What should students wear? Hijab or saffron scarves?

Wearing clothes or not wearing them is a fundamental right of any individual.

We have individuals covered in body bags to naga sadhus and jains roaming around dangling their dicks around. It is their fundamental right, absolutely yes.

No one is offended if a naga sadhu or a naked jain walks naked in the street.

The same sensibilities get offended when anyone else walks in the streets not covering their body enough (that varies from who the person wearing these clothes is and also the person who sees them, poor and destitute without clothes do not offend these said sensibilities, they are only offended when a person makes a conscious choice as to wear whatever they wish to wear).

The society is what it is, crude, callous and uncivilised.

I wear clothes as per societal norms, weather and mood so as to function and be productive in this society, many times my clothes offend people and I am told not to wear such clothes to work place and so on.

This society would not let me earn a living if I wear no clothes at all, and not being clothed appropriately for the weather would probably kill me too.

These are usually the determining factors behind what clothes I wear usually.

I do not give two fucks about anything else.

Wearing a hijab or a burkha or a body bag is one’s prerogative.

Wearing a saffron shawl/towel/lungi is also their prerogative as well.

As long as the society is so uncivilised, we will have to wear some clothes.

The day when you don’t have to give a damn about society is when you can truly choose what to wear.

Your clothes need to protect you from the elements, that is their purpose, we have made them out to be something beyond it.

The society has imbued the clothes with the power to protect “dignity”. Many have realised that is a folly, this pervasive concept of dignity is not in how much skin is visible or not visible, naked people are worshipped as I have outlined earlier, and destitute are also exempt from this notion of dignity in most instances.

This society chooses to suspend its terms and conditions as it sees fit.

So, it is no surprise that people have decided to challenge this societal norm and start questioning where and why these norms come about.

Face/head and body covering of women is practiced around the world through ages, and it is usually through religion this societal norm is enforced.

Wearing a hijab is a fundamental right, however, given our understanding of what it represents (oppression of women, and negation agency), when students demand, they be allowed to attend school in hijab, one suspects the real intent and the continued oppression and religious fundamentalism pervading the educational sphere.

It is their right to wear the hijab as it is the right of any other person to wear a saffron cloth to school as well or no clothes at all.

I suspect when students wear hijab to school as much as I suspect when a student wears a saffron scarf/towel to the school as well.

In both cases, I do not see agency, I do not see choice, I do not see an exercise of the fundamental rights. I see religious fervour and religious fundamentalism.

The idea of school uniform is to eradicate this divide in the educational institutes so that students learn to recognise how similar we are and these artificial divides are a hurdle to learning.

Particularly in a country as India, it is far more important to educate children in this aspect, we are all human, the artificial divides and religious fault lines do not help us excel in any field and they are an impediment to personal freedom, personal growth and social harmony.

Do not throw students out of schools for wearing hijab or saffron scarves, educate them that these symbols hate are not healthy for them.

The world has forgotten the foundational principle of bioethics in dealing with covid – Autonomy.

Coercion by the governments from all over the world to vaccinate against SARS-CoV2, which is a self-limiting mild viral illness in 99% of population goes against the foundational bioethical principle of Autonomy.
It is a pandemic alright, and has caused deaths alright, but are these deaths caused by this viral illness in addition to the usual number of deaths each year.
The data about vaccine efficacy seems to not add up, there is conflicting information regarding the effectiveness of vaccination compared to immunity acquired by natural infection (1,2,3,6).
The vaccines don’t seem to offer any better protection than natural infection for the vast majority of people, particularly children. There is evidence of some variations of vaccines being harmful(4,5,6).
A safer and prudent way of going forward with the vaccines is to identify the populations that it is useful for, risk stratification and immunising the high-risk individuals and leaving the option open for everyone else.
Publish the unambiguous data first, study it better, confirm if the vaccine is really useful for everyone and does not hinder natural immune response for the younger population.
Stop fucking around with people by fearmongering and making vaccinations mandatory.
Do not forget the principle of autonomy.

The governments all over are not publishing the conflicting data and providing guidelines and recommendations which are not warranted.


