It was in the year 1492 AD that Christopher Columbus left the shores
of Spain in search of a new sea route to India with the hope that the
world is round. Exactly 514 years later I am asking this curious
question if the world is flat now after reading the recent book on the
topic. Your first impression is to rubbish this, as there is
"scientific" proof to show that the world is round. One will, at most,
agree that the world has shrunk into a global village, thanks to the
new revolution in communications. Today a child sitting in Bangalore
could access something happening in SanFransisco! Doesn't that make
the world flat-level playing ground for everyone in the world? That is
exactly what I meant by saying that the world is flat now.

One of the famous journalists and TV interviewers recently wrote an
excellent book on the topic after having interviewed one of the Indian
IT bosses. The journalist agreed that there is a level playing ground
for all in the world in the opinion of both of them. The reporter
admired the way the world has changed for the better for mankind in
the last thirty odd years after the computer came into the picture and
then the email and the World Wide Web with very powerful search
engines like the Google et cetera. Globalization meant to them, (the
journalist and the IT boss), that the world has opened for all to
enjoy the resources there for a better living. For example, they
argued, that the brightest kid in a remote part of the world could
aspire to get the best education in any of the top world Universities
of its choice at the flick of a computer button in the house.
Information is available there for the asking, free. What more does
any one need to make this world flat-"a level playing ground- for all"
questioned the reporter agreeing with the IT boss in Bangalore?

So far so good. No body could deny that the world has shrunk to a
small neighborhood with the advent of modern communication systems.
The journalist mentioned above also thanked the "generous" American
investors who advanced money for laying the under sea, under water
cables to help this revolution happen. The third world countries, he
thought, are reaping the harvest without having had to invest in that
effort at all. Right! For the shrunken world to be a level playing
ground for everyone, each and every individual, all over the world,
should be able to get at least two square meals a day, clean water to
drink, and a roof above the head in place of the star lit sky now.
This has not happened at all. The world still is a divided house
between the haves and the have nots, be it in the rich developed
nations or in the so called third world countries. Human kind has to
widen its horizon to make this small neighborhood into a large
brotherhood if the world has to become flat. Humanism is the need of
the hour. Humanism simply means the primacy of man over everything
else in the world. The world should change from below. Small is
beautiful wrote Schumacher, the father of big revolutions in the past.

Until and unless the lowest of the low get the bare minimum needs of
existence there is no meaning in saying that the world has become flat
because the big IT revolution. I was once talking to another IT boss,
who felt that unless wealth is produced it can never be distributed. I
agreed, but told him that all the wealth that these entrepreneurs
produce is distributed among themselves and their staff and share
holders. How much does the cleaner woman get paid in those IT
companies? They do lots of charity, but that does not touch even the
fringe. Let us look at the developed countries. There are billionaires
but the number of people below the poverty line is going up and not
coming down. Billionaires in India are going up in number but the gulf
between the rich and poor is widening by the day. More than two thirds
of the world population, nearly four billion people, gets an average
of less than $200 per year. Just because there are more cell phones in
China than the total population of US does not mean that the poor
Chinese had all the bare minimum facilities to survive. The poor all
over the world pay for their poverty with their lives; poverty is the
mother of all illnesses. Crime is increasing. Oppression, suppression
and denial breed criminals and terrorists all over. That does not mean
that wealth production is a sin. Far from it, very, very far. Wealth
distribution is the problem. Wealth has to be produced but one must
find a way of giving equal opportunity to all to earn at least the
basic minimum. It is the opportunity that is lacking.

Let me give some glaring statistics for India, leave alone the large
African Continent where majority of the worlds' poor live. When many
of us are over fed and suffer from it the majority of Indian masses in
the villages and city slums is under nourished. The sanitary levels
are so bad that a recent survey in India showed that 70% of Indian
kids had only less than 50% blood haemoglobin. The rest of it was
eaten by the hookworms lodged in their gut. ! The "flat" world has
produced enough vaccines to prevent some of the childhood killer
diseases. They are given free, hailed by the media, by the NGOs and
the governmental agencies all over the world. People forget for a
minute that a vaccine can only stimulate the anti-body production in
the child's body. The anti-bodies are basically proteins. If a child
has such bad nutrition that it has only 50% globin in the blood how
could we expect that child to produce enough anti-bodies to get
protected from that illness?

