Lavasa beckons in November

Where flowers bloom so does hope.
- Lady Bird Johnson, Public Roads: Where Flowers Bloom
Something about flowers delights and stirs the soul of man. Since the beginning of literature and poetry, flowers have represented beauty, nature and tranquility, and love. According to the Bible, "Not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of [the lilies of the field]."
I took my kids for a drive to Paud for the Lavasa property registration & was welcomed with a sea of yellow flowers beckoning us to Lavasa. I think they are some type of wild yellow daisies. I'm not sure about the genus, but for sure this sea of yellow is soothing to the eyes. People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us. Yellow is a lovely color - and simple too! There are always flowers for those who want to see them.
A movie may have a cast of dozens of supporting actors, with hundreds of crew members working behind the scenes to bring the story to the silver screen. In the end, though, all eyes are on the star. It's the glamorous diva or the handsome stranger who gets all of the attention. But, I'm sure in November, even if the diva is Lavasa, it is these supporting actors who are going to hog the limelight. A bright flower can be the star of public roads. You'll be automatically drawn to a bloom that looks dramatically different from its surroundings. This is why perennial flowers in shades of yellow and orange can have such a strong impact on the environs. Whether they are part of a natural garden of wildflowers, or a carefully-chosen component in a formal display, the boldness and brightness of yellow to orange perennial flowers always makes a strong statement. We waded through this sea of yellow fromn Chandni Chowk to Paud & hoped that these remain in bloom for a few months more!
Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine for the soul.
-Luther Burbank

They say that happiness is elusive; a slippery thing, not easily held. And yet the stuff of happiness is everywhere. It is all around you in each moment, in each person in your life, and in every step you take on this holy ground. Happiness is yours to choose to see. Stop for a moment. Breathe. Open your eyes to what is around you. Breathe the beauty of nature and melt into it, and allow it to melt into you. If you want to know happiness; if you want to find it, take a walk. Smell the grasses and trees. Look down at your feet. See the small but powerful beauty of the wild flowers pushing up between rocks. Why do you think you feel their beauty? It is natural isn’t it? But why? A wild flower is just one example of nature’s gift, and its message to you: that beauty and happiness are at your feet; that it is your choice to either see them or walk on by, and that seemingly delicate beauty, possesses great strength. You will find happiness in your connection to this natural world — including your own nature. You will find happiness in curiosity. You will unearth it when you indulge your sense of awe and excitement.We live in a rich universe of unimaginable abundance, power, and mystery. Is it that difficult to accept the simple happiness embodied in the pure and beautiful? You can still be tough and street-smart. You can still go toe-to-toe with the best of them. But do take time to look down at your feet now and then to notice where you are. And especially, take a moment to see the small beauty that grows in the hard places of your life. Feel just how powerful that beauty is, and be happy for it.

Happiness can be a yellow flower – if you so choose.

Look at the picture of the pillon rider on the motor-bike on the Lavabahn. The Saffron turban, the white kurta & the greens that he is carting off for maybe fodder. What does it remind you of? It reminded me of our tricolor & of National pride. It reminded me of how Lavasa is making the country proud. It reminds me of the small team with vision to procreate a hill-station that will be an envy to the world; a place where we will earn the most carbon credits in this vast nation. A place where we will show-case the best India has to offer the world. Coming back to the sea of yellow, I returned late evening & these wild yellow flowers seemed to have changed color to orange. Maybe I was hallucinating, maybe not!

"I love to smell flowers in the dark," she said. "You get hold of their soul then."
-Lucy Maud Montgomery in Anne's House of Dreams

Dad's sperm linked to IQ

The results of a relatively small study suggest that children conceived using a fertility technique called intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) may have slightly lower IQ scores than children conceived naturally or with in vitro fertilisation (IVF).

ICSI is typically used for men who have low numbers of sperm in their semen or who have poor quality sperm. However, it can also be used in cases in which the mother's eggs are difficult for the sperm to penetrate.

In a laboratory, a single sperm is isolated and then directly injected into an egg removed from the prospective mother. If fertilisation is successful, the embryo that develops a few days later is transferred into the mother and the steps are then the same as with IVF.

As reported in the journal Fertility and Sterility, Dr. Sylvia Veen and colleagues from Leiden University Medical Centre, the Netherlands, compared the IQ at age five to eight years of 83 children conceived by ICSI with that of 83 children conceived by IVF and 85 conceived naturally.

