Daily Excelsior... Editorial

EDITORIAL

By Pawan Kumar Verma

The Himalaya are the greatest and most famous of mountains on the land surface of the Earth. They remain an enigma. After 150 years of geological study we still do not know how they ware formed.......more

EDITORIAL

Twisted logic. Untrue men

Serious Kashmir watchers, who do not have agendas to shoot up and down, discern two type of 'points' made on Kashmir-points and debating point. While the former would lead one to light on the purposely-darkened Kashmir scene the later are fabrications made either rhetorically or to camouflage a more sinister, unacceptable or un-supportable stance. The most prominent of the debating points thrown up to cover demands that would stand neither logic nor legal scrutiny is what is the so-called 'third option', the suggestion that the underlying demand is 'independence'. Now, independence is something that the modern world finds so much easy to munch and digest. Independence seems inherently legitimate and answers many illegitimacies that would otherwise cleanly discredit the Pak-sponsored 'struggle in Kashmir'. Independence is instantly justifying. And, the groups and people who call for it can easily placate their detractors by saying that it is a 'political strategy' and nothing more, as the KLF people have actually been saying in the heart and hamlets of Kashmir.

There in the closed-door conclaves they would explicitly State how this 'is the shortest route to Pakistan'. A palatable route to Pakistan is what this option is all about. Independence as an'option' came into view after the fall of Bangladesh. Seeing that a fully Muslim province, almost half of the erstwhile State of Pakistan, chose to sever itself from the Mamlikat-I-Khuda-Dad presented two plain problems. One, if a part as large as Bengal could not get its due from the Punjabi-Muslim dominated Pakistan where would a few-lakh strong Kashmir stand vis-a-vis those thorough exploiters. This was a practical problem. The other was the ideological problem. How do you hold fast to an idea, which has been rejected by a province , a large Muslim province that had been part of Pakistan, legally and aspirationally? It looked ridiculous, illogical even mean. So the third option was born. Since then, the Pak agents in Kashmir have been dangling the option, before their critics both in the Valley and outside. With this the tasks assigned to them have become easy to be performed and they have even got a 'wholesome idea' to hold before a world that would have simply scowled on their holding an illegal brief.

As it does happen, the trick sometimes begins to befool the trickster. So it has happened with the 'independence' mongers. Some have actually begun to think the idea out logically though few are ready to go the whole hog. Thus Amanullah Khan, who at the height of insurgency in Kashmir would 'defy' the Pak authorities and bring 'liberators' to the LoC to 'free' Kashmir, never thought of visiting the illegal 'Northern Territories' of Pakistan to make a plea for some freedoms there. Other 'independence' seekers gladly went to the Pak-military's camps, got training and guns to fight ISI's 'war for liberating Kashmir from the Indian clutches'. Yes, just like that, without thinking where Pakistan fitted in the 'liberation' scheme. And now those same 'soldiers' of Pak designs are piqued that the PoK Kashmir Committee Chief, Qayuum Khan does not talk of the third option. How would he ? Did your actions ever speak of that option? What was the rationale of fighting the ISI's battle and undermining the independence, freedom and peace in J&K? And where do the UN resolutions that you never tire of speaking of, mention the 'independence'? And, most importantly who when and where is the State of J&K is, or was for independence? Two, or even twenty-three, men do not make J&K. But they would not ask those questions. They did not need to. Pakistan was all they were for and it is all they still are fighting for. 'Independence' is just a cover. Only it has got blown over leaving them naked in their untrue allegiances.

