CHARVAKA-FIRST INDIAN RATIONALIST [FREETHINKER] !
Fire is hot, water cold,

refreshingly cool is the breeze of morning;

By whom came this variety?

They were born of their own nature.

There is no heaven, no final liberation,

nor any soul in another world,

Nor do the actions of the four castes,

orders, or priesthoods produce any real effect.



If a beast slain as an offering to the dead

will itself go to heaven,

why should not believer slain his father in order to preserve his place in heaven ?



If offerings to the dead produce gratification

to those who have reached the land of the dead,

why the need to set out provisions

for travelers starting on this journey?

If our offering sacrifices here gratify beings in heaven,

why not make food offerings down below

to gratify those standing on housetops?



While life remains, let a man live happily,

let him feed on butter though he runs in debt;

When once the body becomes ashes,

how can it ever return again?



If he who departs from the body goes to another world,

why does he not come back again,

restless for love of his kinfolk?

It is only as a means of livelihood

that brahmins have established here

abundant ceremonies for the dead—

there is no other fruit anywhere.
[Charvak Darshan Sholakas, translated from Sanskrit].

THE HISS OF RELIGIOUS OBSCURANTISM;
FROM PROGRESSION TO REGRESSION !
Has anything caused as much as human suffering as religion?You might say-disease but religion itself is a disease of human race and of individual minds.Persecution,war,torture,terror,bodily pain,mental anguish,profound misery,wasted lives are the significant products of religion.
Religion should have been wrecked beyond repair b

y science.In case ,science were properly taught to children and all 'god' good stories classed with fairy tales,as they should be,religion as a force in public life would soon come to an end.We doubt,whether there is an innate need in the human psyche to believe in the '
supernatural'?We doubt that religion arises naturally,fulfilling some evolutionary function.It arose,in human race because it was natural to homo sapiens to seek knowledge about their surroundings.Religious answers were guesses.Science now provides real answer,more than enough of them to expose the old religious explanations as childish fantasy.
Concerning religious belief and lunacy, here’s another quotation from The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris. It’s a horrifying story.

The boundary between mental illness and respectable religious belief can be difficult to discern. This was made especially vivid in a recent court case involving a small group of very committed Christians accused of murdering an eighteen-month-old infant. The trouble began when the boy ceased to say “Amen” before meals. Believing that he had developed “a spirit of rebellion”, the group, which included the boy’s mother, deprived him of food and water until he died. Upon being indicted, the mother accepted an unusual plea agreement: she vowed to cooperate in the prosecution of her codefendants under the condition that all charges be dropped if her son were resurrected. The prosecutor accepted the plea provided that that resurrection was “Jesus-like” and did not include reincarnation as another person or animal. Despite the fact that this band of lunatics carried the boy’s corpse around in a green suitcase for over a year, awaiting his reanimation, there is no [other] reason to believe that any of them suffer from mental illness. It is obvious, however, that they suffer from religion.

AGHORI-EXTREME RELIGIOUS CULT IN HINDUISM !
The Aghori or Aghouri is a Hindu cult that is considered to have split off from the Kapalika order in the fourteenth century AD. Many Hindus condemn the Aghorias non-Hindu due to their cannibalistic rituals. The streets of northern Indian cities are littered with followers of this cult carrying a kapala, which is a cup made from a s

kull! These bizarre people will eat anything from rotten food to animal faeces. In order to achieve the highest citadel of enlightenment, the Aghori will perform horrendously crude rituals. The finality of their rituals is attained from eating the decaying flesh of a human.

According to Hindu mythology and practiced beliefs, everything emanates from “Brahman". Therefore, there is no evil. The Aghori believe everything to be god itself and to abandon anything would be equivalent of abandoning god. This is the bizarre philosophy followed by the Aghori Babas.

The roots of the Aghori date back to ancient times. An Aghori ascetic who went by the name of Kinaram is responsible for the present-day rituals and beliefs of the cult. Since the Aghori worship lord Shiva with all their fervor, they believe that Kinaram was a reincarnation of lord Shiva.

The Aghori cult dwells on cremation grounds, daubing themselves with the ashes of the corpses and eating from a cranial begging bowl or a kapala. Many Aghori opt to roam around baring all. This is their representation of their detachment from the ways of life that normal people abide by. A strong belief which surrounds them is that by doing so they are above and beyond the normal worldly emotions of human beings.

MULTINATIONAL PHARMACEUTICAL EMPIRE EXPLOITING INDIANS AS GUINEA PIGS AND RATS FOR CLINICAL TRAIL OF DRUGS !
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, India , Aug 14 2012 (IPS) - Four-year-old Deepak Yadav, a mentally disabled boy from Indore city in the Indian state Madhya Pradesh, was being treated for stomach problems at Chacha Nehru Bal Chikitsalaya, a government hospital for children attached to the M. G. M

. Medical College.

But when repeated administration of the anti-ulcer drug Rabeprazole started to exacerbate his condition, his parents stopped treatment and sought help from the Clinical Trial Victims Association (CTVA), which discovered that the boy had been a lab rat for an untested drug.

“We should have been told an unknown drug was being tested on our innocent child and given the choice to say no,” Deepak’s father Sooraj told IPS.

Deepak is now almost entirely reliant on his mother for survival. The family is poor, yet “doctors did not take any steps to get us compensation,” his father added.