References:

1. Comparing SARS-CoV-2 natural immunity to vaccine-induced immunity: reinfections versus breakthrough infectionsSivan Gazit, Roei Shlezinger, et al., doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415.
2. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/vaccine-induced-immunity.html
3. https://www.immunology.org/coronavirus/connect-coronavirus-public-engagement-resources/covid-immunity-infection-vaccine
4. https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/coronavirus-johnson-johnsons-vaccine-loses-antibody-protection-against-omicron-in-study-2651899
5. https://twitter.com/AviDascalu/status/1471923594775126021
6. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2787447

Ayurveda and other pseudoscience can kill you

This is a horror story of me coming quite close to death as a result of the ongoing promotion of Ayurveda and other pseudoscience in the name of national pride.

I got infected with SARS-CoV-2, developed fever and myalgia 27th April evening, got RT PCR done on 28th and by evening got the positive report.

I was prescribed baseless antibiotics like Ceftriaxone, Ivermectin and Doxycycline, and Dexamethasone 40 mg BID, I humbly refused and did not take any of them. Started treatment based on available evidence, just paracetamol, Vitamin D with Zinc and Vitamin C, and gargling with Chlorhexidine.

By next day evening, lost taste and smell. – That gave some more confidence.

Next morning was feeling fine, no fever, no myalgia, but loss of taste and smell were almost 100%. My mother asks me if I want coffee, I say, yes. She prepared coffee and gave it to me around 11 am, I couldn’t taste any coffee at all, intermittently I taste some burning, I thought my taste sense is probably returning so I have altered taste sensation. By 12 noon I feel severe abdominal cramps, and go to the washroom, I have diarrhea, which throughout the day gets worse and worse to the point of making me go to the toilet every 5 minutes or less. I initially think this could be covid itself. I ask my mom, why was the coffee so dark and so much dust like sediment at the bottom. She doesn’t tell me that she put some Ayurvedic shit some relative had brought, but remains quiet. The diarrhea gets worse and worse, and ass starts burning.

It clicks, mom put some shit into my coffee. I ask her again what did you put in my coffee with deceit. Asked her to show me the powder then she admits, it was given by a relative for cough and colds. This, happens to the person who refused unfounded, evidence less concoctions by so called evidence-based medicine practitioners only to be almost get killed by diarrhea caused by jadi bhutiya.

People, fuck that ayurveda has no side effects shit. Don’t take treatments not having any evidence. This is what happens to even unwilling doctors because of none other than the prime minister posturing from last 7 years to garner votes by associating himself with ayurveda to be seen as protecting the hindu culture.

Dangers of falling prey to pseudoscience called ayurveda.

Dangers of falling prey to pseudoscience called ayurveda.

I am currently treating a young lady in her early 20s.

Her story goes so…

She got married to a gentleman who works in the city, they were unable to conceive within the first 6 months of their marriage so her elders in the family and everyone else around them started suggesting them to consult doctors so that she can become pregnant soon.

The couple went doctor shopping for a while and her medical records show that her blood pressure used to be what it should be for her age, her thyroid profile was quite normal and she had no complaints of palpitations or chest pains that made it difficult for her to function and get any sleep at all.

She was essentially normal.

Husband’s semen analysis showed abnormal morphology in majority of spermatozoa, and reduced counts.

So, she was instructed by her relatives, neighbours and family members to go and take treatment from the famous ayurvedic doctor in a nearby city, this doctor is very famous as many people from their village and other villages go to him for all kinds of problems.

So this lady and her husband consult the doctor who prescribes multivitamins and antioxidants initially to both husband and wife.

On subsequent visits, the “doctor” prescribes herbal “medicines” to the lady and asks her to continue to take the medicines till she gets pregnant.

And this lady takes the medicines for nearly an year.

As time goes by, she starts developing chest pains and difficulty breathing on many occasions.

The frequency of such episodes goes on increasing and she continues to consult this ayurvedic “doctor” and continues to take the same medicines in addition to some more “ayurvedic medicines”.

This ayurvedic “doctor” fails to record the upsetting developments in the medical history of the patient, but the lady was taken to multiple cardiologists and hospitals for her worsening headaches, newly developed irregularity in her menstrual cycles, difficulty breathing and chest pains associated with severe palpitations.

By now her records are showing that she has hypothyroidism, hypertensive crisis and unexplained chest pains.

