Aug 05 2015 : The Times of India (Delhi)

`Happy hormone' can kill cancer tumours, discover Kol-born scientists

Prithvijit Mitra & Sayan Mazumder TNN

Kolkata:





A 14-year study by two Kolkata-born scientists has led them to discover that dopamine -known as the happy hormone -can also kill tumours, putting them on the verge of one of the most significant medical discoveries ever.Trials on mice have been successful, say researchers Partha Dasgupta and Sujit Basu. If human trials succeed, cancer cure will get significantly cheaper -a chemo course costs lakhs, while a vial of dopamine comes for just Rs 25.
Dasgupta is an emeritus professor with Chittaranjan National Cancer Research Institute and Basu, a professor at Wexner Medical Centre, Ohio State University. Like penicillin -said to be the biggest medical discovery in history -the cancer-killing property of dopamine was discovered almost by accident, when the duo was carrying out random tests to analyze the hormone.Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that helps regulate movement and emotions. The duo says it also starves cancerous tumours of blood, causing them to shrink and eventually vanish. “Tumour cells multiply rapidly, making them swell very fast. We concluded that if the growth of blood vessels can be checked, tumours will stop growing and disappear. In animal-model experiments, we observed that dopamine acted very well on cancerous tumours, effectively countering vascular endothelial growth factor (that helps tumours grow),“ said Dasgupta.
But dopamine fluctuation could lead to serious disorders like Parkinson's disease. “We need to know more about its efficacy in the long-run,“ said oncologist Gautam Mukhopadhyay .
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Only 8.15% of Indians are graduates, Census data show

Despite a big increase in college attendance, especially among women, fewer than one out of every 10 Indians is a graduate, new Census data show.

Over the weekend, the office of the Census Commissioner and Registrar-General of India released new numbers on the level of education achieved by Indians as of 2011.

They show that with 6.8 crore graduates and above, India still has more than six times as many illiterates.

While rural India accounts for only a third of all graduates, the rate of increase in graduates was faster in rural than in urban India over the last decade, and fastest of all among rural women. From 26 lakh graduates 10 years ago, nearly 67 lakh rural women are now graduates. Rural Indians are more likely to have non-technical graduate degrees than urban Indians, while urban India accounts for 80 per cent of all Indian technology and medicine graduates.

Among those with a graduate degree or above, the majority (over 60 per cent) are those who have a non-technical graduate degree.

Technical qualifications double

New Census data on the educational status of Indians show that the biggest increase is in the number of people pursuing engineering and technology diplomas or technical degrees equivalent to a graduate or postgraduate degree.

The proportion of Indians with engineering and technology qualifications has nearly doubled over the last decade, while the proportion of women technology graduate equivalents has more than tripled.

In all, there were over 73 lakh Indians with a tech qualification in 2011. India also has over 30 lakh people with a teaching degree and over 15 lakh people with a medical degree.

Chandigarh and Delhi have the highest proportion of graduates — over one in every five persons — followed by Maharashtra among the big States, while Bihar and Assam are worst off among the big States, with fewer than one in every 20 persons a graduate. Across the country — with the notable exceptions of Chandigarh and Kerala — the proportion of male graduates is higher than that of women.

The proportion of graduates among the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes is far lower than the national average; just over four per cent of the SCs are graduates or above, while for the Scheduled Tribes, it is below three per cent, and lower still for women.

Keywords: Census data, Registrar-General of India

Famous last words? Say them before it’s too late

The deathbed is where we impart one final piece of wisdom, settle one final score

I was at a funeral recently. The woman who had died had reached her ninth decade and had been a wonderfully kind lady. In the eulogy, her son remarked that she had seen her death coming; that it was the best kind of death and one that would not be available to most of us. She had prepared herself for the end and had been able to say what she needed to say to the people she loved.

