City psychiatrists explain just what the Chilean miners are going through deep within the earth, and steps they can take to maintain their mental balance
A couple of years ago, the BBC aired a special show called Total Isolation. Six people were shut inside a cell in a nuclear bunker, quite in the dark. After, 48 hours, the volunteers experienced auditory and visual hallucinations, visions and an inability to sense time. Tests proved that their ability to complete the simplest tasks had deteriorated. One subject’s memory capacity fell 36 per cent and all the subjects had trouble thinking of words beginning with the letter ‘F’.
This was the psychological impact of 48 hours of isolation from the world on subjects who knew they were taking part in an experiment, and were assured of physical safety. Imagine the state of 33 miners trapped underground in Chile for more than three weeks. Holed up in a hot and cramped shelter, they know that whatever chance at rescue will arrive in about four months. Some of them are already despondent, and aren’t eating well either. The officials said that while the rescue operations are under way, the trapped men would receive water, sustenance, medical care and communication through a tiny drill probe hole that located them last Sunday. But that is hardly enough, psychologists feel.
It is tough to stimulate your brain with no light, says Dr Vikram Prabhu. This senior psychiatrist thinks sensory deprivation is serious threat. “Without normal stimuli like light and sound, brain functions are disrupted or in extremes cases lost,” he says. Any kind of confined space over a period of time can make people get disoriented, confused, and lose a sense of time and place. Often, in such circumstances, people tend to withdraw into themselves, and a hopeless, helpless feeling can set in, he says. “This is usually followed by an inability to talk to each other.”
HYDERABAD: Five judges belonging to the state’s subordinate judiciary were suspended by the AP High Court on Wednesday for allegedly copying while writing their LLM examinations at the Arts College of Kakatiya University in Warangal on Tuesday.
The judges were doing this course under distance mode from Kakatiya University as the degree would help them gain some increments in their careers.
Those placed under suspension include K Ajitsimha Rao, senior civil judge, Ranga Reddy district, M Kistappa, principal senior civil judge, Anantapur, P Vijayendar Reddy, second additional district judge, Ranga Reddy district, M Srinivasachary, senior civil judge in Bapatla of Guntur district and Hanumantha Rao, the additional junior civil judge in Warangal.
They were allegedly caught red-handed in the act of copying on Tuesday by the authorities and upon receipt of this information, the HC suspended them from service pending an inquiry. The HC would soon launch disciplinary proceedings against all these judicial officers, sources said.
Source/Author: Rishiraj Mistry | Posted on: August 17th, 2010
Superb portrayal of the typical social attitudes towards issues of domestic violence.
DV is NOT gender specific… Anyone and everyone can be a victim of DV in home, every human being in a domestic relationship deserves protection against the perpetrator!
For a country accustomed to gloating about GDP growth figures and taking these as a measure of achievement, here is sobering advice from NR Narayana Murthy, founder of Infosys Technologies, India’s second-largest infotech firm. Stop focussing exclusively on 8 or 8.5% growth, look at the sorry state of affairs on the governance front, he said at a function here.
Drawing a contrast between the success of the private sector and the decay and corruption in the government sector, he said: “In areas where public governance is involved, we have hardly made any progress.”
Murthy said the politicians and bureaucrats are trapped in a colonial mindset. “They feel they are the masters and there is no need to show fairness and transparency,” he said.
Murthy, seen as an idealist by many, owns less than 5% of the total shares of Infosys. He will step down as chairman of the company in 10 days.
While admitting to some exceptions, he noted many of the leaders and bureaucrats were completely out of touch with the dynamics of the current world. “Once I was with a senior bureaucrat discussing how badly our high school students had performed in an international competition and he said, ‘we must stop participating in such competitions’,” he said.
The outdated mentality of the political class, he said, is accentuated by an equally apathetic population, which has almost accepted corruption and inefficiency. “For over 1,000 years, the government belonged to someone sitting either 2,000 miles or 4,000 miles away. There is no sense of societal ownership,” he said. “The penalty (for corruption) is minimal. As a result, there is no fear of repercussions and there is no accountability.”
Murthy’s cure, besides tougher punishment, is to abolish the system of generalised administrators under the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) and replace it with specialists under a new ‘Indian Management Service’.
The new breed of government servants would have specialised knowledge to manage projects. Their salaries must also be increased to ‘near private sector’ levels, while making 60% of their remuneration variable according to how well they are able to implement projects. “If we had kept track of the activities using a project management software, we would not be where we are,” he said, about the delays in setting up the Commonwealth Games infrastructure.
