Letters to The EDITOR: Aditya L1 in Place

Aditya L1 in Place

Success is continuously kissing the feet of ISRO; it is acquiring one accomplishment after another. Now, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has placed the Aditya-L1 spacecraft in a halo orbit around the Lagrangian point (L1) to put the Aditya-L1 spacecraft as the first space-based Indian observatory to study the Sun into its final destination orbit, some 1.5 million kilometres from the Earth. It is a fantastic breakthrough by Indian scientists in exploring the Sun. However, ISRO's first Sun mission is set to be injected into final orbit. Aditya L1 will provide crucial insights into solar mysteries. Upon reaching its final destination, Aditya-L1 will be able to view the sun without any eclipses, and Indian scientists will leave an ever-lasting impression on the world.

Tauqueer Rahmani,

Guwahati.

Keep the War Away

Top international diplomats discussed strategies for keeping the Gaza war from spreading beyond Israel and the Palestinian freedom fighters on Sunday, exactly three months after the start of the conflict, as Palestinian and Israeli authorities claimed thousands of military and civilian deaths. The number of deaths is increasing day by day from both sides. Palestinians have been deprived of food. The fighting has displaced most of Gaza's 2.3 million population, with many homes and civilian infrastructure left in ruins amid acute shortages of food, water, and medicine. Therefore, all these international diplomats, including world leaders, should discuss how to stop the war and revitalize the peace.

Ibne Farooq,

Guwahati.

Monopoly by airlines

Through your esteem daily, I would like to express my concern over the monopoly of low-cost airlines. The rate of airline tickets, especially from ex-Guwahati to the rest of India, is flying sky high.

Most of the airlines call themselves low-cost airlines under Udan policy. But the cost of a ticket from Delhi to Guwahati and Guwahati to Delhi is around Rs 11000 to Rs 12000 one way in economy class. Airlines may be saying that it is due to last-minute booking that rates are high, but it’s always at this time that rates of tickets can touch high skies. There is no control of the Indian government over the airlines. After paying a huge amount for tickets, you have to pay for the food as well as the seats. In all sorts of ways, we common people are suffering because of this. So I would like to request Government to intervene in this.

Samar Deb

Chandan Nagar,

Guwahati.

Cervical cancer

is preventable

Cancer of the cervix is one of the few cancers that can be prevented by education, awareness, screening, and vaccination. The WHO has set itself the lofty ambition of globally eliminating cervical cancer by 2030. For starters, the cervix is a female genital organ lying below the corpus of the uterus and inclined anteriorly to the vagina. Many developing countries, including India, are showing a downward trend in the incidence of cervical cancer. Since the cervix is an accessible organ and symptoms are relatively manifest early, a great deal of work has been done in prevention, early diagnosis, and treatment of the disease. Right from the Papanicolaou (Pap) smear screening examination to the Human Papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine administration, considerable volumes of effort have ensured early diagnosis of the disease and protection.

The HPV vaccine has revolutionized cancer cervix prevention. Strains 16 and 18 are the causative agents for the majority of cervical cancer patients through sexual intercourse, and the HPV vaccine protects women from being affected by these strains. Many HPV infections are self-regressing, while others give rise to full-blown cancers of the cervix, vagina, and vulva in women, and anus and penis in men. 1 plus 2 is equal to 6, which exemplifies the efficacy of the vaccine because two doses of one vaccine can protect both men and women from six cancers. January is cervical cancer awareness month.

Dr. Ganapathi Bhat

(gbhat13@gmail.com)

Laws for Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the demon that will one day devour all our jobs, and we will be mere spectators to this debacle. This demon is not a "millennial" one; its birth dates way back to the 1950s. There is still a lot to be understood before we saddle up this demon. This demon is growing stronger, and the leash that we have right now will no longer be able to hold back this demon. We need more stringent laws for artificial intelligence, as we can see that it is spreading like wildfire as people and institutions are now heavily dependent on AI. Almost all the developed countries have laws or regulations regarding AI, which mark the territory for AI, and it cannot trespass on that. India is the only exception where we cannot see any regulation of any kind for artificial intelligence. We are a population of 1.44 billion people, and if any problem crops up regarding AI, it will be much bigger and almost impossible to regulate. The sooner policymakers realize this, the better.

Noopur Baruah,

Tezpur

Who is a minority?

First, minority opinion expression is especially pronounced among individuals who hold either strong attitudes or attitudes that deviate from the majority in a direction consistent with the desirable group attitude. A great deal of social psychological research has focused on antecedents of conformity to the majority. The present article, however, reviews the various conditions under which people express minority opinions. First, minority opinion expression is especially pronounced among individuals who hold either strong attitudes or attitudes that deviate from the majority in a direction consistent with the desirable group attitude. Second, minority opinion expression increases to the extent that highly-identified group members believe that expressing minority opinions will promote their group’s welfare, or to the extent that one’s membership in a particular social category entitles him or her to speak up. Third, minority opinion expression increases when people’s motives to have a unique or clearly defined sense of self are salient. It is argued that these sources of minority opinion expression can help shed light on the functional value of such opinions for individuals.

The idea of a “majority” and a “minority” is a description, but not of reality. Let us step aside from the more historically charged examples and consider a majority-minority distinction that occurs in every society: the distinction between the rich and the poor. The rich are always the minority in every society. Why should I say that the poor must accommodate them? There isn’t a fixed category of “poor” or "rich." There are instead employers, employees, lovers, friends, enemies, strangers, temporarily embarrassed millionaires, old money, etc. Instead of fixed distinctions, what exists—truly—is a mosaic of individual interactions. It is in the interests of those who look to exercise power on behalf of either grouping to obscure that reality. But exercise a little selfishness, and the illusion collapses. Rather than accepting that the minority threatens the interests of the majority, ask how exactly they threaten me. Humans are gregarious by nature. That is why a realistic picture of society is not one marked by distinction but by relations, and what is the characteristic of any relationship if not accommodation? In fact, I strongly feel that the first responsibility of the majority (in a democracy) is protecting the rights of the minority.

C.K. Subramaniam,

(cksumpire@gmail.com)