Erstwhile blogger is for many reasons, but now I have confirmation that it s obviously genetic; her Uncle is Arunabha Ghosh, who recently accompanied rapper Jay-Z to Africa. Uncle Arunabha (do you like how I totally mooched him?) is involved with many worthy issues:

He worked on the rights of indigenous people, international migration, and the rise of culturally intolerant movements around the world.

He recently delivered a lecture on the integration of immigrants at the Universal Forum of Cultures in Barcelona. [ ] What caught my attention and what Saheli just blogged about, however, is water:
Over a billion people lack access to clean drinking water. Every day including today, Christmas Eve over 4000 children lacking good drinking water will die of diarrhea-causing diseases.

It s hard to wrap our heads around such astonishing statistics, or understand what causes this great gaping need, and how simple some of the solutions are. Last month MTV put up a set of videos in which Shawn Jay-Z Carter went on a tour of a home and a school in Africa to understand the basic issues. He was accompanied by his homeboy, my uncle, Arunabha Ghosh, a Policy Specialist and one of the authors of the UNDP Human Development Report.

Arunabha has spent the last few years tirelessly running around the world, raising the alarm about development needs and spreading the word about development solutions. Last week he addressed an Indian Parliamentary forum on national water issues.[ ]

Saheli does a fantastic job of breaking down the plight of children who spend hours fetching something which most of us shamefully take for granted, as (wasting 3-7 gallons per minute).

See for yourself, on her More Fantasticness blog, . And if you want to know what I want , see for yourself, .
Not long ago Abhi, fresh from watching Al Gore s documentary, us to the consequences of global warming for the subcontinent.

And they are as dire as he predicted. In a crisis that has mobilized India s High Altitude Warfare School (HAWS) and Snow and Avalanche Studies Establishment (SASE), the Shiva lingam at Amarnath has failed to form this year. The glacier cover of the cave has receded by 100 meters, and there has been insufficient snowfall.

At the onset of the annual pilgrimage season, when hundreds of thousands of pilgrims trek up to the cave to see the lingam, temple officials faced a major problem. Consider the two pictures below. The first shows the lingam in a normal year.

The second shows the lingam site on May 6, 2006:
But when pilgrims and journalists arrived, a full five-foot lingam had mysteriously appeared in place even though there had been no snowfall. It was immediately that this lingam was a crude fake:

Though the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board (SASB) on Sunday said the lingam was natural like every year s, it does not take more than a look at it to conclude otherwise. In the absence of a natural lingam , someone thought it was better to put together one so that pilgrims are not disappointed and the pilgrimage, like every year, earns the success tag.

And indications are that the SASB was in the thick of action.

The operation would have worked but for the lingam s finish. The natural smoothness was not there and dirt and imprints (though partially covered by a fresh layer of snow) gave away the story.

Sources said in all probability J K Governor S.K. Sinha too knew about the lingam as he chairs the SASB.

He had himself seen the lingam twice on May 16 and on June 11. Still, he kept quiet.

Now, with the media on the case, the SASB has changed its story, the lingam was tampered with, but only because it formed smaller than usual:

In a fresh twist to the controversy surrounding the Shivlingam in the Holy cave of Amarnath, the Chief Executive of the shrine board admitted that it was tampered with even as religious leaders and the saffron brigade demanded that the truth be made public.

We received some complaints that some people had brought some snow and put on top of the usual Shivling. We don t defend that but this is something which has happened in the past, Arun Kumar, Chief Executive of the Shree Amarnath Shrine Board and Principal Secretary to the Jammu and Kashmir Governor said. He, however, was quick to add, Our belief is that the Shivlingam has naturally formed howsoever small it maybe.

It appears to be an act of sacrilege if the himlingam has been raised manually or mechanically as reported by a section of the media. Keeping in view the sentiments of devotees, I demand that a sitting Supreme Court Judge be appointed to find out the truth so that the guilty are punished, Charri Mubarak custodian Mahant Deependra Giri said on Sunday. He expressed concern over an artificial, chemically-made ice lingam being installed in the cave and sought the Centre s intervention.

