WHY ARE SOME OF US LEFT-HANDED?

If you are left-handed, it means it is easier for you to use your left hand to do things like writing, brushing your teeth, catching or throwing a ball, and lots of other things. Only about ten percent of people - just one in every ten - are left-handed.

But Why? - Scientists think handedness, or the hand we prefer to use, is affected partly by our genes. Different genes have instructions that determine the colour of our eyes, whether our hair is curly or straight, how tall we are, and much, much more. Whether you are left-handed or right-handed might also be decided by our genes. But scientists aren't sure why. Gene mutations, or changes or mistakes in our DNA, in one group of genes might play a role. Another idea scientists have is that while we are still in the womb, hormones may make changes to our brains that influence whether we are left-handed or right-handed.

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INTERESTING FACTS.

1. Sea urchin-inspired device may help explore Mars: Scientists have 3D printed a claw-like device, inspired by the sea urchins intricate mouth and teeth, that may be used to sample sediments on planets such as Mars. The urchin's mouthpiece is composed of an intricate framework of muscles and five curved teeth with triangle-shaped tips that can scrape, cut, chew and bore holes into the toughest rocks. "Our goal was a bio-inspired device that's more precise and efficient at grabbing ground samples and won't disturb the surrounding area like a shovel would", said Michael Frank, a Ph.D Scholar at University of California. Simulations show that teeth with keels when subjected to a 4.5 kg load. Researchers also noted that adding keel increases mass of the tooth by 4 percent.
2. Earth home to one lakh crore species: Earth may contain nearly one lakh crore species, while 99.999 percent of them remain undiscovered, according to the largest ever analysis of microbial data. Researchers at Indiana University in the US combined microbial, plant and animal community data sets from government, academic and citizen science sources, resulting in the largest compilation of its kind. This data represents over 5.6 million microscopic and non-microscopic species from 35,000 locations across all the world's oceans and continents, except Antarctica.

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A SECRET HISTORY OF MAPS.

If the government has its way, swathes of India could be blacked out from interactive maps we use on smartphones and devices. The Geo-spatial Information Regulation (GIR) Bill is an example of sarkari cartographic paranoia: it proposes ridiculously high fines of up to Rs. 100 Crore and / or jail of up to seven years for violators.

'Culprits' could range from companies like Google or Apple, which provide these maps, to users like Uber, or shop or hospital or restaurant-locator sites that use such maps. It could be even be you. Its defenders in government use words like 'cartographic colonialism' or 'national security'. What rubbish.

The GIR insanity takes India back around 2,000 years in history. In the early 1970's, Hendon Harris, a Baptist missionary fluent in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, discovered a rare  trove of ancient Chinese maps, One, called 'Tian Xia', or 'Everything under Heaven', was particularly exciting.

China and Korea took up the centre of the world. But off to one side, was a coast-line, called 'Fu Sang' that looked oddly familiar to Harris. It was the coast of America. "I became weak. I was forced to sit down", he wrote later. His collection is now curated. It is almost certain now that the Chinese had reached America 1,500 years before Columbus.

Empires, like nations, used to guard their maps jealously. Chinese exploration and trade reached its zenith under the eunuch Muslim admiral Zheng He in the fifteenth century. Then, the emperor decided that too much knowledge was a bad thing. Zheng had died in Kozhikode, Kerala. His fleet was grounded and allowed to wither. Maps were locked up in imperial vaults.

China's ;oss was Europe's gain. Because of Europe's incessant conflicts over trade and territory, its map-makers - of land and sea - were prized. But their output became state secrets. One new trade route, one shortcut through a mountain range could yield windfall gains to which ever despot learnt of it first.

By 1500, Portuguese voyages yielded a huge hoard of information which royal cartographers put down on a remarkable map. This charted the eastern coast of South America, the African-Atlantic coast, but most important, located India with proper latitude numbers. It was, literally, priceless. Everyone wanted it.

