The Last Calligraphers

The age of calligraphy died when British soldiers toppled the Mughal courts. It's hard to remember that there was a time before the age of computers when penmanship was considered one of the highest art forms. Outside of a some particularly ornate wedding invitations and hand-written copies of the Koran there is little need for formally trained Urdu calligraphers. That is, except for one small ink-stained corner of Chennai where the world's last hand written newspaper still churns out 20,000 broad sheets a day.

I was walking through Tripplicane late last week looking for someone who might be able to teach me the Urdu script when a local fakir led me into a small gully off a main road and introduced me to Syed Fazlulla who has edited "The Musalman" for the last 18 years.

The newspaper employees three full-time calligraphers who painstakingly handwrite and manually typeset the paper the same way they have since 1927. Fazlulla says that they have never switched to computers because he wants to keep the art of calligraphy alive in the secular world. The news room only has three computers--none of which are used for editing or typesetting, and for all intents and purposes are little more than e-mail terminals for the one computer-savvy employee.
I spent a day with the staff and took a few photos of the process. I'm pitching the story to a few magazines to see if anyone is interested in reading more about the paper's struggle to survive in the modern world.

Every page of the newspaper is a work of art.

The off-set printing press is an artifact of the 1920s and has been in continuous operation since the paper's inception.Syed Fazlulla, editor of The Muslaman sits at his desk.

India's Medical Schizophrenia

I still don't understand medicine in India. One day I can be investigating illegal clinical trials that spawn mutant children and the next I will be profiling a top-notch hospital that attracts American patients. A week after that I'm uncovering gangs of kidney thieves that steal thousands of organs from poor people and a little while later I'm discussing revolutionary new stem cell treatments that seem to be years ahead of the United States. Welcome to my life of juxtapositions. Today I'm interviewing a man who was paralyzed from a broken spine and is now able to talk again with a first-of-its-kind stem cell treatment. Real the bodyhack post below.

A paralyzed man with a broken spinal cord can walk again after a revolutionary spinal cord treatment implanted his own stem cells into the injury and sparking a recovery. The patient had broken his spine while working on a construction site in Abu Dhabi and had been paralyzed from the waist down. The treatment was deceptively simple. A joint team with Lifeline and Nichi Center for Reproductive Medicine isolated stem cells from the man's bone marrow with a cooled centrifuge and introduced the fluid into his spinal cord.

It is still too early to know if this treatment is one of a kind or could be transformed into a regular treatment for spinal cord injuries.

Doctors from Lifeline Hospital have had a recent string of success with clinical applications of stem cells, including a major breakthrough I reported for Wired News involving a successful treatment of a diabetic ulcer in November.

I have been in touch with the doctor's at lifeline for more than a week and will have updates on this case soon. For more information check out the story in the Hindu. [link]

As for what I'm up to tomorrow. I shudder to think of what I'm going to find behind the city's morgue . . .

Ode to the Indian Half-Toilet

For at least a century there have been two basic types of toilet in India: the "squatter" and the "Western". The squatter, otherwise known as the "Indian Toilet" is not particularly comfortable for people brought up on western designs since they require a bit of balance and make it almost impossible to peruse the morning paper while you go about your business. The Western, on the other hand, is not particularly comfortable for someone used to squatting. I guess I'm not entirely sure why, but perhaps we are just creatures of habit and most comfortable doing out business the way we learned.

But having multiple types of toilet designs led to a lot of confusion in India. Often apartments have two bathrooms -- one with each type of toilet -- so that guests more comfortable with one over the other wouldn't be inconvenienced.

And then some brilliant bathroom engineer came up with a solution to the steady proliferation of water closets: why not create a device that was equal parts western and India. In other words why not create the world's most impractical toilet on the planet and set it loose on millions of people around Indian. They created the great Indian half-toilet, or "Oriya pan": a marvel in idiotic design. It resembles an art-deco Starship enterprise

In all my travels through this great continent I have never met a single person who prefers this design. It sits an uncomfortable twelve inches off the ground--too low to sit on, and way too high to squat on. And while negotiating the bowl shape -- because crap falls differently if you are squatting or sitting -- they found a happy medium that invariably has to be cleaned after every use.

