Month: May 2014

With the canons firing across so many (imaginary) Lines of Control around the globe, the angry, needy, young men (majority) are viewed as a product of their genes and/or defective culture, who should be wished away or excused (liberal bigotry), or crushed and destroyed by any means fair or foul (conservative bigotry).
….
If
there is one thing I’ve learned from such encounters, it is that
carrying a British passport doesn’t necessarily make you feel British. I
came to this country to seek sanctuary. I am a multi-award winning
journalist. I am an immigrant and a refugee – but I am still made to
feel like an asylum seeker. I am a Muslim, an African and a
Somali. And should the security services be reading this: I am a British
citizen. Please treat me like one.
…………..

…..
Link: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/26/british-citizen-passport-control
…..

regards

Response to Malik: Thanks for the comments. We are not experts but there are many big-shots around who do have lot to say on this matter. Again it is a pity that the old BP box is lying at the bottom of the sea where no one can find it.

The important question (for us)- is there any new knowledge? A large part of the “analysis” seems to us to be self-serving back-calculation, look at why Middle East or South Asia is struggling and put up a theory to fit the evidence. And often the evidence cited is not that clear-cut at all.

The other side (the establishment) is also of not much help, the only message we hear is that race related issues must be handled with care. We agree, but this will not stop people from speculating about the truth…so it is perhaps better that we thrash out the ideas in the open market-place (any firm judgement is unlikely to come though).

The second possibility is that the changes in
our genomes were driven by natural selection. According to this
hypothesis, the frequencies of genetic variants can diverge among
populations because some variants increased the fitness of their
carriers, perhaps by increasing their chances of survival in a harsh
environment encountered on the particular continent on which they lived. 

The study of
genomes provides new ways to find evidence of natural selection.

//////
Wade
also thinks that “evolutionary differences between societies on the
various continents may underlie major and otherwise imperfectly
explained turning points in history such as the rise of the West and the
decline of the Islamic world and China.” 

Here, and especially in his
treatment of why the industrial revolution flourished in England, his
book leans heavily on Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms (2007).
Across these historical turning points, the details differ but the story
remains the same: certain peoples were predisposed genetically to
behaviors and thus institutions that paved the way for their success,
whether, say, economic (the West) or intellectual (the Jews). Other
peoples, alas, had other genes.

Wade, now a freelance writer and reporter, is best known for his work as a journalist at The New York Times. He has also written several popular books on biology. The most recent—Before the Dawn (2006) and The Faith Instinct (2009)—focused on evolution in human beings, including the evolution of religion. In A Troublesome Inheritance,
Wade maintains this focus on human evolution, though he turns to a far
more controversial topic, human races. 

His goal, he says, is “to
demystify the genetic basis of race and to ask what recent human
evolution reveals about history and the nature of human societies.” He
concludes not only that human races are real but that they probably
differ genetically in surprising ways.

Wade’s main claim is that
human races likely differ in social behavior for genetic reasons as a
result of recent evolution. These slight differences in behavior may, in
turn, explain why different sorts of social institutions appear among
different peoples:

Institutions are not just sets of
arbitrary rules. Rather, they grow out of instinctual social behaviors,
such as the propensity to trust others, to follow rules and punish those
who don’t, to engage in reciprocity and trade, or to take up arms
against neighboring groups. Because these behaviors vary slightly from
one society to the next as the result of evolutionary pressures, so too
may the institutions that depend on them.

Evolutionary biology might therefore have something to say about why
some peoples live in modern states and others in tribal societies, and
why some nations are wealthy while others remain mired in poverty.

A Troublesome Inheritance
cleaves neatly into two parts. The first is a review of what recent
studies of the genome reveal about our evolution, including the
emergence of racial differences. The second part considers the part that
genetic differences among races may play in behavior and in the social
institutions embraced by various races. These two parts fare very
differently.