That is one side of the coin. Look at the darker side. Iron pigment in
the blood in a child is needed for the growth of that part of the
brain that looks after the proper growth of the hippocampus major, a
part of the brain that is responsible for the memory and other vital
functions of the nervous system. The hippocampus major for its growth
in a foetus inside the mother's womb also needs the iron pigment from
the mother's blood. Mothers are more impoverished than the kids as
they give what little food they get first to their kids and then eat
the rest, if any is left over! Hence the child is born with poorly
developed hippocampus major and has inherited poor memory. Today's
information over loaded educational system demands the child to
remember so many things and the child falls behind in the school.
Where does this child have the flat level playing ground that the
journalist and the IT baron have been raving about? Be that as it may,
even that kind of education is denied to a sizeable percentage of kids
in India. A recent survey in Delhi showed that 30% of the kids there
(20,00,000 kids) can not go to the Govt. free schools as they did not
have the dress and food needed to attend schools.

There is a still darker side of the coin. We see every day in the
media that killer dieses like heart attacks and diabetes are
increasing in young Indians. The remedy that we are thinking of
(including the Govt. Babus) and of course, the five star hospitals, is
to improve our capacity to screen all Indians, 1.2 billion in all, for
these diseases and intervene early to postpone death. No body thinks
as to why this phenomenon is occurring. The heart and the pancreas and
other organs are all made in the first trimester of pregnancy when the
child is in the womb. An undernourished mother at this stage can not
keep the infant alive. If the child does not die in the womb, thanks
to Nature, Nature tries to make the placenta of the mother very big to
supply some blood to the foetus and the organs of that child which
survives with the skin of its teeth, consequently, are very small in
the first place. This child when it grows up and, if put in a food
plenty atmosphere, would have the mis-match between its small organs
and the big need for greater metabolism. This mis-match (Barker's
Hypothesis) is the cause of precocious diseases. The remedy is not
building more hospitals and spending more money, but in improving the
sanitation and nutrition of for the poor mothers so that their kids
are not born in the first place with defective organs. That would be
flattening the world indeed.

Let us look at the health scenario in the poverty ridden parts of the
world. The deprived immune system of the poor because of the bad
sanitary system and the resultant hookworm and other infections takes
a very heavy toll of lives in the young. The large majority in this
world, which is supposed to be flat, (more than 80%) do not get clean
drinking water. The latter would automatically abolish 80% of the
disease load in hospitals and millions of unnecessary deaths. Clean
food, uncontaminated by human and/or animal excreta, is another rarity
for the poor people. This is the next cause of illness and death.
Even the carbon monoxide in the cooking smoke in villages kills women
by thousands and the children below five years of age of pneumonia.
How do you expect this to change with globalization and IT revolution
and outsourcing of jobs from the west? The IT barons do not take
second class kids to be trained to be good engineers; they want the
best of the lot. Naturally! Is this world flat then?

This brings me to the field of primary education. The kids who go to
IITs in India and the Ivy League Universities in the US are the ones
coming from rich homes with good food and excellent primary education.
Now let me give you the details of the PROBE report of the Govt. of
India in the four large States of the North India. 47% of schools
there do not teach. The teachers run vegetable shops, gambling dens,
and arrack shops there. The children who come to the school will have
to run errands and work in the teachers' houses, baby sitting, helping
with cooking and dishwashing before going home in the evening-may be
on empty stomachs, anyway. Luckily, there are excellent parallel
schools run by the underworld Dons in those areas. Those schools teach
and train students very well. They even help the poorest of the poor
with books, dress and meals et cetera. This is a blessing in disguise
to a few who could afford that at least. This PROBE report stimulated
so much interest in primary education, that a team of experts visited
India from Britain to get some ideas as to how these underworld Dons'
schools are run. I am told that they have taken important tips to
assist the fund starved Inner city schools in London! That much for
the level playing ground (Flat world) in the educational arena.

