Why sex education is necessary

Recently, the whole saga of the government proposing to introduce sex education in schools, and the opposition protesting, and the idea put on hold, happened again in Maharashtra, after last year. All in the name of preserving our culture. Never mind that children are exposed to the ideas of sex, love and obscenity daily in movies, the news, and by false beliefs among classmates.

A committee has been set up, which will no doubt submit it's report in an year, and it will be implemented when the current students in the 9th and 11th classes become grandparents. It's all done in the name of preserving Indian culture, against 'western' values. It is impossible not to laugh at the people who make these decisions. Here are some tidbits, with some sarcasm of my own:

(Last year) the government banned sex education in schools after parents, teachers and political parties protested saying that the content was sexually graphic.

Oh my, they're teaching sex with pictures! In 9th and 11th classes, where the students are oh so innocent! This will corrupt them, no doubt.

Ramdas Kadam, Shiv Sena Leader: ''This is wrong. It goes against all the tradition of Hindus in Maharashtra.''

Wow. I guess Hindus in Maharashtra don't have sex either, because it's against their culture.

Nawab Mallik, MLA, NCP: ''Students are constantly complaining about sexual exploitation or harassment by teachers. If these sex gurus are appointed, then more girls will be exploited.''

"Sex gurus"? Excuse me? I thought sex education would make the students more knowledgeable about sex, and hence, more able to know when exploitation is happening, and thus safer.

Vinod Tawde, MLC, BJP: ''Instead of calling it sex education, it would be better if we referred to it as Adolescent.''

Hahahahaha... wait... *inhale*... hahahahaha!

Bashir Patil, MLA, NCP: ''We are proud of the fact that our women can walk alone on the roads. If sex education is implemented, it will increase the evils in the society and like colleges, schools will also fall prey to such evils.''

The same old argument, sex --> evils.

Why we need sex education

Frankly speaking, though, our kids need sex education. And 9th graders (well, even 6th graders) aren't wholly innocent about sex, and talk about "balls" (ie, breasts), "rods", and a whole barrage of such terminology; and most of the boys have easy access to porn. It's rather easy for kids to hide their "forbidden" activities from their parents.

There are many reasons why a child (well, a teenager) needs sex education. Two of the most important are awareness of STDs, and the recognition of and safety from abuse.

There are more reasons, one of which is that sex is elevated to a higher status than necessary by the taboo status it has, and thus teens think of it as more important than it is. There's reluctance to talk about sex in our society. Where can the kid talk about those sexual things which are bothering him? His peers are about as knowledgeable as him. Sex is a part of human life, and hence it must be a part of a complete curriculum. Sex education is education in the strictest sense: it is essential knowledge about life.

Finally, for those who think the students will become corrupt after sex ed, it's rather that they'll become well disciplined. Sex education makes us more aware of the need to respect our fellow students, be they boys or girls. It teaches us respect for women, and respect for other sexual orientations.

I may be faulted for believing that education can do anything. Maybe it can't. But the school is one place where everyone can receive the education most parents are afraid to give at home.

Here is another list of why students need sex ed.

Here is a general page about sex ed. You can of course google to find out more.

Comments and suggestions appreciated. :)

Re-Christening

You'll notice that I haven't written limericks of late. I seem to have lost my motivation, maybe I'll gain it again someday. Also, this blog was only sporadically updated for a long time. So I decided to do what most people do when they want to re-invigorate their interest in something: start again.

No, I'm not going to start another blog. I'm not going to delete all the earlier posts, (of course not! :) ). What I did, though, was give the blog a new name. It's a name you may or may not like, but I think it conveys the very essence of my being, namely, pondering.

Ponderomotive is an archaic physics word, actually, the proper term is "ponderomotive force". It means, the force exerted by light on atoms. So taken that this quaint little word expresses a certain love for philosophy, has a connection with physics, and also conveys a love for English (who else but someone who likes English would use that?) , I feel it's a fitting name for this blog.

As always, comments and suggestions (other names, maybe?) welcome.

Ayurveda

I'll begin, as is my tradition, with a quote, from Christopher Wanjek, in his article on Ayurveda (see references) :

"Then along came Western allopathic medicine, the Rodney Dangerfield of the medical world. Its identification of viruses, bacteria and genetic disorders as the underlying cause of disease has nearly doubled human life expectancy in the past 100 years. Still, it gets no respect.

