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NOVEMBER 2018

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EVERYDAY HEROES: SAVIOUR BOY ...................... 18

THE #METOO REVOLUTION .................................. 30

LIFE’S LIKE THAT ................................................... 50

COMMON DREAMS DECODED ............................. 102

BE A WORD WIZARD ............................................. 157

PAGE 62

Children show us the way

IF KIDS RULED THEWORLD

STOP DIABETES NOWPAGE 88

NEIL GAIMAN ON WHY BOOKS AND LIBRARIES MATTER

PAGE 82

BONUS READ

FINDING MY MOTHERPAGE 134

WHAT PERSONAL BANKERS WON'T TELL YOU

PAGE 56

Cover Story

62 IF KIDS RULED THE WORLD Children share their unique plans for the future.

Classic Read

76 NOW ... WHILE THERE'S TIME A father learns to embrace the chaos

of parenthood. ED BARTLEY

82 DARE TO DAYDREAM Everything changes when we read. NEIL GAIMAN

88 DIABETES: WHAT'S NEW, WHAT'S NEXT The latest preventives and treatments explained.

LISA FIELDS WITH GAGAN DHILLON

102 COMMON DREAMS DECODED What your subconscious is really trying

to tell you. MONICA HEISEY

Drama in Real Life

106 PINNED TO THE EARTH Trapped, with only a pocket knife. HELEN SIGNY

Kindness of Strangers

114 AN ERA OF GOODNESS A lost suitcase and a new-found friendship.

DR D. C. SRIVASTAVA

118 THE CAPITAL OF PLAY Fun and learning at Lego House. LISA FITTERMAN

126 ROBOTS RULE Technology permeates every aspect of life

in Seoul, South Korea. GARY SHTEYNGART

Bonus Read

134 FINDING MY MOTHER An adoptee attempts the impossible. ROBERT KIENER

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ContentsNOVEMBER 2018

REGULAR FEATURES

10 Dear Reader

14 Over to You

40 Good News

48 News from the World of Medicine

163 Studio

164 Quotable Quotes

Everyday Heroes

18 Saviour Boy An 11-year-old rescues his

drowning family. NAOREM ANUJA

VOICES & VIEWS

Department Of Wit

28 Four-Wheel Dives Cars can say a lot about their

owners. ROZ WARREN

In My Opinion

30 The #MeToo (R)Evolution When women take matters in

their own hands. MIHIRA SOOD

You Be The Judge

34 The Case of the Mosquito-Bitten Worker

Are companies responsible for

protecting employees against

insects? VICKI GLEMBOCKI

Finish This Sentence

42 “My favourite one-liner is:”T

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READER FAVOURITES

12 Humour in Uniform

22 See the World Differently

26 All in a Day's Work

36 It Happens Only in India

38 Points to Ponder

50 Life’s Like That

72 As Kids See It

81 Laugh Lines

97 Shocking Notes

98 Laughter, the Best Medicine

105 Quickipedia

156 Quiz

157 Word Power

P. | 28

P. | 18

Vol. 59 | No. 11NOVEMBER 2018

4 | NOVEMBER 2018 | READER’S DIGEST

Total number of pages in this issue of

Reader’s Digest, including covers: 166

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ART OF LIVING

43 To Fail Without Feeling Like A Failure NATASHA BADHWAR

Health

46 Alcohol Reality Check SAMANTHA RIDEOUT WITH

ABHA SRIVASTAVA

Food

54 Eat The Rainbow FIONA HICKS

Money

56 Smart Investor Alert DEVANGSHU DATTA

Family

59 15 Fibs Teenagers Tell ANNE ROUMANOFF

Home

60 Inside Story KATHAKOLI DASGUPTA

AND SASWATI SARKAR

WHO KNEW?

150 13 Surprising Innovations from the First World War JACOPO DELLA QUERCIA

154 How to Make it as a Fossil JOHN PICKRELL

Me & My Shelf

159 Devika Rangachari’s favourites

Entertainment

161 Our Top Picks of the Month

P. | 54

COVER BY KESHAV KAPIL

P. | 161

Vol. 59 | No. 11NOVEMBER 2018


Editor-in-Chief Aroon Purie

Group Editorial Director Raj Chengappa

© 2016 Trusted Media Brands, Inc. (Reader’s Digest editorial material). © 2016 Living Media India Ltd. (Living Media editorial material). All rights reserved throughout the world. Reproduction in any manner, in whole or part, in English or other languages, is prohibited. Printed and published by Manoj Sharma on behalf of Living Media India Limited. Printed at Thomson Press India Limited, 18–35 Milestone, Delhi–Mathura Road, Faridabad–121007, (Haryana) and at A-9, Industrial Complex, Maraimalai Nagar, District Kancheepuram–603209, (Tamil Nadu). Published at K–9, Connaught Circus, New Delhi–110001. Editor: Sanghamitra Chakraborty (responsible for selection of news).

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VOL. 59 NO. 11

NOVEMBER 2018

Editor Sanghamitra Chakraborty

Deputy Editor Abha Srivastava

Assistant Editors Ishani Nandi, Suchismita Ukil

Contributing Editor Blessy Augustine

Editorial Coordinator Khushboo Thakur

Senior Art Director Sadhana Moolchandani

Assistant Art Director Keshav Kapil

Production Gajendra Bhatt

Narendra Singh

Dear ReaderChildren Get It

READING ABOUT THE EXPERIENCES of women coming out with their horror stories in the context of #MeToo, one can only feel despair at the adult

world. How did we get here? Misogyny, and the abuse of power and authority existed much before we found the words to describe them. Rampant and widespread, these were considered normal, until quite recently. Revelations of the sordid accounts of sexual misconduct and predatory behaviour in the wake of this massive pushback campaign (read In My Opinion on p 30), if only in a mostly urban context, have compelled many of us to rethink what we knew about grown-ups. The backlash unleashed by patriarchy, with intimidation and harassment, has only lowered our expectations further.

With adults having ruined the world in so many ingenious ways—look around and you will know what I mean—children remain our only hope. This November, we celebrate Children’s Day with a cover story featuring bright young minds, who share their plans on not just how to make the world more equal, just and compassionate, but run it better in general. ‘If Kids Ruled The World’ (p 62) brings together a wonderful bunch of ideas, through which children, aged 10 to 15, exhort adults not to lose their way.

Neil Gaiman is an author who has won the hearts of millions of readers throughout the world. In ‘Dare to Daydream’ (p 82) he tells us how he could not have become who he is today, if it were not for books and libraries. Read his illuminating piece, illustrated stunningly by Chris Riddell—it is truly a treat!

Natasha Badhwar, author and columnist, who focuses on her own experiences of raising children, writes the warm and touching ‘To Fail Without Feeling Like A Failure’ (p 43). Find author Devika Rangachari’s picks of the best books for children in Me and My Shelf. Please do not miss ‘Saviour Boy’ (p 18), the story of a heroic 11-year-old, who rescued his mother and aunt during the Assam floods.

Of course, there are our reader favourites and regular features—the humour sections, Drama in Real Life (p 106), Kindness of Strangers (p 114), Bonus Read (p 134) and our Art of Living section, full of great tips and advice for better living.Diwali is almost here—may you all have a wonderful festival of lights! P

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Send an email to [email protected]


“Careful, now. I don’t like the looks of this.”

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WHILE SERVING in Vietnam, my friend and his buddies were hunkered down in a mud-filled hole that had been dug into the side of a berm [an artificial ridge] and covered with lumber for protection. Their one extravagance: a bare light bulb they’d hung from the ‘ceiling’. One guy was reading a newspaper article from back home about a congressional investigation into why some troops were living in relative luxury. The guy put down the paper, turned to my friend and said, “Well, there goes the light bulb.” JAMES VALOUCH

AS A. J. AND HIS PLATOON were marching, their sergeant slipped and tumbled down a ravine. The irate sergeant got back up amid guffaws and barked, “Those who laughed, get down and give me 20!” A. J. and some others fell to the ground quickly and did their push-ups. Meanwhile, the sergeant glared at the others. “As for the rest of you, get down and give me 40 for lying!” S. C. v i a m a i l

Humour in UniformHumour in Uniform

Reader’s Digest will pay for your funny anecdote or photo in any of our humour sections. Post it to the editorial address,

or email: [email protected]


TEACHERS WHO INSPIREThe reader-contributed article on teachers [‘From the Heart, Not the Book’] touched my heart. Teachers play an important role in their students’ lives; it is they who make a subject interesting or dull and help in shaping personalities.

I understood this when I started teaching. I had a shy backbencher in my class who needed special atten-tion. One day I loudly praised him in class for acing a spelling test, and his classmate accused him of cheating. As I looked into his eyes, I saw de-nial, mixed with apprehension—as if his life hung on my next few words. When I said I believed he was hon-est, the relief in those young eyes was my greatest reward. A few days later when I was leaving for home, I saw a tiny figure standing in the scorching summer sun just to greet me with folded hands, without a word. USHA DUBEY, D e o g h a r, Jh a r k h a n d

Usha Dubey gets this month’s ‘Write & Win’ prize of `1,000. —EDs


Over to YouFEEDBACK ON OUR SEPTEMBER ISSUE

AFFECTING ETERNITYUrmila Chowdhury’s remi-niscence ‘Why I Became a Teacher’ reminds me of a saying by Henry Adams: “A teacher affects eternity. He can never tell where his influence stops.” The pro-cess of teaching involves enabling students to dis-cover and gain knowledge. Only exemplary teachers can stand as ideals and leave a lasting imprint on their students. As William Arthur Ward said, “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” DR VRINDA MENON, T h r i s s u r

LAUGHTER THERAPYThe article ‘Brilliant and Funny’ touches upon how a sense of humour helped Stephen Hawking not only explain scientific facts but also en-dure his terminal illness. This also brought home memory of perhaps the greatest humourist of our time, Art Buchwald. He was separated from his mother soon after birth. As his father had fallen on bad times, Buch-wald was brought up in foster homes. Though painful childhood memories and the absence of a mother’s love

WRITE &

WIN!

haunted him throughout his life, he vowed to make people laugh as his life’s mission. K. NATARAJAN, Ma d u ra i

beaches? Were they supposed to clear the coals from the beaches? If not, are they supposed to highlight it as a warning and, if so, was it done? The answers will decide whether there was negligence. MEETA AGARWAL, Ko l k at a

LIVE AND LET LIVE‘I Will Persevere’, the sacred promise made by Zainab Priya Dala is no less than an oath. Her resolve towards ex-pressing herself freely deserves to be saluted. Bold writers need to stand up to religious fundamentalism, threat-ening many societies across the world. The deadly assault on the writer and subsequent physical and mental trauma could not shake her confi-dence. JAGDISH CHANDER, Ja l a n d h a r

LITTLE DROPS OF WATERThe column ‘Be A Conservationist’ hits home. In today’s fast-moving con-sumerist culture, the use of packaging has increased exponentially, making up about 40 per cent of the global plastic waste. One can’t avoid this but one can mitigate the damage. There is an urgent need for eco-friendly and recyclable substitutes. You can con-tribute by carrying a jute or cotton bag when you go shopping, actively refus-ing the polybag. Hopefully, others will be motivated to do the same. DHEERAJ K. SUTHAR, B i k a n e r

O V E R T O YO U


Write in at [email protected]. The best letters discuss RD articles, offer criticism, share ideas. Do include your phone number and postal address.

A JOB APPLICATIONRe: ‘Wanted: A Personal Assistant’

Madam Mary Cella,I am glad to accept your kind offer without the ‘date’ task, as I am a man and hence unsuitable. I am happy that for the task ‘have a baby’, you have mentioned child-rearing and wisely excluded childbearing.

Your requirement of the right candidate exercising for an hour daily and allowing you “to reap the benefits”, while selfish, shows how well you take care of your health.

P. S.: You have not mentioned the emoluments, so I will take it that you will offer me a blank cheque with your signature, if you find me fit for the job.

Yours, etc. M. V. APPARAO, Hy d e ra b a d

EMPATHIC HEALTH CARE It was good to read the well-arti- culated and informative article, ‘All About Safe Abortions’. As a society, we must recognize the rights of a woman over her body and life. Providing safe abortions in a regulated medical system would diminish the trauma she may likely face over an unwanted, unhealthy or risky pregnancy.

SMRUTI REKHA, D e l f t , Ne t h e r l a n d s

UNANSWERED QUESTIONSThe verdict [‘The Case of the Hot Coals in the Sand’] was based on “other outdoor recreational use”. However, a few questions arise: what is the maintenance liability of private


HEROESEVERYDAY

A brave 11-year-old jumps into a

raging river to rescue his family

Saviour Boy

EVERY MONSOON, rains flood Assam with unfailing regularity, claiming loved ones, homes and livelihoods. This year was no excep-tion. Heavy showers throughout India’s north-east regions caused the Brahmaputra to swell, leaving chaos in its wake.

On 5 September 2018, at around 1 p.m., 11-year-old Kamal Krishna Das stood patiently with his mother, Jitumoni Das and aunt, Meenakshi Das, on a ferry crossing the river. His grandmother was on her way to a pilgrimage and they had gone to south Guwahati to see her off. They were now headed home, located on the northern bank of the river, with little idea that their journey was about

to turn into a terrifying misadventure.The ferry—carrying 28 people—

was unusually slow that day. Still, passengers did not give it much thought, until they noticed the smoke. Terrified, they raised an alarm, but the operators assured them that everyone was safe. Mildly reassured, everyone fell back as the ferry moved on.

Halfway through the trip, the boat suddenly stopped. The operators still insisted that there was nothing to worry about: It was simply a case of trash jamming the engine. The passengers, already agitated by the smoke, felt fear setting in, and with the mounting panic, came anger. People began hurling abuse at the ferry operators, while others made

BY NAOREM ANUJA

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Kamal Krishna Das

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S AV I O U R B OY

frantic calls to loved ones. Kamal’s mum phoned his dad, and after a few words, handed it over to Kamal.

By then, the smoke from the engine had returned in thick, black clouds—the inky fumes blanketing the boat. The engine spluttered out and the vessel was now at the mercy of the river, tossed about by its powerful current like a toy. The distraught passengers started hail-ing a ferry boat floating past, but it continued steadily, ignoring their cries for help. Perhaps they feared that any attempt at a rescue would endanger the people on both boats.

As the ferry was pushed forward by the current, quite out of control, it became clear that they were headed straight for a seven-foot-wide pillar that was part of a water-supply struc-ture. With no engine, the ferry had no means of changing course. They were going to capsize—it seemed inevita-ble. With disaster imminent, a few men among the passengers climbed on to their motorcycles, and began jumping off the boat to try and cling to nearby structures before they crashed. But before they knew it, the ferry collided against the pillar with a sickening crunch, turning over and plunging all 28 souls overboard.

Caught in the midst of the furious river, Kamal’s mother first thought of

her child’s safety. Fearing for his life, she yelled out, urging him to swim ashore. Disoriented and scared, Kamal heard his mother’s voice and did as she asked. “I knew he would be able to save himself since he swims in the Brahmaputra … twice a week,” Jitumoni would tell The Times of India

much later. Thrashing his way towards the bank as hard as he could, Kamal, almost at the edge, turned to look back. That’s when he realized that his mother and aunt had not followed him. He remembered—his mother could not swim.

Kamal swerved back towards the crash site to reach his mum. “I was terrified that my mother would drown; my pehi [paternal aunt], I knew, can swim a bit,” he said. The violent, swirling river didn’t make it easy. “I didn’t see Ma at first. The cur-rents were very strong, but I was able to grab her hand. I knew that she was wearing a broken bangle and that’s how I was able to spot her hand,” Kamal explained.

Struggling in the water, Jitumoni was delirious. Speaking to Reader’s Digest, she said, “I wasn’t in my full senses. I didn’t realize that it was Kamal who had grabbed me and pulled me to the pillar. I remember feeling grateful, but it was only later that it struck me that it was my son who had saved me.”

Kamal was at

the river’s edge

when he

remembered—

his mother

could not swim.


I managed to grab her hand, but she pulled away, yelling that her baby would be swept away. It happened before I could do anything.” Kamrup’s deputy commissioner, Kamal Kumar Baishya confirmed that, luckily, the mother was able to grab her child with her dupatta and eventually reach the pillar. Soon, three boats arrived to rescue the stranded passengers.

Swimming since he was three years old, Kamal dreams of becoming a swimmer at the national level. With his father as his coach, he aims to one day swim across the Brahmaputra. Speaking about the harrowing experi-ence, he said, “The currents were very strong that day but I was not scared. When I spoke to deuta [father] over the phone, he told me that if some-thing bad happened, “keep swim-ming as fast as you can and help your mother and aunt; if possible help others too”. His words bolstered my courage.” Brimming with pride and love for her brave boy, Kamal’s mum simply said, “I owe him my life.”

Slowly, Kamal got his mother out of harm’s way, but he knew there was no time to rest. Diving back in, he fought against the current towards his aunt. “I had put Ma near the pillar, but I could see pehi struggling against the current, so I dived back in, grabbed her hand and pulled her to safety.”

With his mother and aunt now out of danger, Kamal could finally rest. As he took deep, gulping breaths to calm his racing heart, he looked towards the river, frothing and roiling power-fully, and noticed something strange. In an instant, he made sense of the dipping shapes—a woman cradling her baby was floundering in the water. Kamal recognized them as fellow pas-sengers on the ferry. The child was too small to swim and the mother was struggling to stay afloat.

Limbs weakened from fighting the current twice over, Kamal jumped into the water again, using every last bit of willpower to reach the desperate woman. “By the time I got there, the woman and her child were separated.

Kamal with his

mother Jitumoni

(right) and aunt

Meenakshi (left)

SEETHE WORLD ...

Turn the page


The sun never sets at the Palau de la Música Catalana! This palatial con-cert hall in Barcelona possesses its very own day star—in the form of a massive, stained-glass dome. The work of Spanish artist Antoni Rigalt, the dome weighs hundreds of kilo-grams and curves downwards to-wards visiting eyes. The numerous windows also mean that this breath-takingly spectacular concert hall needs no artificial lighting during the day, making it even more unique.

... DIFFERENTLY


FOTOS: (VORIGE SEITE) © GETTY IMAGES/1001NIGHTS; (DIESE SEITE) © GETTY IMAGES/DANNY LEHMAN



SCENE: A graphic artist consulting with a client.Client: I’m not too sure about the blue …Me: Actually, that’s green.Client: Who’s the client?Me: You.Client: And what colour is it?Me: … Blue?Client: Right. Now let me see what other shades of blue we have.

We settled on pine tree “blue”.Source: clientsfromhell.net

AFTER SIGNING OFF from my last container ship earlier this year, I was on my way home to Mumbai. I began a friendly chat with my on-flight co-passenger, who asked me about my profession. I replied that I work in the merchant navy. Unaware of the difference, and as proud as she was of our defence forces, she said, “Thank you for your service.” I smiled and answered, “If you’re referring to your Christmas gifts, I’m glad they reached on time.” HIMANSHU SAWANT, Mu m b a i

“Most people use the cloud. We just stuff paperwork in the ceiling tiles.”

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A Day’s Work


Reader’s Digest will pay for your funny anecdote or photo in any of our humour sections. Post it to the editorial address,


WE UBER DRIVERS never know whom we’re going to end up with as a passenger. One day, I was driving over a new bridge, the design of which was very confusing. Comp-letely confounded, I muttered, “I’d love to meet the genius who designed this mess.”

With that, my passenger extended his hand in my direction and said, “Well, today is your lucky day. My name is Mike, I work for the county engineer’s office, and I’m the genius who designed this!”

Surprisingly, he still gave me a tip.PATRICK GRILLIOT

TEACHING IS NOT for sensitive souls. While reviewing future, past and present tenses with my English class, I posed this question: “‘I am beautiful’ is what tense?”

One student raised her hand. “Past tense.” REEMA RAHAT

RANDOM THOUGHTS from office drones counting the hours till the weekend:

Today is the one-year anniversary of this six-week project.

I keep hoping they’ll put the two perfectionists on the same project and they’ll correct each other to infinity and stay out of everyone else’s way.

Just once I’d like to spend more time discussing the project on a conference call than we spend asking “Who just joined?” Source: meetingboy.com

MY MOTHER was browsing in a store when a saleswoman offered assistance. Mum admitted she didn’t have anything particular in mind, and the pair started chatting. The woman quickly learnt that Mum was retired. Interested, she confessed that she, too, was consi- dering retirement. Mum immediately started telling her how much she liked her retirement and how the saleswoman would enjoy it too. Finally, convinced by Mum’s enthusiasm, she asked, “How long have you been retired?”