Udhampur College

Two developments in the Government Degree College in Udhampur call for a deeper thought and comment. One is that the students there, in opposition to their 'leaders', have refused to go on a strike. Realizing that the strikes meant sheer wastage of precious time, which at the near-end of the academic year they just cannot afford? Indeed, given the fact that the curricula have become wide-ranging over the years, it is difficult to see how any student can waste time on hartals and strikes. They would even be hard put to find time for the normal extra-curricular activities. That non-academic aspect has also seen a great expansion with thousands of activities and interests vying for the students' time. A serious student would be perhaps thinking of protesting that there were only twenty-four hours to the day, much less squandering them on futile diversions. It is not clear whether it is a shortage of time in view of the imminence of examinations or a rejection of wasteful activities that has made the students to opt out of a strike, but they have made a good decision. College days are not for striking, they are for giving their full and gaining the fullout from their academies and teachers.

But that does not mean that the college authorities should be gloating over a 'victory' that just isn't theirs. The constructive decision of the students should have shamed them into immediately setting to sort out the issue of fines for re-examination that has been imposed upon the students. Here the college administration is actually in the wrong. But even if it had been in the right, it would have been more befitting to take the burden off the students and soothe them. ''That students are the virtual children of teachers'' is not a mantra to be recited on the Teachers' Day but to be lived each moment of the academic activity. One of the greatest failures of the post-independence education has been that it has cleanly broken the hoary Guru-Shishya tradition of India. Today, while educationists in the west are trying to somehow incorporate that holistic tradition into their academies, the Indian educationists and administrators are breaking the last vestiges of trust and reliance, understanding and regard, love and respect between the present day Gurus and their Shishyas. There they are not trashing the very idea of education but also breaking the backbone of Indian society.

AIDS : The Deadliest disease

By Abrar Ahmed Naseem Chowdhary

At present AIDS is the largest glo-bal pandemic with about 36.1 million infected persons in the world. In India about 8 million people are infected with AIDS. An estimate reveals that about 16000 people get infected with AIDS everyday. The most remorseful tragedy is that the infection has no cure and promising treatment available so far except the availability of some drugs which temporarily increase the longevity and thus one who is caught in its net is supposed to shake hands with death sooner or later.

AIDS, is itself not a disease. But the infection with AIDS virus causes the destruction of human immune system (the one which defends the body against the invasion of pathogenic organisms, the viruses, bacteria, protozoans and the like) and therefore invites multiple infections in the body which are not treatable because of the feeble immune machinery. As a result the patient dies of a very terrible death marked with various infections.

Additionally, the infection of AIDS brings a number of social stigmas to its sufferer because of the very shameful means of transmission (the sexual contact which is the predominant one) and the lack of the information about the disease (which due to its frightening consequences renders its patient as isolated and untouchable). As a result the patient undergoes a multitude of mental conflicts and virtual trauma. This kind of paradox thus impels the sufferer to abstain from diagnosis and subsequent treatment. The patient is therefore much harmed by social scorn than by prognosis of disease.

How AIDS is caused ? AIDS infact is the result of infection with HIV (Human Immune Virus) which is transmitted from one person to another through well defined means of transmission. No vector like mosquito or else is involved in the transmission of AIDS virus as is in case of malaria or sleeping sickness (because unlike other viruses, the HIV is not able to survive and replicate in the gut of mosquito). The AIDS virus, to put it simply, consists of genetic information (RNA) on the inside and a protective outer shell or proteins and glycoproteins. Since the host's genetic information is deoxyribose nucleic acid (human DNA), the viral genetic information has therefore first to be reverse transcripted into DNA. The tools for this are delivered by the host cell itself except a little helper protein (reverse transcriptase) which the virus has brought with itself. The DNA is now legible for the host cell and is transferred to its nucleus. The process is already finished by half a day after infection. The foreign piece of DNA is then inserted randomly into the host DNA and is now ready to be transcribed. The now modified viral genetic information is now transcribed into many RNA molecules. What causes this transcription is yet not known.

