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Postage stamps are a significant visual text of an issuing state. In 1947, British India was divided into independent states of India and Pakistan. The successive new regimes in both countries got the freedom to design, print, and circulate the official visual iconography through postage stamps as a symbol of sovereignty for its citizens and the world community. This article explores how India and Pakistan visualized the narrative of national identity and discourse on development through postage stamps in the first two decades of their independence. The article does not intend to retell the narrative of the postcolonial nation-building process in the subcontinent. Instead, the objective is to introduce postage stamps as a primary visual resource for exploring the contours of public history of India and Pakistan by arguing that stamps retain its importance as excellent visual archives for postcolonial scholarly analysis in the age of new media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To report epidemiology of uveitis in a tertiary-care referral institute in North India. Methods: Hospital records of patients with uveitis between June 2011 and September 2014 were retrospectively analyzed. Results: Of the 1912 patients, 56.64% were males. Anterior uveitis (43.04%) was the most common manifestation followed by posterior uveitis (24.58%), panuveitis (16.21%), and intermediate uveitis (10.66%). Specific etiologies could be ascertained in 60.56%. Tuberculosis (22.9%) was the most common infectious and HLA-B27-associated uveitis (9.46%) among non-infectious causes. Conclusions: There is a trend towards a decrease in idiopathic etiologies of uveitis. Tuberculosis remains the most common infectious etiology in North India [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little attention has been paid to the problem of the spread of vancomycin resistant enterococci (VRE) in India. Between August 2002 to March 2003, faecal and urine samples of patients from various wards of the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, India, were screened for vancomycin resistance. 36 VRE were isolated (18 Enterococcus gallinarum, 9 E. casseliflavus, 7 E. faecium and 2 E. faecalis). These isolates were characterized as low-, moderate- and high-level resistant strains by phenotypic as well as genotypic methods such as minimum inhibitory concentration determination, polymerase chain reaction assays, sequencing of PCR products and multiple sequence alignment of van genes. Correlations established between these results and the vancomycin resistance markers were designated as vanA (783 bp), vanB (635 bp), vanC1 (822 bp) and vanC2 (484 bp) according to the findings of earlier workers as well as comparison with existing databases. Prolonged hospital stay and vancomycin were important risk factors for both VRE UTI and colonization. Renal dialysis, renal failure, prior aminoglycoside and third generation cephalosporin were the other significant factors for VRE UTI. The study also highlights the importance of screening for VRE in clinical samples and recommends the institution of control measures to prevent the further spread of VRE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]