Mum said, “This is my first day.” LEE BEACHAM

ST PETER: Why should I let you into heaven?Me: Once, a co-worker said “suppos-ably” seven times in a meeting, and I just let her.St Peter: Get in here.

@ABBYCOHENWL

HARD TO BELIEVE, but many of our customers at the bank still don’t know how to swipe their card through the ATM card reader. One teller com-plained that she kept getting odd looks every time she explained how it’s done. I found out why when I overheard her tell one man, “Strip down facing me.” GCFL.net

ROZ WARREN

is a librarian,

a writer and

the editor of the

humour collection

When Cats Talk

Back.

HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED that with some friends, when they offer you a ride and you get in their car, the first thing they say is “Sorry about the mess,” even if the car’s interior is so antiseptic you could perform surgery in there? On the other hand, I’ve been in cars that more closely resemble the inside of a hamper than a vehicle—and the owner doesn’t seem to notice.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in Detroit, USA, but I believe that the condition of your vehicle says something about you. Is your car the mobile counterpart of the kitchen junk drawer, an area designated for chaos, a place to speed away from responsibility? Or is it a sanctuary from the chaos of your home, your job, your family, a self-contained space

Four-Wheel DivesBY ROZ WARREN FROM HUMOROUTCASTS.COM

Department of Wit

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the junk on the floor of my car.

My car is spotless. I just wish the rest of my life were this beautiful and well-ordered.

I think of my car as my pocketbook on wheels. It contains everything I

need for daily survival.

Food wrappers. Books. Thermoses. Coffee cups. Sunglasses. Jackets. Blankets. Troll doll in a nurse uniform. Emergency apocalypse backpack. Flashlights. Hair ties. Reading glasses. Newspapers. Receipts. Grocery lists. Stuff for Goodwill [an

American non-profit] ...

We call my husband’s car Meals on Wheels because he has stashed so much snack food in it.

Last week, I found a squirrel in my car.

I’m a teacher, which means my car is full of school supplies. If times get tough, I’ll just sell pens, markers and coloured paper out of my trunk.

My husband has stashed an axe under the driver’s seat of my car. Yes. An axe.

I keep a duster

in the door

pocket and use

it at lights.

There’s nothing

wrong with that.

where order is easily attained and maintained? After all, cars are all about escape, starting with that first solo drive out of your parents’ driveway and into the world. So I recently asked my Facebook friends: Is the inside of your car clean and tidy, or is it a disaster area? Here are some of the more telling examples from my personality driving test:

I have four dogs, one of whom is chronically carsick. You really wouldn’t want to get into my car. Unless you’re a dog.

I keep a duster in the door pocket and use it at lights. And I shake out my floor mats once a week. There’s nothing wrong with that. There ISN’T.

I divide people into those who brush off my passenger seat and hop right in and those who grimace, then get in with a look of determination and pity.

I always carry lots of bottled water, just in case I break down in a desert. Even though I live in a city.

If I ever disappear due to foul play, the cops will easily be able to trace the last six months of my life from

HUMOROUTCASTS.COM (9 JANUARY 2017), COPYRIGHT © 2017 BY ROZ WARREN.

IN MY OPINION


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THE ‘ME TOO’ MOVEMENT STARTED as early as 2006 when American gender rights activist Tarana Burke first used the phrase to highlight the pervasiveness of sexual assault and harassment, particularly in the workplace. In October 2017, the phrase went viral as a social media hashtag, when Hollywood actor Alyssa Milano encouraged women to use it to tell their stories and help people understand the magnitude of the problem. It was in the same month that The New York Times published an investigative story on decades of sexual abuse by Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, which broke a dam of further accusations against him, led by American actor Rose McGowan.

This was perhaps the point when the movement went from women naming themselves as survivors to women naming the men who had violated them. And with this shift, the movement went from a social media trend, enjoying widespread support and empathy, to front- page news and deeply polarizing conversations about its methods and consequences.

India had a similar moment in 2013, when women wrote about their harassment by members of the judiciary and legal fraternity, but this was short-lived, in no small part thanks to an accused judge approaching his parent High Court, along with a battery of senior advocates to issue a gag order on the allegations against him. Brave women came forward subsequently with complaints against high-profile and powerful men like R. K. Pachauri and Tarun Tejpal,

The #MeToo (R)Evolution

MIHIRA SOOD

is a Supreme

Court lawyer

and academic

specializing in

women’s rights

and feminist

political theory.

She can be

reached on

Twitter at

@mihira_sood

BY MIHIRA SOOD

Women, finding no recourse to sexual assault and harassment,

take matters in their own hands


which are still being litigated. Then, in October 2017, as #MeToo gained steam internationally, a law student took to Facebook to publish a crowd-sourced list of alleged harassers, containing some of the biggest names in academia. The list divided Indian feminists, some of whom questioned its methods and, particularly, the fact that the accusations were anonymous. Others argued that the vulnerability of the accusers demanded anonymity, and that an over-reliance on ‘due process’ was a mark of privilege that many did not possess.

Almost a year later, in September 2018, former Bollywood actor Tanu-shree Dutta spoke to a television channel about how she was harassed 10 years ago by Nana Patekar, an actor with strong political connections, and, separately, by director Vivek Agnihotri during film shoots. The snowballing campaign soon saw writer–comic Mahima Kukreja calling out a fellow comic for sexual misconduct, jour-nalist Sandhya Menon and others tweeting accounts of their own abuse

and those that people had shared with them, along with other feminist influ-encers and allies, on Twitter. All of a sudden, the floodgates had opened. As the last resort, as a cathartic exercise in getting a semblance of closure, out poured the stories—one after another, often similar instances—of abuse. Big names in the news media, film indus-try and literary circuit, as well as artists, musicians, lawyers and activists were accused of sexual harassment, assault, molestation and worse.

With each name, the nervous questions multiply. Why didn’t she complain all those years ago? Why did she continue working with him? What proof does she have? Why doesn’t she file an FIR now? Why are people treating a bad date as an instance of #MeToo? What stops a person from making a false complaint?

To address these issues, a little bit of legal perspective is essential. Sexual harassment at the workplace was not an offence until 2013. Prior to that, all that existed by way of law were Supreme Court guidelines laid IN

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members of the senior management of the organization, who are more likely, historically speaking, to side with the abuser—often in a position of power—than a junior or mid-level employee. It requires a single external member, who is paid by the organization and is often on a retainership with them, thereby compromising their independence. The committee members are often poorly trained, bringing a superficial understanding of their role to the job. There is an over-reliance on

eyewitnesses and other ‘hard evidence’, assuming that all other complaints and forms of proof lack weight. This ignores their role as investigators, to cross-examine and verify accounts, ask detailed questions, probe for inconsistencies and determine which account sounds more probable or credible. That is

the standard of proof required for internal committees, not the ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ provision that criminal courts rely on.

According to a 2015 survey by Ernst & Young, 40 per cent of the companies surveyed had not trained their internal committees, while 35 per cent were unaware of the penal conse-quences for non-compliance with the PoSH Act. A 2015 FICCI study on the Act and its implementation found 47 per cent with untrained committees and

down in 1997 in Visakha v. Union of India, popularly known as the Visakha guidelines. These required the institutionalization of an internal committee in the workplace, but were extremely vague in terms of defin-ing its ambit with respect to different kinds of workplaces and different categories of workers. The Supreme Court itself did not set up any such committee until later that year, and neither did most other workplaces. Gender equality was not as vociferous or widespread a move-ment as it is today, and the situation in most offices was at the stage where women employ-ees had to fight for their own bathrooms. They were considered lucky to just be hired; nobody would countenance a troublemaker. That is, briefly, why women did not complain then and continued working with their harassers. They had fought hard to be able to work in such jobs, to live away from their parents, to make careers for themselves, and they would do their best to retain that while suffering in silence. The few that spoke up found little redress.

Today, a more detailed law is in place to prevent and address sexual harassment at the workplace, but it is far from perfect. It requires the internal committee to comprise

T H E # M E T O O ( R ) E V O L U T I O N

#MeToo has

evolved ...

from seeking

consequences

to exposing a

social fault line

36 per cent Indian companies with no committees at all. The fact that these organizations face no consequences for their lack of compliance shows the seriousness with which they are moni-tored. This perhaps explains the figure of 69 per cent women who face abuse and do not report it, as per the Indian National Bar Association.

It must also be remembered that courts have recognized that sexual offences are, by their very nature, not often ones that can be backed by witnesses or other tangible evidence. Therefore, a woman’s testimony may, on its own, be sufficient evidence. This doesn’t mean that an innocent man will be jailed just because a woman says so. It means that if a woman’s testimony is of sterling quality, is believable, stands up to scrutiny and cross-examination, is able to rebut the defence of the accused in a reliable manner, then it may be taken as the sole evidence for conviction without any need for further corroboration. This is a standard that internal committees have failed to apply.

Is it any wonder then, that women, having lost their faith in the law, have taken to social media to share their stories? Instead of reacting with anger to that, imagine the extent of frustration it takes for a woman to give up on seeking justice, and settle for this online purge instead? To have your humiliation served up in nightly news and morning front-pages, to face armies

of Twitter trolls and ‘meninists’? If the legal process is worse than this, then surely that is a bigger cause for concern than the lack of appropriate form in the complaints?

#MeToo is not static; it is not yet ripe for analysis. It is evolving— we have already seen it shift from women being harassed with ques-tions on their integrity to focus on the men who harassed them, challenging the toxic masculinity born out of their male privilege. It has moved from seeking consequences to exposing a social fault line. And in that, it has moved from harassment and assault to a broader range of misogynistic encounters, including the ‘bad dates’ which merit calling out for the entitle-ment and sexism they display. It has made clear that it may not have the answers, but that asking the ques-tions is equally important.


R E A D E R S D I G E S T. C O . I N

A visualization of the #MeToo movement

in India, from Google Trends, shows it

has spread to every corner of the country.

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machine, where 58-year-old William spent his days levelling the track and packing the crushed stones that lay under neath the tracks, didn’t close completely and there were holes in the floor. He could never escape the bugs. William reported the problems to his supervisor at Union Pacific Railroad, where he’d worked for 32 years, but he says the company didn’t repair them, mow the grass along the railroad tracks or provide bug spray.

On 22 October, William’s daughter Sarah Nami found her father slumped over on the couch at home.

EVERY MORNING when William Nami and his crew stepped out of their truck to repair and replace the rail line in Sweeny, Texas, USA, they were swarmed and bitten by mos-quitoes. It shouldn’t have been a surprise; Sweeny had long ago chris-tened itself “the mosquito capital of the world”. Still, those working on the job from July to October 2008 amid tall grasses were basically a buffet for the mosquitoes, especially after 13 September, when Hurricane Ike blew through and left pools and pud-dles everywhere. It didn’t help that the door on the cab of the tamping

Is a railroad company responsible for keeping insects away from its employees?

The Case of the Mosquito-Bitten Worker

BY VICKI GLEMBOCKI

YOU BE THE JUDGE


THE VERDICT

No, it was not. A jury in the District

Court of DeWitt County did find

that Union Pacific was negligent

and deserved 80 per cent of the

blame for William Nami’s illness.

(It ruled that William himself was

20 per cent to blame because he

didn’t try to mitigate the problem

with bug spray or long-sleeved

shirts.) William was awarded

$752,000 in damages, and Texas’s

13th Court of Appeals upheld that

ruling. But the Supreme Court of

Texas overturned those rulings. It

cited a common law doctrine called

ferae naturae, which states that

a landowner is not liable for the

acts of wild animals on the owner’s

property if the owner hasn’t

attracted the animals on purpose.

The court decided that the law

applied to business owners as well.

“There is no evidence that Union

Pacific could have done anything

to prevent mosquitoes throughout

the area from being around its

siding and tracks,” explained the

Supreme Court on 24 June 2016.

Further, “Union Pacific did nothing

to attract mosquitoes, indigenous

to ... all South Texas.” “Basically,”

says the railroad’s attorney,

Bob Burns, “the railroad couldn’t

be found to be negligent for the

actions of mosquitoes.”

Agree? Disagree? Sound off at

[email protected].

He was sweating and mumbling incoherently, and he had a fever of 103°F. Sarah called her mother, who rushed home from work, and to-gether they lifted William off the couch and got him to the emergency room. After many tests, William was diagnosed with West Nile virus, an infectious disease spread by mosquitoes that can develop into a potentially life-threatening neuro-logical infection. As a result, he developed encephalitis and has suffered permanent damage, includ-ing cognitive impairment, muscle weakness and decreased kidney function. He can no longer work.

In 2012, William sued Union Pacific under the 1908 Federal Employers’ Liability Act, which protects railroad workers hurt on the job. He claimed the company was negligent for not providing him a safe work environ-ment. Union Pacific argued that since 2002, the company had held several safety meetings and sent a bulletin to employees about the threat of West Nile (which William said he’d never received and knew nothing about). Plus, it was impossible to tell whether the mosquito that infected William bit him at the work site in Sweeny or at his home, at a football game or, really, anyplace he went outdoors during his time on that job.

Was Union Pacific negligent because it didn’t protect an employee from mosquitoes? You be the judge.


MANISHA BARDE, of Dhamangaon village, in Nashik, Maharashtra, had stepped out of her hut to relieve her-self one early August morning, leaving the door ajar. Her children, who slept in the same bed with her, were inside. A bit drowsy, she returned home soon to the warmth of her bed. She noticed her pet cat curled up between her two kids, inside the mosquito net. As Mani-sha crawled back inside, she felt the cat cuddle up to her. That’s when she realized she wasn’t snuggling with a cat at all, but a leopard cub. It had been orphaned a month ago when his mother died in a road accident, and had snuck into the hut, going straight to the bed for a nap.

Forest officials, who were soon alerted, trapped the three-month-old cub. Last heard, the cub was doing fine and under the care of the local forest department. It will be released into the wild once it is old enough to hunt. Spotted by LESTER SANTOS, Mumbai

Source: The Times of India

IT’S RAINING poop over the capital! It all began in October 2016 when a disgruntled south-Delhi resident filed a complaint with the National Green Tribunal (NGT) after his house—and other houses in the neighbourhood—was splattered with human faeces, apparently dumped from aeroplanes flying overhead at night. The tribunal


Only in India

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Excuse me! But I’m

Prakash Kokday.

ordered the Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) to issue circulars to airlines to pay a fine of `50,000 as environmental compensation if their planes were found to have dumped waste during flight.

The DGCA didn’t pay heed to the order, claiming the waste came from bird droppings. In a final bid to stop airlines from dumping waste mid-air, the NGT warned the DGCA that his salary would be withheld if he didn’t ensure the directive was met. He has also been asked to carry out surprise checks to ensure planes, while land-ing, do not have empty toilet tanks. Looks like the DGCA has to deal with an odd ground reality. Source: indiatoday.in

HERE’S SOMETHING you probably haven’t heard of: ‘jail yoga’. The Times of India reported that Ramesh Singh, 38, a businessman from Lucknow, served a 24-hour imprisonment, because—wait for it—an astrologer told him to! This astrologer said that his kundali (horoscope) predicted a jail term, which would eventually land him in trouble. Singh moved an appli-cation before the district administra-tion with a copy of the kundali. After his papers were vetted, he was allowed to spend 24 hours in jail.

He is not the only one: Another believer in the higher forces of the stars, Ankit Chaturvedi, went on a jail ‘yatra’ for 24 hours too. Apparently, this is a regular affair in the office of Lucknow’s district magistrate. There

is no legal provision to imprison a person without any criminal record, but they permit requests on religious grounds. Spotted by S. N. SAROJA, Pune

Source: The Times of India

EXAMPLES of the intellectual prow-ess of social media ‘influencer’ and ‘thinker’ Vivek Agnihotri, from an interview with Abhinandan Sekhri: “I never claimed I’m an expert

on Maoism. So don’t put words in your mouth.”

“Who said facts are facts? This is the biggest scam in the world.”

Agnihotri also said the colour of the interviewer’s kurta, evidently white, may not be as we saw. It could be black, reflecting the colour of Sekhri’s heart. Enough said! Source: Newslaundry

—COMPILED BY SUCHISMITA UKIL


Reader’s Digest will pay for contributions to this column. Post your suggestions with the source to the editorial address,

or email: [email protected].

WHAT WAS THAT AGAIN?

A Bengali textbook misidentified

Farhan Akhtar as Milkha Singh. Akhtar

had starred in a biopic on the athlete.

Source: @LYFEGHOSH

Points to Ponder


My story, told honestly and matter-of-factly, is the best weapon I have against terrorism, and I plan on using it until those terrorists are put on trial. There is still so much that needs to be done. World leaders and particularly Muslim religious leaders need to stand up and protect the oppressed.NADIA MURAD, No b e l P r i z e -w i n n i n g h u m a n

r i g h t s a c t i v i s t , who survived sexual slavery under ISIS

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THE IDEAL SUBJECT of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experi-ence) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

HANNAH ARENDT,

p h i l o s o p h e r a n d p o l i t i c a l t h e o r i s t

CLOUDS COME FLOATING into my life no longer to carry rain or usher storm but to add colour to my sunset sky.

RABINDRANATH TAGORE,

p o e t , l i t t é rat e u r, p h i l o s o p h e r

KIDS ARE BORN CURIOUS. Period ... If you’re a child, you are curious about your environment. You’re overturning rocks. You’re plucking leaves off of trees and petals off of flowers, looking inside, and you’re doing things that create disorder in the lives of the adults around you. So what do adults do? They say, “Don’t pluck the petals off the flowers. I just spent money on that. Don’t play with the egg. It might break. Don’t ...” Everything is a don’t. We spend the first year teaching them to walk and talk and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON,

a s t r o p hy s i c i s t


I AM 50 YEARS OLD. There was a war that started when I was in high school, in the 1970s in Afghanistan. Various superpowers have now declared that the war is over. But it has never stopped. Bombs have been falling, villages have been blowing up. I am pretty sure that when I am dead, this war will still be going on. Increas-ingly, you see this war replicated else-where—in Syria, in Libya, in Yemen. I am sometimes horrified that this business of life and this business of war have become inevitable. I also think about our own complicity. I watch war unfold on TV, but I am taking my child to school, my dog for walks. That kind of colossal con-tradiction—that we can be at peace, when there will always be some peo-ple who continue to get bombed—that is what I was trying to get at.

MOHAMMED HANIF,

w r i t e r a n d j o u r n a l i s t , about his book Red Birds

WE ALL KNOW that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. If he only shows in his work that he has searched, and re-searched, for the way to put over lies, he would never accomplish anything.

PABLO PICASSO,

a r t i s t

YOU HAVE TO BE political if you are a filmmaker. You have to be political if you are a citizen; to vote and believe in one ideology is to be political, isn’t it? Bollywood is not political because the state does not give us the liberty. We are the easiest, softest targets. Before a film releases, there are a hundred demands to ban it. You don’t have a choice, really.

VISHAL BHARDWAJ,

f i l m m a k e r, on political films and censorship

TO UNDERSTAND WHAT I am saying, you have to believe that dance is something other than technique. We forget where the movements come from. They are born from life. When you create a new work, the point of departure must be contemporary life—not existing forms of dance.

PINA BAUSCH,

Mo d e r n d a n c e r a n d c h o r e o g ra p h e r

COOKING PROFESSIONALLY is a dom-inant act, at all times about control. Eating well, on the other hand, is about submission. It’s about giving up all ves-tiges of control, about entrusting your fate entirely to someone else. It’s about turning off the mean, manipulative, calculating and shrewd person inside you, and slipping heedlessly into a new experience as if it were a warm bath.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN,

c e l e b r i t y c h e f a n d T V s h o w h o s t

SOME POSITIVE STORIES THAT CAME OUR WAY

Good News


BY SAPTAK CHOUDHURY

Safeguarding harmony AMITY They say one good deed begets another. It certainly seems true in Uttar Pradesh (UP) where, despite communal tensions and bloodshed in recent years, some acts of kindness have spread harmony and neighbourly love among the troubled state’s diverse inhabitants.

During the 2013 riots in Muzaffar-nagar, when arsonists attempted to demolish a 120-year-old mosque, Ramveer Kashyap, a Hindu mason, stood firm against them and even garnered the support of the villagers to protect the structure. Five years on, the 59-year-old still takes care of the mosque in the Hindu-dominated Nanheda village. Despite declining footfall, he keeps the building clean and lights candles every day, even having it whitewashed before every Ramzan. Kashyap’s efforts have drawn admiration from many—the village pradhan and devotees included.