Part of our understanding of death is the deathbed scene. It’s where we impart one final piece of wisdom, settle one final score or say something so witty that our erudition in the face of the grim reaper will b

Ke celebrated for years to come. Oscar Wilde, lying in a fleapit hotel on the left bank of the Seine, took a look at his surroundings and said: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.” It was the most Wildean of comments: arch, funny, tasteful and poignant. And 100 years after he died, he had the last word when the cursed wallpaper was replaced by red, blue, green and gold frescos based on designs by his friend Aubrey Beardsley.

If we can’t be as witty as Wilde, what should we say? A survey carried out recently found that 83 per cent of the 2,198 of adults polled had received final words of advice from their loved ones — 62 per cent had received advice about their relationships, while 56 per cent had received career advice. After that, wisdom relating to family (43 per cent), education (39 per cent) and finances (32 per cent) was the most common.

It’s heartening that advice about relationships tops the poll. Perhaps all the career and financial advice was full of truth, but there still seems to be something a little depressing about being given some final top tips on how to nail that key job interview or how to correctly fill out a mortgage application. Of course, you’d be in great company if you were to impart financial advice. Bob Marley’s final words, “Money can’t buy life,” were financially themed. And Plato tells us that, having been sentenced to death and having drunk the poison that would kill him, Socrates turned to his friend Crito and said: “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Do pay it. Don’t forget.” Crito assured the philosopher that he would not forget and then, seeking some greater piece of wisdom, asked Socrates if he had anything more to say. He did not.

These things — career, finance — are all an important part of the rich tapestry that is life but surely, in the end, it’s not only hippies who recognise that friendships and relationships are the things that matter the most. “Only connect,” reads the epigraph to EM Forster’s novel Howards End, and this need to reach out to others is perhaps strongest at the end.

Connecting with fellow human beings

Other famous figures chose to celebrate connecting with their fellow human beings by paying tribute to love. “I love you very much, my dear Beaver,” the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said to his partner Simone de Beauvoir. “Goodnight my kitten,” was Ernest Hemingway’s offering to his wife Mary before he killed himself. “Oh, I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy,” Charlotte Brontë told her husband, while T.S. Eliot simply whispered the name of his wife, Valerie, and nothing more. If this is all a bit too touchy-feely for you, then the deathbed is also a great place to tell people “what you really think of them” or, if you are feeling Shakespearean, order that your death be avenged. “How the little piglets would grunt if they knew how the old boar suffered,” the ninth-century Norse warlord Ragnar Lodbrok said as he was being devoured, naked, in a pit by a horde of snakes. The “little piglets” he was referring to were his sons (he was the “old boar”) and indeed the sagas record that they sought and exacted vengeance by ritually executing Ælla, the Northumbrian king who had cast their father into the snake pit.

Your final moments offer you a chance to impart wisdom by reflecting on your own life, something that many public figures do. In Karen Thorsen’s documentary about the great American writer James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket, Baldwin’s brother, David, recalls that James hoped that he had done his work so that when he was gone, those looking could find “in all the turmoil, through the wreckage and the rumble … something that I left behind”. Having considered all this, you might just think “to hell with it” and follow in the footsteps of Karl Marx, who hollered at his housekeeper: “Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough!” In short, say it now, before it’s too late.

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2015

Freedom after many midnights

Even the sternest of critics of Indian foreign policy will find it a tough task to question some of the diplomatic feats that New Delhi has managed to notch up of late. The settlement of the dispute related to the maritime boundary with Bangladesh in July 2014, albeit after an intervention by an international tribunal, was one of these. And as if to mark its anniversary, the long-running land boundary dispute was buried in July. The enclaves on both sides were exchanged quickly after the required formalities by the midnight of July 31. Settlement of inter-country disputes — especially those that involve sacrifice of territory — are always the most remarkable of achievements, howsoever cordial their relationships might be. So settling a dispute that involved issues that ran counter to the very opening lines of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations, that recognises ‘equal and inalienable rights’ of the ‘human family’ to ‘freedom, justice and peace’, is a creditable achievement. Indeed, the enclave issue involved the denial of the right to freedom and justice to many. It had its roots in Partition. Now, as the national flags of the respective countries fly in the 162 former enclaves, it is time for the state to set up the infrastructure as quickly as possible to mitigate the trauma of citizens who lived without a country for decades. From now on, the diplomats’ responsibilities are less than those of the local administrative authorities.

