Last week was McGill’s reading break, though to be quite frank, I got less reading done than catching up on Bollywood (for uh… educational purposes?). So with India in mind, this evening I attended a talk by Dr. David Malone, a renowned diplomat, international security scholar and the current president of IDRC. He was previously Canada’s High Commissioner to India and based on his experiences and academic interests has written a book titled Does the Elephant Dance? looking at the contemporary foreign policy in India.

*Image source

It’s always a good thing when you hear a speaker so clear and compelling that you immediately want to pick up their book. I’d like to outline some of the things I picked up from the talk, perhaps as a useful reference.

In the talk, Malone identified three salient elements that shape any contemporary foreign policy: first, the history of a nation; second, the geography; and third, the capability (which include military capability, economic capability, quality of leadership, natural and human resources endowment [1]).

I found the historical part of the talk particularly insightful with respect to the background reading I’ve done so I’ll describe it in a little more detail than other parts. During a discussion one of my friends described India as a ‘nation of many nations’, and it’s completely true. The country, perhaps more than any other nation, has had a long history of cultural and religious plurality. However, Malone pointed out that India’s long term sociocultural trajectory has generally been affected by Western influxes (Afghan and Persian influence, Islam and Christianity), whereas Indian influence has generally gone Eastwards (Buddhism).

Another interesting historical point Malone made was the economic outcomes of the British Raj in India. There is a prevalent romantic portrayal of the Raj as a colonial rule that despite some—mishaps—advanced the people of India. Malone contended this perspective by describing economic research that shows that before the British Raj India had 17-20% economic output of the world, but by the time the British left the output had been reduced to 2% and the country’s prominent industries had been decimated.

As well, during the rule of the British Raj, India had several major famines, the last of which was during World War II in Bengal and killed between 1.5-4 million people. After Indian independence, despite hunger and poverty, there has not been widespread famine in the country—indicative of, and perhaps reinforcing, successes of democracy in the country. The failures of colonialism and successes of democracy have shaped Indian policies to be distinctly anti-imperialist. This was one of the factors Malone mentioned may have contributed to the country’s preference to take a neutral non-aligned stance in international standoffs. He described divergence from this policy (allying with the USSR) to have been an outcome of autocratic rule by, for example, Indira Gandhi.

The second motif Malone highlighted was geography. Many of the practices in Indian foreign policy emerge directly out of India’s massive border with China on the one hand, and Afghanistan/Pakistan on the other side and its troubled relationship with these neighbors. One interesting point Malone made was that China, which has 3 times the economic output of India, appears to have replaced Pakistan as the primary Indian concern/obsession (well, to be honest, everybody seems a little obsessed with China at this point), while Pakistan continues to be concerned about India’s economic growth while its own economy stagnates. Another point was that despite the China-India rivalry, traditional alliances around India are also changing. While Pakistan’s alliance with China strengthened during the Chinese-Indian war of 1962, in recent years China has not shown unequivocal support of Pakistan. This relationship may have soured in part because of the rise of Wahhabist insurgency in Pakistan and associated insurgencies in China.

With regards to capability, Malone described India as a country with a lot of potential which may or may not be fulfilled. The country’s military strengths, he said, are limited largely to its nuclear arsenal and an effective navy, though economic development and an increasingly middle-class population/tax base may contribute to a more advanced military. However, he mentioned that internal turmoil, primarily the extensive Naxalite-Maoist insurgency in one-fourth of the country (the eastern Red Corridor) may hinder efforts to increase governance capability. Finally, Malone described the economic development that has taken place in India since economic liberalization in the 1990s. In particular the development of various free-trade agreements that are currently in process and their implication for relationship with China, US, Europe and Canada.

Based on his work, Malone laid out three principle drivers in Indian foreign policy emerging from history, geography and capability that he elaborates in his book:

(1) A quest for autonomy – Stemming from the country’s historical experience, and evident in, for example, in disagreements with the West on its Iranian policy. (A rate acute observation Malone made here was that perhaps the West could, instead of being baffled by Indian foreign policy, ask and learn from a country that probably has better understanding of its Asian neighbors).

(2) Strategic restraint — Favoring development over militaristic capacity, and other examples including the country’s hesitation to engage in aggressive response to various insurgencies originating in Pakistan (although not having read the book I do wonder if this is related to a more politically-coherent country maintaining mutually assured destruction (MAD) policy).

(3) Focus on economic progress, but not necessarily a desire to become a ‘dominating world power’.

After hearing this talk, I think it will be really interesting to see whether India will continue to show the foreign policy traits characterized above, or if economic growth will mean a shift in the country’s policies to less ‘autonomous’ and less ‘restrained’. Also in light of (somewhat alarming) conjecture by foreign policy experts about increasing tension between Western and Eastern powers, I do wonder about the alliances that India as a rising power will choose to form and how they will shape history.

References
[1] Adeyemi-Suenu, W., Inokoba, P.K.(2010). Commitment Capability and Nigeria’s Strategic Interest in West Africa: Lessons for Statesmen. J Soc Sci, 22:3. P. 179-184.

