Paterno's Statue: Once a Monument to a Man, Now a Reminder of a Society's Failing

A brilliant column by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the New York Times today argues for not removing Paterno's statue from the prominent place it now occupies at Penn State:

Arguing for the statue’s removal, the legendary coach Bobby Bowden said he wouldn’t want Sandusky’s crimes “brought up every time I walked out on the field.” That’s the point. Sandusky’s crimes should never be forgotten, nor should the crimes of the broader community. It is shameful to deify men who put nationalist ritual before children. But it is more shameful to pretend that this elevation was achieved by Joe Paterno’s singular hand.

Removing the Paterno statue allows Happy Valley to forget its own compliance in a national crime, to expunge its own culpability in its ruthless pursuit of glory. The statue should remain, and beneath it there should be a full explanation of Sandusky’s crimes, Paterno’s role and some warning to all of us who would turn a pastime into a god and elect a mortal man as its avatar.

Profiting from Social Media

Sree Sreenivasan, a professor of digital media and dean of student affairs at Columbia Journalism School, has a new blog on CNET. His first post is on profiting from social media.

Forbes Article on D.C. Pedicabs

The nose wheel makes an acute turn and plants itself in the six-foot-wide gap between two cars idling at a traffic light on 14^thStreet. Before we have time to analyse just how our driver would steer the rest of the 10-foot-long ‘pedicab’ into that space, we’re straddling another lane line a few feet down the road between a big, red tourist bus and a truck. A few more zigs and zags later, we are in front of a bank of vehicles at least 30 cars deep, clear of all the exhaust. Our driver looks back at us and declares triumphantly, “Like I said, this is not my first day on the job!”

For the past two years, Will Visbeck has been honing his skills as a driver of a pedicab – known to the rest of the world variously as cycle rickshaw, cyclo, becak or trishaw – on the streets of Washington, D.C. It has no roof, doors, seatbelts, airbags, rear-view mirrors or stereo systems (though headlight, taillight and turn signals are in evidence) but we do get to make leisurely circles around statues and monuments as our driver keeps up his commentary of the sights.

Originally published in ForbesLife India. A link to the pdf version is here.

Blogging, Journalism and Plagiarism

Mridula, a popular India-based travel blogger, details her struggle against an Indian newspaper:

On Sunday we get a lot of newspapers. Hindustan Times is one of them. I was flipping through Brunch and then I had a feeling of Deja Vu. I started laughing and said the same thing to Sesha- this is my picture. This time he didn't tell me it could be ia generic photograph. If you hold a copy of the Brunch you would find that the foam in the coffee is pixel by pixel same, the image above and the image on page 12 of Brunch of December 6, 2009.

As Mridula mentions on her blog, there have been numerous instances in which bloggers have had to deal with print media using their content without permission. I hope Mridula is able to resolve this matter satisfactorily.

Brief Quote in Article on Virtual Travel

Deccan Herald carried an article on virtual travel this weekend with a brief quote from yours truly.

There are other online resources, which can be used as educational tools. At mapmsg.com for instance, you can move blocks of countries around with the mouse. In that sense, are online resources such as wonderrotunda.com a great option for young learners?

Wonder Rotunda is an American website, which offers many virtual tour options. You could go on a climate change expedition if you so wish to, and there are simulations of Arctic ice on that particular tool.

However, Sujatha, a blogger and mother of two, says: "When we pick a destination, we pull out the atlas, check out the other places we can sensibly include in our plan and then move online to check out reviews and to make reservations. My son’s geography lessons still come from maps, board games, TV shows and the Nat Geo magazine."

Old fuddy duddies that we are, I had no clue that such a concept as 'virtual' travel existed, and that there are now websites dedicated to what used to be called 'armchair' travel back in the day.

The Power of Education

I know it's not as simple. Education does not necessarily bring empowerment. But when you read Tererai's story, it's difficult not to think otherwise:

After much argument, the father allowed Tererai to attend school for a couple of terms, but then married her off at about age 11.

Tererai’s husband barred her from attending school, resented her literacy and beat her whenever she tried to practice her reading by looking at a scrap of old newspaper. Indeed, he beat her for plenty more as well. She hated her marriage but had no way out. “If you’re a woman and you are not educated, what else?” she asks.

