|
The football fever grips Oman |
|
Every ordinary citizen of
the country can carve a niche for himself in the game and achieve the top
most honours. It is this underlying character of football that has taken the
game both onward and upward. It is also this truth that will produce world
class football players in Oman |
|
 |
Every
morning Mausa throws half a dozen lime green
florescent jackets into the washing machine and then hangs them up on the
line to dry. Every evening the young boys in Mausa's family don the jackets,
lace up their boots and walk the short distance to one of the new football
pitches in the capital.
Here in the middle of Wadi Adai as it passes through
the shopping arcades of Qurum, the boys forget the world around them and
play football to their heart's content. It's just a neighbourhood game but
it is not unusual for passers-by to stop, park their cars and sit on the
metal railings to watch the boys dribble the ball.
Who knows? It may be just one of these neighbourhood boys |
who will make it to the big league
and bring football glory to the country.
Children in Oman are weaned from breast milk straight on to a diet of
football. When they are knee high to their elder siblings or uncles or
neighbours they are taken to the pitch as part of an evening outing. From
this tender age, they watch every move and commit to memory the foot
movements, the catch phrases during the game and the post mortem at the end
of every match.
Children watch older children and imbue everything about the
game in much the same way as the country has imbued a hundred other
traditions through observation and word of mouth. By the time a child enters
the playground in school there is very little that he needs to learn about
football. He knows the size of the field, the width of the goalposts, the
players who have gone places in the country and the long term ambitions of
the country in the realm of football. In fact his general knowledge includes
how much AC Milan paid for Ronaldinho and how the hero has performed since
he started kicking a ball.
Young Omani boys start playing football wherever there is room for a group
of friends to kick a ball. The long stretch of beach is a favourite place to
turn into a game field and preparations begin with one member of a team
drawing the boundary lines at the water's edge. With his foot in drawing
mode and his big toe as a pencil, he determines the size of the field and
draws the basic outlines essential for the game. Then in a ceremony that is
worth watching, the members of the team carry the goalposts stored in the
boot of a car and sink it into the accepting sands. The stage is set and the
game commences without a thought to anything including a prominent notice of
the Muscat Municipality that clearly says that playing football is not
allowed on the beach.
Not everyone on the beach has a florescent jacket like
the lucky members of Mausa's family. But that never comes in the way and the
boys have their own systems in place for recognising the members of Team A
from Team B. The matches on the beach are rough and keenly fought —everyone
who is one the sands seems to be keenly aware that they may one day be
someone on the billboard. It must be mentioned that the goal posts for the
beach game are a small version of the regular game. It is for this reason
that at the end of the game it is once again carried back to the car and
stored carefully for the next game.
Not everyone has a level wadi to set up the goal posts and not everyone has
access to the soft sands. For youngsters who live away from the beach and
the wadi even a parking lot comes in handy for a short game in the evening.
Football in a car park is both hard and hazardous. It often involves
crossing the adjoining street to retrieve a ball that has been kicked out
and facing the ire of car owners who find that they are parked in the
penalty kick area. Its improvisation all the way — the goal posts here are
two piles of ready made concrete bricks and the size of the ground may be
just adequate to park a few cars — a far cry from the regulation ground.
The love for the game of football is all pervasive. Omanis in senior
positions, Omanis working in the ministries and in the private sector are
all there for a good game. There are also hundreds of veterans who join the
young players on the beach. Last week there was what clearly was a veteran's
football game being played on the grass at the Kalbod Park. With the
dishdasha folded up and the kuma and mussar placed on the sidelines some
seniors enjoyed a few kicks and re-lived the thrill of a game they played
once upon a time.
Recently after the final match of His Majesty's Cup, enthusiasts in some
localities poured out on to the streets to celebrate and show support to
their heroes in the Suwaiq Club. An Omani couple was stuck in the middle of
the celebrations and despite several calls for help were unable to move for
nearly an hour. They were caught in the middle of an unplanned and
spontaneous road block created by the Club's supporters. At times like this,
the law enforcement authorities believe that football fever needs to burn
and they consider it well in order to give young adults ample opportunity to
express their deepest sentiments — this is about football, about Oman and
about a passion that is bound to last for generations to come.
Football in Oman has created its own set of peers. Players like Ali al Habsi,
the Bolton Wanderers goalkeeper and Emad al Hosni have smiled down at
beginners from outdoor hoardings and product advertisements. Their names are
familiar, their faces endorse products and they are the first sporting icons
of the nation. They have more than ever proved that every ordinary citizen
of the country can carve a niche for himself in the game and achieve the top
most honours. It is this underlying character of football that has taken the
game both onward and upward. It is also this truth that will produce world
class football players in Oman.
