The Hindu Business Line : What's so good about cancer?

"MAY you live all the days of your life". Thus begins the intro with a quote from Jonathan Swift in the book Cancer has its Privileges, by Christine Clifford.

It has all the stories of `hope and laughter' to highlight what it means to be a survivor and why comedy has a place in cancer. Excerpts:

It's a strange phenomenon what happens to people when they hear that a friend or loved one has cancer.

Most people don't know what to say. They don't want to say the wrong thing, so they end up saying nothing. A cycle of avoidance and denial only deepens the loneliness and isolation the cancer patient feels.

Cancer does not just affect the patient. It permeates the home environment and reaches across state lines to pull every living relative into its path. Whatever the mix of families today, be they blended or not, everyone's life in the family will be turned upside down.

"When told I would have to have a bilateral mastectomy upon receiving a diagnosis of cancer, my husband hugged me and said, `When we hug our hearts will be closer'." (A survivor mail to The Cancer Club)

Cancer patients and survivors are among the most creative people on earth. Cancer can often bring out the passion in people. The creativity and growth that is so very often experienced in cancer patients is a life-affirming experience that tells the world, "I've faced adversity, but I'm not ready to give up yet!"

People going through cancer treatment often feel unattractive due to hair loss, weight changes, problems with their complexion or just not feeling "up to par".

It's amazing what a compliment can do to lift one's spirits! Look the cancer patient in the eye and tell them they look great! Call attention to the positive changes or just the fact that the patient has made an effort to get out of the house to go to a movie or meet you for lunch.

Life is a gift. I didn't always have this appreciation for life — living was something I simply took for granted. Cancer allowed me to realise that every day is a gift to be cherished. Did you wake up this morning and embrace the day?

A book you can buy to gift appropriately.

(Book courtesy: EastWest Books (Madras) Pvt. Ltd. E-mail: ewb@vsnl.com

Knowing terror

TERROR is not a new business. We have been living with terror, from the era of Homer to Osama. Andrew Sinclair explores the history of terrorism in his book An Anatomy of Terror, from the Roman destruction of Carthage to the WTC attacks. A selection:

The most illuminating use of terror in Greek tragedy would become a fulcrum of Freudian psychiatry, the myth of Oedipus. He solved the riddle of the horrible man-eating Sphinx: the answer was `Mankind'. The response delivered his city Thebes from catastrophe.

Alien or minority rule, imposed by conquest, is the most common of the conditions that tend to produce the nationalist secret society. Opposition to such rule usually begins in the form of an open cultural society, set up as a club for the leaders of the oppressed majority.

Although the Mafia was a protection racket that took its percentage on practically every transaction made in the island, it remained a force of law and order — its own law and its own order.

Sicilians had to pay a double tax, the first to the government to subsidise the official police and the official judges, the second to the Mafia to maintain its police and judges.

For the first time, the Nazis introduced the factory methods of the conveyor belt to the murder of the condemned masses, who were branded with numbers as if they were industrial products.

The ledgers of their murders were like a census, which logged a serial number and name, date and place of birth, profession and last address, grounds for execution and its date, and any comments.

The weight of gold taken from their extracted teeth, of hair shaven from women, the catalogue of stripped clothes, the time-sheets of the guards and the quantity of the pitiful supplies, all were recorded as if running a government department. This was the invention of the bureaucracy of terror.

In a world split into rival areas of influence — American, Russian, Chinese, and to a lesser extent, European — would-be conspirators have little difficulty in obtaining supplies of money and arms from a foreign power.

Get to know terror, lest it surprises you suddenly.

Enron = dead and gone. But how?

ENRON is now history and Power Failure, by Mimi Swartz with Sherron Watkins, is the inside story of the company's collapse.

Watkins became a household name as the Enron whistleblower and was named along with two others as one of Time magazine's 2002 Persons of the Year. A sampler from the book:

Enron Gas Services was a meritocracy — no special dispensation for the deadwood, no sentimental attachments to people who didn't "add value", in company parlance. Skilling had brought along a lot of concepts from McKinsey — "loose/tight" for free thinking and strict controls, for instance — but the Performance Review Committee, or PRC, was the most crucial import for building the kind of organisation he wanted.

Rebecca Mark understood the power of signs and symbols. Circling the globe on Enron's behalf, she became a devotee of mystical priests and shamans, who all told her, in one way or another, that her destiny was to bring light into the world. She was featured prominently in a 1996 Fortune cover story titled "Women, Sex & Power".

Eventually, Enron employees came up with a different name for their company: The Bizarre Social Experiment. This company was forever reorganising, so no one ever really knew for whom they were working or what, exactly, they were supposed to be doing.

The question for Enron, as always, was how to present the news. Nor surprisingly, executives at Enron wanted to say as little as possible.

Andersen had just been down this path with Waste Management and Sunbeam, clients accused of cooking their books. Andersen, still smarting from those two revelations, urged Enron to come clean.

Depending on the compassion level of the various managers — that is, how much time they gave their employees to clear out — some floors looked hit by smart bombs, the kind that vapourised people in their tracks. People left drawers open, apples half eaten, coffee cups half full.

White boards held calculations that would never be completed. Laptops and Palm Pilots lay abandoned, their passwords cancelled.

Story of a big `E' that lay always a bit tilted, and at last got disintegrated.

(Books courtesy: Landmark, Chennai. www. landmarkonthenet.com)

Tailpiece

"Why is Women's Bill meeting with so much resistance?"

"Because they have too many reservations."

hindubusinessline@hotmail.com

D. Murali

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