As people dispersed about the planet, they
ultimately settled into the five great “continental races”: Africans
(sub-Sahara), East Asians, Caucasians (Europe, the Indian subcontinent,
and the Middle East), Australians, and Native Americans. Some of these
groups are younger than others (America was peopled only in the last
15,000 years), but this division provides, Wade says, a reasonably
realistic portrait of how human genetic diversity is partitioned
geographically. Because of their geographic isolation from one another,
these groups of human beings necessarily evolved mostly independently
over the last tens of thousands of years. During this period of
independent evolution, much of what we think of as characteristically
human arose, including agriculture and settlement in permanent villages.

So
what has study of the human genome over the last decade revealed?
Wade’s chief conclusion here is that human evolution has been “recent,
copious and regional.” The facts are fairly straightforward. The
continental races of human beings differ somewhat from one other at the
level of DNA sequence. As Wade emphasizes, these
differences are “slight and subtle” but they can nonetheless be detected
by geneticists who now have access to many genome sequences from around
the planet.

The central fact is that genetic differences among
human beings who derive from different continents are statistical.
Geneticists might find that a variant of a given gene is found in 79
percent of Europeans but in only, say, 58 percent of East Asians. Only
rarely do all Europeans carry a genetic variant that does not appear in
all East Asians. But across our vast genomes, these statistical
differences add up, and geneticists have little difficulty concluding
that one person’s genome looks European and another person’s looks East
Asian. 

To put the conclusion more technically, the genomes of various
human beings fall into several reasonably well-defined clusters when
analyzed statistically, and these clusters generally correspond to
continent of origin. In this statistical sense, races are real.

Natural selection can take a
genetic variant that is beneficial but initially rare and drive it to
much higher frequency in a population. This process leaves a signal in
the genome. Because a whole stretch of DNA that
surrounds the beneficial variant will rise to high frequency along with
the variant, nearly everyone in the population might end up carrying the
same DNA sequence in this part of the genome.
Geneticists will thus see a stretch of the genome that shows unusually
little genetic variation in a population.

Using this or, more
often, related approaches, geneticists have obtained fairly good
evidence of natural selection acting on our genomes. Indeed Wade reports
that 14 percent of the human genome has experienced recent natural
selection. These genomic approaches can’t tell us why natural
selection acted in a particular case (was it, say, adaptation to a new
parasite?), but they can tell us that these bouts of natural selection
were sometimes recent and restricted to particular continents.

Wade’s
survey of human population genomics is lively and generally
serviceable. It is not, however, without error. He exaggerates, for
example, the percentage of the human genome that shows evidence of
recent natural selection. The correct figure from the study he cites is 8
percent, not 14, and even this lower figure is soft and open to some
alternative explanation.
And Wade generally assumes that evidence of selection reflects
adaptation to the ecological environment, whereas some events might
reflect the action of other evolutionary forces like sexual selection,
in which individuals compete for mates, not for survival.

In the latter half of A Troublesome Inheritance, Wade ventures into far more controversial territory. His claims are, in outline, simple enough.

As
human beings evolved over the last tens of thousands of years, the
genetic basis of people’s behavior may have changed, just as the basis
of their skin color did. Some of these changes may have resulted from
Darwinian adaptation to new forms of social life. 

For example, the
“Great Transition” from nomadic life to permanent settlement that began
some 15,000 years ago likely produced a profoundly altered social
environment: populations grew larger, people interacted with more
non-kin, and society became more hierarchical.

In response to this
new environment, social behaviors may have changed by natural
selection. In some societies, people who were less aggressive or more
trusting, for instance, might have prospered under these conditions.
Indeed Wade argues that, because the rich could produce more surviving
children than the poor once permanent settlements appeared, genes for
whatever behaviors underlay their success could spread. “The social
behaviors of the elites could thus trickle down into the rest of
society” by natural selection.

Crucially, Wade says that
“evolution in social behavior has necessarily proceeded independently in
the five major races,” reflecting their geographic and thus genetic
isolation. The net result of all of this, during settlement as well as
other events in recent evolutionary history, is that the continental
races might well come to differ genetically in social behavior.

Why, for instance,
do Chinese immigrants to Malaysia and Thailand succeed so often
compared to the Malays and Thais themselves? After all,

people
are highly imitative, and if Chinese business success were purely
cultural, everyone would find it easy to adopt the same methods. This is
not the case because social behavior, of Chinese and others, is
genetically shaped.

