Link is busy back in school, which makes everyone in the ashram who asks, smile. For us both, it’s a mixed bag. Daily I watch the students from the great hall of learning pass over the foot bridge, Amrita Setu, that connects the island to the mainland. The students are in their own world, a world of cell phones, for many, romance, dreams and ambitions. Their hearts are in their minds, they are taught and encouraged to follow their minds. For the most part, like all higher university education in India, they are pressed, groomed and conditioned to seek placement, above all, in a multinational company, to dream of technologies and projects that can, perhaps, in 10 or 20 years time, make big bucks for a new company, and be eco-friendlier, that what exists… As they walk over the bridge, hand made canoe type boats, loaded with brick and sometimes sand, manned by human beings whose limbs are as thick as the bamboo poles they wield to push the boat along the backwaters, cross the waters underneath. Two
different worlds, utterly unconnected.

When we first came to the ashram,in 1999, we were not certain we wanted to live inside it. There was a house near Amma’s room which we looked into renting. The family living near it had two children Link and Anni’s ages, the boy a little younger. Without knowing us, they welcomed us as human beings, with sincere smiles, and hospitality. Their house was very small, but adequate for the four. The father is a fisherman. Amma told us to buy a flat, and so we did not become neighbors, but that initial sweetness and friendship has always remained and expressed itself whenever we have met.

The ashram eventually expanded the kitchen, and the few cents of land they owned were bought up, and they moved to another home, not too distant.

A few years ago, I ran into the mother in town, and we were talking. I have always found language not to be a barrier if the hearts are connected. She expressed that all the fisherman families then hadn’t eaten in over a week, as the catches were very poor. I wrote a letter to Amma immediately, offering that those of us in the ashram who wanted to could give up one or two meals for those outside the ashram who had no means to eat. I received a very loud scolding, I really don’t know about what, as translation is such a problem, but I soon noticed that the fishermen families were eating in the ashram.

Last December, 2006 we went to their new location with Anni. The entire family had contracted the dreaded Chikun gunia disease. I think it is a form of the black plaque. It’s a terrible viral illness that leaves the joints aching, sometimes for years, and can even permanently disfigure the body. When we came back in August, 2007 with Anni’s ashes, I saw the daughter, a tall and very beautiful girl. She was still suffering from the chikun gunia, and was very sad about Anni. Five days ago, January, 2008 Link and I were sitting outside the ashram having coconut water. The father and some friends came by. He saw us and immediately, with tears in his eyes, asked how we were, etc. We asked how the children were, and made arrangements to meet on Sunday.

On Sunday, Jan 27th when we arrived, it was the daughters 21st birthday. The family has grown very thin. We learned with dismay and horror that for nearly two months they had had very little to eat. The eldest child, the daughter had come to our temple here to offer prayers for food. The father said that there were NO FISH in the ocean and he wasn’t going out to sea due to eye problems and joint pain in his elbow. I have given the verbatim account of a newspaper article about this below. The children were taking part in a Computer course, offered for free to Tsunami survivors, to give other job skills. The father said that one cannot make a living anymore with fishing. On the day that we had come, by God’s Grace, a wealthier distant family member had called, learning of their situation and sent food. They have no skills, no handcrafts to keep them gainfully occupied. Still a TV is there to distract their minds… The education that they have struggled to get cannot help them in the least in these
circumstances….They dream of jobs in the police, the army, at the schooling centre… anywhere… like desperate people everywhere, they do not see that the social structures they crave to join have contributed mightily to the position they are in….
In addition to their suffering, we learned that again, all the fisherfolk families are literally starving to death on our own island, right here, right outside the ashram walls. Hearing their pain, I felt so sad and angry and helpless. Furious with the Indian government for taking such poor care of its people. Furious with the type of education that divorces people, young intelligent minds and hearts from the actual reality of life right around them, that makes these rich kids right here, in this ashram, unable to EVEN SEE these suffering people, to hear their cries, to be moved, to share…I felt helpless for not being in a better position to be able to help them meaningfully.