Yet somehow despite the fact they no one actually wants to use the darn half-toilet they have bred steadily across the country. A full half of the apartments I have seen here in Chennai are equipped with the deal-breaking appliance and no land lord is willing to contemplate swapping them out for a more practical design.

Well here's to the Oriya Pan, the half-squat, half-sit contraption that is sure to make hundreds of millions of people groan with misery until one day a populist government finally bans the device and soars into a brief span of unrivaled popularity.

Lethal Security Precautions made the Train Bombing Worse

Sixty-seven people were burned alive when a group unknown terrorists planted three firebombs in a Pakistan-bound train. The news of the attack has been splashed across papers around the world not only because the attach was aimed at derailing India-Pakistan peace talks, but because of its freakish reminiscence to dozens of train attacks that have happened in this country since Partition.

The national discussion of the attack has drifted towards catching the people responsible for planting the bombs and a few stories of heroism of quick acting individuals who disarmed a bomb that was about to explode. Pass the Roti has commented on the way this will be used to ignite more sectarian violence. Yet one important detail has been unilaterally overlooked (well except for a great post on Sepia Mutiny). The bombers were only successful because of a goulishly misplaced security precaution where all of the emergency exits on the train were padlocked shut. Apparently the trains go though rough areas and are occasionally held up, so the government thinks it is a better idea to lock every carriage down.

I have seen this happen all over the country. At movie theaters the staff generally padlocks the doors so no one can sneak in or out during the performance, at night my chowkidar locks the building's front gate with a padlock, schools across the the country padlock doors to keep kids inside, and just about every window in the country has bars on it to keep thieves out. The prevailing thought is that it is better to hermetically seal trains, houses, theaters and schools to keep danger out than let people escape in an emergency.

Witnesses said the fire in the other coach was so intense that its occupants could not open the doors. Two victims died beside the tracks. - The Guardian

Lack of emergency exits has caused far more deaths than locking them ever prevented. But let's first take an example or two from my home state. In 1928 in Fall River MA a cloth mill in the center of the city caught fire with hundreds of workers inside. At that time it was standard practice for factory owners to lock worker inside the mill so that no one left work early. However, because the air was thick with lint from the clothing it was only a matter of time before tragedy struck. When a malfunctioning machine ignited the pieces of cloth hundreds of people died and local government forced regulation changes to keep fire exits unlocked.

I worry about the fact that every night my watchman locks our front gate. While the building is made of concrete, and not a big fire risk, if there were an earthquake, second tsunami or a fire in the neighborhood at night no one in the building would have a way to escape without first fiddling with a lock.

And this is exactly what happened in the train bombing. The bombers knew that the people in the carriages would have no way to escape and that a firebomb would definitely kill everyone on board. It was a mistaken security precaution that drove up the death toll, not the ingeniousness of the attack. News reports tell of people pushing against the locked doors and screaming as they burned alive. These were preventable deaths.

And even worse, without any discussion of emergency exits, my guess is that we will read about other tragedies where the death toll climbs because no one can escape the disaster.

Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter The Chennai Real Estate Market

For the medieval scholars who I know frequent this blog will be happy to know that I've uncovered a missing chapter to Dante's Inferno here in Chennai. In the last couple weeks as Padma and I have been searching the city for an apartment we have come to the realization that the final stage in a soul's journey though hell can easily be accessed though any broker or classified ad in the newspaper.

Let me explain. For those of you who have only had the opportunity to find apartments in sane and honest cities in Europe or the United States, you might not be able to wrap your head around the infernal state of land lording here in Asia. And, no I'm not just talking about the silly questions that brokers and landlords ask before renting, or the way that the price fluctuates seemingly at random. That's just part for the course. The real pain comes after you've found a place you like.

Take this great two-bedroom flat we discovered in the heart of Kilpauk. It was in our price range, had lots of light, decent flooring, bathrooms galore and a functional kitchen. It was more or less perfect for what we wanted and we told the broker that we would take it. He smiled knowingly and said of course we could have it and rubbed his palms together in anticipation of his fat brokering fee. All we were going to have to do was talk to the landlord, pay him a wad of cash and move in. Or so we were told.