The Patents Bill, recently passed by the Indian Parliament, to get a
pat from the WTO, will, I hope, not make matters worse for the poor.
Essential drugs will be beyond their reach, but the Govt. said in the
Parliament that they will not allow that to happen. I want to believe
the Minister. It might help indirectly even if the prices went up,
though. Many of those drugs kill more people than they save in the
west, anyway. The recent I.O.M report in the US showed that Adverse
Drug Reactions (ADRs) are the fourth important cause of death there
following heart attacks, cancers, and hospitals and doctors'
interventions! Have the do gooders in the world read the British House
of Commons Report on the maneuverings of the large Pharma companies
released this week? If not read on to find the truth. Then one
understands the ravages of the Patents Act in the flat world. If one
wants to get at the bottom of the real flat world one only has to read
the following book just published. Before paying $ 25 for the book
glance at the New York Times book review section a couple of days ago
There is a book on the best seller list. The blurb tells you that it
is CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HIT MAN BY John Perkins, a former
employee of an International consulting firm, published by
Barrett-Koehler. He talks about the corporatocracy which would be an
eye opener to all those that are interested in human welfare.

Corporatocracy is a new addition to the long list of democracy,
autocracy, plutocracy, monarchy and the other economic isms. Long live
human kind on this planet bereft of all cracies except humanocracy
(economic humanism). The world still is round with less than five
percent of the population sitting on the top with 95% of the wealth
and the rest hanging on without knowing where their next meal comes
from. The Mathew Law still works in this world. He who hath shall be
given. While the rich sit on the top the poorest of the poor drop down
from below to the bottomless pit to perish for ever due to hunger,
malnourishment and disease. Science has been proven right. The world
still is round.

