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News Updates - 31 March
2006
Indian spas - Washington Post
Nalanda to be restored - Silicon India
Whats behind India's success? - Newsweek magazine
Globalization 2.0 - New York Times
India
Spas: Feel the Heat
19 March 2006, Washington Post, By T.R. Reid
My stay
at the Arya Vaidya Chikitsalayam in Tamil Nadu puts me at the heart of a hot
new trend in exotic getaways: the ayurvedic massage tour. A growing number
of hotels, spas and hospitals are luring travelers to some not-often-visited
corners of India for a soothing - and sometimes life-changing - regimen of
massage, meditation, herbal medication and yoga. It's all based on the
teachings of the ancient sages who invented ayurvedic medicine three
millenniums in the past.
To some
degree, you can take part in the ayurveda boom without traveling this far.
Yoga salons and self-styled "ayurvedic" clinics are springing up all over
the United States. But going to New York to experience ayurveda is like
going to
Paris
to take in a rodeo. The authentic way to benefit from this ancient medical
methodology is to travel to the land where ayurveda was born, to work with
licensed Indian healers and yoga trainers amid the color, the clamor, the
crowds, the temples, the flavors and the fragrances that make the
subcontinent a tourist destination unique in the world.
You can find
ayurvedic spas today all over India, from northern hill stations in the
Himalayas to the southern vertex of the country where
the
Arabian Sea,
Bay of Bengal
and Indian Ocean meet. India's southernmost states, Kerala and Tamil Nadu,
have particularly embraced the spa industry's hottest new phenomenon. In
these areas - where ayurveda is the main form of medical treatment - hotels,
resorts and hospitals offer packages ranging from a weekend to a month
designed to introduce Americans, Europeans and East Asians to ancient Indian
massage, medication and yoga. In the fascinating seafront city of Kochi
(formerly Cochin), Kerala, the options include such giant establishments as
the five-star Taj Malabar hotel and the 26-room boutique resort Brunton
Boatyard, built on the site of a 19th-century shipyard.
But if you're
serious about ayurveda, or if you have a medical condition that might
benefit from a supervised course of alternative treatment, you can bypass
the resorts and head instead to a full-scale ayurvedic hospital or
chikitsalayam. There you will find doctors and nurses trained at leading
universities -- many Indian medical schools offer degree programs in both
allopathic (Western) and ayurvedic medicine -- who employ the full panoply
of massage, medication and yogic and spiritual techniques.
Explained Sumit Kumar Ghosh, a young vaidya or physician, on the staff at
the Arya Vaidya Chikitsalayam and Research Institute (AVC) in Coimbatore "We
know that ayurveda works, or it wouldn't have lasted 3,000 years. Even when
the British raj tried to suppress ayurveda and replace it with allopathic
treatments, the Indian people kept our tradition alive because they
recognized its healing power. We don't cure any specific ailment. Your body
is going to cure itself. The goal of ayurveda is to open the channels in the
body, to restore the natural balance of forces. This evokes your body's own
healing response."
Today,
thousands of Indians annually come to the Arya Vaidya main campus and
several sister institutions to be healed. Recent years, though, have seen an
influx of Western visitors who travel to
Coimbatore
for treatment sessions lasting from 10 days to five weeks.
To help
my body heal its painful right shoulder, the vaidyas prescribed a daily
regimen of foul-tasting herbal medications, regular prayers at the Hindu
temple on the grounds of the chikitsalayam and a consultation with a staff
astrologer, to determine whether the timing was auspicious for a cure (it
was).
The heart of
my treatment, though, was massage. Two experienced massage therapists, Vinod
and Balu, came to my cottage on the hospital grounds three times each day.
(For female patients, the massage team is all women.) I would lie back on a
long, hard table of neem wood with gutters along both sides to catch the
excess oil. After Vinod chanted a prayer to the Hindu god of healing,
Dhanwanthari, the work would begin. The abhyangam (massage) itself was
structured, methodical and comprehensive. I could almost feel the blocked
channels in my body opening up to release the flow of prana , a vital force
that the ancient sages said was essential to balance and health. The
abhyangam left me feeling wonderful. This full-body workover was followed
each morning by a localized massage called pizhichil. This one, too, felt
marvelous. Each afternoon, the pair would return to my massage table for the
strangest treatment of all, the navarakizhi. One man would immerse
fist-sized burlap sacks filled with rice into a vat of boiling milk; then
the other would use those heated rice bags to swat and knead my back and
ailing shoulder.
Along with
the herbal medicines and massage, the doctors imposed restrictions during my
treatment. No alcohol was permitted and no meat. The bland vegetarian meals
served up by the AVC kitchen were to be eaten without utensils, the common
way to dine in southern
India.
To enhance my body's healing power, I was also ordered to remain sedentary,
calm and quiet in my comfortable but plain four-room cottage on the hospital
grounds.
Despite
the fact that my stay at the chikitsalayam was only half the recommended
treatment period, the ancient methods produced a clear improvement in my
medical condition. After two weeks of medication, meditation and massage, I
had considerably more movement and considerably less pain in my arthritic
shoulder. With regular exercise, I've maintained that improvement since I
left.
Whether the setting is austere or extravagant, the heart of an ayurvedic
massage tour remains the healing technique devised by Indian medical sages
centuries before the birth of Christ. You can make the trip, as I did, with
a medical goal in mind. Or you can spend a few days at an ayurvedic spa in
the course of a traditional tour of India. In either case, one thing is
certain: You're going to get the best massage you've ever had.