The only catch was that the landlord was out of the country and we would have to wait a week for him to return. So we call off the brokers we had been talking to, give up places that were equally good and waited. Until Wednesday of the next week.

At that point we meet the landlord in his office in Anna Nagar (he sells hip-replacement devices for a living). We asked him some basic questions about the place. Such as, why do we need to give a 10 month deposit? Can we paint the place? When we give him the deposit can we get a receipt for the money? They were the sorts of questions that anyone would ask who is about to part with $2500.

He was smug and business like. "If you don't want it, I can find someone else to move in no problem," was his answer to everything we said.

We left feeling unsure about whether or not we really wanted to have him as a landlord--the apartment was nice, but he certainly wasn't. But we had promised to give him a deposit of 5000 rupees to start the transaction.

Then at 9:00 AM this morning my phone rang with the broker on the other end. The apartment was mysteriously not available anymore. Apparently landlords only want tenants who have tons of money and no questions. So we spent another two hours looking at places today and nothing was any good. It looks like this may take longer than we had expected.

Only when we had that realization did it happen. The ground opened up beneath our feet and the concrete let out a poisonous burp of sulfur and tar. When we came to our senses was a dusty manuscript in Dante's own hand. It's first words?

"Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter The Chennai Real Estate Market"

She's Still, She's Still Padma from the Block

The Indian blog world just got a little more crowded, and I'm loving every minute of it. This week on Pass The Roti on the Left Hand Side my favorite desi, Padma Govindan started adding her own leftist thoughts and opinions to their ace team of desi-critics.

Today she's lamenting the CIA-Industrial-Prison complex and the sad fate of an innocent Syrian who was tortured by a Canadian and American coalition of intelligence agencies for ten months before they figured out he was, in fact, the wrong guy.

And yesterday she was examining propper Islamic couture for women as prescribed by the Koran.

And why do we love Padma's postings? Is it only because we burned our fingers over a sacred fire some time last year (before meandering around it seven times), you ask? Well, I admit that speaks favorably for her choice in partners, but would by no means cloud my editorial opinions. Reading her writing is like adding another Salon article every day, the right blend of lefty thinking and moral outrage at the world situation that I just don't get while chasing my own stories of one-eyed children and kidney thieves.

Opening Pandora's Box

First Napster fell, then Limewire got hobbled by the MPAA and it's even difficult to find active streams on BitTorrent. So what am I supposed to do to get a steady rotation of new music on my computer? Well, earlier today I came across a great site that I had never seen before called Pandora-a free internet radio service that lets you design your own radio station. Ok, so it isn't quite as user friendly as downloading whatever MP3 you want and importing it to iTunes, but since I spent most of my time on my computer at home, it's really nice. The really cool thing about pandora is it's genealogical approach to music--if you enter in your favorite aritist's /song's name Pandora searches its database and picks out similar musicians who you may never have heard of. It's a great way to expand your knowledge of music you like.

For the last couple years Woody Guthrie, the godfather of American folk music since the early 1900's--has been in steady rotation on my computer. The only problem is that once my CDs were stolen in Madison, I have only had a few dozen of his songs. But by logging onto Pandora and entering his name I suddenly have a steady stream music by him and his contemporaries.

So if you are feeling a similar music miasma--then check out Pandora.

(This blog post was not sponsored in any way by an internet music service)

Foetal Bones in Ratlam Probably Not Foetal

Newspaper and TV reports around India are reporting that 400 bones found in a pit behind a hospital in Ratlam are probably the remains of aborted fetuses. Yet the photos of the bones seem to indicate that the bones that were recovered came from children or full-grown adults--further clouding the mystery. Is this a case of infanticide, murder, or just clumsy disposal of human remains. Take a look at the bones that the man in the red shirt is holding. I'm not a forensic anthropologist, but it looks like the big one in the middle either came from the world's largest fetus, or is an adult tibia.