Yet when Jo Luck came and talked to Tererai and other young women in her village, Luck kept insisting that things did not have to be this way. She kept saying that they could achieve their goals, repeatedly using the word “achievable.” The women caught the repetition and asked the interpreter to explain in detail what “achievable” meant.

[...]

After Luck and her entourage disappeared, Tererai began to study on her own, in hiding from her husband, while raising her five children. Painstakingly, with the help of friends, she wrote down her goals on a piece of paper: “One day I will go to the United States of America,” she began, for Goal 1. She added that she would earn a college degree, a master’s degree and a Ph.D. — all exquisitely absurd dreams for a married cattle herder in Zimbabwe who had less than one year’s formal education. But Tererai took the piece of paper and folded it inside three layers of plastic to protect it, and then placed it in an old can. She buried the can under a rock where she herded cattle.

Read the rest of Tererai's story in this New York Times Magazine essay titled The Women's Crusade (excerpted from a forthcoming book titled "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide" by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wu Dunn). Her story and the stories of some of the other women profiled in the essay are exhilarating.

Complications during VBAC and a terrible tragedy

The Mad Momma has posted Rashmi and Vivek's horrifying story of the birth and death of their second child. Attempting a vaginal birth after caeserean (VBAC), the delivery ran into complications resulting in the baby's death. It is an excruciatingly painful story, their grief amplified by what they say was the hospital's negligence and uncaring attitude.

I felt no urge whatsoever to push, yet was asked to do so. The stirrup on the delivery table kept breaking off – I was told that this is a recurring problem that “needed attention”. At 1.50 pm, the fetal heart rate dropped to 80 beats per minute. Dr. Prabha was called again. She checked the fetal heart rate on the CTG, explained that this was normal when the baby was passing through the birth canal, and asked me to hold my breath and push hard. I felt no sensation in my cervical area, but felt intense pain tearing my stomach apart. I felt like my baby had rolled into my stomach and could see its body pushing up against my ribcage. I was screaming, pointing at my stomach, and telling them that my stomach was hurting, and there was no urge to push. But she told me to “push, push harder”. I then heard Dr. Prabha saying “Get the OT ready”. She told my husband that she was going to attempt to deliver by forceps – if that was unsuccessful, she’d have to do a Caesarian.

The OT wasn’t on standby, wasn’t ready. I was numb with pain. They wanted me to get up and move to the operation table. I couldn’t move. They eventually slid something under my back and I pushed myself on to the OT table, as there was no transfer stretcher available. I complained of severe shoulder and chest pain. No one paid me any attention; everyone was busy preparing the OT, and the anesthetist was attempting to top up my epidural. The fetal heart rate was never monitored in the OT. Dr. Prabha unsuccessfully attempted a forceps delivery at 2.20 p.m., and then cut me open. I heard a deafening sucking sound, after which I must have passed out.

Later, I learnt that my uterus had ruptured along the scar of my previous Caeserian section. My baby was found floating in my abdomen. He had no heartbeat and he wasn’t breathing. He had been deprived of oxygen for a long time – 43 minutes. They “resuscitated” my son and put him on a ventilator.

When I opened my eyes I saw Dr. Latha leave, followed by Dr. Prabha. Dr. Shirley was suturing me while laughing and talking with another nurse. I felt reassured that my baby was okay, even though I had neither seen nor heard him.

After months of working with the hospital to find out exactly what when wrong, Rashmi and Vivek were met with stonewalling and assertions by the attending doctor that she would do the same thing over again in a similar case in the future. And that is exactly what Rashmi says she is looking to prevent.

Please do click the link above and read the entire post.

Wockhardt Bangalore, the hospital where Rashmi attempted to have her baby, is responding in the comments section to The Mad Momma's post. Girl on the Bridge linked to the post on her blog:

As someone who will be (hopefully) a mother soon, this story is my worst nightmare. Of course, my situation is not the same. This is my first child. What annoys me most is the hospital’s claim (Wockhardt has a long rebuttal in MM’s comments) that Rashmi chose Dr. Latha because she wanted a VBAC. This is conjecture and probably not useful to any lawyer fighting on facts but I know, I just KNOW that no matter how certain a woman is about how she wants her birth to be, no matter how much she is set on a certain type of experience she would not, would not put her child at risk.

