Tag: US Politics

WORLD INTHAVAARAM, 2023-40

About: the world this week, 1 October to 7 October 2023; Trouble in the US; Bedbug attack in Paris; Father of India’s Green Revolution; The Noble Prizes; and the Asian Games.

Everywhere

The United States Speaks

In a shocking event, for the first time in the history of The United States (US) of America, Republican leader Kevin McCarthy earned the dubious distinction of ‘the first ever House Speaker to be removed from office’.

Came the comment, “It took 15 rounds of voting for McCarthy to become the House Speaker in January, but only one to get ousted from the job”.

McCarthy lost a no-confidence vote, 216-210, with eight Republicans voting with 208 Democrats to end his tumultuous nine-month-long leadership of the Republican majority in the lower chamber of Congress.

The Republicans criticised McCarthy for mishandling government spending and budget fights since the Republicans took over the House in January. And accused him of cutting a ‘secret side deal’ with US President Joe Biden on providing additional funding to Ukraine, which has become a source of outrage. McCarthy denied the existence of any such deal.

The Democrats unanimously voted to oust McCarthy as he shares a close relationship with former US President Donald Trump. And he had recently launched an impeachment inquiry into Biden for benefiting from his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings, among other issues.

The House was then adjourned for the week and might reconvene on 10 October to discuss McCarthy’s successors. Given the deep polarisation within not only the House but also the Republican Party, the path to electing a new Speaker remains uncertain.

Meanwhile, the US is grappling with an outbreak of ‘migrant infiltration’ into the country from across the Mexican Border and authorities are overwhelmed. Thousands have crossed into the US from Mexico, in recent weeks, and border cities are bulging with people.

Increases in violence in certain regions of Mexico has fuelled the migration. People arriving at the US border have the right to request asylum without being criminalized, turned back, used for political stunts or separated from their children. Asylum -under US Law-is a form of protection granted to individuals who can demonstrate that they are unable or unwilling to return to their country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.

Paris: Bug Attack

France’s Paris is under attack – by bedbugs, with a widespread outbreak occurring across public spaces.

From hotel rooms to trains to movie theatres, Paris seems to be crawling with bedbugs. Reports of the bugs plaguing hotels and rental apartments first flared up over the summer, and now Paris is coping with an infestation just 10 months before it is set to host the 2024 Summer Olympics.

Full-grown bedbugs are brown or reddish-brown with an oval-shaped body about the size of an apple seed, while their young are much smaller, translucent or whitish-yellow, and can be very hard to see. Bedbugs come out at night to feed on human blood.

Mosquitoes and Bedbugs are after our blood. Watch out!

Father of India’s Green Revolution: India Grows

Towards the end of last week, probably one of the greatest Indians in the history of India passed away in Chennai, Tamilnadu, India, at the ripe old age of 98, on age-related issues. And maybe many did not notice his greatness at all.

He is agronomist, agricultural scientist, plant geneticist, Mankombu Sambasivan (M S) Swaminathan, who led India’s dynamic push, in the 1960s, to become self-reliant and food grain surplus, promoting the use of hybrid varieties and chemical fertilisers as the need of the hour. He prevented India from ‘certain starvation’ and is deservingly called the Father of India’s Green Revolution.

He could achieve this stupendous outcome due to two other visionary Leaders- who have passed to the legions above: then Prime Minister (PM), Lal Bahadur Shastri and then Minister for Agriculture and Food, Chidambaram Subramaniam – called the architect of the Green Revolution.

On another track, the PM-Minister duo were also responsible for bringing in Dr Verghese Kurien who founded the National Dairy Development Board, which ushered the Indian White Revolution or Operation Flood, making India self-sufficient in milk and milk products.

First, a grain of history.

India’s struggle to meet its food grain demand first began in the year 1937 when Burma (now Myanmar) separated from British India. The problem got accentuated when India lost West Punjab and East Pakistan – to Pakistan / Bangaldesh – during Independence and Partition in 1947. Burma was a crucial region for growing pulses, East Pakistan was a rice bowl and West Punjab, which had a well-networked canal system, was a wheat granary.

