-A
www.animeshpathak.in
--sent from my Google HTC Magic--
The fundus fluoresciene angiography was reviewed and showed very clearly a choroidal neovascular membrane beyond the existing chrioretinal scar.
[from wikipedia]
First, a few caveats: we didn’t create the Chrome OS build ourselves — it was downloaded from BitTorrent. In theory it could possibly have been tweaked by some malicious hacker to steal your Google account information (this is unlikely, but who knows). There’s an easy fix if you’re worried though: just go make a throwaway Gmail account, and use that to play around with the OS. Also note that because this is running in a virtual machine, you’re probably not going to be seeing great performance (like that 7 second boot time). But it’s more than good enough to get a feel for the OS for yourself.
[16 year old]Babar Ali's day starts early. He wakes, pitches in with the household chores, then jumps on an auto-rickshaw which takes him part of the 10km (six mile) ride to the Raj Govinda school. The last couple of kilometres he has to walk.
The school is the best in this part of West Bengal. There are hundreds of students, boys and girls. The classrooms are neat, if bare. But there are desks, chairs, a blackboard, and the teachers are all dedicated and well-qualified.
As the class 12 roll-call is taken, Babar Ali is seated in the middle in the front row. He's a tall, slim, gangly teenager, studious and smart in his blue and white uniform. He takes his notes carefully. He is the model student.
Babar Ali is the first member of his family ever to get a proper education.
The minute his lessons are over at Raj Govinda school, Babar Ali doesn't stop to play, he heads off to share what he's learnt with other children from his village.
At four o'clock every afternoon after Babar Ali gets back to his family home a bell summons children to his house. They flood through the gate into the yard behind his house, where Babar Ali now acts as headmaster of his own, unofficial school.
Lined up in his back yard the children sing the national anthem. Standing on a podium, Babar Ali lectures them about discipline, then study begins.
Babar Ali gives lessons just the way he has heard them from his teachers. Some children are seated in the mud, others on rickety benches under a rough, homemade shelter. The family chickens scratch around nearby. In every corner of the yard are groups of children studying hard.
Babar Ali was just nine when he began teaching a few friends as a game. They were all eager to know what he learnt in school every morning and he liked playing at being their teacher.
Now his afternoon school has 800 students, all from poor families, all taught for free. Most of the girls come here after working, like Chumki, as domestic helps in the village, and the boys after they have finished their day's work labouring in the fields.
Am writing this from the train to Versailles, my eyes still dilated.
Met Dr. Cassoux this morning. She is a retinal surgeon specializing in my ailment, and came highly recommended by my ophthalmologist, Dr. Zeghidi. (Huge thanks to @k_sam for accompanying me.)
After looking at my retina, she said, like the previous retinal surgeon, that my loss of vision is due to the scar itself, and in her opinion, it will not be wise to perform surgery, given how little it will possibly achieve for the many risks in the operation.
So yeah. I'm f*&ked.
But wait, there's more. Apparently there is a high chance (50%) of this infection's relapse, and she recommended I take an antibiotic (Bactrim) once every three days for the next two years to bring that risk down to 20%.
Well, I guess that is a good motivation for me to eat right, exercise, and meditate to keep my immune system strong.
-A
--sent from my Google HTC Magic--
Woh kehte hain na, sabr ka phal meetha hota hai.
Jhooth kehte hain!
[They say that the fruit of patience is sweet.
They lie.]
Good things happen to good people.
Bad things do not happen to good people.
Bad things can happen to good people, but usually they have a strong social net of similarly good and understanding people to rely on, and that helps reduce the recovery time.
Yes, I am back in the Thalys/TGV, going to Amsterdam for a conference. Will be back on Sunday. Ciao!
-A
www.animeshpathak.in
--sent from my Google HTC Magic--
This is what my right eye looks like right now (after dilation of pupil, so that the doc can see inside). After looking inside, the doc said that my condition is worse than before, and eye surgery is strongly recommended.
Will meet the surgeon next week.
-A
www.animeshpathak.in
--sent from my Google HTC Magic--
When I think loudly about this issue, the following comes to mind.:
Problem context/assumptions:
2. The people of pakistan do not actively want to mess with India. They, like people everywhere, want to lead their lives and raise their kids.
...
Assumption 2 above rules out options like nuking/war, not to mention the fact that they also have nukes :-).
So the _way to go_ to address the situation there, in my opinion, is
1. Figure out what action hurts their _government/army_. They don’t care if you send back their singers, hell it plays directly into their hands of “Indians are hegemonical, and we should hate them”. Until we hurt their establishment, there is no solving this problem. [focussed trade boycott anyone?]
2. The only way out, in addition to finding the magic bullet in point 1 above, is to _encourage_ the moderates there. Lets face it, a pakistan which is ruled by the Taliban is not in India’s interest. But it is also _not_ in the interest of the moderates there. [I have pakistani friends, and have heard a lot about how they feel threatened by the taliban/moral-police as much as you feel threatened by the Senes]. The only long term way out for us is to help the moderates in Pakistan get a voice. If it means letting some of them even show up on our TV Channels to make their case, so be it.
