Opposing bt brinjal is antinational?

While there maybe some NGOs, or even many, that follow hidden subversive agenda, opposition to BT brinjal and large nuclear power plants does not make one antinational.
I am sure those who designed reactors at Fukushima assured everyone that their design was hundred percent safe.
(can you imagine some engineer designing a reactor and saying "well, it's quite safe, but I can't say what will happen if an earthquake of magnitude > 8 and tsunami hit it together" )
While we all understand there is a crisis...Tamil nadu more than others perhaps since, as I experienced briefly last fortnight, they are having powercuts every alternate hour in Coimbatore.
In fact, many of those who oppose large nuclear power plants are as patriotic as the prime minister...they probably favour many small plants instead of one large one. As with mini hydels, one need not be an expert to see the risk is lower and the disaster, in case of an accident, much less.
How does anyone guarantee that something will NEVER fail?
Maybe because we drive cars without seatbelts and motorbikes without helmets, and believe in living "Ram bharose" we can have potential hazards in our backyards and don't deserve to ask for it to go away.

WiS

A link thanks to Arundhathi
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.14801,y.2012,no.2,content.true,page.1,css.print/issue.aspx

mediocrity

A remark I read in a blog is about something that has been on my mind for sometime now. "Today, in the country, mediocrity has become a much bigger virtue than excellence, since mediocrity is misunderstood as equality,"
It is not anything as lofty as desire for equality that makes people encourage mediocrity. We are afraid of excellence.
An excellent student is a nuisance in that he asks questions in class which one doesn't know the answer to. An excellent young man/woman in ones team or department is a nuisance since he shows us up. I can understand this. One doesn't like to be upset. One likes to go on as one is till the age of superannuation.
However, it trickles down so insidiously that before we knew it, mediocrity is everywhere. I have not seen anyone below 60, who is really good at his/her work, in the academic circles I am familiar with. I have not seen one really great student in the last few years.
And that's exactly what's been on my mind.......how easy and comfortable it is to be mediocre!

Norwegian Social services.

About 25 or 30 years back, I had been horrified to read an article about a family where two small children were taken away from their mother because she had not kept her house tidy. This was in Norway or Sweden (I forget which). A woman with two small children very often does not have time to tidy up her house. I remember my house when my son was about 5 years old and my daughter was an infant. I did not have any domestic help and it was all I could manage to cook a meal of sorts, send my son to school and take care of my daughter. Tidying the house was last on my priority list. If I had chosen to spend time tidying my house I would have to stop cooking or bathing the baby or some such more important task. (in my age group, husbands did not consider any of this their business)
In most of our households, very small children sleep with was their parents. In fact, when one of my relatives made her infant son sleep in another bedroom alone, I thought that was ill treatment of the baby. I believed (and still do), that a small baby needs to be near its mother at night.
It is ridiculous for governments to decide how someone should bring up his own child unless the parent is actually hurting the child in a manner universally perceived to be harmful.

Contd..........

Coincidentally, I just read Amy Chua's book "Battle hymn of the Tiger mother".
I do believe that we must praise children appropriately (meaning no extravagant praises), but Amy Chua is something else.
The Chinese mother treatment is fine when the child turns out to be a concert pianist as well as a cosmologist at the age of 16, but what about the normal, average children? If they become just a run of the mill physics teacher who plays the piano at family get-togethers? I think Amy Chua was lucky that her daughters survived the sergeant major treatment.

excellence

A recent post on nanopolitan mentioned something that I have come across many times. People who firmly believe they can sing beautifully, or that Harvard is just waiting for them to apply in order to give them a PhD. It varies in degree, but it's the same thing.
In our college, we have an assembly every morning where a prayer is sung. A group of students lead the prayer. A boy often goes up on stage to join this group. He is really tone-deaf, but holds the mike. So his voice predominates. The result is really painful. So why does he not know that he cannot sing? After all, these are not small children. In our college fests, students put up dances which are reproductions of the popular Hindi movie songs and that too very often with lack of coordination. The practice for just a couple of hours and it shows. But they get "wows' from the audience of fellow students.
We do not expose our children to excellence during any part of their education.

A project

I had posted on my stint as a judge for a school science fair under the INSPIRE scheme.
In this exhibition, one participant had set up a the lemon battery. Old hat. I think every science fair has one lemon battery. But when I probed a bit, this boy told me he had observed that if he used old lemons, that were spoiling a bit, he got a higher voltage. That is a remarkable observation and I found it intriguing. I told him that he must take it further.
So though his actual project was unimpressive, his was probably the most scientific work.