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Tuesday, April 2, 2013

DECCAN HERALD 11

Panorama
Dateline
New Delhi
Dalip Singh

Erroneous memo puts Mumbai cops in spot. P 12

With Modi, Amit Shah in Team Rajnath, will Cong take the bait?
JPs much anticipated Team Rajnath was finally declared on Sunday. The most imperative induction in the squad, that of Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi in the parliamentary board and the central election committee, was least surprising given the fact that RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat some time back had himself introduced Hindutva posterboy as his friend -- a recognition of his growing popularity in the party after posting a hat-rick in his state. Positioning Modi in the key decision making bodies of central leadership is a statement, which besides officially stamping his success, also clearly points at the gradual peaking of Modi as the face of the BJP in the next round of Assembly elections and Lok Sabha polls scheduled for this year and in 2014, but may be advanced as many senior politicians are hinting at publicly.

Rajnath Singh in his second tenure as the BJP president seems to have learnt from the mistakes of his previous stint and that of his predecessor Nitin Gadkaris which is to keep the flock together, as a senior leader said as people do not like a party with quarrelling politicians. What comes across in the rejigged team is a message of unity as Singh has tried to balance out keeping in good humour different factions, castes, regions and most importantly the RSS. He has also attempted at carrying forward a mix of development politics with a tinge of Hindutva, propelled third generation leaders to shoulder future responsibilities and exhibit intolerance towards indiscipline by dropping some senior leaders from posts. The party wants to project Modi in a phased manner to avoid burn out of the poll mascot. In built in this Singhs strategy is perhaps a mechanism to rally and channelise the energy of other generals such as patron L K Advani, Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitely -- behind one charismatic face, which by itself would also reduce the rat race for PM contenders and reduce friction among lead-

ers. This combination had paid dividends during the time of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajapyees tenure too. Electoral trump Advanis reservation with Modi as the partys electoral trump card has been quite visible in at least his tutelages at two party conclaves -- one which took place in Delhi in January and the previous one at Surajkund in Haryana -- where he

cautioned the party to not give up on secularism as an ideology which was essential to hold on to present NDA partners as well as to enlarge the members to make it what he called NDA Plus for becoming an alternative to the UPA in the coming polls. Advani had made botched move to bring in Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan at the centre. Still, party leaders believe, if Chauhan manages to win the Assembly polls due later this year, he stands a chance as by then he would have repeated the performance of Modi, winning three consecutive polls as CM. Though Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitely have publicly praised Modis governance in Gujarat, both have their reservations on seeing him driving the poll bus knowing not only his not very democratic style of functioning, but they will be forced to play second fiddle to a politician who till recently was merely a chief minister. However, party sources say that if the RSS decides it would be very difficult for them to veto it as was recently witnessed during the partys presidential poll. Except for Advani, the top brass, including

Swaraj and Jaitely, was left with no choice but to agree to Nitin Gadkari having second term on the RSS dictates. It is another matter that Gadkari had to bow out of the race on the eve of election due to an Income Tax raid on his Purti Group. Of the 32 new faces drafted into 51 organisational posts, the choice of selecting Modis close associate Amit Shah as one the four new entrants in the group of ten general secretaries is most controversial. Shah, an accused in Sohrabuddin encounter case of Gujarat, is out on bail given by the Supreme Court. Defending the decision, a party leader close to the RSS said that Shah was not directly involved in the fake encounter. Other than that, by having Shah in the central team, the party wants to drag the Congress to attack Modi on communal issues which they were reluctant to do in the recent Gujarat Assembly polls that BJP won comfortably. If they do that, the BJP feels, it will be interpreted as an attack on Modi himself, argued the leader. But, will carrying the riot stigma pay political dividends outside Gujarat for Modi? In this, the party believes that they

would be able to nurture soft hindutva politics by default and at the same time continue to harp on good governance achievements in the BJP ruled states of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. The addition of hardliners in the line-up, including of Uma Bharti, clearly indicates that Singh cannot afford to ignore prescriptions of the RSS. Singh has also attempted at infusing young blood by bringing in Varun Gandhi, Rajiv Pratap Rudy and Murlidhar Rao as general secretaries and daughter of late Pramod Mahajan, Poonam. Basically, these third generation leaders are being conditioned to take up the mantle from the second rung, like Sushma Swaraj, Jaitely and Venkiah Naidu, as part of their 2020 vision. Apart from his balancing act, Singh has quietly sent an unwritten memo to the cadres to either to follow discipline or perish by dropping some senior leaders like Yashwant Sinha, for his public campaign against Gadkari, and Shanta Kumar, for promoting anti-party activities during Himachal Pradesh polls which the party lost.

