http://m.thehindu.com/news/national/fix-our-cities-chennai-floods-turned-out-to-be-a-great-deal-harder-for-people-with-disabilities/article8005418.ece

disability in Chennai flood



The no warning of the impending floods in Chennai made it especially difficult for people with disabilities, who were left to fend for themselves. While some needed rescuing, others lost essential implements like hearing aids, crutches and calipers, leaving them more vulnerable than ever before.
The disaster, however, did bring to the fore incredible stories of courage and grit, where ordinary citizens became heroes as they helped save lives.
 One such story is that of physically challenged teacher K.S. Mariappan, who rescued four mentally challenged students from a special school as water gushed into the campus.
December 1 seemed like just another rainy night to the students at the Annai Special School, located on the banks of the Adyar river in Saidapet. The inmates had retired to bed after dinner, as had Mariappan, who also lived on the school premises.
Around 9 p.m., Pratap, one of the students who noticed the water seeping into the school, rushed to Mr. Mariappan’s quarters to wake him up.
Jolted into action, Mr. Mariappan took a call to move the students out of the school to the home of a teacher who lived a kilometre away. By the time they had collected a few essentials and started out of the school on Mr. Mariappan’s retro-fitted bike, the water in the school campus was ankle-deep. Since he suffers from polio, and depends on his crutches to move about, the swirling waters posed a huge challenge for Mr. Marippan, especially as he had to escort others to safety.
“To reach the house, we walked around half a kilometre. Walking through the flooded streets on my crutches meant that the progress was slow, and I had to accompany each student individually,” he said.
After he escorted the last student, Subhash, to safety, Mr. Marippan went back to his bike to collect the certificates and other essentials that he had managed to save from the water. “By this time the flood waters had reached my chest, and I could no longer walk through the swirling waters. I somehow managed to hold on to my crutches, but I had to be carried by bystanders to prevent me from being washed away,” he explains.
For the next three days, the group was forced to live with one of the teachers, with very little food, almost no medical care, and two special instructors to manage four distressed students.
A similarly harrowing situation played out in Nandambakkam, where the students of MGR School for Hearing Impaired were stranded on their campus, and were rescued by the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF). Many of the students lost their hearing aids and certificates.
Official figures state that 11.7 lakh persons with disabilities live in the State (around 1.7 per cent of the population). Estimates suggest that the Chennai metropolitan area alone has over 1.5 lakh disabled people. About two months ago, Vidyasagar, a city NGO working with the disabled, wrote a letter to the State Disaster Management Authority headed by the Chief Secretary, asking it to include the needs of people with disabilities when making a disaster management plan.
“The letter, which was sent in October, asked that persons with disabilities be included on the panel of the authority so that they could better explain the issues faced during natural disasters,” Smitha Sadasivam from Vidyasagar said. So far, there has been no response from the authority.
In a disturbing coincidence, the floods ravaged the city soon after the letter was sent, and seemed to only emphasise the need to include the disabled when coming up with a strategy for disaster management.
The case of Bhavana, who has cerebral palsy and lives in Sriram Nagar Colony with her parents and caregiver, is one example which highlights the crucial need for rescue teams to have adequate training to deal with people with special needs.
Bhavana is wheelchair-bound, and is unable to speak. When the river water started flooding her house, her caregiver managed to signal for a boat to rescue them. But when the team arrived, they realised that Bhavana would have to be transported in her wheelchair. One of the members of the rescue team says, “After trying several different methods, we had to ask her mother and her caregiver to wade through the water and help carry her on to the boat, since none of us had the training needed to undertake such an operation.” The fact that civilian-led rescue teams, even though they meant only good had no experience to anticipate such situations, compounded rescue efforts.
Amba Salelkar of Inclusive Planet Centre for Disability Law and Policy, emphasises the need for disaster management policies to ensure people who are visually or hearing impaired receive warning messages, and that people with mobility impediments are rescued. Only then will these policies be comprehensive, she says.
Trapped in the floods
While people in danger were rescued from their homes, a majority of the city remained indoors for a few days, with telephone lines failing, no electricity and the streets continuing to be flooded with water.
Many of the inmates of Vidyasagar were in a similar situation. With no electricity, and many of the people on wheelchairs, they were all forced to stay on the third floor of the school building. This dealt a blow especially to those who got around using electronic wheelchairs, which could not be charged, due to the prolonged blackout in the area. As a result, they were unable to even use the toilet without someone carrying them. Since there were very few caregivers, the situation became dire.
Medical care for people with special needs also became a problem during the floods. Ms. Sadasivam herself was stranded in her house with viral fever. “I have multiple sclerosis, and I am on immunosuppressants, which means that I cannot take many over-the-counter medicines,” she explains.
Attempts at rebuilding
 Now that much of the water has receded, the focus is on the city and its people trying to rebuild themselves. K. Manivasan, Commissioner, Disabilities, government of Tamil Nadu, says, “The government has ensured that all the camps have a special officer who is taking care of people with disabilities. Wherever possible, we are issuing certificates immediately.”
A disaster that was termed as a leveller, in terms of its effect on people of all social classes, was still a great deal harder on people with disabilities, who have, in the past, lobbied for better accessibility in the city. Activists and people with disabilities alike hope that the floods, disastrous as it was, would jolt the government into finally taking their cause more seriously

