After a lot of procrastination, the delimitation commission of india's notification has finally been accepted and passed into a law. Let us look at what it would do.
Basically it would divide the total number of LokSabha and VidhanSabha seats in each state according to the population so that each constituency has equal population.
Some of the constituencies will be abolished, others increased or pared down in size to reflect the demographic equality.
The urban centres within the states would get increased number of MPs and MLAs. thus increasing the influence these centres would have on the polity. this also reflects the growing population in the urban centres.
However the total number of seats would not be increased which is sad really. It has been increasingly felt that the parliamentarians have grown far apart from the common man. India needs in excess of 1000 loksabhas if it is to be governed properly. the number of seats have been frozen as the south indian states have protested saying thier numbers are coming down and they are being punished for a better population control.
There is a solution to this dilemma. let the number of seats be increased in all the seats in a proportional manner so that the relative number of seats for each state remains the same.
The next delimitation committee should be given a mandate to increase the number of seats and not just shuffle them as it has done this time.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
did nawaz kill benazir?
for those of you who love the conspiracy theories, here is a new one. it says nawaz sharif more than musharraf stands to gain from the death of benazir bhutto and was thus responsible for her deaths. here is why-
1. PPP being a personality cult based party would be without its binding glue and would fall apart sooner or later leaving the country with only one national party.
2. everyone knows that nawaz sharif could only come back to the country with the help of saudis, everyone also knows that the saudis are the biggest financiers of the terrorists, at least unofficially. so they had it within their power to eliminate the biggest competitor to nawaz.
3. by next election nawaz is sure to emerge as the largest party as public hates zardari, this would give saudis an unimaginably large influence over pakistan.
4. PML-N is known for its softer approach towards fundamentalists and the consevative sections often end up supporting PML-N rather than PPP. so they are more comfortable with the idea of nawaz as the PM rather than benazir, who was a women and thus an anathema.
i am not saying that the above assertions are true and i kind of like nawaz sharif, but this guy has gone through a lot of trouble in the past ten years and led a very frustated and insecure life and sucha person can easily become a pawn in the hands of others more powerful people.
1. PPP being a personality cult based party would be without its binding glue and would fall apart sooner or later leaving the country with only one national party.
2. everyone knows that nawaz sharif could only come back to the country with the help of saudis, everyone also knows that the saudis are the biggest financiers of the terrorists, at least unofficially. so they had it within their power to eliminate the biggest competitor to nawaz.
3. by next election nawaz is sure to emerge as the largest party as public hates zardari, this would give saudis an unimaginably large influence over pakistan.
4. PML-N is known for its softer approach towards fundamentalists and the consevative sections often end up supporting PML-N rather than PPP. so they are more comfortable with the idea of nawaz as the PM rather than benazir, who was a women and thus an anathema.
i am not saying that the above assertions are true and i kind of like nawaz sharif, but this guy has gone through a lot of trouble in the past ten years and led a very frustated and insecure life and sucha person can easily become a pawn in the hands of others more powerful people.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Jodha Akbar
So what is good about jodha akbar? i know it is a very odd way of starting with a review but very appropriate. i think the film should have a disclaimer- the contents of the film are nowhere a reflection of the acting abilities of hrithik and aishwarya, the laziness of the director and the editor has no bearing on the lead actors. having made that clear lets move on.
what was that about letters being written on parchments sorry thick paper in hindi? hindi in akbars time that too chaste hindi? this from the director of lagaan who had gone to britain to search for bats from that period? but there was aamir you said? you said it. so now we know the true spirit behind the authenticity of lagaan.
so what was it that gowarikar did? he took the budget..very generous one too and made something very grand with very grand actors but without any convictions. in the end you get something much more preachy than halla bol. when will these people stop letting the present cloud their judgement of the past?
what was it that gowarikar trying to convey, that akbar loved jodha and not just kept her confined in the harem? it took 4 hours to convey that. that akbar was virtuous and wise, so what made him think that he was also a stickler for women's rights in that age and time, isn't that looking at the past from todays perspective. the muslims spoke urdu and the hindus chaste hindi, wow.