I have said many times before on this blog that we need to be involved in the medical procedures that we go through, we need to ask questions, read on our own about the conditions and the procedures. Rashmi's story does not take away from any of that. If anything, it emphasizes the need to not only be aware of what's being done to us but also the need to be careful in choosing medical institutions and doctors.

Many times, in emergencies especially, we don't have a choice regarding what hospital we end up in or which doctor attends to us, but for the times we do, I wish there were some service that would rate the doctors on their competency and bedside manner and success in their field. I'm not saying that the tragedy that befell Rashmi and her family will never ever happen again, but it will arm people with the kind of information that I didn't have when I was getting ready to have my baby in Bangalore, the kind of information that parents-to-be come searching for to my blog (and I'm sure many others) on the backs of a google search.

I deeply admire Rashmi for what she is doing. She has lived through an experience so devastating that we would not wish it on our worst enemies and she is using her story to educate mothers-to-be. A story that, I'm sure, calls up her pain every time she recounts it, that reopens wounds that would heal faster if only they were allowed to stay closed. I do hope that her efforts result in a better experience with hospitals for anyone considering having a baby.

P.S. Thanks, Aaman, for alerting me to this story.

In the Wake of the Iranian Elections

From .faramarz's Flikr photostream

Amazing coverage at the Daily Dish. More at Global Voices. Gripping photos on Flikr. History is happening.

The Newsweek Oprah Story: What Do Celebrities Owe Us?

Newsweek carries a scathing article in its latest edition, about Oprah and the 'bad', 'wrong', 'risky' health advice she dishes on her daily TV show:

Her viewers follow her guidance because they like and admire her, sure. But also because they believe that Oprah, with her billions and her Rolodex of experts, doesn't have to settle for second best. If she says something is good, it must be.

This is where things get tricky. Because the truth is, some of what Oprah promotes isn't good, and a lot of the advice her guests dispense on the show is just bad. The Suzanne Somers episode wasn't an oddball occurrence. This kind of thing happens again and again on Oprah. Some of the many experts who cross her stage offer interesting and useful information (props to you, Dr. Oz). Others gush nonsense. Oprah, who holds up her guests as prophets, can't seem to tell the difference. She has the power to summon the most learned authorities on any subject; who would refuse her? Instead, all too often Oprah winds up putting herself and her trusting audience in the hands of celebrity authors and pop-science artists pitching wonder cures and miracle treatments that are questionable or flat-out wrong, and sometimes dangerous.

Yes, Oprah is popular. Wildly so. Yes, she has a broad-based, ardent following for her TV show. Yes, the things she recommends on her show have the habit of flying off the shelves (or whatever the equivalent is on Amazon). But does any of this mean that she owes anything to her audience other than being honest when she says she tried such and such product or when she says she loved the book she picked for her book club?

I am not an expert on Oprah. I watch clips from her shows off and on and read her and about her in magazines and on websites. From what I've seen and read, she comes across as the person who is enthusiastic about certain things (some ideas, some products, some services) and uses her show - a vehicle and brand she created from scratch and built to dish on her view of life and its struggles - to talk about them. That a million people rush off buy the thing she mentions on the show - what exactly does it require her to do? Worry that her audience might use the information blindly without investigating it further for themselves? Should she be responsible for the actions of her audience?

This is a question I've asked before in relation to the Phelps marijuana fiasco. Just because a celebrity is good at something and they make money off of it or are popular because of it, does it mean that they should be on their best behaviour, do the right things and say the right things?

The Newsweek article places a litany of demands on Oprah's show. A sampling:

""Because of the power and influence that Oprah's show has, she should make an extra effort to be clear."" (Comment on a show about the HPV vaccine.)

"Oprah said almost nothing about possible risks." (Comment on a show about 'thread-lifting'.)

"Fanning believes Oprah should have made it clear that Thermage isn't for everyone."

