On the question from Dr. Anbu...(and the somewhat unexpected answer)

A rather striking hoarding ad for Tulir went like this...

November 19 isn't Child Sexual Abuse Awareness Day.

EVERY DAY IS.

Might seem a little like stating the obvious, but there's no doubt that the message hits you with a thud.

A cynical journalist friend once muttered that the increasing numbers of International Day for Some Worthy Cause or the Other threatened newspaper real estate for...well, REAL news. I don't think he meant the World Tuba Day/International Moment of Laughter Day variety fuelled by imaginative greeting card manufacturers.

It's more on the 'lest we forget' vein...why the month of May has seen World Press Freedom Day and World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development. The Week of Solidarity with the Peoples of Non-Self-Governing Territories is ongoing and International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers is coming up.

All ironically, against the backdrop of the 'situation' in Sri Lanka!

So, it was with a touch of skepticism that I fielded Dr. Anbu's query shortly before he went on air on the occasion of World Schizophrenia Day. Why is May 24th, specifically, World Schizophrenia Day? What's the origin...some long gone psychiatrist's birthday?

How does it matter... I thought, after telling the good psychiatrist that I was nowhere near Google, the God of all answers. Aren't these 'Days' picked at random, in any case? Who cares, anyway...these things are getting meaningless except for those who are affected...

It's fortunate that the quizzing gene I was born with, has not been completely subdued. Because it took me a good 30 minutes coaxing an answer out of an unusually tight-lipped Google.

And here's what I found...

Schizophrenia Awareness Day occurs annually on May 24 - the day which psychiatric patients were unshackled from the walls of the Bicetre Asylum in Paris in 1793.

Dr. Phillipe Pinel, appointed chief physician at the facility that year, ordered this action in response to his assessment of "treatment" conditions. To many, it marks the beginning of humane treatment for the mentally ill. Yet, despite today's effective therapies, many afflicted with schizophrenia and related disorders remain confined by societal misperceptions, fear and ignorance. This special observance helps to raise public awareness about schizophrenia.

It was only then that I remembered one man's battle for Erwadi's forgotten, and how much is left undone after Shahul's untimely death.

May 24th is now, at least for me, no longer just Schizophrenia Day. It's Wake up!-Don't get thick skinned!-Shut up or DO something-Eliminate Selective Amnesia Day.

How many more Erwadis will it take? Do these special days ever get dispensed with because they've served their use? Perhaps, when memories can be satisfactorily put to rest - with good conscience.

Till then, centuries after Pinel's act of liberation, all things humanity has forgotten scream for help in dreams.

Of Booby Traps and Honey Pots

VISIT TNHEALTH.ORG, GET VIRUS FREE!

First the country was invaded by the sea route, leaving testosterone-pumped citizens pawing at the ground and ready to charge. Terror attacks have the advantage of surprise, some others have the advantage of an insidious subtlety. One in the virtual world has penetrated a government website — not quite a hijack, but a hack. To add to the growing list of “wares”, be it adware, spyware or malware, is a term called badware — and some unsuspecting legitimate-but-compromised websites play host to malicious software to breach your computer’s defences. Insinuating itself into a website’s code, the virus lays out the welcome mat and waits, like a typhoid-Mary sleeper mole, for gullible visitors.

Google tnhealth.org and you're informed that “this site may harm your computer”.Brushing the warning off as overly cautious you forge ahead with your trusty sidekicks AVG Antivirus and Windows Defender, only to discover another Google page informing you helpfully: “this site is badware”.

A little peeved at Google playing parental control-freak, you click compulsively at the next tantalising link — and then voila, Google and Stopbadware.org finally spit out the bad news: 15 pages of tnhealth.org resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent — a total of 17 scripting exploits, 16 exploits and 2 trojans! The malicious software is hosted on 4 domains including loskut.cn, whitebiz.cn, and 79.135.187.0 with loskut.cn functioning as intermediary for distributing malware to visitors of this site.

For those who experienced Google’s glitch a couple of days back, this is no human error, it’s more like human terror — because your friendly browser delivers the final salvo — successful infection resulted in an average of six new processes on the target machine.

Translation from hackerspeak: the gobbledygook above means that in a virtual world security breach, access to the Tamil Nadu health portal has been denied as it has been flagged by StopBadware.org — the consumer-oriented global powerhouse run by Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, and Oxford University’s Oxford Internet Institute.

Worse still, to carry on in the spybioterror vein — a Chinese website is acting as an intermediary double agent.

While China is notorious for cyber-censorship, the paradox is that it hosts over 50 per cent of malicious software spreading sites globally — numbering a whopping 2,00,000 in mid 2008.

On one side we have a country that created the world’s first PC virus (Brain, created in 1986 by the Farooq Alvi Brothers, operating out of Lahore) and on the other side a neighbour equivalent of a land shark with virus goondas running amok. While this is normally no more than the nerd equivalent of muscle flexing, resulting in cyber-graffiti website defacements, the implications of information theft loom in a decade of website hacks as diverse as Indian Army, BARC, Indian embassy (Spain), SBI, IIT Kanpur, Airtel and AvSoft — a company peddling the anti-virus software SmartCop.

While some hacks can be explained as ‘Mafiaboy’ wannabes pushing boundaries, others have more disturbing implications of data theft or access to manipulation of sensitive information (as in the MEA hack hop-trail which led to China.) Cyber-and-otherwise citizens of India — be prepared. When it comes to safety and privacy, buying peace of mind is a better investment. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to disinfect my computer!