RATLAM, Feb. 17 (UPI) -- Local authorities following a tip have found bones and skeletal remains of newborn babies and fetuses at a hospital in the Indian city of Ratlam. Experts identified up to four fetuses among the remains found Saturday at Christian Hospital in Ratlam, prompting discussions of possible abortions taking place, the Press Trust of India said. "The thickness of skulls and bones indicates that the remains were of around three to four neonates or fetuses," district Vaccination Officer RG Kaushal said.

And look at these photos. The bones in the picture look pretty well formed, not the mostly-cartilidge stuff that infants are made out of for a a few months before their bodies begin to harden. Either the on-site anthropologist forgot forensics 101, or he didn't actually take any time to look at the remains.

Feeding the Monster

For those of you still dabbling in the mid-levels of Web 2.0 I've got a bit of fun news for you. On the right side of this post are two new additions to the Trailing Technology web page--options for you to subscribe directly to this blog's feed and get updates in your in-box whenever I post new material. There are two ways to manage the feed, you can subscribe to Feedburner and get updates on all of the blogs you like to read in one place (something that I have still yet to really take advantage of myself) or sign up for e-mail notifications.

I'm blogging more again, so look forward to a a slew of posts this month.

Can Chennai go Wireless?

When Oxford Bookstore in Nungabakkam opened its doors a couple months ago I popped in an set my laptop down on a small plastic table in the cafe to test for wireless. And for a little while the router pumped out a steady 256k unencrypted signal enabling me to work from somewhere other than my home office. It was a great deal for them because I would buy occasional books from their store, dozens of coffees and lunches. It was bliss until the store manager clasped got the sick idea that he could eek a little more money out of me by signing on with Tata Indicom or Reliance to make me pay for wireless by the hour.

So I packed my bags and now alternate my time between the only two free wireless bastions that I know of in the city: Amethyst in Gopalapuram and Anokhi on Chamiers. These two family run establishments are the cream of the crop here in Chennai, and not only have great gardens and to relax in, I have written some of my best pieces while watching roving troupes of Mongeese (Mongooses?) trot by.

The most successful cafes in the United States offer wireless as a free perk. They bank on the fact that people will come there, and order a lot of coffee while taking care of their computing. As far as a business expense goes, all a cafe has to spend is 4000 rupees on a wireless router and another 1000 rupees a month for the broadband service. They make that money back on my patronage alone.

So why is is that Barrista, Coffee World, Cafe Coffee Day and Oxford Bookstore haven't yet figured out that making wireless free means they are going to get more business?

Bloggers in Chennai could make a huge difference on the quality of free-wifi in the city by calling up these cafes and asking them to consider dropping the corporate enabled services and biting the bullet to provide a free service to their customers.

You Like Apartment? You Must Buy Now!

BROKER: Just come upstairs this is a very nice place, I have seen it just myself. I will only show to you good places because I know you foreigners only like things spic and span. I can tell that I know what you like.

ME: This is a great location, but it looks like the place is a bit run down. How often do they scrape off that moss?

BROKER: No moss. It is a nice place.

(Padma, the Broker and I walk upstairs)

PADMA: Wow, this place is huge, and look at the kitchen!

SCOTT: It's definitely better than where we are now. And look, it has three bedrooms. I guess that would mean we have to get more furniture. The only thing is, the walls are pink. We would need to repaint.

BROKER: Yes you like? You buy now. Fourteen thousand rupees. Ten month deposit.

SCOTT: Didn't you say it was only twelve thousand with a six month deposit?

BROKER: Don't listen to what I say on the phone. If you like you rent right now. It is best or us.

PADMA: But we will need to repaint.

BROKER: That will cost you extra. How much more will you pay for paint?

PADMA: What are you talking about? The walls are pink! We will do it ourselves.

BROKER: That is ok, do it yourself, but we increase the rent. Can you put down deposit right now?

SCOTT: AARRGGGAAAGG!AGRAGARG!

BROKER: Why does your husband look so red in the face?

PADMA: I don't think he likes you.