Meanwhile, in the Muslim-domi-nated Ladhewala area in UP, locals have been reciprocating in kind. For 26 years, the Muslim community has tended to a Hindu temple, long after the families who frequented it left the area in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition. Even though there’s no shrine in the temple, the residents clean and maintain the tem-ple and protect it from squatters and vandals. They also want their Hindu neighbours to return to the area.

“I’ll have to take better care of my camera in future.”William Etherton , 10, who was reunited with his camera after i t vanished

on a Brit ish b e ach and was f ound f our months later, s t i l l functional,

on a G erman island 563 kilometres away.

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Protecting wildlife CONSERVATION Ever heard of an entire tribe giving up an ancient tradition to protect wildlife? The Angami tribe in Nagaland have done just that! A major ethnic group in north-east India, the Angamis were originally a warrior clan, but today their primary source of sustenance is agriculture and animal husbandry. They would practise hunting as an age-old cultural tradition for rituals, food, sport as well as for sale. But all that changed in 1993 when reports revealed that more than 300 grey-bellied Tragopans (an indigenous pheasant and a popular, endangered

game bird) were killed for their meat. This triggered a conservation campaign to protect the species.

Spurred by a desire to protect Tragopans and other species, the Angami slowly gave up their hunting practice and set up a 20 sq km hunt-ing-free area, which became the Khonoma Nature Conservation and Tragopan Sanctuary in 1998.

Over the years, a local village council also banned logging, burning jungles and any commercial activity that exploits natural resources and the surrounding forests.

Here’s hoping such eco-sensitive efforts become more the norm!

HEROES: BRAVE PILOTS

PRESENCE OF MIND and out-of-the-box thinking allowed two Air India pilots, en route to New York from Delhi, to avert disaster and save the lives of 370 people on board an Air India Boeing 777-300 aircraft.

Senior commander Rustom Palia and second-in-command Sushant Singh faced a pilot’s worst nightmare—“No auto-land, no wind-shear systems, [no] auto-speed brake and the auxillary power unit is unserviceable as well,” Palia reported to New York’s Air Traffic Control. So the duo tried a different approach—a manual, “non-precision landing”—a manoeuvre totally outside their training. With low fuel levels and catastrophic system failures, the pilots managed to touch down at Newark airport, New Jersey, after 38 nail-biting minutes with zero casualties.

Sources: Amity—Times of India, 08.09.18, 17.09.18; Conservation—BBC, 10.09.18; Heroes—The Better India, 18.09.18

Senior commander Rustom Palia (right)

and second-in-command Sushant Singh

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Take my advice; I am not using it.

USHA GOEL,

Bijnor, Uttar Pradesh

FINISH THIS SENTENCE

“My favourite one-liner is:” For my kids: You can lead

a horse to water, but you

can’t make it drink.MRINALINEE PATRO, Bhubaneswar

It’s easier to cover your feet with

slippers than to

carpet the whole world.

@_CUZEE

Trust, but verify. DHWANI SHAH, Mumb ai

Don’t be trapped in

someone else’s dreams.

YASHASWINI SINGH, Patna

Those who stand for nothing,

fall for anything.

KHUSHI DESAI,

Jamnagar

No one wants to die; even the ones who want to go to heaven.

SWATI KHATRI, New D elhi

The bad news is, time flies. The good news is,

you are the pilot. NIVEDITA DAS, Hyderab ad

BY NATASHA BADHWAR

To Fail Without Feeling Like

A Failure

In a culture of tough love and tougher parenting,

we need to give ourselves permission to ease up

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Describing how she pushed her seven-year-old Lulu to master a piano piece, Chua wrote:

I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was pur-posely working herself into a frenzy be-cause she was secretly afraid she could not do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.

Chua clarified in interviews that her book was the story of her own even-tual transformation as a mother. “Mine is a cautionary tale and I am the mad woman in it,” she has said.

At first glance, it may appear that the parent in the trenches with her kid is doing all the hard work, and the lenient ones are lazy. It may seem that the ‘tiger mother’s’ kids are soaring, while others are still playing in the mud, their potential unrealized. The truth is that it is easy to be the ‘tiger’. You are the boss, you set the rules, you roar. The little ones get in line. It is the ‘mother’ part that demands courage, as Chua discovered. Parents make mistakes, they are vulnerable. They learn to back off and cede territory.

Parents need permission to fail without feeling like failures. This parenting business is a complex web. We source the design from deep sub-conscious wells, from our memory and experience. We repeat patterns from our own childhood. We are the agents of our culture. If Chua decided that

WHEN I WAS A KID, I used to lie, cheat and steal. It is a useful memory to hold on to as a parent. There’s not very much my daughters can do that I have not already done, I reassure myself. Their adventure-hunting father has covered the re-maining range of possibilities. There came a time when I began to find things in my daughter’s pockets—crayons or money. I chanced upon a packet of biscuits in the drawer of her study desk.

I stayed calm. It’s all right, all kids steal. “It is normal for a very young child to take something which excites his or her interest,” Google confirmed in 0.27 seconds.

Yet there was the unmistakable soundtrack of panic galloping to-wards me. Despite my highfalutin decisions to rewrite the family script, I had to be doing something exactly like my parents for my child to be behaving as I did at her age. I walked into the park nearby to breathe out a silent scream.

A while ago, I read Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, where she explained how Chinese parents produced successful kids. Her bluntness and clarity was a hook, but I was also amused by the self-parody and wry humour. I shared the article online. That is when I began to realize the enormity of what this piece was doing to its readers. It was dredging up anger, fear, self-doubt, judgement and passionate counter-arguments.

A photograph from My Daughters’ Mum.

Excerpted from My Daughters’ Mum: A book of

permissions to love, laugh, heal and find one's

way home by Natasha Badhwar, relaunched by Simon & Schuster India in November 2018.


her daughters would play instruments and excel academically, this was a function of her background—she was the child of immigrants, in single-minded pursuit of praise, ex-cellence and admiration in America. She had no clue about the value of fun and games.

When Chua asked her 15-year-old to suggest a title for her book, the girl said, The Perfect Child and the Flesh-eating Devil. Sometimes, it is not so complex after all. Ask a question and you might get a very revealing answer.

Most Indians will recognize the type of tiger mom Chua is. The word love was never used in Chua’s child-hood home. That sounds familiar, too.

My brothers and I were high-achieving children of strict parents. When I was 12, I pasted an article in my diary, titled, ‘The greatest gift you can give your child: self-esteem’. I don’t think I knew what self-esteem was, but I must have wanted it badly, because we were not allowed to cut out pages from Reader’s Digest.

I now know that self-confidence is not something anyone can give you to keep forever. It is like a lake in the mountains, a valley of flowers—it must be discovered again and again.

With three children, I get several opportunities to trip and fall. One evening, at my parents’ home, when our kids were being kids, I suddenly yelled at them to calm down. The children were stunned. My father was watching. He will be proud of me, I

thought. I’m showing him how well I have learnt to be a strict parent.

Mum called the next day. “Your father was saying, ‘Tell Natasha not to be so harsh, these hurts are not easy to heal. Why repeat our mistakes?”’

The voice of Gabbar Singh whis-pered in my ear, Socha tha sardaar khush hoga? Shabaashi dega? (You thought the boss would be pleased, did you? That he will congratulate you?)

I believed my father was the original tiger parent. And here he was telling me not to be like him. He spoke through Mum, yet something inside me healed. My father was giving me permission to be the change.

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The truth about the risks of drinking

Alcohol Reality CheckBY SAMANTHA RIDEOUT

WITH ABHA SRIVASTAVA

moderate ones: The commonplace 175-ml glass of wine is closer to two standard drinks rather than one.

However, India does not seem to have any drinking guidelines.According to Dr Vivek Benegal, professor of psychiatry, Centre for Addiction Medicine, National Insti-tute of Mental Health and Neurosci-ences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru, “This is because studies need to be con-ducted to derive these guidelines—assessing mortality due to alcohol is very difficult here as we usually do not record this as a cause in our health/crime statistics.”

Internationally, there’s evidence that genuinely moderate drinkers have a slightly lower risk of diabetes than teetotallers and certain car-diovascular episodes, including ischaemic strokes and heart attacks.

HAVE YOU EVER noticed that alcohol is going to extend your life according to one headline and send you to an early grave according to another? Do the terms ‘moderate’ and ‘heavy’ drinking confuse you? And have you ever wondered whether alcoholism is genetic? If your answer is yes, here’s information that may help you clear some doubts.

The good Alcohol’s risk-benefit profile depends on how much you’re consuming. Most public-health authorities currently draw the admittedly fuzzy line between ‘moderate’ and ‘heavy’ drinking at one or two ‘standard drinks’ (14 grams of pure alcohol) per day for women and two to four for men. You wouldn’t be alone if you were mistaking heavy habits for

HEALTH


The bad According to Dr Marilys Corbex of the World Health Organization’s European office, even a light habit significantly raises the chances of mouth and upper throat, oesophageal, larynx and breast cancers. These odds increase

with heavier consumption.

It’s particularly hazardous to combine drinking with smoking: Alcohol acts as a solvent for the carcinogens in cigarettes, creating a risk that is greater

than the sum of its parts.When it comes to cardiovascular

diseases, some forms are less common among moderate drinkers compared to abstainers, but others—including atrial ibrillation and haemorrhagic stroke—show the opposite pattern. Heavy drinking is bad for the cardiovascular system all around.

The ugly Alcohol’s risks extend beyond drinkers. At least 10 per cent of all deaths from alcohol-related injuries happen to others around them because of accidents, impaired driving, abuse and violence.

The ambiguous Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that booze delivers its buzz by impairing the brain, long-term heavy drinking is the most important and best known, preventable risk factor for dementia. So far, the evidence is less clear when it comes to moderate consumption: It may marginally con-tribute to brain decline, provide slight protection against it or neither.

Alcohol has a com-plex relationship with clinical depression, as well. As Benegal points out, “People sufer-ing from depression and other mood disorders are often likely to use alcohol in frequent heavy-drinking patterns. And drinking heav-ily is likely to worsen depression.” He is quick to add that genes do not con-trol drinking. Instead, they lay out the programme for the brain’s develop-ment and its response to multiple environmental demands.

He explains, “hose who have a low boredom threshold are more likely to repeat the use of their sub-stance of choice (alcohol, chocolate, tobacco) and the repeated exposure leads to long-lasting, gene-mediated brain changes that predispose a per-son’s behaviour, setting the pattern for heavy and frequent usage, which is recognized as addiction.”

Harmful use of alcohol results in

3 million deaths

worldwide every year. Source: WHO


a specific speaker; it then automati-cally picks that person’s voice out of a mixed audio feed and amplifies it. In a recent trial, almost all the subjects found the device helpful and wanted to continue using it beyond the test.

Diabetes meds can combat osteoporosisBecause type 2 diabetes affects bone metabolism, it’s not uncommon for people with the illness to develop osteoporosis. In fact, many medica-tions treat both diseases. Researchers in the United Kingdom and Greece found that metformin (such as Gly-comet and Cetapin), sulfonylureas (e.g., Amaryl), DPP-4 inhibitors (such as Galvus and Trajenta) and GLP-1

Why vegetarians should add in B12In a National Institutes of Health study, vegan and vegetarian participants tended to score higher than meat eaters on a depression- measuring scale. While the results don’t prove causality, it wouldn’t be surprising if nutri-tional shortfalls were to blame, the researchers said. In particular, vege-tarians and vegans are often low in vitamin B12, and animal products are the only natural source of this nutri-ent. However, it’s possible to reach the recommended levels by taking sup-plements or by eating fortified foods such as soya milk and breakfast cereal.

New smart hearing aid in the worksResearchers at New York’s Columbia University Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science are developing a high-tech hearing aid that can help people focus on a single voice in a noisy restaurant or any other setting that’s packed with com-peting and overlapping sounds. The hearing aid works by monitoring the brain activity of the user to determine whether he or she is conversing with IN

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NEWS FROM THE

World of Medicine


receptor agonists (e.g., Victoza and Trulicity) work best to help strengthen bones and control diabetes. If you suffer from both conditions, ask your doctor which of these drugs is best for you.

Dim light making you dim?Working in a poorly lit office isn’t just depressing— it may actually make you dumber. In a study from Michigan State University, USA, Nile grass rats who spent their days in dim light did not do well on spatial learning tasks and showed a 30 per cent decrease in the number of dendritic spines—the connections that allow neurons to communicate. Rats who were exposed to bright light, though, improved their performance. The study’s co-author noted that this is “similar to when people can’t find their way back to their cars after a few hours in a movie theatre”, suggesting that light levels might have the same effect on us. Luckily, when the dim rats were exposed to bright light again, their brain capacity recovered fully.

Tears help diagnose Parkinson’s Researchers found that tear samples from people with Parkinson’s disease had higher levels of a toxic form of a protein called alpha-synuclein than those from healthy individuals. This discovery might one day allow doctors to diagnose—and even treat— Parkinson’s before symptoms appear.

QUICK TAKE

High-fibre foodsHigh-fibre foods offer many

benefits, such as maintaining

a healthy gut, boosting heart

health and promoting weight

loss. According to the WHO, a

daily intake of at least 400 g, or

five portions, of fruits and vege-

tables constitutes the adequate

daily intake of dietary fibre. A

balanced high-fibre diet must

include plenty of fruits, vegeta-

bles, legumes and whole grains

to ensure a healthy balance of

soluble and insoluble fibre.

High-fibre legumes

Split peas, lentils, pinto beans,

mung beans, black beans,

chickpeas, soyabeans, green peas

High-fibre vegetables

Potato, sweet potato,

broccoli, pumpkin

High-fibre fruit

Avocado, prunes, guavas, pears,

apples, bananas, oranges

High-fibre nuts and seeds

Chia seeds, quinoa, pumpkin

seeds, almonds, popcorn

Source: Medical News Today



Life’s Like That

THE OTHER DAY I got carded at the liquor store. While I was taking out my ID, my old Blockbuster [a video rental company] card fell out. The clerk shook his head, said, “Never mind,” and rang me up. ANDREA PRICE

MY FRIEND GARRICK had the solu-tion to forgetting his wife’s birthday and their wedding anniversary: He opened an account with a local florist and provided it with both dates as well as instructions to send flowers and a card signed “Your loving husband, Garrick.”

For a few years, it worked. Then one day, Garrick came home on their wedding anniversary. He saw the flowers on the dining room table and said, “What nice flowers. Where did you get them?” YEFIM M. BRODD

ONE ELDERLY TO ANOTHER: “How are you?” “OK, sort of,” says the other.

“Why, what’s wrong?”“I am 80, you know,” says the grouch.“Pish. It’s just a number,” says the

first cheerfully. “Indeed, it’s a numb-er. I am numb

all over.” MANOJIT BHOWMIK, v i a e m a i l CA

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“Here’s the wine you mispronounced.”

Reader’s Digest will pay for your funny

anecdote or photo in any of our humour

sections. Post it to the editorial address,


EVERY CLASS is drama class when you’re in high school.

@TIMOTHYBIRD186

PRETTY MUCH the most frightening part of my day is when I get a notifi-cation that my mother has tagged me in a post on Facebook. @CULTUREDRUFFIAN

SPOTTED ON a Laundromat cork-board: “Please keep clothes on while doing laundry.” SUE CONNOR

MARRIAGE IS JUST your spouse perpetually standing in front of the kitchen drawer or cabinet you need to open. @COPYMAMA

I WAS WAITING at a small train station when a man put up a sign about my train: ‘30-Minute Delay’.

“What happened?” I asked.“The train went off the rails,”

he said.“How long will that take to fix?” “Quite a few hours.” “So why put up a sign saying it

would take 30 minutes?”“It’s the only sign we have.” JAMES JOY

MY WIFE JUST SAID, “That’s definitely your daughter” after our three-year-old muttered incompre-hensible gibberish, laughed out loud and said very proudly, “I made a funny joke!”

@SPENCERHH

ZZZZZZZZZZIP IT!

A woman finds herself constantly

awakened at night by her boy-

friend talking in his sleep. So,

since she’s up, she decides to

record what he’s saying. Here are

some of his midnight ramblings:

“No, octopus, you can’t do that!”

“Spaghetti is hair for meatballs.”

“Where are my pancakes, penguin?”

“I won’t. The toilet said no.”

“Butterfly, you made a mistake

walking in front of me.”

“But I wanna be Mary Poppins.”

“Do you know where the TV remote is? No? I’ll just ask

the duck.” boredpanda.com

AT OUR WEEKLY Bible study, the leader asked an elderly gentleman, Walt, to open the meeting with a prayer. Walt did so in a soft voice.

Another man, straining to hear, shouted, “I can’t hear you!”

Walt replied, “I wasn’t talking to you.” RICHARD STEUSSY

L I F E ’ S L I K E T H AT


BY FIONA HICKS

Five colours for a healthier, more vibrant you

Eat The Rainbow

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FROM BREAD TO CHIPS TO

CRISPS, have you ever noticed that the majority of processed foods are beige or brown? Many whole and natural foods, on the other hand, are brightly coloured—and eating them can help you feel vibrant. Here’s why:

RED HELPS YOUR HEART. Studies show that lycopene, a red-coloured phytonutrient found in tomatoes, can help reduce the risk of heart attack due to its potent antioxidant activity. What’s more, fresh tomatoes and tomato extracts have been shown to lower LDL cholesterol—the ‘bad’

kind that can lead to clogged-up arteries. Virgin Mary, anyone?

ORANGE MAINTAINS YOUR

IMMUNE SYSTEM. Carrots’ bright colour comes from beta-carotenes— compounds that are converted into vitamin A in your body. Vitamin A, in turn, plays a pivotal role in the healthy functioning of your immune system, helping you to fight everything from the common cold to cancer.

YELLOW SUPPORTS YOUR EYES. The humble corn-on-the-cob has a compound called lutein, which is also found in your eye’s retina. A report in


FOOD


the British Journal of Ophthalmology suggested that eating lots of yellow-coloured foods can support the functioning of your eyes, thus reducing your risk of conditions such as age-related macular degeneration.

BLUE PROTECTS YOUR BRAIN. Pterostilbene is a phytonutrient that’s found in the skins of blueberries and dark grapes. Recent animal studies have shown that supplementation with pterostilbene can improve cog- nition, reduce anxiety and enhance mood. Try adding a cup of blueberries to your morning muesli, or throw to-gether a fruit salad with purple grapes.

GREEN ASSISTS YOUR LIVER. Cabbage, kale and broccoli are all full of glucosinolates—compounds that support your liver’s ability to elimi-nate toxins. Aim to eat two large hand-fuls of these vegetables daily. There’s no need for soggy veggies though, as steaming them is the best way to pre-serve their health-boosting properties.

White FoodsWhen nutritionists warn against white foods they typically mean refined sugar, rice, flour, pasta and other processed foods such as white bread, crackers and cereals. The main problem with these foods is the degree of processing, which strips away most of their nutritional content, and their lack of fibre. They are usually full of empty calories that make you feel full but add close to zero nutritional content. However, all white foods are not necessarily bad for you. Quinoa, oats and potatoes for instance, are all good sources of fibre, as well as vital vitamins and minerals. Cauliflower is one of the richest sources of Vitamin K. Garlic, another white consumable, contains organo-sul-phur and flavonoids—compounds that boost immunity, lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels and protect against cancer. Other healthy white foods include radishes, pine nuts, white beans, onions, turnips and mushrooms.

RED – Watermelon, cherries, pink grapefruit, pink guava, chilli pepper, apple, strawberries, red bell pepper, pomegranate, red spinach

ORANGE - Mango, papaya, apricots, pumpkin, wild salmon, turmeric, sweet potato, peach, citrus fruits such as mandarin, satsuma, nectarine

YELLOW – Egg yolk, sa�ron, ginger, musk melon, pineapple, passion fruit, yellow pepper

GREEN – Squash, asparagus, avocado, rocket leaves, spinach, lettuce, broccoli, green beans, peas, green pepper, spring onions, parsley, coriander and mustard leaves, green apple, kiwi fruit

BLUE AND PURPLE - Jamuns, figs, prunes, raisins, red cabbage, aubergine, beetroot, purple grapes

More Foods For Your Rainbow Diet

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MONEY

BY DEVANGSHU DATTA

LET’S SAY, YOU ARE AN earner with a reasonable saving habit. You want to invest and gain better returns than what you get from fixed deposits. You have little idea how to do this, and your work leaves you with even less time to learn.

