Vegetarians are no longer in the majority in India.

In a country whose religions and economy encouraged a vegetarian lifestyle there has been a huge change.

Economic growth can be attributed with raising the living standards of Indians as well as their expectations to indulge in more Western habits.

Food in India was once a symbol of tradition. Now food is a symbol of status.

Yes, even though there are some 300 million vegetarians here, in the new affluent urban India, meat has become a status symbol. In the U.S. vegetarianism is a lifestyle choice. In India, once, it wasn’t even an “ism” — it was just the way some of us were brought up for generations, a part of our cultural DNA.

The impact of all this meat eating on the environment is posing a whole new set of problems.

Rising incidents of heart disease aside, pollution and pharmaceutical toxicity need to be addressed to keep us all safe.

TB that resists antibiotic treatment is causing problems in India.

Over crowded living conditions, poor hygiene, ill-informed medical staff are and over use of antibiotics are fueling the already rampant problem.

The risk of drug resistant disease becoming pandemic is one of the Greatest concerns of the World Health Organization.

The problem of evolving TB drug resistance has been brewing for years. In the early 1990s, multidrug-resistant TB began spreading in New York City, abetted by homelessness, prison outbreaks and HIV. Aggressive identification and treatment of these cases, including the direct observation of patients taking their pills, snuffed out that epidemic.

In 2005, extensively drug-resistant TB — strains untreatable with the three first-line drugs and several second-choice medications — cropped up in the South African province of Kwazulu-Natal, again abetted by HIV, which devastates immune defenses.