SOUTHASIA Online

Despite tough outside pressures, the small kingdom of Bhutan has succeeded in protecting its cultural heritage from the global onslaught.

The colorful and uniquely designed dress code of Bhutan is a symbol of its national identity as well as the evidence of the stress that is laid on the cultural character of the nation. A land-locked kingdom cradled in the lap of the Himalayas, Bhutan has tried hard and successfully so far to sustain a balance between traditions and modernity in the face of globalization.

Roughly the size of Switzerland with a population of 700,000, "Druk Yul" or the Land of the Thunder-Dragon as it is known locally, has a draping style which dates back to the 17th century when Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyel entered Bhutan to unite it and to give the country its distinct attire.

India lately has been rocked by a series of scandals involving self-styled "godmen" who have been allegedly running vice rings and cheating people.

In a world of pain and sorrow, a smiling man in a saffron robe who can cure misery by magic is a bewitching prospect. However, when the same healer is found to be at the centre of a raging sex controversy, it creates nothing but anger and a sense of humiliation among the millions of otherwise complacent devotees.

India lately has been rocked by a series of scandals involving self-styled "godmen" who have been allegedly running vice rings and cheating people under the guise of legitimate religious practices. In March this year, an Indian guru, the long-haired Paramhamsa Nityananda, came into the limelight after local television channels in India showed him allegedly engaging in sexual acts with two women, believed to be Tamil actresses. The guru, who claims to have devotees in 33 countries, was later arrested from the northern state of Himachal Pradesh and was charged with "molestation, indulging in acts that are not in conformity with what they profess to be in religious and spiritual order, obscenity, criminal intimidation and hurting religious sentiments."

Animals cannot predict human responses to drugs and disease. How often has a headline caught your eye, promising cures for everything from cancer to Alzheimer's disease? Then, upon reading the article, you are disappointed to realize that the "advance" was made on a laboratory mouse. It has long been appreciated that animals cannot predict human responses to drugs and disease. Dr. BB Brodie said in the August 13, 1963 issue of The Pharmacologist:  "It is often a matter of pure luck that animal experiments lead to clinically useful drugs." More recently, then-U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt stated on January 12, 2006: "Currently, nine out of ten experimental drugs fail in clinical studies because we cannot accurately predict how they will behave in people based on laboratory and animal studies." Vaccines against AIDS have worked well in monkeys but failed in humans. The way HIV affects animals differs significantly from the way it affects humans. These examples could be easily multiplied.

Can a book offer different messages at different times? It seems Qurratulain Hyder's ‘Aag ka Darya' does.

Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus it was who famously said that one cannot step twice in the same river. What this thought affirms is that a river, ceaselessly flowing, also changes ceaselessly. It becomes a different river every moment.

But can a book you have once read will be the same when you read it again, after a long interval, particularly when it uses the analogy of a river as the symbol of continuity as well as change?

I am alluding, of course, to Qurratulain Hyder's ‘Aag ka Darya.' And this is not a review of the great Urdu novel but an attempt to share with you some of my thoughts and feelings when, in a metaphorical sense, I stepped into it the second time - after an interval of more than forty years. Yes, I was quite young and greatly enamored with the romanticism that I associated with the writings of Qarratulain Hyder when I first read ‘Aag ka Darya" in the sixties.