SOCIAL MEDIA CHALLENGES MAINSTREAM ENGLISH MEDIA WITH NEWS BROADCAST ON SOCIAL MEDIA.

On February 10, The Washington Post published a headline that got a good amount of attention: "The U.S. government is poised to withdraw longstanding warnings about cholesterol."

Every five years, the Department of Health and Human Services, along with the Department of Agriculture, issues "Dietary Guidelines for Americans," a federal publication that has far-reaching implications on what we eat. The guidelines affect everything from the way companies can advertise their products, to what's in your child's school lunch, to the diet advice offered up by nearly every doctor and nutritionist in the country.

Remember the food pyramid from when you were growing up? Today's iteration, MyPlate, relies on these guidelines as well. They're also the basis for the information on nutrition facts labels on just about all food packaging.

So you can see why so many people are anxiously awaiting the 2015 update.

The 112-pagereport from 2010 included 23 recommendations for the general population and sixadditional recommendations for specific population groups, such as pregnantwomen. The three major goals emphasized were:

The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government's efforts towards making India a better place for business might have started showing results, with India jumping 12 spots in the World Bank's rankings in terms of ease of doing business. For 2016, India has been ranked 130th on a list of 189 countries, compared with a ranking of 142nd this year, the steepest rise seen by the country in recent years.The rise was primarily on account of improvement in two areas - ease of starting a business and securing an electricity connection."In 2014, the government of India launched an ambitious programme of regulatory reform, aimed at making it easier to do business. Spanning a range of areas measured by 'Doing Business', the programme represents a great deal of effort to create a more business-friendly environment, particularly in Delhi and Mumbai," said the report, titled Doing Business 2016, Measuring Regulatory Quality and Efficiency.

Rukmini Bhaya Nair, in her recent article in NDTV has posed a question to scientists as to why they were not returning their awards when a lot of writers and other ’artistes’ were returning theirs.

At the very outset, to even suggest that not returning awards was akin to either being apathetic  to someone’s killing, or not having courage to speak up is very rash.  The entire structure of her argument stands on a very shaky foundation –  to first assume that this is the worst time for civic rights in the history of post-independent India without establishing it with any objective evidence, and then to try and win people with a  ‘you are either with us or against us’ logic.

Before we move on, I want to say this – in a recent debate on Times Now, Maya Krishna Rao angrily asked Anupam Kher and Arnab Goswami not to dictate to the writers when they should or should not be returning their awards (when they quite reasonably asked her why none of these people returned their awards during the earlier riots and incidents). Now, turning the tables, how would it be if a scientist said ‘’ Please don’t dictate to the scientists when they should or should not speak up’’?

With that childishness out of the way, here is my  broad response to Ms. Nair.