Before Independence, under British Rule, in the year 1943, Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered food grains meant for eastern parts of India to be diverted to the British troops in World War II. This resulted in a deadly man-made famine in Bengal causing deaths of millions of people, besides aggravating and extending India’s food shortage problem until the early 1950s.

Indian agriculture sector’s struggle after Independence was also due to the farm sector being neglected in favour of industries. Imports of food grains affected agriculture as farmers did not have any incentive to produce more.

A few in the Government believed that it was cheaper to import food grains than to incentivise domestic agricultural production. As a result, wheat prices dropped sharply until 1963, preventing any private investment in wheat-growing regions, which held promise in the 1950s. During the period 1961-65, food grain production growth halved from nearly 3% in 1955-60 as India depended on rain-fed agriculture.

The ‘young’ Government of India then signed a long-term agreement with the United States under the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act, also called Public Law (PL) 480, to get food aid, in 1954.

Under the program India got little rice. And the wheat supplied was so bad that critics called it ‘unfit for pigs’. Gradually the US began pulling political strings over food supply, making it contingent to India’s support of US action in Vietnam. India became entirely depended on the US for food – not imports that India paid for.

(The agreement was signed a few more times before the US ended it in the late 1960s. This was because PM Lal Bahadur Shastri and then PM Indira Gandhi were unwilling to make policy changes, especially to allow privatisation of the industrial sector, in return for food aid).

The food situation in India in the 1960s was pathetic, with food production dropping continuously and reaching a nadir in 1966. In the background was a burgeoning population – more mouths to feed every year. Until 1965, when the population was more than 500 million, wheat output in India was barely 12 million tonnes. India was a country infamously living ‘ship-to-mouth’ on imported US grain. The situation was so bad that the US Scientists predicted deaths of millions due to starvation in the 1970s. However, that prediction did not happen, as in the decades since annual wheat production has multiplied almost 10 times to 112 million tonnes.

In the year 1964, Lal Bahadur Shastri took over the prime ministership of India following the death of Jawaharlal Nehru. And soon after, India was attacked by Pakistan, leading to War. At the same time, there was an awful scarcity of food grain in the country.

In a radio address to the nation PM Shastri reminded people that dependence on food imports undermined the country’s self-confidence and self-respect. This is when he gave the nation an inspiring, unforgettable slogan: ‘Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan (Hail the soldier, hail the farmer). “Sacrifice one meal at least a week”. This was his plea to Indians in 1965 when India was at war with Pakistan. He urged people to manage the situation: for the farmer to produce more, the trader to market supplies at fair prices, and the consumer to exercise greater restraint on consumption.

Chidambaram Subramaniam who was the Food and Agriculture Minister in Shastri’s Cabinet favoured the introduction of science and technology in farming and began a process of engaging agricultural scientists, which marked the advent of agricultural science in India.

Now, enter M S Swaminathan. But, first a quick flash back on his roots and how he arrived on the field, when India needed someone like him, the most.

Swaminathan was born in Kumbakonam, Tamil Nadu, in 1925 to a General Surgeon father and home-maker mother. He began his studies at the local school and later at the Catholic Little Flower School, Kumbakonam for where he passed his Matriculation Exams, at age 15. He was deeply influenced by his father who was also a social reformer. His parents wanted him to study medicine. With that in mind, he started his higher education, with zoology. But when he witnessed the brutal impact of the Bengal famine of 1943, during World War-II and shortages of rice throughout the sub-continent, he decided to devote his life to ensuring India had enough food. Despite his family background, and belonging to an era where medicine and engineering were considered prestigious career options, he chose agriculture.

From childhood, he was close to farming and farmers; his extended family grew rice, mangoes, and coconut, and later expanded into other areas such as coffee. He saw the impact that fluctuations in the price of crops had on his family, including the devastation that weather and pests could cause to crops as well as incomes.

He went on to finish his undergraduate degree in zoology at Maharaja’s College in Trivandrum, Kerala (now known as University College, Thiruvananthapuram, University of Kerala). After graduating in zoology, he joined the Madras Agricultural College (University of Madras, now the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University) and graduated with a Bachelor Science degree in Agricultural Science, from 1940 to 1944.

