World Death Index: How Much are You Worth?

There is nothing like a number to get you thinking. And these days I've been thinking about how much a life is worth. This morning I sat down with a calculator, scoured news reports and have come up with a few estimates that might put a little perspective on the senseless death of thousands of people. It could be the beginning of something I would like to call the World Death Index.

A few weeks after 2,973people died in the collapse of the World Trade Centers in New York the United States launched a massive global campaign to eradicate terror. While both soldiers and civilians are dying in the conflict, so far 2,710 American soldiers http://www.icasualties.org/oif/ have died in the line of duty while Iraqbodycount.net, an independent news portal that tracks civilian deaths via newspaper reports states that at least 43,546 Iraqi civilians have died in the conflict. The American military does not track casualties of the militants it has reportedly killed.

So if we add up the total American dead (Sept 11th+Military) and divide it by the total number of dead Iraqis it turns out that one American is worth 7.6 Iraqi civilians. The military however, has a different way to measure it. According to the Washington Post, when a civilian is killed by a stray cluster bomb, they doll out cash to the bereaved families to the amount of $2,500. A dead US soldier's family gets about $400,000. So in financial terms, one American soldier is 160 times as valuable as an Iraqi civilian.

But what about Indian civilians? Unfortunately it is difficult to calculate Indian lives based on an American military occupation (the standard unit for these sorts of mathematics) , but luckily new legislation across India is making it easier to put a rupee amount to civilian lives. In the last year farmers across Karnataka have been going through hard times. First there were draughts, then there were floods, and just about every farmer is severely in debt. Many are driven to suicide. According to a state government assessment there have been 777 suicides in total. Naturally it is a big problem that politicians are just now beginning to address by lambasting one another for their failures to the suffering agrarian population. Recently the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has issues a rehabilitation package that is meant to address the suicides. He ha authorized 15.5 crore to go to the families of the farmers (or about $330,000), or about $429 per suffering family.

By this calculation it seems that one American soldier is worth 932 Indian farmers, while a bombed Iraqi civilian is worth about 5.8 Indians. Anyone want to check my math?

Deccan Chronicle Seeks Untalented Writer

This snippet from a job advertisement in the Chennai Chronicle (the inside supplement of the Deccan Chronicle that features classic columns like "Party Whirl" and invariably keeps me up to date about Paris Hilton's love life, is destined to be a classic. While some of my readers may be interested in such a job, my jaw is dropping over 1) that they don't really care about experience and 2) that their requirements of telling Gucci from Gap and to sight makeup-less stars are about as easy are boiling water for that morning's chai. And what is "a" Gucci, anyway?

As far as I can tell the only talented writer at the Chennai Chronicle is Vinodhini who actually combines investigative research with well-written copy. The rest of the CC's rag tag bunch of feature writers droll on about obvious topics that most of us caught wind of a year ago. The one thing that I will give the Deccan Chronicle credit for is that they do seem to have great sources for news. Their reporters in the field get a lot of excellent facts, but often don't understand the story well enough to write something convincing.

But, should you be looking for a small freelance gig that might pay anywhere from 300 to 1500 rupees a shot, you have the e-mail address. Maybe you can help make the paper a little better. Just remember, I'll be watching.

A morning after pill 'Mis-take'

Two months ago I wrote about a new over the counter morning after pill that was being advertised on billboards and newspapers all over the city. For a while it seemed that Mis-take was going to be more available than the morning after pill in the United States and that the Indian government was taking rational steps about unplanned pregnancy. While the Ministry of Health let the pills to be sold over the counter they somehow forgot to tell Intra labs that not every other government agency was going to submit to MoH reproductive tyranny.

Three days ago the Directorate of Drug Control seized 117,555 strips of the pills worth Rs 50,0000 from a company warehouse on the premise that the contraceptive might encourage immoral behavior. The DDC apparently was acting on a series of complaints by "welfare organizations" like the Satvika Samuga Sevagar Sangam (whose acronym sounds like a snake hissing), who said, "The advertisements encourage youngsters to indulge in free sex and also get away with it."

But the Deccan Chronicle contacted the Ministry of Health and discovered that the DDC had no authority to seize the pills since they had already been approved in 2005 for over the counter use (and advertising campaigns).

Organizations like the double S.S. think that it is better to have a whole bunch of pregnant teenagers running amok in the city than it is to provide a bit of birth control. They also make the mis-take of assuming that the only people who might want to use emergency contraception have pimples on their faces and no kids in the kitty. What about people who already have kids and just don't want to have any more? [via boing boing.]

And if they were so mad about the ad campaigns for Mis-take, I wonder if they have seen the way local companies package Viagra and Kama Sutra condoms? Why not seize those, too?

Given that the DDC has illegally removed the birth control from the market, I propose that any women who would have used Mis-take, but were unable to find it between September 24th and August 1st should be provided free medical care by the government agency and the S.S.S.S.

Also see Sepia Mutiny for an older post about the pill.

