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October 29, 2006
In brief
News on Radio and Television
ByAnwar Saeed Siddiqui
Syed & Syed Publishers.
Available with Fazlee Sons,
Urdu Bazar, Karachi.
206pp. Rs165
With the ever increasing number of television channels in the country, it is understandable why more and more people are gradually becoming interested in knowing and understanding the intricate functioning of the news media. There were days when radio alone was the source of information for the people at large. The family members would sit glued to the radio and wait for the news bulletin. The most exciting moment generally came when people would anxiously await the appearance of the moon. But with growing involvement of people in the affairs of their lives and with the political awakening, people have become more interested in getting first hand information about the issues that have been troubling their minds.
The book under review is a serious endeavour to educate the uninitiated about the art of broadcasting or telecasting news through radio and television. A detailed description of the various stages of presenting news bulletins has been highlighted in the book. It includes the history of the electronic media and the structural pattern of the Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation. Separate chapters have been devoted to a discussion of the television network with special emphasis on the sources of news, the difference between the print and the electronic news media and the analysis of news bulletins presented by the national bulletins, regional bulletins, external bulletins and local bulletins.
Prof Zakaria Sajid, former chairman of the Department of Journalism, University of Karachi, in his foreword to this book has rightly suggested that with liberal approach in allowing private initiative to establish FM radio stations, television channels and cable networks underscore the urgent need to arrange professional training programmes for various cadres in these organisations.— Akhtar Payami
Endless RainBy Meena Arora Nayak
Penguin India.
For more information visit
www.penguinbooksindia.com
ISBN 0-14-306216-6
321pp. Indian Rs295
Endless Rain by Meena Arora Nayak is a passionate work of fiction in which the writer tries to find answers to some pertinent questions relating to a dispute which has been declared as “the unfinished agenda of Partition”.
The Kashmir dispute has been the bone of contention between the India-Pakistan governments since 1947. Three wars have already been fought over the disputed valley and the cost is enormous in terms of human lives, emotional scars and the disintegration of the social and cultural fabric of society. There is not a single home in the valley that has not lost a family member.
Rapes, disappearances, curfews, strikes, communal hatred, torture and loss of livelihood have become the order of the day in Kashmir. The land of Sufis, tolerance and coexistence has become the land of hatred and this transformation has affected the people of Kashmir in an unimaginable way.
It goes to the credit of Nayak that she has been able to strike a balance between two conflicting and extreme views and in the process been able to weave an intricate plot for her story that is interesting, humane and objective. The truth, as the cliché goes, is the first casualty of this war but she goes on to prove that peace too is a casualty here.
Nayak has traced the lives of three people from a different generation within the same family. All of them have been involved in some political incident in Kashmir. The author has described their lives in a simple and touching manner. There is Ali who goes through a total metamorphosis — from an over-protected elite school student to a “freedom fighter” or “terrorist”, depending on which side of the fence the reader belongs to.
Through her story, Nayak has raised some major concerns about the political conflict in Kashmir and the way that it has been handled or mishandled by the two neighbouring governments. She writes about the political alienation and disillusionment of the masses from the existing system and the insistence of the militant groups to solve it militarily and the role of some ubiquitous intelligence outfits. It is sad to see how the people of Kashmir have been treated by the Indian security forces and the mindset of the angry young men who take up arms to fight for their right.
All in all, Endless Rain is a remarkable and captivating novel which unfolds the tragedy of Kashmir in a heart-rending narrative. — Moniza Inam
Allergy: The History of a Modern MaladyBy Mark Jackson Reaktion
ISBN 1861892713
288pp. £25
The term “allergy” was coined 100 years ago by an Austrian paediatrician, Clemens von Pirquet, who used it to describe “any form of altered biological reactivity.” By this he meant both “the generation of immunity against disease” and “a state of so-called hypersensitivity or super sensitivity” resulting in tissue damage. However, this elegant theory, which arose from clinical observations of children’s reactions to vaccination, didn’t impress his scientific colleagues and the unhappy Von Pirquet committed suicide with his wife in 1929, just before his idea became influential.
In his “global history of allergy”, Mark Jackson revives Von Pirquet’s contributions to medicine, as well as telling the story of allergies in general. His meticulously researched book traces the genesis of allergy as a biomedical concept in early 20th-century experimental physiology and paediatrics, and explains how it became an “endemic scourge of the modern world.” Arguing that the “meaning of allergy changed across time”, he also highlights the flexibility of the term itself. Although his scholarly writing style is rather dense at times, Jackson’s fascinating study is undoubtedly an important contribution to the social history of medicine.
Jackson has a personal interest in his subject, as he, his five siblings and his children all “enjoy some form of allergic sensitivity.” His family is by no means unusual. The last century witnessed a global surge in allergic diseases, such as hay fever, asthma, food allergies and eczema. In the inter-war years, just one in 30 suffered allergic reactions. But as the new millennium dawned in the UK, as many as one in three were diagnosed with allergies. Treating them costs the NHS more than £900m a year. Even animals are increasingly prone to allergies. It is, says Jackson, a “plague of global proportions.”
Of course, allergies existed before Von Pirquet coined the term. The first clinical description of hay fever was in 1819, by the British physician John Bostock. What became known as “Bostock’s catarrh” was, the medic suggested, a disease of the middle and upper classes of society. He prescribed his affluent patients a trip to Ramsgate to inhale the bracing sea breezes. “Summer sneezing goes hand-in-hand with culture,” wrote another British physician, later that century. He saw in our seasonal snufflings an opportunity for flag-waving: “our national proclivity to hay fever may be taken as proof of our superiority to other races.”
It was soon widely accepted that only “persons of cultivation” suffered from allergies. In E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), hay fever appears as the “embodiment of innate cultural refinement”, Jackson writes. Proust was a chronic sufferer from both hay fever and asthma. He had a special smoking room where he treated himself with a pharmacopoeia of “fumigations”. The cures he tried included “stramonium or Espic cigarettes, Legras or Escouflaire powders, ephinephrine, caffeine, carbolic acid fumigants, isolation, auto-suggestion, morphine and opium.”
Allergy is “a malady of our own creating”, claims Jackson. But allergy is also an “index of cultural anxiety”, revealing popular fears about how we live today and the pollution of the planet. Allergy has became a powerful and pervasive “metaphor for the pathology of progress.” Von Pirquet thought allergy was “indicative of a self-destructive pathological process.” It is therefore (argues Jackson) highly appropriate that allergy has become a “metaphor for the self-inflicted damage being wrought by western civilisation.” Where once it was thought that only civilised people had allergies, now we believe that civilisation causes them. Our hygienic homes have been identified as allergenic minefields, with paint fumes and dust mites among the chief culprits. One square metre of carpet can conceal 100,000 asthma-causing dust mites. As Jackson concludes, “perhaps more than any other condition, allergy embodied the biological, political and spiritual challenges faced by the inhabitants of the post-modern world.”— P.D. Smith (Dawn/Guardian News Service)
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