So the Italians sent in a spy called Alberto Cantino, disguised as a horse trader. Cantino actually got the map and smuggled it back to Ferrara, Italy. Ironically, it is after the spy and not its makers that the map is now celebrated as the Cantino Planisphere.

Soon after the Battle of Plassey, 1757, the British East India Company commissioned the Survey of India (SoI). It was called an engineering institute, but its real job was to map territories west of British-controlled Bengal-Bihar-Orissa, overrun by Marathas and others, which the Brits wanted to seize.

By the 1850's the British were terrified about Russia's 'plans' to expand southward. Thus began the Great Game of the nineteenth century. The Brits created a contingent of spies, drawn from local 'pandits', to travel uncharted territory from Tibet to Central Asia and provide data to make maps.

Their methods, described by historian Peter Hopkirk, were ingenious. First, each was taught to maintain a pace of exactly the same length whether they went up or downhill, or flat land. To keep count, they used a rosary, which had 100, instead of the usual 108 beads: at every 100th step, the pandit would turn one bead: one complete circuit would be 10,000 paces.

Prayer wheels were useful. Instead of the usual prayer scroll inside, there was a roll of blank paper to record a day's observations. Compasses were concealed on top of the wheels, thermometers hidden in walking sticks, mercury in cowrie shells, sextants in hidden pockets in robes.

I cannot resist mentioning fellow Bengali Sarat Chandra Das, who not only survived two clandestine trips to Tibet between 1879 and 1882, but wrote books about his travels afterwards. He was the man after whom Rudyard Kipling modelled Hurree Chunder Mookherjee, boss of Kim the child spy, in his eponymous bestseller. Imagine, a Bong Bond.

All were trained at the SoI's headquarters in Dehradun. Despite all these precautions, around one in four of these intrepid explorer-sleuths returned alive. Even today the SoI's website marks out certain categories of maps as off-limits to civilians and foreigners.

During the Cold War, the US and Soviet Union competed to map the other's territories and hide their own. Secrets once thought well-kept by America have been blown apart by the hundreds of satellites that orbit earth today.

The Soviet Union's collapse released a gigantic horde of classified cartography which astonished western researchers: for example, European road networks also showed their load-carrying capacities. Local British maps from the 1980's had blanked out a coastal region, which the Soviets had plotted accurately as a submarine base, down to loading docks. Cols War veterans say the penalty for losing maps was imprisonment or worse. 

But globally, this cartographic paranoia has receded: simply because it is impossible to hide much from highly sensitive eyes-in-the-skies. How silly, then, that India wants to retreat a few centuries into the past and pursue the technologically impossible mirage of map secrecy. -- Based on an article by Abheek.Barman@timesgroup.com published in The Times of India dated 18th May, 2016. -- 

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INDIA'S BIG FAT PROBLEM.

Amid a slowing Chinese economy and global gloom, there is nothing quiet as comforting as the glow of a growth story. But, alas, not all growth stories bring cheer. Especially when the growth is in girth. Overweight constables were recently put through an unusual fitness test in Uttarakhand's Udham Singh Nagar. One constable found weighing 97 kgs was asked to go around carrying a senior on his back. A probe is on. But being fat is not funny.

The latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4) tells us that India is growing at the wrong places. Obesity is now a serious issue even as vast areas of the country continue to battle malnutrition. Since 2005-06, the number of obese people has almost doubled. City dwellers fare worse than villagers. The urban woman is growing fatter at a faster rate than the urban man.

In West Bengal, 10 years ago, 11.4 percent of women were found to be overweight or obese. That has gone up to 19.9 percent now. If you break that up, it is 30.6 percent for urban areas and 15 percent for rural, which means urban women are putting on weight at twice the rate of rural women. Men are a little better off but not much - nearly 5 percent of men in the state were overweight or obese a decade ago. That figure has shot up to 14 percent.