I asked the daughter what she wanted to do…if she could dream of studying anything, what she would study, what she would do. She said, “I can only dream of getting a job, a job so we can all eat….” The children commute to Karunagappally daily for their computer course instruction. They get a concession on the bus fare, totaling 4 rs. a day on expenses for transport. I do not know how they can study with stomachs growling…the chikun gunia has done something to the structure of the head bones on both her and her younger brother…their foreheads appear lower, and sloped back at a sharper angle… I later spoke to a friend who is an MBBS student, and she said that starvation also causes this deformity. The mother has it also. I warned her to be careful of kidnapping, as when Link and Anni used to cycle to school there Amma had told me to be careful of kidnapping…the parents said that a boy of about 15 years, who lives just two kilometers away had been kidnapped when he went to Karunagappally, but had
escaped when his abductors stopped for tea somewhere, and returned home. He had been taken for an operation – to remove his kidney….Such despicable unrighteousness abounds, right here, within the precincts…

We still have not done anything with Anni’s Care Fund, ACF. Since the U$D is falling so fast, I may seek to put it into Euros somewhere, somehow. The album has been going slowly. Karthu plans to come down, possibly in Feb. after finishing with the soundtrack and songs for a movie he is making about Hanuman…Jai Hanuman, Jai Karthu! Karthu is now married to beautiful Nirali, Jai Sita-Ram! As of this time, I have still not talked about ACF to Amma, it has completely left my mind when the opportunity was there. I feel I do not have the right to indulge in music production when the children right in front of me are starving…the planet is in such a horrible mess that we have to think first things first…

The article from the paper:

From: The Hindu Monday January 28, 2008 Vol.131 #23 p.2
Dwindling fish stock worries coast
By Special Correspondent
Thiruvananthapuram: It is a period of poverty and deprivation in the coastal villages of the State. Heavy depletion of fish stocks has pushed thousands of families to the brink of starvation, according to the Kerala Swanthantra Matsya Thozhilali Federation (KSMTF).

“It is unprecedented,” says T. Peter, State president KSMTF. “Most of the common varieties of fish that are available at this time of the year have disappeared.” He says. “The Central government has permitted 50 Indonesian trawlers to operate from Munambam for tuna fishing. There trawlers operate in the coastal waters where traditional fishermen net most of their catch,” points out Mr. Peter.

The federation has threatened to launch an agitation to press for its demands.

The callous disregard of the government for its own people is heartbreaking….so many times, everywhere, Amma has had to pick up the reigns of human survival management, that is the responsibility of the elected, tax paid government servants… We welcome your suggestions. We don’t know what we can do. I will of course, write to Amma again. The family known to us, is not the only one…there are thousands…we still have not been able to tell you the story of Shiva, and he is gone from the ashram now…

Loving you,
Kamala Aunty, Link and Anni

The following is an article that Link wrote for his Mechanical Association’s Quarterly, Sanketika.  Please read and consider.

Choose Your Cancer with Care

        Susan Reynard never guessed that it would kill her.  Nobody told her.  In fact, everybody said that it was perfectly safe.  Nonetheless, Mrs Reynard is now one of the most famous casualties of the cell phone industry.  She died in 1993, afflicted with a strange cancer – growing into her head from the skin right next to her phone’s antenna.

        But this isn’t a chronicle of cell-phone related deaths.  Let us confine ourselves to cold, hard, facts and research.  Here’s a sampling of some history:

           1960’s – The National Research Council of Canada studied the non-thermal effects of microwaves on birds.  They witnessed the birds become more stressed and double their death rate under radiation.  Young chicks under the influence of 25mW/cm2 microwave radiation for more than five seconds collapsed on the floor until the influence removed.  For comparison, the permissible level for humans is 4mW/cm2 for half an hour.
Additional research between 1965 – 1980 showed that birds are severely affected by microwave radiations.  Their feathers act as a dielectric, picking up the signals, and irritating them.  They become stressed, change their flight patterns, or migrate away from the source of radiation.  Chickens had 13.7% more eggs, but twice the mortality rate.
1980’s – Mobile Phones (also known as Cell Phones and PCS phones) were introduced to the consumer market, without any pre-market safety testing.  This was permissible, since they were presented as “low powered” devices, and were within “safety limits”.
1993 – Dr George Carlo was chosen by the FCC to head up a study group called the “Wireless Technology Research Group”.  His job was to research the effects of wireless technology (mainly cell phones).  The funding for the research was to provided by the technology providers (cell phone manufacturers).
1994 – Dr. Henry Lai (University of Washington, USA) conducted independent research.  He and his research partner found (by looking at the DNA) that microwaves cause DNA to break down; which is a known cause of memory loss, cancer, and diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
1996 – The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) released the results of a study, noting that “exposure to EMFs has been linked to increased risk of diseases, including cancers such as childhood leukemia”.  Studies on humans demonstrate depression, irritability, disturbed sleep, heart palpitations, miscarriage, birth defects, sore joints, nausea, difficulty concentrating, migraine headaches, and memory loss.
1997 – Milt Bowling (Executive Director of the Canada-based Electromagnetic Radiation Task Force) was covered on the Fifth Estate (a Canadian CBC TV program) for his opposition to the installation of a cell phone transmission station on the top of his son’s school.  He shocked the world with his disclosure that the then “safety limits” only regulated human exposure to radiation when it was powerful enough to raise body tissue temperature by one degree Celsius in six minutes!  It had to cook you to be unsafe!
1998 – Dr Carlo’s six years and 28 million dollars of research showed that the nearfield electromagnetic plume (within 20cm of the cell phone) caused leakage in the blood-brain barrier and rare neural epithelial cancers.  The risk of a benign or malignant brain tumor was nearly tripled.  His funding was cut after he published this information in 1999.
2001 – Professor Kjell Mild (Orebro University in Sweden) surveyed 1,600 tumor victims who had been using cell phones for up to 10 years before diagnosis.  He compared the cases with both tumor-afflicted and healthy non-users of cell phones.  He found that use more than one hour daily increased the risk of Acoustic Neuroma by 30%.  Worldwide incidences of this type of cancer have increased by more than 80% since 1980.
In another study, Dr Mild compared the phone use of 4,400 people, half with cancer, and half who were healthy.  They found that using the cell phone for just one hour daily for 10 years increased the chances of getting a malignant tumor by 240%.  Sweden has had cell phones since 1984, and now the long term effects are starting to emerge.
2006 – Professor Ashok Agarwal (Cleveland Clinic, USA) led a study done in Mumbai involving 361 men, with 40 never using a cell, 107 less than 2 hours daily, 100 two-four  hours daily, and 114 more than four hours.  The last group had 25% less, 50% less properly formed, and 33% less live sperm.  Translation: defective children, if at all.
2007 – Dr Rony Seger (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel) exposed human and rat cells in a laboratory to low-level radiation at 875Mhz.  Though they used much less power than a typical cell phone, within ten minutes the cells began to produce a chemical signal.  This chemical signal is involved in the division of cells, and is linked to several cancers.
There is no dearth of research on the subject.  One survey of more than 300 studies completed between 1996-2002 found that those funded by manufacturers were six times more likely to find nothing wrong, compared to those funded independently!
Is there any solution?  The US Department of Defense funded research at the Catholic University (Maryland, USA) to find a way to avoid the non-thermal effects of EM radiation on humans.  The outcome?  There is a way.  By introducing a significant amount of noise at a frequency near to the transmitting frequency, the cells in the lab were no longer affected by the radiation.  They designed a chip, which is easily integratable into the existing cell phone architecture.  This will not, however, protect you from the heating effects of microwaves.
Why haven’t the Cell phone companies adopted this comparatively safer approach?  Let’s just imagine that one fine day Nokia said “Here’s a phone that is safer to use.”  There would be scandals and public outcry – “Why have you said that these phones are safe all along?”  Nokia (in the best-case scenario) would have to recall all of their current cancer-causing phones, and update them or replace them with the safer version.  Which mobile phone company is prepared to sustain that sort of mess?
All of the studies above invariably contained a line stating that there were no health risks attached to using a mobile phone.  Shall we listen to that rhetoric, or shall we look at the statistics?
Besides studies, there are also observations regarding this:
In New South Wales (Australia), hens and roosters inexplicably died soon after the installation of a mobile phone base station.  They were about 200 meters away from it.  The family who lived there developed tinnitus (microwave hearing) and severe headaches.  The headaches decreased after the street’s electrical supply was altered.  A bird keeper also had problems: all of his exotic birds died soon after the installation!
Sparrows are disappearing from cities, thought to be a result of increasing amounts of microwave radiation in the air.  In Toronto (Canada) the background radiation is more than 500,000 times what it was seven years ago.
The disappearance of bees is also linked to microwave radiation.  In one study, bees did not return to their hive when an active mobile phone was placed near it.
Many people have died, or contracted rare (less rare now than before) cancers, located suspiciously near to their mobile phone antenna.
We hope that this information is helpful to everyone…  Please take care of your health.  The best solution is to not use the mobile phones at all.  If that’s not possible, please try to keep it as far away from you as possible – use the speakerphone or a wired headset.  Some studies say that the wired headset poses more risks, as the wire acts as an aerial, picking up signals from the cell phone.  This can be averted by wrapping it around a ferrite bead (like that bulge on computer cords).

Loving you,

Kamala Anni and Link