The infection of AIDS virus proceeds in a very simple manner. The virus is acquired by a person most commonly through sexual contact, blood transfusion or by using infected needle. The virus reaches the human blood and attack certain cells of human immune (defense) system called the helper T-cells which are fundamental part of the immune system. The AIDS virus almost fully specializes on these white blood cells since these T-cells have CD4 molecules on their surface to which the AIDS virus binds. This causes the viral membrane to fuse with the host's cell membrane. This way the viral genetic information is passed into the host cell where it replicates, gives rise to an unlimited number of progeny viruses. Consequently the host cell bursts away releasing the progeny viruses which infect the new WBCs in the same manner. This way the human immune cells are infected and gradually destroyed by the HIV. This over the passage of time leads to the gradual weakening of the immune system and a stage comes when body becomes susceptible to many secondary infections (like flu, tuberculosis and many other dreaded infections). As the defense system of the body is already eroded by HIV invasion, the body is now unable to combat and come out of this host of secondary infections. And therefore irrespective of any treatment the patient lands into the valley of death. This stage at which there are multiple secondary infections is infact the full blown AIDS and the patient at his stage becomes restless and usually unmanageable.

AIDS can take 8-10 years to develop after infection with HIV. However, most people in developing countries die after three years of being diagnosed will AIDS. In case of new born babies, especially, in which the virus is transmitted vertically (from infected mother) the period of survival is more shortened, possibly because of juvenile immune infrastructure in the body of such babies.

The means of transmission of AIDS virus are now well known. The HIV is transmitted through sexual intercourse, blood transfusion, use of infected needles in medicare and by drug users, transmission through infected mother before birth of the baby, during birth or through breast feeding.

It is worth mentioning here that no AIDS spreads through ordinary social contacts; shaking hands, travelling in the same vehicle and on the same seat, working in the same office or any other workplace, eating from the same utensils, hugging and uisng same cloths and attending upon and treating AIDS victims. It therefore deserves making amply clear that AIDS should not be treated as leprosy or any other such disease which is transmitted through these ordinary contacts. And therefore the sufferers of this health catastrophe should not get undue social harassment and isolation.

The women are at more risk of getting infected with AIDS because of their increased vulnerability. Also because their genital tract is more likely to get infected easily than that of men. Moreover, their low status within the family and society further heighten their vulnerability to infection. Women have little or no access to affordable health services. Poverty makes them socially vulnerable to HIV. Women can seldom negotiate condom usage or other risk reducing strategies. Lack of access to information is linked directly to women's lack of participation in decision affecting their lives.

As AIDS is the full blown stage of HIV infection, there are a plethora of symptoms which characterize this stage. The very common among them include prolonged unexplained fatigue, swollen glands (lymphnodes), uninterrupted fevers lasting more than ten days at a stretch, chills, excessive sweating especially night sweats, mouth lesions painful swollen gums, sore throat, cough, shortness of breath, frequent diarrhea, symptoms of secondary infections like candida pneumosystis, TB and so on, tumor (Kaposi Sarcoma), weightloss, general uneasiness and headache. There are many additional symptoms as well like speech impairment, muscle atrophy, decreasing intellectual function, joint stiffness, blurred vision, abdominal pain, cold intolerance so on and so forth.

There is a general quote - 'Prevention is better than cure'. Unfortunately in case of AIDS no cure is available till now nor one is likely in the very near future as is evident from the frequently mutable physilogical genetics of the virus. Therefore the only safe side is a complete prevention. The latter in a country like ours can only be achieved by a mass awareness campaign from all important fora like educational institutions, health institutions, political platforms, involving NGOs etc. and through press and electronic media.

There are, however, certain treatments available which can only enhance and improve upon the quality of life of the sufferer. These include various antiviral drugs which suppress the replication of HIV in the body. The important ones include AZT, ddl, ddc, saquinavir (trade names). However, these drugs are very expensive and have severe adverse reactions while the virus tends to develop resistance combination of drugs including protease inhibitors but this makes the treatment further expensive. Dr Robert Gallo, the co-discoverer of HIV has crafted a vaccine that hunts AIDS virus when it is vulnerable. A test conducted on monkeys for this vaccine has shown encouraging results. However, the becoming of the latter as a final treatment is a long way ahead.