/ these are initial thoughts, but I hope you see where I am going.
// am not saying that allow any T,D&H from pakistan on Indian TV. But for a change, lets stop focussing on the crazies there who call us “hindu zionists”, and focus on the more moderate voices there. I know it makes for better TRP to give airtime to the former, but the latter are the ones whom _we_ should give visibility to.
/// There are those who would say ‘just secure our borders, close all communications, and wait for it to implode’. I for one would _not_ want a Nuclear armed neighbor to implode, and last time I checked, we were nowhere near securing our borders completely.
//// Reiterating: Lets _not_ break cultural ties. If anything, let their artists perform here. If they have a good welcome, they will go back and share their experiences, which will only work to dispel the lies that their govt. has told their people.
In 1965 Lal Bahadur Shastri thought a little give would purchase a lot of take at Tashkent. In 1972, Indira Gandhi bought Bhutto's plea that what remained of Pakistan would crumble without her sympathy. She did not insist on a written agreement ending the Kashmir dispute along the Line of Control. Atal Bihari Vajpayee reached out to shake Pakistan's hand at Lahore, and got slapped in the face at Kargil.
In the political calculus, Gilani does not have to do much more to survive. After all, what can India do if he does nothing? Start a war?
... is on a take-out pizza (speed rabbit) menu!
-A
www.animeshpathak.in
--sent from my Google HTC Magic--
Picture taken right before I ate this double scoop (cocktail exotique and cassis) in a special dual-cone :-). The store website is here, and it is supposed to have the best ice-cream in Paris :-).
-A
www.animeshpathak.in
--sent from my Google HTC Magic--
In case you didn't know, dr. Singh is the chief guest of the French independence day parade. Am posting this from the venue. More to come later. Watch this space.
-A
www.animeshpathak.in
--sent from my Google HTC Magic--
suppose Romeo is in love with Juliet, but in our version of the story, Juliet is a fickle lover. The more Romeo loves her, the more she wants to run away and hide. But when he takes the hint and backs off, she begins to find him strangely attractive. He, on the other hand, tends to echo her: he warms up when she loves him and cools down when she hates him.
Add to those possibilities the two ways Romeo could react to Juliet’s affections — either increasing or decreasing his own — and you see that there are four personality types, each corresponding to a different romantic style.And in the end, he shares with us what happened when he applied math to his own love-situation back in the day, and why math stopped working beyond a point, but only due to a clearly mathematical reason.
...
Although these examples are whimsical, the equations that arise in them are of the far-reaching kind known as differential equations. They represent the most powerful tool humanity has ever created for making sense of the material world. Sir Isaac Newton used them to solve the ancient mystery of planetary motion. In so doing, he unified the heavens and the earth, showing that the same laws of motion applied to both.
We call it love. It feels like love. But the most exhilarating of all human emotions is probably nature’s beautiful way of keeping the human species alive and reproducing.Then, the interesting bit about how the body behaves, in reaction to hormones, during the phases of "love" - lust, attraction, and attachment. Among others, this gem:
With an irresistible cocktail of chemicals, our brain entices us to fall in love. We believe we’re choosing a partner. But we may merely be the happy victims of nature’s lovely plan.
Does love change the way you think?And finally, they talk about a fool-proof three step procedure titled "how to fall in love". But for that, you should read the article :).
A landmark experiment in Pisa, Italy showed that early love (the attraction phase) really changes the way you think.
Dr Donatella Marazziti, a psychiatrist at the University of Pisa advertised for twenty couples who'd been madly in love for less than six months. She wanted to see if the brain mechanisms that cause you to constantly think about your lover, were related to the brain mechanisms of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
By analysing blood samples from the lovers, Dr Marazitti discovered that serotonin levels of new lovers were equivalent to the low serotonin levels of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder patients.
किस किस को बताएँगे जुदाई का सबब हम
kis kis ko bataayengay judaai kaa sabab ham
Who else must I explain the reason of separation
तू मुझ से ख़फ़ा है तो ज़माने के लिए आ ।
tu mujh se khafaa hai to zamaanay kay liyay aa
Come, despite your displeasure, to continue the ceremony
Six cabinet ministers of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's new team are 'non-believers'. These ministers "solemnly affirmed" that they would bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution while taking oath today.
The Prime Minister and 13 of his ministers took the oath in the name of God.
This who didn’t, are A K Antony, P Chidambaram, Sushilkumar Shinde, M Veerappa Moily, S Jaipal Reddy and C P Joshi, a first-timer in the cabinet.
The other ministers who took oath in the name of God include Pranab Mukherjee, Sharad Pawar, Mamata Banerjee, Vayalar Ravi, S M Krishna, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Kamal Nath, Meira Kumar, Murli Deora, Kapil Sibal, Ambika Soni, B K Handique and Anand Sharma.
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