Open Letter to All Squabblers

When I was six or seven years old my family used to take interminably long one-hour road trips to the beach for summer vacation. My parents would sit in the front seats of the car leaving my older sister and I to squabble in the back for the duration of the journey. Those were days when my sister would unwind after a hard day at school by chasing me around the house while threatening to castrate me with a wiffleball bat. At the time I thought she was being rather cruel (she was twice my size), but now she swears it was all out of love. Nevertheless we were at each other's throats quite a bit in those days.

On one such trip we embarked on an epic shouting match in what was a mutual attempt to describe each other's noxious odor.

Big Sister: You smell. I don't even want to be near you.
Me: Yeah, well you stink.
Big Sister: No you stink.
Me: If I stink then you stench.
Big Sister: What does that mean?

(My mother and father let out an anguished chuckle in the front seat)

Me: It's worse than stink.
Big Sister: Then you stench even worse.

The whole affair rapidly descended into a fit of hair pulling, biting and kicking before my parents mercifully announced we were at the beach and we shouldn't talk to each other for the rest of the day.

Looking back on those days I realize that I was learning a valuable lesson that I can now apply to my presence here in the blogosphere. Over the last week or so I have gotten quite a few abusive posts and comments (on this blog and others) that, in my own stupidity, thought I could resolve by replying to. The ensuing melee has descended into a spiting and biting match that I haven't been able to replicate since I was the time I was a child. After reading some of the posters blogs, it seems that there a few people who's content subsists on little more than hurling insults.

Sadly, I took the bait a few times and now have a seething mob at the gates. In the future I will not make such mistakes. I will delete any abusive posts that appear on this blog. Though I am happy to engage in a discussion of ideas on occasion (though I may scale back on that as well), posts that include the world "dumbfuck", "puke", or just generally spout hate will no longer be welcome here.

High times on three wheels. More on the Autorickshaw challenge

Now in its third round of edits, the story I am writing for Wired Magazine about the rickshaw race across Tamil Nadu has generated more material than I know what to do with. Over the weekend I am taking the whole thing back to the drawing board and restarting from scratch. In the meanwhile I realize that a lot of people want to know about the little adventure so I am posting a few more photos and a video that was put together by Simon Laidlaw, a british journalist whose best known work to date was a hit UK tv series called Topless Darts, a show whose title says it all. It is a big download, but in the end I think it is worth it.

I've been told that bus drivers in Tamil Nadu are paid on the basis on how quickly they can complete their route. While that could be an urban legend, busses drive quite recklessly and sometimes end up bloody and on the side of the road. When we came upon this wrecked chasis we thought it would be a good photo op and snapped a few photos before we looked inside and saw it soaked in blood.

Rickshaws are beautiful things when they aren't breaking down. In some cases, even the breaking down can be beautiful. We took this shortly after the white rickshaw had a bit of an overheating problem.

Oz of Extreme Trifle wasn't really all that upset that he smashed into the rickshaw in front of him and lost his headlight in the process. As he says on his website, it is not if you win or lose, it's the breaking down that counts.
This is me and a goat that I found along the way. It isn't the goat that walked in front of my enfield and was tragically run over and most likely eaten that night, rather this is the one that I took it upon myself to shower with love and affection. I still feel bad for the goat I hit.

The race took us to a lot of interesting places that I had never been before. This is a Tsunami Relief project that is being constructed by the Government of Tamil Nadu and Habitat for Humanity. The homes are almost complete, but not yet occupied. The planned area looks a lot like the early scenes in City of God about a slum in Rio Brazil before it descended into disrepair. From what I understand projects like this are doomed to failure since the concrete materials the government uses make the homes too hot to live in. Most people who are alocated these shelters immediately rent them out to other low income people and build grass huts adjoining the premsis that are more habitable.

"We're going to bomb you back into the stone age"

A couple days after September 11th, 2001 the United States was gearing up to retaliate against someone; they just weren't sure what country would bear the brunt of our anger. Covering all their bases the then Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage sent a message to the intelligence director of Pakistan and said "Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age."

The CBS news magazine "60 Minutes" is going to air an interview with Gen. Musharraf on Sunday that will give an inside look at the scare tactics that the US uses against heads of state to get them to cooperate on the War on Terror.

The idea that you could bomb someone back to the stone age first came up during the Vietnam war when American forces dropped more explosives on the North Vietnamese than were used in all of World War II. After a decade of combat and over 50,000 US dead, Vietnam remained firmly in the modern age and American forces pulled out.

While the very few if any bombs have fallen on Pakistan since September 11th, the United States has expended record amounts of precision armament on Iraq and Afghanistan. To date no one has stopped Bin Laden and Iraq is looking more like Vietnam every day. Maybe the United States should change its tactics.

(Photo: Scott Carney, minutes after the 2nd tower fell)

But it was a crowd that killed him!

Apparently all it takes to suspend the rule of law in Chennai is for people to act in groups. This morning the Deccan Chronicle carried a story about a suspected thief who broke into a local businessman's house and was nabbed in the act. Neighbors rushed in to capture the thief and when they had him safely in custody they beat him mercilessly. Once the police arrived the man was carted off to the hospital where he promptly succumbed to his injuries.

