Cities Of Northern India Research Articles

The Life and Works of Ruskin Bond (review)

Reviewed by: The Life and Works of Ruskin Bond Michael Heyman (bio) The Life and Works of Ruskin Bond. Khorana Meena G. . Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003 It has taken the better half of fifty years for Ruskin Bond, one of India's most prolific writers in English for adults and children, to receive the critical attention that he deserves. Quietly, Bond has been writing novels, poems, essays, and countless short stories for his mostly Indian fans since the 1950s, yet critics have tended to pay more attention to expatriate Indians rather than the indigenous, especially those known mostly for writing children's literature. Meena Khorana, in her critical biography of Bond, therefore has the daunting task of making up for neglect and lost time, and she does an impressive job of covering a vast career in a slim volume. Not only does she give the most complete and sophisticated look at Bond up to now, but her work also helps to define the post-independence Indian literary identity and its relation to British influences. The first five chapters of Khorana's book follow Ruskin Bond's life, with a particular focus on his childhood and adolescence, the periods most influential in his writing, in the mountains and cities of northern India. We see the young Ruskin migrate from his home in India, to Britain for a short, but crucial period, and back to the foothills of the Himalayas, where he has stayed, more or less, ever since. Along the way, he deals with his mixed British and Indian identity and perseveres in his tireless effort to survive as a writer. While Khorana is a careful biographer, there were a few moments when I was hoping for a bit more, particularly on Bond's failed proposal to a Vietnamese woman in Britain, and his going to trial in India on charges of obscenity, of all things. Still, the real value in the biographical section is in Khorana's gliding naturally into critical discussions of Bond's usually autobiographical work, including The Room on the Roof (1956), The Young Vagrants (1957), and many short stories and poems. Khorana distances Bond from those to whom he is often compared, such as Kipling, by aligning him with other post-independence writers like Godden and Macfarlane, who, as she claims, along with Bond, tend to deconstruct the colonial novel. Moving away from the biographical format, Chapters 6 and 7 are insightful critical essays focusing on Bond's vision of childhood and his use of natural imagery, with a focus on his writing for children. In the last chapter, she admirably defends Bond from his detractors, though at this point it hardly seems necessary. Bond, trying to avoid the controversy and confusion around the variously-used label of "Anglo-Indian," prefers instead to call himself simply "Indian," a choice that Khorana goes to great pains to defend through biographical detail and literary analysis. She shows that, throughout Bond's life, he has had unusually intimate experiences within both high and low Indian culture, from the Indian friends he made in 1951 in Dehra, where he spent his time, "wandering around Dehra, absorbing its flavor, observing trains, dhobis ('washermen'), and wrestlers, and playing football and cricket in the maidan ('open ground')" (18), to his adult life in Mussoorie in the midst of a large Indian family. Ample biographical detail places Bond firmly within Indian culture, but Khorana's analysis goes deeper, revealing Bond's "Indian-ness" through his writing. His many stories are steeped in the culture, religion, and indeed, the very soil of India. In "Angry River," for example, he "firmly anchors the story in the Hindu tradition" (123) through the ordeal of Sita and Krishan, characters strongly tied to Sita and Rama (an incarnation of Krishna) in the Ramayana, one of the primary Hindu texts. Most of his [End Page 253] stories describe the richness of rural life and promote many of the fundamental Indian values found in mainstream, post-independence Indian children's literature, such as the sanctity of family and respect for elders. In particular, he depicts relationships between adults and children where children are not wiser, and where they rarely challenge the...

Genetic variability of human rotavirus strains isolated from Eastern and Northern India.

An epidemiological study was conducted in Eastern and Northern India to determine the genomic diversity of rotaviruses in these parts of the country. In 2001, a total of 126 Group A rotavirus positive samples were detected from children below 4 years of age with diarrhoea from Kolkata, Dibrugarh and Bhubaneswar in Eastern India, and Chandigarh, a city in Northern India. All the samples were genotyped for VP7 (G-type) and VP4 (P-type) gene by reverse transcription (RT) and multiplex PCR using different type specific primers. The strains with G1P[8] (32.5%) was predominant as reported earlier [Das et al. (2002) J Clin Microbiol 40:146-149] followed by G2P[4](4.7%) and only one sample was of G4P[8] specificity. Along with these common types some rare strains like G1P[6], G2P[8], G2P[6], G4P[4], and G4P[6] were also detected in 14.3% of cases. Thirty percent of samples in this study were mixed infections and 21 (16.7%) specimens remained untypeable either for the VP7 or for the VP4 gene. After sequencing of the VP7 gene, two G9 strains (RMC321 and ISO-3) were identified with P[8] and P[19] specificities. Sequence analysis revealed that they have much lower homology to the G9 strains (116E, INL1, and G16) isolated earlier from Indian subcontinent, but have much higher homology to isolates from Argentina, Brazil, Malawi, Taiwan, and USA suggesting a separate progenitor for these strains.

