War and Sex

11 Nov

War is deadly for both sexes. A missile doesn’t differentiate between a man and a woman. Then, what is the role of gender in war?

Nearly all active militaries in the world have substantially more male soldiers than female soldiers and far more men die on the battlefields than women. But the impact of wars is never limited to artificial battlefields. War enters civilian life through hunger, inadequate health care, the decline in availability of potable water, rape, pillage, and many other ways, reducing life expectancy drastically for both men and women. For example, life expectancy in Afghanistan is 46 years (men), 46 years (women) according to UN figures. The figures hide an important fact that on average women will live longer than men. These figure mean that more women are dying as a result of war than men. These figures still don’t take into account the large number of crimes like rape that are committed predominantly against women.

Facts About South Asia

19 Aug

South Asia is home to one-fifth of the world’s population and about 40% of the world’s absolute poor—people living on less than $1/day. Imagine the lifestyle of an American earning $1/day and you will get a window into the poverty described by these figures.

India is home to nearly half of the illiterate population in the world. The adult literacy rate in South Asia (49%) is behind sub-Saharan Africa (57%) as well as that of Arab states (59%). To make matters worse, South Asia’s current annual expenditure on education is 1.9% of GNP. In contrast, military spending in the region is 3.8% of GNP and is as high as 7% in Pakistan which has 50% more soldiers than teachers. A brief zoom in on Pakistan’s education system…. what indeed are people fortunate enough to afford an education are taught? According to a report by an independent government agency, SDPI ( Sustainable Development Policy Institute. See Link at Bottom), ‘facts’ like “Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam.” and “The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things — Hindus did not respect women…” have been included with the general objective of inculcating “Love and aspiration for Jehad, Tableegh (Prosyletization), Jehad, Shahadat (martyrdom), sacrifice, ghazi (the victor in holy wars), shaheed (martyr)”

Due process of law is often quoted as a key ingredient for a free society. With over 20 million court cases pending at the end of 2002, India doesn’t even pretend. More stark crime statistics in India include—over 1 million people in jail waiting for trial, and a conviction rate of about 1%.

Links
SDPI report on Pakistan Education System (pdf)
World Literacy of Canada

Merchants of Art

26 May

“Shakespeare Wallah” was my introduction to the magic of Merchant Ivory Productions. An elegy to a lost era, a bitter-sweet tale of a traveling English theatre troupe in India right after the Indian independence, it is still vivid in my memory. The debonair Shashi Kapoor and Satyajit Ray’s beautiful score are the two other things that I remember from the film. Since then, I have seen many other Merchant Ivory productions. And their films have always left me simultaneously reassured and disturbed.

A constant in all their movies has been the excellent production values, largely a product of Mr. Merchant’s vision, and his acknowledged genius for creating beautiful, authentic sets on a shoestring budget. With the demise of Ismail, we no longer have a producer who fussed over each detail.

The troika of James Ivory, Ruth Prawer Jhabwala, and Ismail Merchant over the past four decades virtually invented a new genre of films. They showed that you don’t need to compromise on art to be successful. And to me, that is the legacy of Merchant Ivory.

I will forever be indebted to their patience, art, and virtue.

Further Reading:
BBC article on Ismail Merchant

The Misspelled Universe

18 Apr

How many times have you typed something in Google to be asked “Did you mean: ….” Next time you reach this page, stay a little longer and take a look at the pages that Google did find. This is your gateway to the parallel universe of misspelled words. Well let me correct myself — these “misspelled” words can belong to a different language altogether or they even might be rarely used genuine English words with close resemblance to the heavily used ones.

An entire gamut of information is being denied to us due to mere errors in spelling. To deride these spelling mistakes as “mere errors in spelling” is to ignore a small minority of people who deliberately misspell words so as to make their pages less publicly accessible. This works as an effective low-tech solution for every underground society has demands obscurity.

Then there are people who exploit misspellings to make their living e.g. People searching auction sites like eBay for misspelled (or mislabeled) items, and hence hopefully underbid items. (* eBay now offers a spell-check utility but surprisingly few people still refuse to use it.)

Excepting eBay entrepreneurs, one thing that is clear is that we are “losing”‘ this increasingly vast pool of information containing misspelled “keywords” (words we type in a search engine). There is an argument to be made that the quality of information source with misspelled words may itself be poor and hence we needn’t worry about the “lost” information. Arguably, the frequency of misspelled words in a peer-reviewed journal is much lower than say my blog. ;) The normative question is, Does that rightly consign my blog to obscurity?

Internet search is a classic case of finding a needle in a haystack, and search algorithms are built of dispense with as much “clutter” (hay) as fast as possible, leaving a very small minority of websites that are given genuine value. What we are seeing are two trends implicit in Google’s search algorithm — most of our search needs are about “popular”‘ items (given a higher rank by Google), and it is progressively harder to find “unpopular” sources. On the face of it the trend is innocuous and even sensible but the wider ramifications include information hegemony.

Let us turn the discussion around to sites that use “syntactically correct but meaningless verbiage including commons search terms” (a sentence like “Indeed, a blind crenelation blasphemously a player inside the stictomys. For example, a whopper behind a ferrocyanide indicates that the saccharinity behind a casino tropez another euphausiacea from another modem.”) People also “Google bomb” (mass posting on blogs/lists associating a search phrase with online address). Some sites have in fact automated this by writing programs that automatically go to different blogs/lists and post entries/comments like “poker chips poker – [web address].” This problem is much worse as it is making it progressively harder for us to find “genuine” (or most popular/reliable) information.

So will there be too much seemingly reliable unreliable information or will we miss a lot of seemingly unreliable reliable information? Chances are that both will happen.

Some Die Young

26 Dec

There are 34 countries in Africa where life expectancy at birth of both men and women is equal to or less than 51.
Data are from the 2003 UN estimates.
Note that life expectancy at birth is strongly impacted by infant mortality.

Name of country Av. Age of Men  Av. Age of Women

Angola      39      41
Benin       48      51
Botswana    39      40
Burkina Faso    45      46
Burundi     40      41
Cameroon    45      47
Central African 38      40
Republic
Chad        44      46
Rep of Congo    47      50
DR Congo    41      43
Djibouti    45      47
Equatorial  48      50
Guinea
Ethiopia    45          46
Guinea      49      49
Guinea Bissau   44      47
Ivory Coast 41          41
Kenya       43          46
Lesotho     32          38
Liberia     41          42
Malawi      37          38
Mali        48          49
Mozambique  37      40
Namibia     43      46
Niger       46      46
Rwanda      39      40
Sierra Leone    33      35
Somalia     45      48
South Africa    45      51
Swaziland   33      35
Tanzania    42      44
Togo        48      51
Uganda      45      47
Zambia      33      32
Zimbabwe    34      33