RESEARCH

Screaming headlines declaring India's first 'swine flu' death followed by measured editorials advising people level-headedness, or the sight of people moving about masked followed by pacifying messages from doctors days later. Honey-I-Blew-Up-The-Kid has been the story of media's information management on the potential H1N1 worldwide pandemic, which in India is still merely an outbreak W hen I left Frankfurt, Germany, I got on a deadly 747, and I am gonna go home on a deadly 747 and connect in Chicago, which happens to be a deadly airport, to get back to deadly Atlanta..." Daniel C Rutz, Global Health Communications Team Leader of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was reacting to the opening sentence of a report that had appeared in The Times of India , which said, "The deadly H1N1 swine flu virus continues to spread across school students in Delhi..." Another report that had appeared in Mail Today found the "government in a tizz...

The media is hysterically celebrating the reading down of Section 377 of the IPC that has decriminalised homosexuals. Fine prints of the judgment are being overlooked at will and ignorance of both science and religion are being bandied about by English media journalists, gay rights activists and, yes, also religious heads. In this backdrop, Research , setting out to put the records straight, finds that neither side in the debate is bang on T he ruling by the Delhi High Court that treating consensual gay sex as a crime is a violation of fundamental rights protected by India's constitution, is welcome. Indeed, what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedroom is nobody's business, least the state's. But the euphoria in the Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender (LGBT) community succeeding the verdict must not suppress some questions that keep intriguing the learned who are not so visible in the debate. Most importantly, the charged atmosphere of political correctness th...