ten amazing tips to increase your wealth through vastu.

1. Five elements or Panchtattva and the 16 Mahavastu zones determine how you think, react.

2. Vastu-perfect homes attract wealth.

3. In the north vastu zone, ensure that blue is the main colour; avoid red shade, designating space for kitchen and toilet. Also, don't place a dustbin, broom, washing machine, mixer-grinder here. The kitchen represents fire and with wrong placements, you'll end up diluting money, opportunities and career.

4. Keep a money plant in a green vase, or hang a scenery showing a lush field or thick forest in north zone. These will attract money and better career opportunities.

5. The north west vastu zone is the one which gets you support (financial) of banks and relevant persons in your ventures.

6. A beautiful entrance brings happiness and prosperity, and helps in appreciation of an individual's value in the society. If it is a sloppy and unkempt one, troubles will hound you.

For instance, the south-west door will bring in debts, loans and financial problems. A north vastu entrance brings good career opportunities and money. The east vastu entrance brings peace. The west entrance brings in wealth and prosperity. The south entrance is also a beneficial one.

7. Keep the kitchen in the south east or south south-east. The main colour should be pastel shades of red, orange and pink. Keep the safe, work table, drawing room in the northern areas for a healthy money flow.

8. In the West, the main colours are white and yellow. This is another location for the safe. Use round shapes as these represent the earth element here. The west south-west is the zone of savings. Keep this clean and use as a place for studies. Keep money and valuables in an iron safe in this area— this will ensure your wealth remains safe.

9. Overall, see if there is a harmonious and balanced energy cycle in your house.

10. Get your house thoroughly checked using the 4-Step Mahavastu method. Discover which areas have an imbalance and whether zones are cut, extended or missing. These areas can be
treated with simple vastu cures using colours, lights, symbols, rangoli and plants.

If you experience the loss of someone else, what does that do to your health?

In a first of its kind study on the motivations for suicide, published in the official journal of the American Association of Suicidology, two were found to be universal: hopelessness and overwhelming emotional pain. Heartbreak, divorce, the loss of a job, terror attacks, communal riots and accidents — the modern world is fraught with incidents that leave you grieving. The reaction to it tends to be commonly marked by anguish, numbness, guilt and deep sorrow. Health professionals are concerned about the absence of adequate support the urban resident faces to cope with grief, thus jeopardising not just his mental but physical health, too.

Hidden risks
While anxiety and depression have been associated with grief, doctors warn that life-threatening diseases like obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes are possible fallouts, too. An Italian study published in 2011 in the International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine suggests a link between the death of a parent in childhood and obesity in adulthood.