Happy Fundamentalist Valentine

To my very great sadness I missed the chance to blog about the most important Hindu fundamentalist extravaganza of the year while I had my nose buried in a pile of news stories. But luckily the good people at BoingBoing and Security Matters were one step ahead of me when they recorded the latest--and greatest--attacks on Valentine's Day yet.

Sure your remember last year how Shiv Sena got their pink and heart embossed panties up in a bunch over the the sale of valentines day cards in Varanasii and they burned down a couple card carrying stores. Well yesterday they struck again, this time in Jaipur.

In Rajasthan capital Jaipur, Bharatiya Kamgar and Students' Federation of India, organisations affiliated to the Shiv Sena and CPI-M respectively, said they would "blacken the faces" of those making public displays of affection. Another group, Sanskriti Bachao Samiti, said teams of youth would move around college and university campuses to "detect couples abusing public places". [via BoingBoing and Bruce Sterling]

But perhaps even more amusing were the attacks on valentines day floats in Madya Pradesh.

A 'rath' (decorated vehicle) prepared by the protesters, mainly activists of the Dharam Sena, for "forcibly marrying couples found celebrating Valentine's Day" was seized in Jabalpur, Additional Superintendent of Police Manohar Verma told PTI.

It is a sad day when Hindu fundamentalists get upset over forced marriages. I guess they prefer the term "arranged marriage". But please do tell me what a forced marriage on a valentines day float consists of? I have a picture of a many armed blue cupid grabbing young men and women willy-nilly and dragging them around a sacred fire.

Renting in Chennai

Could anyone tell me why renting a new apartment in Chennai is a Herculean task? For the last two weeks my wife and I have been calling numbers in several different classifieds sections of newspapers, trolling Sulekha.com and making calls to chronically elusive brokers. In fourteen days we have only been able to see three houses--and two of those houses we had to visit twice because the broker forgot the key.

On top of all that, half the people in Chennai have ludacris requirements. Here's a sampling of a few standard questions I've been asked so far: Are you Married? Are you a vegetarian? Are you the executive of your own multi-national company? If I were ever to answer no, the person on the other end immediately hangs up after offering the measly excuse "I'll get back to you."

So in the last week I've verified with my wife that we did indeed get married, dropped meat from my diet and founded my own sweatshop supplying cheap undergarments to western outlet stores. Next I fear they are going to ask if I am a professional wrestler.

To top it all off people here ask for a standard deposit of 10 months rent. Add a brokerage fee on top of that (for all the labor the had to put in hanging up on you and losing keys) and it's pretty close to a year up front just to get an entry level apartment. And don't even ask about getting interest on the three thousand dollar deposit--it's your free gift to the landlord.

The whole thing makes me sick.

Thanks for listening to my rant.

Indians Buy Organs with Impunity

For the last week I have been covering the kidney racket scandals here on my blog and occasional posts on Bodyhack, but I was saving some of the juiciest bits for an article on Wired News. And now it's out. When I first started reporting on this story I spoke with several women in Ernavoor who sold their kidneys to brokers and were cheated out of the majority of what they were promised. From there I followed the leads until I ended up in the office of someone who sits on the Transplant Ethics Committee who told me that they had unofficially sanctioned the organ trade for the last 13 years. I have a series of stories due out on this issue later this month on Wired News. Keep tuned in on this blog for updates. - Scott

Indians Buy Organs With Impunity

WIRED NEWS. CHENNAI, India -- Police raids here last month that led to the arrests of at least three alleged dealers in human kidneys have thrown a spotlight on lapses by local medical regulators and recharged the global debate over legalized organ sales.

More than 500 people across the state of Tamil Nadu say they've sold their kidneys to organ brokers, in violation of a ban enacted in 1994. Since then, however, the agency responsible for enforcing the ban has frequently turned a blind eye.

"We do everything in accordance with the letter of the law on paper, but we know that almost all of the documents we see are false," said a member of Tamil Nadu's Transplant Authorization Committee, who spoke to Wired News on condition of anonymity. "It is an open secret. It is either, approve a transplant with forged documents, or a patient is going to die."

Humanitarian arguments excusing black-market organ sales may seem a stretch given the stark danger of exploitation that led to the ban in the first place. Given the failure of India's official system, however, some medical policy experts say some form of legalization may be the best solution.