where was the editor? the songs were long and boring. and after seeing films like mithya i find it demeaning that someone would try to hoist something so silly on us.
what was that about letters being written on parchments sorry thick paper in hindi? hindi in akbars time that too chaste hindi? this from the director of lagaan who had gone to britain to search for bats from that period? but there was aamir you said? you said it. so now we know the true spirit behind the authenticity of lagaan.
so what was it that gowarikar did? he took the budget..very generous one too and made something very grand with very grand actors but without any convictions. in the end you get something much more preachy than halla bol. when will these people stop letting the present cloud their judgement of the past?
what was it that gowarikar trying to convey, that akbar loved jodha and not just kept her confined in the harem? it took 4 hours to convey that. that akbar was virtuous and wise, so what made him think that he was also a stickler for women's rights in that age and time, isn't that looking at the past from todays perspective. the muslims spoke urdu and the hindus chaste hindi, wow.
where was the editor? the songs were long and boring. and after seeing films like mithya i find it demeaning that someone would try to hoist something so silly on us.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Osteoarthritis
All of you must either have experienced or known someone who has experienced pain in their knees at some point. That constant dull aching pain that is present with every step a person walks has troubled many and in fact is a common factor in reducing the quality of life of a person especially as one ages.
This disease is misunderstood by many and often results in people changing their doctors frequently and also has resulted in many people turning to quacks who take advantage of a patient by charging exorbitant amount of money and by giving them spurious medicines laced with steroids which though give immediate relief to the patients, sometimes have disastrous results.
So what is this Osteoarthritis? How does it start? Whom does it affect? Is it really incurable? These are some of the queries that we would try to answer in this article.
To answer the first question, osteoarthritis is a disease of cartilage, not only of the knee but also of almost all the joints in the human body such as fingers, hip and spine. Cartilage is that smooth but tough tissue that lies between the bones at the joints that enables us to have smooth yet painless motion. This joint is lubricated with a highly viscous fluid that enables us to walk without much friction between cartilages. It is this fluid that is called as water by your neighborhood know it all. This whole structure is covered by synovium, the tissue that produces the synovial fluid.
To be truthful to you, modern science yet does not know the exact reason for the beginning of osteoarthritis however we have known certain constant associations between osteoarthritis and other factors. These are female sex, increased weight and older age. What it means is that female, obese people and elderly are all liable to develop osteoarthritis much more than those of us who are not one of these. Just look around you and you will find this assertion to be true. However this does not mean that all female, obese and elderly will get osteoarthritis. There are many a elderly who have a knee that would put an young persons knee to shame.
Another association is with repeated trauma to the knee, we shall explain how in the coming paragraphs.
How does it start? Well all of you must have seen the unraveling of a sweater. The thread once pulled out never stops until whole of the sweater is unraveled, you may try various things to prevent it or delay it but it invariably gets worse. Similar is the case of our cartilage, it is made up of very fine filamentous structures that are interwoven at the microscopic level to make a very firm but elastic and compressible cartilage. However it has one distinct weakness. It is that once its surface has been notched due to any reason, trauma or otherwise the fibers unravel, water seeps in, it begins to swell and things go downhill from here.
So how would one know that he has osteoarthritis and not something more sinister, after all there are other conditions that cause knee pain too. Rheumatoid arthritis is a very common disease of the joints that may cause knee pain and mimic osteoarthritis. It is a treatable disease that must not be neglected. One simple way is to contact the doctor for every knee pain but for those of you who are wary of seeing a doctor here is a simple differentiation, pain of osteoarthritis is very less initially and usually affects one knee more than the other, the stiffness of the joints in osteoarthritis that comes after sitting or resting for a while lasts less than half an hour. Rheumatoid arthritis on the other hands affects both sides equally and the stiffness lasts greater than half an hour.