This week Mausa will not throw the lime green vests into the washing machine
— instead, she is going to help the boys in the family hang up the Omani
flag right outside their home. It's the football fever! |
|
Celebrating the 19th Gulf Cup
in Muscat |
|
In
celebrations of the 19th Gulf Cup hosted by the
Sultanate, football fans all over the country cherish the pride of the
national team amidst other participants from the Gulf and other Arab states.
In almost all corners of busy residential, commercial and major streets,
youth have decorated houses, streets and cars with the Sultanate's flag,
emblem and the theme of the national team. Even as the count down to the
start of the games, fans have enthusiastically left no stone unturned in
preparation of the tournament, this is evidenced with their participation at
overnight picnics by the beach side and some have started dressing special
costumes specifically designed for enthusiasts. Such costumes range from
sports wear to scarves, caps and car streamers. Others have started painting
green and red paints on their white dishdashas.
— Pictures by Fadhil Abdulwahid |
|
Predicting ‘the next big
thing’ |
|
Scientists and artists predict the next big things that will
change everybody’s world |
|
 |
 |
Some possible outcomes: personalised medicine, in which drugs are prescribed
according to the patient’s molecular background rather than by trial and
error |
|
There
are predictions that the low emission technology sector will flourish. — AFP |
|
Flying
cars, personal jetpacks, holidays on the moon,
the paperless office — the predictions of futurologists are, it seems,
doomed to fail. The only thing predictable about the future is its
unpredictability. But that has not stopped edge.org, the online intellectual
salon, asking which ideas and inventions will provide humanity’s next leap
forward. In its traditional New Year challenge to the planet’s best thinkers
it asks: “What will change everything — what game-changing scientific ideas
and developments do you expect to live to see?”
World-changing technology has a habit of arriving out of the blue and
turning society on its head. The printing press, electricity, antibiotics,
the pill, mobile phones and the Internet have all transformed human
experience in ways that their inventors could scarcely have imagined. So the
more than 110 respondents — including scientists, authors, philosophers,
musicians and journalists — have a tough job on their hands. Their
life-changing ideas span everything from new forms of energy, mind-reading
and foreign life forms living among us to the ability to reprogram life.
Here’s a taste.
By nearly all insider and expert accounts, we are or will be at peak oil
somewhere between now and the next five years. Even if we did not have
profound concerns about climate change, we would need to be looking for
different ways to power our civilisation. How fortunate we are to have a
safe nuclear facility a mere 150m kilometres away, and fortunate too that
the dispensation of physical laws is such that when a photon strikes a
semiconductor, an electron is released. My hope is that architects will be
drawn to designing gorgeous arrays and solar towers in the desert — as
expressive of our aspirations as medieval cathedrals once were.
We will need new distribution systems too, smart grids — perfect
Rooseveltian projects for our hard-pressed times. Could it be possible that
in two or three decades we will look back and wonder why we ever thought we
had a problem when we are bathed in such beneficent radiant energy? This
past year saw the introduction of direct-to-consumer genomics. A number of
new companies have been launched. You can get everything from a complete
sequencing of your genome (for a cool $350,000), to a screen of more than a
hundred Mendelian disease genes, to a list of traits, disease risks, and
ancestry data.
Here are some possible outcomes: personalised medicine, in which drugs are
prescribed according to the patient’s molecular background rather than by
trial and error; an end to many genetic diseases; cafeteria insurance (where
you choose your own level of cover) will no longer be actuarially viable if
the highest-risk consumers can load up on generous policies while the
low-risk ones get by with the bare minimum; the ultimate empowerment of
medical consumers, who will know their own disease risks and seek
commensurate treatment, rather than relying on the hunches and folklore of a
paternalistic family doctor.
We have now shown that DNA is absolutely the information-coded material of
life by completely transforming one species into another simply by changing
the DNA in the cell. By inserting a new chromosome into a cell and
eliminating the existing chromosome all the characteristics of the original
species were lost and replaced by what was coded for on the new chromosome.
Very soon we will be able to do the same experiment with the synthetic
chromosome. We can start with digitised genetic information and four bottles
of chemicals (the four nucleotides of the genetic code) and write new
software of life to direct organisms to do processes that are desperately
needed, like create renewable biofuels and recycle carbon dioxide.
As we learn from 3.5bn years of evolution, we will convert billions of years
into decades and change not only conceptually how we view life but life
itself. The question itself and many of the answers already given by others
here on edge.org point to a common theme: reflective, scientific
investigation of everything is going to change everything. The snowball has
started to roll and there is probably no stopping it. Will the result be a
utopia or a dystopia? Which of the novelties are self-limiting and which
will extinguish institutions long thought to be permanent? Will universities
and newspapers become obsolete? Will hospitals and churches go the way of
corner grocery stores and livery stables? Will reading music soon become as
arcane a talent as reading hieroglyphics?
