Book Review: South and Southeast Asia: India and World Politics: Krishna Menon's View of the World

Author(s):  
Neville Maxwell
2021 ◽  

In this volume, prominent anthropologists, public health physicians, and psychiatrists respond sympathetically but critically to the Movement for Global Mental Health (MGMH), which seeks to export psychiatry throughout the world. They question some of its fundamental assumptions: the idea that "mental disorders" can clearly be identified; that they are primarily of biological origin; that the world is currently facing an "epidemic" of them; that the most appropriate treatments for them normally involve psycho-pharmaceutical drugs; and that local or indigenous therapies are of little interest or importance for treating them. Instead, the contributors argue that labeling mental suffering as "illness" or "disorder" is often highly problematic; that the countries of South and Southeast Asia have abundant, though non- psychiatric, resources for dealing with it; that its causes are often social and biographical; and that many non-pharmacological therapies are effective for dealing with it. In short, they advocate a thoroughgoing mental health pluralism.


2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Liemberger

One of the major challenges facing water utilities around the world but especially in Low and Middle Income Countries (LAMIC) is the high level of water losses either through physical losses (leakage) or commercial losses (customer meter under-registration and theft of water in various forms). This difference between the amount of water put into the distribution system and the amount of water billed to consumers is known as “Non-Revenue Water” (NRW). Levels of NRW in South and Southeast Asia are among the highest in the world. This paper will give an update of the general NRW situation in the various countries and the ongoing remediation measures.


Author(s):  
Stephen Davies

In the godowns, shipping offices, chandleries and dockyards a medley of voice did business in a multiplicity of languages and dialects. The goods they handled, shipped in from all over the world, represented as many ways of seeing and being, eating and dressing, living and dying. Yet there were disconnections as well as connections in this interface of interfaces. This chapter describes how the colonial government set apart seamen of different ethnic backgrounds by issuing different sets of regulations for seamen’s boarding houses according to whether they were lascars (Indians, Malays and others from South and Southeast Asia), Chinese or Westerners. Deepening the divides was the strong native-place and dialect-basis principle under which Chinese boarding houses were organized, indicating a certain degree of segregation among the Chinese themselves. The separateness is also shown in the different church missions, which ministered to seamen according to their ethnic origins.


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