Largely divorced from the knowledge of diseases that plagued our ancestors, Americans are increasingly turning to ancient cures like those found in the ayurvedic system. "

Wisdom of the ages

I'll admit at the outset there are many claims I can't stand, one of which is this: "This has been practised for thousands of years, it is the wisdom of our ancestors. " (And the one sentence left unsaid is: How dare you challenge it?)

I really can't believe how people fall for that statement. Maybe they are more attached to the past and to their country than I am. My mind immediately harks back to Astrology, Ptolemy's Geocentrism, and Aristotles "things fall because it's in their nature to fall" when people talk about thousand-year old wisdom. We have much better facilities now, much better instruments, and a much better method of doing Science. It is a good bet that, as far as probing the natural world is concerned, we are eons ahead of the aged wisdom of our ancestors.

Where were the ayurvedic cures fr the thousands of years that diseases now regarded as curable or preventable: smallpox, T.B., leprosy were plaguing the Indian subcontinent. As Wanjek says, then came along allopathy.

My post on Ayurveda won't be as long or as detailed as my posts on astrology... I haven't researched the subject enough. But still, I venture to propound my humble view on Ayurveda in what follows. (And now I stop writing ayurveda with a capital A. The capitals are reserved, aside from English rules, for "I" (no egoism, just standard practice), and Science.)

Is EVERYTHING ayurvedic?

I look at the little details on the back of my Vicks Vaporub bottle: whoa, "Ayurvedic Medicine". There are ayurvedic soaps, ayurvedic toothpastes, and believe it or not, ayurvedic shampoos. I suspect that the Indian government taxes less if the thing you are marketing is ayurvedic.

There is a buckload of ayurvedic beauty creams, and ayurvedic medicine is a flourishing business in India. Ayurveda is pretty damn big for a medicine system which has little or no high-quality studies backing it.

Can ayurveda treat EVERYTHING?

From the common cold to cancer and even AIDS (huh? I doubt the sages of 1000 B.C. knew of AIDS), ayurveda claims to treat everything, and that too completely. Pretty mean for a medicine system whose theory has very little in common with modern scientific know-how of human diseases and the human body.

Of course, there are those who complain that, hey, it may be based on a flawed theory, but hey, it works. (Astrology deja vu ... )

I have two objections to that:

1) What evidence do you have that it works? Our modern scientific method doesn't admit anecdotal evidence. ("My father/uncle/late grandmother's second cousin's daughter had cancer/TB/cold that doctors had given up on, and he/she tried ayurvedic treatment and it was cured!") It needs clinical trials, double-blind tests, or such. These happen regularly in the case of conventional medicine, and that's how they doctors know which drug works where, when and how. If you uncritically listen to anecdotal tales, or read what is written in 2000 year-old books and take it as the truth, I think our present system would go haywire.

There are few high-quality studies that give a positive result for ayurveda, and this may or may not be because it doesn't work. The main factor is, I think, that the ayurvedic system simply doesn't call for testing.

2) If you have a flawed theory, how would you know how to make a new medicine for a new disease that crops up, say? Or a disease in some other part of the world that the ancient ayurvedic books don't mention? I think (and hope) you'd agree if I said that the flawed deduction leading to a new medicine based on a flawed theory are likely to be flawed themselves?

A few proponents, eager to do a one-up on modern science, try to mention the correspondence between the "chakras" of ayurveda and the endocrine glands of the human body. How can this be co-incidence, they ask.

The first question is, whether they actually do correspond. Answer: they don't, of course. The chakras of ayurveda are just uniformly distributed through the body, at positions people ignorant of most medical knowledge would put them if asked to do so: there's a knowledge chakra in the brain, the sexual and root chakras at the lower abdomen, the expressive chakra at the neck. COME ON! The knowledge chakra, "the focus of intuition, the perception of truth", corresponds to the pituitary glands? And the sexual chakra doesn't even correspond to the testicles. Apparantly, the one that does is the "root chakra", which "other centres of energy" rely upon. I thought the other glands depended upon the pituitary. The correspondence, when you look at it closely enough, vanishes.

And of course, where are the bacteria, the viruses, the hormones? They aren't there, of course, because our ancestors didn't know about them. They simply tried to make a theory to explain the human body, to find a cure for the diseases. A lot indicates that the ancient Indians craved for explanations. That doesn't mean they found the right ones.

Something harmful this way comes...