They finally end up with me after consulting many cardiologists and neurologists for nearly 6 months.

I go through her medical records in a chronological order and examine her after taking a detailed history.

Through her history I gather that she has panic attacks precipitated by palpitations.

And her investigations reveal that she has developed hypothyroidism recently.

And her blood pressure is 180 systolic and 120 diastolic on repeated measuring in supine as well as sitting and standing positions in all limbs.

I send her for investigations to rule out secondary hypertension.

And strictly instruct her to stop ayurvedic “medicines”, and initiate antihypertensive, anti anxiety therapy with thyroid hormone supplementation.

She has no renal vascular pathology, no cardiac pathology, no coarctation of aorta, she has no pheochromocytoma or any other adrenal tumours, does not have hyperaldosteronism, no pituitary tumours, no anti TPO antibodies or iodine deficiency, no cardiac arrhythmia, no other etiologies for her newly developed hypertension.

Now with the current treatment her hypothyroid state has normalised, her blood pressure is is under 120 systolic and under 80 diastolic, she has no palpitations or chest pains, she can now sleep peacefully.

My final diagnosis for her is, drug induced hypothyroidism with drug induced panic disorder and drug induced hypertensive crisis.

If she was not treated as aggressively as I did to reduce her blood pressure, she would be dead very soon due to hypertension.

And that is the cost she would have paid for believing in pseudoscience.

This is just a recent case, there are many more which have had very sad endings.

The roots and need for freedom of speech

This is an attempt to bring into discussions, currently underway, the arguments hitherto not considered or not voiced in the open because there is a general sense of fear of offending the masses, my aim is to discuss those issues that need better elucidation and to bring back the discussion to the basic premises when one is engaged in discussion/debate concerning freedom of speech and expression, and freedom of thought and conscience.

There have been attempts made by lawyers and judiciary to address this issue, progress has been made, albeit slowly and painfully, I am not discounting this fact.
With regards to freedom of thought and speech one must begin the discussion with the sound understanding of the human history, evolution, our place in the cosmos.
The fundamental flaw in understanding freedom is a failure to acknowledge where we come from and how we come about. The discussion always starts without taking into account the natural process of birth, and evolutionary history.
To illustrate my point, I would like to quote Professor Richard Dawkins from “Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder”. “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.” I would highly recommend you to watch this beautiful 4-minute video of the same on Youtube here https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=B94EtOOaoOM
Contemplate this sentence for a few days to understand the gravity of the matter and the extremely unlikely fact of our lives, now that we are here, let us for a moment reflect on that fact, did we choose to be born, importantly, did we choose to be born in a particular geography, di we choose who our parents should be, did we choose what language our mothers and fathers spoke? The simple answer to all these questions is a resounding no.
Now let us consider the history and evolution briefly, human beings have been around since 2,00,000 years in this planet, for much of our existence we did not have a coherent language and we did not have the know how to record what we experienced, the process of civilization is predicated on scientific breakthroughs of one kind or the other, humanity made great leaps because of cooking their food, cooked food meant we had to spend less energy in digesting what we ate that resulted in a surplus of energy which was utilised by the brains for thinking, this is why we are intelligent. The next ground-breaking advances were primarily because of agriculture, domestication, and then group formations, the social structures that slowly emerged had a powerful evolutionary advantage in the form of safety of young, distribution of labour, strengthening of altruism, also increased in group – out group distinction and rivalry among different groups. Somewhere along the line we also stupidly started believing in supernatural entities because we could not explain thunder, flowing water, volcanos, rain, lightening etc., This however is a significant step because that was the first attempt by human beings at understanding the surrounding which we found ourselves in.
Because of the advantage large groups provided, we gradually built civilisations and developed scripts for our languages, the advent of the scripts meant an explosion of transmission of ideas from one generation to the next and also from one civilisation to the other. Large civilisations also brought in the necessity to form social structures and need for keeping, the ones that took unfair advantage of the society, in check, so that society as a whole can be peaceful and prosper.
That is where we must start our question of individual, because till this point, individual had no restrictions, it is because of the social structures that we imposed restrictions on some of our freedoms for greater good, the people make a compromise with their freedoms so as to be happy and lead a life of considerable comfort afforded by being a part of the society.
However, with such social structure, the inherent problem of power vested by the people in few individuals to safeguard the society at large started to erode those freedoms not forgone too, the freedom of speech is one such freedom which was never willingly compromised by the individuals but the rulers gradually eroded that and we have the recorded history as a testament to the atrocities committed because of this erosion.
With this background, one must understand the importance of freedom of speech as a guardian against fascism, oligarchy, and dictatorship.
We had no choice in where we were born, nor did we choose our parents or the language, so it becomes imperative to question our loyalties to narrowly defined notions of states and nations particularly blind following of the people who espouse those narrow definitions of nations, language, ideology etc., At the same time, since we find ourselves in a social structure that should enable us to grow to our full potential but fails miserably primarily because of the greed and fascistic thugs that try to erode our freedoms, we must constantly make efforts to better the society we live in, that is our social and moral responsibility.
Recall the opening lines of “Unweaving the Rainbow”, this is the only chance we get to live a life, we must live a meaningful life, a considered life, a person who is not reflective is no better than a tree that stands for a thousand years without much change.
It is you and me in our ordinariness that need to fight the forces that try to divide us, it is our responsibility to bear the burden of protecting freedom of speech and expression against all those that try to take it away from us. Without that fundamental freedom, our societies will not be conducive to humanity.
So it is up to you and me to fight the current attack by the BJP/RSS and Narendra Modi and his thugs.