All jokes about shrivelled lingams aside, this is a pretty remarkable example of the effect of global warming and what we are doing to our planet. If I were Lord Shiva, I wouldn t be pleased either.
I absolutely love animals: sometimes I feel that I ve learned almost as much from animals as from human beings about how to live and conduct myself in the world. So a tip on the News page (thanks, WGIIA) about the recent of one of the three elephants at the Los Angeles Zoo has got me deeply saddened. Gita suffered from foot ailments, as apparently many captive elephants do.

She d undergone surgery earlier this year and was making what zookeepers believed was good progress toward . But last Saturday they found her in her area lifeless, with her legs folded beneath her. She was 48 years old and had lived at the zoo since 1959.

The photo shows a priest from the Malibu Hindu Temple (lately of Britney Spears ), Krishnama Samudrala Charyulu, giving prayers last Wednesday at a service for Gita (she was an Asian elephant) held at the entrance of the zoo. The service was the idea of activists who oppose keeping elephants in captivity and who have been waging a battle against the city of Los Angeles. Apparently Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa failed to veto a $50m improvement in the elephants lodgings.

The activists believe elephants should be kept in wildlife sanctuaries, not zoos, which seems reasonable enough; so they actually exposed the expansion of the zoo exhibit on grounds that it would still be too small and that the city had more pressing needs for the money.
There seems to be some disagreement as to how the elephants are protected from foot ailments that stem from walking on hard surfaces. From the Los Angeles Times :

But she also had become a symbol for impassioned animal rights activists who argued that her crippling problems were the result of treading on concrete surfaces in the zoo for years, and that she would never completely recover.

(All the zoo s elephants now pad around on soft dirt surfaces.)

It has become evident that the LA Zoo cannot provide the space, exercise or social enrichment needed to preserve the elephants health and well being. They are kept in woefully inadequate quarters and are forced to stand on hard surfaces such as concrete or hard-packed earth.

The organization says that only one elephant was on exhibit at the L.A. Zoo, while Gita and another were kept for two years in a temporary off-exhibit area with only one-tenth of an acre for the two of them.

If so this is quite damning, as the Bronx Zoo in New York has three Asian elephants on two acres, and has decided to the exhibit altogether once these elders pass away.
So why not support the $50 expansion which, according to LCA itself, will increase the elephant area to 3.5 acres?

I understand the arguments against keeping elephants in zoos altogether, but zoos can be better or more poorly designed and run. Isn t it somewhat inflexible to oppose the chance to improve the exhibit to state of the art standards, a process that a more accomodating activist group could even be invited to take part in?
Most of all, I go back to what I get from exposure to animals, which is perspective and a sense of peace.

Many a time I ve taken a personal time out at the zoo, just to be in the company of other species and get my head straight. So I see value in exposing people, especially children, to animals at close range. Taking animals away from city zoos and placing them in rural wildlife sanctuaries makes seeing them a much more complex and expensive project.

It means that wealthier families will find it much easier to expose their children to animals, while poorer families whose children often grow up in more precarious and violent settings, and can benefit from encounters will animals will find it much more difficult. There s something profoundly democratic in going to a city zoo and seeing the shared joy and wonder on the faces of children of all backgrounds. If we can really invest in giving zoos the space and resources to honor the animals needs, I think that is money well spent.

In the meantime, pour a little of your drink onto the ground in honor of Gita the pachyderm to help speed her in her transition to ancestry.
Abhi the documentary An Inconvenient Truth earlier this week. I just saw it, and I think it s beautifully done as well I would strongly recommend it.

Even if you don t think much of Al Gore as a politician, the science is convincing and all the pictures of vanishing glaciers and dried-up inland lakes ( ; the !) are terrifying.
In the film, Gore refers several times to the potential catastrophic consequences of Global Warming in the Indian subcontinent.

It s somewhat ironic, because countries on the Indian subcontinent are far smaller contributors of greenhouse gases than the developed countries (India s per capita emissions are ) but you can be sure that the subcontinent will feel its effects. As I understand it, there are two major consequences of global warming for the Indian subcontinent that are essentially guarantees, and a third which seems to me to be a maybe:
First guarantee: significant amounts of land in the Bay of Bengal are going to disappear if oceans rise even 1 foot, as is predicted to occur in the next 50 years. Most estimates I ve found give the number at about 15% of the total landmass of Bangladesh, with a comparable loss of land in West Bengal on the Indian side.