One day, you receive a polite phone call from your bank’s client or customer relationship manager (CRM). The bank has noticed you have cash to spare and they’d like to help you make investments. A friendly young person smoothly talks you through some options and presents you with a list of suggestions. Simply sign a few forms and your investment needs will be taken care of, quickly and painlessly, they suggest.

This fills a genuine need for hassle-free financial advice to those who are keen to invest but are either overwhelmed by the paperwork and financial rigmarole, or apprehensive about fine-print

minutiae and hidden costs. However, a CRM’s advice could lend itself to what is known as a principal–agent conflict: The objectives of the princi-pal (you) are not perfectly aligned to that of the agent (the bank, often represented by the CRM).

Don’t get me wrong. Customer relationship managers often give good advice. But that’s incidental to their interests. Investments are a long-term process where you may have to take periods of underperformance in your stride. So, even if you suspect a princi-pal–agent conflict, once you’ve com-mitted, you are in for the long haul.

Now, you might think that paying an extra, say, one per cent in fees is a reasonable cost for the time and trouble it saves you. But remember, that same one per cent could have compounded to a much larger sum over time. Here’s an easy example—compare your earnings from investing `1 lakh for 10 years at a 10 per cent rate of return (compounded annually)

Smart Investor Alert

5 secrets your bank’s customer relationship managers won’t tell you


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(this is `2,59,374) versus investing `99,000 for 10 years (`2,56,780). The ‘missing’ `1,000 in the invested amount would have grown to `2,590. Many financial schemes charge much higher fees, which means the bank earns fat commissions, and there is less of your capital working for you.

In order to ensure you get the best mileage out of your CRM, keep the following things in mind:

What’s in it for youIf the bank can earn a good return for you, while charging its fees, great. But that’s not the agent’s primary concern. You are interested in a decent return; the bank wants to put your money into schemes where it earns the highest fees; the CRM is interested in meeting their finan-cial targets and earning commissions. In fact, you may have noticed CRMs

being particularly insistent that you sign off on investments around the time the financial calendar ends, since they are under high pressure to meet their targets.

The bank’s takeawayFind out how much the bank makes for signing you up for each of the investments it is suggesting. Also, ask if there are termination fees or other hidden costs and lock-in periods. These are very important questions so do not be embarrassed to ask. If the charges seem high, dig deeper. In fact, don’t be afraid to ask any questions that occur to you, no matter how silly they may seem. It’s your money—you have a right to know.

Take your timeDon’t sign up immediately. Go online and look up the returns for


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any suggestions made by the bank. If these are standard mutual fund schemes, you will have a fair picture of return history and the types of port-folios held. Companies are required by law to provide this information to potential investors. If these are not standard schemes, follow up with your CRM by asking questions about returns, portfolio make-up and invest-ment strategy.

Also, using online sources to educate yourself about financial terms (equity, debt, mid- or large-cap, actuals, NAV and SIP to name a few) and investment gambits will ensure you are more confident while dealing with professionals. Senior citizens and young earners can be particularly vulnerable to erroneous investment choices, so hold back from making decisions or signing anything until you’ve done your homework.

Consider multiple optionsWe all go window-shopping, both offline and online, before we buy things like a mobile phone. We’ll choose, say, the online purchase option only after carefully checking prices, features and discounts available at retail stores. Treat your

investments the same way. You can, for example, subscribe directly to a mutual fund and save some cash, rather than buy through the bank.

Consult trusted sourcesAsk the CRM if they can refer you to other clients. If you want to weaponize this approach, start a social media page and ask your friends for feedback. Chances are your friends have financial profiles simi-lar to yours, and may have useful experi-ences to share as well. If possible, hire a financial advisor. Give them a clear brief regarding your specific investment goals,

parameters and constraints (if any), and they can advise you on every-thing from portfolio management to asset allocations.

Yes, all this does involve spending a few extra hours. But a bit of due diligence is much better than trying to rescue a poor portfolio, and this can make a vital difference to your returns over the long term.

Devangshu Datta is a financial journalist and columnist with over 25 years of pub-lished work. He has written extensively on personal finance, mutual funds and equity investments in Business Standard, Value Research, Asia Times and Outlook.

Do your homework! A bit

of due diligence is better than trying to rescue a poor

portfolio.

S M A R T I N V E S T O R A L E R T

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One euro was `85.56 at the time of going to press.

Sure, you can trust your teen— with a pinch of salt!

1. BUT MUM, I PROMISE YOU,

everyone scored lower than average on that awful maths test!

2. But of course I gave you the change from the shopping! There was hardly anything left anyway, five or 10 euros … I don’t really remember.

3. I didn’t do anything, I swear! No, I didn’t look at my phone during class. That teacher just doesn’t like me.

4. No, it’s wasn’t me who borrowed your cashmere sweater.

5. Would you please pay for my swimming pool membership? It won’t be like tennis last year, I’ll go every week, I promise. It’s only 250 euros a quarter.

6. Of course I told you I was going out. Anyway, you never listen to me when I tell you something.

7. You look so lovely and young dressed like that, Mum. Would you give me 30 euros so I can go shopping at Zara?

8. Don’t worry, I never drink alcohol at parties ... except for mojitos.

9. But I am! I’m going to tidy my room right away!

10. I’m not mucking about on the internet at all. I’m watching a film about the Second World War, so why don’t you try asking me before you tell me off?

11. Sorry I didn’t come right away, but I couldn’t hear anything with my headphones on.

12. Why are you shouting like that? I was just about to clean up my room.

13. I’m going to spend the night at a girlfriend’s. Well, he’s a male friend. But yes, his parents are at home. I think.

14. Chiara’s mother lets her stay out till three in the morning.

15. I tried to call you to let you know I was coming home late, but I didn’t have any battery left.

15 Fibs Teenagers TellBY ANNE ROUMANOFF

FAMILY


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The dirt on indoor air pollution

BY KATHAKOLI DASGUPTA AND SASWATI SARKAR

Inside StoryYOU MIGHT WANT to take a

deep breath (or not): Most Indian living spaces are like sealed boxes, which allow fumes such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and biological irritants (mould and dust mites) to build up over time. This means your indoor air quality is likely two to five times worse than the air outdoors.

Bad air can trigger health condi-tions such as heart disease, stroke, cancer and asthma. While VOCs may cause headaches, eye and lung infec-tions, radon (a naturally occurring radioactive gas found in most homes) is the second leading cause of lung cancer. A new US study now claims that air pollution, even low levels of air particulates (dirt, dust, smoke and soot) can lead to serious kidney prob-lems. The good news? It doesn’t take much to clean up your indoor air.

CLEAN CAREFULLY Dust is a lead-ing source of air pollution because it absorbs toxic gases, including VOCs and radon. Most of us sweep our floors but it’s more effective to follow up with a wet mop or use a vacuum cleaner. Make sure to clean carpets, upholstery and curtains—all common dust traps.

RUN THE FANS Switch on the kitchen hood or bathroom exhaust

fans while cooking or showering. The vents draw moist air out, redu-cing the risk of mould development.

SLEEP ON CLEAN LINEN Dust mites like to burrow into your bed-ding. So make sure to change it at least once a week and wash used linen in hot water to kill germs.

LAY OFF FRAGRANCES Many air fresheners contain phthalates, hormone-disrupting chemicals that may affect reproductive development. Opt for natural options by boiling citrus peels or herbs—for instance, sage, rosemary or mint.

BUY A FICUS PLANT Researchers especially like them for their gas- absorbing and antimicrobial power.They can even remove formaldehyde, (a potent VOC) from the air.

ADAPTED FROM PREVENTION INDIA. © SEPTEMBER 2011 LIVING MEDIA INDIA LIMITED.

Open windows let out built-up fumes,

smoke and dust from inside your home.

HOME



If KidsRuled the

Worldhildren are the future, but we never really take their opinions into account when planning for

them. Have you ever wondered what a 13-year-old would do if he was in charge of our space mission? Or how a 15-year-old would go about promoting world peace? For our Children’s Day Special, 10 kids from around the country share their hopes and vision for the road ahead. Grown-ups, take note!

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COMPILED BY BLESSY AUGUSTINE

ILLUSTRATIONS BY KESHAV KAPIL


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Minister for books and education

Minister for health and happiness

IF I WERE THE MINISTER for books and education, I would make sure that students had a lot more freedom than they do at the moment, which is close to none.

School and community libraries would always be open and have books on a large variety of subjects—skateboarding, oceanology, origami. Libraries would be organized and have an online archive so that no book goes missing.

Instead of having separate subjects in school, there would be projects that combine various topics, so that students won’t just be memorizing facts, but also understanding how things affect them in real life.

A project on how houses are built would mean that students see where the materials come from and what all goes into the making of homes. They would be able to understand the economics and how interconnected everything is—how many work hours construction workers and architects put in, and how much they are paid; the geography of the place and how it affects decisions about design and materials; how plumb-ing and electrical wiring are done; how they all affect climate change and what their carbon footprints are.

There are a lot more fascinating ways to learn things than by just sitting in classrooms. In fact, there would be no classrooms at all. Instead of sitting inside, stu-dents would be outside, under trees and shelters with-out walls. Rather than going out to experience nature once a year, why not bring nature into schools? After all, the future is all about saving our planet that is al-ready on the brink of destruction.

AS TECHNOLOGY ADVANCES, its original goal has been forgotten. It was meant to make our lives richer but has, in fact, done the exact opposite. We have become lazy and unfit. Ask yourself, when was the last time you rode your bicycle or played cricket outdoors? It is essential we take out time every day to do some form of physical activity. We weren’t born to just lie on

Sahar Beg, 15 years, Delhi

Shubham Jaglan, 14 years, Delhi



IF I WERE the minister for space, technology and robotics, I would use the power of technology and our space advancements to bring all of humanity to an equal footing, to provide opportunities to all and bring the world closer to a state of peace and security.

Every year, many lives are lost due to undiagnosed ailments or inaccessible health-care services. Techno-logy can help fix this. Under my leadership, the advances that computer scientists are making every day in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in predicting and diagnosing diseases will be utilized in hospitals.

We are all aware of the malicious activities being conducted on the Dark Web. We shall strive to bring this danger to a close and shut down its malicious websites—as was done a few years ago to Silk Road [an online black market for illegal drugs].

the sofa. So get going and your body will thank you.No matter how much money one has, he or she is

not rich until they have something money can’t buy. We are too focused on others. Social media has done more harm than good. Who cares what your friend did in the Bahamas? At least you shouldn’t! We are so consumed by ‘success’ that we never have time for ourselves. Instead of working an extra 10 hours in the office, why don’t you go out for lunch with friends? We can be the most productive only when we maintain a perfect balance in our lives. So just sitting and playing with your dog over the weekend isn’t a bad plan. Start your day by giving yourself five minutes.

As a sportsperson, I understand the importance of being healthy and happy. If I were the minister of health and happiness, I would set up gardens and parks everywhere so that people could just go out with their families and take quiet walks. I would promote more healthy restaurants instead of the usual fast-food chains. I would open large sports complexes at afford-able rates to encourage people to play and exercise. I would allow people to take time off from work and spend it with their families, surrounded by nature.

Minister for space, technology and robotics

Arjun Sharma, 13 years, Gurugram

00 | OCTOBER 2018 | READER’S DIGEST66 | NOVEMBER 2018 | READER’S DIGEST

Minister for nature and environment

DO YOU THINK that the world can go on like this for the next 50 years? Never! But we can make it survive for at least 50 years if we stop using plastic, if we reduce, reuse and recycle, if we stop using diesel

Ritam Gupta, 10 years, Puducherry

Popular services that use AI or big data have helped many and have become an integral part of our lives. However, they have the potential to be misused, and thus, my government will carefully scrutinize all such products in the future.

Another area where technology can have a deep impact is helping the elderly and the disabled, the numbers of which have only increased in recent decades. We will also be bringing smart gadgets to all homes as well as public spaces and make using them a breeze, while simultaneously educating all (especially the elderly) about technology and its uses. Robots will be found in public areas to help those with mobility issues or other disabilities.

Robots are likely to become an important part of the workforce. We shall ensure that the jobs they take are only the ones that humans ought not to be doing. A relevant example of the implementation of this is to make robots do the dangerous job of cleaning sewers in India, where many are currently losing their lives.

Our aims for space are ambitious. We hope to send autonomous satellites with mining robots to the Moon and nearby asteroids—both of which are rich in natural resources, thus eliminating the need to exploit our planet and damage it further for its resources.

We also wish to establish an interplanetary travel base on the Moon, to make it easier to travel to farther terrestrial bodies and hold rocket launches there, thus avoiding polluting our planet and disturbing nature.

As part of our goal to make the public understand and be aware of space and technology, we will commence a weekly programme in schools to educate children about new-age technologies and their uses. After all, it is children who will be ruling this world!




Animals are captured and keptIn cages all day long.They are so sad, in factThe birds don’t sing a song.

My world would have none of thisNo misery at allNo animals in cagesOr put behind a wall.

Animals would roam aroundBirds would be free to flyPeople would see themRoaming happily by!

If I were the minister of kindnessTo animals and birds too,Happiness I’d ensure for themYes, that’s what I’d do!

Minister of kindness towards animals

Hamsini Padmanabhan, 11 years, Hyderabad

and if we use solar panels, if we use less water and adopt other green initiatives.

As the minister for nature and environment, I would stop the use of fossil fuels in the country because they cause so much air pollution, ban the use of single-use plastic, make it a law to have only one car per household and install solar panels for free everywhere. I will make all these changes because if we harm nature, we harm our future—because nature gives us everything we need. If we protect nature, we protect ourselves and all the other creatures. I will trust the people to follow these rules. If that doesn’t work, I will make strict laws with fines and appropri-ate punishments. Because to save the planet I need everyone’s cooperation and support.


Minister of love and peace

Minister for hobbies

LOVE IS AN intensely positive emotion and peace is experienced as a sense of tranquillity. Both make us capable of recognizing the bountiful beauty present in all of Earth’s creatures. Nature has blessed us with emotions of love and aggression and given us the ability to make the rightful use of each. However, some people’s greed for power is disturbing this balance and destroying our humanity.

If I were the minister of love and peace, I would appoint social agents who would educate people about the strength of forming healthy relation-ships and the harmful consequences of violence and aggression. There would be special community-based activities in neighbourhoods to help people develop emotional maturity so that they can handle prob-lems with ease. Positive ideas would be transferred amongst all so that people do not become easy victims of the power-hungry.

Value education would be mandatory. ‘Peace week’ would be held every month through a variety of events like discussions, dramatics, problem-solving and con-flict-resolution activities. Youth would be encouraged to become ‘peace volunteers’ to monitor and maintain harmony in their localities.

Building healthy international relations would be of prime concern. I would encourage exchange of ideas to create empathy for other cultures and promote collaborative developmental programmes to maintain peaceful international relations.

Love and peace at the global level will only be possible if we, first, ensure them at an individual level and, second, believe that if we are damaging our so-ciety we should be the ones to improve it.

EVERYONE NEEDS A HOBBY—mine is painting. It relaxes me: I have to calm myself down and silence all the negative thoughts in my head to be able to paint. You can be stressed and angry while studying but you can’t paint or sing feeling foul. Painting has taught me

Aashiya Arora, 15 years, Jammu

Meena Bahadur, 15 years, Faridabad




Minister for justice and equalityRoopkatha Roy, 15 years, Kolkata

EQUALITY AND JUSTICE for all have remained a utopia in Indian society—starkly different from reality. Discrimination against girls and women is a pervasive and long-running phenomenon. India ranks abysmally at 127 out of 146 countries in the United Nation’s Gender Inequality Index; 24,771 dowry deaths have been reported between 2012 and 2015 alone. One in every three married Indian women has been a victim of domestic violence. These practices create incentives for parents not to have girl children or to invest less in girls’ health and education. Female foe-ticide causes increasingly skewed sex ratios in India. According to the UNICEF, foetal sex determination by unethical medical professionals has grown into a `1,000–crore industry.

As the minister for justice and equality, I would focus on women’s education. Education accelerates women’s financial empowerment and independence. These are critical factors to end the dowry system and its grave consequences.

discipline. You can have an interest in something but to be able to do it, you need to learn the right way to do it; and to be good at it, you need to practise regu-larly. Being good at painting has also made me more confident as a person.

If I were the minister for hobbies, I would ask all schools to have classes dedicated to hobbies. Every child would get to pick one hobby. Equal importance would be given to studies and activities such as dance, music, art, craft, reading fiction and so on. Some kids would be appointed as spokespersons, and they would work towards inspiring and guiding other children with respect to their hobbies.

All parents would be educated on the importance of hobbies—many of them only ask their children to study. They would be encouraged to find out what their child is interested in and support these interests. What we do for pleasure can often turn into dreams and careers. But as the minister for hobbies I would ensure that the fun part of pastimes is not taken away from us.


Minister for grown-upsAmalia Das Ribeiro, 13 years, Delhi

I also propose mandating representation for women in positions of local leadership to reflect female voices fairly. This will make women more confident to report crimes. Not to mention that female role models raise educational and career aspirations for adolescent girls and their parents.

Another area I would focus on is equal rights for India’s LGBTQIA community. It is frankly disgusting how key public figures refer to homosexuality as “dangerous to social morality” and a “disease”. Here too education is key; it remains the sole way to change people’s narrow mindsets. I would set up committees to address the issue of LGBTQIA-related bullying in in-stitutions and workplaces. Schools and parents would be encouraged to help adolescents understand that having a non-conformist sexuality is not abnormal.

Throughout the history of India, our culture is what it is because we were inclusive. Laws may be passed. However, our country will have equality and justice only when its citizens genuinely believe and practise inclusivity—this is my appeal.

ALL CHILDREN tend to complain about their parents. Of course friction between generations is a given, but maybe it’s not entirely the fault of “whiny” children.

One of the biggest mistakes parents make is that many expect too much of their children. Encouragement and a desire for your child to succeed are wonderful, but full marks in every test is too much to ask for.

Many parents also try to mould their child into exactly what they want. Do this, don’t do that, don’t talk to her, don’t wear that, don’t listen to that. They forget we’re all individuals.

If I were the minister for grown-ups, I would advise parents that they guide their children instead of forcing them into a certain ideal. I would do away with the practice of grown-ups banning things. No more saying no to junk food and extra TV time. All parents would have to be open with their children, despite their instinct to protect us from the world.

A child isn’t something to own. Eventually they will take flight, and it is the responsibility of grown-ups to give them wings.




Minister of magic and fantasy

OUR ENTIRE existence is magical. Our bodies contain this weird presence we call a ‘soul’. When you look in the mirror, what are you staring at? Are you seeing yourself or are you a soul looking at your reflection, trapped in a dense collection of muscles and nerves? Not to mention that you can move this body by just thinking about it. How is all this possible? It’s unexplainable, right? Magic is the name we give to unsolved mysteries.

All the mundane facts of today were once consi-dered impossible myths and fantasies before they were proven by science. Believing in the impossible is what makes things possible. Lost your socks? Maybe elves stole them. Or fairies are playing tricks on you. There’s no need to limit your imagination.

If I were the minister for magic and fantasy, the first problem I would solve by snapping my fingers is global warming. Greenhouse gases, our increased burning of fossil fuels, including gasoline, diesel, kero-sene and natural gas, as well as petrochemicals we now make from oil, would make no contribution to global warming whatsoever. One snap and the earth would be as good as new!

But what’s the point if we can’t enjoy our new, pollu-tion-free, earth? I would make it possible for everyone to take time off their busy schedules and just sit and enjoy the planet and its bounties. I bet if a person does that he or she would realize how magical every-thing around us could be.

So, maybe today, after you are done with your rou-tine, instead of taking out your phone and checking your social media profile, take a break and acknow-ledge your surroundings. Maybe you’ll end up turning fantasy into fact. —WITH INPUTS BY ABHA SRIVASTAVA

Khadijah Syed, 15 years, Mumbai

DEPARTURE POINT

Speak the truth, but leave immediately after.

SLOVENIAN PROVERB

MY PUPIL’S MOTHER, unable to attend the parent–teacher meeting, landed up at my doorstep. Her daughter was academically brilliant and during the course of our conver-sation, I remarked that she was a gifted child. After the lady left, my little daughter pounced on me look-ing completely perplexed, “Why did her parents ‘gift’ her away?”

VIJAI PANT, Ut t a ra k h a n d

MY FIVE-YEAR-OLD niece refers to sex scenes in movies as “fancy time”,

so now whenever anyone talks about sex, I picture the people involved wearing top hats and monocles.