Under India's 1994 legislation, a state-appointed ethics committee must approve all transplants. The committee must interview all prospective donors before approving each transplant. On average the committee hears 20 requests a week and approves 15. The anonymous committee member said brokers routinely produce forged documents so that the transaction takes on the appearance of legality.

"The major issue as far as India is concerned is getting rid of the brokers. This would mean government regulation or administration of any compensation policy that would be developed," said Transplant News editor Jim Warren, who advocates compensating people at a standard rate and providing state-sponsored health insurance for life.

Such a system, however, might not work if the state is offering less than the global market, says Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a medical anthropology professor at the University of California at Berkeley and founding director of Organs Watch.

"Free health care sounds good on paper, but the problem is that when a country goes legal then it enters into competition with the international market in organ transplant tourism," says Scheper-Hughes. "When the state offers incentives along with a lesser pay scale, but a broker from another country offers slightly more cash without the medical benefits, most people opt for the cash and you run into the same problems you had before legalization."

The Tamil Nadu agency has unofficially sanctioned the illegal organ trade for the past 13 years, the unnamed committee member said. Without illegal organ trade, he says, patients have no hope because in India, organ donation after death is extremely rare. Without incentive, donors are practically nonexistent.

The committee member denies that brokers bribed members of the transplant committee. But local police believe there's more behind the Tamil Nadu organ trade than altruism.

"These brokers are not rich people," said police superintendent Chandrabasu (his only name) of the Crime Branch Central Investigation Department in Chennai. "Out of the (several thousand dollars) they took as their commission from the operation, most of that went to bribes. They would only make about ($300) per transaction in the end."

Flouting the law may have saved lives; but, by allowing brokers to operate with impunity, the Transplant Authorization Committee has allowed poor people to fall victim to organ brokers -- the same problem that was rampant before the 1994 organ donation law.

In January, a group of poverty-stricken women living in a tsunami refugee camp 7.5 miles north of Chennai confessed at a public meeting that they sold their kidneys through brokers.

"When I went to the ethics committee, there were four other women sitting next to me who had also been arranged by the broker," said one of the refugees, known as Rani (her only name), in an interview with Wired News.

She said she received only about $900 of the $3,300 she was promised by the broker who arranged her transplant. "We went up one at a time and all (the committee) did was ask me if I was willing to donate my kidney and to sign a paper. It was very quick."

With no viable solution in sight, the Tamil Nadu Transplant Authorization Committee took matters into its own hands, and authorities are scrambling to respond.

The police have three brokers in custody for forgery, according to superintendent Chandrabasu. The director of Medical Services says his division is investigating reports that 52 hospitals may have been involved in illegal transplants.

Tamil Nadu's health minister last week suggested possible ways of strengthening the government ethics committee. He did not return phone calls requesting comment for this story.

- - -

Scott Carney is a freelance contributor to Wired News and writes for the Bodyhack blog.

Why Do All Muslims in Tamil Nadu Speak Urdu?

Yesterday I was reading my motorcycle its last rites at the mechanic shop a couple hundred meters from my front door. For the last year I've had trouble talking to the man because of an intractable language barrier. But recently things have begun to change. He hired a Muslim assistant from nearby who speaks urdu and since then I've been able to explain exactly how dilapidated by bike really is.

When I asked the mechanic why he spoke Urdu he looked at me as if I had just asked the stupidest question he had ever heard and said "Mai Musalmaan hoon", as if that explained everything.

So call me crazy, but since when did being a Muslim imply that you definitely know Urdu? I've traveled all around India and found that most Muslims do speak it--even in some rural outposts in the middle of nowhere--but it doesn't really make sense to me. Most of these people have never traveled North and must only speak Urdu with their family. Many of their families have lived in Tamil Nadu for dozens of generations. So how did Urdu spread so widely down here?