As many as 60 million people will be displaced in both countries.
In Orissa, the receding coastline is already a fact of life. In the Satabhaya region of the Orissa coastline, according to , the shore has moved 2.

5 km inland over the past 25 years, displacing a number of villages. And it continues to move. (The article doesn t specify what could be causing the rising sea levels in that specific part of the state.

)
In the short run, scientists are already noting a pattern of a growing number of low pressure systems (leading to cyclones) in the Bay of Bengal in the post-Monsoon season. These are expected to worsen meaning that extreme storms may force mass evacuations of coastal regions well before the land itself disappears. (See for more.

) Also, erosion caused by the storms is already seriously affecting these regions. As Banglapedia puts it:

Flooding and erosion/sedimentation Bangladesh experiences moderate to severe flooding every year. Frequent storm surges also cause severe coastal flooding.

The flood situation is further aggravated by the high tide in the Bay of Bengal. It has been seen with a 1.4m rise in sea level water level rises to about 6m near the meghna estuary.

Even with a 0.2m rise in sea level, water level rises between 4.5 and 5m near the estuary.

Since most of the coastal area is below 1.5m above mean sea level (MSL) and the area near the confluence of the ganges and Meghna is below 3m above MSL, both depth and area of inundation will increase extensively. However, the water level in the Ganges and Upper Meghna also increases significantly due to backwater effect as a result of changes in the hydrodynamics of flow.

Hence the severity and extent of flooding will increase even in the upstream portion of the river. On the other hand, a rise in sea level will also move the shoreline landward and this will result in loss of farmland, leading to the shifting of agriculture, reduced crop yields, and loss of cultivable areas. Increased flooding will cause problems with existing irrigation and drainage system too.

( )

Even small changes in the mean sea level could lead to a cascade of problems for the Bengal delta, because the water systems are all interdependent. Even before the land disappears, the damage caused by increased flooding is expected to make a lot of coastal land essentially uninhabitable.
Tyler Cowen, when he was in India a couple of years ago, .

It s a little in the heartless economist vein, but it s worth reading.
And here s a about attempts that are being made in Bangladesh to raise awareness about the coming catastrophe.
The second guarantee: The glaciers will disappear, leaving all of the subcontinent s major rivers dry.

last fall, though he didn t get much of a response to this shocking fact at the time. These rivers, as everyone knows, provide the vast majority of water to India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh. (And glacial water also feeds China; in total, 40 percent of the world s population is dependent on water from the Himalayas.

) The retreat of the Himalayan glaciers is not a prediction; it s happening. The only question is when the effects will start to kick in. But I would say that even if it takes 100 years for the water supply to crash, it s not to early to start doing something about it.

But here s the irony: in the short run, the rapidly melting glaciers may actually cause flooding in the plains.
The third maybe consequence is that the whole weather pattern could change if ocean currents change as a result of rising water temperatures. The monsoon could disappear entirely (or it could double in intensity!

). There s not much to say about this because no one really knows except that it reminds us how little we really know about what is happening.
In An Inconvenient Truth Gore talks about an instance where scientists were surprised by the rapidity of change.

In Antarctica, in 2002, the over the course of a few weeks. No one predicted that a chunk of solid ice the size of Rhode Island could break up so fast. But now scientists think it was probably caused by earlier partial melting, leading to the creation of under the ice, that exponentially speed up the break-up of ice shelves.

Those same moulins are being , suggesting that large melt-offs may be imminent there too.
In effect, the predictions for ocean level rise over the next fifty years may be understatements: it could be much sooner than that. Scientists have been unpleasantly surprised by things like this before, and may be again.

How to dispose of a dead body is carefully prescribed by religion. Burial is popular in the U.S.

, but a new book called makes clear that unregulated burials shunt body parts into a ghoulish trade. In a morbid sense, it s a triumph of capitalism:

Every year human corpses meant for anatomy classes, burial, or cremation find their way into the hands of a shadowy group of entrepreneurs who profit by buying and selling human remains. While the government has controls on organs and tissue meant for transplantation, these body brokers capitalize on the myriad other uses for dead bodies that receive no federal oversight whatsoever: commercial seminars to introduce new medical gadgetry; medical research studies and training courses; and U.