@MICHMARKOWITZ

TODDLER WALKS by with a hammer. Me: What are you going to make?Toddler: Noise. @IWEARAONESIE

MY TWO-YEAR-OLD came up to me and announced she was going to spin a coin. I sat down next to her to watch. She placed the coin on the floor, crouched down next to it and


As Kids See It

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shouted, “Spin coin, spin!” Long silence as we both stare at the coin. She looked up at me and said, “It doesn’t want to spin, Amma.”

SUVASINI SRIDHARAN, Hy d e ra b a d

OUR THREE-YEAR-OLD neighbour, Zoey, was sitting on our front porch when she spotted an ant in the drive-way. She quickly jumped down and stepped on it. “There,” she said. “Now it won’t get run over by a car.”

ARLEEN AND PAUL MEYER

IT WAS AUTUMN and the lawn was strewn with falling leaves and small brown fruits. My four-year-old son Vivan stopped me with a, “Mum, be careful!” “Why?” I asked, to which he promptly replied, “The trees have pooped everywhere.”

SWATI JAIN, Ne w D e l h i

I PICKED UP my four-year-old son, Isa, from school on a very windy day. Grabbing his hand, I joked, “I’d better hold tight so the wind doesn’t blow you away!” With a serious face, he replied, “Don’t worry, Mum. We have gravity.” KANWAL NABI

I GOT MY seven-year-old nephew a cute piggy bank, so he learns to save. As I taught him to insert the coins and fold in the currency notes, he asked me, “But, it doesn’t open. How do I get the money out when it’s full?” “You have to break it,” I said. He wasn’t impressed, and asked, “If

saving is important, why did you spend on a toy-pig that we have to break?” BHAWANI VERMA, Ne w D e l h i

MY FRIEND MARY’S four-year-old son seemed a little distracted on Christmas Day but she was too busy to pay him any attention. By the end of the day, unable to contain himself anymore, the little fellow marched up to his mother demandingly and said, “The whole day people have been wishing you ‘Mary Christmas’ but not a single person has wished daddy ‘Venkata Rao Christmas’.” JAYA VEDAMONY, T h i r u v a n a n t h a p u ra m

ONE AFTERNOON, I asked my four-year-old daughter, Alishba, “Do you have friends in school?” “Hmm, no,” she replied. I asked her why. She

AND ONE FOR THE KIDS

Q: What has ears but can’t hear?

A: A cornfield. reddit.com

Q: What did one egg say to the

other?

A: You crack me up. everythingmom.com

Q: What do you call a bear with

no teeth?

A: A gummy bear! reddit.com


said, “Because it’s too late now. They’ll all be at home.” RUBAB RAZA

MY SON VYOM recently got admission in a new school. When I went to pick him up at the end of his first day, he seemed elated. “How is your new school?” I asked him, to which he replied, “The games period was wonderful.” GIRISH MAINRAI, D a m o h , Ma d hy a P ra d e s h

MY CHILDREN could walk across a whole bed of Legos without flinch-ing, but two grains of sand in their shoes render them paralyzed.

@MOMMAJESSIEC

DURING OUR VISIT to Canada, my wife’s cousin bought a packet of chips that was extra spicy to suit our Indian palate. Her three-year-old son asked whether he could have some, only to be told they were very ‘hot’. He withdrew, “Let’s wait for them to cool down then.”

APARJEET S. NAKAI, Pa n c h ku l a , Ha r y a n a

COMING THIS FALL to NBC, This Is Mine, the heart-wrenching story of a toddler laying claim to things that are not his.

@DAVELEARNSTODAD

AFTER A HECTIC day at work, I was dead tired when I got back home in the evening. My son came to me and asked me to help him with his school project. I sat down to help him de-

spite my exhaustion and remarked, “When your son troubles you this way, you will know what this feels like.” With a twinkle in his eye he re-plied, “And I will tell him to go ask his mother.”

P. RADHA, R o u r k e l a

DURING A WALK in the park with my four-year-old daughter, we came across a short, old lady bent with age. My daughter excitedly pointed to the lady, exclaiming, “Look mummy, a baby granny!”

MAITHREYI MOHAN, C h e n n a i

MY THREE-YEAR-OLD said she wanted to be an astronaut and I told her she had to study hard, go to college, learn a lot of science and take a fitness test. She shrugged and said, “That’s just four things.” @JENDZIURA

ONE DAY, WHILE cleaning drum-stick leaves, I found a little maggot. Sitting next to me, my child ex-claimed, “Don’t kill it. Take it and go leave it on the road, it will find its family.” LENA KANAGARAJ, C h e n n a i

MY SEVEN-YEAR-OLD daughter, Angel, who studies in the third standard, learnt about all the features of living and non-living things and their differences. While studying these topics before her exam, her face went pale and she said sadly, “Mama, I have all the

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features of living things, like feeding, feeling, breathing and growth.” After a pause she continued, “But I can’t reproduce like living things.”

MEETA MOHANTY, O d i s h a

I BEMUSEDLY WATCHED my eight-year-old nephew wolf down two burgers, half a dozen bananas, a glass of milk and four bars of chocolate. As he reached for another bar, I asked, “Aren’t you full already?” He grinned sheepishly and replied, “Full? Maybe. Fulfilled? Not yet.”

SUNANDA SATWAH, Mu m b a i

MY DAUGHTER NEEDS everything to be in order. Often, we jokingly tell her that she has obsessive


compulsive disorder (OCD). Once when she was playing with her two-and-a-half-year-old niece, Mira, she observed that the little one was obsessively lining up her soft toys in a straight line. She turned to us and joked, “Looks like Mira too has OCD!” Before anyone could say anything, Mira promptly butted in to correct her, saying, “Auntie, it’s not OCD! It’s ABCD!” UMA PATKI, Mu m b a i

JUST OVERHEARD a little boy call rhinos “warrior unicorns” and my mind is blown. @RGLADSTONE91


Reader’s Digest will pay for your funny anecdote or photo in any of our humour sections. Post it to the editorial address, or email: [email protected]

“The teacher didn’t hit me, but I sure made her want to.”


A father learns to embrace the chaos

of his daughter’s toddler years

BY ED BARTLEY

Now ... While

There’s Time

“MISSY,” I CALLED to my wife, “did you smear Vaseline on my desk?”

“No, honey. Meghan probably did.” Just like that. Calm. As I’d feared, she had missed the carefully honed, d o u b l e - e d g e d i r o n y o f t h e question. I knew she hadn’t put it there. The question was rhetorical; its only function was to make clear to her that she hadn’t done her job: Defend my desk against the aggressor.

I abandoned the conversation. I would deal with Meghan, our 22-month-old daughter, later.

All of that was yesterday. Today I sit here at that same roll-top desk, which I salvaged from a friend’s attic two years ago, and stare at the blank sheet inserted in the type writer. I wait patiently for ideas to come to me, exam questions on Herman Melville for a test I will give my English IS

TO

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(2

)

CLASSIC READ


N O W . . . W H I L E T H E R E ’ S T I M E

security. The filthier he grows, the more she seems to rely on his wisdom and homespun philosophy.

About a week ago, my wife put Dumpty in the washing machine, hoping at least to make him recog-nizable. We were not ready for the emaciated creature that emerged. Dumpty had been disembowelled during the rinse cycle. My wife spent 20 minutes picking his foam rub-ber intestines out of the machine. We thought Meghan might discard this mere shell of a Dumpty. We were wrong. There was no detectable difference in her relationship with him, except that she found him easier to carry while performing her chores.

I CAN DO MY OWN work fairly well during most of these chores, and so I concentrate on Melville. (“Discuss the similarity of the

alienation theme in Bartleby, the Scriv-ener and Kafka’s Metamorphosis.”) But I am soon sidetracked. Unfortunately, I had not counted on the arrival of the “bib -bibs”. (“Bib-bibs” are birds.)

“Bib-bibs, bib-bibs!” shr ieks Meghan. She insists I go with her to the window. “In a second. Just let me finish this question. Have you read Kaf ka’s Metamorphosis, Meghan? You haven’t? You’d really enjoy it.”

The sarcasm leaves no mark and she pulls me by the hand (two fingers, actually) towards the window. I see myself as a slow-wit in some novel, being led oaf-like to watch the bib-

students tomorrow. My wife is off to a reunion somewhere, but I am not alone. Our two children keep me company. Ten-month-old Edward cooperates to some degree; he spends most of his day poring over a seemingly end-less array of cards, tags and other assorted pieces of paper, plus a Sears [an American chain of department stores] catalogue that he tears apart page by page. Occasionally, he leans out and flails madly at the piano, which he can just reach.

But it is Meghan whose plans h a v e b e e n d e s t i n e d f r o m a l l eternity to clash with mine today. She follows a daily routine that is both time-consuming and challenging. It includes certain basic tasks: watching the “grop”. (That would be the fish.) Sweeping the rug in her room and her crib. (Yes, Meghan sweeps her crib.) Sitting for a few minutes on the b o t t o m s h e l f o f t h e b o o k c a s e to determine whether she sti l l fits there. (She fit yesterday and t h e p r o s p e c t s l o o k g o o d f o r tomorrow.) Checking periodic- ally on Edward. Climbing in and out of the stroller for practice. Testing the sofa springs.

Her constant companion through all of this is Dumpty, a shapeless rag doll whose best days are far behind him. A year ago, he was well stuffed and bursting with good cheer. His perpetual smile endeared him to Meghan immediately. She provides his transportation; he provides her



bibs. And we do watch them. They chatter incessantly and leap back and forth on the lawn just outside our apartment window. Meghan is ab-sorbed, but as I watch them, I wonder whether I parked the car under a tree last night.

Suddenly she bolts from the ro o m ( s h e s e l d o m walks), and I hear her naked feet slapping against the wooden f l o o r o u t s i d e . S h e returns with Dumpty. She holds him up to the window, stretch-ing him out by his two pathetic, tr iangular arms and whispering into his non-existent ear, “Bib-bibs, Hindy, bib-bibs!” Dumpty smiles. It’s a much wider smile than it used to be.

I leave them in conversation and return to my desk. Within five minutes she appears before me, wearing her mother’s shoes. She reaches up to the typewriter keys and depresses four of them simultaneously. “No, thank you, Meghan. Daddy’s seen your work. He’ll do it himself.”

She backs off. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see her in the kitchen watching the grop swim around in his circular world. I can see that the water in his bowl needs to be changed.

Back to the test. Determined. (“Dis-cuss illusion and reality in Benito Cereno.”) “Don’t even ask, Meghan.

Not today.” She stands in front of me with her shoes and socks in her hands. I know the pattern. First the shoes and socks. Then the stroller. And pretty soon we’re in the park. She’ll want me to pick her a dandelion or a leaf from a tree. And she’ll clutch that leaf or dan-delion the way she always does when

we walk to the park. Oh, yes, I know the pattern.

She rests her head on my leg, just as she did when she first learnt to walk. She used to bring her plastic comb or her hairbrush and rest her head on my leg while I combed her hair. That ritual, however, ended after only a few

months—much too soon for me. Finally she leaves and I watch her

frustration as she sits on the floor and tries for several minutes to put on one of her socks. The art proves too elusive. In years to come, she’ll put on stock-ings or leotards with the ease and grace of a ballerina. But today, a tiny pair of socks defeats her. She sees me looking! Back to work. (“What is the signifi-cance of the motto carved on the bow of Benito Cereno’s ship?”)

She pats the wicker chair, the com-fortable one we sit in together to watch TV or to read, and she hastily gathers her books: The Poky Little Puppy, The Magic Bus, The Cat in the Hat, even that ancient copy of National Geographic with the penguin

Meghan’s plans have been

destined from all eternity to

clash with mine today.

N O W . . . W H I L E T H E R E ’ S T I M E


lovable Dumpty will vanish from the life of a little girl who has outgrown him.

I resent Dumpty for an instant. He’s consoling my girl, and that is my job. She and I have few enough days like this to share. So the paper slips gently into the top drawer; the hood slides over the typewriter. The test will get

done somehow. Tests always get done.

“Meghan, I feel like taking a walk down to the park. I was wonder-ing if you and Edward would care to join me. I thought you might like to go on the swings for a while. Bring Dumpty—and your red sweater too. It might be windy

down there.” At the word park, the fingers leave

the mouth. She laughs excitedly and begins the frantic search for her socks.

Melville will have to wait, but he won’t mind. He waited most of his life for someone to discover the miracle of Moby Dick—and died 30 years before anyone did. No, he won’t mind.

Besides, he’d understand why I must go right now—while bib-bibs still spark wonder and before dandelions become weeds and while a little girl thinks that a leaf from her father is a gift beyond measure.

This story originally appeared in

the December 1969 issue of Reader’s

Digest. It won the Reader’s Digest

First Person award.

on the cover … Good Lord, she’s got them all. With her free hand, she tugs at my sleeve.

“No, Meghan,” I snap irritably. “Not now. Go away and leave me alone. And take your library with you.”

THAT DOES IT; she leaves. S h e m a k e s n o f u r t h e r a t t e m p t t o

bother me. I can fin-ish the test easily now without interference. No one trying to climb on to my lap; no ex-tra fingers helping me type. I see her standing quietly with her back against the sofa, tears running down her cheeks. She has two fingers of her right hand in her mouth. She holds the tragic Dumpty in her left. She watches me type and slowly brushes the tip of Dumpty’s anaemic arm across her nose for comfort.

At t h i s m o m e nt , o n l y f o r a moment, I see things as God must—in perspective, with all the pieces fitting. I see a little girl cry because I haven’t time for her. Imagine ever being that important to another human being! I see the day when it won’t mean so much to a tiny soul to have me sit next to her and read a story, one that means little to either of us, realizing somehow that it is the sitting next to each other that means everything. And I see the day when the frail, loyal and

Suddenly, I see things as

God must—in perspective, with all the

pieces fitting.

Cooking tip: Quickly slice a block of cheese by throwing it through a harp.

@MARKLEGGETT

Fill your coffee maker with cake mix for an amazingly delicious yet entirely unex-pected Thursday morning. @8989BELINDA

I hate cooking, but I am excited to debut my cookbook, Toast on a Paper Towel, 365 Ways. @LIZHACKETT

I tell people that the secret ingre-dient in my cookies is “love”, but it’s actually

“floor”.

@UGHREVOLUTION

Tired of boiling water every time you make pasta? Boil a few gallons at the beginning of the week and freeze it for later.

@SWAGLORDPAT

Cooking tip: If you put too much water in your rice, toss a few phones in there.

@UNIQUEDUDE2

Laugh LinesCOOKING HACKS FOR HACKS


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Neil Gaiman

began reading

at the age of four

and has loved it

since then. In his

book Art Matters,

he writes about

the importance

of libraries,

reading and

daydreaming,

and how fiction

changes us.

Excerpted from Art

Matters by Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell, published by Hachette India in 2018.

Dare to Daydream


D A R E T O D AY D R E A M


DIABETESWHAT’S NEW

WHAT’S NEXTBY LISA FIELDS WITH GAGAN DHILLON

DIABETES

IT’S NO EXAGGERATION to say that diabetes is an international health emergency. According to the Interna-tional Diabetes Federation, as of 2017, 425 million adults (aged 20 to 79 years) in the world have some form of the dis-ease; experts estimate that this num-ber could go up to 629 million people by 2045. In the same year, India alone reported 7,29,46,400 diabetes cases.

Type 1 diabetes, caused by an immune system attack on the pancreas, usually strikes younger people and follows them throughout their lives. Type 2 diabetes is more common and caused by resistance to the hormone insulin, which tells the body

to absorb blood sugar. According to Dr Ambrish Mithal, chairman, division of endocrinology and diabetes, Medanta – The Medicity, Gurugram, “Type 2 diabetes cases are increasing rapidly and they are now occurring at a younger age. The figures are staggering. In Delhi and Chennai 20 per cent of people get the disease by age 40. About 30 to 40 per cent have type 2 by age 60.”

But here’s the good news: Over just the past few years, a remark-able number of diabetes treatments, from medication to surgical solutions to high-tech devices, have shown promise. It’s too soon to declare victory, but these breakthroughs have P

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METABOLIC SURGERY

‘ARTIFICIAL PANCREAS’

METFORMIN

DOUBLE-DUTY DRUGS

ISLET CELL TRANSPLANTS



D I A B E T E S : W H AT ’ S N E W & W H AT ’ S N E X T

Adapted from an article by Sari Harrar

progress to type 2 diabetes. “It helped me to lose a lot of weight—just over two stones [12.7 kg]—and I’m still losing weight,” Hancock says. “What we’ve been watching is the portion control on the plate. Now I have three to four roast potatoes. And I’m eat-ing a lot less of the chocolate cake, and not as often.” HOW IT WORKS The Diabetes Pre-vention Programme in the UK was modelled after landmark diabetes

prevention studies from the US, which set goals for people at risk of developing type 2 diabetes : A modest seven per cent weight loss over nine months and a mini-mum of 150 minutes of exercise each week.

Dr V. Mohan, chair-man and chief diabe-tologist at Dr Mohan’s Diabetes Specialities Centre in Chennai, agrees that an inten-sive diet, exercise and lifestyle modifi-cation methods are

solid preventives. “In the Diabetes Community Lifestyle Improvement (D-CLIP) study, we showed that up to a third of people with prediabetes can avoid developing diabetes. This is an important finding given that there are around 80 million people with prediabetes in India and the fact that the

given people with diabetes something sweet: Winning strategies for today and considerable hope for the future. Here are six that are already here or on the way.

FOR PREDIABETES

Prevention Programmes WHAT IT IS As recently as last year, Pamela Hancock, 67, of Northwich, England, wouldn’t think twice about eating a dozen or more lard-roasted potatoes as part of her dinner or a hulk-ing slab of chocolate cake for dessert. “I knew about healthy eating, but as the years have gone by, the plates got piled up more and more,” Hancock says.

Six months ago, her doctor worried that Hancock’s ex-cess weight and high blood pressure put her at risk of diabe-tes, so he asked her to join the National Health Service’s Diabetes Prevention Programme (NHS DPP), that aims to help people with prediabetes eat healthier, exercise more often and drop enough weight to slash their risk of having their disease

“THIS

PROGRAMME

helped me to

lose a lot of

weight,” says

Hancock.



conversion from prediabetes to diabetes occurs much more rapidly in Indians,” he says. Managing portion sizes and reducing fat are key. “Fat cells, particularly in the abdomen, re-lease hormones that increase risk for diabetes,” says David Nathan, a pro-fessor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and the director of the Diabe-tes Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, USA. “And it takes only a small amount of weight loss to lower risk. We found that dropping just two pounds [ less than one kg] lowers your odds for diabetes over three years by about 16 per cent.”

“Weight reduction is the single-most powerful technique to prevent or delay diabetes,” adds Mithal.

Metformin

WHAT IT IS Metformin has been research-proven to reduce the incidence of type 2 diabetes among people with impaired glucose tolerance. It helps reduce insulin resistance. “This is the most commonly used drug to treat type 2 diabetics who can tolerate it (the drug has gastrointestinal side effects). It is also prescribed for people with prediabetes who are not responding to lifestyle measures,” says Mithal.HOW IT WORKS Metformin reduces blood sugar by lowering the amount of sugar coming from the liver. A 2017 Georgetown University, review showed that it cuts the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 18 per cent over 15 years.

FOR TYPE 2 DIABETES

Metabolic Surgery

WHAT IT IS Rerouting the digestive system with gastric bypass surgery (so called because it creates a smaller stomach and bypasses part of the small intestine) or with a sleeve gastrectomy (which reduces the size of the stomach by about 80 per cent) is a drastic diabetes solution. After all, it is major surgery, with small but real risks for complications, such as infections, bleeding and gastrointestinal problems. It’s also not a stand-alone solution. “Metabolic or bariatric surgery is offered to people with diabetes who are severely obese and where other lifestyle measures have failed,” Mithal warns.

Such was the case with 13-year-old Amit Gupta* from Bengaluru, when he was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. He spent hours playing tennis and tried countless diets, yet his weight re-fused to budge from 108 kg. With blood sugar levels over 500, well beyond normal levels, his body was running on borrowed time. For five years his doctors worked hard to reign in the soaring blood sugar levels with little success. His sugar levels rarely dropped below 250. Eventually, doctors recom-mended bariatric surgery. Amit was 19 years old at the time. Soon after, he lost 37 kgs and his sugar levels have been normal ever since.