Holly G Prigerson has spent more than 20 years studying grief. The director at the Centre for Psychological Epidemiology and Outcomes Research, Harvard Medical School says that empiricalevidence demonstrates that intense grief (yearning for a dead loved one, dwelling in the past and failing to reengage with life) that persists for more than six months is an invitation for an adverse health outcome. "It can include a significant increase in alcohol and tobacco consumption, changes in eating and sleeping patterns, skipping work, high blood pressure, and even the incidence of cancer," she says in an email interview. In extreme cases, she has seen it leading to hospitalisation after a heart attack. "There is some evidence that grief affects blood clotting and predicts high blood pressure, which explains the heightened risk of heart attack," she says.

The mortality project
Dr Toni Miles, director at the Gerontology Institute at University of Georgia, is heading an initiative called the Mortality Project, which trains the spotlight on life after death — more specifically, health after death. "Our project asks, 'If you experience the loss of someone else, what does that do to your health?"

Grief is now a public health issue, Dr Miles warns, in much the same way that infectious diseases are. "It is a mistake to separate negative emotion from physical illness. Depression causes changes in our body, and these are measureable. I suspect that being depressed for an extended time causes the injury. In our survey, we found that newly bereaved persons are more likely to be hospitalised during the year after a death." Which is why her claim that "(grief) kills people" has been recognised. Prolonged grief will now be listed as a new disorder in the International Classification of Diseases 11 (ICD 11). "Prolonged Grief Disorder is essentially a social attachment disturbance where those separated from a highly significant other feel intense emotional pain, abandonment and a yearning, craving to be reunited (explaining the suicide risk)," she says.

Call in support staff 
Social support is one of the most important factors in recovery from grief. This can come from partners, family, friends, relatives, a spiritual leader or a support group. "Indians shy away from seeking professional help. Seeing a behavioural expert is not the first move they'd consider. That's a mistake. If you sense you are unable to deal with your grief, and even close ones can't help, it's time to look outside," says Nagpur-based psychiatrist Dr Tushar Shinde.

Confirming perception that men and women handle grief differently, research suggests that men, who are used to emotional restraint, are more reluctant to address feelings of pain than women. In a paper published in The Review of General Psychology in 2001, psychologists at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands revealed that widowers display a higher incidence of mental and physical illness, disabilities, death and suicide than widows. Women who lost their husbands spoke of "feeling abandoned or deserted", while men spoke of their loss as "dismemberment".

The way ahead
What will help cut down the sense of loss? The answer to that one lies in identifying the 'accurate' process of dealing with grief. Dr Shinde says processing grief needs time, patience and care. "Accept the loss, work through the pain, and learn to be without (the person, circumstance)."

Dr Miles raises a red flag when she says, "Often, people say there is nothing new about loss and depression. That grief is natural. There is nothing to be 'done'. Our research proves there are several strategies to diminish the ill health effects of loss. Our goal is to identify effective ones."

Do it like Kia
Kia Scherr was in Florida for Thanksgiving when she heard that the Oberoi Hotel in Mumbai had been attacked by terrorists. Her husband, Alan, 58, and daughter, Naomi, 13, were staying there. Hours later, she heard that both had been killed. A few days on, she stunned the world by saying in a press interview that she had forgiven the terrorists and felt compassion for those "so separated from humanity that they would kill". Scherr shares her 4 steps to tackling grief guideline.

I was open
Find support. I had multiple levels of it — I family, friends, and so many people whom I had not met, but empathised. Everyone's wishes were sincere and heartfelt, and I felt connected to the world as a family. Even the funeral was taken care of for me. Things hit me only after everybody went home. I was left to deal with the pain.

I didn't let it linger
Lingering grief is a private matter; unless you have gone through it, no one completely understands it. Emotion has a life of its own. Grief can fester. You can numb it through alcohol or drugs, or you can try distraction (work, television etc). I understand why people go down that path. But repressing painful feelings does damage — it may seem good in the short term, but over the long run, it's deadly.

I sought professional help 
Grief doesn't go away on its own. You have to seek help. I went in for counselling sessions and meditation. My healing process started with setting up One Life Alliance, a peace organisation, but pain continues to engulf me at times. That I decided to return to Mumbai was part of the healing process. My mother died of lung cancer two years ago, and I was with her through it. This may be an experience that almost all of us go through — a parent's death — but that doesn't mitigate the pain or loss.