Wade
also thinks that “evolutionary differences between societies on the
various continents may underlie major and otherwise imperfectly
explained turning points in history such as the rise of the West and the
decline of the Islamic world and China.” 

Here, and especially in his
treatment of why the industrial revolution flourished in England, his
book leans heavily on Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms (2007).
Across these historical turning points, the details differ but the story
remains the same: certain peoples were predisposed genetically to
behaviors and thus institutions that paved the way for their success,
whether, say, economic (the West) or intellectual (the Jews). Other
peoples, alas, had other genes.

Readers
should be fully aware that in chapters 6 through 10 they are leaving
the world of hard science and entering into a much more speculative
arena at the interface of history, economics and human evolution.

It perhaps would have been best if this sentence had been reprinted at the top of each page in chapters 6 through 10.
……..

Link: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jun/05/stretch-genes/
……..

regards

……….. 
Kargil is/was hopefully the last time that we will see hand to hand combat in South Asia. While war is exciting for some people, for us ordinary humans, it is the human factor that is of primary interest, the fact that war (always) creates hidden victims who will never find the support they need from a society which has forgotten them.

On the Indian side, one example was particularly shocking. This was the Adarsh society scam, a building which was intended for widows of the Kargil war dead (soldiers). The top people from politics, bureaucracy and (shamefully) military were involved. Here is the kicker- after all the investigations (as they say in vernacular) not even a single hair was touched. The culprits (alleged) are all out on bail due to a technicality (CBI did not charge-sheet them in a timely manner…why was that??). Ashok Chavan resigned as Chief Minister of Maharashtra and now elected as Member of Parliament in the latest Lok Sabha elections.

People who opine that corruption is the necessary grease that propels developing nations towards developed nation status should stop and reflect about the implications of Adarsh (and a thousand other scams, most of which have not seen any light of the day) and what it means for a country to disgrace the memory of her fallen soldiers.

On the Pakistani side, the report below confirms what was well known- the fact that Pakistan Army disowned its own soldiers as mujahideen and went to the extreme extent of refusing to take the bodies back. The soldiers (who fought for a lost cause) did not get a penny as compensation for their heroics in the battlefield.

However the most shocking revelation (for us) is as follows: child soldiers who were advised by the Army to lob grenades at the enemy. We are not from a military tradition so we would not know about all the intricacies, but it seems that the lines between a professional force and a religious cadre bent on jihad is a very thin one. 
……
[Ref. Wiki] The Adarsh Housing Society is a posh, 31 storey building constructed on prime real estate in Colaba, Mumbai, for the welfare of war widows and personnel of India’s Ministry of Defence.
Over a period of several years, politicians, bureaucrats and military
officers allegedly conspired to bend several rules concerning land
ownership, zoning, floor space index and membership get themselves flats
allotted in this cooperative society at below-market rates.  

The scam was unearthed in November 2010 which forced the then Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Ashok Chavan, to resign (Sidnote: he has now been elected as a member of Parliament).

In January 2011, the Maharashtra government
set up a two-member judicial commission to inquire into the matter. The report highlighted 25 illegal allotments, including 22 purchases made by proxy. The report also indicted four former chief ministers of Maharashtra: Ashok Chavan, Vilasrao Deshmukh, Sushilkumar Shinde and Shivajirao Nilangekar Patil, 2 former urban development ministers: Rajesh Tope and Sunil Tatkare and 12 top bureaucrats for various illegal acts. The allottees included Devyani Khobragade (Sidnote: main actor in the non-payment of wages to maid case in New York).

There was a spate of petitions filed in Bombay High Court seeking to monitor CBI investigation. The petitions are Criminal PIL
No. 34 of 2010 by former Journalist Ketan Tirodkar, Criminal Writ
Petition No. 3359 of 2010 by Simpreet Singh and Criminal PIL No. 36 of
2010 by Mahendra Singh. Ref. Bombay High Court order dated 17th Feb.
2011.
By this order High Court asked CBI to amend the F.I.R. by adding Benami
Properties Transaction Act section 4. Also, the High Court transferred
the missing filed probe from Mumbai Police to CBI. Praveen Wategaonkar
filed Criminal PIL later seeking invoking of Prevention of Money
Laundering Act (PMLA) into the case. So it has been invoked and
Enforcement Directorate came into picture.


