Since March 2009, we have been exposed to our daily doses of swine flu virus and the impending dooms day. Word smiths of the media ensure that the words 'swine flu' are always preceded either by 'deadly' or 'dangerous' and are succeeded by 'epidemic' or 'pandemic'. But the occurrence of some contagious bio disease seems to have reached predictable seasonal regularity of Hindu Brahmin or Jewish festivals, though the festivals are joyful celebrations with food and prayer.
The net is riddled with fragmented pockets of reliable as well as fraudulent information. Search engines do a poor job in getting at the gist of the average user's intention in finding something on the net. I am not squealing about locating restaurants , ticketing or porn. Yahoo has gone a step further and introduced it's notion of 'ideological search', where one gets to see an un spammed search content. Much like the Truman Show!
Other than standard precautions such as eating healthy regular food, personal hygiene and building up resistance thru exercise and natural food supplements one can do precious little. The sale of Tamilflu medicine has skyrocketed!! While WHO and Centre for Disease Control (CDC) and US Food and Drug Org say Tamilflu should be administered for five days, UK researchers don't agree. UK government issued a directive stating not to take Tamiflu as a preventive due to it's side effects.
The business side of Tamiflu is certainly a cause for smile for the companies involved ( quite sad though that it has come to such a pass) and it's stake holders. The medicine Tamiflu is marketed by the Swiss multinational company Hoffmann-La Roche Holding. Roche in turn has been licensed the use of this patented in the US drug, by the US company Gilead Sciences. Roche sells Tamiflu (Oseltamivir Phosphate) at US$23.80. Roche's patent application to sell exclusively in India has been rejected , and rightly so, by the Indian government, but Roche has licensed the sale to a Hyderabad based company Hetero Drugs. The Indian company Cipla has developed a generic version, though derisively called copy cat version by some, called AntiFlu that is sold at US $ 10.70. Cipla will supply it's medicine to Mexico, and Latin American countries. Cipla says it's not against patenting but against Monopoly.
Indian government has been acting quite wisely, by not allowing Tamilflu to be sold at street corners unlike the over the counter i-pill and Unwanted 72 contraceptive tablets which have found democratic use amidst, primary and high school girls and grown up singles and multiples.
Both Roche and Cipla registered a strong and healthy quarter on quarter growth, spurred naturally by a healthy spread of swine flu scare.
Let us hope and pray the scare and the flu subside. For those who would like to reboot their knowledge on this piggy back flu , check out the following:
http://nitawriter.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/is-swine-flu-more-dangerous-than-other-types-of-influenza/
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Thursday, August 6, 2009
North By NorthWest
India as a country with it's assorted collection linguistic states came into being on the night of 15th August 1947. India achieved what the EU is still pursuing . That is, a single currency. despite having partial coverage with it's EURO. UK still deftly pounds it's parallel course. In a way, as the largest functioning democracy in the world, Indian union with it's free trade within, free travel as an Indian Citizen within ( not as in one schnengen visa on member country's passport as in EU/UK) should give it a pat on it's back. However, this post is not about post Independence history of India. This post is about a strange primal behavior of homo sapiens which I call the North by NorthWest gene.
It is my unproven hypothesis that people have an innate desire to belong little up north or a little up west or combining these two, a little North by Northwest. Conversely, people of a certain region resist being clustered ( in a Classification Theory Sense) with a group that is a little south or a little to the east or combining these two a little, South by SouthEast. Let us look at some samples to check if this could be true, perhaps to a large extent.
Starting with Kerala, I have often heard some one say for a poser such as "So you are a native of Kerala ?" ( We have to establish the 'native' of anyone in the first 10 micro seconds usually) "Yeah, I am from Kannur district, but that is north Kerala". This response can be heard perhaps upto Wayanad district. It is not uncommon for Palakkad Iyers in Kerala to avoid matrimonial links with Iyers in the same lattitue but a little East , in Tamilnadu (Kizhakathikaaraal Koncham Dushtaal!!)
Take Karnataka and it's border row with up north Maharashtra. The North Karnataka (there we go) border guys would want to pile into Maharashtra, thus becoming north Indians. However I have heard my own colleague mention that though he speaks Marathi at home he is from Vidarbh district which is northern border with Madhyapradesh.