S. Army land-mine explosion tests. A single corpse used for these purposes can generate up to $10,000.

[ ] The corpses including those donated for medical research and those left unclaimed at morgues are cut up into parts, not unlike chickens, and distributed through a complex network of suppliers, brokers and buyers, Cheney writes she takes a tour of a factory where crushed human bone is turned into precision-tooled orthopedic tools their loved ones are destined for, among other things, testing of anti-mine protective armor she tells the grim story of how mishandled bodily tissue killed a young man who underwent a routine orthopedic operation using bone from a cadaver. The killer? Deadly bacteria from the bone s donor, a young man who shot himself and went undiscovered for almost a day.

[ ]

Many Hindus and Buddhists practice cremation due to hygiene and beliefs about detachment and reincarnation. However, Christian and Muslim theologians have long opposed the practice, Christians because of a belief in literal resurrection:
Many people thought cremation was at best irreligious and at worst barbaric. The strongest opponents came from the Catholic Church which banned cremation for its members in 1886, and did not finally remove the ban until the 1960s.

[ ]
In an Instruction issued in 1926, the [of the Vatican] referred to cremation as a barbaric custom a practice repugnant to the natural sense of reverence due to the dead. [ ] Cremation also has non-theological issues. In India, some object because it destroys murder evidence.

Even cops are perpetrators:

the blatant murders continue behind the high walls of police stations, as it has now happened in the case of Harjeet Singh, a Dalit youth, in the Batala area. Here the policemen even cremated his body without following proper procedure the police force still continues to be seeped in colonial mentality. Being true inheritors of the British legacy, they think that the only way to govern the country is through the use of brutal force.

[ ]

Mercury is a highly toxic heavy metal that has been linked to damage to the brain and nervous system. It is estimated that crematoria release up to 16% of the UK s total mercury emissions. [ ] Parsis have customarily relied on vultures, but the bird population is dwindling:

In recent years, India s vulture population is estimated to have declined by as much as 90 percent, which has affected the rituals surrounding the mortal remains at the towers of silence.

In Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay and home to more than 50,000 of India s 76,000 Parsis, the disposal of dead bodies is becoming a problem. Gone are the days when about 70 to 100 birds would swarm at the tower of silence. Today only a few birds come.

[ ] conservationists are now warning that a drug [diclofenac] used to treat sick cows is killing the scavenging vultures by the millions. They say the drug is responsible for a 97 percent decline in the species over the past decade [ - thanks, ]

But there s a new, secure, environmentally-friendly solution on the horizon. It s called promession, and it freeze-dries the corpse using liquid nitrogen.

: Promession involves freezing the body and coffin to -18C then dipping it in liquid nitrogen at -196C. Both body and coffin become so brittle that by the time they are placed on a vibrating pad, they disintegrate into a powder. A metal separator then picks out metals such as artificial hips and mercury dental fillings to be put in a biodegradable coffin.

The powder is put into a small box made of potato or corn starch and placed in a shallow grave, where it will disintegrate within six to 12 months. Relatives would then be encouraged to plant a tree on the grave which would feed off the compost formed from the body. [ ] The process shakes a corpse into sand, like in reverse.

Freeze-drying: you heard it here first. Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Robert Frost,
The current issue of magazine has a spectacular by Brendan Corr on shipbreaking in Bangladesh: huge ships driven at full speed onto the beach at high tide, armies of workers trudging out to strip them with bare hands. The physical danger is intense; the health and environmental consequences are potentially dire, as these tankers and container vessels and cruise liners are loaded with asbestos and other contaminants.

In Bangladesh, according to the text, shipbreaking employs 200,000 people. Amazingly, it yields 80 percent of Bangladesh s steel production. So this massive and hazardous recycling effort generates a vital input into the economy.

You can provide your own comment about macroeconomic trade-offs.
Shipbreaking has been a major activity in South Asia for years now; here is a 2000 by uber-reporter William Langewiesche on the Alang beach in Gujarat, which favorable tidal conditions have turned into a surreal junkyard of corroding behemoths. Now, though, it seems that Chittagong has outflanked Alang with even cheaper labor.

This week, the Clemenceau, once France s biggest aircraft carrier, was forced to break its journey to Gujarat after legal challenges in both countries. President Chirac has now the Clemenceau back home.
Meanwhile the 315 meter-long cruiseship France, is to be on its way to Chittagong though the Bangladesh government has demanded it be decontaminated first.