He, however, refused to encourage speculation that he would join public life. “I am too old. Besides there is already someone from Infosys,” he said, referring to former CEO Nandan Nilekani, currently heading the UID project.
Between 7 and 10 per cent of men are exposed to either physical or mental abuse at home
“I must be the first man in the Balkans to admit that I have been battered by my wife,” Dusan Stojkovic said with a wry smile, speaking from Serbia’s first safe house for battered men.
It took a lot for the man who is in his fifties to reach out and get help, breaking a taboo in a country where men still cling to a fierce macho image.
Stojkovic has been in the safe house for abused men in central Cuprija, the first in Serbia, since it was founded in July 2009 by the Safety for Men nongovernmental organisation.
“My wife and her daughters (from another marriage) hit me with baseball bats,” he told AFP, thumbing through his thick legal file.
After the beatings, Stojkovic said, his wife accused him of battering her, saying she fought back in self-defence. He assumed this was his spouse’s way to get her hands on his assets: the house and his dog breeding business.
The hardest part for Stojkovic was to convince people that, actually, he is the victim. He was jailed for two months following his wife’s accusations, and when he was released he was ordered to stay away from his own home.
His wife has kept his house, his assets and his business. “All this is the result of the court’s denial that men can also be victims of domestic abuse,” said Verica Zivanovic, a lawyer who volunteers for Safety for Men.
The organisation’s founder Dusan Trifunovic, a former mayor of Cuprija, explained that many men were having trouble getting justice in abusive situations. “Even if they get a court ruling in their favour it is almost impossible to enforce,” he complained.
Stereotypes run deep in Serbia’s still very traditional society.
Even Zivanovic admitted that she suppressed a snigger when she first heard of Safety for Men but said she was stunned by the number of cases similar to Stojkovic’s.
According to the group around a thousand men have contacted the NGO since the safe house opened, most of them following an appearance by one of its residents in a popular talk show.
“There is a lot of interest but our capacity is limited. We can take in only urgent cases,” said Stojkovic, who has become a coordinator for the NGO.
Safety for Men founder Trifunovic said between seven and 10 per cent of Serbian men were exposed to either physical or mental abuse at home.
Few men dare to come forward due to the stigma attached and prevalent prejudices. But men at the safehouse have not only suffered at the hands of their wives. According to Trifunovic a growing number of men say they have been assaulted by their own children.
“When it comes to physical violence Serbian men will not easily admit they were the victims because of the patriarchal society,” where men are considered to be the strong head of the family, Svetlana Acimovic, a social worker in a family and marriage counseling centre, told AFP.
“Men now speak more openly about mental abuse but we still see many more female victims of domestic violence. Over 90 per cent of the people who turn to us for help are women,” she stressed.
Safe house resident Janko Paunovic meanwhile has a practical suggestion to help male and female victims of domestic violence overcome their ordeal.
“They should build the safe houses for men and women next to each other,” he said.
“We will have men and women who suffered there. They can talk about it and who knows what could happen…,” he explained with a hopeful smile. -AFP
Source/Author: Napster | Posted on: July 22nd, 2010
Well, I saw Inception the other day. Brilliant movie. Awesome storyline and brilliant performances.
One strange thing that caught my attention in the movie was how Mal Cobb dies. She commits suicide but Mr. Cobb ( Dicaprio) is the one who gets into trouble. When I saw this, I was strangely reminded of our country’s dowry death laws. Strange, I know.
What is dowry death?
This Section of the Indian Penal Code was inserted by a 1986 amendment. The Dowry deaths law defines a ‘dowry death’ as the death of a woman caused by any burns or bodily injury or which does not occur under normal circumstances within seven years of her marriage. For a woman’s death to be a dowry death, it must also be shown that soon before her death she was subjected to cruelty or harassment by her husband or any relative of her husband for, or in connection with, any demand for dowry. If this is proved, the woman’s husband or relative is required to be deemed to have caused her death. Whoever commits dowry death is required to be punished with imprisonment for a term which shall not be less than seven years but which may extend to imprisonment for life.
Well, in a simple language, if the wife dies within 7 years of marriage and there is even a slight reason to believe that she was being harassed by her husband or his relatives, then they will be held responsible for her death.
Source/Author: 
Posted on: August 29th, 2010
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