If we move to Utterpradesh no one can deny an often unsolicited compass direction embedded in a reply, as in, "No, No , I am not from eastern UP". Well, Pakistan still has trouble in dealing with people, though muslims, who came from the east and of course it's share of Punjab which by the way was called west Punjab pre-partition!! May be that is why India gave up Eastern Bangladesh to Western Pakistan. Strange are the long term side effects of letting the British refine your life and tastes.
Let us travel a bit, naturally, a little west out of India. Iranians with their Persian background would not want a clustering with Afghanistan. But the Kurds in the northern Iraq would want out of Iraq and wouldn't mind becoming an appendix to Turkey, it's northern border. But we see how hard Turkey is trying, to get into EU !!! But UK has managed to achieve the best. Be part of EU whenever it is convenient.
Of course we do have south and north america and northerner and southerner in USA itself, but Canada would like to stay out of US.
I guess one could give more samples and certainly it would be interesting to see that for different regions. It is my guess that the North by NorthWest syndrome operates at the micro level and at the macro level.
Just so the North by NorthWest hypothesis is not misinterpreted, let me clarify my version. A particular coordinate on the globe and it's so called near neighbourhood may have the best practices at the pinnacle of refinement, as life form. However, there seems to be a built in impedance for values/tastes/traditions/language to penetrate up towards, North by NorthWest, and by corollary have a degree of ease to propagate it to South by SouthEast.
May be that is why , atleast the believers think heaven is up and hell is down and the compass uses its arrowhead in the north while it will just as well serve the purpose of navigation if the Compass Rose marked it's arrow head on any of the four directions!!
It is my unproven hypothesis that people have an innate desire to belong little up north or a little up west or combining these two, a little North by Northwest. Conversely, people of a certain region resist being clustered ( in a Classification Theory Sense) with a group that is a little south or a little to the east or combining these two a little, South by SouthEast. Let us look at some samples to check if this could be true, perhaps to a large extent.
Starting with Kerala, I have often heard some one say for a poser such as "So you are a native of Kerala ?" ( We have to establish the 'native' of anyone in the first 10 micro seconds usually) "Yeah, I am from Kannur district, but that is north Kerala". This response can be heard perhaps upto Wayanad district. It is not uncommon for Palakkad Iyers in Kerala to avoid matrimonial links with Iyers in the same lattitue but a little East , in Tamilnadu (Kizhakathikaaraal Koncham Dushtaal!!)
Take Karnataka and it's border row with up north Maharashtra. The North Karnataka (there we go) border guys would want to pile into Maharashtra, thus becoming north Indians. However I have heard my own colleague mention that though he speaks Marathi at home he is from Vidarbh district which is northern border with Madhyapradesh.
If we move to Utterpradesh no one can deny an often unsolicited compass direction embedded in a reply, as in, "No, No , I am not from eastern UP". Well, Pakistan still has trouble in dealing with people, though muslims, who came from the east and of course it's share of Punjab which by the way was called west Punjab pre-partition!! May be that is why India gave up Eastern Bangladesh to Western Pakistan. Strange are the long term side effects of letting the British refine your life and tastes.
Let us travel a bit, naturally, a little west out of India. Iranians with their Persian background would not want a clustering with Afghanistan. But the Kurds in the northern Iraq would want out of Iraq and wouldn't mind becoming an appendix to Turkey, it's northern border. But we see how hard Turkey is trying, to get into EU !!! But UK has managed to achieve the best. Be part of EU whenever it is convenient.
Of course we do have south and north america and northerner and southerner in USA itself, but Canada would like to stay out of US.
I guess one could give more samples and certainly it would be interesting to see that for different regions. It is my guess that the North by NorthWest syndrome operates at the micro level and at the macro level.
Just so the North by NorthWest hypothesis is not misinterpreted, let me clarify my version. A particular coordinate on the globe and it's so called near neighbourhood may have the best practices at the pinnacle of refinement, as life form. However, there seems to be a built in impedance for values/tastes/traditions/language to penetrate up towards, North by NorthWest, and by corollary have a degree of ease to propagate it to South by SouthEast.
May be that is why , atleast the believers think heaven is up and hell is down and the compass uses its arrowhead in the north while it will just as well serve the purpose of navigation if the Compass Rose marked it's arrow head on any of the four directions!!
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