….
Reacting to these petitions and based on the slow pace of the investigation in the last two years, Bombay High Court severely castigated Enforcement Directorate for its failure to initiate any probe in the matter on 28 February 2012. 
Expressing its unhappiness the court observed, “It
is unfortunate that ED has remained a mute spectator. There is a
serious lapse on the agency’s part for not probing into money laundering
offence. ED has not moved an inch. It reflects a sorry state of
affairs. We are summoning the director as there has been no assistance
from his department to the court.” 
The Court also rapped the CBI for the tardiness in its investigations (begun in January 2011).
The High Court, again on 12 March 2012, severely castigated the CBI for
not arresting any of the accused in spite of having evidence and
ordered it to take action without fear or favour.
ED having registered a case under Prevention of Money Laundering Act,
has decided to launch attachment proceedings of the flats after going
through the latest charge-sheet filed by CBI.

Following the Court’s criticism, the CBI carried out eight arrests including two retired Major Generals
TK Kaul and AR Kumar, retired brigadier MM Wanchoo, former General
Officer Commanding(GOC) of Maharashtra, Gujarat and Goa, Adarsh promoter
Kanhaiyalal Gidwani and Pradeep Vyas, the then city collector and currently, finance secretary (expenditure) in the Govt. of Maharashtra. Accordingly on 22 March 2012, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Prithviraj Chavan announced in the legislative assembly that the two IAS officers whose names have figured in the scam, Pradeep Vyas and Jairaj Phatak have been suspended from government service.


…
In a further twist to the case, the CBI
officers arrested their own lawyers, J K Jagiasi and Mandar Goswami.
Jagiasi allegedly asked an Air India (AI) official, one of the accused
in the case, to pay a bribe of Rs 5 million in exchange for diluting
charges levelled against him. The petty cash books maintained by Jagiasi
helped unearth the conspiracy. 
…
In addition, Rs 2.5 million was
allegedly paid to Goswami. He was the Special Counsel in the Ministry of
Law and Justice and at present is working as Retainer Counsel for CBI.
According to CBI sources, the tainted AI official approached the CBI for dilution of the case filed against him. Jairaj Phatak
and Ramanand Tiwari were arrested by the CBI on 3 April 2012, for their
alleged involvement in receiving illegal gratification in the Adarsh
Housing Society Scam.

On 29 May 2012, a special CBI court granted bail to seven of the nine
arrested accused in the Adarsh scam since the CBI failed to file a charge-sheet within the stipulated 60 days from the time it took them in custody. Those granted bail include Maj. Gen. (Retired-retd) A. R. Kumar, Maj. Gen. (retd) T. K. Kaul, Brig. (retd) M. M. Wanchu, IAS officer and former Mumbai district collector Pradeep Vyas, former Defence Estate officer R. C. Thakur, IAS officer P. V. Deshmukh and former Congress member of the Legislative Council Kanhaiyalal Gidwani (the chief promoter of Adarsh). 

………………………………. 

I needed a new guide to help me
find the elusive colony of people displaced by the Kargil conflict and
living somewhere behind Islamabad’s Bari Imam shrine. Wars between
Pakistan and India have claimed thousands of victims but forgotten among
them are the living victims of the Kargil war who have sought uncertain
refuge in the squalor of shanty towns around the country.

Across a
bridge and up and down narrow streets lined with palm trees and mud and
brick houses, their doors painted in shades of orange and green, Baqir,
our pied piper, led me and a long line of local children to a small
hamlet teetering on the edge of the creek. 

A sheepish Wafadar found us
again somewhere along the way. “Why did your family move here?” I asked
him. “I don’t know,” Wafadaar said. “Ask my father.” Something terrible
had happened to Wafadar’s father — something senseless but dreadfully
common among hundreds and thousands of people who have been displaced
from several parts of Pakistan brutalised by war.

