pics from the past that shooks the world-6

Cyclops Baby Born in India Only Survives 1 Day

A baby boy with one eye in the center of his forehead and no nose was born in India last week. He survived only one day.Doctors were shocked when they delivered the infant by cesarean section from the 34-year-old mother, Veena Chavan.
Dr. Ashok Anand, professor of gynecology at the hospital, told reporters, "The child must have possibly suffered from cyclopia."
A sonogram during Chavan's 32nd week of pregnancy revealed the baby was hydrocephalic, meaning water was accumulating on his brain. According to the doctor's report, medical staff wanted to perform an intrauterine shunting procedure but could not because of the advanced stage of her term.
Chavan not only grieved the loss of her son, but was upset that she did not even have an opportunity to see him."This was my third pregnancy. I lost my previous child while I was carrying. I was told that the baby had water in the brain but never had I expected the baby to be born with one eye and no nose," she told reporters.Chavan's one surviving child is an 8-year-old daughter.
Surprisingly, this form of cyclopia occurs in roughly one in 250 embryos and is a rare form of holoprosencephaly, which affects how the front of the brain is formed during fetal development. With cyclopia, the eyes and nose don't form properly.
Such fetuses are often lost early in the pregnancy. Thus, despite the higher-than-expected odds, it's rarely seen. The cause is often the result of a genetic mutation, though alcoholic and diabetic mothers are at greater risk of carrying a cyclopic child.
In 2006, India saw another cyclopic baby born in the city of Chennai. The baby girl survived and was taken home by her parents. No recent reports offer any further information about her survival.
A year earlier, a one-eyed baby girl was born prematurely in Russia but died almost immediately after being delivered. Reports claimed her head, shoulders and back were covered with thick hair and a "small trunk" was growing above her eye.
Cases like these have been documented for hundreds of years but have surely occurred for thousands. The mythological Cyclops dates back to ancient Greece and may have been inspired by a cyclopic infant.

pics from the past that shooks the world 5

  


An easy way to reach the top? :)

Narayana Murthy (NRN), at old Infosys campus in 1990s. Since most of them know about the story of Infosys and NRN, let me narrate some interesting and rare facts which many might not know. 

If Indian engineering students have taken job placements for granted, it is because of visionaries like Narayana Murthy. He is the Sultan of Indian IT but the journey was not as smooth as that of Tipu Sultan or other kings who were born in royal families.

Coming from a middle class family, like any other Indian, he had a dream of getting into IIT. He had managed to clear the IIT-JEE exams but his father could not afford IIT hostel and tution fees, due to which he made up his mind and joined a local engineering college (NIE, Mysore). He said to himself "All students from the IITs study well and do big things in life. But it is not the institution, ultimately it is you and you alone who can change your life by hard work" and he went on to prove his statement!! After engineering, he received Master's degree from IIT Kanpur. 
Not many know that his first job was at IIM-A as systems engineer (also, he had 5 job offers including HMT, Air India, Telco after graduation but took up IIM-A which was the least paying).

He was initially a firm believer of communism but an interesting incident changed his life which led him to become a capitalist & an entrepreneur. During a foreign visit, for having talked against the Bulgarian govt with somebody in train, NRN was jailed for 4 days without food but later released because he was from India (which was a friendly country to them). This changed his life, he gave up the idea of communism and decided to create jobs in India. Thats how the story of his entrepreneurship started.

Infosys was his second attempt as an entrepreneur. The first one being Softronics, which was targetted to domestic market. Since India was not mature for IT yet, it turned out to be a big flop. So he started InfoSys (yes, the S was capital) and the rest is history. 

Here is an interesting 3 min clip from a BBC documentary showing Infosys, Indian IT in general and the impact on India.


The journey of Infosys was certainly not smooth and had seen lots of obstacles. Getting a computer took them 24 months, thanks to our govt red tape. Getting a loan was almost impossible. And at some point of time, the company was even at the verge of a sell-out. How they overcame all those troubles and became such a successful company is another story which I will be narrating using a different photo later :)

As usual, our next question. What is thought provoking in this story and what can we learn from it? 
NRN has demonstrated that even if you are from a middle class family, inspite of studying in a local college, and being without any money to start a company & inspite of license raj of 1980s, you can go on to succeed in life and build a great empire by creating millions of jobs. He has shown that you need not have a surname called Tata/Birla to be successful. You dont have to be only from IIT to succeed. All it takes is hard work, determination & self confidence!! Hoping to see many more Narayana Murthys in future :


treat from the blogee

 

pics from the past that shooks the world 4

Horribly disturbing photo.
A vulture waiting for a starving child in Africa to die so that it can eat it up.

This was shot by the photojournalist, Kevin Carter in 1993-94 when he had been to Sudan to report about the famine. The photo received lot of accolades and he was even awarded the Pulitzer prize for photography..

In an interview, Carter mentioned that he had spent 20 mins adjusting the camera to take the best shot. The child was actually crawling towards a food camp which was just 200 meters away. All he needed to do after taking the photo was to pick the child and spend a min to walk till the camp and leave it there, which he unfortunately did not do. He also said that he felt guilty for not having helped the child and returned to the same place after a week and was told that the child was no more. 

This created lot of roars across the world and every newspaper/magazine criticized him for not being human enough to help the child.
The St. Petersburg Times in Florida said : "The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering, might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene"



3 months after winning the Pulitzer prize, Carter committed suicide..