Today is the 142nd birthday of an amazing Canadian researcher and physician– Dr. Maude Abbott. It’s hard to sum up in a few words just how awesome this lady was. Briefly, she was orphaned as a child and was raised by her grandmother. After graduating high school, she joined one of the first groups of women to enroll and graduate from McGill. Although she was tremendously interested in pursuing medicine, she was not admitted to the McGill medical school which at the time was exclusive to men. So instead, she enrolled in Bishop’s where women were admitted, and later pursued her postgraduate studies in Europe.

When Abbott returned to Montreal, as I outline below, she was able to establish herself as an expert in congenital heart disease. For her work she was awarded an honourary medical degree from McGill and became a professor at the very institution that had some three decades earlier refused to consider her application on the basis of her gender. Being a woman researcher and physician, Abbott faced many challenges in a world where science and medicine were considered to be men’s territory. However, she overcame many of these barriers by the excellence in the quality of her work and her strong character, consequently paving the way for many more women to succeed.

The following is not an autobiographical sketch, but rather looks at a particular artifact of medicine that I had the pleasure of seeing at the McGill Medical Museum earlier this year and how it shaped Maude Abbott’s career.

The Holmes Heart
Rise of Pathological Anatomy in Canada

By Marzieh Ghiasi (Mar 2011)

athological anatomy, the study of altered or abnormal anatomy, is a field that in its early stages relied heavily on the collection and study of specimens. The ‘Holmes Heart’ is one of such specimens. Stored today at the McGill Medical Museum, it gave early modern physicians an understanding of the human body and its pathologies.
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I have exciting news! Today we sent out the final version of MSURJ (the McGill Science Undergraduate Research Journal) to the printers. We’ve completely revamped the look of the journal from previous years, and we have more research articles than ever. Our launch is in about a week when everything is going to come together, and that’s definitely the best part of being Editors-in-Chief. It’s been a great run.

Every year, for more than twenty years or so, the McGill Anatomy & Cell Biology Students Society has held an “anatomically correct” bake sale at the systemic human anatomy class. This year’s bake sale was pretty amazing and apparently in an hour managed to raise nearly two-thousand dollars for a charity for deaf students here in Montréal! I took a couple of (low-quality) cell-phone pictures. Yes the last one is legs and kind of NSFW.

http://www.mcgilldaily.com/articles/20738

Diagnosis gone digital
By Marzieh Ghiasi
Monday, October 5th, 2009

Almost every field has adopted digital technology, and medicine is no exception. However, the transformation of health informatics in the past decade has not simply been a change in tools of the trade, but a change in the very way knowledge is acquired and applied.

13th century Anatomical Illustration | Source

As a discipline that brings together health care and information science, health informatics is involved in setting up resources like search engines that doctors can use to retrieve clinical data. These tools can be grouped into two categories – information retrieval systems (IRS) and clinical decision support systems (CDSS).

Pierre Pluye, a physician and associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine at McGill University, investigates these electronic resources. He explained how IRS provide a way to filter the staggering amount of available information down to only the most relevant.

“There are 19 million abstracts on Medline [an online biomedical database]. Physicians do not have time [to read every single one]… because basically you would have to read 24 hours a day, seven days a week just to keep updated,” said Pluye.

CDSS differ from IRS in that they provide patient-specific information. Clinicians can use calculator-type programs that look at a patient’s history to determine their likelihood of contracting diseases or experiencing medical complications.
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Article #2, finally– the fruit of our collective effort!

http://www.mcgilldaily.com/view.php?aid=6776
Also featured on: http://www.ntdsociety.com/among-the-neglected/

Among the Neglected
By Marzieh Ghiasi and Hannah Thomas
Thursday, November 29th, 2007

Marzieh Ghiasi and Hannah Thomas explore the chasm between the enormous human cost of Neglected Tropical Diseases and funding for research and drugs

“The parasite gets inside the nose and it completely destroys the face.”

Professor Greg Matleshweski, a parasitology expert, is describing the fate of 12 million people afflicted with Leishmaniasis, a highly prevalent condition in parts of South America. “When you have that kind of affliction you can’t function in society. You are outcasts, really lepers.”

Leishmaniasis is just one of 14 infections known as Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs). Sometimes called the “biblical diseases,” or the “diseases of poverty,” they have persisted for centuries. Along with HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, NTDs pose a huge challenge to global health – but because they almost exclusively affect the world’s poorest, their plight has been neglected in public discussion, investment, and research.

NT-What?

The World Health Organization’s (WHO) list of NTDs includes leprosy, elephantiasis, Chagas disease, cholera, dengue, and sleeping sickness. Categorized as viral, bacterial, or helminthic, they thrive in regions far beyond the tropics.

According to the WHO’s numbers, one billion people are afflicted, 2.7 billion are at risk, and between 500,000 and one million die each year of NTDs. If a 670-person classroom were a microcosm of the world, these diseases would plague 100 people.
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