A sepahi in the
Pakistan army, Shah returned to his village across the border from
Kargil one morning to find that an Indian shell had crashed through the
roof of his two-storey house and left his son and daughter dead. His
second daughter, 10-year-old Sidra, was lying semi-conscious under a
tree, her skull crushed by the bombardment.

As he gathered his
children’s bodies, Shah says he remembers fretting that the bales of hay
stacked on the roof for the goats’ winter fodder had caught fire during
the shelling. He worried for his animals. A few days later, after India
blocked water to the area, Shah fled, his bleeding daughter bundled in
his arms. Sidra died a few days later. But grief and remorse
trailed him to Islamabad, combining with other stresses: financial
troubles and the absence of support from relatives and friends. 

Fifteen
years later, Shah is a driver at the Earthquake Reconstruction and
Rehabilitation Authority, surviving on a meagre salary and a Rs5,000
pension. He blames Nawaz Sharif. “Kashmir was in our hands,” he told me
at his house, sitting in a blue plastic chair under harsh fluorescent
lights and a clock that read 6:54, no longer keeping time.

“But
then Sharif went to the United States and we had to give Kargil back.”
For Shah, and his neighbours, many of them ex-army men, Sharif’s
greatest betrayal was calling the Kargil fighters mujahideen. “Kashmiri
mujahideen?” he scoffed. “He said we were mujahideen! I’m retired from
the army. He disowned his own army.” While Shah has never been
compensated for what he left behind, and several trips to the GHQ have
borne nothing, Sharif will travel to India next week to make gains for
the future.

A neighbour’s son Ali Raza, now 20, also remembers
shells: exploding Indian shells dripping like rain every day on his way
to school. A shell fell near his school bus once, so close it rocked the
bus from the side to side. He tells me about the 12-year-old girl whose
nose was sliced off by shrapnel. He also tells me about how the war
changed children’s lives — and their toys too.

“They [army] would
give us one gola (grenade) each and send us to throw them on the
Indians,” Ali, a cook at Nadra, said. “The children were small and were
hard to detect at night. And plus we knew all the inside routes that
even the adults didn’t. So they gave us a gola each and off we went,
running up the hills.”

As Ali tells me about the unusual toys and
the invented games, his infant daughter plays with a rattle by his feet.
She chuckles. At least for her, one can pray, the war is over.

…..
Link: http://www.dawn.com/news/1108390/footprints-kargils-leftovers
….

regards

We are curious but is APPNA (and any other medical association of Pakistani doctors in America) also segregated by communities? Will anybody on BP be knowing the family? It must be a terrible thing for them as a family and as well as the community. How do people heal after something like this? Please note our sincere condolences.

And this must be emphasized above all: please do not risk your life and limb (as well as inflicting terminal harm to your immediate family) by taking unnecessary risks such as traveling to your native land. If you must engage in charity work please carry on by any remote means possible (or better yet focus on opportunities in your adopted country). Please.
…….
An American volunteer cardiologist was shot dead in Pakistan on
Monday, a member of his minority Ahmadi community said, the latest
attack on a group which says it is Muslim but whose religion is rejected
by the state.

Mehdi Ali had taken his five-year-old son and a cousin to
a graveyard in Punjab province at dawn to pray when he was shot, said
Salim ud Din, a spokesman for the Ahmadi community.

“He came
here just one or two days ago to work at our heart hospital, to serve
humanity and for his country,” Din said. “Two persons came on
motorbikes. They shot 11 bullets in him.”

Ali was born in Pakistan
but moved abroad in 1996. He had returned to do voluntary work at a
state-of-the-art heart hospital built by the Ahmadi community in the
eastern town of Rabwah.

Ali, 51, moved to Columbus, Ohio, in the
United States, where he founded an Ahmadi centre and raised funds for
medical charities in Pakistan, Din said. He is survived by a wife and three young sons, Din said. 

The US embassy said it was providing consular assistance but declined to give further details. “We express our deepest condolences to his family and friends,” the embassy spokeswoman said.
…..

regards