clerics and political leaders.
There are 150 million Muslims in India. They have gained particular prominence in one area: Bollywood. Several top directors and composers are Muslim, as well as some of India’s biggest movie stars. One, Aamir Khan, was a star and producer in “Lagaan,” a song-and-dance epic about a game of cricket that was nominated for an Academy Award in 2002. But Muslims are massively underrepresented in the professions — few of India’s top lawyers, judges, doctors and professors are Muslim. Many Indian Muslims are poor, and a few are angry.
Pakistan was carved out of the eastern and western portions of British India. To this new nation flocked Muslims from the Indian heartland. Leading the migration were the lawyers, teachers and entrepreneurs who hoped that in a state reserved for people of their faith, they would be free of competition from the more populous (and better educated) Hindus.
Pakistan was created to give a sense of security to the Muslims of the sub-continent. In fact, it only made them more insecure. Nehru’s letter of October 1947 was written in response to a surge of Hindu militancy, which called for retribution against the millions of Muslims who stayed behind in India. Three months later, Mahatma Gandhi, who was both Father of the Indian Nation as well as Nehru’s mentor, was shot dead by a Hindu fanatic. That act shamed the religious right, who retreated into the shadows. There they stayed until the 1970s, when, through a combination of factors elaborated upon below, they came to occupy center-stage in Indian politics.
If the first tragedy of the Indian Muslim was Partition, the second has been the patronage by India’s most influential political party, the Congress, of Muslims who are religious and reactionary rather than liberal and secular. Nehru himself was careful to keep his distance from sectarian leaders whether Hindu or Muslim. However, under the leadership of his daughter, Indira Gandhi, the Congress party came to favor the conservative sections of the Muslim community. Before elections, Congress bosses asked heads of mosques to issue fatwas to their flock to vote for the party; after elections, the party increased government grants to religious schools and colleges. In a defining case in 1985, the Supreme Court called for the enactment of a common civil code, which would abolish polygamy and give all women equal rights regardless of faith — the right to their husband’s or father’s property, for example, or the right to proper alimony once divorced. The prime minister at the time was Rajiv Gandhi. Acting on the advice of the Muslim clergy, he used his party’s majority in Parliament to nullify the court’s verdict. After Rajiv’s widow, Sonia Gandhi, became Congress president in 1998, the party has continued to fund Muslim religious institutions rather than encourage them to engage with the modern world.
Partition and Congress patronage between them dealt a body blow to Muslim liberalism. The first deprived the community of a professional vanguard; the second consolidated the claims to leadership of priests and theologians. In an essay published in the late 1960s, the Marathi writer Hamid Dalwai (a resident of Mumbai) wrote of his community that “the Muslims today are culturally backward.” To be brought “on a level with the Hindus,” argued Dalwai, the Muslims needed an “avant garde liberal elite to lead them.” Otherwise, the consequences were dire for both communities. For “unless a Muslim liberal intellectual class emerges, Indian Muslims will continue to cling to obscurantist medievalism, communalism, and will eventually perish both socially and culturally. A worse possibility is that of Hindu revivalism destroying even Hindu liberalism, for the latter can succeed only with the support of Muslim liberals who would modernize Muslims and try to impress upon these secular democratic ideals.”

Ramachandra Guha is the author of ‘India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy.’ He lives in Bangalore.
Read More
(Submitted by Shahabuddin Haji)

Read the movie’s review
Director Corey Yuen’s work here is fast, exciting and, above all, clean. One of the best action directors in the world, Yuen never sacrifices precision for speed — although at times the pace of the movie is incredibly fast — and he has an infallible sense of camera placement. (He’s aided by Keung Kwok Man’s sleek cinematography and Ka-Fai Cheung’s razor-sharp editing.) Even in the midst of the fastest-moving sequences, you’re always able to tell exactly what’s going on.

Read More

In search of my father and my Pakistani roots I went on a journey to rural Sindh, befriending a mysterious landlord who drank heavily and brandished an AK-47

By Aatish Taseer

My parents met in Delhi in March 1980. My Pakistani father was in India promoting a book he had written on his political mentor, the Pakistani leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. My mother, a young Indian journalist, was sent to interview him.

Their affair began that evening. My father took my mother’s number, they had dinner at a Chinese restaurant and for a little over a week they disappeared together.

My parents met at a time when they had both become politically involved in their respective countries. The state of emergency that Mrs Gandhi declared in 1975 had come and gone—she had returned to power and the terrorism in Punjab that would take her life was about to begin.

In Pakistan the year before (the same year as the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the great hope of Pakistani democracy, had been hanged. And now, General Zia, the military dictator, was settling into the blackest decade Pakistan would know.

My father had loved Bhutto. He had heard him speak for the first time as a student in London in the 1960s and was moved to his depths. The events of 1979 then ushered in a time both of uncertainty and possibility. Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir, had entered politics; Zia had to be fought; and for this man of 36, touched by unusual idealism, his biography of Bhutto became his political entry point.