Well, what's the harm, though? Maybe it works on the placebo effect. What's the harm in some people falling prey to a little ignorance?

It isn't a little ignorance, it's a whole lot of ignorance. Ayurveda is tied in with astrology, both being integral aspects of the knowledge of ancient India. It's a whole system, and it's a whole flawed system. And it isn't a few people, it's millions of Indians who are falling prey to the greedy wiles of people like Baba Ramdev, who claim to cure everything with the help of yoga and ayurveda. It's millions of people giving up conventional, rigourously tested medicine for a two-thousand year-old, untested, flawed system. If this isn't harmful, I don't know what is.

And it's certainly bad for our future if we fall prey to such alternative systems of medicine... we don't want our health to be in risk because we had a good system but abandoned it for faulty alternatives. With conventional allopathy, we have hit upon the key to the human body and diseases. It would be ridiculous to now ignore it and try to hit the target with broken, old darts.

Two more things before we part

1) A common misconception I often find in India: are ayurveda and homeopathy closely related? The answer, from what I discern, is no. The two systems differ greatly in both the underlying theory and the method of preparing medicines. Ayurveda is mostly herbal-based, and had the chakra-theory. Here is an overview of homeopathy which describes the underlying theory and the method of medicine-preparation in brief.

2) I have asserted throughout this article that ayurveda is a flawed system, and it has few studies backing it. That doesn't mean some of it's cures won't work, and that herbal based medicines are bound to be silly. Even though the sages of yore didn't conduct clinical trials, they could have chanced upon some medicines that actually do work. I'm saying it's a better bet to stick with allopathy, because it's a growing system, where people are trying to find the root causes and cures for many ailments, and it's a peer-reviewed system. Researchers are trying herbs, chemical, everything for finding a cure for, cancer say, and they have an actual chance to find it, because they know the details of the diseases on the biochemical level.

Maybe it's time to acknowledge that our ancestors were ignorant, and we're in the middle of a revolution in human knowledge about nature.

Two Addendums

Some (private and public) responses to my post have spurred me to write a bit more on ayurveda and science, in general.

It is argued that though ayurveda may not have been scientifically tested, it's the product of trial-and-error of the ancient sages. However, the fact remains that ayurvedic have not been tested extensively by modern scientific methods (use of controls, randomisation, double-blinding). And unless so tested, it won't be a credible method of treatment. The modern methods of testing, and there's a whole branch of science dealing with research methodology, tries to cancel as many biases as possible, in a study. And since it's not possible to totally be unbiased, there are systematic reviews of earlier studies. But why should ayurveda even bother about the label "science"? That's because science is not just a name for what scientists do, but it's a method of doing things, the best method to discern what is true and what is false (when testing a system which claims to make repeatable, observable predictions... like General Relativity, or Astrology, or Homeopathy). It's currently the only possible method to get credible evidence to support claims like ayurveda's.

The second note is about side-effects. "Ayurveda has no side-effects" is widely claimed as the basis for the superiority of ayurveda over "western medicine". There are few studies to show that ayurveda even has effects, so I guess there are fewer which conclude that it has no side-effects (that said, it's only a guess, I haven't found this quoted anywhere). Why do side-effects occur in allopathy? They occur because in allopathy, the medicine is usually in chemical form, and often a certain chemical has various roles to play in the body. If the ancient sages had found some miracle cures that (well, at root, all plant medicines are chemicals) know where to go in the body and what to avoid, it's a cinch that modern medicine would have chanced upon it too. And considering the fact that the creators of ayurveda had a faulty theory of the body, it's not very probable that they did find side-effectless cures.

Disclaimer: People are, of course, free to choose whatever medical system they want to subscribe to. But they should know that if they are choosing Ayurveda or Homeopathy, they are choosing something with does not have scientific evidence backing it.

References:

Ayurveda, the Good, the Bad and the Expensive, by Christopher Wanjek, Livescience.

(Focussing on Swami Ramdev and a bit left-leaning) Ayurveda under the scanner, by Meera Nanda, Frontline. Read this article for the details of the practice and influence of Ayurveda in India.

(Focussing on Deepak Chopra) A Few Thoughts on Ayurvedic Mumbo-Jumbo, by Stephen Barrett, M.D., Quackwatch.

Why does my medication give me side-effects? , by Glenn Brynes, M.D.