I'm not complaining. The fact that most Muslims understand Urdu is a huge boon to me and allows me to travel all over the country with the understanding that at least I will be able to speak to someone in every village and t own. I just would like to know how it happened. Was it Mughal influence? Were there huge migrations of Muslims from the North to south? Were there mass conversions/language lessons? I refuse to believe that every muslim in south india is a recent north Indian transplant, and yet I can't understand how the whole community can keep the language intact over the generations.

Enforcing the Kidney Case

On Monday I had a chance to get a sneak peek at the inner workings of law enforcement in Chennai. I was tracking down the story on the organized mob of kidney brokers that have been preying on poor people in chennai for the last 13 years and I was at the Crime Branch Central Investigation Department office in Thenampeyt speaking to the superintendent of police about how they are going to charge the three alleged brokers that they have in custody. While the brokers are clearly in violation of the Transplantation of Human Organs Act (1994) they claimed that they were not empowered to prosecute the brokers under it. The police instead are opting to charge the men only with forgery. To charge them under the act the superintendent told me that only Bava Fathurudeen, the Director of Medical Services was empowered by the government.

So 20 minutes later I was in Fathurudeen's office asking him about what his department was doing to prosecute the kidney brokers. The act reads that anyone caught selling organs, offering organs, advertising for organs, operating as a broker, or makes and financial transaction that offers cash for kidneys is punishable for between two and seven years in prison.

But Fathurudeen didn't seem to know that. Instead he said that his division was busy investigating hospitals across the state and hadn't even heard that the police had a few brokers in custody. In fact, when I told him that news reports are claiming that over 500 people have had their kidney taken by brokers he was a little shocked. "Really, that many?" he asked. Apparently the only people keeping on top of the investigation are the bloggers and reporters covering the case. The authorities just seem like they want it all to go away.

In addition to not really knowing what is going on, Fathurudeen's incoherency extended into his own quixotic and confused way of talking. He was unsure of his words and at least three times during the interview crept--yes, crept--into a back office to confer with his office assistants about what to say. When he came back to speak with me he continued to stutter and looked to other people around him for answers. Incidentally, his secretaries looked quite competent. I have a feeling that they are the ones running the show.

It seems that while I have been able to track down multiple brokers simply by interviewing women who had their kidneys taken, no one in law enforcement seem to be taking the necessary steps to prosecute the crime. Instead, kidney sales are becoming defacto-legal.

I have a story coming out about this tomorrow in Wired News where I reveal just how complicit the government really is. Later in the month I should have a series of articles about the kidney racket.

Photo: Bava Fathurudeen has been blindsided by this case.

Radio Story on Thumbprint Banking

If you couldn't get enough of reading the stories that emerge from my fingertips now is your chance to hear me talk about technology and consumer affairs on New Zealand Radio. A few weeks ago a radio host from ThisWayUp New Zealand contacted me about speaking to him on a the stories I've been writing for Wired and Wired News. We only did one take and it was a little early in the morning for my tongue to shed the "um"'s, "err"'s and inarticulate pauses, but hey, it was my first stint on radio. Next time I promise to do better. If they weren't too aghast with my performance I might turn into a regular contributor.

Check out the radio story here.

Open Letter to Director of Medical Education

This afternoon I will speak to the director of medical education about her role as the head of the ethics board that controlled kidney transplants in Tamil Nadu. At the same time I will also drop by the office of Dr. Chinniyan who controls the records of the one eyed baby, and could release information on her death. This is a copy of the letter I am sending to the DCME.

Dear Director of Medical Education,

For the last six months I have been working on a story for Wired News (www.wired.com) about an illegal clinical trial that may have been going on in Chennai for more than a year. On July 29th a child diagnosed with a rare chromosomal disorder known as cyclopia was born in Kasturba Gandhi Hospital and was registered under the name "Baby of Gomathi". On hearing the reports of the child I traveled to the hospital and spoke to the Superintendent Dhanalakshmi about the child's case. Dhanalakshmi informed me that she suspected it was a random genetic defect and that the child had gone for testing at GH Hospital. However she also stated and that the mother had taken a fertility treatment from an unnamed fertility clinic somewhere in Chennai and that also could have caused the deformity.

