Page 22 - Pakistan Link - August 21, 2020

P22 – PAKISTAN LINK – AUGUST 21, 2020
F n By Shruti Rajagopalan
or very different reasons, both Indians
and US conservatives are emphasizing
Sen. Kamala Harris’s Indian heritage.
This shouldn’t be entirely surprising. In-
dians have always been quick to appropri-
ate successful members of their diaspora.
And right-wing commentators and even
US President Donald Trump are seeking
to spread suspicions about the Democratic
vice presidential candidate’s citizenship
by emphasizing her mother’s Indian back-
ground and father’s Jamaican heritage. In
reality, though, Harris is the very definition
of American.
Indian society still largely believes that
identity is determined more by one’s birth and
family than by individual choices and actions.
Especially for the very large conservative fac-
tion in India, caste and religion are assigned
at birth, never to be altered. One cannot tech-
nically convert to Hinduism. And the caste
system, maintained by marriage, ensures very
little social mobility. In India, the birth lottery
is everything.
So, Harris and other US political leaders
such as Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley will al-
ways be claimed as “Indian” even though they
are American-born and their public service
has been devoted almost exclusively to Ameri-
cans. By contrast, someone like Sonia Gandhi,
who has spent more than five decades in India
and led the Indian National Congress party
successfully through two national elections, is
routinely described as “Italian-born” or a “for-
eigner.” Had Gandhi not married into the first
family of India, her political rise would have
been impossible.
That’s not to say Harris’s Indian roots
haven’t fundamentally shaped her. Her moth-
er Shyamala Gopalan was born in India and
raised in a Tamil Brahmin family, which likely
afforded her the Indian equivalent of white
privilege. Because of this Brahminical edge,
families such as Shyamala’s (and mine), boast
multiple generations of college graduates in
a country that has yet to achieve 100% basic
literacy.
Not unusually for “Tam-Bram” families,
No Need to Worry about Virus Spread through Food, Packaging: WHO
Geneva: The World Health Organization said
on Thursday it saw no evidence of coronavirus
being spread by food or packaging and urged
people not to be afraid of the virus entering
the food chain.
Two cities in China said they had found
traces of the coronavirus in imported frozen
chicken wings from Brazil and on outer pack-
aging of frozen Ecuadorian shrimp, raising
fears that contaminated food shipments might
cause a new outbreak.
“People should not fear food, or food
packaging or processing or delivery of food,”
WHO head of emergencies program Mike
Ryan told a briefing in Geneva. “There is no
evidence that food or the food chain is partici-
pating in transmission of this virus. And people
should feel comfortable and safe.”
WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerk-
hove said China had tested hundreds of thou-
sands of packages and “found very, very few,
less than 10” proving positive for the virus.
Brazil’s Agriculture Ministry said in a
statement that it was seeking clarification on
the Chinese findings. Ecuador’s production
minister, Ivan Ontaneda, told Reuters that the
country maintains strict protocols and cannot
be held responsible for what happens to goods
after they leave the country.
More than 20.69 million people have been
reported to be infected by the novel coronavi-
rus globally according to a Reuters tally.
The WHO urged countries now that
are striking bilateral deals for vaccines not to
abandon multilateral efforts, since vaccinating
pockets will still leave the world vulnerable.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on
Tuesday that Russia had become the first coun-
try to grant regulatory approval to a COVID-19
vaccine after less than two months of human
testing, a move Moscow likened to its success
in the Cold War-era space race.
Why India Wants to Claim Kamala
Kamala Harris, top left in an undated photograph, is seen with her grandmother, Rajam Gopalan,
grandfather P.V. Gopalan and sister Maya Harris. In front are Maya’s daughter, Meena, left, and Harris’
cousin Sharada Balachandran Orihuela (Courtesy of Sharada Balachandran Orihuela)
Shyamala and all her siblings were encouraged
to pursue advanced graduate degrees. In Shya-
mala’s case, this included a rare opportunity
move to the US to attend Berkeley, creating
the possibility of joining the Indian-American
elite, or what scholars have dubbed “The Oth-
er One Percent.” This educational foundation
in turn, would have helped ease Harris’s own
entry into the ranks of the American elite.
The idea that anyone who comes to this
country and works hard can change their for-
tune is still the essence of America, though.
While social mobility is limited in certain de-
mographics, the accident of birth matters less
in the US than in almost any other country
in the world. The American dream remains a
cherished personal and policy goal.
Moscow’s decision to grant approval be-
fore then has raised concerns among some ex-
perts. Only about 10% of clinical trials are suc-
cessful and some scientists fear Moscow may be
putting national prestige before safety.
The WHO does not have enough infor-
mation to make a judgment on the expanded
use of the Russian vaccine, said Bruce Aylward,
WHO senior adviser.
“The vast majority of the population of the
world is susceptible to this disease,” he told the
briefing. “The second thing that we are seeing
is the stringency of the application of control
measures is dropping. People are coming closer
together...masks aren’t being used the way that
they should, etc.