Chew on this:
Its a complex process
We all chew differently and our oral processing habits are like a fingerprint
By Mary Roach

Honour for Bhagat Singh divides Pak


By Salman Masood

hen I told people I was travelling to Food Valley, I described it as the Silicon Valley of eating. At this cluster of universities and research facilities, nearly 15,000 scientists are dedicated to improving or, depending on your sentiments about processed food, compromising the quality of our meals. At the time I made the Silicon Valley comparison, I did not expect to be served actual silicone. But here I am, in the Restaurant of the Future, a cafeteria at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, where hidden cameras record diners as they make decisions about what to eat. And here it is, a bowl of rubbery white cubes the size of salad croutons. Andries van der Bilt has brought them from his lab in the brusquely named Department of Head and Neck, at the nearby University Medical Centre Utrecht. You chew them, he said. The cubes are made of a trademarked product called Comfort Putty, more typically used in its unhardened form for taking dental impressions. Van der Bilt isnt a dentist, however. He is an oral physiologist, and he likely knows more about chewing than anyone else in the world. He uses the cubes to quantify masticatory performance how effectively a person chews. I take a cube from the bowl. If you ever, as a child, chewed on a whimsical pencil eraser in the shape of, say, an animal or a piece of fruit, then you have tasted this dish. Im sorry. Van der Bilt winces. Its quite old. As though fresh silicone might be better. Van der Bilt and his colleagues have laid claim to a strange, occasionally repugnant patch of scientific ground. They study the mouth more specifically, its role as the human food processor. Their findings have opened up new insights into quite a few things that most of us do every day but would rather not think about. The way you chew, for example, is as unique and consistent as the way you walk or fold your shirts. There are fast chewers and slow chewers, long chewers and short chewers, right-chewing people and left-chewing people. Some of us chew straight up and down, and others chew side-to-side, like cows. Your oral processing habits are a physiological fingerprint. Van der Bilt studies the neuromuscular elements of chewing. You often hear about the impressive power of the jaw muscles. In terms of pressure per single burst of activity, these are the strongest muscles we have. But it is not the jaws power to destroy that fascinates Van der Bilt; it is its nuanced ability to protect. Think of a peanut between two molars, about to be crushed. At the precise millisecond the nut succumbs, the jaw muscles sense the yielding and reflexively let up. Without that reflex, the molars would continue to hur-

BUILT-IN-PROCESSOR: A study of the mouth more specifically, its role as the human food processor, opened up new insights into things that most people do every day but would rather not think about. NYT

tle recklessly toward one another, now with no intact nut between. To keep your he-man jaw muscles from smashing your precious teeth, the only set you have, the body evolved an automated braking system faster and more sophisticated than anything on a Lexus. The jaw knows its own strength. The faster and more recklessly you close your mouth, the less force the muscles are willing to apply. Without your giving it a conscious thought. Teeth and jaws are impressive not for their strength but for their sensitivity, Van der Bilt has found. Chew on this: Human teeth can detect a grain of sand or grit 10 microns in diameter. A micron is 1/25,000 of an inch. If you shrunk a Coke can until it was the diameter of a human hair, the letter O in the product

name would be about 10 microns across. As it happens, my masticatory performance is just fine, Van der Bilt said. But the study of oral processing is not just about teeth. Its about the entire oral device teeth, tongue, lips, cheeks, saliva, all working together toward a singular revolting goal, bolus formation. Licence plate The word bolus has many applications, but we are speaking of this one: a mass of chewed, saliva-moistened food particles. Food that is in, as one researcher has put it, sounding like a licence plate, the swallowable state. In Van der Bilts line of work, on any given day you may find yourself documenting intraoral bolus rolling or shooting magnified

