Tavleen Singh's views on Anna Hazare's fast

Hysteria will not end corruption
Tavleen Singh

As I have watched mass hysteria build up over Anna Hazare’s fast, there have been moments when I felt that his supporters had forgotten that India is a democratic country. I have long believed that the most apolitical Indians are those who belong to the English speaking, tweeting, texting middle classes but I had no idea just how apolitical they were till last week. Without reading the Jan Lokpal bill that Anna Hazare is trying to ram down our throats, actors, writers, social activists, television anchors and sundry other supposedly educated Indians leapt on to Anna’s bandwagon.Some seemed to have been inspired by the recent revolution in the Middle East. They babbled on about text messages and social media sites having brought about a ‘people’s movement’ without noticing that in India the people have the right to vote. Every five years they choose who they want to represent them in the Lok Sabha and in their state assemblies. It is the job of these legislatures to make laws for the country. It is not the job of sanctimonious activists.

If they had bothered to read the draft that Hazare’s Leftist advisors have drawn up, they would have noticed that its worst flaw is that it is anti-democratic in the most frightening way. It is not an ombudsman that it seeks to create but a despot with the powers to investigate, judge and punish anyone he suspects of corrupt practices. So if some NGO type of Leftist persuasion were to decide that his local MP was spending his constituency allowance on a project that did not benefit ‘the masses’, he (or she) could complain to his local Lokayukta and organise a raid on the MP’s property and order his arrest if he decides that public funds are being misused. It is not just officials but private citizens who will be under the Lokpal’s purview.

This is the way of totalitarian countries like China. It is not India’s way but you would not know it if you had been watching our news channels last week. One famous TV anchor became a sort of Lokpal himself by haranguing a Congress Party spokesman on behalf of ‘the people of India.’
Meanwhile, hunger pangs appear to have caused Anna Hazare to suffer hallucinations of becoming India’s next Mahatma, so he has ordered a ‘jail bharo andolan’ as if we were still fighting the British. And, his coterie of Lefty advisors are using their fifteen minutes of fame to rant against the liberal economic policies that have brought the only prosperity that India has seen since 1947. Without it there would be no tweeting, texting middle class.
In the process we seem to have all forgotten that it is not the economic reforms that have created India’s vast and wondrous infrastructure of corruption. This was built in those times when the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy were inflexibly in the grip of high officials and mighty ministers. With the rise of the private sector in the past twenty years, politicians have turned their greedy eyes upon the possibilities of bigger takings and to this end ensure that their progeny succeed them to take care of the family business. If we want corruption to end, we could begin by banning hereditary MPs and making it compulsory for political parties to have regular elections. We could also ban political parties who cannot account for their donations. Political parties are richer today than ever because they have become leeches on the back of the private sector.

Nearly all corruption in India is related to government. If big businessmen pay for every contract they get, pavement shopkeepers pay for the right to earn their meagre living. I have never met an Indian who has not been forced to bribe an official at some time or other. This is why there is so much understandable anger against corruption but anyone who thinks a despotic Lokpal is the solution is deluded, naïve or an NGO.

Speaking of which, I found it most annoying last week to listen to NGOs behave as if they were the incorruptible, rightful spokesmen for ‘civil society’. In my time, I have met as many corrupt NGOs as I have met corrupt officials and they are accountable to nobody. Many receive funds from mysterious foreign sources that they would have to declare if they stood for elections. Is that why fasting in Jantar Mantar is the preferred option? If NGO types want to make laws, let them get elected to the Lok Sabha or else go back to activities that are genuinely non-governmental. Making laws is the right of governments, no matter how ineffective or corrupt these governments may be. This appears to have been forgotten in the mass hysterics of last week. It is time to remember.

Give a man a wire and see him light up your life!

This Star Trek-Style Scanner Tells If You’re Healthy Or Not

I never thought I would live to see something like this: A hand held scanner that can detect if a patient is healthy or not just by pointing it at the skin. It seems out of Star Trek, but it is real and it works today.

The scanner has been developed over a five-year period by a group lead by professor Jürgen Lademann of the Department of Dermatology, Venereology and Allergy of the Charité-University Medicine in Berlin (and sponsored by the German's Federal Ministry for Education and Research). Right now, it is being tested in Germany using a group of 19-year-old students.

How does it work?
The device—which will have a $280 price tag in Europe—is very simple: Point it at the skin, wait three minutes, and it will tell you how healthy you are in a scale from one (worst) to ten (optimal). The machine produces a light beam that reflects on the skin, analyzes the wavelengths reflected, and processes that information to figure out the anti-oxidants level in the skin. Before this Star Trek-style scanner, doctors needed to get tissue samples and process them in a laboratory to get the same kind of readings.

According to the researchers, the anti-oxidant level in your skin is a good indicator of your overall body health, since it is affected by stress, smoking, alcohol drinking, unhealthy food, lack of sleep and UV radiation. During trial, they were able to detect changes in diet and smoking habits.

The scanner is not designed to detect specific diseases, just your overall health level. It will work for any kind of patients—like cancer patients under treatment, to check out the negative impact of chemotherapy—but the German Government is hoping that it will help people who are not sick to adopt a healthier lifestyle.

Lademan thinks that, by allowing people to measure their health level in a comprehensive way, they will be able to modify their habits and immediately see the results. It sounds like a video game, but according to the ongoing tests, it's working among the students. I would use one, but then again, I'm not going to change my decadent lifestyle, so I prefer to live—and die—in ignorance but happy.

