RESEARCH

Editors, shed a tear for yourselves A report published in HT City 's 13 June 2008 edition: Blogstress.com Burning the midnight oil, skipping meals, stressed out 24/7 - we aren't talking about students or BPO workers; we are talking of bloggers. Neck deep in competition to write the best post, get maximum clicks or make the most money, their lives are nothing but grist for their next post. They surf incessantly, are hooked on news updates, and are constantly thinking of opinions they can give. Taking a break is not an option. In the US, two popular tech bloggers, Russell Shaw and Marc Orchant, died suddenly of heart attacks. Another prolific blogger, Om Malik, 41, also had a heart attack, but survived. Delhi guy Pratyush Ranjan has been blogging for three years. "It's stressful. I need higher levels of concentration. I've to socialise to make my blogs popular, which further saps my energy " Zola Marquis's blog Elitechoice.org started as a passion. But now i...

The RSS's prevalence in orkut had made Google nervous, as it briefly blacked out all RSS communities a year ago. It shouldn't be difficult to guess who had arm-twisted Google into taking the action of intolerant censorship. Nevertheless, the youth protested vociferously and all those banned fora were back online. This is an announcement of the commemoration of the event, marking youth power, next week ________________ Amit Chatterjee ________________ W e often celebrate festivals and days of national importance and also mourn the death and sacrifices of great leaders. The reason we do this is to remind ourselves and the present and future generations every now and then about our history so that they remember and learn from the past.This is a universal phenomenon. Such days or periods unify people and strike emotional chords. Similarly we, the RSS members who are regular orkut users, thought of remembering a dark chapter in orkut for the Sangha Pariwaar communities (or fora)....

( Click on the headline for a surgeon's prescription describing genuine cases of appendicitis ) _________________ Surajit Dasgupta _________________ Anywhere in India, if someone suffers from stomach pain, the ailment could be anything. If it's West Bengal, and it's a woman, chances are high she will be diagnosed with 'appendicitis'. How reliable is this diagnosis? Background: This article was written in December 2004. However, none of the two newspapers I worked with during the period September 2004-March 2008 had enough space to accommodate it, even as it's difficult to do away with any of its technical details. The Pioneer had published an abridged version (about 800 words) of this exposition in 2006; the article was not uploaded on to the newspaper’s Internet version. Four years after writing this article, as I heard last week from friends and acquaintances from Kolkata and its suburbs and the towns Burdwan, Durgapur and Asansol, the scourge of doctors presc...

______________ Nithin Sridhar ______________ I bow to thee : Before taking the oath as the 25th Chief Minister of Karnataka in Bangalore on 26 May, BS Yeddyurappa touches the feet of LK Advani as BJP national president Rajnath Singh looks on T he results of the Karnataka assembly elections are out and the BJP is all set to form the government with the support of a few independents. This election has been crucial for several reasons. It is the first election after the process of delimitation which the Election Commission had conducted decently. There was no sight of banners or sound of loudspeakers blaring all around. Better still, hardly any incident of violence was reported from any part of the state. The elections have largely been free and fair as they were held in three phases. The BJP having got 110 seats, 32 more seats than its tally in 2004, is the clear winner. The JD(S), which got 27 seats, 31 less than its score the last time, is the clear loser. Results also show that the po...

But that does not surprise, as they don't know Hindi either ________________ Surajit Dasgupta ________________ Almost everyday for several years now, one has been coming across headlines and texts in the Indian newspapers and sound-bytes in the television news channels that are horrendous examples of communication. Even if content is considered more important than language, what cannot be ignored or glossed over is that many sentences do not mean what the respective writers had intended them to mean. This list is to highlight major flaws of the type. The collection does not include flaws that do not convey to the reader a wrong message. The nature of this post is such that it has to be constantly updated with new additions. So, watch this space T he Economic Times ' 14 May 2008 issue read: "Mobile services provider Bharati Airtel on Tuesday announced it would focus on extending its services to villages in Tamil Nadu with a population of 3000 ." We didn't know the...

Alliance Française, pull up your socks ________________ Surajit Dasgupta ________________ T his article was written three years ago, more as a diary entry that was not intended to be published. It remained tucked, saved in my e-mail account all these years. Today I'm forced to tell the story to all, for I have just been through a horrendous week-long experience of total lack of professionalism by the second seniormost teacher of the institute discussed here. The curricula of the institute have changed lately, rendering the facts related to the courses obsolete. However, the spirit of the teachers, as I heard from the students at the institute's canteen this afternoon, remains unchanged — incorrigibly laidback. Here is what happened last week. Readers who have been through my blog-post, “Don’t Dare Show Your Versatility in Public,” are already aware of the backgrounder to this. A teacher at AFD was entrusted with the task of translating our company’s product brochure by 2 May, w...

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 ...