‘Devastated’ by the Bengal famine of 1943, Swaminathan chose a career in genetics to find ways and means of improving the livelihood of Indian farmers by increasing food production. In 1947 he moved to the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) in New Delhi to study genetics and plant breeding. He obtained a post-graduate degree with high distinction in cytogenetics in 1949.

Social pressures resulted in him competing in the examinations for civil services, through which he was selected to the Indian Police Service (IPS). At the same time, an opportunity appeared in the form of a UNESCO fellowship in genetics in the Netherlands. Yet again, he chose genetics.

Swaminathan became a UNESCO fellow at the Wageningen University & Research, Netherlands’, Institute of Genetics, for eight months. The demand for potatoes during World War II resulted in deviations in age-old crop rotations. Swaminathan worked on adapting genes to provide resilience against parasites, as well as a cold and frost-resistance. To this effect, the research succeeded. Ideologically the university influenced his later scientific pursuits in India with respect to food production. During this time he also visited the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in war-torn Germany; this would later be another deep influence on him, as during his next visit, a decade later, he saw that the Germans had transformed Germany in so many aspects.

In 1950, he moved to study at the Plant Breeding Institute of the University of Cambridge, School of Agriculture, United Kingdom. He earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1952.

Swaminathan then spent 15 months in the United States. He accepted a post-doctoral research associateship at the University of Wisconsin’s Laboratory of Genetics to help set up a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) potato research station. The laboratory at the time had Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg on its faculty. His associateship ended in December 1953 and in the same year he met the legendary American Agronomist, Dr Norman Borlaug, when the latter gave a speech on controlling rust disease in wheat. It was the beginning of an association that continued after Swaminathan returned to India. Swaminathan turned down a faculty position in order to work on achieving his goal of improving India’s food production, by taking up a Government job.

Swaminathan returned to India in early 1954. There were no jobs in his specialisation. And it was only after three months that he received an opportunity, through a former professor, to work temporarily as an assistant botanist at the Central Rice Research Institute in Cuttack in the ‘indica-japonica’ rice hybridisation program. This stint would prove to be a solid stepping stone to his future work with wheat. Half a year later, he joined Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) in New Delhi in October 1954 as an assistant cytogeneticist.

Swaminathan was critical of India importing food grains when 70% of India was dependent on agriculture. Further drought and famine-like situations were developing in the country.

By the year 1959, Norman Borlaug had reported impressive results in growing a high-yielding wheat in Mexico, which used a dwarfing gene from Japan known as Norin10. His young Indian counterpart was the only plant geneticist in Asia who took notice. Back then, the finest varieties of wheat and rice in India, under the best conditions and with adequate doses of fertilizer, could give only 20% to 30% more than the average yield. They could not stand high doses of chemical fertilizers, nor would their slim stems bear the weight of ears of grain.

Swaminathan who helmed the wheat programme at IARI convinced the government that the high-yielding dwarf wheat which US scientist Norman Borlaug introduced in Mexico was the answer to India’s grain shortage. He wrote to his Director in April 1962 on the implications of Borlaug’s success with semi-dwarf wheat that held more grain; he wanted his boss to invite the American scientist to India and request for material used during spring trials in Mexico.

With the political leadership scouting for ways to combat food shortage, the government soon wrote to the Rockefeller Foundation (which funded the Mexican programme) asking for Borlaug’s services and the seeds at his disposal. Borlaug visited India in March 1963 and later sent 100 kilograms of seeds of dwarf and semi-dwarf varieties. These were used widely on ‘demonstration plots’ to persuade farmers in Punjab to try it out. Swaminathan adapted the seeds to suit Indian conditions and trained farmers in their cultivation. And because the Borlaug grain was red in colour, the Indian scientists cross-bred them with local varieties to give it its characteristic golden colour. Today, almost all the wheat grown in India has the signature of the original material that came from Mexico.

In Punjab alone, the wheat yield increased nearly three-fold in five years – from 1.9 million tonnes in 1965-66 to 5.2 million tonnes in 1970-71.