The Story of the Lonely Whale Will Break Your Heart

Once upon a time, there was a whale called June. Or maybe her name is Margaret. Or Kate. We don't really know. A few nitrogen-hearted scientists call her 52 Hertz just because she sings at a 51.75Hz frequency, but I will call her Alice.

Alice isn't like any other baleen whale. Unlike all whales, Alice doesn't have friends. She doesn't have a family. She doesn't belong to any tribe, pack or gang. She doesn't have a lover. She never had one.

In the immense solitude of the ocean, Alice is completely alone.

The only thing Alice does is sing. Like other whales, she has been singing for a very long time. The first time we heard her song was in 1989, when the hydrophone network of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recorded her voice for the first time. The researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have been tracking her using these hydrophones for the last two decades.


Her songs—in this recording accelerated by a factor of five—come in groups of two to six calls, lasting for five to six seconds each. But her voice is unlike any other baleen whale. It is unique—while the rest of her kind communicate between 12 and 25Hz, Alice sings at 51.75Hz.

You see, my dear humans, that's precisely Alice's problem. No other whales can hear her. Every one of her desperate calls to communicate remains unanswered. Each cry ignored. And with every lonely song, Alice becomes sadder and more frustrated, her notes going deeper in despair as the years go by.

Nobody knows why this is happening. Nobody knows why Alice is going through the wrong paths instead of following the usual baleen whale's migratory channels. Some think that she might be a weird hybrid, one of a kind. Maybe she—or he, as we don't really know the whale's sex—is the last member of her species. Perhaps there was a mutation. Who knows. Who cares—the explanation doesn't matter.

Whatever the reason is, the sad fact is that there's no happy ending to this tale. Alice keeps roaming the big blue, eating krill, seeing other creatures around her but unable to communicate with any of them. And one day, the NOAA hydrophones will record Alice's unique voice one last time. And again, that farewell cry will get no reply. But it will not matter this time because, at last, Alice would be sad no more.

Bizarre Sex Laws From Around the World!

The Incredible Story of a Dog Named Wall-E Who Resurrected Himself After Being Put Down

That cute little dog, now named Wall-E, isn't supposed to be alive. He (along with the rest of his littermates) was abandoned in front of a shelter and since the shelter didn't have any room to care for him, was put to sleep.

Wall-E was euthanized twice, with lethal injections to both his heart and limbs, and was pronounced dead after a stethoscope test. They discarded Wall-E and the other dogs in a trash dumpster and moved on.

But! The story doesn't end there. Amazingly, the next day Wall-E wasn't dead. He was somehow resurrected, alive and kicking. Hell, he was healthy as can be, walking around inside the dumpster (his littermates all died) and just doing dog things. An angel dog they called him. A survivor, a fighter and a medical miracle.

Did Dr. Richard B. Hoover Just Discover Alien Life?

So the methane organisms discovered in that hostile little lake in California weren't such a big deal after all. No harm, no foul—they were at the very least interesting. Interesting, but nothing like this: Dr. Richard Hoover, as astrobiologist with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, claims he's found alien life.

Real alien life. Not weird Earthbound extremophiles or hints of the building blocks of life that are really just errant specks of dust on the lens of a telescope. Life, and not of this Earth.

If Dr. Hoover's paper detailing the find holds up to scrutiny, we can finally, truly say it: We are not alone.

In fact, if Dr. Hoover's paper holds up to the incredibly thorough peer review currently taking place around it, life may in fact be pretty boring and downright common in the grand scheme of the universe.

So what, exactly, did Dr. Hoover find? It's pretty mind-blowing, actually: Contained within nine extremely rare meteorites called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites he discovered what he believes are the fossils of common bacteria that's both similar and nothing like what exists on our planet. In addition to being extremely rare, these meteorites are also some of the oldest in our solar system.

"The exciting thing is that they are in many cases recognizable and can be associated very closely with the generic species here on earth," said Hoover in an interview with Yahoo News. Some of the fossils, however, are quite odd. "There are some that are just very strange and don't look like anything that I've been able to identify, and I've shown them to many other experts that have also come up stump."

More specifically, Hoover claims to have discovered traces of filaments and remnants of algae-like organisms called cyanobacteria. Another find was similar to a bacterium called Titanospirillum velox. They were very Earth-like and unremarkable save for one important difference: They lacked nitrogen.

This caveat is important, as the lack of nitrogen indicates the samples are "the remains of extraterrestrial life forms that grew on the parent bodies of the meteorites when liquid water was present, long before the meteorites entered the Earth's atmosphere," he said.

Hoover is being incredibly open about his paper. As stated above, peer scrutiny has already begun, to the tune of 100 experts who have started dissecting his work in advance of its official publication. A broader, more general invitation was issued to a further 5,000 scientists as well, making this one of the most vetted scientific papers ever. This vetting is a good thing, as Hoover has made claims like this before with other meteorites that ultimately did not pan out.

Should the paper hold up, however, the game is well and truly changed. We are not just "not alone," we are common.

Update: Counterclaims calling the journal a joke and the science suspect have already begun.

Update 2: Bad Astronomy, a blog I read often due to its insightful author and spot-on commentary, debunks this news even more. Sigh.