The police didn't charge anyone for the man's death and stated that, "This is a clear case of mob fury since the public caught a man who they thought was a thief and assaulted him...nor can we identify the accused since it was not their intention to kill him."

Forgive me if I have missed something, but when did it become legal for vigilantes to issue death sentences? The man's crime did not merit being beaten to death, and the crowd certainly had no right to do so. The police even used the word "assault" in their statement--and I believe that assault is a crime meriting at least a slap on the wrist.

The officer's statement makes it seem that any time someone acts in a group they are subject to a different set of laws. If we push his logic just a little further what would happen if a mob of people upset about rampant graft and corruption in government stormed the secretariat and killed a few ministers. Would they not be liable? Clearly the mob would simply be upset at the actions of a thief and would assault in a group. Would they not merit at least disorderly conduct charge?

The man's death is also an issue of class privilege and illustrates that in Chennai that there are separate legal systems for people occupying different rungs on the social ladder. The mob in this case was made up of wealthy landowners and businessmen and we can only assume that the thief was a lower class man. Maybe the mob shouldn't have been charged with murder, but they are culpable in a lesser crime.

(Photo: The front page of The Hindu of a riot that happened in Delhi yesterday)

What is Open Source Journalism?

Two weeks ago I spoke at to a crowd at blogcamp about a project I have been working on about a one eyed baby born in Chennai in July. Local authorities stopped providing me information once I told them I was investigating the possibility of an unethical clinical trial and since then I have been able to make little progress in the story. My last resort has been to throw open the doors to the blogging commmunity (and any other community for that matter) and share the information I have collected so far hopefully put a few more pieces of the puzzle together.

Since I gave the speech I have been accused by people of not understanding what blogging is all about, and by local media professionals who allege that only trained journalists have the ability to obtain unbiased information from sources. Many people have said that without proper credentials no one would listen to them when they ask a question of an authority figure. I disagree with all of these points at fundamental level. How can we ensure transparency in government and corporate behavior if we don't ask questions? While I do not know if there was a clinical trial of cyclopamine here in Chennai, there is enough evidence here to merit an investigation. Since the authorities do not seem interested it is up to regular citizens to move this foward. And I hope to do this in an open source way.

Anyone is welcome to use the information in this investigation to publish in any medium they see fit. If you can do so for profit, all the better, but if you benefitted from this investigation I hope you will post your findings here. I welcome journalists, citizens, and bloggers to collect as much information relating to the story as possible and share their findings with the rest of the community. Many people are already helping out in the investigation and we have some leads on where to find a birth certificate.

I will give all the information I have save a few phone numbers since publishing them here could result in an unintentional DOS attack that is not the purpose of this investigation. At the moment I am still trying to acquire the mother's address as well as any information we can uncover about illegal clinical trials. There is no central registry of clinical trials, though there is some movement in higher levels of government to create one. I hope that some people who have seen the recent story on Wired News may know people who have been injured by clinical trials, or know someone on the inside who would be willing to talk either confidentially or publicly.

I do not know what we will uncover. I hope that this was just a freak birth defect and that there was nothing illegal or immoral going on, but the sad truth in India is that there have been numerous instances of medical research gone awry here and in the past people have died because of them.

And the only way to know what really happened is to ask questions.

Tags: chennaioneeyedbaby, cyclopamine

Should India Change its Name to Bharat?

In the last four thousand years or so the Indian sub-continent has gone through a lot of names. Since the Indus Valley Civilization spanned from what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan to the heart of Madhya Pradesh there have been dozens of other civilizations and ruling dynasties. With a few glaring omissions after the Indus were the Mayurans, the Cholas, the Mughals, Hindustan, the Portuguese, the French, the British and now India's democracy. What we know as "India" today had never been united into one territory until the British seized control from hundreds of smaller kingdoms. In a standard process of succession every new leader that took control decimated the remains of the previous civilization and attempted to start a new history. And in every instance cities were dubbed with new names.

Since India gained independence from British rule the Indian government, spurred on by fundamentalist parties that originated in Mumbai, has been changing urban monikers to the "original" Hindu names. Bombay became Mumbai, Delhi - Dilli, Calcutta - Kolkotta, Madras - Chennai and as of today Pondicherry has been renamed Puducherry.

Putting new names on cities, towns and streets may be a way to lay claim to the land in some fundamental way, but calling the new name "original" has some dark undertones. When Bombay was first called Mumbai it was little more than a fishing village with a moderate sized port. When the British took control it transformed into a world economic juggernaut. Delhi grew into a prominence under several generations of Islamic rule--many of whom would have scoffed at the recent name change. What we know as the Indus Valley Civilization or Harappa was most likely called Meluha by the people at the time. The city of Pondicherry didn't even exist before the French borrowed the name of an insignificant fishing village and turned it into their center of operations in South Asia. Renaming it Puducherry is returns it to village status and ignores a rich French history.

If the trend should continue it would make sense that the entire nation of India should get a name change. After all, India was only the name that Alexander the Great (or Sikander if we want to keep up the Indianization of names) gave to all the people on the other side of the Indus River. Technically it would include most of Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh and parts of Burma...er...Myanmar.

