Rambodoc at large

I am sure most of the millions of my loyal readers across the Milky Way have not heard of Second Life. This, a creation of Linden Labs, is a virtual world (current strength: 8 million) where you become a resident by signing up. Just like in the real world, you then buy land (from a small house to an island), weapons to defend it, transport to visit other places, etc. You can create any object under the virtual sun and sell it to others.You meet other people and interact with them like you would choose to in real life. How anyone would want to risk making a new mother-in-law is beyond me, but I guess it takes all sorts….
To come back to the point, in Second Life, you kind of live a parallel life, and use the virtual Linden Dollar as the currency for trades. If you want to buy a pretty girl a diamond necklace hoping that you would give you online bed-space, you spend in Linden dollars. Where will these things come from? You have to buy them, with real US dollars! That is the brilliance of this business: it is no longer true that only a fool and his money are soon parted; this is now a general truism. Once you get passionate about your virtual world, with its neighbors, friends and other properties, you start spending real money to get pleasure or property.
So now, if you want to create a huge casino where other residents would be tempted to come in and blow away their money, you need to spend a few Linden dollars. But, hey, wait a bit, this has just become illegal!
In what could spell the death knell for Second Life, virtual gambling in Second Life has been banned by the US Government, parallel to the ban on all forms of online gambling in October last year. I go frog-eyed at the concept: the US, a bastion of individual freedom for three centuries, has banned a gaming activity, which is strictly speaking, none of its normal business. I mean, this is not about screwing pages, interns or Washington madams, or even firing at the wrong people, so why are they interested?
Turns out that people will always give a twist to good things and make things real!
Second Life is under a cloud because intelligence anticipates or fears that terrorists could transfer money across the globe through virtual transactions (after all, you have to buy Linden dollars with real money if you want to gift or buy things). Child sex abuse is also alleged to have happened in Germany. Of course, people suing one another for ‘copyright’ violation of their virtual products is also a reality.
Individual rights have to be balanced in relation to national security and law-and-order. But there are too many occasions for the State to squash individual rights in the name of national security or law. Take China, for example. I believe this is a similar instance. This is all very regrettable. As someone who has never lost money or time gambling, I feel the pain of those deprived of it. Virtually, actually!

Indians have a few million Gods and Goddesses, and can’t get enough of them, it seems. An infant with both male and female genitalia is being showered unwanted attention in Ball-sore (Orissa), and being thought as a reincarnation of Lord Shiva and Parvati.
To expose the phallacy of this intro, read this news article.
Scientifically speaking, this is old hat. Ambiguous external genitalia is not very rare (may be seen in up to 1% of all births), but true hermaphroditism (where both testicular and ovarian tissue are present) is less common. Contrary to popular notion, the ‘main point’ of the male is not the penis, but the testicles. Similarly, the vagina or the clitoris in the female are not the determining female organs, but the ovary is. External genitalia can be confusing (ambiguous): if the baby’s testicles have not descended at birth, how can one say whether it has a large clitoris or a small penis? I hope you get this answer! If it a large clitoris, the urinary passage is separate, whereas in the male with a small penis, the urine goes through it. However, things become more muddled in the condition known as Hypospadias, where the urinary passage in male babies opens through the scrotum. Now imagine a tiny scrotum without any balls in them, and a small hole through which urine comes out: could it not be confused with the female anatomy?
This is one of several reasons why there is confusion in identifying the gender of some cases.
Apart from the morbid imaginations of the mind, there are some interesting issues here:
* What should the parents do? Surgical reassignment surgery (popularly called sex change operation) is an obvious option. However, whether to make the baby a boy or girl becomes a troublesome issue. Imagine that one (surgically) makes the baby physically a female, and when ‘she’ grows up, she wants to be a boy (because ‘she’ feels like one). What a disaster that would be! For this reason, many experts counsel that the sex change operation should be done when the child grows up and its sexual orientation is clear, along with its choice.
* Imagine again, that the parents of a baby of undetermined sex opt to wait for the child to grow up. How horrible would the child’s growing years be, without it having an idea of what gender it is, and having to cope up with brutal teasing and harassment at home and school!
* Should society officially declare three, and not two, genders: the third being the intersex? Makes you wonder whether these people (we should really coin a word similar to ‘ladies’ and ‘gentlemen’ for them) would visit, after watching a movie, the male toilet or the female!
India being such a reserved country, should we keep away 1% of Parliament seats and 5% of educational seats for the third sex? Should we ban sex determination by preventing doctors from telling the parents what the sex of the baby is? What if the upset parents, upon hearing that they have given birth to a girl, commit murder of the child? (you really have to click that link to understand the irony of this!)
The whole purpose of this article was to engender some discussion by testicling your imagination!