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Nalanda
to be revived as International seat of learning
29 March 2006, Silicon India magazine
In order
to give a new life to the ancient university of Nalanda, the Government has
proposed an international university in collaboration with select Asian
countries. Disclosing this, President A P J Abdul Kalam said, "It’s a great
opportunity for Bihar to house a major universal institute of learning that
can be a beacon of light for the world."
Listing
“Renaissance: Nalanda International University” as one of the ten measures
to put Bihar on the road to prosperity by 2015, Kalam said the new
university will be known as Bodhgaya Nalanda Indo-Asian Institute of
Learning. He said, “To recapture the past glory in the modern
context, in keeping with Buddha's teaching of seeking knowledge in a
holistic way, it has been proposed to establish a Bodhgaya Nalanda
Indo-Asian Institute of Learning.”
Thought the government support with grants, but a group of professionals
from Singapore and India will independently manage the institute. There will
also be a provision to add other Asian countries. Kalam said the idea
evolved during his recent visit to South East Asia and Singapore had shown
keen interest.
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What's behind
India's
success in the global knowledge economy?
6 March 2006 issue,
Newsweek International magazine, By Gurcharan Das
I
recently got a call from a board member of one of the world's largest
consulting companies, who invited me to speak to them about why so many
Indians were succeeding in the global-knowledge economy. He mentioned
innovations emerging from GE and Microsoft's R&D centers in Bangalore;
advanced avionics installed by India's Air Force on Russian fighter
aircraft, and sophisticated research on global capital markets outsourced by
Wall Street to India. Finally, he rattled off the names of a dozen Indian
leaders of multinational corporations.
I
was skeptical. "Perhaps it's our large population?" I suggested. He
countered with half a dozen large countries that are invisible in the
knowledge economy. "Or maybe it's simply knowing English?" He asked if there
was something in
India's
education system that might help explain its recent economic success.
The
best in India
do get a decent education. Aside from the famed Indian Institutes of
Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management, there are about 20 other
centers of excellence in science, engineering, medicine and even the liberal
arts. Both students and parents are intensely dedicated. Night after night,
middle-class Indian parents insist on overseeing their kids' homework—it's a
rare mother who accepts a dinner invitation during exam season. By the age
of 15, the young are packed off to coaching classes to prepare them for
entry into colleges.
A
national study by Harvard University faculty found that on any given day,
one out of four teachers in India’s state-run primary schools is absent, and
of those present half are not teaching. But private schools—which can range
from expensive boarding schools for the elite to low-end teaching shops in
the bazaar—are proliferating. Even the poor now send their kids to private
schools, which can charge as little as $1 to $3 a month in fees and are
spreading rapidly in slums and villages across India.
NIEPA, a state-sponsored think tank, confirms that two thirds of the
children in urban Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu are now in
private schools. According to National Sample Surveys, spending on education
rose from 1.2 percent of per capita expenditure in 1983 to 4.4 percent in
2003. In urban areas it's risen even faster, from 2.1 percent to 6.3
percent. These private schools are delivering results. Although teacher
salaries tend to be two-thirds lower on average, Prof. James Tooley of the
University of Newcastle found that even unrecognized schools in
Hyderabad's
slums delivered mean scores in mathematics that were 22 percentage points
higher than public schools. A national study led by the education NGO
Pratham confirmed that even in villages 16 percent of the kids are now
enrolled in private primary schools, and their reading and math scores were
10 points higher.
This upsets the
Indian left, which wants to shut down these "mushrooming private schools."
Bureaucrats take advantage of this prejudice and extract bribes in exchange
for licenses, which average 5% of a school's running cost. Yet even the
children of government-school teachers go to private schools. As with so
much about India's success story, Indians are thus finding solutions to
their problems without waiting for the state. If China's success is due to
its amazing (and state-funded) infrastructure, India's is largely the result
of individual initiative. If this initiative can successfully broaden access
to and raise the quality of education, India could be even better positioned
for the knowledge economy than its behemoth neighbor.
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The Way We Live Now - Globalization 2.0
26 March 2006, New York Times magazine, By DAVID RIEFF
Two
recent controversies in the US — the sale of port facilities to a company
owned by the government of Dubai and the negotiation of a controversial
nuclear cooperation deal with India — underscore the tensions and
contradictions between America's commitment to economic globalization and
its political priorities in a post-9/11 world.
Bush's deal with
India also
illustrates the new and unexpected conundrums of globalization. The
administration pledged to help
India
develop nuclear power plants despite that country's refusal to sign the
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and its maintenance of an atomic-weapons
arsenal. An implicit argument was this: Because India is so important
a strategic partner and, prospectively at least, a major economic
power, Washington is no longer in a position to insist, even rhetorically,
that New Delhi abide by the established rules of the nuclear game.
U.S.
officials made little effort to deny that they were making an exception in
India's case — an exception they were at pains to point out they would never
make for Iran. Rather, as Bush made clear in his joint press conference with
the Indian prime minister, that the cementing and deepening of the
U.S.-Indian alliance were simply too important to allow a mere international
legal regime to get in the way. In a world where the economic balance of
power is steadily tilting toward Asia, American concerns about runaway arms
races are very likely to be overshadowed by American concerns about the need
to prevent a destructive competition for scarce fossil-fuel resources with
India and China. Better to accept an India that uses more civilian nuclear
power (and offers U.S. companies the chance to benefit from the sector's
expansion) than to vainly chastise an India that is not going to abandon its
nuclear arsenal anyway, whatever the effect on nonproliferation globally.
In the case of the agreement with
India, the US
administration took the view that long-term global stability, including the
stability of energy prices, required the abandonment of long-held
international legal rules. This is certainly not your grandfather's
globalization.
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