West Bengal conforms to the national trend. States like A.P., Puducherry and Sikkim now have nearly 30 percent of their population classified as obese. In Sikkim, the number of overweight / obese men has jumped from 11.9 percent to 34.8 percent, with cities leading. Even in a poor state like Bihar, the number of overweight women has grown almost three-fold in the last ten years, from 4.6 percent of the population to 11.7 percent. In Tamil Nadu, the number of obese women has shot up from 20.9 percent to 30.9 percent in 10 years.

Significantly, both under nutrition and obesity are higher for women than for men. 

The words overweight and obese describe a clinical condition - "abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that presents a risk to health".

For adults, overweight and obesity ranges are determined by using weight and height to calculate what is known as the body mass index or BMI (weight in kgs divided by the square of the height in metres). The WHO defines a BMI equal to or greater than 25 as overweight and a BMI equal to or greater than 30 as obese. Both are major risk factors for diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and cancer.

Once viewed as a disease of affluent countries, overweight and obesity are now hitting low and middle-income countries like India.

What causes overweight and obesity? The reasons are well known. As doctors have been telling us for quiet some time, Indians are not eating wisely. Poor nutrition, too much junk food that is high in fat, salt and sugars but low in vitamins, minerals and other micro-nutrients, not enough fresh fruits and vegetables combined with an increasingly sedentary lifestyle are the key factors fuelling the obesity epidemic.

Paradoxically, this epidemic has hit India even while stunting and anaemia due to malnutrition remain widespread. Studies show the overweight can also suffer from anaemia caused by a deficiency of iron in their diet. 

Though much of what needs to be done to shed weight is known, the government has a responsibility to spread public awareness about diet and physical activity. In this year's (2016) Budget, the finance minister may well consider steeper taxes on unhealthy food, while providing more incentives for walking, cycling, sports and other physical activities.

The battle against obesity needs supportive environments and communities to help people choose regular physical activity and healthy food. People cannot walk if public places remain unsafe. Some schools are making sure their canteens serve healthy food and that they have playgrounds. Many more must follow. Three out of five obese children in the capital are at risk of chronic lever diseases, researchers at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences have found.

India is not the fattest country in the world. That dubious honour goes to the Pacific island of Tonga where up to 40 percent of the population is thought to have Type 2 diabetes with life expectancy falling. But if unchecked, the rate of increase in overweight and obese people in India could push it in that direction.

India's policymakers have been focused on dealing with malnutrition. Now they have a double whammy. The sooner they deal with it the better.

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RIGHT TO FOOD.

It would be perfectly willing to match wits and join issues with a vegetarian or a vegan who questions my desire to eat beef. I might even be convinced if he proved that a single malt tastes better with vegan ham (made out of coconut) or dhokla. But if a law is enacted that bans beef-eating in my home because the state believes it has the right to tell me what my diet should be, I would challenge it. Such a law was enacted by the Maharashtra government called the Maharashtra Animal Preservation (Amendment) Act, 1995, and I did precisely that and invoked the extraordinary powers of the Bombay High Court to strike down this abominable affront to my right to choose my food.

The Act contained some opprobrious provisions such as making consumption of the meat of cows, bulls and bullocks a non-bailable offence which permitted the police to enter my kitchen and arrest me on suspicion that the meat that was my dinner could be beef and then put me behind bars thereby substituting my gournet meal with jail food.