*Name changed upon request



In 2016, more than 45 medical organizations endorsed bariatric surgery for people with moderate to severe obesity and diabetes. “However, the surgery does have some morbidity and a small mortality rate as well. Hence it has to be done by an experienced surgeon with a full

team of specialists, a diabetologist or endocrinologist along with a psychologist, dietician and others in order to ensure the best results,” adds Mohan. For many people, the first steps in battling diabetes should be lifestyle changes, followed by medication as required.

Double-Duty Drugs

WHAT THEY ARE Tablets that combine two diabe-tes drugs into one medication have become more commonplace. The availability of particular drugs var-ies by country, but a number of combination diabetes medica-tion are widely available. The trend gives patients fewer tablets to swallow at each sitting, making it easier to follow doctors’ orders.

In the past many combination drugs were available in India but recently

HOW IT WORKS Reducing the size of the stomach makes it easier for patients to stick with smaller portions—but patients are also strongly urged to follow a healthy diet. New research is showing that the surgery produces safe, long-lasting benefits, particularly in people with recently diagnosed diabetes.

Research has shown t h a t p e o p l e w h o have surgery within five years of being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes have a 70 to 75 per cent chance of a complete remission.

“Remission means t h a t s u g a r l e v e l s b e c o m e n o r m a l , glycosylated haemo-globin levels (HbA1C—the measure of three month’s control of diabetes) also be-come normal and all this is achieved with-out the use of any anti-diabetic drug. Remission of diabetes does occur if these surgeries are done early in the natural history of diabetes, par-ticularly in those who are on small doses of insulin or only on oral anti-diabetic drugs. However, in our ex-perience, most patients still require small doses of oral anti-diabetic drugs and hence true remission is rare in our series of bariatric surgery patients,” says Mohan.

DOUBLE-DUTY

DRUGS

combine

two diabetes

drugs into one

medication,

reducing one’s

daily pill intake.



the government has clamped down on fixed dose combination drugs (FDCs), regulating their manufacturing and sale, and also banning over 328 drugs, including the combination diabetes drug Gluconorm PG.

In a largely unregulated market like India, there are concerns about the efficacy of these drugs when used in combination. “Combination diabetes medication poses its own challenges—their bioavailability and the need to take certain medicines before or after food, for example. What happens when you combine them?” asks Mohan.HOW THEY WORK Two-in-one treat-ment is quickly becoming standard for people with type 2 diabetes. Up to 43 per cent of them now take two or more diabetes drugs, according to a recent international study of the medi-cal treatments of 70,657 people with type 2 diabetes. They may help diabetes patients live healthier lives.

“There are well-known studies showing that if you can reduce the number of medications that patients have to take, then you improve their adherence,” Lawrence says.

FOR TYPE 1 DIABETES

The ‘Artificial Pancreas’

WHAT IT IS When Anthony Tudela, 44, of Vizille, France, skis, snow- boards or does mountain-bike racing, he’s no longer concerned that the intense physical exertion will lead to drastically low blood sugar, known

as hypoglycaemia. Since 2017, he’s worn an experimental type 1 diabe-tes management device known as the Diabeloop DBLG1 system, which mea-sures his blood sugar levels every five minutes and delivers the required insulin to keep him within target levels.

When Tudela plans to physically exert himself or eat something, he inputs the data into the Diabeloop interface system on his mobile phone. The device then adjusts his insulin levels accordingly. It checks his blood sugar levels regularly, so if Tudela over- or under-calculates, he doesn’t suffer the consequences.

“I can take sugar immediately, and 15 minutes later, the sugar level is okay,” says Tudela, who was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age seven.

Before using the device, Tudela’s blood sugar levels were on target only 30 to 40 per cent of the time. His HbA1C levels hovered between 11 and 12 per cent, and he experi-enced hypos regularly.

With the ‘arti f icial pancreas’, Tudela’s blood sugar levels are on tar-get 76 per cent of the time. His HbA1C levels have dropped to 7.5 per cent, and he doesn’t get hypos anymore, because the device keeps such tight control of his blood sugar levels.

“With this machine I feel free—I can live as if I wasn’t diabetic,” Tudela says. “But you have to trust the device. For decades, you got accustomed to the idea that you have to control your disease; you are responsible for it.



faulty,” says Dr Mohan. However, he agrees that insulin pumps, both basic as well as the more advanced versions, do help to achieve and maintain much better control of diabetes and reduce the fluctuations in sugar levels. They are, however, rather

expensive currently.HOW IT WORKS This device automa-tically senses blood sugar levels. It uses a continuous glucose monitor alongside an insulin pump that processes the data to deliver just the right spurts of insulin round the clock. That reduces the need for finger sticks, blood sugar checks, insulin shots and having to programme an insu-lin pump by hand.

“A device such as this should be capa-ble of automatically

switching off when blood sugar is low and step up the dose of insulin when it is high. Different models of advanced insulin pumps are available today but these are, strictly speaking, not an artificial pancreas,” cautions Mohan.

“Insulin pumps have no intelligence;

they just deliver insulin, according to a

programme developed by the endocri-

nologist,” says Pierre-Yves Benhamou,

head of the endocrinology–diabetology

And all of a sudden, the device is responsible. You have to let it go, and it is not so easy.”

It is important to note that the term ‘artificial pancreas’ can be mislead-ing and it is not, in fact, a replacement for the organ, says Dr Anand Khakhar, senior consultant, liver transplant and hepatobiliary surgery, and director for the liver transplant pro-gramme at the Cen-tre for Liver Disease & Transplantation, Ap o l l o Ho s p i t a l s, C h e n n a i , H y d e r-abad and Bengaluru. “These devices do n o t f u n c t i o n l i k e a p a n c re a s. I t i s s i m p l y a n a u t o -matic pump which controls insulin.”

You can’t yet buy an ‘artificial pancreas’ system like Tudela’s experimental one, but that could change soon. Diabeloop is in the process of marketing the DBLG1 system, which could become com-mercially available in France and other EU countries within a few months.

“The reason that these devices haven’t been approved for com-mercial application and are largely used for research is the fear that these instruments could put a patient’s life at risk in case they are

AN ‘ARTIFICIAL

PANCREAS’

delivers insulin

“according to

the blood sugar

level of the

patient”, says

Benhamou.



department at the Grenoble University

Hospital Center in France and member

of the Diabeloop medical development

team. “The DBLG1 system, developed by

Diabeloop, is completely different. The

quantity of insulin delivered to the pa-

tient adapts all the time according to the

blood sugar level of the patient.”

All of the clinical trials thus far have been done on adults with type 1 diabetes, but the next trial will study paediatric patients. The goal is to even-tually regulate blood sugar levels and reduce the risk of hypoglycaemia in all type 1 patients.

Islet Cell Transplants

It wasn’t unusual for Richard Lane of Beckenham, England, to regain consciousness in an emergency department after having a hypo-induced coma (a potentially fatal diabetes-related complication where an extremely low glucose level causes unconsciousness). Lane, now 75, was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 1976, and for most of the years until 2004, he had little to no warning that a hypo was coming on.

“Life was absolutely awful,” says Lane, the first ambassador of the charity Diabetes UK and its immediate past president. “I’d wake up in many different hospitals. And my wife lived a really difficult life, wondering when I went out of the house whether she was going to get another phone call from the ambulance service.”

By 2004, Lane experienced between four and six fairly severe hypos weekly, most with no warning. When his doctor offered him the opportunity to regain warnings of hypos through an experimental treatment called islet cell transplantation, he jumped at the chance. Islet cells in the pancreas make insulin; when they die out, type 1 diabetes results. So wouldn’t transplanting healthy new islet cells fix the problem?

Islet cell transplants are available in many countries, including the UK , Canada, Austral ia, France, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands. “In India, transplants using stem cells and islet cells are being attempted and research is underway. Collaboration with various government and private partners are on; South East Asia’s first islet cell lab will be set up in Chennai by 2020,” says Dr Khakhar.

In a number of countries, this procedure is now government-funded. Lane received three islet cell transplants in 2004 and 2005. Within a few months, he became the first person in the UK with type 1 diabetes to stop taking insulin, as a direct result of the transplants. A year later, he needed to take insulin again, and after a few years, the transplanted islet cells died off.

But Lane is grateful for those transplants. “The main purpose of the treatment was not to enable me to come off insulin; it was to actually bring back my warnings of hypos,” Lane


says. “I have got my warnings of hypos back. So I’m still benefiting hugely from the treatment.”

HOW THEY WORK Islet cell trans-plants aren’t for everyone. “Islet trans-plantation is only considered if patients have been tried on optimal conven-tional treatment first,” says professor Paul Johnson, director of the islet transplant programme at the University of Oxford. “They need to have been treated with the best possible modern insulins and insulin pumps, and despite that , st i l l be get-ting hypoglycaemic unawareness.”

It ’s a much less invasive procedure than a whole pan-c r e a s t r a n s p l a n t : Islet cells are typi-cally injected into the liver via the portal vein where they start to function as they would in the pancreas. (Islet cells aren’t transplanted back into the pancreas, because the risk for complications is fairly high.)

“It isn’t a major operation,” Johnson says. “It’s like having an intravenous drip run through. Nearly all islet transplants in the UK are done in the X-ray department, with the

patient still awake, but with a local anaesthetic injection over the liver and some sedation.”

Most patients need two consecu-tive islet cell transplants to ensure that the procedure is effective and that the islets last. (The cells can last for many years but tend to function for three to

five years.) Patients who receive islet cell transplants must take anti-rejection medi-cation (immunosup-pression)—which have many side effects—for the rest of their lives.

Many patients are able to stop taking i n s u l i n f o r s o m e period of time: In a recent study, when 48 people whose type 1 diabetes was extremely difficult to control (leading to life-threat-ening low blood sugar episodes), received islet cell transplants,

52 per cent had healthy blood sugar levels one year later without insulin.

“Even if they require some insulin, an islet transplant can be life-saving in terms of preventing sudden death by undetected hypos,” Johnson says, “and life-improving by helping to prevent complications such as blindness, kidney failure and heart disease resulting from uncontrolled high blood sugar levels.”


ISLET CELL

TRANSPLANTS

can prevent

sudden deaths

caused by

undetected

hypo-induced

comas.

Shocking NotesON THE AUCTION BLOCK

BY FRANCA G. MIGNACCA

SLICE OF LIFE

It’s not often people bid over a mouldy piece of cake. This year, Julien’s Auctions in Beverly Hills, California, USA, acquired not one, but five pieces of wedding fruitcake from as many royal nuptials: a slice from Princess Anne and Mark Phillips’s ceremony, one from Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson’s, one from Prince William and Kate Middleton’s and one from both of Prince Charles’s weddings. The most expensive piece—William and Kate’s—cost its buyer US$2,556 [`1,88,926]. But the recipient can’t have their cake and eat it too: Each slice comes with a warning that it’s no longer edible.

ODD BIRD

In February 2018, Hansons Auction-eers staff in Derbyshire, England, received a special, and bemusing, offering: five artificial parrot limbs. The peculiar prosthetics each had a name (the largest was Eagle Execu-tive, the smallest Bouncing Budgie) but otherwise came with little con-text, other than a label on the box

that read “Parrifoot LTD”. Auctioneers researched the mysterious company, but

turned up no leads. Thank-fully, the collection’s

puzzling provenance wasn’t a barrier on

the auction block: One lucky buyer purchased the artificial limbs in a bag of miscellaneous items for US$21 [`1,552]—hardly an arm and a leg.

TRUE COLOURS

When Glenna Gardiner’s father said that a painting that had been in her family for more than 80 years was an authentic work by Canadian artist Tom Thomson, the Edmonton native didn’t believe him—they weren’t well off enough. That’s why later, after a friend quipped that the dusty paint-ing Gardiner had been keeping in the basement could be worth a lot, Gar-diner shipped it to her as a gag gift. It wasn’t long before her pal returned the present: After bringing the paint-ing to Heffel Fine Art Auction House, she learnt it was the real deal. The piece eventually received the glory it deserved: Gardiner sold it at an auc-tion for US$4,81,250 [`35.5 lakhs]. P

IER

RE

LO

RA

NG

ER


A LINGUISTICS PROFESSOR is lecturing his class. “In English,” he says, “a double negative forms a positive. However, in Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn’t a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative.”

A voice from the back shouts out, “Yeah, right.” viralnova.com

I ASKED A FRIEND of mine, “Do you know how to swim?” He replied,

“I don’t.” Quite surprised, I said, “You are in the navy and you can’t swim?” He promptly shot back with, “You are in the air force, do you know how to fly?” ASHWIN ADITYA, Ta m i l Na d u

MY GRANDDAUGHTER wanted a Cinderella-themed party, so I invited all her friends over and made them clean my house. @IGREENMONK

A MAN’S BRAGGING about his promotion to vice president got so C

AR

TO

ON

BY

BIL

L A

BB

OT

T

“Yes, I’m sure the eggs have gone beyond their expiration date.”


LaughterTHE BEST MEDICINE

out of hand that even his wife was annoyed. “Look, being a vice presi-dent isn’t that special,” she said. “They even have a vice president of peas at the supermarket!”

Not believing her, the man called the supermarket and demanded, “Get me the vice president of peas!”

The clerk replied, “Fresh, canned or frozen?” NORMAN MIDDLETON

THREE QUICK JOKES that might take some time (and/or Googling) to get:

“Have you any two-watt bulbs?” “For what?” “That’ll do. I’ll take two.”

Who is this Rorschach guy? And why does he paint so many pictures of my parents fighting?

What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?

THE CROWDED diner had a sign reading, “Not responsible for per-sonal items.” So Larry kept checking on his belongings.

Finally his pal said, “Larry, you’re driving me nuts. Stop watching our coats.”

“I’m only watching mine,” Larry replied. “Yours was stolen a half hour ago.” jewishmag.com

THERE’S LITERALLY no way to know how many chameleons are in your house. @MEGANAMRAM

EIGHT COMEDIANS are in a bar telling jokes. “Twelve!” one of them says. The others burst out laughing.

“Four!” shouts another, again crack-ing up the others. When a third hollers, “Twenty-two!!!” they’re all guffawing. Except the bartender.

“What’s so funny about just calling out numbers?” he says.

“We all know the same jokes, so we gave them numbers,” says the first comedian. “To save time, we just shout out the numbers.”

The bartender decides to try it and yells, “Six!” A dead silence falls upon the bar. “Why didn’t I get any laughs?” he asks.

The comedians shrug. “You didn’t tell it right.” Via friarsclub.com

A HUSBAND returned home from work, exhausted. His wife eagerly asked him, “How were the rumali rotis I packed for your lunch today?” “They were very nice. Especially the third one, right at the bottom. I relished it the most,” the husband replied.

The wife took a deep breath and then said in measured tones, “I had only packed two … I kept them on a tissue paper stacked one on top of another.” R. RAGHOTHAMAN B e n g a l u r u

I APPROXIMATED the Black Friday [a huge annual sale in USA] experience at home by hurling myself into a wall a number of times and then ordering online. KUMAIL NANJIANI


Reader’s Digest will pay for your funny anecdote or photo in any of our humour sections. Post it to the editorial address, or email: [email protected]


What your subconscious is

really trying to tell you

Common Dreams

DecodedBY MONICA HEISEY FROM LENNY LETTER

ILLUSTRATION BY BENOIT TARDIF


It’s possible that I’m biased. I have extremely intense dreams and also a twin sister who sometimes dreams the same things as I do. If you have trou-ble remembering your dreams but want to experiment with some deep-sleep analysis, try keeping a journal beside your bed and recording every-thing you can remember about your dream as soon as you wake up.

Analyzing other people’s dreams is fun and free and makes you feel like Freud minus the casual phallocentrism. See below for a few classic dream definitions and some alternative interpretations that could be real—but don’t quote me, please. I am not a doctor.

ANIMALS: Animals appearing in dreams are often a stand-in for the basic needs or deepest emotions of the dreamer. The state of the animal (caged or free, healthy or neglected, angry or happy) can be an indicator that our fundamental requirements are being ignored and necessitate attention and care. Alternatively, hav-ing an animal appear in your dream

can mean it’s time for your boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or wife to stop fighting the inevitable and let you get a dog already—you’ll take such good care of it and walk it every day.

BABIES: You’re not pregnant—babies represent new ideas and fresh begin-nings. Maybe that frantic worry list you keep while you’re nodding off is actually getting you somewhere! Giving birth in a dream is a terrific omen and suggests you will probably be grunting through the process of bringing a great new project into the world sometime soon.

BEING CHASED: A classic anxi-ety image, the vision of someone in hot pursuit invites dreamers to ask themselves what they’re afraid might catch up to them. See if you can re-member what you were being chased by. Was it a family member? A shad-owy presence (i.e., the unknown)? A tree? Many screaming teenagers? A murderer? Ask yourself if you are avoiding something. Is that thing … being murdered? Okay, murder is

I DON’T KNOW WHO STARTED THE RUMOUR that no one wants

to hear about your dreams. I love hearing about other people’s

dreams. I want to hear every single weird thing your subconscious

presented to you while you were asleep; what improbable images

your brain juxtaposed while you were snoozing away, unaware,

or possibly dribbling the best bits out in a breathy ghost voice

that scared your significant other and friends at sleepovers.


C O M M O N D R E A M S D E C O D E D

a bad example; let’s all do our best to avoid that. Basically, though, if something is chasing you in a dream, you likely need to turn around and confront whatever it is you are fleeing.

DEATH: As in tarot-c a rd re a d i n g s, t h e appearance of death in dreams is not the grim omen it may seem to be. Rather, it signals the symbolic death of a period in your life, or the end of a relation-ship or a sign that it’s time to throw out your jeans—they have holes at the crotch, and everyone can tell.

NUDITY: Appearing fully naked in your own dream generally means you feel exposed. If you show up unclothed and uncomfortable in a public place, such as work, it’s a sign that you suspect you’ve exposed too much of yourself to others or that the

world around you isn’t quite picking up what you’re putting down. In rarer cases, nudity in dreams can represent intense freedom, an impression that you have ‘nothing to hide’ or the fact

that you’ve been to the gym twice this month and, though it’s early, you feel like you’re see-ing results.

FLYING: Flying is a very f u n t h i n g t o d o i n a dream. It frequently suggests you’re on top of whatever situation you’re in. But if you find your-self struggling to stay aloft, chances are you

feel out of control in your waking life. Dreams are not very subtle. Once I imagined I learnt how to fly, taught my mother how to do it, and then she told me not to tell anyone because that would be embarrassing for her. Slow down, subconscious! That is almost too inscrutable! What does it all mean?!

© 2016, MONICA HEISEY. FROM ‘WHAT IT MEANS WHEN YOU DREAM ABOUT A PONY’, LENNYLETTER.COM

DEATH IN DREAMS IS NOT

THE GRIM OMEN IT MAY

SEEM TO BE. IT COULD MEAN IT’S TIME TO THROW OUT YOUR JEANS.

LOVE LAB

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of

two chemical substances: If there is any reaction,

both of them are transformed.

CARL JUNG


QuickipediaBLOCKCHAIN

BLOCKCHAIN IS AN OPEN LEDGER

that is used to record online financial transactions in chains. Each chain is made up of individual units called blocks—bundles of these records. Each block consists of a unique code called hash. Every hash also contains the hash of the previous block in the chain. They link with each other in a specific order, to form a blockchain.

The transactions are made through unique ‘keys’ assigned to every user in the chain. These are conveyed over the network for verification and vali-dation for ‘mining’. The records of veri-fied transactions are then transferred and stored in a single block.

Blockchain is a decentralized sys-tem. Transactions are made directly between parties instead of passing through a single, central node—such as a financial institution’s payment gateway. Such transactions can be regulated by the conditions governing the operation of the gateway, but can be subject to significant risks. With decentralization, transactions can be made through multiple nodes; each node stores the transaction data and passes it on to all other nodes in that chain. The records can be accessed by all participants in the chain, who can check the information directly without IN

DIA

PIC

TU

RE

the approval from a controlling authority. No one party can claim exclusive access to the data in a chain.

The technology is tamper-proof. Once a transaction has been made and the ledger updated, it is tough to alter the records. If one tries to change a record, the hash in that block will change, resulting in delinking from the previous block and the chain col-lapsing. To restore the chain, a hacker would have to recalculate all the hashes in that chain. Also, blockchains use unique alphanumeric addresses to conduct transactions. This adds an extra level of protection.

Still, security breaches, such as the 51 per cent attack where more than half the miners in a chain gain control, remain a concern.