Would it make sense to call India "Bharat" or "Hindustan"? Bharat is the Sanskrit name for the land of the Mahabarata. It carries Hindu connotations and overlooks centuries of Islamic and British rule. "Hindustan", however, was the name for British occupied India and represents the first time that the entire region existed under a single leadership. If politicians did try to rename India there would probably be riots on the streets. Every minority group in the country would feel disenfranchised--as if their own regional histories had no real stake in the nation.

But if you can't rename the country, why can you rename the cities? You cannot simply delete several millennia of non-Hindu rule from the pages of history (though they may have tried that in Gujarat). Sure, under the British many people suffered. People suffered under the Mughals, too. More people lived in poverty than palaces in the areas where there were flourishing Hindu kingdoms. How much better is the India that we know today? Has giving it a new name changed anything?

Finding the Birth Certificate and Cyclopamine

The Baby's Certificate

With the help of Guru Subbaraman who was referred to me out of the blog camp initiative I have been able to locate the reference number for the one-eyed child's birth certificate. While the hospital refused my request to see the certificate, I have been amazed to discover that the corporation of chennai keeps many birth and death records online.

As a non-Indian I am still unable to request the document, but I know where to find it. Just about anyone but me can request it from the Corporation of Chennai in Egmore.

Child's Name: No name
Mother: Gomathi
Father: Nagaraj
Zone: 06
Division: 86A
Registration Number: 5891
Birth Date: July 29, 2006
Link to record

Cyclopamine for Sale
I was checking out information on my blog on tecnorati and there were two ads from compaies selling cyclopamine. It is quite expenisve (over $1650 per gram) but they ship anywhere in the world for "research purposes". In their defense, the notes on the drug state that it is a known teretogen and that it causes birth defects. Here are the company links: LC Laboratories and Logan Natural Products.

Tags: chennaioneeyedbaby, cyclopamine, blogcamp

When Slave Prodogies Run

Everyone loves a child prodigy. Especially Indians. Whether it is an 8-year-old child who becomes a certified Microsoft engineer, or Akrit Jaswal who preformed surgery on a deformed child when he was only seven years old. And who doesn't want their child to excel at a young age? But does having an exceptional ability at a young age mean that parents or guardians should encourage the ability to grow? And what happens when money gets involved?

Born in 2002 Budhia Singh, became India's most famous athlete when he broke all world records for the longest run by a four year old. A few days after he was born his mother sold him to a slaver for 800 rupees. The man had agreed to raise and educate Buddhia, but the tune of the education sometimes bordered on torture. One day when Buddhia was misbehaving the man told him to go run in a field until he collapsed. 20 hours later Buddhia was still running laps and the man knew he had something special on his hands. A few weeks later he was sold to a local Judo coach and a legend was born.

The coach, Biranchi Das, has made a small fortune running Budhia across India and garnering all sorts of media attention. In May of this year the child entered into the Limca Book of World Records for a 65-kilometer run from Jagannath Temple to Bhubaneshwar. He was four years old.

Since his rise to fame there has been a surge in copycat child runners. Today the Deccan Chronicle has announced that a 10-year-old girl in Bhudia's hometown named Anastasia plans to run 110 kilometers and is seeking permission from the Orissa high court to waive objections that it could damage her health.

The run is scheduled for October 2nd, and assuming that she doesn't collapse half way through the race she will garner some sort of record.

But why are these children running in the first place? While it could be argued that they have some special physical abilities that could be honed and perfected, I think that it is more likely a way to make people money. The runs don't have the children's best interests in mind.

Budhia began life as a bonded laborer who was destined to be a house servant or manual laborer until the day he died. They discovered his extraordinary ability to run after what amounts to a torture session and yet we still cheer on his budding career. Human rights organizations have jumped on the case, but their arguments are that Budhia shouldn't be forced to run anymore--not that he shouldn't have been sold into slavery in the first place. I think they miss the point. Underneath the story of these child prodigies are tales of slavery that people don't want to talk about.

I have to wonder if the only way that a bonded laborer can escape the clutches of slavery is if they run.

Back from Malaysia

I just made it back from my trip to Malaysia. Sorry for the blog black out, some of my regular readers were wondering what happened. There were some technical difficulties with some aspects of this weblog that I couldn't figure out while abroad, so I decided to take it down before I could deal with them when I had more time. For the next week or so I will be writing up three stories about Malaysia and one about the one eyed child born here in Chennai.

Censorship Central and the Malaysian Blog Community

At first glance Kuala Lampur looks like any other major first world metropolis. The streets are immaculate, there are mega-malls on every street corner chock full of fancy merchandise and a public transportation system that should be the envy of Asia. It's intensely diverse with large Malay, Chinese and Indian communities as well as a sizeable group of European and American business folks hammering out deals to invest even more cash into the already impressive economy. Some of my favorite images happen in the mall under the famous Patronis Towers (the spiky twin towers that dominate the city's skyline) where I routinely see women in full burkhas embossed with diamond studded Channel logos.