They report that the average IQ, based on the Revised Amsterdam Child Intelligence Test, was 103 in the ICSI group, 107 in the IVF group, and 110 in the naturally conceived group.

The four-point difference between ICSI children and IVF children was not considered significant from a statistical standpoint, meaning that it could have occurred by chance. However, the seven-point difference in favour of naturally conceived children versus ICSI children was statistically significant.

"The ICSI children performed worse on all subtests with differences in (average) scores ranging from 0.7 to 2.1," the investigators note.

Veen and colleagues point out that "the clinical significance of the differences in IQ between ICSI children and both IVF and natural conception controls is debatable."

"On the one hand, the (average) IQ of ICSI children was within the normal range," they explain. "On the other hand, a shift of the total ICSI population to lower IQs may result in children crossing borders at the lower edge of the normal range. Indeed, ICSI children more often scored less than 85 than natural conception children."

Scientists attempt stem cell breakthrough

Sydney scientists have been given the go-ahead to try to achieve a controversial world first in medical research - obtaining stem cells from cloned human embryos.

Researchers at the fertility company Sydney IVF were yesterday issued with Australia's first licence to produce cloned human embryos. By extracting stem cells from them, they hope to gain unprecedented insights into how crippling conditions including muscular dystrophy and Huntington's disease develop, and how to treat them.

The director of research and development at Sydney IVF, Tomas Stojanov, said the company had a unique combination of skills, technology and access to human eggs - 7200 of them - to be the first to succeed.

"The race is on," he said.

A national ban on the research, known as therapeutic cloning or somatic cell nuclear transfer, was lifted in December 2006 after a rare conscience vote in Federal Parliament.

The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd - then an Opposition MP - was among those who voted to retain the ban on the process, which involves putting DNA from a patient's cell into an empty egg to produce a days-old cloned embryo, or blastocyst, from which embryonic stem cells are collected.

The director of Australians for Ethical Stem Cell Research, David van Gend, criticised the issuing of the licence by the National Health and Medical Research Council. He said cloning research was no longer necessary because of recent advances in stem cell science.

"It is unspeakable that we should continue this project of creating living human embryos with the sole purpose of destroying them when the compelling justification for such experiments has gone."

But Dr Stojanov said Australia had one of the strictest sets of ethical standards in the world for cloning research.

It did not involve the creation of a human life. "We are not creating an embryo for reproductive purposes," he said.

In 2005 British researchers produced a cloned human embryo, and in January this year a Californian company, Stemagon, produced three from 23 eggs, but neither team was able to extract stem cells from them.

Julia Schaft, who will lead the Sydney IVF project, said that only eggs that were unusable for IVF because they were immature or had not been fertilised properly, and which donors had given consent for, would be used.

The licence allows for 7200 of these eggs, which would otherwise be discarded, to be used over three years.

Her team will use three different types of cells - embryonic stem cells, cumulus cells attached to the collected eggs, and skin cells - to produce the cloned embryos.

Dr Schaft said the researchers had the necessary micromanipulation skills, and had developed special cocktails of chemicals for growing blastocysts to the five-day stage.

As well, Sydney IVF was the first, in 2004, to extract stem cells from Australian IVF embryos, and has since extracted and grown 10 more colonies of embryonic stem cells this way.

"So we have experience at every step [of the cloning process]," Dr Schaft said.

The managing director of Sydney IVF, Robert Jansen, said stem cell research sat well with the company's emphasis on helping parents avoid passing on genetic diseases to their children, by carrying out pre-implantation genetic diagnosis of IVF embryos.

"Families appreciate the opportunity to help develop treatments for a genetic disease in their families," Professor Jansen said.

The short-term aim of the cloning research was to produce disease-specific stem cells from patients that could be used to test for new drugs.

Longer term, therapeutic cloning would be the only way to produce new tissue that was perfectly matched to a patient, he said.

Last year, Japanese researchers developed a new way of producing embryonic-like stem cells, called induced pluripotent stem cells, by simply adding four genes to a cell from a patient.

Dr van Gend said this negated any argument for carrying out therapeutic cloning.

But Andrew Laslett, of the Australian Stem Cell Centre, said it was not yet clear which type of stem cell would lead to new therapies.