I connected with others like me 
Support groups are helpful because they bring together people who have suffered loss. Life goes on for others, but someone who has experienced terrible grief needs support and encouragement. Often, the loss is so immense that you have no words to express it. It's someone's presence that makes the difference. Be there for the person, show your love. Love makes all the difference; it has the power to make you sail through the roughest times.

ENOX

enox(evilnoxious). the most deadliest embodiment of human form. when he sees s person he will suck all his mind, soul and thought through his pale looking eyes like monalisa and put it in a picture of a n angel is holding in a dollar note , that he has in his pocket. Then his friend would draw what he sees it. if he sees it good it will come out good. If u r angry with him , he would draw u in the most uglist form one would ever imagine. He would seeu naked and draw u naked. if u r good he would draw u in the most beautiful form. or u will be the most ugliest form with all cancerous cells all around you. He would draw each part of your body in zoom and it may be good or bad.

note: this story was a dream I inspired it after seeing musee de louvre. If christopher Marlowe was there he would he would have integrated in his master piece Dr.Faustus.

The title is also orignal coined by me.

MONEY IS IMPORTANT BUT HOW MUCH DO YOU NEED IT?

Money is important, but how much do you need?

How much money it costs is not the issue, but how much the money costs us is crucial

Once you get basic human needs met, a lot more money doesn’t make a lot more happiness

Money is not everything, but money is something very important. Beyond the basic needs, money helps us achieve our life’s goals and supports — the things we care about most deeply – family, education, health care, charity, adventure and fun. It helps us get some of life’s intangibles – freedom or independence, the opportunity to make the most of our skills and talents, the ability to choose our own course in life, financial security. With mone y, much good can be done and much unnecessary suffering avoided or eliminated.

But, money has its own limitations too. It can give us the time to appreciate the simple things in life more fully, but not the spirit of innocence and wonder necessary to do so. Money can give us the time to develop our gifts and talents, but not the courage and discipline to do so.

Money can give us the power to make a difference in the lives of others, but not the desire to do so. It can give us the time to develop and nurture our relationships, but not the love and caring necessary to do so. It can just as easily make us jaded, escapist, selfish, and lonely. How much do you need? What is it going to cost you to get it? It is keeping these two questions in mind that gives us a true sense of money’s relationship to happiness. If we have less than what we need, or if what we have is costing us too much, we can never be happy. We need money to eat, sleep, dress, work, play, relate, heal, move about, and enjoy comforts. We should remember in choosing our style that it comes with a price tag.

Evidence of the psychological and spiritual poverty of the rich and famous fills our newspapers, magazines, tabloids, and television programmes and hardly needs repeating here. “We always think if we just had a little bit more money, we’d be happier,” says Catherine Sanderson, a psychology professor at Amherst College, “but when we get there, we’re not.” “Once you get basic human needs met, a lot more money doesn’t make a lot more happiness,” notes Dan Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard University and the author of the new book Stumbling on Happiness.

Yes, we get a thrill at first from expensive things. But we soon get used to them, a state of running in place that economists call the ‘hedonic treadmill’. The problem is not money, it’s us. For deep-seated psychological reasons, when it comes to spending money, we tend to value goods over experiences.

Money can help us find more happiness, so long as we know just what we can and cannot expect from it. Many researches suggest that seeking the good life at a store is an expensive exercise in futility. Money can buy us some happiness, but only if we spend our money properly. We should buy memories.

How much money it costs is not the issue, but how much the money costs us is important. Money should not cost us our soul, relationships, dignity, health, intelligence and joy in simple things of life. People who figure out what they truly value and then align their money with those values have the strongest sense of financial and personal well-being.

powerlessness on actual lives is the hurtle justice must clear

The ongoing theories of justice in mainstream political philosophy are very strongly dependent today on a way of thinking largely initiated by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, with an overwhelming concentration on a hypothetical “social contract” that the people of a sovereign state can be imagined to have endorsed. This presumed contract is supposed to identify the “just institutions” needed. This “contractarian” approach is the dominant influence in the contemporary political philosophy of justice, and its limited focus has narrowed the analysis of justice unduly, and in particular distancing the theories of justice from the actual lives of people.