Injury to the knee can produce pain acutely by a simple soft tissue trauma or something more troublesome like ligament or meniscal damage so it should not be neglected and a consultation with a doctor is necessary as timely intervention can be very effective. Letting things fester can cause further complications later.
A patient with osteoarthritis of the knees will complain of pain in his knees usually associated with walking. Difficulty in climbing stairs or rising from a chair, stiffness in the joints after a period of inactivity. Some patients may even complain of swelling in the joints and in later stages of the disease deformity of the knees in which the knees may bow outwards.
So, is the disease incurable? In a word yes but is it untreatable? NO. the disease is treatable. There are ways in which the progress of the disease can be slowed also there are several ways by which the pain and disability of the patients may be alleviated.
First treatment is cause specific. Obese patients should lose their weight and patients with trauma to the knee should get the underlying ligamentous or meniscal damage assessed and treated as these can lead to osteoarthritis.
For those patients who do not fall in these categories the first line of treatment is physiotherapy of the joints. Physiotherapy strengthens the muscles around the knee and thus decrease the rubbing of the cartilage to each other thereby decreasing the pain. It also keeps the joint active and prevents the formation of deformities in the joint.
Analgesics in moderation and under supervision gives good relief of pain but its injudicious use can cause gastric ulceration and damage to kidneys. This is the reason that the doctors do not recommend taking the tablets over the counter.
Certain supplementary treatments such as glucosamines and chondroitin sulphates also provide relief to some patients.
Intra-articular steroids give instantaneous relief but cause further damage to the cartilage so they should only be given under supervision of an orthopedician.
Viscosupplementation with hyaluronic acid which is a natural constituent of the synovial fluid has been found to give reliefs of upto one to three months in the patients and are very useful though limited form of treatment.
Among the surgical methods of treatment available with us, the first treatment that we prefer is an arthroscopic debridement and lavage of the knee joints. It is nothing but a cleaning up of the joint by which we introduce a scope through a small incision and pass a lot of water through it and also remove debris and loose fragments of the joints. This procedure gives relief to relatively younger patients with lesser severity of disease.
Final tool in the orthopedician's hands is a total knee replacement. Again it is a very useful tool in the patients with severe osteoarthritis , unbearable pain with deformities of the knee joint, it is a proven method with more than 99% longevity of the replacements by the 20th year. The improvements in both the implant and the operation methods have been such that this operation can be done in younger patients than was possible earlier so the patients need not wait till the condition worsens to a great extent. As the results then would not be as good as they would be at an earlier stage.
To summate, osteoarthritis is not a disease of despair and can be effectively treated by a doctor using the various modalities at his disposal but these modalities vary from patient to patient depending upon the age, severity and the associated conditions.
This disease is misunderstood by many and often results in people changing their doctors frequently and also has resulted in many people turning to quacks who take advantage of a patient by charging exorbitant amount of money and by giving them spurious medicines laced with steroids which though give immediate relief to the patients, sometimes have disastrous results.
So what is this Osteoarthritis? How does it start? Whom does it affect? Is it really incurable? These are some of the queries that we would try to answer in this article.
To answer the first question, osteoarthritis is a disease of cartilage, not only of the knee but also of almost all the joints in the human body such as fingers, hip and spine. Cartilage is that smooth but tough tissue that lies between the bones at the joints that enables us to have smooth yet painless motion. This joint is lubricated with a highly viscous fluid that enables us to walk without much friction between cartilages. It is this fluid that is called as water by your neighborhood know it all. This whole structure is covered by synovium, the tissue that produces the synovial fluid.
To be truthful to you, modern science yet does not know the exact reason for the beginning of osteoarthritis however we have known certain constant associations between osteoarthritis and other factors. These are female sex, increased weight and older age. What it means is that female, obese people and elderly are all liable to develop osteoarthritis much more than those of us who are not one of these. Just look around you and you will find this assertion to be true. However this does not mean that all female, obese and elderly will get osteoarthritis. There are many a elderly who have a knee that would put an young persons knee to shame.