The most thought provoking part in this, in my opinion is about the concept of humanity.. He won Pulitzer prize, he might deserve it, its the judges choice. 
I agree that the photo was important to show the world about Sudan famine. At the same time, was taking the photo the only priority? Even a robot would have taken a photo. (Looking at the way technology is growing, in the next 20 years, you will be able to take photograph of any corner of the earth using satellites and robots).
So, what makes us different from robots? Our human nature. If it is a war, its fine if the photographer had not helped. Those who join the army know about the risks and it is not expected of a photographer to go and help soldiers wounded in a battle. There are doctors and ambulances for that. If its a concentration camp, it is not expected of the photographer to help anybody because doing so can cost his life. (the dictator would be angry and execute him)

But, in a famine like this, when you have 20 mins spare time to take a photoshoot but you dont have 2 mins to help the child.... 

Some might say the job of photojournalist is such that you should just shoot a photograph because the world has to see it. Helping the person is secondary. If thats the case, let me ask something. Suppose you are driving down the road and find that on the other side of the road, there is an accident and the victims are bleeding. Will you continue driving and go ahead because your job is just to drive your vehicle and reach the place or will you get down and try to help your bit. 

I dont want you to come to conclusions. I dont want you to come to judgements. Carter might have done the right thing depending on the context or it might be wrong. But the takeaway from this picture must be that we are humans and we should give more priority to humanity than our professions. 

Another takeaway is that food should not be wasted. I agree, the food saved here cannot be sent to Africa to feed poor kids but lets not forget that ours is still a developing nation and we have millions of starving kids in our own country. I hope every company canteen puts this picture at food counters so that people think twice before refilling and dont waste food later.

Some of you might feel that I am trying to show Carter in bad light. Well, all that I am trying to do here is describe the context in black and white with the help of reliable links and discussing about the takeaway from this description. Dont judge anything about Carter. Try to see what you can learn from a situation and make your life & others lives better. Maybe if you conclude that you will try to be human first and professional next, Carter will be happier to see that his photo has made a positive difference to your thinking.

pics from the past that shooks the world 3

911 jumpers

From 110 storeys, a distance of over 1,300ft, it was impossible at first to see what it was that was falling. One witness said it looked like confetti.
Perhaps it was debris: in a desperate attempt to escape as the World Trade Center towers burned around them, workers were hurling chairs or tables through the windows to reach fresh air before they were rescued. In those early minutes, a rescue operation seemed plausible.
Then two women on the ground, staring up at the gaping hole left in the North Tower by American Airlines Flight 11, clutched at each other and started screaming. It was people that were falling from the towers. Trapped above the point of impact, many witnesses concluded that they were jumping. “The Jumpers”, as they became known, were one of the most graphic and controversial elements of 9/11.
Thomas Dallal, a photojournalist at the time, was on the ground near the North Tower. He photographed the two women crying, put a long lens on his camera and turned back to the tower snapping away at the uppermost floors. One of his photographs, to be named “Impending Death”, has become an iconic image from that day. It shows around 50 figures leaning out of the broken windows of the North Tower shortly before it collapsed.

People jumped or fell from all four sides of both towers. USA Today estimated that around 200 people died in this way. The New York Times ran a more conservative estimate of 50.
It took 10 seconds for each person to fall, it was calculated, as they accelerated at 32ft per second achieving a speed of 150mph. Some who witnessed the jumpers see only desperation. Others see freedom: choosing how to die as a final act of defiance.

pics from the past that shooks the world-2

The Nanking Massacre or Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, was a mass murder, genocide and war rape that occurred during the six-week period following the Japanese capture of the city of Nanjing (Nanking), the former capital of the Republic of China, on December 13, 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War. During this period hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers were murdered and 20,000–80,000 women were raped^[1] by soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army.^[2][3][4]
The event remains a contentious political issue, as various aspects of it have been disputed by some historical revisionists and Japanese nationalists,^[3] who have claimed that the massacre has been either exaggerated or wholly fabricated for propaganda purposes. As a result of the nationalist efforts to deny or rationalize the war crimes, the controversy surrounding the massacre remains a stumbling block in Sino-Japanese relations, as well as Japanese relations with other Asia-Pacific nations such as South Korea and the Philippines.
An accurate estimation of the death toll in the massacre has not been achieved because most of the Japanese military records on the killings were deliberately destroyed or kept secret shortly after the surrender of Japan in 1945. The International Military Tribunal of the Far East estimates more than 200,000 casualties in the incident;^[5] China's official estimate is about 300,000 casualties, based on the evaluation of the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal. Estimates from Japanese historians vary widely, in the vicinity of 40,000–200,000. Some historical revisionists even deny that a widespread, systematic massacre occurred at all, claiming that any deaths were either justified militarily, accidental or isolated incidents of unauthorized atrocities. These negationists claim that the characterization of the incident as a large-scale, systematic massacre was fabricated for the purpose of political propaganda.^[6][7]
Although the Japanese government has admitted the acts of killing of a large number of noncombatants, looting and other violence committed by the Imperial Japanese Army after the fall of Nanking,^[8][9] some Japanese officials have argued that the death toll was military in nature and that no such crimes ever occurred. Denial of the massacre (and a divergent array of revisionist accounts of the killings) has become a staple of Japanese nationalism.^[10] In Japan, public opinion of the massacres varies, and few deny the occurrence of the massacre outright.^[10] Nonetheless, recurring attempts by negationists to promote a revisionist history of the incident have created controversy that periodically reverberates in the international media, particularly in China, South Korea, and other East Asian nations.<sup>[11]


bitter treat of the day</sup>

Be Thankful Of What You Have