Which leads me to believe that the audience has no responsibility for its own actions, that her viewers are gullible and unquestioning, that they will swallow every piece of advice that tumbles out of her mouth without assessing the pros and cons for their specific circumstances and health conditions. Is this really so? If that is the case, then Oprah and other celebrities like her are standing at the top of a very long, slippery slope. Which one of her audience members should she worry about? The ones that do not understand that medical or cosmetic procedures involve risks? The ones that do not get that medicines may have side effects? The ones that do not know enough to ask if such and such procedure is right for them? The ones that will refuse vaccinations for their children because Jenny McCarthy said so and she was on Oprah's show? Where do you start and where do you stop?

The article gives off a whiff of wanting to take the contrarian view just because. The complaints against the show appear lame and the authors and the experts they consult indulge in some heavy patronizing. The recommendations for alterations to Oprah's show (listing a procedure's side effects, introducing experts who take the opposite view on the medication being discussed, among other things) are great - if you are a C-SPAN show or a medicine ad that must follow the Federal Trade Commission rules or one of those public TV channels that no one watches. Not if you are Oprah and all you are selling is escapism in doses of an hour a day and the idea that we are all in the same boat (so what if she is super rich and super connected and super famous while most of her audience is thoroughly entrenched in the middle class?), and believe strongly in stories about wanting to be the best you can be.

So let's hang back and take Oprah's health advice with a pinch of salt. As we should. And as I'm sure she would want her audience to.

Updated June 2: Changed 'author' to 'authors' in the penultimate paragraph. The Newsweek article is credited to two writers.

A soldier faces down the Taliban - in pink boxer shorts

I was driving to Arlington National Cemetery this morning when I heard this report on NPR's Weekend Edition titled Real Men Wear Pink Boxers:

Photo Credit: Associated Press photographer David Guttenfelder

U.S. Army Specialist Zachary Boyd of the 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry, who is 19, was sleeping when the Taliban attacked his unit in Afghanistan's Kunar province. Specialist Boyd leapt from his bunk. He grabbed his weapon, pulled on his helmet and vest, and manned his station behind sandbags at Firebase Restropo. He did not stop to pull on trousers.

His mom's reaction? Priceless.

"I was always telling him to pull up his pants," Sheree Boyd recalls. "I would give him a wedgie to make him do it. As a mom, you want your son to look nice. But he has always been one to run around in his boxers."

Bravery comes in all forms. Some are brave in battlefields. Some are brave in ordinary homes just like yours and mine all over the world.

Tweeting and a history of brevity

Ryan Bigge in The Smart Set:

By the early 17th century, Shakespeare was praising short and snappy punchlines in Hamlet. Later that century, Japanese poet Matsuo Basho became a haiku master thanks to his immortal frog-pond-splash trifecta. By the 20th century, the telegraph made it possible to send your thoughts around the world, but curtness was an economic imperative since you were charged per word. The modern equivalent of the telegraph, thumb-intensive cellphone SMS (text messaging) also makes pithy thoughts a necessity. And overdiscussed Twitter imposes a 140-character limit on your genius, which works out to 20 or 30 words, depending on the sophistication of your vocabulary.

[...]

The concision of telegrams created poetry and wit born of economy. "STREETS FULL OF WATER. PLEASE ADVISE," is what humorist Robert Benchley sent his editor at The New Yorker upon arriving in Venice for the first time.

The entire article is available by clicking here.

The pursuit of happiness (and an unconventional tour of Washington) by Maira Kalman

Image credit: Maira Kalman for the NYT

Kalman takes you on a whirlwind tour of Washington. Hold on to your hats and enjoy this thoroughly delightful ride!

Digging dirt in politics

The Washington Post deploys its investigative reporting resources to delving into the etymology of a hyphenated word that is creeping into Obama's statements - shovel-ready.

The phrase doesn't appear in Merriam-Webster's online dictionary. Dictionary.com is stumped, but suggests an alternative spelling: "shovelhead." The Oxford English Dictionary, final arbiter of all word arguments that it is, offers no shovel-ready listing, either.

Could this be a made-up word? If so, who made it up, and how did it end up in the mouth of the next leader of the free world?

Deeper digging is required.

Read more and dig deeper yourself.

Speaking of made-up words, blogpourri is one too!

Time's 2008 Person of the Year...

