It ia always nice to have an Indian physician on-board

It was already a packed flight from Amsterdam to Boston, but passengers and crew were more than happy to make room for one extra person this morning when a Ugandan woman gave birth to a baby girl.

Two doctors aboard Northwest Airlines flight 59 sprang into action when the call came across the Boeing 757's public address system for a medical emergency. The physicians found a woman 8-1/2 months pregnant and moaning with severe abdominal pain. She was obviously in labor and the child's head had already crowned, according to the doctors.

As the plane cruised somewhere over Canada, the doctors laid the woman across a row of seats in coach class while a husband and wife from Danvers held up a blanket to create a makeshift delivery room. Flight attendants grabbed a medical bag and handed the doctors surgical gloves, a clamp, and scissors. At about 9 a.m., the woman gave birth to a 6-1/2 pound baby girl she named Sasha.

"She looked perfect," said Dr. Paresh Thakkar, a family physician from Methuen. "She opened her eyes and was very happy. She was so calm, she didn't cry at all."

Thakkar was assisted by Dr. Natarajan Raman, a radiology oncologist from Minneapolis. They snipped and clamped the umbilical cord and handed the girl to her mother. The entire plane burst into applause.

When the flight landed at Logan International Airport at 10:30 a.m., mother and daughter were whisked by ambulance to Massachusetts General Hospital, where they are reported to be doing well.

Customs officials said that Sasha was deemed a Canadian citizen, because she was born over Canadian airspace. The name of the mother was not released.

National Anthem?

This is interesting. .....and shocking.... ........ any wise ones to comment on the veracity?? I have no clue!!!


'Jana Gana Mana' - Just a thought for the National Anthem! How well do you know about it?

I have always wondered who is the ' adhinayak'and' bharat bhagya vidhata',whose praise we are singing.. I thought might be Motherland India ! Our current National Anthem 'Jana Gana Mana'is sung throughout the country.

Did you know the following about our national anthem, I didn't.

To begin with, India 's national anthem, Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka, was written by Rabindranath Tagore in honor of King George V and the Queen of England when they visited India in 1919. To honor their visit Pandit Motilal Nehru had the five stanzas included , which are in praise of the King and Queen.(And most of us think it is in the praise of our great motherland!! !)

In the original Bengali verses only those provinces that were under British rule,i.e . Punjab, Sindh,Gujarat ,Maratha etc. were mentioned. None of the princely states were recognized which are integral parts of India now Kashmir, Rajasthan, Andhra, Mysore or Kerala.

Neither the Indian Ocean nor the Arabian Sea was included, since they were directly under Portuguese rule at that time. The Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka implies that King George V is the lord of the masses and Bharata Bhagya Vidhata is 'the bestower of good fortune'.

Following is a translation of the five stanzas that glorify the King.

First stanza: (Indian) People wake up remembering your good name and ask for your blessings and they sing your glories. (Tava shubha name jaage; tava shubha aashish maage, gaaye tava jaya gaatha)

Second stanza: Around your throne people of all religions come and give their love and anxiously wait to hear your kind words..


Third stanza: Praise to the King for being the charioteer, for leading the ancient travelers beyond misery.

Fourth stanza: Drowned in the deep ignorance and suffering, poverty-stricken, unconscious country? Waiting for the wink of your eye and your mother's (the Queen's) true protection....

Fifth stanza: In your compassionate plans, the sleeping Bharat (India) will wake up. We bow down to your feet O' Queen, and glory to Rajeshwara (the King).

This whole poem does not indicate any love for the Motherland but depicts a bleak picture. When you sing Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka, whom are you glorifying? Certainly not the Motherland. Is it God? The poem does not indicate that.. It is time now to understand the original purpose and the implication of this, rather than blindly sing as has been done the past sixty years.

Nehru chose the present national anthem as opposed to Vande Mataram because he thought that it would be easier for the band to play!!!

It was an absurd reason but today for that matter bands have advanced and they can very well play any music. So they can as well play Vande Mataram, which is a far better composition in praise of our dear motherland India!

Reproducing Makes You Famous

People like Nadya Suleman, the IVF junkie mother of 14, and Alfie Patten, the 13-year-old father from England, are getting famous just for reproducing. It's a pretty gross trend.

Probably the most troubling thing of all is how greedily we've slopped all this stuff up. But after making celebrity baby covers the biggest sellers for the likes of Us, People and OK!, we get the freakshow news we deserve. Still hungry for more and more babies, we've turned to the circus disaster that is regular lives made alien and shocking when bad choices mixed with a few bits of bad luck and stories were born.

Maybe it coms from exhaustion with all the other media. First it was scripted television shows, and then their high-concept reality descendants. And now we've sifted through every last layer of story until we've gone and found a low, universal denominator. People come out of other people's vaginas sometimes. The more that come out of the same one or the younger the owners of the necessary body parts are, the more we're interested. 220 channels and nothing else was on, so we've settled on the baby zoo currently on display on TLC or sitting in a dimly-lit room across from Ann Curry.

While Suleman's desire to go and get herself knocked up with octuplets when she was already a cash-strapped mother of six probably had far more to do with some murky and deep-seated emotional cataclysms than it did with a desire for fame, the end result has been a raft of high profile TV appearances, implied hopes for a reality series, and a website asking fans or followers or whomever to donate money to this Elephantitis-suffering family. Ms. Suleman has become a rickety celebrity simply by making the wreckless decision to bring many children into this world for whom she had no way of caring. Good for us!

Little Mister Patten may not have been courting fame when he got his young girlfriend pregnant, but now he's likely being paid exclusivity fees by the Sun. And, in the wake of the media frenzy surrounding the unsettling story, two more boys have come forward, claiming paternity of 15-year-old Chantelle Steadman's daughter. There are posed photos of the two boys, aged 14 and 16, on Splash, the photo agency where I find many of the silly celebrity pictures I use for Open Caption.

It had become fairly routine for celebrities to profit off the act of procreation, what with the big glossy magazine industry and whatnot. But now common folks are saying "me too!" and the troubling thing is, if you don't already have a certain degree of popularity, you have to make your babymaking pretty sensational to get any attention. And what's sensational is often ugly. Again these folks probably didn't enter into reproduction with designs on tabloid notoriety, but once the first publicist calls or newspaper camera flashes... Well, the Siren call is tough to resist.

Though humanity has its limits, and the public outcry against Nadya Suleman—and the sad revulsion expressed over the Patten thing—suggests that maybe there is a limit to this mayhem. But we don't suspect it will die down quickly. Prepare yourselves for other strange stories, for other curious and unpleasant parlor tricks of the body. After all, while everything's being torn down around it, Coney Island still has its sideshow.

richard@gawker.com

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