When you no longer need to eat to stay alive, or procreate to have
offspring, or locomote to have an adventure-packed life, when the residual
instincts for these activities might be simply turned off by genetic
tweaking, there may be no constants of human nature left at all. Except,
maybe, our incessant curiosity. Neurology will change the game of human life
drastically, as soon as we develop the tools to observe and direct the
activities of a human brain in detail from the outside. The ancient myth of
telepathy, induced by occult and spooky action-at-a-distance, would be
replaced by a prosaic kind of telepathy induced by physical tools.
To make radiotelepathy possible, we have only to invent two new
technologies, first the direct conversion of neural signals into radio
signals and vice versa, and second the placement of microscopic radio
transmitters and receivers within the tissue of a living brain. I do not
have any idea of the way these inventions will be achieved, but I expect
them to emerge from the rapid progress of neurology before the 21st century
is over. It is easy to imagine radiotelepathy as a powerful instrument of
social change, used either for good or for evil. It could be a basis for
mutual understanding and peaceful co-operation of humans all over the
planet. Or it could be a basis for tyrannical oppression and enforced hatred
between one society and another.
Knowledge of exactly how the brain works will change everything. Just as we
are beginning to learn that it is not the gene that controls what happens in
our bodies, but rather the interplay of many genes, proteins, and
environmental influences that turn genes on and off, we will learn how the
interplay of various neural tissues, the chemicals in our body,
environmental influences, and possibly some current unknowns, come together
to affect how the brain works.
We will, for example: ameliorate diseases in which the brain stops working
properly — from diseases involving cognitive deficits such as Alzheimer’s to
those involving issues of physical control such as Parkinson’s; understand
and repair brains susceptible to addictions, or criminality; develop models
of brain function for advanced robotics and computers to design ‘smart’
interactive systems, for, eg, space and ocean exploration; and maybe,
frighteningly, attempt to improve upon the current human brain. Many of us
grew up among the reverberations of the 1960s. At that time there was a
feeling that the world could be a better place and that our responsibility
was to make it real by living it.
But suppose the feeling changes: that people start to anticipate the future
world not in that way but instead as something more closely resembling the
nightmare of desperation, fear and suspicion. What happens then? Humans
fragment into tighter, more selfish bands. Big institutions, because they
operate on longer timescales and require structures of social trust, don’t
cohere. There isn’t time for them. Global projects are abandoned — not
enough trust to make them work. Resources that are already scarce will be
rapidly exhausted as everybody tries to grab the last precious bits. Any
kind of social or global mobility is seen as a threat and harshly resisted.
Freeloaders and brigands and pirates and cheats will take control. |
|
— Guardian News & Media 2008 |
|
Genetic
variation may hasten
onset of cardiovascular disease |
|
 |
Researchers
have identified a variation in a particular gene that may hasten onset of
coronary artery disease. For years, scientists have known that the
devastating, early-onset form of the disease was inherited, but they knew
little about the gene(s) responsible until now. In a previous study, a
region on chromosome 7 was linked to coronary artery disease (CAD).
More recently, the researchers focused on identifying the gene in this
region that confers risk of early-onset CAD and identified it as the
neuropeptide Y (NPY) gene. NPY is one of the most plentiful and important
proteins in the body and is a neurotransmitter related to the control of
appetite and feeding behaviour, among other functions.
The current research, led by Elizabeth Hauser, found evidence for six
related variations in the NPY gene that show evidence of transmission from
generation to |
|
generation and
association across a population of early-onset CAD patients. The researchers
evaluated 1,000 families for CAD or evidence of a true heart attack, as part
of the GENECARD study put together by the Duke University Cardiology
Consortium, said a Duke release.
An independent, nonfamilial study used a collection of samples of nearly
everyone who had an angiogram at Duke since 2001. Co-authors William Kraus
and Christopher Granger founded this repository, called CATHGEN, which is
now nearing 10,000 subjects. The nonfamilial work showed a strong
relationship between the NPY genetic variants associated with coronary
disease. The genetic results were even stronger in patients with onset of
CAD before the age of 37. “We showed a strong age effect,” said Hauser. “If
one has the NPY gene variants in one of two copies (from mother and father),
then you may develop coronary disease earlier.” The results were published
in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics on Friday.
— IANS |
|
|
Grannies’ yummy pizzas help build old age home |
|
_
By Maitreyee Boruah in Bangalore
_ |
Two
grand old ladies of Bangalore have come to be
known as pizza grannies. They serve yummy pizzas, for a cause — to build a
home for the aged and to keep it running. The pizza grannies are Padma
Srinivasan, now 73, and her friend and business partner Jayalakshmi
Sreenivasan, 75. In 2003 Padma came up with the idea of building a home for
elderly citizens of Bangalore.