But underneath the gloss, Malaysia seems to be on the verge of a conflagration that will burn down the multi-racial viscad and leave unrest in its wake. Like many former colonial states, Malaysia is still struggling with the divide and rule strategy where British administrators set one group against another in order to keep themselves in power. Every cab driver I have taken has spent the entire ride complaining about other communities and has vowed that they were ready to take to the streets.

For the most part Indians here are lower and middle class, having been former laborers and bureaucrats for the British, while the Chinese have dominated the business sector and enjoy a comfortable standard of living. Local Malays, however, have historically been the most oppressed community, yet government affirmative action programs that give them favorable interest rates on bank loans, preferential treatment in corporate affairs and discounted property prices have seemed to level the playing field, and now the Indians and Chinese are resentful at what they see as an unfair advantage.

Yet airing your grievances can be dangerous. A government act issued in 1984 forces all newspapers to register every year and, if the ruling party doesn't like what they have been writing, they can shut them down for good. In 1987 the Star, a formerly liberal paper, was shut down for two weeks and almost went out of business. It has since begun to tow the party line and generally stays away from politics. This year, in the wake of the Danish cartoon that lampooned Mohammed, one paper lost its charter and was forced out of business.

The Internal Security Act (ISA) allows the government to imprison people without a trial for up to two years. In the past journalists and outspoken political leaders have been jailed and threatened by the act and more or less forced to shut up. The ISA is a leftover law from the days of the British when communism was a real threat to the country and they needed strong laws to put them out of commission.

In 1996 Malaysia made a bid to become a 1st world nation by 2020 and began an ambitious project to modernize the entire IT infrastructure. A 50-kilometer swath of land was wired for high-speed Internet access along with a new set of laws that eliminated all censorship from the electronic media. So while print journalists are cautious about what they write, bloggers have gotten a new lease on life.

Following a bout of racial unrest in the late 1990s Malaysiakini , a critical news portal for all liberal sentiments opened its doors and has become the most important place to get information about government scandals, crime, and political discussion.

Another influential blogger, Jeff Ooi has made it his personal mission to dish out straight talk about the government and he has been wildly successful with over 3 million hits a month.

Both Malaysiakini and Ooi have been threatened by the government and there are prominent voices that have called for them to be shut down or imprisoned, but so far they have remained up and running.

I have been interviewing prominent members of active blogging community here for the last few days and hope to publish something about it in an upcoming issue of .Net magazine.

Open Source Journalism and the One Eyed Baby

I just got back from giving a short talk at blogcamp about the one eyed child born here in Chennai. I am hoping that the blogging community will be able to move this story ahead where I have run into a dead end. Here is what I know and I have a few suggestions on how to move the story forward

The Facts:
The baby girl was born at Kasturba Gandhi Hospital by a woman named Gomathi on or about July 31st 2006. The child had a single eye in the center of her forehead and severe brain damage. She died early last week, but the hospital has not released a cause of death.

An internal hospital report mentioned Cyclopamine, an experimental anti-cancer drug, as a possible cause for the child's condition. A hospital nurse in the ward said that the mother was taking "tablets" to get pregnant because she had been childless for 6 years. The superintendent, Dr. TMT Dhanalakshmi also said that the mother had gone to a fertility clinic, but that the attendant doctors did not take a complete medical history and failed to ask her what drugs the mother had been on, or the name and address of the fertility clinic. It is possible that a drug that the mother was taking helped cause, or bring to term, the baby's condition. While there is no firm evidence that cyclopamine was involved in the child's condition, there are precidents of anti-cancer medications being prescribed as fertility treatments in clinical trials in India as in the case of Letrozole in 2003.

Cyclopamine is a publicly available compound that can be bought from numerous sources in the United States and can be sent to India. One doctor who e-mailed me after the article in Wired News came out said that he had conducted an independent theraputic trial of cyclopamine on a human patient in the United States.

The hospital was not doing its job when it failed to take a medical history, so we need to take up where they left off.

What Next:
To carry this story forward we need to located the fertility clinic in question and determine what drugs the mother was prescribed. We do not want to berate the mother with questions, since she has obviously been through a very traumatic ordeal and do not want to post photos of her all over the internet, but we may need to contact her in order to locate the clinic since the hospital has failed to cooperate. To find her we must locate the child's birth or death certificate and follow the address listed there to the parent's residence. The certificates could be obtained through the RTI act, by connections at the hospital, in the government or any other source for public records.

This is an experiment in Open Source Journalism. I hope that bloggers and activists will be able to crack this case so that we can either say for sure that there was no foul play, and that this was a genetic accident, or hold people accountable for what could be a crime.

Please keep me informed on what you discover, but feel free to blog about your findings and publish in any medium you are comfortale with. Also, members of blog camp have begun to include a tecnoratti tag for "chennaioneeyedbaby" in their posts so we can track this story as it develops.

God speed.

Tags: chennaioneeyedbaby, cyclopamine, blogcamp

Deported to Malaysia. Be back soon.

A little over two months ago I lost my passport. Well, lost may be the wrong word. It was sitting on my desk for about two weeks when one day the window was open and it somehow managed to leave my house on its own accord. Perhaps it has been incorporated into a bird's nest. Maybe it was in the hands of black-market goons and off to an Al Qaeda training camp. I don't know.