In the 1968, Rabi harvest, India produced 16.5 million tonnes of wheat, over 30% more than the highest before that. In two years’ time, wheat production was double the average output during 1960-65. The Green Revolution had got going.

India needed a huge quantity of fertilisers, estimated to cost USD 250 million then. It needed foreign financial aid and India managed to get it from then US President Lydon B Johnson. The rest is history.

Swaminathan knew even then that intensive use of fertiliser was a short-term measure to tide over near-famine conditions. In later years, he batted for what he called an ‘Evergreen Revolution’ through organic farming. Swaminathan was also instrumental in bridging scientific know-how and farmers’ do-how by the effective use of the radio and television. He contributed to the concept for ‘Krishi Darshan’-one of India’s longest-running TV programmes- aimed at disseminating agricultural information to rural farmers.

India’s food production in 1967 was 11.3 million tonnes. By 1970 it went up to 20 million tonnes and then there was no looking back, ever.

Today India’s food grain production is a whopping 315 million tonnes!

Swaminathan’s collaborative scientific efforts with Norman Borlaug, spearheading a mass movement with farmers and other scientists and backed by public policies, saved India from certain famine-like conditions. His leadership as director general of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines was instrumental in his being awarded the first World Food Prize in 1987, recognized as one of the highest honours in the field of agriculture. The United Nations Environment Programme has called him ‘the Father of Economic Ecology’.

MS Swaminathan met his wife Mina while studying in Cambridge and the couple had three daughters, all of whom went on to become established figures in the academia and global development: Nithya Rao is professor of Gender & Development at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom; Madhura Swamination is Professor in Economic Analysis Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Bengaluru; and Soumya Swaminathan is a former Chief Scientist at the World Health Organization. His wife Mina Swaminathan died in 2022. She worked as a Teacher in St. Thomas’ School, New Delhi.

He left behind enough food for us, in India.

Monsoons: Not Benefitting India, this Time

Breaking the four-year trend of good rainfall in either ‘normal’ or ‘above normal’ category during 2019-2022, India recorded ‘below normal’ monsoon rainfall at 94.4% of the long-period average. This according to data for the June-September period released by the India Meteorological Department (IMD) late last week. The Met department, however, forecast ‘normal’ rainfall for winter monsoon in Peninsular India during October-December.

Nobel Prizes: Benefitting Mankind

This week, The Nobel Foundation tasked with the ultimate responsibility of fulfilling Alfred Nobel’s Will continued doing so and blasted-off its annual announcements in quick succession.

Recall the excerpt of his will, where Alfred Nobel dictates that his entire remaining estate should be used to endow “prizes to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind”.

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was jointly awarded to Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, ‘for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19’. I had hoped this would happen. Read more about that story on

https://kumargovindan.com/2021/01/02/world-inthavaaram-2021-01/

The Nobel Prize in Physics went to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier ‘for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter’.

‘Atto’ is the scientific notation prefix that represents 10 to the power of (-)18, which is a decimal point followed by 17 zeroes and a 1. So a flash of light lasting an attosecond, or 0.000000000000000001 of a second, is an extremely short pulse of light.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov , ‘for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots’.

Quantum dots (QDs), also called semiconductor nanocrystals, are semiconductor particles a few nanometres in size, having optical and electronic properties that differ from those of larger particles as a result of quantum mechanical effects.

The Nobel Price for Peace went to Iran’s Narges Mohammadi for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all. Narges is the deputy head of the Defenders of Human Rights Center, which was founded by fellow Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi. The 51-year-old is currently being held in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison for ‘spreading propaganda’. She has been arrested 13 times, convicted five times, and sentenced to a total of 31 years in prison and 154 lashes. He brave struggle has come with tremendous personal costs.

Asian Games: Medal Haul by India

India continued its terrific performance at the Asian Games 2023 in Hangzhou, China sending home a ton of medals. Its total medal tally eclipsed the previous high of 70 in the Jakarta Asian games, Indonesia in 2018.