At present AIDS can be said as the deadliest ever pandemic across the globe. As per the world statistics of UNAID & WHO, the number of people living with HIV/AIDS at the end of year 2000 stood at 36.1 million. The spread has outnumbered the 1991 predicted projection of WHO to an increase of more than 50 percent. The challenges thrown by HIV vary enormously from place to place depending on how far and fast the virus is spreading and on whether those infected have started falling ill or die in large numbers. An estimated 2.5 million men aged 15-49 became infected during 2000 bringing the number of adult males living with AIDS/HIV at years end to 18.0 million. During the year 2000 more new HIV infections would have been registered in the Russian federation alone than in all previous years of the epidemic combined.

For the first time there are signs that HIV incidence- the annual number of new infections may have stabilized in Sub-Saharan Africa. New infections in 2000 totaled an estimated 3.8 million, as opposed to a total of 4.0 million in 1999.

The incidence of infection has badly eroded the economic status of the affected countries. In South Africa the epidemic is projected to reduce the economic growth rate by 0.3-4 percent annually, resulting by the year 2010 in a GDP 17 percent lower than it would have been without AIDS and wiping US$ 22 billion off the country's economy. In diamond rich Botswana, the country with highest per capita income in Africa, in the next ten years AIDS will take away 20 percent off the government budget, erode development gains and bring about 13 percent reduction in the income of poorest households.

In Asia as well the picture is warning. An estimated 7,00,000 adults, 45,000 men among them have become infected in the south and SE Asia at the closing year 2000. Overall, at the end of 2000, the region is estimated to have produced 5.8 million children and adults with HIV/AIDS.

Himalaya - Higher and Higher

By Pawan Kumar Verma

Much of the difficulty afflicts geology generally, as the term ‘mountain’ is unsatisfactory. To the layman, a mountain in a very large hill, commonly with steep slopes and mountains have a habit of being gregarious.

Readers are perhaps unlikely to agree with the comment of the late M.J.B. Baddeley, in the introduction to his Thorough Guide to the Highlands of Scotland, published in 1883; ‘As to the Scotch mountains themselves, there are far too many of them. Their multiplicity is wearisome..," but 1 think they will understand what he was getting at. Mountains in fact only rarely are isolated and only rarely do they individu- ally rise above a general level of summit peaks; they are what in left after valleys have been formed by erosion.

But to the geologist mountains are not just topographic features. Although geologists are, of course, extremely interested in topography, in erosion and in shapes in other words, in geomorphology they are interested even more in the totally different problem of how mountains form in the structural sense: why they are high, why they are where they are. And this is a very difficult problem. First it is not generally appreciated by laymen that much terrain which is fiat of almost flat consists of old, worn down mountains. Furthermore, mountains may be typographically very young but built of very old rocks., this is certainly true of the Lesser Himalaya, which lie everywhere between the Siwalik or Outer Himalaya and the Great Himalaya.

But, first, what are the Himalaya? Until recently this itself was a problem. The great European explorer geologist of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remained obsessed with the topographic aspects of mountains and sought the continuation of the Himalaya eastwards into China, while labelling the westward continuation the Hindu Kush.

The very existence of a great Indian Empire which included Burma also led to a concept of a certain unity of mountain systems around the Peninsula. All this is now quite unacceptable. We can say now that the Himalaya ex-tend from Chitral in northern Pakistan to just cast of the great Tsangpo Gorge, about 2,400 km. The rather lower mountains of Baluchistan and the Pakistan Afghanistan border region are totally different, as are the mountains of Burma and China.

Yet there is a structural as well as topographic connection in the broadest sense and most geologists regard the Himalaya as merely a part, if a very prominent one, of that great Alpine Himalayan mountain belt which extends from Spain to the Pacific.