Another association is with repeated trauma to the knee, we shall explain how in the coming paragraphs.
How does it start? Well all of you must have seen the unraveling of a sweater. The thread once pulled out never stops until whole of the sweater is unraveled, you may try various things to prevent it or delay it but it invariably gets worse. Similar is the case of our cartilage, it is made up of very fine filamentous structures that are interwoven at the microscopic level to make a very firm but elastic and compressible cartilage. However it has one distinct weakness. It is that once its surface has been notched due to any reason, trauma or otherwise the fibers unravel, water seeps in, it begins to swell and things go downhill from here.
So how would one know that he has osteoarthritis and not something more sinister, after all there are other conditions that cause knee pain too. Rheumatoid arthritis is a very common disease of the joints that may cause knee pain and mimic osteoarthritis. It is a treatable disease that must not be neglected. One simple way is to contact the doctor for every knee pain but for those of you who are wary of seeing a doctor here is a simple differentiation, pain of osteoarthritis is very less initially and usually affects one knee more than the other, the stiffness of the joints in osteoarthritis that comes after sitting or resting for a while lasts less than half an hour. Rheumatoid arthritis on the other hands affects both sides equally and the stiffness lasts greater than half an hour.
Injury to the knee can produce pain acutely by a simple soft tissue trauma or something more troublesome like ligament or meniscal damage so it should not be neglected and a consultation with a doctor is necessary as timely intervention can be very effective. Letting things fester can cause further complications later.
A patient with osteoarthritis of the knees will complain of pain in his knees usually associated with walking. Difficulty in climbing stairs or rising from a chair, stiffness in the joints after a period of inactivity. Some patients may even complain of swelling in the joints and in later stages of the disease deformity of the knees in which the knees may bow outwards.
So, is the disease incurable? In a word yes but is it untreatable? NO. the disease is treatable. There are ways in which the progress of the disease can be slowed also there are several ways by which the pain and disability of the patients may be alleviated.
First treatment is cause specific. Obese patients should lose their weight and patients with trauma to the knee should get the underlying ligamentous or meniscal damage assessed and treated as these can lead to osteoarthritis.
For those patients who do not fall in these categories the first line of treatment is physiotherapy of the joints. Physiotherapy strengthens the muscles around the knee and thus decrease the rubbing of the cartilage to each other thereby decreasing the pain. It also keeps the joint active and prevents the formation of deformities in the joint.
Analgesics in moderation and under supervision gives good relief of pain but its injudicious use can cause gastric ulceration and damage to kidneys. This is the reason that the doctors do not recommend taking the tablets over the counter.
Certain supplementary treatments such as glucosamines and chondroitin sulphates also provide relief to some patients.
Intra-articular steroids give instantaneous relief but cause further damage to the cartilage so they should only be given under supervision of an orthopedician.
Viscosupplementation with hyaluronic acid which is a natural constituent of the synovial fluid has been found to give reliefs of upto one to three months in the patients and are very useful though limited form of treatment.
Among the surgical methods of treatment available with us, the first treatment that we prefer is an arthroscopic debridement and lavage of the knee joints. It is nothing but a cleaning up of the joint by which we introduce a scope through a small incision and pass a lot of water through it and also remove debris and loose fragments of the joints. This procedure gives relief to relatively younger patients with lesser severity of disease.
Final tool in the orthopedician's hands is a total knee replacement. Again it is a very useful tool in the patients with severe osteoarthritis , unbearable pain with deformities of the knee joint, it is a proven method with more than 99% longevity of the replacements by the 20th year. The improvements in both the implant and the operation methods have been such that this operation can be done in younger patients than was possible earlier so the patients need not wait till the condition worsens to a great extent. As the results then would not be as good as they would be at an earlier stage.