At the time of this publication, India had won a total of 95 Medals (expected to reach 100): Gold-22; Silver-34; Bronze – 39, occupying the fourth place after China-350, Japan-166, and South Korea – 164.

The Asian Games close on 8 October 2023 and India has a story to tell with inspirational performances by various athletes from amazing backgrounds.

More medal stories coming-up in the weeks ahead. Work with World Inthavaaram.

WORLD INTHAVAARAM, 2023-01

About: World Inthavaaram is news that made the week. ‘Inthavaaram’, in Tamil, means ‘this week’. I began in week 41 of the year 2020 and have been writing and publishing every week with a unique calligraphy doodle -in my own hand -to match the stories. I collect news from all over the world and present it in a fresh, light-hearted manner.

This week is about a never-ending war, lingering Covid19, a path-breaking medical invention, politics of economics, bidding bye to a Pope and a legendary football player.

Everywhere

New cold winds are blowing in January of the brand New Year. The sun itself has become awfully shy and wears a blazer to keep itself warm, I guess. But dear Earth is getting warmer by the degree. In the United Kingdom (UK), for example, last year 2022, was the warmest year on record. The average annual temperature was more than 10 degrees Centigrade for the first time. Is this a hot sign of things to come?

Kick-starting the New Year, the diaries, calendars, and resolutions are singing all over the world. I started a new Bullet Journal-doing it fo the past four years. In every month I allocate a page titled ‘World’ to record the ‘news temperatures and flare-up’s’ of the year. Some events keep hugging the pages, hogging the headlines seemingly forever.

Ukraine is fighting back like hell in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine War. This week a Ukrainian missile strike killed 89 Russian troops – the actual death toll is still being assessed: we may never know. The attack was one of the deadliest by Ukrainian forces since the war began last year. It involved four rockets fired from United States-made launchers targeting barracks in the Russian-occupied eastern Donetsk region. And it is a massive blow to Russia’s ill thought-out, meaningless invasion of Ukraine. Russia surely finds itself at a stage where it does not know how to exit honourably.Late in the week, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a ceasefire for 36 hours on 6th and 7th January along the entire line of contact between the armies in Ukraine. This is to allow Russian Orthodox Christians to attend Christmas services, considering the appeal of Patriarch Kirill, Bishop and Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church. Perhaps, he should appeal and pray for the war to stop?

Covid 19 has a stranglehold on China and is tearing through the country, with most of its people never exposed to the coronavirus and the elderly not fully vaccinated. While the coronavirus Omicron variant causes mild symptoms in most people, a large number of Chinese are still vulnerable to severe illness. The country’s weak health-care system is already under huge pressure.

The always tight-lipped and walled China says only 13 people have died from Covid19 so far in December. The real toll is undoubtedly much higher. China only counts as Covid19 deaths those who die from respiratory failure or pneumonia. But the virus often causes death by damaging other organs-other kinds of failure. China’s crematoriums are busy: it is estimated that over 5,000 people are probably dying of Covid19 every day; the burial queues are getting longer. And a model predicts that in a worst-case scenario 1.5 million Chinese will die from the virus in the coming months. The World Health Organization (WHO) has demanded that more information be shared with the World. And has accused China of ‘under-representing’ the severity of its Covid outbreak and criticised its ‘narrow’ definition of what constitutes a Covid death But, is China listening?

Base Editing: A Path-breaking Invention

First, a quick basic lesson in the science of Genetics.

Bases are nitrogen containing biological compounds which store information and is the language of life. We must have learnt in school that the four types of Base – Adenine (A), Cytosine (C), Guanine (G), and Thymine (T)-are the building blocks of our genetic code-the DNA (DeoxyriboNucleic Acid). Just as letters in the alphabet spell out words that carry meaning, the billions of bases in our DNA spell out the instruction manual for our body. In RNA (RiboNucleic Acid), the base Uracil (U) takes the place of T.

The incurable cancer of a teenage girl, Alyssa from Leicester, UK, has been cleared from her body in the first use of a revolutionary new type of technology medicine, called ‘Base Editing’.