I canceled the passport and after a 12 hour rigmarole, filed a police report that it could have been stolen. Since then I have gotten a new passport and was hoping that my life might soon return to normal.

No such luck.

As of Sunday night I am being politely deported from India to Malaysia where I will have to reapply for a visa to come back into the country. In the last few weeks I have gotten to know the man in charge of the Foreign Registration Office in Chennai, Mr. Ram. Every day he sits in a dilapidated office and wields the full might of India in the form of rubber stamps and squiggly signatures. I asked him repeatedly to issue me a replacement visa (something their website says is possible) but he stated time and time again that it was impossible and I would have to drop everything for a flight out of the country. So I will spend next week standing in lines outside the Indian embassy in Kuala Lampur.

So next week if I manage to post you will be reading about DVD piracy and government censorship in South East Asia. Wish me luck.

A Solution to Female Infanticide

Last week in police uncovered over 50 discarded female fetuses at the bottom of a well in Punjab. It has sparked an aggressive statewide crackdown on at illegal clinics across the country and exposed how corrupt government officials have been helping protect illegal clinics. According to the article in the BBC, there are 776 girls born for every 1000 boys in the Punjab--it's a birthrate that is entirely attributable to female infanticide.

Between female infanticide and illegal clinical trials (as in letrozol in 2003 and possibly cyclopamine) fertility clinics across India have become houses of death that are severely weakening the future of this country. While I am going to continue to search out problems in underground clinics in Chennai, I have an idea that could help Punjab out of its woes.

The response to female infanticide in the state government has been to "crack down" on clinics that provide the services and stop them from operating. They assume that if they cut off access to the technology then the practice will be forced to stop. It's a good plan except it does not take into account the myriad of other ways that women occupy a low social rung.

The problem basically stems from a dowry system that cripples families' incomes. The poor often have no other choice than to get rid of a child who they know will eventually cost them a lot of money. And if they can't have abortions, the might sell the child into slavery or kill her after birth. The answer can be found not in policing the problem, but by publicizing the extent of it.

Now that the gender disparity has shown up with so many more boys than girls, it seems logical that female children should be seen as valuable commodities. Since every girl will be able to find a partner, 1 out of every 5 men will go marriage-less (according to the statistics). In fact, because the numbers are so drastic, it is possible that 10 years down the line women will be in a position to demand dowry from men, not the other way around. It comes down to economics. The supply of women is short, so their demand has to rise.

I think there should be a massive public awareness campaign about the extent of the problem that doesn't only attack people for aborting female fetuses, but makes them aware that the problem is so advanced that in the future female children will be more valuable than boys. If enough people know that the birth ratio should right itself and women may even begin to occupy higher positions in the social milieu.

My Agenda at BlogCamp 2006

Assuming my registration gets sorted out, I am going to spend the weekend with a vast array of India's top bloggers here in Chennai at BlogCamp 2006. I'm not sure how I first heard about the event, but about a month ago I attended one of the organizational meetings and then got swamped in other work and haven't peeked at the site to see how it has come along. It looks like the organizing team has done a great job and from Sept 9th -10th over 200 bloggers will descend on Tidal Park to discuss some of the hottest issues of the day. Topics include Blogging and Governance, Blogging and Entrepreneurship, Corporate Blogging, Getting Geeky, Blogging in New Media and Blogging and Community.

My aim, however, is to try to enlist some bloggers to help me out on an important story that has run into a dead end. I need an outcry from the local community to get anywhere with it. If you have been reading my blog you might remember a story about a one-eyed baby that was born at Kasturba Gandhi Hospital in late July. A report by the hospital said that the mother went to a fertility clinic after being childless for six years. The report also said that one possible cause for the defect was that she had taken an experimental anti-cancer drug called Cyclopamine sometime during her pregnancy.

In what can only be described as gross negligence, the hospital never asked the mother what drug the fertility clinic had prescribed her, or what clinic she attended. The absence of that information means it is impossible to rule out that there could be an illegal clinical trial going on here in Chennai that may be hurting innocent women.

In the conference I hope to get a few people interested in following up this story and get the hospital to correct the error.

Last week the child died in the hospital. Superintendent Dhanalakshmi told me that she would get the information about the clinic to me if and when the child died, but she has not done so to date. I will have to stop by the hospital this evening to talk to her again.

There I go, off topic again. See you at BlogCamp.

Disturbing Narcissism and India's Dark Side

There are a couple of things on my mind today, one disturbing, one narcissist. Narcissism first. Over the years I've interviewed more than my share of people and written up profiles and articles about dozens of folks. Yet, I have never been on the receiving end of microphone/keyboard. Well, as of Saturday that has changed. Tan Lee Kuen (a reporter I met while couchsurfing in Malaysia) wrote an article that mentioned me in one of the two big Malaysian papers. Sure it was in the back pages, but there was a pretty picture of me driving a rickshaw that should make up for it. It was about my bygone days as a guidebook writer for Fodors when I schlepped my way through Rajasthan in obscene heat for very little pay. Check out the link in The Star.