close-ups of retained custard with the Wageningen University tongue-camera. Should you need to employ, say, the Lucas formula for bolus cohesiveness, you will need to figure out the viscosity and surface tension of the moistening saliva as well as the average radius of the chewed food particles and the average distance between them. To do that, youll need a bolus. Youll need to stop your subject on the brink of swallowing and have him, like a Siamese with a hairball, relinquish the mass. If the bolus in question is a semisolid yogurt and custard are not chewed but orally manipulated and mixed with saliva the work is yet less beautiful. Most of the time, while youre just breathing and not swallowing, the larynx (voice box) blocks the entrance to the esophagus. When a mouthful of food or drink is ready to be swallowed, the larynx has to rise out of the way, both to allow access to the esophagus and to close off the windpipe and prevent the food from going down the wrong way. To allow this to happen, the bolus is held momentarily at the back of the tongue, a sort of anatomical metering light. If, as a result of dysphagia, the larynx doesnt move quickly enough, the food can head down the windpipe instead. This is, obviously, a choking hazard. More sinisterly, inhaled food and drink can deliver a troublesome load of bacteria. Infection can set in and progress to pneumonia. A less lethal and more entertaining swallowing misstep is nasal regurgitation. Here the soft palate home turf of the uvula, that queer little oral stalactite fails to seal the opening to the nasal cavity. This leaves milk, say, or chewed peas in peril of being horked out the nostrils. Nasal regurgitation is more common with children, because they are often laughing while eating and because their swallowing mechanism isnt fully developed. Round foods are particularly treacherous because they match the shape of the trachea. If a grape goes down the wrong way, it blocks the tube so completely that no breath can be drawn around it. Hot dogs, grapes, and round candies take the top three slots in a list of killer foods published in the July 2008 issue of The International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology (itself a calamitous mouthful). A candy called Lychee Mini Fruity Gels has killed enough times for the Food and Drug Administration to have banned its import. The safest foods, of course, are those that arrive on the plate pre-moistened and machine-masticated, leaving little for your own built-in processor to do. They are also, generally speaking, the least popular. Mushy food is a form of sensory deprivation. In the same way that a dark, silent room will eventually drive you to hallucinate, the mind rebels against bland, single-texture foods, edibles that do not engage the oral device.
The New York Times

f ever a squabble over a street name could sum up a nations identity crisis, it is happening in Lahore, Pakistans cultural capital. Late last year, a group of Lahoris made progress in getting local officials to rename a busy traffic circle after Bhagat Singh, a Sikh revolutionary who was hanged at the site by the British in 1931 after a brief but eventful insurrection against colonial rule. They see it as a chance to honour a local hero who they feel transcends the ethnic and sectarian tensions gripping the country today and also as an important test of the boundaries of inclusiveness here. But in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, questions of religious identity also become issues of patriotism, and the effort has raised alarm bells among conservatives and Islamists. The circle was named in 2010 after Chaudhry Rehmat Ali, a Muslim student who coined the name Pakistan in the 1930s, and there was an outcry at the news that it might be renamed after a non-Muslim. If a few people decide one day that the name has to be changed, why should the voice of the majority be ignored? asked Zahid Butt, the head of a neighbourhood business association and a leader of the effort to block the renaming. The fight over the traffic circlewhich, when they are pressed, locals usually just call Shadman Circle, after the surrounding neighbourhood has become a showcase battle in a wider ideological war over nomenclature and identity here and in other Pakistani cities.