In contrast with the contractarian tradition, a number of other Enlightenment theorists (Adam Smith, the Marquis de Condorcet, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill, for example) took a variety of approaches that shared a common interest in the people’s actual lives, rather than on institutional perfection. What happens to people depends not merely on the institutions that exist but also on other influences, in particular people’s behaviour and social interactions. This alternative approach has much to offer to contemporary political philosophy and also to our actual practices and policies.

If our concentration has to be on the actual lives of people, the question that immediately arises is how to understand the richness and poverty of human lives. The approach I have tried to pursue has largely focused on the freedoms, in various forms, that people enjoy. This differs sharply from many other approaches to assessing the demands of justice: for example, looking for the fulfilment of certain formal rights that people should have, and whether or not these rights can be actually exercised. Many of these rights can, of course, have an instrumental rule in advancing more free social lives, but the pursuit of justice can hardly stop there. Individual freedoms can be seen to be a social commitment, and this requires the state to play an active role in advancing the substantive freedom of the people to do what they have reason to value, as well as to know what is feasible.

If it is important not to be restricted by the reading of freedom within institutional libertarianism, the need to go beyond the utilitarian concentration on the mental metrics of utilities in the form of pleasures or desire-fulfilments is no less strong. Even if chronically deprived persons — the hopelessly poor, or long-term unemployed — learn to come to terms with and accept cheerfully their deprived lifestyles, that cultivated cheerfulness will not eliminate the real deprivation of freedom from which they will continue to suffer.

Freedom has many aspects, and it is necessary both to distinguish between them and to choose the focus of analysis depending on the nature of the problem being addressed. For example, in dealing with the issue of torture and its unacceptability as a means to other — allegedly more important — ends, what would be particularly important is to see the relevance here of the classical libertarian aspects of freedom, arguing for the immunity of every human being from forcible infliction of pain by others.

When, however, the focus is on issues of economic and social inequality in the lives that different people lead, the relevant aspects of freedom can be captured better by a fuller assessment of what is called, in the new literature, “capabilities”, which reflect the actual opportunities of a person. It is easily checked that means such as incomes and other resources, while valuable in the pursuit of capabilities, are not themselves indicators of the capabilities and freedoms that people actually have. The real opportunities that different persons enjoy are very substantially influenced by variations of individual circumstances (for example age, disability, talents, gender, maternity) and also by disparities in the natural and the social environment (for example epidemiological conditions, pollution, prevalence of crime). An exclusive concentration on inequalities in income distribution cannot be adequate for an understanding of economic inequality.

Consider an example. Being disabled has a double effect, in reducing the person’s ability to earn an income (the “earning handicap”) and in making the conversion of income into good living that much harder, thanks to the costs of assistance, and the impossibility of fully correcting certain types of disadvantages caused by disability (the “conversion handicap”). A person who happens to be physically disabled may need to pay for assistance, and even then may not become able to move around freely. The conversion handicap is routinely missed in poverty relief programmes that concentrate only on the lowness of incomes.

As Wiebke Kuklys, a brilliant young student at Cambridge, has recently shown (she died tragically shortly after completing her work), the conversion handicap for British families with disabled members is four or five times as important as the income handicap, in terms of their respective impacts on deprivation. A system of poverty removal that concentrates only on the lowness of income, in particular whether a person’s — or family’s — income is below the poverty line, will catch the earning handicap, but not the conversion handicap, and this could make the poverty relief programme fundamentally inadequate.

