| Hari |
Posted
on 26-Jun-01 10:25 PM
This is an offshoot of Sally's previous posting elsewhere on her observation that living room conversations, as long as they are not "scientific" are okay; but start a "scientific" dialogue and people start looking for credentials.
I have been perplexed by that as well. After all, we regularly talk about other issues, economic, social, even anthropological, as if they were regular living-room topics. Why not science?
Perhaps one reason is that scientists do not "identify" with non scientists and they even take pride in calling everything else academic "pseudo-sciences", as if they were somewhat lesser in rigor or importance to science. They pride on being the unbiased reporters of natural "facts" that people in the non-sciences would naturally (according to them) be biased. I must say that I've noticed that kind of snobbery on the part of SOME scientists (perhaps more than just SOME).
But a more important question that I'm personally interested in is this: What about NEPALIS discussing science? I think non-scientist Nepalis are even less willing to discuss science. And I have always been the most perplexed by that. One hypothesis :-) that I have is that Nepalis have other non-scientific interests at hand that are more pressing than science. For example, even at the national level, Nepal needs to progress in terms of giving its people bare necessities, like educational access, cleaner drinking water, health services, etc. And although scientific know-how helps in delivering and thinking about a lot of these things, there is no pressing and urgent need for scientific advancement. No one in Nepal expects the RONAST to have a funding priority to JalShrot. Does this seed in us the desire to seek things that the society seeks, and be somewhat afraid of science, to put science into the domain of "others"? I don't know, but I would definitely love reading about others' ideas on this.
Dui Paise Musings (this is more worth it, thanks Sally :-),
Hari
|
| Hari |
Posted
on 26-Jun-01 11:11 PM
The following is a statement given to the New York Times by a Nepali AIDS activist. Perhaps my hypothesis is at least partially correct :-). The following is fresh from NYTimes Web Edition:
Indeed, while the official debate has centered largely around the cost of AIDS drugs and their availability, most people outside the official delegations are more concerned with addressing the basic problems that have contributed to or resulted from AIDS: a lack of even rudimentary health clinics in districts of Nepal where thousands have died from diarrhea; grandmothers in Uganda who have no income and are raising a half dozen orphans, many of them infected with AIDS; widespread starvation in various African villages where everyone who used to farm the crops is either dead or sick.
"There has been an overemphasis in this conference about drugs," said Vijay Rajkumar, a Nepal-based AIDS adviser for Save the Children. "The lack of drinking water is a much bigger priority in most countries than anti-retroviral treatments."
For full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/27/world/27AIDS.html
|