“So any leveling of the disease that we are
looking at is just lulling you into a sense of false
security ... because it has lots of space to still
cause trouble,” Aylward added. - Reuters
www.PakistanLink.com
What really sets Kamala Harris apart is
not the caste or ethnicity of her mother, but
the choices her mother made. At 19, Shyamala
was relatively young when she came to the
US and she quickly became very active in the
civil rights movement. That’s how she met and
married fellow immigrant Donald J. Harris,
who is now professor emeritus of economics
at Stanford University.
That Shyamala Gopalan married out-
side her caste and ethnicity would have been
extremely unusual for someone of her back-
ground in the 1960s. Even more remarkably,
she got divorced within a few years. I doubt
this was an easy choice. The Brahmins of Be-
sant Nagar, a suburb of Chennai, who are now
so eager to claim links to the Gopalans, likely
COVID-19 Symptoms
Often Appear
in This Order
n By Elizabeth Elkind
Researchers at the University of Southern
California say they’ve found that the symptoms
of COVID-19 tend to appear in a specific order,
a finding that could help enable earlier detection
and treatment for numerous patients.
“This is a good guide of sorts,” Dr Bob La-
hita, a professor of medicine who is not affiliated together,” Lahita said of the first grouping of
with the study, told CBSN anchor Anne-Marie
Green. “We can say safely, studying as they did,
I think it was 55,000 patients from China, they
looked at the data and looked at the symptoms
and found that this order was pretty reproduc-
COMMENTARY
have ancestors that shamed Shyamala’s choice
of husband. Only recently another Tamil
Brahmin, renowned classical vocalist Sudha
Raghunathan, was pilloried when her daugh-
ter married an African-American man.
In her memoir, Harris writes that her
mother also “knew that her adopted homeland
would see Maya and me as black girls, and she
was determined to make sure we would grow
into confident black women.” The two girls
sang in a choir at a Black church and learned
about Black leaders at a local childcare cen-
ter. Kamala herself chose to attend historically
black Howard University rather than an Ivy
League school.
Whether this makes her any more or less
“Indian” is irrelevant. Identity is a complex
thing, even without throwing in immigration,
mixed parentage, exogamous marriage and
more. Kamala Harris is probably a little of ev-
erything she appears to be — and yet the sum
of the parts is very different from the compo-
nents. Like other Brahmin immigrants, she is
well-educated, professionally a unicorn and
financially successful. But contrary to the ex-
pectations of a “Gopalan,” Harris enjoys pork
chops. And to her proud Jamaican father’s dis-
pleasure, Harris makes jokes about pot-smok-
ing Jamaicans.
As the campaign unfolds from here,
Harris will have to be careful. Hopefully, the
birther slurs will be ignored. But Indians can
also turn quickly on those they consider their
own when they don’t conform. Any critiques
of India’s handling of Kashmir, for instance,
will be perceived as those of a traitorous “In-
dian,” not an American politician. Similarly,
many in the Black Lives Matter movement will
have trouble reconciling Harris’s identity as a
woman of color with her prosecutorial record.
Harris no doubt realizes she will never be
black enough for some African Americans, or
Indian enough for some Indians and Indian
Americans. But, as the successful daughter
of two successful immigrants, now running
for the second-highest office in the land, she
couldn’t be any more American.
(Shruti Rajagopalan is a Senior Research
Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Ma-
son University. Bloomberg)
ible.”
According to the study, published in the
medical journal Frontier Public Health, the most
likely order of symptoms is as follows: fever, then
cough and muscle pain, followed by nausea and/
or vomiting, and then diarrhea.
“Fever is number one, followed by cough,
followed by aches and pains — and they do not
all have to appear in sequence, they can appear
symptoms. After that, he said, comes nausea and
vomiting, followed by diarrhea.
Not all patients experience the same set of
symptoms. But the new findings help underscore
how COVID-19 differs from other well-known
illnesses. While fever and cough are also associ-
ated with a number of other diseases, like the flu,
the study notes that it was the timing in which
these symptoms appear, and the later gastrointes-
tinal symptoms, that set this virus apart.
In a press release about the study, USC scien-
tist Peter Kuhn said that understanding the order
of virus symptoms is useful during “overlapping
cycles of illnesses” like the upcoming flu season.
“Doctors can determine what steps to take
to care for the patient, and they may prevent the
patient’s condition from worsening,” Kuhn said.
To discover the sequence, the USC research-
ers, led by doctoral candidate Joseph Larsen, ex-
amined medical records and other data on over
55,000 coronavirus cases in China collected over
a nine-day span in February, along with a set of
over 1,000 cases from December through Janu-
ary. They also compared their findings to data on
2,470 influenza cases in North America, Europe
and the Southern Hemisphere from 1994 to 1998.
“It is important to have this information,”
Lahita said. “Besides the things that we all talk
about like loss of smell and loss of taste, again —
fever, cough, muscle aches, nausea, vomiting and
then diarrhea are very good indicators of the fact
that you may have COVID-19.” – CBS News