Now for the disturbing. Since I started blogging I've shown a rather morbid curiosity with physical deformities and criminal activity here in India. Whether it is a one-eyed baby born in a local hospital , a thumbless rickshaw driver , prostitution in Kollywood, or an emerging porn industry, I'm always writing about something that portrays a gritty underside to India. Not that anyone is complaining, but I wonder if perhaps I should spend more space talking about something more wholesome, like, say politics in Tamil Nadu, or the funny thing I saw on the street the other day.

Alas, I don't have anything like that for you today. Instead I've found this story in while cruising a blog called Bombay in LA about a man in Bombay who was born with his twin brother inside his own body. While he always had a bid of a gut, as he approached his mid-thirties the bulge in his stomach grew almost human in size and started to make it difficult for him to breathe. He went to a doctor who initial thought he had some sort of enormous tumor and proposed operating on him to remove it. What happened next is something straight out of a horror movie.

Removing the Mutated Body

One doctor recalled that day in the operating room.

"He just put his hand inside and he said there are a lot of bones inside," she said. "First, one limb came out, then another limb came out. Then some part of genitalia, then some part of hair, some limbs, jaws, limbs, hair."

Inside Bhagat's stomach was a strange, half-formed creature that had feet and hands that were very developed. Its fingernails were quite long.

"We were horrified. We were confused and amazed," Mehta said."

I still don't know what to think of it. But I have to say that my fascination with this side of India doesn't look like it is about to die down.

Crocodile Hunter Killed by....Stingray

Leave it to the worlds' most audacious animal handler to be killed by one of the world's least dangerous animals while filming an underwater documentary. Steve Irwin, best known as for his hit series Crocodile Hunter, died yesterday after a stingray placed a poisoned barb close too his heart. For the most part the worst a stingray can do is leave a painful dart in someone's foot that can be painful, but not life threatening.

But if you have ever seen Irwin's show "Crocodile Hunter" then you would know that he gets pretty close to the animals he is filming and probably was in the middle of picking up the creature and asking it to smile for the camera. In that position the tail of the ray would have been next to his heart. It's sad because he was one of Austrailia's leading environmentalists. At the same time, I don't think anyone is surprised that a man who happily takes his one-month-old infant within a few feet of a twelve foot crocodile eventually got killed by a wild animal.

In the next few months get ready for a Warren Herzog documentary where he watches footage from the fatal attack and decides that it would be too painful for us viewers to see.

[link]

Jilted Lover Turns Pornographer

Getting dumped hurts. But I imagine that getting dumped and then getting arrested because you turned out to be a misogynistic slime bag is probably a little worse. Earlier this week the Deccan Chonicle reports that police arrested Satheesh, 27, from Ayanavaram for distributing pornographic films of he and his ex-girlfriend as a way to get back at her for leaving him for another man. He sent a copy of the film to her new lover who broke off their engagement and then thought he might have happened upon a nice way to make a little extra cash and started selling them in his neighborhood.

The police found over 100 copies of the film on VCD in a side compartment in his two-wheeler. In a turn of the case that could land him in jail for a long time, they also discovered that he used to sell pirated copies of Tamil DVDs--a crime that will give you a lot more jail time than the porn.

I could spend some space berating the him for his tactless crime and the utter misogyny that no-doubt will damage this girl's reputation in the city for the rest of his life. But I think we can all agree that what he did is criminal and he find his way into a dark hole in the back of a police "re-education chamber".

What really gets me is that he found a market for his C-grade porn material here in Chennai, and that there are people willing to buy such schlock in this city. In a place where a thumb-less primate (I know they are out there somewhere) could tap ten strokes into Google and come up with a world of professional porn in every shape and size, why on earth would people support a local slime bag who is just trying to get back at his ex? At that, they apparently paid money for it. If anything the customers of his film bought it for no other reason than to satisfy their cruel curiosity. They too should be held liable for aiding and abetting the filmmaker.

Bio-Beer: Get Drunk, Stay Healthy

Any second now Rod Sterling is going to jump out of the woodwork and welcome me to the Twilight Zone. In this strange new world beer guzzlers make it to old age and alcoholism is a virtue, not a vice. What happened? A company in Bangalore recently announced they are putting a new beer on the market that not only eliminates nasty hangovers, but it actually improves your health.

Distilled from aloe vera and a few unpronounceable herbal ingredients, the new alcohol was supposedly developed after 20 years of intense research by scientists at Khoday International and Advaith Biotech. The scientists claim that it gives the high of normal alcohol, but without any of those nasty liver-murdering side effects.

I don't know about you, but I for one am a little skeptical. There are a lot of people selling snake oil in this country, but most of them at least have the sense to avoid packaging it in booze.

Officially launched last year, the companies are currently producing about 150,000 bottles and have plans to expand distribution to the UK and USA.

The new beer seems to be more of marketing gimmick than cure all. But you have to wonder: what does a beer made from cactus taste like?