“I have always wanted to contribute to society. Elderly people in our
society are the most neglected ones. Thus I wanted to contribute to their
cause," Padma said. She purchased a plot of land in Vijayanagar village, 30
km from Bangalore. “I spent Rs 10 lakh (Rs 1 million) from my own pocket to
purchase the land," said Padma, who retired as finance manager of an
Industrial Training Institute.
“The site measures 22,000 sq ft. But I did not have the money, an estimated
Rs 78 lakh (Rs 7.8 million), to build the old age home. It was during that
time my daughter Sarasa Vasudevan and my friend Jayalakshmi Sreenivasan gave
me the idea to prepare and sell pizzas to raise the money and our pizzeria
took birth," she |
|
recounted. The pizzeria, christened
Pizza Haven, started in the garage of Padma’s daughter. “Soon our pizzas
became popular among young techies of Bangalore as we started selling them
at IT companies," said Jayalakshmi.
The pizzas are mostly served at top MNCs, including HP, IBM, Symphony,
Accenture and Sun Microsystems, to name a few. “The growth and popularity of
Pizza Haven surprises us also," smiled Jayalakshmi. “We have a van where we
carry all the raw materials, including vegetables, cheese and dough to
various IT offices and prepare the pizzas in the offices itself. We use
electricity, space and other resources of various offices to prepare pizzas.
Thus not only do the techies enjoy hot pizzas but also pizzas that are rich
and affordable," Padma said. On an average 200 pizzas are sold by Pizza
Haven every day. The price ranges between Rs 30 and Rs 120.
“We also take orders for parties and festivals," said Padma. The pizzas come
in 12 mouthwatering varieties. The Pizza Haven serves Mexican Pizza,
Hawaiian Pizza, American Pizza and Indian flavours like Chennai Masala Pizza
and Mumbai Pizza. Granny’s pizzas, as the pizzas from Pizza Haven are
popularly known, do not use preservatives. “I am a big time fan of Granny’s
pizzas. Often in office I enjoy the delicious and soft pizzas from Pizza
Haven," said Anand Kumar, a city-based software professional. Ten destitute
women have been trained by Padma to prepare the pizzas. “We serve only
vegetarian pizzas. Today’s youngsters prefer pizzas to dosas," smiled Padma.
“Granny’s pizzas are a hit among the software professionals, not just
because they are delicious, but also because they are sold for a cause,"
said Padma. The profit from pizzas and generous donations from some
well-wishers have helped in completing the home for the eldely, named
Vishranthi (Rest), in June 2008. “Vishranthi already has 10 inmates. More
will soon join. Vishranthi is not just an old age home. It is a multi-speciality
home for elderly people. We provide them all facilities, including
healthcare and recreational activities. The inmates have to just deposit an
amount, depending on their capacity, to be a part of Vishranthi," said Padma.
According to data with Karnataka’s Department of Welfare of Disabled and
Senior Citizens, Bangalore had 565,668 elderly people, in a total population
of 5.28 million, in 2007. India is home to over 76.6 million people over the
age of 60. The projected elderly population of India by 2025 will be 160
million. “Along with age-related health problems, lack of finances is the
main issue of concern for around 90 per cent of senior citizens in the
country and Vishranthi wants to contribute in a small measure to the cause
of elderly people," said Padma. “In Vishranthi, I am also planning to start
an orphanage and vocational training centre for poor rural women. And again
our pizzas will come in handy to finance all our projects.”
— IANS |
|
 |
|
Eating less fends off
weight gain in middle-age |
|
Does
eating less help fend off weight gain in middle
age? Yes, says a new study. The study found that women had more than twice
the risk of substantial weight gain if they did not become more restrained
in their eating. “Some suggest that restrained eating is not a good
practice,” said Brigham Young University’s Larry Tucker, a professor and the
study’s co-author. “Given the environmental forces in America’s food
industry, not practising restraint is essentially a guarantee of failure.”
The study followed 192 middle-aged women for three years and tracked
information on lifestyle, health and eating habits. Their analysis revealed
that women who did not become more restrained with eating were 138 per cent
more likely to put on 3 kg or more. Columbia University researcher Lance
Davidson, who was not involved with the analysis, said the findings
highlight an important principle of weight management. “Because the body’s
energy requirements progressively decline with age, energy intake must
mirror that decrease or weight gain occurs,” said Davidson, a research
fellow at Columbia’s Obesity Research Centre.
“Dr Tucker’s observation that women who practise eating restraint avoid the
significant weight gain commonly observed in middle age is an important
health message.” Tucker says watching what you eat is not about physical
appearance — it’s a direct investment in your health, said a Brigham
release. “Weight gain and obesity bring a greater risk of diabetes and a
number of other chronic diseases,” Tucker said. “Eating properly is a skill
that needs to be practised.” The study was published in Friday’s issue of
the American Journal of Health Promotion.
— IANS |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