Writing Styles in English

If you are a lover of vocabulary, English is the best language for you. It has borrowed words from many other languages, and has a wide availability of resources to help you if you get stuck, and if you can't find a word fit for the situation, there are phrases, idioms and quotes to boot.

My friend Anne recently complained on her blog about my insistence on avoiding the use of "big words" while writing. While I don't claim to be (and am not) an expert on writing styles, I do have my own view on the subject. It is just personal opinion, mind you... it formed as a result of my comfort (or the lack of it) while reading essays written in various styles.

When I was in school, the elite of my classmates used to write essays that started like (suppose it's an essay on "A typical classroom") :

Every classroom is an eclectic mix of the serious, the impish and the in-betweens. Teachers are not without their quirks and idiosyncrasies either.

It seemed to be a bit, um, silly that an ordinary essay about an ordinary classroom demanded such a pompous (ehm, no offense) start. Unfortunately, this guaranteed marks from the impressed teacher, so the students stuck to it. My essay would've started like this (in the unusual situation that I had the exact same thoughts)

There are many kinds of students: the studious (teacher's pets, first bench), the uninterested (last bench, or outside the class), and the in-betweens. The teachers are of various breeds too.

Of course, the earlier two lines are much more poetic then these two, which are, if you have an unusually strong sense of humour, merely amusing. But I wonder, how poetic is it to run to the dictionary every two sentences?

Herein lies my main point. If you are writing chiefly to communicate your opinion to other people (which is what blogging comprises), the use of big words is unnecessary, and even contrary to the main purpose: to communicate you views and opinions in the clearest and nicest way possible. That does not mean using only monosyllabic words: it just means the reader shouldn't have to consult the dictionary every so often.

One more argument that can be made for using big words is that they make the writing seem much more important and official. However, avoiding them would make the writing more accessible, I think.

There are other types of writing, though, whose main purpose is not to communicate opinions, but to tell a story, or to just show off your literary prowess. In telling a story, what may be required is to illustrate the situation as closely as possibly. For that, the writer may employ some words which may not be in the common vocabulary, but describe the situation perfectly with the requisite beauty or grandeur (or flashiness). In poetry, of course, one not only has to transmit the beauty or irony, but also do it in the shortest and most elegant possible way. There is no way out but by using big words.

I'd like to show you an example of an essay (whose primary purpose is communication) written both ways:

A teacher is to a subject what a conductor is to scrolls of a Bach concerto. Teachers hold the reins that can metamorphose the dull into the fascinating or vice-versa. And when pupils are compelled to listen to less-appealing lectures, they are likely to get prejudiced against the subject itself. For example, I still get a cold, clammy fear when I hear ‘Differentiating with respect to’.

---

Ever been to a calculus class where the teacher talked on and on in monotones and half the students were busy drawing sketches of the teacher? A teacher has to be engaging. It's his/her duty to make the students understand, and love the subject. Otherwise the students (and I, personally) would rather be elsewhere. We have a right to, don't we?

I think the first is a very elegantly written paragraph, but the second gets the point across better. I must confess, if this weren't just an essay about classroom attendance, but something about, say, global warming, the former would be the way to go, because there we would have to convey an idea which is alien to the readers, and to illustrate it properly would require suitable words.

Note: The elegant-style lines are taken from Anne's essay on Classroom Attendance. I like her writing (it's smooth, and it flows well), but with qualifications. ;)

This is MY point of view, MY opinion. I'd like to hear yours too, and I have a fear you'll disagree with me. I'm ready to discuss it, debate it.

I'll conclude with a quote from Bertrand Russell's "How I write":

Take, say, such a sentence as the following, which might occur in a work on sociology: "Human beings are completely exempt from undesirable behaviour-patterns only when certain prerequisites, not satisfied except in a small percentage of actual cases, have, through some fortuitous concourse of favourable circumstances, whether congenital or environmental, chanced to combine in producing an individual in whom many factors deviate from the norm in a socially advantageous manner". Let us see if we can translate this sentence into English. I suggest the following: "All men are scoundrels, or at any rate almost all. The men who are not must have had unusual luck, both in their birth and in their upbringing." This is shorter and more intelligible, and says just the same thing. But I am afraid any professor who used the second sentence instead of the first would get the sack.

Q&A - II

I forgot to do this... well, after I answered her first question about Bohr atoms, I asked her a question, which she answered on her blog. Here's the link, and I hope this Q&A series continues. :)

How do different cells function differently, if all have the same DNA?

Do see the rest of her blog... a damn nice one.