Although the induced pluripotent stem cells were ethically uncontroversial, there were safety concerns because viruses were used to add the genes.

"The jury definitely is still out," Dr Laslett said.

If Sydney IVF succeeds in obtaining stem cells from cloned embryos, their properties will be compared with those of induced pluripotent stem cells imported from the United States in a $550,000 research project funded by the NSW and Victorian governments.

IVF clinic sued over haemophiliac boy

A couple who wanted a girl are suing an IVF clinic after the woman gave birth to a boy with haemophilia.

Fiona and Paul Amos asked Melbourne IVF to ensure they only had a female child so Mrs Amos would not pass on the genetic blood condition.

She gave birth to son Jesse, who has haemophilia, on June 1, 2005.

The genetic disorder will impair the ability of Jesse's blood to clot.

In a statement of claim lodged with the Victorian Supreme Court, the couple from St Arnaud, in northern Victoria, are suing Melbourne IVF and its obstetrician and gynecologist Dr David Wilkinson.

They also are suing Ballarat Health Services and Bendigo Radiology.

Mrs Amos underwent treatment at Melbourne IVF between November 2003 and late January 2004.

In the statement of claim, the couple argue the clinic breached its duty of care by failing to advise that pre-implantation genetic diagnosis was not 100 per cent accurate.

They also allege Melbourne IVF failed to advise them that the analysis could lead to the wrong gender of an embryo being diagnosed.

It is further alleged the IVF centre inaccurately reported the embryo contained two chromosomes and failed to report that the embryo contained only one X chromosome.

The couple allege Ballarat Health Services failed to have an ultrasound performed that would have confirmed the child was not female.

It also is alleged Bendigo Radiology failed to confirm the child was male.

They are suing for psychiatric injury including depression, shock and anxiety.

In a statement of defence, Melbourne IVF said the couple failed to refrain from having unprotected sex during their IVF treatment.

It also alleged the couple failed to have a repeat ultrasound after one was carried out in January, 2005, and did not have an amniocentesis, a procedure which could have determined genetic abnormalities.

The matter will return to a later date.

A house divided: Estranged couple's home cut in half

A Cambodian couple who separated after 40 years of marriage may have taken things too literally when it came to splitting their assets:

A couple who separated after 40 years of marriage split their house in two -- literally.

The husband cut the house in two.

"It is the strangest thing I've ever seen," said May Titthara, who wrote about the case for The Phnom Penh Post, an English-language newspaper in the Cambodian capital. "People there never saw this happen in a divorce. It is very interesting for them."

The husband and wife had been living together in the house in a village in the Prey Veng province of southern Cambodia, roughly 50 miles (80 km) from the capital.

The couple would not talk to the newspaper, but the village chief told May Titthara that the husband was angry because his wife wouldn't tend to him when he was ill.

Last week, the husband and his friends moved his belongings to one side of the house -- and sawed and chiseled it off, said the reporter, who interviewed the village chief and neighbors.

The couple also divided their property into four sections: for themselves and their two children.

Because the couple side-stepped the provincial courts when they parted ways, their unusual resolution could pose a problem later, said Prak Phin, a lawyer for Legal Support for Child and Women in the province.

"This was a not a legal divorce. It never went to the court," he said. "If they have disagreements in the future, they will not have a legal (recourse)."

The man moved his part of the house to his parent's property, May Titthara said. He lives with his parents, while the wife continues to reside in her precariously perched, upright half.

Girls & Guys

Pragmatism

A husband and wife were having a fine dining experience at their exclusive country club when this stunning young woman
comes over to their table, gives the husband a big kiss, says she'll see him later and walks away.

His wife glares at him and says, "Who was that?!"

"Oh," replies the husband, "she's my mistress."

"Well that's the last straw," says the wife. "I've had enough, I want a divorce. I am going to hire the most aggressive, meanest divorce lawyer I can find and make your life miserable."

"I can understand that," replies her husband, "but remember, if we get a divorce it will mean no more wintering in Key West, or the Caribbean, no more summers in Tuscany, no more Cadillac STS in the garage, and no more country club, and we'll have to sell the 26-room house and move to two smaller homes, but the decision is yours."

Just then, a mutual friend enters the restaurant with a gorgeous young woman on his arm.

"Who's that with Jim?" asks the wife.

"That's his mistress," says her husband.

She replies, "Ours is prettier."