Long as it is this is the shortest of the throw great global systems of young mountains, the other being the Circum-Pacific bait and the almost entirely submerged but exceedingly high Mid-Oceanic Ridge System. Though each of then great systems is complex and by no means uniform along its length, there is little doubt that each has a unity which demands an explanation in terms of global processes.

In another sense the Himalaya are merely the uplifted edge of the Tibetan Plateau, itself the highest on Earth. We do not know why Tibet is so high. Comparison with greet mountain systems on other continents given us a clue. It is the central part of Asia which in high, and this High Asia is broadly circular.

Though fairly narrow high zones beyond the circular area, the great plat- forms of old rocks in central Siberia, peninsular India and much of China are conspicuously lower. The Siberian plat- form is monotonously flat. This is certainly not true of China, a most complicated area geologically, but it is much lower then Tibet, with a great sudden rise most prominently seem on the western side of the Red Basin of Szechwan.

All readers will be familiar with the predominantly rather flat Peninsula, crossed as it is by hills rather than mountains. The only really high mountains are in the extreme south, and quite why they are so high is yet another problem, but they do not form more fact, most mountains on the Peninsula are merely residual, or are really the edges of small plateaus formed by simple fracturing, one part being slightly raised above the other.

Though all mountain systems are narrow in relation to their length, they very very greatly in the style of linearity. Some like the Caucasus are exceedingly straight others such as the combined Alps, Appenines and Carpathians, are extraordinarily sinuous. The Himalaya in contrast are neither they form an almost perfect arc.

It is not generally appreciated that this is a arc of almost exactly ninety de- grees, i.e. a quarter of a circle, not that the radius of the arc is one quarter that of the average radius of the Earth (one quarter of 6,370 km, about 1,600 km). It is difficult to believe that these facts are without some global significance.

Arcs are conspicuous features of the Earth, but confined mostly to particular regions: the western Pacific with Indonesia, the Caribbean, and the extraordinary Scotia Arc between southern South America and Antarc- tica. In all these regions however the arch are what we call ‘island arcs," and all are volcanic. The Himalaya cannot be compared with them.

In marked contract to much of the rest of the Alpine Himalayan belt, and very much in contract to the Circum Pacific Belt and the wholly volcanic Mid-Oceanic Ridge System, they are totally without volcanism at Dasht-i- Nawar recently found in central Afghanistan, while to the cast the nearest are in centre Burma, a continuations of those of the great Java-Sumatran Arc.

Another point has to be made. Most mountain systems have a very complex internal structure and are built of materials previously eroded from a region to one side of them, which accumulated in sea, this accumulation commonly went on for tons of millions of years and ultimately caused such disturbance to the crystal balance that some kind of paroxysm occurred not of course in- stantly, but over a much shorter period than the period of accumulation.

The mass of material was then in some manner uplifted, in a disturbed and twisted condition, to form mountains or rather to form a mess from which mountains and Valley, wore form the very beginning of the period of unfit, gradually formed by geological process. Not only local accumulation around the rising mass.

Such a picture is not true of the Himalaya. Far from being the product of the erosion of either the Peninsula or of Tibet, it has long been known that in large part the Himalaya are made up of Peninsular material, little altered except by quite mild thermal processes. Only further north do we ace sediments truly the product of erosion, deposited in a former sea (which we call Tethys) and lying on this mildly modified Peninsular material. It is not quite so sim- ple of course, as there are new granites along the axis of the Himalaya which result from much stronger thermal changes, but these too are probably remitted Peninsular rock.

All this is immensely important because the Peninsular in a very peculiar part of Asia. One hundred years ago H.B. Modlicott recognised in central India the existence of rocks he named Gondwana after the Gonds of that region. These rocks, those which are rich in coal seams, contain fossils with affinities far more with similar rocks in the countries of the southern hemisphere than with the rest of Asia.