Now called Lady Blue, the ship is registered in the Bahamas by a Norwegian company owned by a Malaysian company owned by a Hong Kong company. This opaqueness, standard in the shipping industry, makes accountability hard to enforce.
Yesterday when I was watching Oprah who selflessly gave up time, money and jobs to head South and volunteer with the victims of Katrina, the moment I broke down was right after was lauded for her work in rescuing emaciated, terrified dogs who had been locked in closets.

I mourn for all of Katrina s casualties, but something about an animal being unable to scrawl, HELP on a roof makes me extra .
When I was in college, before I had my first , tigers were what I adored. I took an International Law class at Davis just because we were going to focus on the and treaties.

I did all of my assignments on India s tigers, and winced as I learned more about their situation. That was over a decade ago, but from ye olde BBC still makes me happy:
Four alleged poachers in the western Indian state of Rajasthan have confessed to killing tigers in the Ranthambore National Park, police say. The hunters, who were arrested last week, have admitted to killing nine tigers and one leopard, police said.

Mock it if you care to, but it s a start. The government of Rajasthan has also transferred two senior park officials for their inability to protect the only cats I ve ever loved. We haven t much time:
Tiger numbers at Ranthambore dropped to 26 from 47 last year, a census showed.

Urgent action is needed to stop Indian tigers becoming extinct, activists say. At least Ranthambore still HAS tigers. According to environmentalists, Rajasthan s Sariska sanctuary has all of zero, down from over a dozen in the May before last s census.

Restocking the park is under consideration.
Police in the town of Kota near Ranthambore, about 200km (125 miles) south of the city of Jaipur, told the BBC the arrests resulted from information obtained during another investigation.

We arrested two poachers for hunting wild turtles and it led to the arrest of two more hunters, from where the details about the tiger killings unfolded, police superintendent Alok Vashisth said.

What? Someone important wasn t above the law? Mr Vashisth said one of those arrested was a village chief from the neighbouring state of Madhya Pradesh.

Good.

These tigers are the most feared of all tiger species, since they have been known to resort to hunting humans for food. In fact, the record for the most people killed by any large animal goes to one of these tigers, called the Champawat Tiger, who alone devoured 436 people in the Kumaon area of India during the 19th century.

Many countries look at their as a measure of how strong their economy is and whether it s expanding or contracting, but also to give an idea as to the standard of living in the country:

GDP is defined as the total value of final goods and services produced within a territory during a specified period (or, if not specified, annually, so that the UK GDP is the UK s annual product). GDP differs from gross national product (GNP) in excluding inter-country income transfers, in effect attributing to a territory the product generated within it rather than the incomes received in it
Blah Bla Bla Blah Blah. I m not freakin Alan Greenspan and I ve never taken an economics course in my life.

What else you got? on economic indicator of choice. It is a measure that in my opinion is ready for export.

The GNH, or Gross National Happiness:

What is happiness? In the United States and in many other industrialized countries, it is often equated with money.
Economists measure consumer confidence on the assumption that the resulting figure says something about progress and public welfare.

The gross domestic product, or G.D.P.

, is routinely used as shorthand for the well-being of a nation.
But the small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has been trying out a different idea.
In 1972, concerned about the problems afflicting other developing countries that focused only on economic growth, Bhutan s newly crowned leader, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, decided to make his nation s priority not its G.

D.P. but its G.

N.H., or gross national happiness.

Bhutan, the king said, needed to ensure that prosperity was shared across society and that it was balanced against preserving cultural traditions, protecting the environment and maintaining a responsive government. The king, now 49, has been instituting policies aimed at accomplishing these goals.

Their economic theory isn t that far out is it?

I am not naive enough to think that they ll get later this week and am not ready to declare that I am moving to Bhutan, but why not consider the merits of this idea? Every economic statistic thrown at you about a given country might tell you that the population as a whole is becoming wealthier. That doesn t mean that are any better in terms of quality or happiness does it?

We have to think of human well-being in broader terms, said Lyonpo Jigmi Thinley, Bhutan s home minister and ex-prime minister. Material well-being is only one component. That doesn t ensure that you re at peace with your environment and in harmony with each other.