High prevalence of diabetes, obesity and dyslipidaemia in urban slum population in northern India.

In this study, a prevalence survey of various atherosclerosis risk factors was carried out on hitherto poorly studied rural-urban migrants settled in urban slums in a large metropolitan city in northern India, with the aim of studying anthropometric and metabolic characteristics of this population in socio-economic transition. A cross-sectional epidemiological descriptive study. A total of 532 subjects (170 males and 362 females) were included in the study (response rate approximately 40%). In this study, diabetes mellitus was recorded in 11.2% (95% CI 6.8-16.9) of males and 9.9% (95% CI 7.0-13.5) of females, the overall prevalence being 10.3% (95% CI 7.8-13.2). Based on body mass index (BMI), obesity was more prevalent in females (15.6%; 95% CI 10.7-22.3) than in males (13.3%; 95% CI 8.5-19.5). On the other hand, classifying obesity based on percentage body fat (%BF), 10.6% (95% CI 6.4-16.2) of males and 40.2% (95% CI 34.9-45.3) of females were obese. High waist-hip ratio (WHR) was observed in 9.4% (95% CI 5.4-14.8) of males and 51.1% (95% CI 45.8-56.3) of the females. All individual skinfolds and sum of skinfolds were significantly higher in females (P<0.001). In both males and females above 30 y of age, there was a steep increase in the prevalence of high WHR, and in females, %BF was very high (particularly in %BF quartile>30%). Furthermore, total cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol were high in both males and females. Stepwise multiple linear regression analysis showed that for both males and females BMI, WHR and %BF were positive predictors of biochemical parameters, except for HDL-c, for which these parameters were negatively associated. Appreciable prevalence of obesity, dyslipidaemia, diabetes mellitus, substantial increase in body fat, generalised and regional obesity in middle age, particularly in females, need immediate attention in terms of prevention and health education in such economically deprived populations.

Perceived Crowding in Indian Classrooms: The Effects of Age, Gender and Household Density

Ninety primary school students in a city in northern India, an equal number of boys and girls, participated in a simulation task in which they placed small figures in a model classroom that they were told to make, in counterbalanced order, crowded or non-crowded. The students, 30 from each of three age groups (6-7, 9-10 and 12-13), also rated conditions in their classroom and their home. Analyses revealed consistent age effects, such as that younger children were more likely to place the figure representing them farther from the front of the simulated classroom, and, with regard to their actual classroom, to think there were too many children. In terms of gender, boys, compared to girls, generally placed the figure representing them more centrally in the simulated classroom, although this difference disappeared when the simulated classroom was crowded.

Arterial Expressway Corridor, Jammu, India

Jammu is an historical city in Northern India, the winter capital of Jammu and Kashmir State and a busy rail terminus. All road traffic must pass through the city, where rapid industrialisation, population growth and increased vehicle ownership have all contributed to sever traffic congestion.Given the great need to improve traffic flow, the first objectives were to separate local traffic from through traffic and to improve access to the city centre from outlying residential areas. The need to widen some roads to cope with traffic volumes also had to be considered. An arterial expressway corridor with a flyover over existing roads was seen as the best solution. The corridor, nearly 4 km long, consists of an elevated highway system with flyovers, interchanges, and grade-level roads with under- or overpasses.

Rubella Infection: The Indian Scene

Few studies have probed the problem of rubella in India. These few investigated seroepidemiology in female populations, carried out serosurveillance of pregnant women, and assessed the role of prenatal rubella in the causation of congenital malformations. Seroepidemiologic surveys showed that greater than 80% of women of childbearing age (15-34 years) in three cities of northern India had rubella antibodies, as detected by the hemagglutination-inhibition (HAI) test, whereas only 56.8% of such women in Calcutta in eastern India had rubella antibodies. No studies have been done in other areas of India. Serosurveillance of pregnant women in Delhi showed that none of the 47 pregnant women lacking rubella HAI antibodies delivered congenitally malformed babies, although six women seroconverted during pregnancy. However, in Lucknow one of the 62 pregnant seronegative women delivered a baby with expanded congenital rubella syndrome after having had a clinically inapparent infection at 16-18 weeks of gestation. In addition, retrospective studies of infants with congenital malformations do suggest that prenatal rubella often was responsible for their condition.