To summate, osteoarthritis is not a disease of despair and can be effectively treated by a doctor using the various modalities at his disposal but these modalities vary from patient to patient depending upon the age, severity and the associated conditions.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
another nail in the coffin
as i have commented before, our judiciary has been surely and steadily dealing one blow to the another to politicians. i can remember a long list of cases now in which bahubalis have been shown the door.
to this long list were added the names of Rajesh ranjan alias pappu yadav , rajan tiwari and today Romesh Sharma.
both pappu yadav and rajan tiwari have been part of the rangdari culture in bihar that was allowed to fester and infact actively abetted to by lalu prasad yadav.
they had become so brazen under his rule that they had no qualms about indiscriminately killing people without impunity. both have been awarded the life imprisonment by the district court.
nitish government has been doing a great job not by doing something actively but by passively letting the law takes its own course. and that should come as an eye-opener for others.
to this long list were added the names of Rajesh ranjan alias pappu yadav , rajan tiwari and today Romesh Sharma.
both pappu yadav and rajan tiwari have been part of the rangdari culture in bihar that was allowed to fester and infact actively abetted to by lalu prasad yadav.
they had become so brazen under his rule that they had no qualms about indiscriminately killing people without impunity. both have been awarded the life imprisonment by the district court.
nitish government has been doing a great job not by doing something actively but by passively letting the law takes its own course. and that should come as an eye-opener for others.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
open source
Katukbihari loves his web browser, he has been online for the last fifteen years and has used Netscape, Internet explorer by default and firebird (before it became Firefox) followed by firefox in different versions. Finally he had to leave firefox too as it had become vulnerable to adware. He shifted a year back to opera and has not left it ever since.
Opera is blazing fast, very secure- no pesky adwares as yet- and can be decorated with a lot of widgets as well as themes. What the heck he also plays chess on his opera. Opera also has a very rapid update cycle that makes it very very secure.
Katukbihari takes his commitment to open source very seriously. So he uses openoffice in place of Microsoft office and vlc media player in place of windows media player. But one thing katuk is not willing to change and that is his support for windows. He feels it is robust and very simple to use, extremely customizable, ubiquitous and there is nothing like it. Katuk also bill gates a lot and feels he is being victimized unnecessarily.
Opera is blazing fast, very secure- no pesky adwares as yet- and can be decorated with a lot of widgets as well as themes. What the heck he also plays chess on his opera. Opera also has a very rapid update cycle that makes it very very secure.
Katukbihari takes his commitment to open source very seriously. So he uses openoffice in place of Microsoft office and vlc media player in place of windows media player. But one thing katuk is not willing to change and that is his support for windows. He feels it is robust and very simple to use, extremely customizable, ubiquitous and there is nothing like it. Katuk also bill gates a lot and feels he is being victimized unnecessarily.
open source
Katukbihari loves his web browser, he has been online for the last fifteen years and has used Netscape, Internet explorer by default and firebird (before it became Firefox) followed by firefox in different versions. Finally he had to leave firefox too as it had become vulnerable to adware. He shifted a year back to opera and has not left it ever since.
Opera is blazing fast, very secure- no pesky adwares as yet- and can be decorated with a lot of widgets as well as themes. What the heck he also plays chess on his opera. Opera also has a very rapid update cycle that makes it very very secure.
Katukbihari takes his commitment to open source very seriously. So he uses openoffice in place of Microsoft office and vlc media player in place of windows media player. But one thing katuk is not willing to change and that is his support for windows. He feels it is robust and very simple to use, extremely customizable, ubiquitous and there is nothing like it. Katuk also bill gates a lot and feels he is being victimized unnecessarily.
Opera is blazing fast, very secure- no pesky adwares as yet- and can be decorated with a lot of widgets as well as themes. What the heck he also plays chess on his opera. Opera also has a very rapid update cycle that makes it very very secure.
Katukbihari takes his commitment to open source very seriously. So he uses openoffice in place of Microsoft office and vlc media player in place of windows media player. But one thing katuk is not willing to change and that is his support for windows. He feels it is robust and very simple to use, extremely customizable, ubiquitous and there is nothing like it. Katuk also bill gates a lot and feels he is being victimized unnecessarily.
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