The enclave question was tossed around for too long and was never seriously acted upon. The obfuscation of justice helped none. Now the questions of citizenship and legality can be redefined. The ‘illegal Bangladeshis’ of the enclaves — predominantly those from the minority community — have become ‘legal’ because the states felt the time was conducive to award the ‘inalienable right’ to the poorest of the poor. Perhaps if there were different sets of political parties, leaders or diplomats in both the national capitals, the enclave-dwellers would still have been considered ‘a security threat’ and arrested across the line, as was being done until just last week. There are more people now crossing continents and concertina wires for survival — more often than not without state-stamped papers — and thus it may well be the time to recollect and record the memories of our nationals who suffered just for being born in the enclaves. Maybe what we need now is not a powerful state or a diplomat, but a historian to document the plethora of personal narratives on both sides, which are otherwise bound to be forgotten. For in the words of Tolstoy, “Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.”

the speaking tree - The Way We Are

SADHGURU JAGGI VASUDEV





Whichever way you have `become', you have only created and cultivated a small part of it consciously . A large part of you is unconscious because most of what you perceive is not in your awareness. Sense perception is like that -everything that goes in through your sense organs gets established in your system to be remembered forever. This is karma.Every impression that the five sense organs take in is stored. This is not against you; this information is useful. If you clean up all this information, you will not know how to handle even the simplest aspects of life. It is only because the information is coming in such torrents, it is so complex, and most of it goes into you without your consciousness, so it has become a problem.
How you became the way you are is just a tendency that you are is just a tendency that you developed because of the information you gathered. This tendency is traditionally called vasana. It is like a smell.Whatever is there in maximum quantity is the kind of smell you experience. Because you produce this kind of smell, a certain type of life moves towards you, and you also tend to move in that direction.
Now, you use perfume to cover the smell. In the first meeting, people may get deceived.The moment they notice the stink, they are going to run away . So, it doesn't matter what impressions you have gathered, what you make of it is in your hands. If unpleasant things have happened to you, it is all the more important that you turn wiser and more beautiful as quickly as possible.

the speaking tree - Disasters: Making Sense Of Human Suffering

Rajiv Vij





Over two million children were impacted by the recent Nepal earthquake; over half a million people rendered homeless; and thousands dead. More recently, floods in eastern India have caused suffering to many . The impact of natural disasters on human life is staggering. These events shake up our faith. We wonder about the existence of God or another higher force and its justice ­ why would it want millions of innocent people to suffer this way? Here's an attempt to make sense of such suffering.Firstly, natural disasters are not disasters in themselves. They are events that emanate from the natural working of the universe and follow its laws. The sun rises and sets as it needs to, the clouds turn into rain as they need to, and the plants are born ­ some to become trees and some to die early ­ as they need to. However, we are conditioned by our judgmental evaluation of every situation as good or bad based on how it affects us. We clearly take the havoc caused by such disasters personally and experience them as evil.
Having said that, these events are sometimes an expression of the growing ecological imbalance with which humans are collectively living with mother earth. They are an alarming reminder that the excessive focus on mate rial progress at the cost of negative environmental impact could eventually kill the whole.
Collectively aligning our ac tions with the rhythm of nature and its laws will eliminate the excessive reactions of the earth.s Secondly , when impacted by these events, we tend to wonder if it's our personal fault or bad karma. Questions like, why is this happening to me, what have i done to deserve this, is this God or Universe's way of punishing me, flood our mind. The reality is these events are agnostic to the goodness, integrity , faith, race or colour of their victims. They are in no way a form of punishment directed at the affected individuals.
As per the law of karma, what we experience at the level of our psyche and inner state is a direct reflection of our cumulative thoughts, intentions and actions. However, what manifests in our lives at the physical level is influenced by another dimension as well ­ that of the superseding laws of nature. That's why a corrupt businessman can be wealthy and a saint could meet with an accident. Thus, it's futile to blame our individual selves for being a victim of any of nature's tragic events.
Further, it's important to recognise that it's not what happens to us at the physical and material level, but how we respond to it, that has a deep impact on our inner state ­ and on the ongoing cycle of karma. Starting with learning to not blame or pity ourselves, we can practice meditation or other reflective techniques to reframe our outlook, connect with our inner source of strength and wisdom, and make peace with our reality.
Lastly , witnessing tragic death of loved ones, particularly of young children, creates insufferable pain for the survivors. Living through it plainly seems pointless. However unbearable and despairing our lives may appear in such circumstances, there's potential for a meaningful purpose to every human life. Every personal crisis can be a powerful teacher towards fulfilling our deeper purpose. Experiencing irreparable loss could become a pathway to deepening our sense of detachment, softening our ego, acquiring resilience, and learning to be compassionate towards ourselves and others. (The author is a life coach.)

