Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Why to educate the girl child?

If you educate a boy you educate an individual.
If you educate a girl you educate a family.

Uganda
Afghanistan
  • Globally, 77.6 million girls do not attend school
  • There are 33 million fewer girls than boys in primary education
  • Girls with secondary education are 6 times less likely to be married as children
  • A girl with 7 years of schooling in the developing world will have 2.2 fewer children
Afghanistan
Hyderabad, India
  • A child born to a literate mother is 50% more likely to survive past the age of 5
  • Two thirds of the 775 million illiterate adults, and 63% of illiterate youth, are female
  • Literate mothers are twice as likely to immunize their children and send them to school  
Thailand
Uganda
  • A girl who completes basic education is 3 times less likely to contract HIV
  • A girl earns 20% more as an adult for every additional year of education she receives
  • A nation’s GDP rises an average of 3% when 10% more its girls attend school 
India
Indonesia
  • Less than 2% of international development funds are specifically allocated to girls 
  • School is not free in over 50 countries

Friday, April 29, 2016

Turn off the bloody alarm







My brother in law nicknamed Ruby was a kidney patient and needed needed dialysis thrice a week. The dialysis procedure is an artificial equipment used to remove toxins in the blood, lasts for 4 hours and purifies about 1/8th of the blood in the body.

Whenever Ruby visited us in Pune, my wife Mohini and I accompanied him to one of the best dialysis centres in Pune.

As I sat in the crowded waiting room full of tense looking people, I decided to start a conversation with the people who had accompanied and escorted the patients to the dialysis centre.

A shocking 85% of the people said that the dialysis patient's kidneys were damaged as a result of medication and consumption of pain killers for a sustained period of time.

I was seized with rage. How could doctors be so irresponsible and prescribe pain killers for long periods?  Then I thought about the problem for a long, long time until I realised that placing the blame on the doctors was somewhat misplaced.

Take the case of Ruby, he started encountering constant headaches and spells of dizziness, when he was still a young student of medicine. Visits to numerous doctors failed to find a cause for these severe headaches, and they would invariably prescribe painkillers and send him home. What cannot be cured, can at best only be tolerated.

Not wanting to bother his parents he tried to find a solution to his headaches and dizziness by himself.  Unfortunately Ruby, the person who had a noble heart and himself a great healer was unable to heal himself. He confessed that the only way he could get through most days and nights was to keep on popping painkillers regularly, which eventually claimed his life.

What is pain and what are painkillers?
Pain is an alarm system that the human body's defence mechanism triggers to warn us of damage occurring to our body.
Painkillers are blockers of pain. They numb the body and mind so that the pain is 'killed'. A pain killer turns off the alarm so we feel comfortable for a while. In reality it suppresses the pain but does not remove the offending cause of the pain. The body tries to rid itself of the problem, but we have by consuming painkillers suppressed the problem.

The ailment, or infection is negative energy, which is manifested in the body and needs a cure. An attack on the symptoms but not on the root cause of the pain achieves at best temporary relief by suppressing the pain.

Energy cannot be suppressed, it will just find alternative channels to flow through within the body.
The negative energy or illness flows to other parts of the body and affects some vital organ like the kidneys, the liver pancreas etc.

Responsible doctors know very well the harmful effects and therefore prescribe painkillers for a short period of time to help people cope with the pain until a cure is found and implemented.

Patients are only human, and humans particularly when in pain do inexplicable things all the time.
Desperate to live normal lives, exhausted patients lose faith in doctors and medication. They try to save money and time, finding an easy and convenient solution to pop painkillers regularly. Over a period of time the pain comes and goes but the killing goes on.

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Next time you feel pain, try and find and treat the root causes of the pain. It requires a bit of self analysis and understanding to try and locate the cause, it rarely requires self medication of painkillers.

Here is a technique that works well. Close your eyes and try to focus on the pain, after sometime you will sense the general area and then the point where the pain is being sensed in the head or body. This is where the alarm is ringing, meditate on this point and your body will start revealing a path to where the pain is originating and quite likely the cause.

Stay focussed on the pain seems to disappear, at least  for quite a long while.  Sometimes the cause is the diet, sometimes lack of sleep, could be caused an injury or an allergy, but you will come to probable causes. Remove the cause and the pain will disappear.

Turning off the alarm never stopped the fire from burning everything down, so it is with the body. Respect and listen to the body and it will provide you a good chance to be happy, prevent health related miseries and in the end may even save your  life.