We have all read of the Indian teen surgeon who did a Caesarian Section under the doting eyes of his parents, one a surgeon and the (m)other a gynecologist. The father thought he could post a claim for the 'youngest surgeon of the world' tag with a beer manufacturing company that recognises the oddballs in the world, and out of it! The only thing is he forgot his son had no degree, and that for the patient, it would be a medical third-degree.
Now, after putting the parents behind bars, the cops are out looking for the young boy.
I have some brilliant points lined up as commentary about this event. In case I forget these and end up with just a typically chaotic circum-Presidential mish-mash (a.k.a. 'beating about the bush'), blame it on the hot air. Global warming is finally here!



First, the act of experimenting on a patient is tough enough to defend. Next, the father has to defend doing that without taking due consent from the patient and her unborn child. Another problem: he has to explain away his enormous stupidity to his in-laws on one side of the prison bars! How could he, as a practising doctor, not know that he was publicising an act that would make him not only a criminal in law, but a criminal-in-law!?
To top it all, he didn't have the brains to marry a woman who would have the senses about her to tie him down to his chair and ask him to behave. What sort of woman allows her husband to make such a global ass of himself, unless he is the President of the United States? I mean, is her name Hillary or what?
Dr. Murugesan (let us all reverentially call him by that prefix before it gets struck off the rolls) was not much more than stupid and unlucky. He just had the typical Indian laissez faire (to give the term a bad name it doesn't deserve) chalta hai attitude that embellishes a blatant disrespect for the law, and a conviction that in this country, do what you can before you get caught, if at all, and then buy and beg your way out.
In much of the country, health care is about making a black buck and hunting a case like the animal of the same name.
So a surgeon trains his son to be an expert surgeon, a money making cottage industry, without remembering that civilised Third world countries also profess (practice is a different thing altogether) the need for certain recognisable standards like degrees (what degrees?), credentialling and privileges. Those are Western standards. Do they have any relevance in a country where quacks treat a majority of people, where politicians and actors sniff the pungent feet of inebriated sadhus and babas, where neurosurgeons cut hydroceles, and cardiac surgeons do hernia operations? Yes, I am not talking of the big city hospitals, but of the real India, from which we are blissfully protected by our LCD screens and power-windows.
In a country where the health infrastructure rests dominantly on quacks, why target an errant surgeon to this extent? Let us give him his place under the Indian sun, and make him a Health Minister or something. That will show the world that, bullshitters though we may be, we are consistent and honest, unlike Zimbabwe, Gabon or Bangladesh. But, as we say: "What to do, we are like this only!"

Yes, the Chinese have their own culture, and their solutions, like their legendary torture methods, defy conventional norms of 'civilised' nations. Spurious drugs are a result of lax law enforcement, low level of protection for intellectual property (read patents), and general corruption. The Chinese just decided to say "foggedaboutit" and took a shot at a solution.
Maybe people in India, like Barun Mitra, will have something to say about this.

KOLKATA, Aug 28: The Supreme Court verdict on a hotly debated area of medical jurisprudence -- establishing an act on negligence by doctors -- has come as a major relief for medicos across the country.
The country's largest peer body of medicos Indian Medical Association (IMA), which has long been crying hoarse about the increasing cases of assault on doctors, says it is "relieved" with the Apex court's ruling.
"This has come as a great relief. The ruling should end the dark era of doctor bashing when medical practitioners had to face the ire of patient parties, mostly without any fault of theirs," IMA national president Sudipto Roy said.
According to the ruling, the negligence attributed to the doctor must be gross in nature to make him liable for criminal prosecution. A simple lack of care, an error in judgement or an accident, is not proof of negligence on the part of a medical professional.
"We used to be baffled with the number of doctors being ill-treated by patients or their family members. This trend was badly hitting patient-doctor relationship, so crucial to the profession," Roy pointed out.
The Court had noticed the increase in cases of doctors being subjected to criminal prosecution and has laid down elaborate guidelines to shield them from frivolous criminal prosecution.
During a recent interaction with Union Health Minister A Ramadoss, IMA had strongly voiced its concern over the indiscriminate use of force and law against the medical community.
Doctors are also weary of the imbalance in a certain section of media on coverage of difficult medical cases.
"Most of the times, the patient party feeds in negative information about doctors and the kind of procedures adopted when they lose hope of the patient's survival. They resort to sob stories, which the media laps up as human interest without confirming if their is any truth in it and whether the doctor has tried his best or not," says Rupak Barua, vice-president of the multi-speciality Peerless Hospital in Kolkata.
Eminent city-based laparoscopic surgeon B Ramana, known for employing international practices in his interventions, agrees.
"We adopt state-of-the-art technology as per international standards to give the best treatment to patients. But since these are uncommon practices and not ratified by old-timers, who would stick to conventional procedures, patient parties do not seem to appreciate them and dismiss young doctors as novices." (PTI)