- Show quoted text -



On 4/27/05, BM Hegde wrote:
> I shall try Avinash.
> I also send you an editorial that I wrote on the WPH.
> love,
> monappa
> "WHOLE PERSON HEALTH SUMMIT 2005 AND THE SECOND QIGONG
> SUMMIT 2005 IN WASHINGTON DC."
>
> Nanotechnology, a method primarily of molecular manufacturing, for the
> creation of tools, materials and machines that might eventually enable
> us to "snap together the fundamental building blocks of Nature easily,
> inexpensively, and in most of the ways permitted by the Laws of
> Physics". It all began with a talk by Nobel Laureate physicist,
> Feynman; in 1959 titled "there is plenty of room at the bottom."
> Conventional thinking is that nanotechnology would revolutionize
> modern medical science.
> One of the founder fathers of nanotechnology research, Prof. Rustom
> Roy, emeritus professor of material sciences at the Penn State
> University, thinks otherwise and feels that the reductionist science
> of modern medicine will take medicine on the wrong path, if it has not
> already done so. I think he is dead right in his assessment. He had
> recently put together an international seminar on the theme of WHOLE
> MAN HEALING in Washington DC during the weekend of 14th through 17th
> of April 2005, after having done extensive meticulous research on many
> of the complementary systems of medicine himself using the yardsticks
> of nanoscience.(1) Many other organizations, led by the Penn State
> University, chipped in to make this a great success.
> I had the privilege of delivering a plenary talk on The Clinician's
> view of Whole Man Healing, wherein the advantages, of looking at the
> human being as a whole vis-à-vis looking through the tinted glass of
> reductionism and organ based specializations, were demonstrated. The
> highlight of the talk was the documentation of "mode locking" between
> breathing and heart's function viewed through heart rate variability.
> With continuous wavelet transform (CWT) pattern of colored computer
> display through wavelet coefficient analysis of ECG strips, we have
> been able to make better diagnosis and accurate prognostication
> possible in cardiac ailments.(2) The talk also showed the way to
> future research in holism in human wellness and illnesses.
> Well researched papers on various complementary systems, ranging from
> the ancient Indian wisdom of Ayurveda, successfully practised for
> "times out of mind" in many parts of the world, the Chinese Qi Gong,
> acupuncture, homeopathy, naturopathy, spiritual healing, another great
> Indian system of preserving health, Yoga, and even the good that
> prayers, reiki, pranic healing, Sufi healing techniques of Iraq
> (including the fast wound healing demonstrated by one of the US
> researchers as a subject) and other such methods do were presented by
> speakers from all over the world. Effect of Yoga in neuro-psychiatric
> disorders was an excellent paper from the U'sity of California in San
> Diego by David Shannof Khalsa.(3) Prof. Roy's paper on the structure
> of water and its therapeutic values was the high light of the seminar.
> Homeopathy could benefit from this scientific explanation. Avinash
> Patwardhan of Arlington gave an impressive talk on what is true Yogic
> life style for good health.
> Bala Manyam, professor and director of research at the Texas
> University, Bhushan Patwardhan, a molecular biologist from Pune,
> India, Hari Sharma of the Ohio State U'sity along with Prakash, a
> practising Ayurvedic physician from Dehradune, India gave excellent
> scientific data on the various facets of Ayurveda in a special session
> sponsored by the Chopra foundation. Kenneth Freidman, of the Clifton
> Mining, presented extensive data to show the "Myths of the Free Market
> Economy" on the future of Pharma company products. Effie Poy Yew Chow,
> President of the East West Academy of Healing Arts, California gave an
> impressive demonstration of the powers of Qi Gong. Element water was
> discussed by Jon Stout, Oleg Yasko of the US and Chao Liu of Tokyo
> Denki University. Larry Dossey, formerly of the National Institute of
> Health and the present editor of The Journal of Health and Healing,
> gave two passionate talks on whole man healing.
> Just as manufactured products are made from atoms, the properties of
> anything depend more on the atomic structure and much less on its
> chemistry, e.g.: if atoms are rearranged coal becomes diamond and sand
> turns into computer chips. That should give us an idea as to why we
> have invented this monster of adverse drug reactions that has been the
> fourth important cause of death even in the US.(4) The future of our
> race on this planet depends on holistic research in the field of
> health sciences, which could do most good to most people most of the
> time. Let us get out of our cocoon with our holier-than-thou attitude
> towards other systems of medical care. Research should try to separate
> the wheat from the chaff in all those systems for the benefit of human
> kind. This initiative of Prof. Roy should be picked up by other
> researchers in the conventional modern medical field.
> B. M. Hegde,
> Retd. Vice Chancellor, India
> hegdebm@gmail.com
> References:
> 1) Roy R. www.wholepersonhealing.com
> 2) Hegde BM. Heart rate variability- a new diagnostic and prognostic
> tool. Kuwait. Med. J 2003; 35: 208-210.
> 3) Shannof-Khalsa DS. The effects of unilateral forced nasal
> breathing on cognitive performance. Int. J Neurosci. 1991; 57:
> 239-249.
> 4) Starfield B. Is US Health Really the Best in the World? JAMA.2000;
> 284: 483-485.
>
>
> On 4/27/05, Sankhya wrote:
> > I could not open the wps file by any means available to me. Please
> > send me the article again in MS Word or as plain text file.
> >
> >
> > On 4/26/05, BM Hegde wrote:
> > > Dear Avinash,
> > > The article did not go earlier.
> > > love,
> > > monappa
> > >
> > > On 4/23/05, Sankhya wrote:
> > > > Dear Dr. Hegde,
> > > >
> > > > I am sorry I could not respond earlier. The very next day of my
> > > > presentation saw my mother (who is visiting me) in the hospital and
> > > > she is currently hanging to life by a thread.
> > > >
> > > > It was and is such a pleasure to make an acquaintance with you. You
> > > > might turn out to be one of those few with whom I may be able to
> > > > communicate comfortably in my out of the beaten way thinking
> > > > (infinitismal and yet finite value to Zero, elimination of the notion
> > > > gravitational attraction from the field of theoretical physics, just
> > > > to give two examples).
> > > >
> > > > I enjoyed your public talk as well as private conversations. However
> > > > just as I become oftimes taciturn and laconic you tend to flood
> > > > audience with huge and diverse data at a breathtaking pace, habits,
> > > > that do not meet "user friendly" certification.
> > > >
> > > > Hope we nurture a lasting friendship. My last personal friend from
> > > > Karnataka was G.A. Kulkarni, who lived in Dharwad, taught English and
> > > > wrote his literature in Marathi. Had he written in English, I seldom
> > > > doubt he could have easily made to Nobel in literature.
> > > >
> > > > I have spoken with my father-in-law about your possible approach. He
> > > > promised to do his best though he pointed out that he was aging pretty
> > > > fast, 74 that he already is.
> > > >
> > > > --
> > > > With warm regards and wishes for a good day,
> > > > I am, truly yours,
> > > >
> > > > Avinash Patwardhan M.D., M.S., Fellow A.I.S.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > >
> > > --
> > > bmhegde
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> > --
> > With warm regards and wishes for a good day,
> > I am, truly yours,
> >
> > Avinash Patwardhan M.D., M.S., Fellow A.I.S.
> >
>
> --
> bmhegde
>


--
bmhegde


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