Alyssa was diagnosed with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in May last year. T-cells are the body’s guardian angels-seeking out and destroying devilish disease threats – but for Alyssa they had become the danger and were growing out of control. Her cancer was aggressive. Chemotherapy, and then a bone-marrow transplant, were unable to rid it from her body.

All other treatments for Alyssa’s leukaemia having failed, doctors at the Great Ormond Street Hospital, Bloomsbury, London Borough of Camden, UK, used ‘base editing’, which was invented only six years ago-to perform a feat of biological engineering to build her a new living drug. Six months later, the cancer is undetectable, but Alyssa is still being monitored in case it makes a comeback. This would have been unthinkable just a few years ago and has been made possible by incredible advances in Genetics.

Base Editing allows scientists to zoom to a precise part of the genetic code and then alter the molecular structure of just one base, converting it into another and changing the genetic instructions. The large team of doctors and scientists used this tool to engineer a new type of T-cell that was capable of hunting down and killing Alyssa’s cancerous T-cells. They started with healthy T-cells that came from a donor and went about modifying (editing) them.

The first base edit disabled the T-cells targeting mechanism, so they would not assault Alyssa’s body; the second removed a chemical marking, called CD7, which is on all T-cells; the third edit was an invisibility cloak that prevented the cells being killed by a chemotherapy drug; the final stage of genetic modification instructed the T-cells to go hunting for anything with the CD7 marking on it so that it would destroy every T-cell in her body – including the cancerous ones. That’s why this marking has to be removed from the therapy – otherwise it would just destroy itself. Looks so easy!

If the therapy works, Alyssa’s immune system-including T-cells-will be rebuilt with the second bone-marrow transplant. She is the first patient to be treated with this technology. This kind of genetic manipulation is a very fast-moving area of science with enormous potential across a range of diseases. What a start in the New Year!

America Fails to Elect a Speaker: Speechless

Meanwhile, in the United States (US) of America, for the first time in a century, the House of Representatives, one person did not receive the necessary 218 votes on the first ballot to become Speaker of the House. Speaker hopeful, Kevin McCarthy secured 203 votes, leaving the top job up for grabs as Republicans took control of the Chamber. Hard right lawmakers followed through on their threats to oppose him as Speaker. By the end of the week Kevin McCarthy lost a historic eleventh vote over three days. And still no US House Speaker. Democracy is a work in progress!

A Pope Dies

Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI the first Pope to resign in 600 years, died on 31st December, aged 95. He had resigned in February 2013 citing a ‘lack of strength of mind and body’ due to his advanced age. Speaking in Latin he had said: “After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.”

Pope Benedict’s handling of sexual abuse cases within the Catholic Church and opposition to usage of condoms in areas of high HIV transmission, despite their effectiveness in preventing the spread of HIV, led to substantial criticism in the public domain.

Amazon Sheds Fat-Letters

This week, e-commerce technology giant Amazon announced that it is shedding about 18,000, A to Z roles as it goes on a drive to cut costs. The job cuts amount to around 6% of the company’s roughly 3,00,000 strong corporate workforce. Amazon is the latest technology firm to unveil major layoffs as the cost of living crisis sees customers cut back on spending. Amazon said it had to announce the layoffs sooner than they wanted to, as the information had leaked out.

India’s Demonetisation is OK

Most of us may faintly recall that dour day of 8 November 2016 when India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, appeared on National Television to announce that all Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 banknotes, of the Mahatma Gandhi Series, will no longer carry legal tender.

He said the action would curtail the shadow economy, increase cashless transactions and reduce the use of illicit and counterfeit cash that funds illegal activities and terrorism. The Govt also announced the issuance of new Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 banknotes in exchange for the demonetised banknotes. Oh, I loved those new green 500, pink 2000, which first emerged, followed by the orange 200 and blue 100 notes, later on.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) stipulated that demonetised notes should be deposited with the Bank over a period of 50 days until 30 December 2016. In the final tally, the RBI said that approximately 99.3% of demonetised currency was deposited- returned to the Government coffers.

