RESEARCH

We are close to figuring out what we are made of, or are we? _____________________ Chaitali Bhattacharjee _____________________ W hat makes a human a human? Why are we so different from all other animals? What is it that makes us tick? These are questions that intrigued the human mind always. However, the answer kept eluding us till a series of momentous discoveries led one to believe that the answer lay in the unique genetic composition that every organism had. Finally, an extremely ambitious project was undertaken — that of mapping the whole human genome (the entire hereditary information of a given organism encoded in its DNA). What that meant was that one would exactly know every bead that formed the DNA of a human being. The task was (technically) completed amid a lot of excitement in the year 2000. Though the whole genome got mapped, the result turned out to be a lesson in humility rather than a moment of exultation. There were approximately 30,000 odd genes that were identified ...

______________ Nithin Sridhar ______________ Her lap is a sacrificial altar; her hairs, the sacrificial grass; her skin, the soma-press. The two labia*(lips) of the vulva are the fire in the middle [Brhad-Âranyaka Upanisad, 6.4.3] This man (ama) am I; that woman (sâ), thou! That woman, thou; this man am I! I am the Sâman; thou, the Rig! I am the heaven; thou, the earth! Come, let us two together clasp! Together let us semen mix, A male, a son for to procure! [Brhad-Âranyaka Upanisad, 6.4.20] (1) W henever the issue of love, nudity, sex and Hinduism comes into picture, we usually get to see one of the following reactionaries: (a) The West in general and its scholars studying South Asia [for example RISA (2) ] in particular, and their Indian counterparts who consider Hinduism to be a mix of voodoo and pornography; or (b) The Hindu orthodoxy which thinks sex is taboo. Now let's examine how valid these perspectives are. Hindu purushartha s: Purushartha means "objectives of a hum...

Both sides in the debate are perverts betraying mid-life crisis [ Click on the headline to read an exposition on mid-life crisis ] T here are a whole lot of things that look odd in the prevailing debate over what apparently is a non-issue: Should ‘cheerleaders’ be banned from prancing — or, is it dancing? — during the matches of the Indian Premier League? Blaming a certain minister from the Congress party in the Maharashtra Government or a certain politician from the opposition in the state, the BJP, would shift the focus away from the greater malaise that the authorities in this country suffer from. If not for raising such controversies, how many of us would know that some Mehtre and some Gadkari existed in this world numbed by an overdose of events whose importance in public perception varies in degrees as distinct as fingerprints of individuals? How many Indians outside West Bengal have heard of Subhash Chakraborty, Kshiti Goswami, Nandgopal Bhattacharya and Pratim Chatterjee? Polit...

Medical students in Kolkata, India, walk in a silent rally protesting police atrocities against them during an earlier protest against quota-based programmes for Other Backward Castes __________ Anish Nair __________ T he issue of OBC reservations, which has been lying dormant for a while, has been catapulted to prominence in the public by a recent Supreme Court verdict. NDTV and IBN appear to be racing with each other in hosting talk shows featuring many opinions from either side of the divide. This issue seems to affect everyone, so there have been opinions from almost everywhere: actors, cricketers, politicians, students, bureaucrats, scholars... It seems almost everyone's had his say. When a thousand people speak, there will at least be a hundred opinions. We have heard a variety of arguments ranging from the ones that are bizzare, like "Tamil Nadu, which has 69% reservation, has the best educational standards among backward castes", to the silly ones like "they ...

Interviewing the Father of the Internet 25 January 2005 O n 4 January, a section of the press made it appear that people would soon interact with ‘Martians’, though no life is known to exist on that planet. Two days later, Vinton Cerf , after his plenary lecture at the recent Indian Science Congress, appeared flustered by such an ornamented report. Excerpts from an interview and subsequent Internet chat with Cerf, who is known as the Father of the Internet, by Surajit Dasgupta When you created the Internet, did you ever think it would take off as it has? Many of us who worked on the early technology of the Internet and its predecessors knew that we were working with extremely powerful concepts. But I could not in all honesty say that we were conscious of the magnitude of the impact it would have. I think that realisation has come with time as the Internet has penetrated more and more deeply. This is truly a telecommunications revolution in the making. Don’t you think that all this tal...