... is Obama. A foregone conclusion, but Time labors to explain its reasoning:

In the waning days of his extraordinary year and on the cusp of his presidency, what now seems most salient about Obama is the opposite of flashy, the antithesis of rhetoric: he gets things done. He is a man about his business — a Mr. Fix It going to Washington. That's why he's here and why he doesn't care about the furniture. We've heard fine speechmakers before and read compelling personal narratives. We've observed candidates who somehow latch on to just the right issue at just the right moment. Obama was all these when he started his campaign: a talented speaker who had opposed the Iraq war and lived a biography that was all things to all people. But while events undermined those pillars of his candidacy, making Iraq seem less urgent and biography less relevant, Obama has kept on rising. He possesses a rare ability to read the imperatives and possibilities of each new moment and organize himself and others to anticipate change and translate it into opportunity.

On another note, here's Obama in 2008.


In 2012, it'll be interesting to go back to this photograph or to any of his recent ones to see how much grayer he's gotten. If recent history is any indication (Bill Clinton, G.W.), Obama will be silver-haired by then.

Picture credit: Callie Shell/Aurora for Time.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Edited to add a link to the Time article (Dec 18, 08).

Salt

A few days ago C asked how salt was made. I gave him some vague answer about salt beds and evaporation and crystallization. Today's Washington Post has the story of one family that works on those salt beds. The latest in its series called A Woman's World - The Struggle for Equality Around the Globe, the story is about the unequal schooling opportunities for boys and girls in South Asia and traces the harsh life of one family as they leave their homes and spend part of the year near the salt beds.

Though the village of 12,000 is a seven-hour walk from Jyotsna's isolated hut on the salt pans, it might as well be England, it feels so different and far away.

"It's easier to be a boy," said Jyotsna, who was forced to drop out of school at 10 to help her parents. "They get to go to school." Jyotsna's mother said she could not afford to let all three of her children study, so she picked her daughter to work.

[...]

"I regret she has this hard life," said her mother, Ranjanben Patadia, 35. "But this is the destiny of girls. It was my destiny, too." Unlike her mother, who never set foot in a classroom, Jyotsna did study on and off for a few years, thanks to a major government effort over the past decade to enroll all children. Though Jyotsna can still barely read or write, that progress has made her more aware of what she is now missing.

[...]

Clack. Clack. Clack. The "machine," as everyone calls their water pump, sounds like a heartbeat. And in a way, it is. If it stops, so does life here. No more salt, money, meals. Jyotsna's parents earn $500 annually from mining salt, and that all depends on the rickety old pump sucking briny underground water to the surface.

Once there, the water is channeled into hand-dug ponds. The sun bakes it, and the salt crystals left behind are sold to flavor potato chips and scrambled eggs in distant lands.

[...]

Her parents had left before sunrise. They earn 35 cents for every 220-pound bag they fill with salt, so they start early and work late.

[...]

Her parents struggle in the heat, and her father, Bhopabhai Patadia, 39, sometimes collapses. He has high blood pressure, as do many people here, because too much salt seeps into his body through cracks in his bare feet.

I don't think I'll ever take salt for granted again. The photo gallery is especially gripping.

From the reporter's notebook, a wry look at toilet facilities, or the lack thereof, near the salt beds.

The entire series is a fascinating, sometimes hearwrenching, look into the lives of women in various corners of the world - Germany, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Pakistan, UK.

Cooper races Phelps and comes up...er...a little short

60 Minutes snagged Michael Phelps for his first extended post-Beijing interview. During the 13-minute segment, Anderson Cooper (guesting on 60 Minutes for this assignment) challenges Phelps to a race. Watch Cooper run down the rules governing this race and Phelps' reaction.

CBS News Showing Video of Train Station Terrorist's Arrest

According to CBS News online:

A grainy cell-phone video obtained by CBS News shows the moments before police in Mumbai arrested the only living suspect in the 60-hour terror rampage that began last Wednesday and eventually left at least 170 people dead.

The one-minute, 35-second video opens with images that apparently show bystanders and Indian security forces beating a man on the ground with sticks.

The journalist from whom CBS News obtained the video says the man is Ajmal Qasab, who, according to a senior Indian police officer, confessed to interrogators that he is a member of the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

For the cell-phone video, click here.

The video is very grainy and it's difficult to tell who the people are (CBS' headline reads, "Video Allegedly Shows India Terror Arrest"), but it's hard not to miss the rage of the people hitting the person on the ground. Reports of the lone terrorist's arrest and subsuquent interrogation have been around for a couple of days now. I really hope some solid information comes out of this.