She later showed me an internal hospital report that suggested that the mother could have been given an experimental anti-cancer drug known as "cyclopamine" during her pregnancy that is known to cause this sort of deformity. After further investigation with my sources back in the United States, I discovered that several shipments of cyclopamine have been sent to India in the last few years by LC Labs and that it was possible that doctors here in Chennai were running an illegal clinical trial to test the drug.

I believe that the fertility clinic that Gomathi went to for treatment may have dosed her with cyclopamine during illegal medical research. Several years ago Sun Pharmaceuticals covertly tested the anti-cancer drug Letrozole on 400 women telling them that it was a fertility treatment. It is not beyond the realm of reason to think that it could be happening again.

When I returned the Kasturba Gandhi Hospital and informed Dhanalakshmi of the potential ethical problem she denied any possibility of a clinical trial and refused to investigate or share information on the child's case. I urgently request that you share the child's medical records with me (which should now be available since the child died over five months ago) so that I can track down the fertility clinic and be sure that there was no foul play.

You can track down the child's record information from her birth certificate, the information is listed below:

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

Please do what you can to release the child's information. You can contact me via cell phone at 9380185773, or e-mail at sgcarney@gmail.com


Sincerely,




Scott Carney
Wired News

Some Thoughts on Poverty

Yesterday I traveled up to Ervanoor to speak with a group of women who chose to sell their kidneys to brokers. It occurred to me that even after living in India off and on since 1998 that I can still barely grapple with understanding the lenghts that extreme poverty can drive people to.

I will save the salient details for an article I am working on. But I would like to raise a question for my readers.

What would you do if you became a mother at the age of 13 and 13 years later your daughter began having children? How would you respond when your daughter attempts to commit suicide by taking rat poison because her in-laws were harassing her for dowry she couldn't afford? When your daughter had medical bills she couldn't pay and the hospital threatened to kick her out on the street how far would you go? Would you sell a kidney to help her? How would you feel if after the procedure the broker you contacted absconded with most of the money she promised you?

Indian Organ Mafia Busted

Police have begun to make arrests in tightly knit ring of organ smugglers who have been operating in Tamil Nadu, India for the last two to ten years. In the last month there have been a slew of media reports about the organ racket, and while many of the details are still a bit fuzzy the implications are clear.

The first reports came during a public meeting of disenfranchised tsunami survivors in the village of Eranavoor who were airing their disappointment with government efforts to find them shelter and alleviate some of the more crushing aspects of poverty. In that meeting a group of 35 women admitted to having sold their kidneys to brokers and that they were put up in posh hospitals in nearby Chennai for a few days before being cast out on the street without after care. They women were primarily upset because the brokers offered them large sums of money, but ended up cheating them out of the lions share of the rewards.

Since the initial report over 150 people have come forward as victims of kidney brokers. Police from around the state are estimating that the total number of illegal transplants edges closer to 500. There have also been reports that some of the brokers also dealt in liver and bone marrow.

Other reports have suggested that many of the buyers are medical tourists from the middle east who have come to Chennai in order to skip over lengthy waiting lists in their home country while also saving a great deal of money on the surgery.

The police have already begun investigations into some of the hospitals that preformed the operations, yet the magnitude of the racket threatens to destabilize the medical administrations across the state. After a slew of illegal transplants in the 1990s, the government issued a law making it illegal to perform an operation without a thorough review from an ethics board.

The rules specifically state that no transplant should be undertaken if there is payment involved, and that all live transplants should be donations, preferably from family members. The organ mafia seems to have been able to provide false documents for the would be patients.

But it now appears that the state level ethics committee chaired by the Director of Medical Education in Chennai was complicit in the illegal dealings and authorized surgeries that they knew were about to be preformed under sham circumstances.

As one reporter I spoke to today said, "The ethics board would have to have been mad to think that all of these people flying in from around the country for transplants had poor, illiterate tsunami survivors for relatives living in the vicinity of the hospitals." Members of the local ethics boards maintain that they did nothing wrong.

Tomorrow I am going to take a trip up to Eranavoor to see what local people can tell me about the racket. Feel free to send any tips or good wishes to me at sgcarney@gmail.com