RESEARCH

... on a wing and a prayer Perception, say some. Reality, say others. Recession, say some. Slowdown, say others. A few contradict themselves, moving from one question to another. What they all agree to consensually is that it does affect them. A report on the state of employment of fresh MBAs this year _______________ Surajit Dasgupta _______________ Parents of final year students of IMI waiting for hours on end, hoping their wards will be placed... somewhere I n the plush lawns of International Management Institute (IMI) Institutional Area, Qutb Institutional Area, New Delhi, this correspondent runs into a bunch of listless students whiling away their time, playing cricket, after the institute failed to place them in any of the corporate houses that turned up for the placement season. That was as of Friday, the 13th, March 2009. “We have placed 62 of our 119 students in the first round of placement,” says Prof CS Venkata Ratnam, Director of the institute, surmising, “We hope to place

________________ Surajit Dasgupta ________________ ( Click on the headline for details of cognitive behaviour therapy for hypochondriasis by the Journal of the American Medical Association ) The reproduction of this article in this blog has been provoked by a frequent topic of discussion at this writer's workplace: health profiles of the respective speakers. It amuses me, hailing as I do from a small town where I grew up leading a carefree and yet disease-free life, as to why the people living in big cities are often unduly worried about their health Asukh: This film by Rituparno Ghosh showed how the mere thought of a disease can wreck a family ( Published first in The Pioneer on 1 October 2007 ) E ver since The Pioneer published the story, "Indian woman stripped of her job for wearing nose stud in UK" (September 19), I have been trying to eat with my nose and figure out how it could possibly affect my hygiene and that of the people whose company I keep. Jokes apart, wh

( 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 ______________ 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