Siamese twins

The Singapore General Hospital (SGH) that painstakingly separated the Nepali Siamese twins last April announced their discharge the other day. The twins are soon expected to return to their village in Nepal as they have now improved physically and mentally. It took almost 94 hours to separate Ganga and Jamuna who were born joined at the head. Now, the question that lies ahead is how these separated twins will be raised in their native country. Will they survive in a village where there is hardly any medical facility? Who will provide them financial assistance if they need to visit Singapore again for further medical treatment? However, the twins have to return to their village even if they do not find sophisticated medical facilities there. The government did not help them at the time of the operation nor has it shown any generosity towards the raising of this unique pair. Their future now depends entirely on the way their parents, who are by no means rich, bring them up and marshal the resources required for their special needs.

The post separation care for at least five years, besides parental care, calls for regular check-ups and meticulous medical treatment, which means more expenses and more caring. The cost of the surgical operation for separating the twins and for post surgical care was borne through donations and the charity of both the Nepalese community in Singapore and the people of Singapore themselves. But the government of the twins’ own country did precious little to help. Indeed, given this country’s poor health status and the low budget allocation for the health sector, it would have been useless to expect any help from government. Neither have the politicians and so-called social workers of this country acquitted themselves any better when it came to helping out the Siamese twins. Successive governments, instead
of helping the poor, have sought foreign assistance even for minor development work. But they had no thought to spare for Ganga and Jamuna as they fought for their life.

The annual budget allocation for health shows that this country will not make any progress in the health sector unless it introduces some radical measures. The child mortality rate has been notoriously higher in Nepal than any other country in the region as a result of deformities at birth and pregnancy complications. The case of the Siamese twins is an example of birth complication. Besides, every year thousands of children die of preventable diseases due to lack of medical facilities, particularly in remote areas. The government wakes up only when preventable diseases assume epidemic proportions or go out of its control. It is a fact that the government has yet to sense its responsibility to provide better health care for the people. But it cannot shirk its responsibility. It must
step in to help in raising children, including Siamese twins like Ganga and Jamuna. After all it is the government’s responsibility to do so.

Terrorist acts and political globalisation

By Siddhi B Ranjitkar

Mulla Mohammad Omar - supreme leader of the Taliban militia issued an edict to tear down all ancient Buddha idols in the central province of Bamiyan (Kandahar), Afghanistan on February 26, 2001 saying, "All we are breaking are stones". Mr Omar told the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press (AIP), "I issued the order to destroy all statues in Afghanistan including the country’s rich pre-Islamic statues in line with Islamic beliefs. According to Islam, I don’t worry about anything. My job is the implementation of Islamic order. The breaking of statues is an Islamic order and I have given this decision in the light of a fatwa of the ulema (clerics) and the Supreme Court of Afghanistan. Islamic law is the only law acceptable to me".

The decree was issued at a time when a team of western diplomats was visiting the Afghan capital Kabul to check reports that Taliban hardliners had vandalized ancient statues in the national museum. The Kabul museum alone housed an estimated 6,000 statues. It is believed most of them have been destroyed. Those tearing down the idols of Lord Buddha - the symbol of peace and compassion - sent a message to the world that they had the capability of destroying the symbols of peace and compassion and could do anything, could inflict unlimited damage on human life and the property of the people they disliked, and destroy world peace. However, world leaders failed to take account of the message and took a very soft approach to the perpetrators of horrendous deeds. As a result we have the unbelievable and unimaginable terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC on September 11.

If we take a look at our own scriptures, we find a number of monarchs terrorizing people they disliked or people they thought posed a threat. For example, Hiranya Kashyapu intimidated his own son, Prahlad, into not meditating on the name of Lord Vishnu. When Prahlad ignored the intimidation he even attempted to kill his own son, but the Lord protected the son from harm.

Lord Vishnu noticed that Hiranya Kashyapu had crossed the limit and took the form of a half human and half animal, came out of the wooden pillar to which Prahlad was tied, and ripped open the stomach of Hiranya Kashyapu with long nails while holding him down on his thighs. He killed Kashyapu at an hour when it was neither day nor night.

Hiranya Kashyapu - the demon king thought that he was immortal and could do anything to anyone because he was not supposed to be killed by animal, bird or reptile or by any sort of man made weapon, at daytime or nighttime. Thus the Lord had to take the form of neither animal nor human but a combination of both, use his finger nails which were not any sort of man made weapon, and during twilight when it was neither a day nor night to destroy the formidable demon king who terrorized humans.