By 1885 the great Austrian geologist Eduard Suess was referring to Gondwanaland, a former continent which had included Peninsular India, Australia, much of Africa, South America, and thought it was not established of course until the twentieth century Antarctica. The most striking discovery of all was that of deposits of a great ice age in all these regions, the first dis- covery being made in India,

This was in no way related to the ice age from which we are still emerging (some people think that we might have to suffer some more of it yet) and which only started about a million years ago, but was immensely old. We now know that it occurred about 250 million years ago. The discovery stunned the geologists of the time. The presence of ice age deposits in a lowlying tropical region was inexplicable.

For many years the geological profession was divided on this problem. The very existence of so large a former continent presented problems in itself, for the fragments now remaining are far distant from each other. The presence within the continental fragments of fossils of land animals quite unable to cross the sea suggested that vast areas of the former superconfident must have subsided and become ocean floor. This later became extremely difficult to believe, for even the early work on the mean floors showed that they are not continental in type.

It was only in 1912 that a totally new concept was put forward, thought foreshadowed much earlier in a primitive way. This was that the continents on the Earth are not fixed in position relative to one another, but have moved, apart from one large superintendent. Wagener, the German meteorologist and Arctic explorer who first suggested this on a global basis, was written off by his colleagues as a crank.

In 1924 an English edition of his work appeared and led to intense controversy, with the few geologist of the then little developed southern hemisphere countries often in agreement, together with many of the British geologists then working in India. But the great majority of geologists, living in Europe and North America, unfamiliar with the Gondwana rocks (for the term is applied to then were they are found), and often frankly disbelieving the interpretation of the ice deposits as correct, ware able to prevent general acceptance of the concept.

All this changed with the development of sophisticated techniques to study the ocean floors, and within less than a decade in the sixties a belief in large scale horizontal displacement of continents has become almost dogma. The main opponents of this are the older Soviet workers, especially those who have been out of the USSR.

The fashionable view is that India was a part of Gondwanaland, from which it became separated and moved in a complicated manner to join Asia, and that the Himalaya are the product of their collision. Some enthusiastic geologist have even gone so for as to suggest that the distance India travelled, and the speed of its movement, explain the great height and size of the Himalaya.

There are many reasons to doubt this, but quits certainly the Himalaya cannot in their present form be the product of any such collision. The timing and the structural pattern are all wrong. Indian and foreign workers have shown that not only was the elevation of the Himalaya exceedingly recent (in the geological sense) but that early Man probably crossed them easily when they were merely rolling hills.

What than is the origin of this superb are? My own views are these. The Himalaya are indeed the uplifted edge of the Tibetan Plateau. The Himalayan Arc is a part of that large circle which bounds High Asia. The centre of this circle lies at the extraordinary depression of Turfan (Tu’lu’fan) in the Chinese Tuan Shan, the surface of which is well below sea level yet not 100 km to the north of which lie mountains 5,000 meters high.

Many geological features of High Asia are radial to Turfan, other appear to relate to it less simply. We know that between the vast, old platforms of Siberia, China and India that central Asia consisted of complex belts generally increasing in age north wards. Super imposed upon these there has been blister like uplift centred upon Turfan, and which expresses itself differently in the different quadrants of the circle. This was largely a recent process, though it seems to have started about 200 mil- lion years ago.

But since the culminating stage, there has been still further uplift of Tibet relative to the Tarim Basin block, for the great Nan Shan radial structure on the northern side of the Tsaidam depression has been truncated by an enormous fracture, that which separates Tibet from Tarim. The Himalaya, essentially part of the Peninsula be- fore uplift took place, are not just simply uplifted but are thrust southwards over the Peninsula, and indeed in part over the Siwaliks, which are really nothing more than material lovely accumulated as the rising Himalaya were eroded.

The exceptional high of the Himalaya above, Tibet, as the British geologist and climber Wager suggested in 1963, is in part probably a kind of round. Many great rivers cross the Himalaya. These remove colossal quan- tities of material, so much so that the crustal balance is disturbed. As a result, the peaks between the gorges are rising.