Ought to be

Just a short note; I don't know if I should post this underdeveloped thought or not. I'm going along with posting it for now.Very sarcastic, but not all rhetorical.

If you don't get what you want, if you want to express the grievances of the people you (claim to) represent, is it right to go about that by vandalising, burning and breaking other people's and the state's property? And is it right for the state to be afraid to arrest you because your followers will become even more aggressive if you get arrested? You are breaking the law. But since you're doing it for a supposedly "right" reason, are you immune to arrest? Wonderful precedent indeed.

One last question: Can you claim to be trustworthy and unbiased in saying that the marathi manoos has really suffered because of the "outsiders", when a few months ago you shielded some marathi boys of a molestation charge by saying that marathi people cannot be molestors¹? (What, by definition?)

Is politics about what the people want or what they need?

¹ I cannot find a news source for this, but I had read this, and a couple of articles quote the same.

Agnosticism or Atheism?

A question that sometimes bothers me is whether I am an Agnostic or an Atheist. I usually describe myself as an atheistic agnostic... which means an agnostic leaning towards atheism. Agnosticism is usually defined as being unsure of the existence of God, but I have always found myself doubting that existence. A better stance would be Atheism, but then, won't I be in the same believing-things-they-don't-know group as theists?

I confess I hadn't given much thought to the issue, and not let my oscillating stance bother me that much, so I am thankful that I found a Richard Dawkins piece about this ambiguity in Forbes Magazine. In it, Dawkins doubts that scientists (like Einstein) who frequently refer to God are doing so with the same God in mind that an ordinary person believes in. But their references get frequently misinterpreted by religious propagandists, who use the mileage of science to get more followers.

Other quotations from Einstein, like "my God is the same as that of Spinoza" are much less widely known. Einstein's God was nature itself, not the God people worship every day. Scientists usually mean "nature" or "laws of nature" (or even "initial conditions") when they say "God". My own stance is similar, except that I call "Nature" as "Nature", and not "God", having developed an aversion to the word (it leads to misunderstandings, especially when people who know I'm an atheist tell me not to take God's name in vain).

The main question Dawkins poses (which comes a little later in the article) is this: can religion and science 'converge'? Is it possible, on one hand, to believe in miracles, and, on the other, to 'believe' in science as the truth? It might be possible for some people but I think that's due to inconsistency on their part. Religion and science are mutually incompatible, atleast if you have a conventional definition of both ;). Praying isn't going to save you from that exam, and if you've studied the physics part of it properly, you should know that. ;)

So let me clarify my stand on God (well, his existence): Atheism. Religion is not equally believable as science. Just like Evolution is much more plausible than "creationism". Religion might step back when the rollcall for scientific theories takes place, but it intrudes into that very territory on most of it's ideas. Like Dawkins, I believe many things are unknown by science, but that doesn't mean they're unknowable.

Q&A Series: Bohr Orbits

Hello, everyone. Anne and I have decided to start a new series: it's called Q&A (I think). What it comprises is this: One of us asks the other a question... it can be anything, from Science to Politics to Philosophy to, I guess, personal opinions. The credit for this great idea goes to Anne, and she went first with the asking of the questions. Her question and my response are posted on the following page (it being too big to incorporate on my blog)...

http://anonicker.googlepages.com/bohrorbitandqm

Hope you enjoy this series as it progresses. I have already given a question to Anne to answer (it's about Biology). Soon, we'll also move on to other non-specialist subjects. Great Idea, this. :)

Jabberwocky in Cartoon form!

I know, I have disappeared lately... but let me assure you that I have disappeared behind a buckload of physics ;).

And, yes, I have also been rather parasitic about my blog's contents, feeding mostly on Charmaine's creations... this post is another such shameless non-efforts. But it IS with Charmaine's permission, and I promise that the next post with be limericks, and all original works.

Enjoy Charmaine's belated Bday present for me till then... her Jabberwocky interpretation :) . (And that's me as the boy in most of the frames, btw. :D)

A poem for a Birthday

A birthday poem, that's new! I know. I sent it to Charmaine on her Birthday recently, when she turned 19. She liked it, and agreed to illustrate it for posting it on my blog. So, here it is, and she's done the drawing nicely (although I wish she would tone down the sarcasm a bit... but hey, where else do you find self-satirical cartoons? ;) )

This might take a while to load, so have patience. :)

We'd love your comments!