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Till 1955 Father and myself (the two males in our family at Muthukur) brushed our teeth with freshly cut neem sticks. And the umpteen females of our family used our leftover charcoal ash.
It was only after I went to my university and bought the Japanese edition of Jenkins and White that I came across the universal copyright symbol:
And after I went to IIT KGP as a teacher I heard the infamous word Patent...infamous because you ought to have a patent or two if you want that coveted promotion these days. I had patented nothing except my genius, like Oscar Wilde (I didn't even copyright my celebrated Lecture Notes with RSS). Still I escaped by a hairbreadth. Of course Einstein started his career as clerk in a Swiss patent office. And one of my son's classmates (I mean one classmate of my son...not of one of my sons) joined a firm as a patent attorney after doing his masters in industrial chemistry.
One of my friends writes English poetry and publishes them as books and booklets periodically at his own expense and prices them at Rs 120 like. And tries to sell them to his colleagues...like me, he is also a physics guy. I however don't price my self-published Ishani booklets nor try to sell them...I give them away...all I got for them is a 3-day-old bouquet that withered in two more days. I asked my poet-friend why he doesn't blog his verses. And he said he is afraid that someone would steal them and sell them and cheat him of his money.
Towards the end of my stay at KGP I heard of what they call IPR (short for Intellectual Property Rights); and that America is said to be damn angry with us for not respecting its IPR. So we now have at KGP the Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law...Rajiv Gandhi is still there, not replaced by my favorite Damoji...after all, like me he has no stellar dynasty behind him. All I can boast of is my acronym GPS which is indispensable if you want to navigate even on my Hyderabad Highways.
I cordially detest all these business tactics...I like our good old Bostonian, Yella (itself short for Yellapragada Subba Rao):
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2012/07/yella.html
Our Supreme Court is on my side. Recently an American firm renowned for its patented cancer drugs tried to patent in India a new drug they made with a cosmetic change of one immaterial atom in a complex molecule claiming it as an altogether different product and that the generic form of the original drug shouldn't be allowed to be marketed in India by an Indian company. The American drug costs Rs 50,000 per month for the stricken patient, while its home-made Indian version costs only Rs 500 per month.
There was along-drawn court battle over the infringement of IPR and stuff, at the end of which our SC ruled that the Americans can go boil their heads and drugs.
And I happen to know all about the costly cervical cancer as you are aware.
And our good particle physicist says that American firms are preparing to patent our weather forecasts after patenting modified versions of our seeds and soil. This, as you know, means that our farmers, who are prone to suicides as it is after going broke, will have to pay through their noses to know if they are going to have a good or feeble or bad monsoon...it is a different matter that all weather predictions have a huge variance, not advertised boldly:
...ask Vandana Shiva...
...Posted by Ishani
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"If they control seed, they control food. They know it,
it is strategic. It's more powerful than bombs, it's more powerful than
guns. This is the best way to control the populations of the world."
...Dr Vandana Shiva, Physicist and internationally renowned activist
Till 1955 Father and myself (the two males in our family at Muthukur) brushed our teeth with freshly cut neem sticks. And the umpteen females of our family used our leftover charcoal ash.
Then there arrived in our market packets labeled "Nanjangud Monkey Brand Black Tooth Powder" in affordable paper-packets. And all of us switched to this salty charcoal ash with gusto and relish. It had a bite as well as bark. This Nanjangud thing is celebrating its centenary, I am told.
Each packet had a @TM inscribed on the monkey figuring on it. And I asked Father what this TM stands for and he said it is short for Trade Mark. I didn't pursue the matter further since all I was interested in was the expansion of TM. For, we were then half a dozen intellectuals in our school who competed with each other about expansions of various abbreviations...let their meanings go to puppies.
There are so many indeed. At random I can pick up those that start with P that I know of...these are but drops in the ocean:
PA, PAN, PBX, PC, PCB, pdf, PE, PET, PEN, PF, PG, PGW, pH, Phy, PIN, PJ, PL480, PM, PO, POP, PP, PR, PRO, PS, PPS, PT, PTE, PTI, PTO, PV...
It was only after I went to my university and bought the Japanese edition of Jenkins and White that I came across the universal copyright symbol:
And after I went to IIT KGP as a teacher I heard the infamous word Patent...infamous because you ought to have a patent or two if you want that coveted promotion these days. I had patented nothing except my genius, like Oscar Wilde (I didn't even copyright my celebrated Lecture Notes with RSS). Still I escaped by a hairbreadth. Of course Einstein started his career as clerk in a Swiss patent office. And one of my son's classmates (I mean one classmate of my son...not of one of my sons) joined a firm as a patent attorney after doing his masters in industrial chemistry.
One of my friends writes English poetry and publishes them as books and booklets periodically at his own expense and prices them at Rs 120 like. And tries to sell them to his colleagues...like me, he is also a physics guy. I however don't price my self-published Ishani booklets nor try to sell them...I give them away...all I got for them is a 3-day-old bouquet that withered in two more days. I asked my poet-friend why he doesn't blog his verses. And he said he is afraid that someone would steal them and sell them and cheat him of his money.
Towards the end of my stay at KGP I heard of what they call IPR (short for Intellectual Property Rights); and that America is said to be damn angry with us for not respecting its IPR. So we now have at KGP the Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law...Rajiv Gandhi is still there, not replaced by my favorite Damoji...after all, like me he has no stellar dynasty behind him. All I can boast of is my acronym GPS which is indispensable if you want to navigate even on my Hyderabad Highways.
I cordially detest all these business tactics...I like our good old Bostonian, Yella (itself short for Yellapragada Subba Rao):
...Subbarao's memory has been obscured by the achievements of others and
his failure to promote his own interests. Part of the reason for his
obscurity was that Subbarao did not market his work, or himself. A
patent attorney was once astonished to find that he had not taken any of
the steps that scientists everywhere consider routine for linking their
name to their handiwork. He never granted interviews to the press; he
never made the rounds of the academies which apportion accolades; nor did he go on lecture tours...
Our Supreme Court is on my side. Recently an American firm renowned for its patented cancer drugs tried to patent in India a new drug they made with a cosmetic change of one immaterial atom in a complex molecule claiming it as an altogether different product and that the generic form of the original drug shouldn't be allowed to be marketed in India by an Indian company. The American drug costs Rs 50,000 per month for the stricken patient, while its home-made Indian version costs only Rs 500 per month.
There was along-drawn court battle over the infringement of IPR and stuff, at the end of which our SC ruled that the Americans can go boil their heads and drugs.
And I happen to know all about the costly cervical cancer as you are aware.
And our good particle physicist says that American firms are preparing to patent our weather forecasts after patenting modified versions of our seeds and soil. This, as you know, means that our farmers, who are prone to suicides as it is after going broke, will have to pay through their noses to know if they are going to have a good or feeble or bad monsoon...it is a different matter that all weather predictions have a huge variance, not advertised boldly:
...ask Vandana Shiva...
...Posted by Ishani
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