This family’s tragic story is just one example of a sinister pattern unfolding across India.

A spate of deaths over the last four years caused by illegal clinical trials of untested drugs has ignited the wrath of rights activists and prompted prominent legal institutions to consider tightening the country’s drug regulation laws.

In response to a Right to Information query filed by Indore-based medical rights activist Anand Rai, the Drug Controller General of India (DGCI) disclosed that 2,031 people have died as a result of serious adverse events (SAEs) during drug trials in the past four years.

SAE-related deaths for 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 were 288, 637, 668 and 438 respectively.
It will be pertinent to mention here that as many as 211 people died between January and June 2012 due to serious adverse events [SAE] during clinical trails.Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad has accepted on Friday the deaths could be related to diseases such as Cancer or administration of drugs and their side effects.It is ironical that there is approval from union Health Ministry for conducting such trails,though "provision for compensation"has been made study related injury or death.

UNETHICAL UNHOLY NEXUS BETWEEN DOCTORS AND PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY AT THE COST OF AILING MASSES !
Clinical trials in the dock

With the Supreme Court issuing notice to the Central government on the matter of illegal drug trials, the sordid state of human clinical trials is all set to be exposed. For multinational companies eager to cut corners, India offers an attractive package of weak laws, lax

and almost non-existent oversight of trials, a huge illiterate, vulnerable population that can be easily exploited, very little volunteer protection and a sizeable number of unscrupulous doctors willing to compromise on ethics for gain. Recent reports of 42 mentally ill patients in Madhya Pradesh being enrolled in a trial held between 2008 and 2010 for testing the efficacy of dapoxetine in curing premature ejaculation highlights the scant regard for ethics. Mentally ill patients can be enrolled only in trials involving drugs that would directly benefit them or reduce the harm they cause to society. In fact, around 230 such patients were enrolled in several trials that do not benefit them. Cases of patients becoming a part of a study without knowing it, and of children being enrolled without obtaining informed consent from parents, have also been reported from the State. It will not be wrong to assume that in other trials the poor, unlettered parents who had signed the informed consent form - the most sacrosanct document of a trial - were ignorant or misled and misinformed of the contents. Individuals subjected to multiple trials, and principal investigators being involved in many studies have also been reported from Madhya Pradesh. The situation may be the same in other States as well. The 2010 expose of human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine trials conducted without proper consent on nearly 23,500 girls in the 10-14 age group in Vadodara, Gujarat and Khammam district of Andhra Pradesh is a case in hand.
It is essential that the Central and State governments put a quick end to this sordid state of affairs. Ensuring the safety of patients is paramount as more than 1,700 persons have died in clinical trials across the country between 2007 and 2010. Doctors go scot-free despite failing to follow up serious adverse events, including deaths. Having amended the patent laws in 2005 to make India an even more attractive destination for trials, the government is duty-bound to put in place a proper regulatory and monitoring mechanism that would prevent unethical trials from being initiated and flagrant violations from taking place. Doctors and companies earning handsome profits by throwing ethics and procedures to the winds and turning vulnerable people into guinea pigs will then, hopefully, become a thing of the past.

GENDER DISCRIMINATION AND RELIGION !
Practically all religions in the world are male dominated, and most biased ideas have their roots in these religions, with women being relegated to a much lower level than men. She is regarded as unclean when she menstruates, she becomes untouchable after childbirth until she undergoes a ritual cleansing, she is described as a t

emptress or a whore in the scriptures, she has to cover herself from head to foot in order not to weaken the man's purity of resolve, she is supposed to have been created by God from Adam's rib, and that too as an afterthought, and God is a man of course! From being burnt at the stake accused of being witches to honor killings that still continue in places like India, Pakistan, and other Islamic countries, to undergoing fasts for the well-being of her husband - all religions have always discriminated against women and continue to do so.

NEW DELHI: Almost one in three drugs (36%) found "not of standard quality" from across India last year were from Maharashtra (23%) and Tamil Nadu (13%) alone.

Around 9.2% of the rest of the sub-standard quality drugs were from Kerala, Gujarat (8.5%), Karnataka (7.2%), Uttar Pradesh (6.9%), Jammu & Kashmir (6.08%) and Rajasthan (5.8%).

Union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said on Tuesday that o

f the 48, 082 drug samples tested by state drug controllers between 2011 and 2012 (till October); 2,186 samples, or around 4.5% failed the quality test.

In comparison, 4.9% of the samples tested in 2009-10 and 4.7% in 2011-11 were sub-standard. Of these, around 133 samples — almost 6% — were found to be spurious or adulterated, the minister said.

The maximum number of samples tested were from Maharashtra (6,928), followed by Karnataka (5268), Andhra Pradesh (4,758), Tamil Nadu (4,110), Kerala (3,904), Punjab (3,031) and Gujarat (2,874).

A very few samples were tested in Delhi (283) of which only 13 samples — around 4.5% — were found to be sub-standard.

As far as spurious or adulterated drugs are concerned, which has no active ingredient or is an expired drug that has been re-labeled and sold, Gujarat recorded the highest number of such samples at 64, followed by Maharashtra (19), UP (11) and Delhi (9). Union health ministry officials say there are more than 10,000 drug manufacturers and more than six lakh outlets that sell fake drugs.