Eideard

Bollywood is to make its first film about the childhood of Jesus.

Director Singeetham Srinivasa Rao said his production will be narrated in four languages and feature an all-Indian cast of child actors and seven devotional songs.

Producer Konda Krishnam Raju said that the film focuses on the childhood of Jesus, a contrast with other movies that depict the later years. “This is the first presentation of this type in Bollywood history,” he said.

While the movie has special significance for Christians, it is “intended for a global audience,” Rao said.

Christians in India number 24 million, or about 2.3 per cent of the country’s population.

Religious Indian films have traditionally used child actors to highlight the “innocence, sanctity and divinity” of religious figures, the director said. Rao’s film will follow that tradition, using the child actors to depict adult characters as well as children.

American makeup artist Christien Tinsley, who earned an Academy Award nomination for his work on The Passion of the Christ, will also be involved in the film.

Aditya Productions plans to release the movie next year in English and three Indian languages – Telugu, Hindi and Malayalam. South Indian star Pawan Kalyan will narrate the Telugu and Malayalam versions, while other well known actors will narrate the English and Hindi versions, the filmmakers said.

You can be assured that questions of youth and sex will be handled with the same innocence and gentleness as any Hindu film. And that won’t make the least little bit of difference to American fundamentalist hypocrites.

Har!

Endorsing vaccines as the world’s most cost-effective public health measure, Bill and Melinda Gates say that their foundation will more than double its spending on them over the next decade, to at least $10 billion.

The change could save the lives of as many as eight million children by 2020, Mr. Gates calculated. He said he hoped his gift would inspire other charities and donor nations to do the same…

For starters, Mr. Gates wants to make sure that 90 percent of the world’s children get shots for routine childhood diseases like measles, diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus. Right now, almost 80 percent do. But with 134 million children born each year, it is a constant struggle to keep up, and efforts can be interrupted by factors like war, natural disasters, bad roads and corrupt officials.

Then he assumes that two new vaccines against rotavirus and pneumococcal disease, which are major killers of malnourished children, are adopted as routine immunizations in most poor countries and reach 80 percent of all children by 2020.

Even in wealthy countries, the introduction of any new vaccine can be tricky because of bureaucratic and logistical delays and because unexpected rumors can spring up, like the persistent one that polio vaccine is a plot to sterilize Muslim girls…

Mr. Gates has criticized many wealthy nations for giving what he considers too little to foreign aid. On what he described as a “list of shame” in the annual letter he released this week, he noted that the United States is last on the list of 22 wealthy nations when aid is measured as a percentage of GDP.

However, Italy recently cut its foreign aid in half, which will drop it to the bottom of next year’s list, and while at Davos, Mr. Gates took a jab at Italy’s famously wealthy and vain premier, Silvio Berlusconi, telling a German newspaper, “Rich people spend a lot more money on their own problems, like baldness, than they do to fight malaria.”

Rumors in the USA are mostly confined to Republican/Libertarian cheapskates who hate to contribute to anything – including children’s health – that might diminish their personal wealth. And, of course, the religious nutball set who can come up with a different heretical plot for every day of the week.

Indonesians have paid tribute to Barack Obama on the eve of his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize. A statue of the U.S. President, who lived in Jakarta, has been unveiled in a park in the Indonesian capital.

The almost life-size statue depicts a 10-year-old Obama, wearing school-boy shorts with his outstretched hand holding up a butterfly…

“We imagined Barry, and we thought the story would be inspirational to all Indonesian children that when you dream big, they can come true,” said Ron Mullers, chairman of the nonprofit group Friends of Obama.

Next month, the citizens of Montana unveil a statue of Dick Cheney as a 10-year-old schoolboy – pulling the wings off a fly.

LIFE Magazine

For parents too stretched to make sure their offspring are perfectly turned out at all times, it may just be the scientific cover they’ve been waiting for.

They will now be able to answer the disapproving tuts of their more fastidious friends by pointing to research which gives biological backing to the old adage that the more germs a child is exposed to during early childhood, the better their immune system in later life

Researchers from the School of Medicine at the University of California found that being too clean could impair the skin’s ability to heal. The San Diego-based team discovered that normal bacteria that live on the skin trigger a pathway that helps prevent inflammation when we get hurt. These bugs dampen down overactive immune responses which can cause cuts and grazes to swell, or lead to rashes, according to research published in the online edition of Nature Medicine…

The pressure group Parents Outloud, which campaigns to stop children being “mollycoddled” and “oversanitised” by health and safety regulations, welcomed the research. “Hopefully research like this will help parents realise that it’s natural and healthy for children to get outdoors and get mucky and that it doesn’t do their health any harm,” said a spokeswoman, Margaret Morrissey.

At last, I realize why I came down with Mono in my high school years. It was after we moved into a home which actually had a hot water heater and all-over bathing wasn’t limited to Saturday night and heating endless buckets of water on the stovetop.