To make matters worse, the offence being non-bailable, I could be stuck with jail food for a long time and at the trial I would have to prove my innocence, so to speak. Few people are aware that this has been the law since 1995 but for 20 years was not brought into effect. On 04th March, 2015, our die-hard non-vegetarian President gave his assent to the Act and made it enforceable. I remember being terribly agitated and when I reached office I asked my young associates to research the law on the subject to examine the constitutional validity of these provisions. The team acquainted themselves with all judicial pronouncements on the subject. The Supreme Court in State of Gujarat v. Mirzapur Moti Kureshi Kassab (1998), had upheld the validity of legislations banning cow slaughter in all its dimensions. The general approach of the Supreme Court was that any enactement banning cow slaughter would be declared valid on economic grounds and virtually gave the government the right to legislate on this field unhindered by any constitutional restraint. We decided to focus on the prohibition on consumption of beef for that was an issue unrelated to any economic welfare programme that a government wished to promote and on the basis of which cow slaughter was justified. We felt that a petition to challenge the ban on consumption would be sustainable on the touch-stone of the right to privacy which included permitting an individual to choose his own diet so long as what he ate did not violate any law. The logic that we followed was that the right to choose one's diet is an aspect of one's right  to live life the way he wishes and thereby live a life of dignity. Our petition was grounded in Article. 21 of the Constitution which provides that no person shall be deprived of his life and liberty except by due legal process. I honestly believed that the state, by bringing into effect a law that had come into existence 20 years earlier, was acting with motive which was aimed at the minorities - Muslims and Christians in particular. But in drafting the petition, we stayed clear of this angle as we felt confident that our challenge on the ground of right to life was solid and uncomplicated.

The 247-page judgment rendered by Justices A.S. Oka and S.C. Gupte vindicated our stand completely. The case was superbly piloted by senior counsel and good friends Aspi Chinoy and Navroz Seervai, assisted by my young, brilliant and enthusiastic team. In summary, the judgment laid down the following:

• That the right of privacy of an individual is a fundamental right emanating from the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution.
• That Section. 9(b) which required an accused to prove his innocence was declared illegal, and struck down.
• That if a person was found transporting meat which was suspected to be contraband, it was for the state to prove that he knew that the meat was in fact contraband.

All in all, the judgment restored dignity to the individual in matters which were personal to him. I cannot help but rejoice over the fact that none of the opponents' arguments in response to my petition were accepted by the Judges and it doesn't surprise me. For instance, when counsel appearing for the state was asked why buffaloes were excluded from the Act and allowed to be slaughtered, he said "they are lazy".

For me, the real heart-warming takeaways from this entire episode are as follows: First, that the right of privacy is now unquestionably a fundamental right; Second, that the phrase "rule of law" which we use almost by rote is demonstrated by this ruling to be a living democratic philosophy which distinguishes us from totalitarian regimes that pretend to operate under a democratic Constitution; and, Finally, that the judiciary is an institution is the most reliable bastion of democracy where judges who believe in their oath will uphold constitutional principles unmoved by extraneous considerations. Our legal heritage is rich, profound and steeped in an innate sense of justice. I say this because in my experience as a lawyer, I have on occasions appeared before lower placed judicial officers in terms of their hierarchy in remote parts of our country and have come across individuals (perhaps a Mamlatdar) whose integrity all the money in the world cannot dent. It's true that we as a society nurture  this invaluable cultural heritage which has such deep and inalienable roots in this sub-continent. --- Based on an article by Haresh Jagtiani, senior counsel and head of Oasis Counsel and Advisory (a law firm). The article was published in The Times of India dated 09th May, 2016 (Monday). Courtesy: The Billion Press. ---  

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-SOMETHING'S ROTTEN IN THE ENVIRONMENT.

Would you describe yourself as an "environmentalist"? I would, mainly to annoy greenies, but also because its true. If your definition of an environmentalist is someone who loves immersing himself in the natural world, makes a study of its ways and cares deeply about its future, I am at least as much of one as English broadcaster and naturalist David Attenborough. But I can see why many fellow nature lovers might balk at the term. That would explain the recent Gallup poll - it was taken in the US but I suspect it applies to Britain too - showing how dramatically this label has plunged in popularity. In 1991, the majority of Americans self-identified  as environmentalists - 78 percent of them. Now, it's just 42 percent: less than half.

Why has the term so fallen out of favour? Well there's perhaps a clue in the fact that the decline has been far more precipitous among Republicans (down to 27 percent) than among Democrats (down to 56 percent). In other words, where 25 years ago the environment was considered everyone's domain, it has since been hijacked by the Left.