My parents’ affair lasted little more than a week before my father left for Lahore, where he already had a wife and three small children. A month later, my mother discovered she was pregnant. For a young woman from an old Sikh family to become pregnant out of marriage by a visiting Pakistani was then (and now) an enormous scandal. During the week when she was considering an abortion, my father called unexpectedly from Dubai. She told him what had happened.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“What do you think I’m going to do?” she replied.

My father asked her what could be done to change her mind. She replied that they would at least have to pretend to be married and so they tentatively agreed to continue their relationship for as long as it was possible.

But by 1982 the relationship was over. My mother had begun work as a political journalist in Delhi and my father was fighting Zia in Pakistan. What I heard of him over the next two decades came only from my mother. We followed his progress across the border, through multiple imprisonments in the 1980s, to the restoration of democracy and Benazir Bhutto’s victory in 1988, to the failed governments of the 1990s, and his eventual switch from politics to business.

In 2002, aged 21, I made a journey to Lahore to seek out my father, Salmaan Taseer. For a few years our relationship flourished, then fell apart. The reason for the latest distance between us was an article I wrote in these pages in 2005, after the London bombings. In response, my father wrote me a letter—the first he’d ever written—in which he accused me of prejudice, of lacking even “superficial knowledge of the Pakistani ethos,” and of blackening his name. That letter was the origin of my book Stranger to History, an account of a journey I made from Istanbul to Pakistan, in the hope of understanding the silence between us. It is a discovery of his faith, his country and the story of our shared but fractured history.

At the end of my journey I was, by chance, together with my father in Lahore on the night Benazir Bhutto was killed. I found to my surprise that the wheels of power in Pakistan had turned once more and my father, who had spent his youth fighting the military, had re-entered politics and was now a minister in General Musharraf’s government. Here was a lesson about life in Pakistan, for the compromises men had to make. But it was not ultimately in the drawing rooms of Lahore or Karachi that I came closest to understanding Pakistani society, but rather in the time I spent with a young feudal landlord, known as the Mango King, in rural Sindh.
Read More

(Submitted by a reader)

By B. R. Gowani

The impact and the reactions caused by the Danny Boyle film Slumdog Millionaire, its Oscar nominations, and consequent winning of eight Academy Awards including 2008’s Best Picture, has been unprecedented in my recent memory. It seems to have evoked praise by just as many people as have blasted it in the way dire poverty in India has been depicted in the movie.

Many of the slum dwellers in Dharavi, Mumbai, where the film is shot have not liked the way their slum has been portrayed. But there may be many who are feeling happy and hopeful that their plight has been communicated to the world and this may hopefully bring some positive change in their lives. In the end, it really doesn’t matter that the conveyor of their plight happens to be a white person and not an Indian. Also, many Muslims are probably glad that, for a change, they are in the spotlight as the victims and not terrorists as the Western media is so fond of portraying them. People impacted by the dreadful poverty depicted in the movie may be somewhat comforted that the world is now seeing the hidden face of India, their India, rather than the utopian depiction romanticized in the media as the up and coming great power only.

It has made the patriots and the nationalists uncomfortable to see their country associated with slums. Actor Amitabh Bachchan criticized the movie: “if SM projects India as [a] third-world, dirty, underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations.” He also added: “It’s just that the SM idea, authored by an Indian and conceived and cinematically put together by a westerner, gets creative globe recognition. The other would perhaps not.” But On BBC Amitabh clarified: “Fact is – some one mentioned the film on my blog. Some expressed opinion for it, some against. And yes, they contained some strong assumptions. I merely put both of them up and invited debate.” In the past, the famous actress Nargis expressed her dislike in the way the great filmmaker Satyajit Ray portrayed poverty in India, especially in his own state of Bengal.

The argument that Boyle is white and therefore the movie received the awards is thought provoking that even in 21st century racism still exists. (The Academy Awards were instituted in 1927, but it was in 2001 that the Academy decided that a black actress should be granted an Oscar. Halle Berry is the only black actress to have received the honor to date.) After the film had received a couple of awards I knew that its fate had been decided, similar to the slum dog being made the millionaire plot of the movie and the union of the female and male protagonists.

Racism takes many forms. One form is insensitivity and indifference, as happened during the red carpet Oscar Award evening with the E-channel reporter who was covering the dresses, designers, and other aspects of the gala event while conducting mini impromptu interviews with the celebrity actors and actresses. When he saw the SM child actors, he mentioned only two actors’ names, and then put an illegible note with the rest of the actors’ names in front of the camera for a few seconds and the camera moved back on the children who were asked a couple of questions in an amusing patronizing manner. This left many viewers upset.