What about power — a concept that closely relates to the idea of freedom? To say that a person is powerless in reversing the kind of neglect that they have been experiencing can also be expressed in the language of capability: they are not capable of reversing the neglect from which they suffer. And yet there is some evocative strength and rhetorical force in the language of power, particularly in dealing with powerlessness, that the word capability, which is really a term of art, cannot really match. Analysing power and powerlessness can help to generate a better understanding of the divided world in which we live. Mary Wollstonecraft’s wrath and bitter irony about the subjugation of women complemented her cool reasoning against gender hierarchy in her 1792 classic, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Or take Steve Biko’s remarks on “powerlessness” in the apartheid-based South Africa in the 1970s. “Powerlessness breeds,” Biko said, “a race of beggars who smile at the enemy and swear at him in the sanctity of his toilet; who shout ‘Baas’ willingly during the day and call the white man a dog in their buses as they go home.” If capability failure of any kind is a matter of concern, those related to people’s inability to act freely or speak openly because of the power of others have special urgency. This is an important concern in the advancement of freedom and capability, since societies involve conflicts as well as togetherness and mutual support. The pursuit of justice in enhancing freedoms and capabilities in peoples’ lives has to be alive to both. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2010

(Amartya Sen, a Nobel prize-winning economist, teaches philosophy and economics at Harvard and is author of The Idea of Justice. The article above is based on his Demos annual lecture.)

Keywords: justice, power, Nobel prize, economist, Harvard, Thomas Hobbes, freedom

reservation and implementation

RESERVATION POLICY AND ITS IMPLEMENTATION ACROSS DOMAINS IN INDIA: Niranjan Sahoo; Academic Foundation, 4772-73/23 Bharat Ram Road (23 Ansari Road), Daryaganj, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 595.

This slim volume is an attempt to assess the seriousness with which the Indian state has implemented programmes of affirmative action. The emphasis is on detailing the various components of such programmes and examining their effectiveness through published data. While the aim is laudable, it needs to be said at the outset that the work has fallen between two stools — its analysis is not incisive enough to hold the interest of an informed reader, nor does it serve as an introduction to the interested but essentially lay audience.

Data

First, let us see what the book’s strengths are. There are data on a spectrum of issues relating to affirmative action such as the status of the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes, and the Other Backward Classes in political institutions from the local bodies to the StateLegislatures and Parliament, and in relation to parameters like literacy, education, and employment. The information is collated from authentic sources. In this sense, it will be useful for any student who wants to have a quick access to data. Of course, there are other such books. But this indeed is a positive feature.

Another positive element relates to the questions it raises for further inquiry. But then, the work has important limitations here. Principally, Niranjan Sahoo makes no attempt to situate his analysis against a large canvas such as the changes that have taken place in the economy and the role of the state, which is getting diluted.

With the state ceasing to be the main employer of the educated classes and with the market-friendly paradigm quite firmly in place, the policy of ‘positive discrimination’ (a term that is, at least in the opinion of this reviewer, more appropriate for the Indian context than ‘affirmative action’) confronts new challenges.

To be fair to him, the author does make a reference to this aspect as well as to the relative neglect that the various other forms of positive discrimination have suffered compared to reservation in employment, which has occupied the centre stage for too long. The work would have turned out to be much more impressive, if only the entire analysis had been housed in this framework.

There are other problems as well. The author rightly discerns a north-south divide with respect to the policy of reservations. But he fails to observe that in Karnataka, for instance, the displacement of Brahmins as the hegemonic class led to the emergence of ‘hegemony’ by the dominant among the backward classes, which in turn triggered a protest movement of sorts in the late 1960s — and this was utilised astutely by Devaraj Urs.

Also difficult to comprehend is Sahoo’s bland assertion that in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala the OBCs outperform the upper castes in higher education and in accessing jobs. The root of the problem must lie in the author’s inability to make nuanced distinctions among the OBCs. In States like Karnataka, this is a major issue.

Observations

There are some interesting, indeed sometimes insightful, observations. One such is that the STs perform better than the SCs in higher education, although, disappointingly, no attempt is made to take a closer look at it. This also goes for the data on enrolment in higher education, course-wise and caste-wise. Elsewhere, some of the information provided is difficult to digest. For instance, his statement that the IITs have been providing reservation for the SCs and the STs “since 1973 as per the constitutional provisions of 15 per cent for the SCs and 7.2 per cent for the STs”. There appears to be some confusion here, between a constitutional mandate and (presumably) a government order, since the percentages are not constitutionally mandated.

Among the interesting issues raised for discussion is the one relating to the woefully small number of SCs/STs securing positions in the non-reserved category — therein lies the “true test” of empowerment.