Watching Mumbai's Terror From Afar

We were on the road on Wednesday, driving down to Asheville, North Carolina, for the Thanksgiving break when we heard. We ended up watching way more television than we intended. It helped that there were two television sets in the condo we had rented. C watched some of the coverage but the kids were focused on movies for the most part.

A few stray thoughts:

1. MSNBC carried sporadic live coverage with feeds from NDTV, but CNN pretty much stayed on Mumbai for the entire duration of the siege with live feed from its "sister" network, CNN IBN. It was not long before CNN got its own reporters, Sara Sidner, Matthew Chance and Nic Roberts into Mumbai. For much of the time, CNN's own reporters and MSNBC's anchors provided voice-overs or commentary on what was transpiring on the screen.
   
2. As the coverage progressed it became hard to ignore CNN trying to distance itself from IBN's pronouncements, choosing to slap a disclaimer - "Our sister network CNN IBN is reporting .... However, CNN is unable to independently confirm this information."
   
3. One striking aspect of the coverage is the stark difference in the demeanor of the Indian and the US reporters (panicked vs. calm, intent on providing information vs. stoking the already rising passions). The Indian TV channels' coverage has come in for some criticism and might be on the hook for more than just bad journalism. Variety reports that the channel bosses have already been summoned to explain their actions (via SAJA).
   
4. Even in the middle of the terror and the chaos and the sorrow, a mob suddenly converged around the CNN reporter Sara Sidner did not pass up the chance to harass her (via Huffington Post and Mediabistro). It was sickening to watch. I wondered why she went off the air towards the later stages of the siege and sent in her reports via telephone. Perhaps this was why. She had stood her ground in the face of the carnage in progress just a few yards beyond her position in front of the Taj - the bombs still going off, the intermittent gunfire - but perhaps the physical assault on her person proved too much. Who can blame her? Click here to see the video (also see update below).
   
   According to Mediabistro, "Sidner would later report, "As we were standing outside a large group of people came around, many of them young, with the smell of alcohol on their breath, frankly. They were standing very, very close and suddenly chaos erupted.""
   
5. What was with the funny map of India on CNN? All of Kashmir seemed to be gone. Trying to find a picture of it. Will put up a link if I can find it.

Update:

The CNN Sara Sidner video showed up on the published post. I still can't see it in my draft or on the Edit Html page. Hmm.

Update 2: Argh. Now I can't see the video. The link still works I hope.

Mumbai Terror Attacks: The Photographer Who Took the Terrorist's Photograph

The Belfast Telegraph interviews Mumbai Mirror pictures editor, Sebastian D'Souza. He's the man that took the now ubiquitous photograph of a young terrorist striding - nonchalantly it seems - toward his victims, his gun drawn and his backpack strapped around his shoulders.

By Sebastian D'Souza, Mumbai Mirror

Sebastian D'Souza, a picture editor at the Mumbai Mirror, whose offices are just opposite the city's Chhatrapati Shivaji station, heard the gunfire erupt and ran towards the terminus. "I ran into the first carriage of one of the trains on the platform to try and get a shot but couldn't get a good angle, so I moved to the second carriage and waited for the gunmen to walk by," he said. "They were shooting from waist height and fired at anything that moved. I briefly had time to take a couple of frames using a telephoto lens. I think they saw me taking photographs but they didn't seem to care."

[...]

"Towards the station entrance, there are a number of bookshops and one of the bookstore owners was trying to close his shop," he recalled. "The gunmen opened fire and the shopkeeper fell down."

But what angered Mr D'Souza almost as much were the masses of armed police hiding in the area who simply refused to shoot back. "There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything," he said. "At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, 'Shoot them, they're sitting ducks!' but they just didn't shoot back."

[...]

I only wish I had a gun rather than a camera."

Updated to add a link to Desipundit which in turn links exhaustively to blogs on the Mumbai attacks.

Helen Thomas is back...

... among the White House press corps. Will be interesting to witness the verbal jousting between a young, cerebral president and the relentlessly inquisitive reporter who has lived a not insignificant number of years, years that Obama will only have read about in history books.