Another example is of a monarch called Kansa who terrorized the people of Mathura, killing innocent children up to the age of two years, thinking that one of them posed a threat to his own life. He sent mercenaries out to identify the innocent child and kill him. He became a perpetrator of terrorism among the people of Mathura. The Lord again noticed that the demonic monarch had crossed the limit, and so came out openly and killed the monarch in his own palace.

The third example is of monarch called Saharsha Arjun who ransacked the dwelling of a holy person called Jagadamni on finding evidence of his acting against the interest of the monarch. Later on, the monarch stole cows belonging to the Trust run by him, and stopped state grants to the Trust causing a great hardship to him and his pupils. Ultimately the monarch killed the holy person. That was the limit, and the Lord, incarnated as the son of holy person, killed not only the monarch but all perpetrators of terror.

We can see from the examples of perpetrators of terror given in our scriptures that they were extremely powerful, they felt that no one would be able to destroy them; they therefore went on terrorizing the people. The Lord himself had to take different forms to finish them off. Likewise, it will not be an easy job to destroy the current perpetrators of terror and uproot terrorism.

The world has many fanatics who have the common goal of capturing state power for imposing their ideology or religion or their own reign. The world has religious fanatics who want to impose their own religion on human kind, the world has ideological fanatics who want to impose their own kind of ideology on others and there are fanatics who believe they need to have their own reign. They do not mind shedding their own blood and the blood of others to achieve their objectives.

Currently the world has heads of state or government who perpetrate terrorism. If you take a closure look at heads of state government perpetrating terrorism, you will find that they are people who usurp power from democratically elected governments. They become despotic rulers. They are a terror to their own people and the people of the world. They launch terrorist attacks on anything and anywhere in the world. They not only harbour terrorists but also train people to be terrorists, thus giving birth to terrorism. Therefore, if world leaders want to root out terrorism they need a democratic system of governance everywhere in the world. There are still many countries where fanatics might come to power and destroy newly established democratic systems of governance. The world community should not permit such things to happen anymore anywhere in the world. There should be political globalization.

Number politics at TU

By Ashmina Bhattarai

Tribhuwan University is certainly Nepal’s oldest educational institution. But is it also Nepal’s most reputed and efficient educational institution? Now that is a very good question and a thought worth pondering upon.

As a student once put it, "Tribhuwan University is like an ex-boyfriend, the one you never want to have anything to do with again!"

Similarly, many seem to agree that the only thing in which the University has been constant and successful over the years is in causing a lot of disappointment among students in general!

"At the time I received my final year TU mark sheet, if someone had told me that only one person in TU is responsible for messing like this with the students’ marks (or rather his/her
whole year’s hard work), I would have gladly beaten and imprisoned that person to death and lived happily ever after to remember the great deed, and with lots of pride!" recalls an ex-student.

There seems to be no doubt that TU needs to keep an eye open for some of these whimsical, malicious and perhaps, even oversmart and incompetent examiners, who most probably consult a dictionary for every other word and a guidebook for all the answers! And what guidebooks they possess, we all know. Half of the time they are directed towards misguiding the students! And anyway, no guidebook can give you an absolutely correct answer when you are dealing with subjects that concern theories.

As a 20-year-old BA 2nd year student burst out, "Its not like correcting a Mathematics paper, for God’s sake! Some teachers seem to be out to poison the whole pond!"

Talk about my own experience, and I’ll tell you, TU is definitely a cul-de-sac for the students of Humanities, because for them pursuing further education in Nepal means studying at TU one way or another! As far as the TU marking system is concerned, it will require some elaboration. Well… between the two Sociology papers that I had to prepare for my third year BA exams, I had written exceptionally well in one (providing suitable examples, clear ideas written in clear paragraphs and so on) and in the other, I had screwed up a bit. I ended up getting equal scores (48 each) in both papers! Far too less for one, and far too much for the other! That left me wondering whether the marking strategy that year hadn’t been based on some Marxist theory! My wild guess is ‘social equality’, what's yours?

Are we awaiting another disaster ?