12 million people have no cooking arrangements in India, says study

Around 12 million people in India have no proper cooking arrangements. The situation is worse in urban India where around seven per cent of households lack cooking arrangements while in rural India over one per cent of households is deprived of the facility.

The facts were revealed by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) report based on the 68th round of survey. Maharashtra (3.8 per cent) and Andhra Pradesh (2.7 per cent) are the top two states which reported “no cooking arrangement”, the survey says.

According to the report, the situation has worsened over the years. It says that 0.7 per cent of rural households lacked any cooking facility in 1993-94 which touched 1.3 per cent in 2012.

Similar is the situation in urban India where 6.3 per cent households did not have cooking arrangements around 20 years ago, but now the figure has reached 6.9 per cent.

The report says, “The proportion of rural households having no cooking arrangement shows a steady increase from 0.7 per cent in 1993-94 to 1.6 percent in 2009-10, but it marginally decreased after that. In this respect, there is no clear trend in urban areas, but the phenomenon of no cooking arrangement is seen to be considerably high.”

In urban areas, the highest proportion of households lacking cooking facility were seen in Karnataka (13.9 per cent), Tamil Nadu (9.2 per cent) and Andhra Pradesh (9.1 per cent), according to the report.

Urban-rural divide

The report highlights that the most common cooking fuel used in urban areas is liquified petroleum gas (68 per cent) while in rural India most households are dependent on firewood.

Chhattisgarh tops the list with 93.2 per cent of households using firewood for cooking. It is followed by Rajasthan (89.3 per cent) and Odisha (87.0 per cent).

At the all-India level, firewood is followed by LPG which is used by 15.0 per cent of households. Around 9.6 per cent and 1.1 per cent of rural households use dung cake and coke and coal respectively as primary sources of cooking. Around 4.9 per cent of households use other sources such as gobar gas, charcoal and electricity for cooking.

Major points in study

Use of coke and coal as the primary source of energy for cooking has been markedly reported in Jharkhand (31.1 per cent), West Bengal (13.5 per cent) and Chhattisgarh (11.3 per cent)

Nearly 40 per cent of urban households use LPG as the principal fuel for cooking in all major states. It is the highest in Haryana (86.5 per cent households), followed by Andhra Pradesh (77.3 per cent) and Punjab (75.4 per cent). It is the lowest in Chhattisgarh (39.8 per cent).

Compared to rural areas, use of kerosene as the primary source of energy for cooking is more prevalent in urban areas, especially in Gujarat (10.5 per cent), Maharashtra (10.1 per cent) and Punjab (10.0 per cent).