Hollywood has always been a global affair in so far as its films making money from foreign countries and the televised ceremony of Oscars are concerned. However, only recently is it attempting to give some semblance of globalism in recognizing, or even considering, third world countries like India.*

Slumdog Millionaire is not as artistic as a Satyajit Ray movie but if one compares it to a commercial movie, then I think it was a well made movie. Of course, the idea that a slum dweller can become a millionaire is like winning a super lottery plus [probably without even buying a ticket], so utterly unrealistic, but the film overall has the element to keep one glued to the screen; and many of the things shown in the film are realities for the millions of people who live this poverty on a daily basis. But for those slum children who acted in the film and then attended the Oscar ceremony, it really was like winning the lottery (albeit, without their due of the financial success), to have come all the way from Mumbai slums to the glory and glitter of Hollywood.

I hope that the nationalists and the patriots will do something to eliminate this “dirty, underbelly”, now that the movie has exposed it and it has generated such uproar.

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

*The cosmetics and related industries were quick to recognize India as a country of 1 billion “al consumers.” This happened in the wake of the new 1990s Indian policy of changing to “market economy.” This set the ball rolling. Suddenly now, the judges of the beauty contests in the West discovered that Indian women were beautiful; and so they began to be crowned Miss Universe and Miss World. So in the end, it is the driving need for profit that drives all decisions on who is beautiful, who wins awards, who is “in” etc.

By Dean Nelson and Barney Henderson

But the reality of life for Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail is far closer to that of the characters they play in the story of love, violent crime and extreme poverty in India.
The child actors’ parents have accused the hit film’s producers of exploiting and underpaying the eight-year-olds, disclosing that both face uncertain futures in one of Mumbai’s most squalid slums.
Slumdog Millionaire has won four Golden Globes and is nominated for 10 Oscars. It is on its way to making hundreds of millions of pounds in box office receipts.
The film’s British director, Danny Boyle, has spoken of how he set up trust funds for Rubina and Azharuddin and paid for their education. But it has emerged that the children, who played Latika and Salim in the early scenes of the film, were paid less than many Indian domestic servants.
Rubina was paid £500 for a year’s work while Azharuddin received £1,700, according to the children’s parents.
However a spokesman for the film’s American distributors, Fox Searchlight, disputed this saying the fees were more than three times the average annual salary an adult in their neighbourhood would receive. They would not disclose the actual sum.
Both children were found places in a local school and receive £20 a month for books and food. However, they continue to live in grinding poverty and their families say they have received no details of the trust funds set up in their names. Their parents said that they had hoped the film would be their ticket out of the slums, and that its success had made them realise how little their children had been paid.
The children received considerably less than the poor Afghan child stars of The Kite Runner, who embarrassed their Hollywood producers when they disclosed that they had been paid £9,000.
Rubina and Azharuddin live a few hundreds yards from each other in a tangle of makeshift shacks alongside Mumbai’s railway tracks at Bandra. Azharuddin is in fact worse off than he was during filming: his family’s illegal hut was demolished by the local authorities and he now sleeps under a sheet of plastic tarpaulin with his father, who suffers from tuberculosis.
“There is none of the money left. It was all spent on medicines to help me fight TB,” Azharuddin’s father, Mohammed Ismail, said. “We feel that the kids have been left behind by the film. They have told us there is a trust fund but we know nothing about it and have no guarantees.”
Further down the tracks, an open sewer trickles past the hut that Rubina shares with her parents, older brother and sister. Her father, Rafiq Ali Kureshi, a carpenter, broke his leg during filming and has been out of work since. “I am very happy the movie is doing so well, but it is making so much money and so much fame and the money they paid us is nothing. They should pay more,” he said, wafting away the smoke from a nearby fire. “I have no regrets. I just had no knowledge of what she should have been paid.”
His daughter has been overwhelmed by the glamour of her experience and idolises Freida Pinto, the screen beauty who plays her character as an adult, with whom she attended the Indian premiere of the film last week .“I want to be a star like Freida,” she said. “I am going to ask Danny-uncle (director Boyle) to take me to London and be in more films.”
A Fox Searchlight spokesman said: “The welfare of Azhar and Rubnia has always been a top priority for everyone involved with Slumdog Millionaire.
“A plan has been in place for over 12 months to ensure that their experience working on Slumdog Millionaire would be of long term benefit. For 30 days work, the children were paid three times the average local annual adult salary. Last year after completing filming, they were enrolled in school for the first time and a fund was established for their future welfare, which they will receive if they are still in school when they turn 18.
“Due to the exposure and potential jeopardy created by the unwarranted press attention, we are looking into additional measures to protect Azhar and Rubina and their families. We are extremely proud of this film, and proud of the way our child actors have been treated.”
Read More

Azharuddin Ismail and Rubina Ali, actors in the film ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, displayed outfits designed by Ashima Leena during a fashion show on the second day of India Fashion Week in New Delhi. Reuters/Adnan Abidi

Read More

Jeffrey St. Clair is an author and co-editor of Counterpunch website.

Hot Climate Cold Cash – Jeffrey St Clair part 1

Hot Climate Cold Cash – Jeffrey St Clair part 2

Via http://redstaterebels.org/

A scene from film Dil Diya Dard Liya (I Gave my Heart and Got Pain) with Waheeda Rehman, Dilip Kumar, Shyama, and Pran.