If you believe the greenies, the blame for this lies with an intransigent right so imprisoned by ideology that it stubbornly denies "the science". Actually, though, I did say it has more to do with the militant left using environmentalism as a cloak for its war on liberty, and small government.

Note the tactics. Like the Viet Minh or the Taliban, the environmental movement has become hugely skilled in the art of asymmetric warfare. The number of true believers is much smaller than you did think - but they have managed in recent years to punch massively above their weight by infiltrating all the key positions.

challenge the "consensus" - whether you are a scientist like Willie Soon or even a cuddly TV presenter like David Bellamy or Jhonny Ball - and these people will stop at nothing to try to destroy your career. This is the tactic that the Marxist urban revolutionary Saul Alinsky advised in his manifesto Rules for Radicals.

Which goes some way towards explaining, I think, why in private people tend to be more vocally sceptical about stuff like global warming or the pointlessness of recycling or carbon taxes, etc. than they are in public. No one wants to be caught speaking out of turn by the green Stasi, for fear of the consequences for their reputation or their job prospects.

Look at what happened to Matt Ridley when he applied for the chairmanship of the Natural History Museum. A distinguished, Oxford-educated scientist and a brilliant communicator, Ridley would have been perfect for the job. But Ridley's mild climate scepticism ruled him out. 

When you write about this sort of thing, you run the risk of being tarred by the green lobby as a paranoid conspiracy theorist. Again, this is very much part of the environmentalist modus operandi. Activists like Bob Ward of the Grantham Institute and Richard Black of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit are paid handsomely to pour ridicule on "deniers", make noisy complaints to the press regulator Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) and concoct letters like the one recently sent to the editor of the Times warning that by giving voice to sceptics he was turning his paper into a "laughing stock".

The letter was signed by no fewer than 13 members of the House of Lords, several of them scientists, who had held offices ranging from Astronomer Royal and president of the Royal Society to chairman of the Financial Services Authority. Any casual observer might naturally assume that such pillars of the establishment must have a point. 

It's only if you are familiar with the territory that you realise how often the same names - Lords May, Rees, Stern and Deben; Sir Crispin Tickell; Sir Paul Nurse, et al - recur with regularity. Probably in their fields they were once rather good. But since then prestige has gone to their heads and they have turned into professional political activists. 

This is precisely the strategy that one of the progenitors of cultural Marxism, Antonio Gramsci, was advocating when he talked about the "long march through the institutions". In order to dominate the political argument, he realised, you don't necessarily need to be in government. You just need to make sure you have nobbled all the influential posts in academe, the media, the arts and big business.

Not all these figures are on the Left. Nor are they all necessarily political. Some are in it for the money, some are in it because all their mates are; some because they have taken the environmentalists at their word.

But regardless of their motivation, the result is always the same; bigger government, higher taxes, less freedom. Ordinary people can smell a rat. They just know something's rotten in the state of environmentalism; they don't want to be tainted by it. -- Based on an article by James Delingpole published in The Times of India dated 09th May, 2016, By arrangement with the Spectator -- 

NEHRU - GANDHIS AND POVERTY.

Has dynastic politics kept India poor? This appears to be an unstated assumption of a speech in the month of March, 2016 by BJP President Amit Shah to the party faithful and the stated view of many in his party. As the formulation goes, after being ruled by the Nehru-Gandhi-dynasty for most of the past seven decades India remains poor. Give BJP 25 years and it will turn India into "Vishwa Guru", or teacher to the world. Take BJP boasts with a large grain of sale, but there's more than a kernel of truth to the idea that the Nehru-Gandhis are responsible for India lagging much of East Asia. The continued hold of the dynasty prevents Congress from fully owing the reform programme that it authored in 1991, and inclines the party towards political postures that hinder development. As long as Sonia Gandhi or Rahul Gandhi remain at the helm, the odds of Congress emerging as a champion of reforms remain exceedingly slim.