—SAPTAK CHOUDHURY

Trapped underneath a fully loaded trailer,

his only hope was a tiny pocket knife

Barry, near a cane farm in Australia, with a

tractor and trailer similar to the ones he was

working with at the time of the accident

PINNED TO THE

EARTHBY HELEN SIGNY


DRAMA IN REAL LIFE



P I N N E D T O T H E E A R T H

nearly 30 years earlier, Barry lived on his own, but when he could he spent time with his two daughters and five grandchildren. One of six himself, he’d been close to his father. He had inherited his father’s beloved pocketknife, with its two blades, pliers, screwdriver and a little saw. It meant the world to Barry. He was never without it, and he ran his fingers over it this morning before he lit up a cigarette and surveyed the day’s work.

To access the crops, he needed to drive the tractor and its load down a steep decline, over a creek and up the other side. He stubbed out the ciga-rette on the hard, dry ground, climbed into the cab, turned the key and felt the tractor noisily rumble into life. He put the machine into gear and set off.

Crunch. The tractor jerked and ground to a halt. “Bugger,” Barry mut-tered. As he clambered out of the cab, his phone dropped out of his pocket. He swore under his breath as he picked it up and made his way behind the tractor to see what had happened.

As the tractor had headed over the ridge of the decline, the pressure on the metal drawbar linking the trac-tor to the trailer had snapped it. The

THE HEAT WAS ALREADY SHIMMERING over the fields

as Australian sugar cane farmer Barry Lynch pulled his

pickup truck to the edge of the road and engaged the

handbrake. 6 a.m. The burly 54-year-old took a quick

swig of cola, adjusted his cap and stepped out of the

cab into the Far North Queensland morning.

Working swiftly, Barry checked out the machinery he was to use that day. The red-and-black tractor was attached to a four-and-a-half-ton trailer—a tanker on wheels filled with 5,400 litres of herbicide. He was heading to a far paddock to spray some young cane, but his mind was already on that evening’s mission. It was 1 October, the first anniversary of his mother’s death. Once he’d finished work, he’d head to the coastal town of Lucinda, 140 kilometres away, where he and his sister Susan would release flowers into the ocean in her memory.

Born and bred in Australia’s sugar cane farming belt along the humid, tropical north-east coast, working the land was in Barry’s blood. He travelled from farm to farm, prepar-ing the ground and nurturing the young cane. It was a lonely job. Most days it was just him. But he enjoyed driving the big machinery, loved the smell of the soil as he worked the pad-docks. And he was well known for his determination and dedication to the job—for never giving up.

This morning he had set out at 5 a.m. from his home in the little town of Tully. Single since his divorce P

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/B

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K P

HO

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AP

HY

-



hydraulic cables were still connected, but the drawbar was hanging lopsided and broken, leaving the trailer—still on flat ground—in a nosedive.

One end of the drawbar was bolted to the underside of the tractor, near the gearbox. All Barry needed to do was loosen the bolt to release it, then he could repair the drawbar and get on with his day.

Barry shifted the tractor into reverse and backed it up to flat ground, nudg-ing the trailer backwards as he did so.

He quickly walked the 500 metres back to his pickup, irritation niggling in the pit of his stomach. He was well known for his dedication to the job. He grabbed his toolkit and a length of chain, took a swig of rapidly warming cola and tossed his mobile phone on the passenger seat. He didn’t want to drop it a second time.

Back at the tractor, the rumbling of the engine and the buzzing of ci-cadas filled the air. There was no one around for miles. Barry inspected the damage more closely. The drawbar

had dug into the earth of the track, but the three-point hitch—another link between tractor and trailer—was still intact. He wrapped the chain around it to lift the trailer off the ground, utilizing power from the tractor ; steadied the trailer wheels with wooden chocks; and jumped on to the tractor to move it forward and give himself space to crawl underneath. Then he slithered through on his left side to loosen the bolt and retrieve the broken piece of drawbar.

It was hot and noisy underneath the tractor as he stretched to manoeuvre the wrench. He didn’t realize it, but as he reached forward his left knee pressed against one of the wooden chocks. The further he reached, the more unsteady the chock became.

In a split second, the chock gave way. The entire 10 tons of fully loaded tanker and fertilizer crashed down on the inside of Barry’s leg.

The cicadas stopped and the paddock went quiet as Barry’s scream pierced the air. He was pinned to the earth with his leg bent, the full weight of the trailer on the inside of his knee, compressing it to half its natural size and completely cutting off the circulation. Barry could feel his bones crushing beneath the weight. Below the knee, his calf and foot immediately started to swell with pooling blood. The pain was over-whelming as adrenaline started to course through his veins.

I’ve got to get that boot off, Barry

HIS BONES WERE BEING CRUSHED, AND

BELOW THE KNEE, HIS CALF AND FOOT STARTED TO SWELL,

POOLING WITH BLOOD.

P I N N E D T O T H E E A R T H


screamed inside his head. He could feel his foot swelling to the size of a melon as he reached down and fumbled to rip off his workman’s boot.

Oh, I’m in trouble here, he thought. My bloody phone’s in the pickup. No one will realize I’m missing until this evening.

As pain and panic washed over h i m i n w av e s, h e re a c h e d f o r

his packet of cigarettes, lay back and lit up with trembling hands. Was it worth yelling? There was no one to hear him. And who would notice a tractor sitting in the middle of a cane paddock in Far North Queensland?

Smoking calmed him a little. About halfway through the cigarette, he realized he had two options. Either I can wait here and do nothing, or I can dig myself free.

Barry reached for his knife, his mind flicking to his parents as he pulled it out of its sheath. The trailer was rest-ing on a block of wood and wouldn’t shift any further, he thought. With the

knife and his spanner, which was still on the ground, maybe he could dig out earth from underneath his leg.

Barry got to work. He pulled out the five-centimetre saw and started to chip away at the solid earth be-neath his knee. The grey-brown soil of the track was as hard as a tarred road, compacted from the weight of heavy machinery over the years. By tapping hard on the little saw with the spanner, he could dig its entire length into the ground. Then he wriggled it from side to side, loosening the dirt before pulling it out and knocking it in again a few millimetres away. After five or six repetitions, a small chunk of road was loose enough for him to scrape it away with his hands. Every 10 to 15 minutes he’d switch to the other side of his leg and start there.

Sweat ran down his forehead and stung his eyes. The temperature steadily rose as the morning wore on, with half of his body in the direct sun and the other half in the heat of the tractor. He had no water, but he thirstily eyed the dripping overflow from the tractor’s air conditioning a couple of feet behind him. He took off his cap and set it upside down on the broken piece of drawbar where it could catch the drips. Then he sucked what little moisture he could from the felt padding on the rim and carried on chipping away.

IT WAS CLOSE TO NOON, and the sun was directly overhead,

THE TRAILER WOULDN’T SHIFT ANY FURTHER. MAYBE WITH

HIS KNIFE AND HIS SPANNER, HE COULD

DIG HIMSELF OUT.


beating down on Barry’s back. His mind wandered to his family . Am I really never going to see them again? He wept in pain and despair. But then he thought of his mother. He was damned if he was going to die here, today, on the anniversary of her death. I’m going to be there to lay those flowers, he told himself. The thought gave him a little strength.

And then anger welled up. I should have secured the trailer better. But anger was good, it seemed to give him more adrenaline to keep going. He pulled himself together and kept on chipping, chipping at the earth.

BARRY WAS GETTING WEAKER. Being crushed is extremely danger-

ous. Not only does it damage the part of the body that has taken the force, but it can also lead to ‘compartment syndrome’, where lack of blood to the muscles and tissues eventually damages the nerves and leads to muscle death. The blood pool-ing in Barry’s leg was causing it to swell up and die, and it was also depriving his whole body of fluid supply. He was at risk of passing out.

By now, Barry’s leg was four times its normal size, growing bigger and turning blacker. He could feel the skin cracking. It was as if his leg was going to explode. Bugger it, I’ll just stab it with the knife to relieve the pressure, Barry thought. But before he could summon the courage, he

Barry stands atop a slight rise where the crossbar broke. In the middle of nowhere,

it is a miracle that the ambulance was able to find him in time.


looked down at the ground and saw it was damp. He rubbed his hand up and down his leg and felt that it, too, was wet—with blood. He realized with a jolt that the skin of his leg had burst, leaving a hole the size of a fist.

Am I going to bleed out? Is this it? He reached around his waist and slowly took the belt from his pants. He tied it above the wound as a tourniquet and the flow of blood slowed a little. But Barry knew his time was limited. He started to dig harder.

H E H A D B E E N D I G G I N G f o r close to six hours. The trench u n d e r h i s k n e e w a s a b o u t 50 centimetres wide and 10 deep when Barry first felt some movement in his

leg. He started to dig more franti- cally. Yes, his knee could definitely move. He took a gamble, grabbed hold of the three-point linkage arms of the tractor and levered himself up.

Wi t h a s l i t h e r o f b l o o d a n d soil , Barr y pulled his leg free. Euphoria and relief swept over him. I’m going to make it to meet Susan after all! Barry thought wildly as he crawled out from underneath the tractor. He pulled himself to stand-ing, but as he put his weight on the injured leg it snapped beneath him. He crumbled to the ground. The leg was no better than jelly.

Unbeknownst to Barry, being free meant he was in critical danger. Over the hours, the lack of circula-

Barry misses farming, but he is happy to be alive for his family—and his dogs.



tion to his leg had caused his cells to try to survive without oxygen. They were generating a large amount of lactic acid, and they were leaking toxic substances like potassium, myoglobin and purines into the surrounding tissues. Now that the leg was free, these substances would be carried around his body, potentially causing life-threatening problems to his heart, kidneys, liver or lungs. He needed medical attention—fast.

Barry was on the ground again. If the pain had been bad before, now it was unbearable. I’ve got to get to my phone, he told himself. It was a long way, 500 metres along the dusty road. He started to pull himself along on his backside, his useless leg dragging in the earth. It took a full 10 minutes for him to drag himself along the road.

As he came round the corner, there was the pickup gleaming in the sunshine. Barry was ready to faint. He reached up to the driver’s seat and pulled himself up on his arm, took a swig of the warm cola and grabbed his

mobile. He rang 000 [primary national emergency number in Australia].

BARRY WAS LYING by his pickup, nearly unconscious. Then, far in the distance, the ambulance came into sight. Barry closed his eyes as the paramedic jumped out and knelt down beside him. “How are you, mate?”

“I’ve had a bit of trouble with my leg,” said Barry, as he slipped into unconsciousness.

FIVE YEARS AFTER the accident, Barry’s still got a bad leg but he’s glad to be alive. It was two years before he was able to lay the flowers for his mother’s memorial—but he did make it in the end. His pocketknife sits in a g l a s s cab i n e t i n h i s h o u s e. It symbolizes the steadfast determina-tion that made him survive—that he was never going to give up and there was no way he was going to die on his mother’s first death anniversary. His parents, somewhere, were looking out for him that warm October day.

END PRODUCTS

Tellingly, right before she died, my grandma’s final purchase

at Bed Bath & Beyond was curtains.

@KATTSDOGMA

Frederic Baur, the man who designed the Pringles can,

had a portion of his ashes buried in a Pringles can.

Source: The Guardian


KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

An Era Goodness

From the pages of memory and nostalgia, a

reader remembers a thoughtful act by an

unknown man that takes us back to ...

DR D. C. SRIVASTAVA

A LONG TIME AGO, when I was posted in Ahmedabad, we would often drive to Mount Abu for short trips—it took us anywhere between seven to eight hours to drive up. That year, my close relatives were visiting from Lucknow during the Dussehra holidays, and we made a plan to visit Abu for three days. Since there were seven of us, including my brother’s family who also lived in Ahmedabad, we hired two cabs. We packed ourselves into the vehicles, stacked our luggage on the carriers on top and started out.

of

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A N E R A O F G O O D N E S S

A GOOD TIME was had by all, and soon it was time to return. During the journey back, we stopped at a dhaba for tea and snacks near the Mehsana district.

That’s when I noticed suddenly that the rope with which the luggage was tied in one of the carriers had come loose and one of the suitcases was missing. It must have fallen off somewhere along the way.

Although it didn’t contain any valuables—just clothes and some cash, we decided to retrace our steps, driving back four kilometres, looking for the bag. But luck wasn’t our friend: We could not locate it and returned to Ahmedabad dejected.

AFTER ABOUT A MONTH, one day, while in my office, I got a call from my assistant that a certain Mr Shah wanted to see me. I was in the middle of a meeting so he was asked to wait. After

I got done, I called him into my cabin. I was looking after the development

of small industries in the state at the time, so my immediate query was: “How can we help you? Do you want to set up an industry or are you facing any issues in your enterprise?”

To which he said, “No, sir. I have not come for any official help. It is a personal matter. Did you lose something recently?”

The incident of the lost suitcase had completely slipped my mind. “Nothing comes to mind,” I said.

“Did you lose your suitcase?” he pressed on.

Of course, it all came back to me and I told him about the lost suitcase from the cab en route from Mount Abu a month ago.

THEN SHAH NARRATED his side of the story: “I was driving back to Ahmedabad with my friend on my

“I noticed the

suitcase lying by

the side of the

road. I waited

there for an hour

or so but no one

turned up to

claim it.”



SMART TECH

When the inventor of the USB stick dies, they’ll gently lower

the co�n, then pull it back up, turn it the other way

and lower it again.

@CLUEDONT

Amazon thinks my recent humidifier purchase was merely the

beginning of a newfound humidifier collecting hobby.

@JUSTINSHANES

motorbike when I noticed a suitcase lying by the side of the road. I picked it up and waited there for an hour or so. Since no one turned up to claim it, I went to a nearby petrol pump and gave my address to the manager with a request that if someone approached him for the suitcase my details may be shared.

About a month passed. Since I did not hear from anyone, I broke open the lock and found your visiting card, with your name and address, inside. So, here I am.”

I WAS ST U N N E D a n d q u i t e speechless, too. I could not find the right words to express myself : How do I repay him for his honesty? Can I thank him enough for his thoughtfulness? I somehow managed to string together a few sentences, but nearly not enough to convey my feelings on his exemplary act of

kindness and generosity. Of course, I mentioned that I would visit his residence in the evening and collect my bag. But ever the gentleman, he insisted on delivering it to me.

In the evening he and his wife came to my house with the suitcase. We chatted over tea.

At one point, he said, “Please open the suitcase and check your belongings.” I could not do it. “Am I to reciprocate your integrity by checking the bag?” I exclaimed.

WE REMAINED IN touch for quite some time afterwards, until I was posted to Delhi. Since that was an era without electronic communication, we eventual ly lost touch w ith each other.

Sometimes I wonder if I would have got back my suitcase had I lost it now. Those were different times—and different people—clearly.

The Lego House is a

masterpiece of fun and

learning for all ages

Three open-mouthed

tyrannosauruses are

each made of the three

different types of

bricks. Two of them

are pictured here.

BY LISA FITTERMAN


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THECAPITAL

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ITH STRONG, calloused and sure fingers, two teenagers sort through Lego constructions,

using little spoons and plastic wedges to separate the pieces. There are thousands of them, some round, some rectangular, some tiny, some not, red, black, white, blue and green, stuck together in the forms of cars and trucks and buildings, and flora and fauna, all the myriad shapes that spring from the imagination of children.

This is the girls’ weekend job: to dismantle the dreams that kids built over the previous week so those very same bricks and blocks can be trans-formed yet again in the days to come.

We are in a back room at Lego House, a sprawling new complex in the small Danish town of Billund where the interlocking toy blocks that have kept children of all ages fascinated for 60 years were born. But to keep the thousands of daily visitors to Lego House happy and engaged, someone has to take apart the creations so the pieces—about 25 million of them altogether—can go back into circulation. This is where Cecilie Lau Andersen and Frida Zeng Wei Mortensen, both 16 years old, come in as part of a 20-member teenaged team.

“Do it like this,” Cecilie says to me, lightly holding a Lego frog in her left hand and flicking her right wrist as she juts out her thumb. “That’s it. Hey, you’re not bad!”

The two girls show me how to check for scratches and fingerprints—signs that a piece is ready to be taken out of circulation.

“We never know what will be waiting for us when we come in,” Cecilie says. “Sometimes, we have to separate up to 1,000 Lego pieces in one day.”

Adds Frida: “It’s a necessary part of the magic.”

I FIRST SEE LEGO HOUSE from the plane, from which vantage point it looks like an avant-garde housing com-plex, with four storeys and lots of glass. There are 21 Lego-like blocks mounted on each other in asymmetrical fash-ion, all but one with roofs in shades of blue, green, red and yellow. It is so big, it makes the unassuming com-mercial buildings and low-rise homes that surround it look like a toy village. All of a sudden, it hits me: I am looking at a real house built of Lego-like blocks in concrete and ceramic, with a white ‘brick’ perched on the top that has eight round, raised skylights.

The word Lego comes from the Danish words, ‘leg godt’, or ‘play well’—and that’s what Lego House is all about. Open to the public since September 2017, it spreads out over 12,000 square metres on the site of Billund’s former municipal hall. This town of about 6,100, which markets itself as the ‘Capital of Children’, has Lego everywhere you turn. Located about 265 kilometres west of Copen-hagen, the Lego Group’s headquarters

W



are here, as is the company’s first-ever brick moulding factory and a top- secret facility with windows shuttered in metal to keep out prying eyes as new creations are designed. The Lego-land theme park has been here for half a century, attracting up to two million visitors a year. But Lego House, which is on target to surpass its first-year goal of 2,50,000 visitors, is something else altogether—a streamlined interac-tive masterpiece, long-held dream of Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, grandson of the toy’s inventor.

“Det bedste er ikke for godt,” the older man had carved on a wooden plaque that hung for years on the wall of his carpentry shop. “Only the best is good enough.”

Building on that legacy, the grandson wanted a place where kids could both

learn the company’s story and have a hands-on experience, no matter their ages. A place that would highlight the intricate works of an international community—5,00,000 strong—known as ‘Adult Fans of Lego,’ or AFOLs. It would feature the versatility of Lego bricks; after all, a computer program developed by a Danish mathematics professor has shown that with only six two-by-four bricks, you can make no less than 91,51,03,765 different things.

To realize his dream, Kjeld hired Copenhagen-based architect Bjarke Ingels’ Group, or ‘BIG’, to build it. Construction began in 2013 and lasted four years. Although the Lego Group, which is privately held, won’t reveal any hard dollar figures, cost was no object, with high-end materials such as ceramic tiles from Germany and

The house from an

aeroplane: The white brick

on the top has eight raised,

round skylights.



lots of steel hidden in the walls to reinforce the structure.

The result is a place that looks like a giant plastic toy house, with white ceramic tiled walls reflecting the dull afternoon light. Although BIG didn’t use toy bricks in the actual building, all the measurements are to (a greatly magnified) Lego scale, so that it’s possible to recreate in miniature. With the sense that I am stepping into another world, I go inside.

I ENTER AN AIRY FOYER that serves as the new town square, where people can meet for a cup of coffee or a meal without having to pay the entry fee. There are hard oak floors, lots of benches, Lego sculptures and, in honour of spring, Lego daffodils peeping out of planters. To my left, there is a restaurant where two whirring, eye-rolling robots are busy picking meals in Lego-like boxes up from a conveyor belt for customers waiting at the counter. On the far right, a bright red machine—a smaller version of the ones in real-life Lego factories—sounds like a train whistle as it turns water into steam and pushes plastic granules into a brick-making mould.

Straight ahead, a crowd of children and adults surround a tree. There are gasps and inarticulate, admiring cries. “Awesome,” I hear. And, “fantastic.” I follow their gaze, up, up, up nearly 16 metres as I realize the tree is not real but made of Lego bricks—63,16,611, to be precise, all mounted and glued

together around a metal frame so they don’t fall off, with 13 lush, ‘leafy’ branches reaching out to brush the staircase that winds up around it.

“It is pretty amazing, isn’t it?” says Stuart Harris, 54, Lego House’s balding, affable British chief designer, who has been playing with Lego ever since he was a “wee lad”. Harris moved here in October 2013, among the first six people to be hired, even before construction began. Now, he stands next to me at the tree’s moss-coloured Lego base, arms crossed and smiling, like a proud parent.

Officially called the ‘Tree of Creati-vity’, it is at once a nod to the origins of the company in 1932 as a producer of toy wooden ducks—with a duck ‘carved’ into the tree trunk—and to the future, with a yellow Lego crane sitting at the very top. Just this one project took Stuart and three teams of design-ers in Denmark and the Czech Repub-lic more than 24,000 hours to plan and build, about 12 years worth of work for one person. The actual installation, from its grass-like green plastic base upwards, took three, eight-hour shifts for nine months. Weighing a whopping 20 tons—the equivalent of three African elephants or five white rhinoceroses—it seems to be holding up the house itself, especially since there is nary another supporting pillar to be seen.