[link]

Rickshaw Race Yakuza

Drag racing auto rickshaws can be dangerous. Never mind that the three-wheeled taxi-pods are only lightly armored from oncoming traffic and that their high-center of gravity brings the chance of rolling over at every corner--the real dangers are the stakes. While I have been working on the story for the Indian Auto Rickshaw Challenge for Wired, I am also slowly being drawn into the underworld world of illegal racing where challengers agree to cut off their thumbs if they loose. Every year several drivers die on the all-or-nothing routes in pursuit of a week's worth of bragging rights and a small cash purse, but when the challenge gets heated the only acceptable stake is to risk the one appendage that separates humans from primates.

In Chennai there are several drag racing routes where local clubs of mechanics supe-up the two stroke engines and navigate their way at top speed through the city's confusing grid work of streets and alleys. One popular route is the journey from Elliot's beach to Mahibellipuram, 50 kilometers south. The driver I interviewed said that for a while in 2003 he was the local favorite as city's most skilled racer. He had won several races for small money in the last few weeks and was feeling unbeatable. Aiming to knock him down a few pegs, another racer offered to race him and put his thumb up on hid left hand up as stake. The loser would not only end up mutilated, but ostensibly never be able to drive a rickshaw again since it requires a thumb to work the clutch. He had a good lead in the final stretch of the run with the finish line in sight when the engine on his rickshaw overheated and died. His challenger sped past him and won his prize.

That evening he used the sickle shaped edge of a thengai kathi--a knife usually used to hack coconuts-- to chop off the thumb on his left hand.

There are dozens of stories like this in Chennai--and several well-known racing clubs with one or two 9-fingered mechanics fixing rickshaws in the back room. There is even a Tamil film tentatively titled "Auto" in production about it. In the coming months I am going to mention the underground sport in a little more detail in Wired, and will start shopping around at other magazines to run a full feature on it.

When (my) lights go out

It has already been two days since we finished the rickshaw race and I am still feeling under the weather. Despite consuming all manner of questionable eatables in my years in India I have been pretty lucky to avoid the worst forms of sickness that inhabit roadside food stands. But I have the feeling that my luck may have run out. I did a Google search on my symptoms and it looks like I am either still dehydrated from three days straight on a motorcycle, or I might have gotten a very mild case of typhoid. I'll pencil in a mid afternoon jaunt to the doctor today.

Adding to my overall misery was my most recent dance with the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the way the Indian government chooses to route power to Guru Nanak Niwas, my betel stained apartment building, it may come as a shock to you that even my own home is rife with a plague of bureaucratic idiocies.

For the last six months my wife and I thought we were getting away without paying our electricity bill. When we moved in our landlord gave us a yellow electricity card and told us to give it to the one-eyed decrepit chowkidar who pretends to keep brigands and terrorists away from our apartment complex. The system was supposed to be that a meter man would drop by once every couple months, take a reading, note it on the card and send us a bill. In exchanged we were allowed to plug in an array of electronic devices and enjoy near-constant power fluctuations and at least one explosion.

Two months passed and we anxiously awaited our first bill. It never came. A few more months slipped by and we thought that perhaps we were somehow off the books. Rather than figure out the problem, we hoped against hope that they would eventually send us a bill or drop a letter threatening to take us off the grid.

Then it happened. A day after we got back from Kanyakumari a man from the electricity board dropped by our meter, saw that we hadn't paid and promptly disconnected our power. In reality all he did was unscrew a single wire from our meter box, but it effectively blackened our apartment and sent us scurrying over to a friend's bungalow for a night.

The next morning we interrogated our guard who said he had never received our card. We asked him to check his files...er...shed for any sign of it, but to no avail. Instead he began to berate us in Hindi for being irresponsible and for letting the bill go unpaid for so long. We called our landlord who delivered a similar speech before inviting us over for tea at his house and chaperoning our first trip to the dingy government office that supplies power to our neighborhood.

We arrived with photocopies of the old electricity card, our lease, six types of identification, an affidavit from our landlord's wife (the actual owner of the apartment), several thousand rupees in cash, and a sinking feeling that this would take a long time. We took up positions next to a bureaucrat wielding a rubber stamp and one fingered typing skills. For the next half hour our landlord spoke to him in Tamil, smiled falsely, and said that the foreigners should be excused for their stupidity. They laughed at the last joke and sent us knowing glares. The man looked skeptical, but eventually capitulated when we gave him a little extra cash under the table. He issued us a fresh card and sent two electricians home with us to reconnect the power.

A couple turns of a screw later and the power was back on. The electrician explained that we should really buy a new meter (one that he could get us "real cheap") because the old one in my building runs a little too fast. My landlord said that would be a good idea and offered to let us pay for the improvements to our apartment.

After saying goodbye, Padma and I made our way up to our flat. We turned on the AC, opened up our laptops and went to check our e-mail when we ran into our second setback of the day. In a technological double-whammy our broadband provider had decided that since we had been out of our apartment for a week that they would disconnect our Internet as well. We spent the next few hours negotiating with a team of technical specialists and customer care people to get everything up and running again.

It was late at night before everything was back to normal and I decided to skip my blog for the day and ruminate on the mundane trials everyone in India has to go through for basic services.