Features
Mess in Health Ministry; interesting new term: brown-skinned white supremacy
We women particularly mourn the death of a beautiful young mother dying in 
Cassandra cannot quote verbatim what they said about the deaths and importation of suspect medicines, but what they cynically said was that deaths of patients reacting adversely to medicines given happens and of course death is due to one’s karma. Who are they to preachify instead of admitting faults – which are definitely not mistakes?
The editorial in The Island of Wednesday July 5 is very pointedly titled Health and Crookery; just those three words implying huge corruption in the Health Ministry which should really be a ministry bringing mercy to the entire population and more especially to those sick with illnesses. They, along with pharmaceutical companies, are now causing untold misery (blindness consequent to poisonous eye drops) and acknowledged medicine-misadventure deaths.
Certain medical associations like the Government Medical Officers’ Forum have pointedly asked Minister K Rambuwella to resign. He should. The public spent money for his hospital stay in Australia due to a leg injury he suffered. So healed and not found the slightest fault with, he now imports or allows importation of substandard, nay poisonous medicines and injections. How callous and cruel and unconcerned can people be?
Who invented email?
A friend sent Cassandra an absorbingly interesting video-ed interview by Alternate Media of India with Dr Shiva Ayyadurai; Gayathri Devi being the interviewer. Dr Shiva A claims, and justifiably, to be the inventor of email; at the astounding age of 14 years – a definite child prodigy. He was born in Bombay in 1963, his father a Burma returnee Tamil and mother who later held degrees in math and physics. His grandmother was a Siddhi healer in South India, who predicted and diagnosed illnesses by studying the patient’s face. They were shudras, as Shiva says. He was deeply hurt when this fact was thrust at him and so started political studies. He is, in addition, a very recognised academic and active politician in the US.
His parents with him migrated to the US and were resident in a poor area of New Jersey. His mother worked in a dental hospital and he, during vacations, worked in the computer department there on a room sized computer. It was to fulfill a need to do away with nurses typing messages and moving from department to department in the dental institution that he developed the process of sending messages via the computer which he named EMAIL. He was 14 and a high school student. Later he obtained three degrees from MIT and his PhD.
In his interview, he said that people expect inventors of such as email to be untidily dressed, unkempt, brainy nerds which he never was. He seems smart, bordering on handsome and once dated a Hollywood star. And of course not shy to pronounce his many achievements. He has a right to do so, having other great achievements to his name.
Origin of Email
Four persons claim the honour of inventing email. Noel Morris and Tom Van Vleck claim that their computer generated software was to facilitate communication within MIT – exchange of ideas/info/reports and such like. They claim that was the origin of email communication. They were students at MIT and their successful innovation was in 1965. Then came Ray Tomlinson of MIT again who devised the system named ARPNET which lengthened reads Advanced Research Project Agency Network in 1971. It had the collaboration of the armed forces.
Shiva Ayyadurai claims that it is difficult for people to accept the fact that a boy of 14 could develop a computerised inter office mail system process, although he copyrighted his EMAIL computer software in 1981.
All this precedes what Cass clasped with most interest and conviction from his interview and was emphasised by Appadurai. You can accept it as valid and justified or not. He said that most of those who would not believe and accept the fact he was the inventor of email were fellow Indians. And he used the word jealousy. That is an emotion Cass never experiences and can hardly accept as possible, but plays an important role in human relations. It is present in the Sri Lankan context too. Jealousy manifests itself in all strata of society and is common to both genders and at all ages. Excessive competition and jealousy go hand in hand. Many tales have arisen centered on this emotion, which pulls down others and even ends in murder.
Another manifestation of Indians, according to Appadurai in his interview with Gayathri Devi, was that though very much one of ‘India/s blue-eyed boys’ he was not accepted as one for very long. Why? Due to what he calls supremacy and this time brown skinned. He traces it to discrimination of the British when Britain ruled India as a colony of its large empire. White supremacy was introduced, induced to the Indian psyche and inculcated by it. Thus now the superiority complex of some researchers and academics of Indian origin to Appadurai as he claims, is a throwback of British looking down on Indians as natives.
We in Sri Lanka had our brown skinned pukka sahibs in the Brit dominated mercantile and plantation sectors when English, Irish and Scottish directors of agency houses and Periar Dorais and Sinna Dorais on estates did have superiority complexes. These were passed on to Sri Lankans and we had that type of superiority/inferiority along with those due to caste hierarchies and caste discrimination.
Much of it is erased or greatly reduced, particularly caste consciousness. Money is now the great divider in society – the richer you are the snootier you become, more especially if you rose from middle class adequacy and lower class poverty to wealth.
That kind of superiority too may disappear and a healthy leveling occur if we the people push out the corrupt with our votes.