Growing effort Although many of Lahores prominent buildings are named after non-Muslims, there has been a growing effort to Islamise the citys architecture and landmarks, critics of the trend say. In that light, the effort to rename the circle after Bhagat Singh becomes a cultural counteroffensive. Since the80s, the days of the dictator Gen Zia ul-Haq, there has been an effort that everything should be Islamised like the Mall should be called M A Jinnah Road, said Taimur Rahman, a musician and academic from Lahore, referring to one of the citys central roads and to the countrys founder. A recent nationwide surge in deadly attacks against religious minorities, particularly against Ahmadi and Hazara Shiites, has again put a debate NYT

over tolerance on the national agenda. Though most Sikhs fled Pakistan soon after the partition from India in 1947, the fight over whether to honour a member of that minority publicly bears closely on the headlines for many. A push to honour Singh has been going on for years. But it was not until the annual remembrance of his birth in September that things came to a head. A candlelight demonstration to support renaming the traffic circle had an effect, and a senior district official agreed to start the process. As part of it, he asked the public to come forward with any objections. The complaints started pouring in. Traders of Shadman Market, the local trade group led by Butt, threatened a strike. Chillingly, warnings against the move were issued by leaders of the Islamic aid group Jamaatud-Dawa, largely believed to be a front for the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba. Clerics voiced their opposition during Friday prayer. The issue quickly became a case for the citys high court, which said it would deliberate on a petition, initiated by Butt and a coalition of religious conservatives, to block the name change. That was in November, and the case still awaits a hearing date. The provincial government has remained in tiptoe mode ever since. It is a very delicate matter, said Ajaz Anwar, an art historian and painter who is the vice chairman of a civic committee tasked with managing the renaming process. Anwar said some committee members had proposed a compromise: renaming the circle after Habib Jalib, a widely popular postindependence poet. That move has been rejected out of hand by pro-Singh campaigners. Rahman and other advocates for renaming the circle paint it as a test of resistance to intolerance and extremism, and they consider the government and much of Lahore society to have failed it. The controversy threatens to become violent. On March 23, the anniversary of Singhs death, police officers had to break up a heated exchange between opposing groups at the circle. Rahman and the other supporters have vowed to continue fighting, saying it has become a war over who gets to own Pakistans history. There is a complete historical amnesia and black hole regarding the independence struggle from the British, Rahman said, adding of the Islamists, They want all memories to evaporate.

WHATS THE BUZZ

Sunscreen fear a risk to health, say experts


Experts fear that warnings about possible health risks from tiny particles used in some sunscreens may kill people. Concern about the potential damage from an anti-nanotechnology campaign being run by environment group Friends of the Earth is so great that public health advocates are abandoning their previous cautions on using sunscreens with nanoparticles, according to the Age.

''In the past I have said that consumers are better to avoid sunscreen with nanoparticles in it. But we are rethinking our position as evidence grows of people being reluctant to use sunscreen,'' said Michael Moore, chief executive of the Public Health Association of Australia. It isnt yet proved that nanoparticles in sunscreen are harmful to health, but the concern is that they generate free radicals that could penetrate cells and interact with cell protein or DNA in unknown ways.

Pneumonia could now be stopped in its tracks


Scientists have discovered a new biological path-

way of innate immunity that ramps up inflammation and then identified agents that can block it, leading to increased survival and improved lung function in animal models of pneumonia. Pneumonia and other infections sometimes provoke an inflammatory response from the body that is more detrimental than the disease-causing bacteria, said senior author Rama Mallampalli, M.D, professor and vice chair for research, Department of Medicine, and director of the Acute Lung Injury Center of Excellence at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. In our ongoing studies of pneumonia, we found infecting bacteria activate a previously unknown protein called Fbxo3 to form a complex that degrades another protein called Fbxl2, which is needed to suppress the inflammatory re-

sponse, said Dr. Mallampalli, who is also chief of the pulmonary division of the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System. The result is an exaggerated inflammatory response that can lead to further damage of the lung tissue, multi-organ failure and shock, he added.

Drastically greener Arctic predicted in coming decades


Rising temperatures will lead to a massive greening, or increase in plant cover, in the Arctic, a new research has predicted. Scientists have revealed new models projecting that wooded areas in the Arctic could increase by as much as 50 percent over the next few decades.

The researchers also showed that this dramatic greening would accelerate climate warming at a rate greater than previously expected. Such widespread redistribution of Arctic vegetation would have impacts that reverberate through the global ecosystem, said Richard Pearson, lead author on the study and a research scientist at the American Museum of Natural Historys Center for Biodiversity and Conservation. Plant growth in Arctic ecosystems has increased over the past few decades, a trend that coincides with increases in temperatures, which are rising at about twice the global rate.

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