12B
Wednesday, January 13, 1988/University Daily Kansan
Egg war fought in India
The Associated Press
NEW DELHI, India — What is fun, tasty, resembles Pope John Paul II's balding pat and won't cause boils no matter what the legend says? An egg, say those who want India's millions of vegetarians to eat more of them.
"You can call it a crusade, a sort of holy war against the vegetarian Indian tradition of not eating eggs," said Surinder Singh Rekhi, local chairman of the National Egg Coordination Committee.
The committee presents puppet shows in remote villages, depicting tales from Hindu mythology while a singer engels the virtues of eggs.
"Eggs! Eggs for taste! Eggs for fun! Eggs are good for everyone!" g goes a merry jingle heard by millions of Indians over the radio every day.
In a recent issue of the committee's journal was a photograph of John Paul II, showing him without his skullcap during his 1986 visit to India. "Pope's pate is a good egg," the caption said.
At the root of much Indian resistance to eating eggs is a belief among traditional Hindus that an egg is a living being.
Among other common beliefs: eatings eggs causes pimples, boils and jaundice, and increases the sex drive in dangerous level, especially in hot weather.
Hoping to change the image, mem
bers of the committee have chased after marathon runners with baskets of hard-boiled eggs, and carried them as gifts to such varied sites as swimming pools, remote villages, schools and vegetarian homes.
"Some places we get the carrot,
some places we get the stick," said
You can call it a crusade, a sort of holy war against the vegetarian Indian tradition of not eating eggs.'
- Surinder Singh Rekhi of India's National Egg Coordination Committee
Rekhi, a former engineer with an American oil company who now is a full-time oil farmer.
A group of vegetarians sued the committee for claiming eggs were vegetarian. The committee argued that eating eggs does not violate Hindu religious beliefs and the case was thrown out of court.
The committee, to which 15,000 poultry farmers belong, spends about $140,000 a year advertising its product.
India is the world's fifth-largest producer of eggs, outranked only by China, the Soviet Union, United States and Japan. The committee and government say the poultry
industry, which provides 1 million jobs, has great potential if more of India's 780 million people can be persuaded to eat eggs.
Prices are low because demand seldom exceeds the supply of 15.9 billion eggs produced in this country every year. A dozen eggs sell for about 46 cents in New Delhi, less than half the price in New York.
"It is a hard battle, but worth fighting. One day when more and more Indians turn to eggs, the egg producers can make solid profit," Mr. Kang, managing editor of Poultry Reporter, New Delhi's only egg magazine.
Rekhi is a Sikh, and members of the sect generally eat eggs
To counter the arguments that eggs live, and that they play fast and loose with the libido, "we are telling people that nowadays 99 percent of the eggs are non-fertile," he said. "They are what we call mechanical eggs. I have 80,000 birds, but not a single male bird."
Resistance from vegetarians also is tough to crack.
"All this talk about egg being vegetarian is just a trick. I am not going to fall into it," said Rita Mohan, a New Delhi housewife.
Customers boycotted a Bombay grocer who stocked eggs, in the belief that other food in the store was being contaminated, the egg committee reported.
The Associated Press
TAMPA, Fla. — A self-propagating computer program is spreading like an electronic "virus," threatening to damage systems ranging from that at IBM's regional headquarters to a computer club's floppy disks.
Disks zapped by program 'virus'
"It kind of creeps up on you," said Jeff White, president of the Tampa Amiga User's Group, whose membership was infiltrated by the small rogue program.
A similar virus affected the vast network of computers at International Business Machines Corp.'s regional headquarters in Tampa last month.
Virus is computer jargon for a self-propagating set of orders devised by a saboteur and automatically copied from one computer disk to another, gradually taking up more memory space.
A virus programmed to wipe out thousands of files in May, on Friday
the 13th, was inserted into Hebrew University computers in Jerusalem, said Yisrael Radai, a senior programmer at the university's computer center.
"It is the most devastating thing we've ever come across," Radai said.
The Tampa Tribune reported Sunday that experts did not yet know what, if any, damage the virus can cause to previously stored programs or stored information. But it quoted one expert as saying a version of the virus was similar to the one found in Israel
White said the program was copied onto more than 20 of his floppy disks before he discovered it. And by then, the program had spread to the disks of many of the club's members via regular disk-of-the-month distribution.
In Israel, university computer experts devised two programs, called "immune" and "unvirus."
which tell users whether their disks have been infected and apply an antivirus program.
At IBM, the virus took the form of an electronic chain letter that grew so large it slowed the company's computerized message system. A holiday message promised to draw a Christmas tree on the screen if someone would type the word "Christmas tree." The program kept repeating itself and spreading to other computers in the network.
The IBM problem was stopped before it spread to customers' computers, according to spokesman Frank Gobes.
"We haven't determined where it came from," he said.
IBM's Information Network in Tampa serves as a hub for a large electronic system that is linked to machines from San Diego to Boston and from Miami to Seattle.
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