Rise India and fight for your the most basic and fundamental right, the right to be able to think, the right to be able to speak without the fear of oppression and persecution.

I am Dr Yogesh D, currently a postgraduate in Anatomy, I studied medicine to help the society, and eventually realised the larger social evils that are at the root of the misery of millions, hence decided to pursue a field where I can educate many young people so that the roots of misery, particularly religion and superstition can be eradicated slowly but permanently.  I also intend to pursue a PhD in genetics and neurosciences so that I can do research that will help us understand ourselves better.

The problem of memetic natural selection – The religions of the world

As long as you have your morality based in scriptures that tell you that you are doing the gods’ work and the god is on your side, you will never see the end of wars.

The whole problem of Palestine was created by the Zionist christians who wanted to bring back their messiah by placing the ravaged bunch of jews in the most disputed of the lands.

The holy books are not so holy when you actually read them, jesus (whose existence is not historically confirmed) supposed to have said,”Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35″For I came to SET A MAN AGAINST HIS FATHER, AND A DAUGHTER AGAINST HER MOTHER, AND A DAUGHTER-IN-LAW AGAINST HER MOTHER-IN-LAW;”

The quran is completely a war manual, 63% of it tells the “true believer” to wage war against the infidel wherever they see the unbelievers. And claims to be the last and perfect word of a god. Absolute in every nature, totalitarian.

The whole gita is a war manual that pushes a human being that refused to fight his own kin, to not worry about the consequences of his actions and go ahead and slaughter every single one them.. The methods supposedly used by krishna are mockery, deception, encouragement threat of punishment..

This makes one with a skeptical brain wonder, what the fuck is wrong with human species, why do they fall in love with the such books more than others that tell you not to kill other human beings?, there is plenty of good literature that is way better than these works of fiction, yet the kinds of works that get into the human brains like viruses are the ones that demand violence and war.

If you analyse the spread of information among the human species, you will notice the most striking feature among the sets of ideas that persist and replicate successfully and get transmitted across generations, it is that these memes end up in pools of synergistic memes (bits of information, just like genes), individually these memes might not survive the test of times because the natural selection does not select the memes that would cause the extinction of the species (altruism — sacrificing ones’ life to save another’s would not be beneficial to the individuals that have this gene that makes them altruistic and would eliminate all those individuals very quickly, probably within one generation, but altruism works perfectly well in conjunction with other synergistic genes that make other individuals reciprocally altruistic, thus establishing a mutual cohabitation that benefits the entire group of individuals, thus making them a very successful in maintaining and increasing their numbers)… The memes also work in a similar way.

Disclaimer– This is my own understanding and my own writing, there is plenty of evidence for what I have written, you may like to read, “The God Delusion”. “The Selfish Gene”, “Ancestors Tale” — All by Prof Richard Dawkins (an evolutionary biologist). “Evolution -3rd edition by Douglas J. Futuyma” — Dr. Yogesh D