The announcement of the demonetisation decision sparked massive confusion and chaos for several weeks as people scrambled for the new currency notes, forming snaky queues before Banks and ATM kiosks, for days. Some people even died waiting to have their money exchanged. The move was severely criticised by those opposed to the Government, as poorly planned and unfair, sparking protests.

India has previously demonetised bank notes in 1946 and 1978 with the objective of curbing counterfeit money and black money.

This week the Supreme Court of India upheld the demonetisation decision with a 4:1 majority. A five-judge Constitution bench dismissed a batch of 58 petitions challenging the demonetisation exercise. It said that the decision, being the Executive’s economic policy, cannot be reversed. And that Centre’s decision-making process cannot be flawed as there was consultation between RBI and the Government. It is not relevant whether the objectives were achieved or not.

The ruling comes as yet another badge to pin on the chest of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which had been subjected to tremendous outrage on the demonetisation drive by the Opposition Parties. And the BJP is shining the light and ringing the bell on the awesome changes, especially the significant rise in digital payments, brought about by demonetisation.

A Dragging Horror in New Delhi

India’s capital Delhi has a knack of getting into gruesome acts, every year, at stunning regularity.

This year on New Year’s Eve a young 20 year old woman, Anjali Singh along with her friend, Nidhi drives a few streets away from her home to a Hotel for an event management. On the return, after midnight, she and a her friend after some kind of an altercation mount the scooter to ride Home. On the way they are hit by a car with Nidhi on the pillion ‘safely’ falling off and Anjali getting trapped under the car along with the scooter. And being dragged for about 10km and mauled to death in a horrific manner, with body parts split-up. It appears that someone in the car knew Anjali was stuck as the car went forward and backwards with Anjali screaming before dragging her in an unmindful manner. It appears the five people inside the car were drunk and with loud music running, they did not hear anything! Heart-wrenching. Police weren’t around despite being called to the scene and the city being under a New Year Security blanket. Nidhi, who could have shouted her guts out, scooted from the scene – fled, fearing ‘everything’ and stayed silent without telling anyone anything for almost two days. Further, Nidhi said Anjali was in an ‘inebriated’ state while the post-mortem report she was not under the influence of Alcohol. As the stories spin, investigations have begun to find out what exactly happened. Unbelievable that a friend could do this to a friend. It is a combined failure of the Police System in particular and the community at large?

Everybody needs to do their part, and unfortunately not one person did theirs, that day.

Goodbye Pele

Football King, Pele passed away last week, and this week his funeral was held in the city of Santos, Brazil. His coffin was kept in the Urbano Caldeira -Vila Belmiro- stadium, home of Pele’s former club Santos, for mourners to pass through for one final look at one of history’s most magnificent athletes, before entombment.

Pele’s coffin was then driven to the mausoleum that he had bought 19 years ago inside the Memorial Ecumenical Cemetery, a high-rise building that holds the Guinness world record as the tallest cemetery in the world. The Santos soccer club estimated that 230,000 mourners had been through the stadium. And huge crowds turned out to accompany the procession.

The procession had started at the Stadium and his coffin was carried through the streets of Santos, including the street where Pele’s 100 year old mother lives.

Hundreds of thousands of people waited for hours under a burning sun on Monday to file past Pele’s coffin. “This is no sacrifice,” said one who traveled three hours to the Stadium and had to be at work in five hours, yet had another few hours before he would be through the line. “He gave us so much joy that it’s a pleasure to be here.”

Pele being a footballer like no other, his final resting place is exceptional too: a large replica stadium complete with artificial turf inside the world’s tallest vertical cemetery.

Some of Brazil’s best-known footballers have faced a furious backlash as fans questioned why they had failed to attend ceremonies bidding farewell to Pele. And only a handful of Brazil’s World Cup winners made the trip to pay homage. “Pele is a citizen of the world, at the same level as Nelson Mandela or Mahatma Gandhi, but Brazilians don’t know how to recognise that,” lamented a former player.

Pele married three times, fathering seven children. He leaves behind his present wife, Marcia Aoki.

Play well through the year 2023. Fix the posts and shoot your goals, with World Inthavaaram.