By Karishma Amatya

Nowhere is a man more helpless than in dealing with nature’s fury. To what extent is the liability to a disaster, whether of body or mind, determined in advance, and to what extent can it be halted? Before the suddenly shifting tectonic plates trigger the devastation, many don’t spare even a minute to think about it.

An earthquake comes uninvited, and when it leaves, within seconds the world is flattened. The earth is not a static planet; the large slabs of the earth’s crust (tectonic plates) are continuously in slow motion. The force of these movements sends shock waves in all directions and shakes the ground. Dropping a stone in a still pond will generate a similar kind of outward wave that results when two plates come into contact. The intensity of these waves depends on how deep the focus is (upto 700 km or 450 miles, below the ground), how far the rocks move, and the strength of the surrounding rocks.

Most earthquakes occur at depths of less than 50 miles from the earth’s surface. Earthquakes can strike anywhere in the world but through the years they have principally occurred in three large zones of the earth. One prominent zone is the Alphide. This belt extends from Java to Sumatra in Indonesia, through the Himalayas into the Mediterranean, and out into the Atlantic. This belt accounts for about 17 percent of the world’s largest earthquakes.

Nepal, as it lies under the bed of the Himalayas fall under the earthquake prominent zones. Some 68 years ago, in 1934, the Himalayan Kingdom of Nepal felt its foundations shaking when an earthquake measuring around 8.4 on the Richter scale hit the nation. Around 8,591 lives were lost; 4297 in Kathmandu alone. Some 80,000 houses were completely destroyed. Among those killed were the two daughters of the late King Tribhuvan and the granddaughters of the reigning Rana Prime Minister Juddha Shumsher.

Earthquake is a major threat to the Kathmandu. If an earthquake, as powerful as the one of nabbe saal, rocks the Nepalese soil, it is predicted that around 40,000 lives will be lost in Kathmandu alone, whereas around 100,000 will be left to suffer in its aftermath. Around 60 percent of the houses in the valley will be completely destroyed. Areas near the rivers such as Maitidevi, Buddhanagar, Anamnagar, Naya Bazar will be more prone to disaster.

Amod Mani Dixit, the general secretary of National Society for Earthquake Technology Nepal, suggests four-prong strategy to cope up with the catastrophe if it happens: mitigation and preparation, rescue, rehabilitation and reconstruction after the disaster, implementation of building codes at the community level, and fourthly, raising awareness and imparting training at the ward level

According to a study report, commissioned by US-based geologists Roger Bilhams and Peter Molnar and India’s Vinod K Gaur, a massive earthquake could devastate large urban areas in Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan very soon in "geological terms". So, the threat is very real.

If this long-predicted earthquake does strike, the water supply and electricity will come to a complete halt. So will be the communication system. With the high injury rate, the hospitals in Kathmandu will be grossly inadequate. There are at present 2,200 beds in government hospitals. These figures will come in handy if the hospitals themselves will not collapse. The loss
of these hospitals will severely limit the city’s ability to care for the quake-injured patients.

In November 2000, an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale rocked the city of Bhuj near Ahmedabad in Gujarat. Some 20,000 died, buried under the rubbles that proved to be their mass grave. 350 children staging the Republic Day parade in Anjar met a terrible fate. In 1999, Turkey experienced seven earthquakes in five months. On August 17, the quake measured 7.8 on the Richter scale, and the duration of the strong shaking was 37 seconds. That quake caused 17,118 deaths, and left over 50,000 injured. Thousands of people were missing, and over 600,000 were left homeless. In Sansi, China, an earthquake in 1556 had the greatest number of fatalities - an estimated 830,000 people perished. On June 20, 1990, an earthquake measuring 7.7 on the Richter hit western Iran- considered one the most destructive on record. Between 40,000 to 50,000 people were killed, and there was extensive damages caused by accompanying landslides.

With the development of measuring systems and methods of learning where the majority of the earthquakes will originate, you might think that seismologists could predict when the next shaking would happen. Unfortunately, there isn’t a reliable mechanism for predicting an earthquake- one reliable enough to allow an area to be evacuated in time. No reliable short-range prediction methods are available, and the long-range forecasts are based on the premise that earthquakes are repetitive and cyclical. Seismologists are studying the history of earthquakes so their occurrence might be predicted. But no one can really predict that a branch of fault line exists below where we are now standing. Indeed, it is difficult to say when we will invite another of nature’s fury.