In the fever swamps of the far right, many people believe that the Nehru-Gandhis deliberately kept India backward in order to nurture a poor and ignorant vote bank. But you need not buy crackpot conspiracy theories to make a more prosaic point. Between them, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, who ruled India for 37 of its first 42 years of Independence, presided over one of Asia's greatest economic flops. In contrast, neither of post-1991 India's reform heroes - P.V. Narasimha Rao and Atal Behari Vajpayee - belonged to the dynasty. Indeed, in practice, if not always in rhetoric, both Rao and Vajpayee generated prosperity by dismantling the economic pillars of the Nehruvian project: mistrust of trade, contempt for the profit motive, and faith in state planning rather than in the invisible hand of the market.

Nehru's flawed ideas - in particular his infatuation with Soviet-style planning - ended up doing India grave harm. But though a few prescient gadflies, most famously the classical liberal B.R. Shenoy and future Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, raised early alarms about India's chosen path, for the most part Nehru was simply following the conventional wisdom of his time. As New York University Professor William Easterly details in "The Tyranny of Experts", it took decades to discredit the statist development model touted by such luminaries as Gunnar Myrdal and Arthur Lewis. Indians were not alone in suffering. Millions of Africans, Latin Americans and fellow Asians kept us company.

The true villain of modern Indian history, dooming millions of Indians to poverty, was Indira Gandhi. Instead of acknowledging a flood of evidence that state planning was not working, Gandhi doubled down on her father's dubious legacy. In 1966, the year Gandhi took power, the average Indian earned about four-fifths as much as the average South Korean. By 1990, on the eve of the balance of payments crisis that forced India to reform, the average Indian earned only half as much as an Indonesian and less than one-sixth as much as a South Korean. More than half of India's then 870 million people lived on less than the World Bank's current estimate for extreme poverty of $1.90 a day.

Why does this potted history still matter? After all, since 1991 India has gone from being seen as a black hole of despair to a bright spot in the global economy. Thanks to the growth spurred by reforms, only about one-fifth of Indians live in extreme poverty today. Soon enough, that figure will likely be reduced to zero. In a normal political system, Congress would have elevated Rao to sainthood and quietly banished the discredited ghosts of the Nehru-Gandhis. Instead, party leaders twist themselves into pretzels to retroactively give the dynasty credit for reforms, or pretend that the economic disaster they presided over was in fact a great launch pad for what followed.

To be fair, the current crop of Nehru-Gandhis no longer quotes Lenin, as Nehru did when he famously declared that the public sector would occupy the "commanding heights" of the economy. But in general the family's impact on economic policy remains negative. Contrast, for instance, Manmohan Singh's record under Rao with his record under Sonia Gandhi. As Rao's finance minister, Singh boldly unshackled the Indian elephant. As Gandhi's prime minister, he burdened it with too many wasteful welfare programmes and too few growth-inducing policies. Meanwhile, Rahul Gandhi's somewhat forgettable political career has been marked by consistently anti-business rhetoric. In 2010, he scuttled Vedanta's $1.7 billion bauxite mining project in Odisha. The young Gandhi's rhetoric about "two India's" and bizarre animus towards people who "drive big-big cars" suggest a diletantish preoccupation with inequality rather than serious focus on eradicating poverty. Though the Modi government is responsible for its own tepid reform effort, there's no question that Rahul's jibe about the prime minister heading a "suit-boot ki sarkar" has helped vitiate the policy-making atmosphere.

So yes, the critics are right about dynastic politics helping keep India poor. Without the Nehru-Gandhis in charge, Congress would have no need to deify some of the worst economic managers in post-colonial history. India would find it easier to get on with the important work of catching up with all those that have left it behind. -- Based on an article by Sadanand Dhume, Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, Published in The Times of India dated 28th March, 2016 (Monday).

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