“As we were building it—and building the house around it—the contractor told us the measurement of the stairs was off and a branch was too


long. We dealt with that but sometimes I wondered if it would all come together. And then it did. Oh, it did.”

As we mount the stairs to-wards the top of the tree, I see classic Lego dioramas nestled in the upper branches, from a medieval yellow castle to the futuristic 928 Galaxy Explorer [a Lego spacecraft set, first launched in 1979]. As I look more closely there are Lego monkeys dressed as knights and astronauts, and a miniscule sign that is a cheeky homage to movies that feature space aliens. It reads, “We come in pieces.”

From there, we mount a second short set of stairs, into a white-ti led space c a l l e d t h e ‘ Ma s t e r p i e c e Gallery’. This, I realize, is the interior of the ‘Lego’ brick with the eight skylights that I saw when I flew in. The rectangular room is lined with glass cases that contain Lego sculptures by AFOLs—everything from a rotary dial telephone to a very round monster with tentacles that is based on Japanese animation. But the pièce de resistance—or pièces—are the three open-mouthed, sharp-toothed tyrannosauruses. Identical in form and shape, each stands more than three metres tall atop a round three-metre podium and has one clawed foot poised on an oversized brick, next to a

Lego dinosaur egg, which is cracking.“This is our legend of how the

dinosaur got its roar,” says Stuart. “They stepped on a brick and they tripped, roaring all the way to the ground.”

But here’s the twist: Each dinosaur is built from one of the three Lego bricks on the market—the original System; Duplo, where bricks twice the size of the original version are safe for toddlers to play with; and Technic, which includes rods and other parts. Stuart and his team consulted with 26 AFOLs as the designs came to life—their suggestions included using turtles

This tree is 16 metres

tall and made from

63,16 ,611 bricks.



as the eyes for the Duplo dinosaur and Duplo buckets for its claws.

FROM THE GALLERY, we move into the more interactive areas of Lego House. Each zone is highlighted by a colour: yellow for emotion, blue for cognitive skills, red for free-range creativity and green for role playing, imagination and the ability to tell a story.

We start with the green zone. In one corner, two children giggle as they create a Lego mini-character that sports a blonde wig and knight’s helmet

and carries a modern-day camera. In another, a boy directs his own movie, complete with a cast of Lego mini-figures that includes a set of parents in distress and kids who save the day.

Much of the rest of the green zone is taken up by three exhibits collectively known as ‘World Explorer’—a cityscape, a tropical island and a mountainous region with a small town located on its slope. Kids stand still as they watch the five-minute ‘day’ turn into ‘night’, which lasts for two minutes before the lights

brighten and it is day all over again. Altogether, the displays also took about 24,000 hours to construct, contain 2,500 Lego mini-figures taking part in everyday (and night) life. Although they’re not interactive, kids flock to them, fascinated, shouting when they see a figure they know.

“We knew even before we built the house that we wanted an experience like this,” says Stuart. “Something that you could go through a million times and not see everything.”

Amid the four kilometres of cabling, 4,000 lights, 1,500 trees, cranes, trains and windmills, there are hundreds of individual stories that Stuart began to write when the models themselves were being created. As I look, they start coming to life—Darth Vader skiing down a hill pursued by R2D2, a dinosaur farm with trees that grow pizzas, a giant robot named Moby Brick who has smashed the side out of an opera house because he wants to watch the performance, through a pair of delicate opera glasses—made of Lego, of course.

How do Stuart and his team think up such yarns? He pauses for a moment before answering: “Well, the best way to stay creative is not to grow up, right? To keep your mind open to possibility.”

No matter where I go, that same sense of fun and wonder is there. In the blue zone, which contains futu-ristic cities and urban conundrums, such as how to balance the need for commercial development with green

EVERYWHERE THERE IS A SENSE OF FUN AND WONDER: FUTURISTIC

CITIES, COLOURED WATERFALLS, AND ALL

KINDS OF CRITTERS.



spaces and playgrounds. In the red zone, with its two ceiling-to-floor, multi-coloured waterfalls in both System bricks and Duplo, and in the yellow zone, with its ‘Critter Creator’, field of Lego flowers and psyche-delic fish designing area, complete with an ‘aquar-ium’ projected on the wall in which fish of all shapes, sizes and colours display their spikes, or smiles, or stripes.

It is in this last section that I meet Morten Lund Mortensen, a slight, dark-haired 30-year-old former gym teacher, one of about 70 play agents who work here. He kneels by a little boy who is resolute in his task to create a fish and refuses to look up or say anything.

“Try this piece,” Morten quietly suggests, holding out a blue brick.

Silently, the little boy reaches for it, chewing his lip as he decides where to place it. Afterwards, using the high-tech wristband with a barcode that he got upon entry, the young boy scans his fish on to an interactive computer screen and then watches, fascinated, as it scoots among all the other fish in that aquarium projected on the wall.

“We have to be good at reading children, and Lego is a language all on its own,” says Morten, “I can talk with a fish or a flower or a creature to a kid from China, for example, even though I don’t speak Chinese.”

I love that image, I think: Lego as

a language all on its own, a babel of colours and simple shapes that is understood around the world.

AS THE LIGHT FADES on this Sunday, thousands of kids stream reluctantly out of Lego House, holding their parents’ hands as they look back. But in the back rooms of Lego House, what gets put together needs to be taken apart. Frida is holding a particularly troublesome Lego frog in one hand and wielding the wedge with other.

“These are the hardest of all because the main pieces are flat and round, and the kids love to pound them like pancakes,” she says. “It’s hard on the fingers. After five hours of doing this, sometimes we bleed.”

The job may be tiring, even gruelling, but they love it for what it represents: They’re the mortar that helps keep the magic of Lego alive for others.

“At first, we thought we weren’t im-portant,” says Cecilie. “Now, we realize that without us, the house falls apart.”

A child’s

imagination

is the only

restriction

on what they

build.

ROBOTSRULE


BY GARY SHTEYNGART

FROM SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE

South Korea is embracing smart technology

and robots. A visit to the capital city can be

a mind-boggling experience

The Dongdaemun

Design Plaza is an

iconic landmark

of the Korean

design industry.


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SEOUL IS A PLACE that veers between utopia and dystopia with alarming speed. The city sleeps less than even New York, and its permanent wakeful-ness leaves it haggard. Driving in from the airport, you get the feeling that Seoul never ends. The sprawling met-ropolitan area, with a population of 25 million, tentacles in every direction.

And yet, getting around the city is a dream. The subway system is spotless, efficient, ubiquitous, with WiFi so strong my fingers can’t keep up with my thoughts. Over an entire week, I witness only three people reading a print-and-paper book on the underground train.

On a journey to the wealthy neighbourhood of Gangnam, the woman next to me, her face shrouded by magenta-dyed hair, shoots out an endless stream of emojis and selfies. I expect her to be a teenager, but when she gets up to exit, I realize she must be well into her 50s.

AFTER A 14-hour flight from New York, I land in Seoul and discover that South Korea is in a mild

state of shock. The country’s top Go champion—Go is a mind-bendingly complex strategic board game—has been roundly beaten by a computer program called AlphaGo, designed by Google DeepMind, a leading developer of artificial intelligence based in London.

T h e t o u r n a m e n t i s s h o w n endlessly on monitors in the Seoul underground railway. Few had expected the software to win, but what surprised people most was the program’s bold originality and unorthodox play. AlphaGo wasn’t just mining the play of past Go masters—it was inventing a strategy of its own. The Korean newspapers were alarmed. As the Korea Herald blared: “Reality check: Korea cannot afford to fall behind competitors in AI.”

Fif ty years ago, the countr y was among the poorest on earth. Today it feels like an outpost from the future. You’ll find bins that politely ask you to fill them with trash, and automated smart apartments that anticipate your every need. I have come to South Korea to find out just how close humanity is to transforming everyday life by relying on artificial intelligence and the robots that increasingly possess it, and by insinuating smart technology into every aspect of life.

A Korean student considers her next

move in Go, a popular board game.



I am myself not immune to the pleasures of advanced technology. At home in New York, my toilet is a Japanese Toto Washlet with heating and bidet functions. But the Smartlet from the Korea’s Daelim puts my potty to shame. It has a control panel with close to 20 buttons, the function of some of which—a tongue depressor beneath three diamonds?—I can’t even guess.

I encounter the S m a r t l e t w h i l e touring the latest in Seoul’s smart-living apartments with a real estate broker named Lauren. Some of the most advanced a p a r t m e n t s h a v e been developed by Raemian, the property division of the mighty Samsung.

T h e R a e m i a n buildings are buffed, gleaming examples of what Lauren refers to as the “internet of things”. When you pull into the garage, a sensor reads your licence plate and lets your host know that you have arrived. Another feature monitors the weather and warns you to take your umbrella. An internet-connected kitchen monitor can call up your favourite cookbook.

Apartment owners wear wristbands that allow them to open doors and

access services in the building. The technology works both ways: Inside the apartments, you can check on family members through GPS tracking.

I ask my guide, Sunny Park, a reporter for the Chosun Ilbo newspaper, whether Koreans are resisting the continued diminution of privacy. “They don’t mind Big Brother,” she tells me. Sunny, of a slightly older generation,

admits that she can sometimes run into trouble navigating the brave new world of Korean real estate. “I once stayed in an apartment that was too smart for me,” she says. “I couldn’t figure out how to get water out of the tap.”

O N E M O R N I N G I take a gleaming high-speed train to the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, an hour south of the city. I have come to meet Hubo, a charming

humanoid robot that blew away international competition at the last Robotics Challenge hosted by the high-tech US military research agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

Hubo is descended from a family of robots that his ‘dad’, a roboticist named

Fifty years ago, South Korea

was among the poorest on earth. Today it feels like an outpost from

the future.

IND

IAP

ICT

UR

E

R O B O T S R U L E


JunHo Oh, has been working on for 15 years. Hubo is the fifth generation of his kind—a five-foot-eight, 80-kilo aluminium humanoid with two arms and two legs. In place of a head he has a camera and laser light that allows him to model the 3D topography of his environment in real time.

Part of the genius of Hubo’s design is that while he can walk like a biped when he needs to, he can also get down on his knees, which are equipped with wheels, and transform himself into a slow-rolling vehicle— a much simpler and quicker way for a lumbering automaton to get around.

Although specific tasks may well call for specialized robots—self-driving Ubers, Amazon deliver y-drones—a humanoid robot, Oh says, is “the only robot that can solve all the general problems” that peo-ple may face, from navigating changing terrain to manipulat-ing small objects.

Oh, a dapper man with round spec-tacles, a high forehead and a friendly grin, explains that at the DARPA chal-lenge, designed to simulate a disas-ter scenario like the meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power

plant in 2011, each robot had to complete tasks that disaster-response bots might face, like climbing stairs, turning a valve, negotiating an obsta-cle course laden with debris and driv-ing a vehicle. Hubo’s human masters were stationed more than 500 metres away, and had deliberately unreli-able wireless access to their avatars, as they might during a real disaster. Although he can execute a given task autonomously, Hubo still needs to be told which task to execute, and when.

O n e s u c h t a s k at DARPA required robots to exit the vehicle after finishing their drive. Hubo does that by following a set of commands pain-stakingly written and programmed by Oh and his colleagues. To climb out of a car, he first lifts his arms to find the car’s frame, then grabs hold of it and discerns the right amount of pressure t o a p p l y b e f o r e manoeuvering his bulk out of the vehicle without falling.

Mo st hu ma n o i d robots would rely too much on their arms, and in the process risk breaking off a finger, a hand or even the whole metal limb. Or they might overcom-pensate by using the strength of their

A humanoid robot,

Oh says, is “the only robot that

can solveall the general

problems” people may face.


legs and tip over once they’re outside. Part of Hubo’s special intuition is to

recognize how to use his component parts differently based on the task. So when he reaches up to grab the car frame, he’s simply bracing himself be-fore ‘jumping’ out of the car. “It’s the same for a person, actually,” Oh says. “If you try to get out of the vehicle us-ing your arm, it’s very hard. Better to relax your arm and jump out.”

Oh’s lab is developing two new versions of Hubo, one with total autonomy—within the constraints of set tasks, of course. The other may lack those smarts, says Oh, but it will be designed for physical agility and speed.

I ask Oh why South Korea, of all countries, got so good at technological innovation. He explains that although Korea was industrialized only in the 1980s, the government has made huge investments in scientific research and has been funding key growth areas such as flat-screen displays. Around the year 2000, the government decided that

robotics was a key future industry, and began to fund research.

We talk about the rumoured possibility of using robots in a war setting, perhaps in the demilitarized zone between South and North Korea. “It’s too dangerous,” Oh says.

H e s a y s r o b o t s s h o u l d b e programmed with intelligence levels in inverse proportion to their physical strength. “If you have a strong and fast robot with a high level of intelligence, he may kill you,” Oh says. “On the other hand, if he moves only as programmed, then there’s no autonomy,” shrinking his usefulness and creativity. Hubo represents a compromise: strong but not too strong, smart but not too smart.

Oh offers me the opportunity to spend some quality time with Hubo. A group of graduate students unhooks the robot from a meat-hook-like device, and I watch them power him up.

The challenge of the day: climb over a pile of bricks sticking out at all angles. Like a toddler just finding his

A humanoid

robot by the

Korean company

Robobuilder in

the Robo Life

Museum at KIRO

R O B O T S R U L E


legs, Hubo takes his time, his camera scanning each difficult step, his torso swivelling and legs moving accordingly. Hubo is the ultimate risk assessor, which explains how he could climb a set of stairs backwards at DARPA and emerge from the competition without falling a single time.

It’s hard to mistake Hubo for a humanoid along the lines of the ‘replicants’ from Blade Runner. But it’s still hard not to find him endearing, which may be true of our interactions with robots in general. When the non-Hubo robots at the DARPA competition fell over, the audience cried out as if the machines were human beings.

As technology advances, a social role for robots, such as providing services for the elderly, may well mean not just offering basic care but also simulating true companionship. And that may be just the beginning of the emotional relationships we’ll build with them. Will robots ever feel sympathy for us when we stumble and fall? Will they cry?

T h e s e q u e s t i o n s m a y s e e m premature today, but I doubt they will be so in a decade. When I ask Oh about the future, he does not hesitate: “Everything will be roboticized.”

ANOTHER HIGH-SPEED TRAIN whisks me to the industrial seaside town of Pohang, home to the Korea Institute of Robot and Convergence (KIRO). The word ‘convergence’ is especially loaded, with its suggestion that humankind and Hubokind are destined

someday to become one. As I await a pair of researchers, I notice a magazine called the Journal of Happy Scientists & Engineers. I’m reminded of what Oh said: “For us, science is all good things.”

The exhibits in the airy first-floor museum show the full range of the institute’s robot imagination. There’s PIRO, an underwater robot that can clean river basins and coastal areas. There’s Windoro, a window-cleaning robot already in use in Europe. There is a pet dog robot named Jenibo.

Pohang is home to POSCO, one of the world’s largest steelmakers. And this has given birth to one of the institute’s most interesting inventions, a blue exoskeleton that fits around a steelworker’s body. It allows ageing workers to continue performing tasks that require great physical strength. This quasi-robot is already in use in POSCO’s steel mills.

Hubo stands with his ‘dad’ JunHo Oh,

who has worked on robots for 15 years.



After my visit, near the space-age train station, I watch an older woman dressed in a black jumpsuit power-walking through a vast stretch of deso-late scrubland, like a scene out of a Fellini movie. Above her are rows of newly constructed utilitarian apartment blocks the Koreans call ‘matchboxes’. I am reminded of science-fiction novel-ist William Gibson’s quote: “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.”

ONE DAY, I take the train out to Inwangsan Mountain, which rises to the west of Seoul and offers spectacular, if smoggy, views of the metropolis. On the mountain you can visit with an eclectic group of shamans, known as mudangs, who, for steep prices, will invoke spirits w h o may f o re t e l l t h e f u t u r e , c u r e disease and increase prosperity. On this particular day the mudangs tear strips of coloured sheets that are associated with particular spirits. White is connected to the heaven spirit, red the mountain spirit ; yellow represents ancestors and green the anxious spirits.

Turning to the spirits makes sense. Technology bestows efficiency and

connectivity, but rarely self-knowledge or happiness. A smartphone GPS tells us where we are, but not who we are.

The Seonbawi, or ‘Zen rock’, is a spec-tacular formation where women come to pray for fertility. One young worship-per has propped up an iPhone in the centre of her prayer mat.

Later, I ask some friends why this ritual was accompanied by this piece

of technology. One tells me that the young woman was prob-ably recording her prayer, to prove to her mother-in-law, who is presumably angry that she hasn’t produced any children, that she prayed for hours on end. Another com-panion suggests that the phone belonged to a friend who is hav-ing trouble conceiving, and that by bringing it along, the woman created a connection between the spirits and her childless friend.

I like this explana-tion. The young lady journeys out from her city of 25 million plugged-in residents to spend hours on a moun-taintop, promoting her friend’s dreams, hands clasped in prayer. In front of her, a giant, timeless rock and a small electronic device steer her gently into the world to come.

SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE (JUNE 2017), COPYRIGHT © 2017 BY GARY SHTEYNGART. HIS NOVEL LAKE SUCCESS WAS PUBLISHED IN SEPTEMBER 2018 BY RANDOM HOUSE IN THE UNITED STATES.

Technology bestows

efficiency and connectivity,

but rarely self-knowledge or

happiness.

BONUS READ

MotherFinding

My

Lost and given up for adoption,

Joel de Carteret returned 30 years

later to the place of his birth

to do the impossible

BY ROBERT KIENER



F I N D I N G M Y M O T H E R

“IDON’T BELIEVE IT! IT CAN’T BE!” Joel de Carteret says to

himself when a market seller in Metro Manila’s bustling

Muñoz Market brings him the incredible news.

Joel feels his heart pounding like a snare drum and beads

of perspiration run down his forehead as the 35-year-old listens to

the stallholder give him the information he has been searching for

so long: “I think I know who your mother is. And where she is.”

From that moment on, Joel realizes, his life will never be the same.

years. Many, especially his Australian adoptive mother Julie de Carteret, worried about him, explaining, “You’ll just get your heart broken.”

However, the idea of reuniting with his Filipino mother has gnawed at Joel for decades. “I have to do this,” he has often said. “I owe it to myself and to my biological mother. I must have broken her heart by getting lost.” Privately, he has also felt that he needed to find his birth mother to discover that part of him “that has been missing for all these years”. But Julie tried to dissuade him.

Recently in a Sydney restaurant, when Joel told Julie that he planned to visit the Philippines to find his birth mother, she told him, “But, Joel, you don’t know your mother’s name, your birth date or where you lived. You didn’t even know your name when you arrived at the orphanage.” Joel understood from documents that the orphanage gave him his name. As a waiter refilled their water glasses, she continued: “You also don’t know where your mother may be. Is she

THIRTY YEARS AFTER being adopted by an Australian family and raised in Melbourne, Joel de Carteret has come back to the country where he was born. He is on a seemingly impossible quest—to find his birth mother.

Although he doesn’t know his mother’s name, or even remember

what she looks like, he is determined to find her. He has spent much of the last month in the Philippines tirelessly—and unsuccessfully—searching for clues about his mother’s identity. And now this.

Friends and family in Australia had told him there was little chance of locating his mother after all these

“BUT JOEL,YOU DON’T KNOW YOUR MOTHER’S

NAME,” JULIE SAID. “YOU DON’T KNOW YOUR BIRTH DATE.”


R E A D E R S D I G E S T. C O . I NA

LL

PH

OT

OS

CO

UR

TE

SY

OF

J

OE

L D

E C

AR

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T

alive? How will you ever find her?” Julie blinked back a tear and felt her heart break when Joel told her, “I know, Mum. But I have to try.”

Julie persisted, hoping to save Joel from a broken heart. She leaned across the table and asked, “How will you feel if you don’t find her? Will you be able to move on if you don’t find anything?”

Joel paused, took a bite of his salad and looked Julie in the eyes, explaining, “I know what you’re saying, Mum, and I understand. But I have to do this. I have to find out who I am and where I came from.”

A few weeks later Joel called Julie as he was waiting for his flight to Manila to begin his search.

“I’m off, Mum,” he said. “Wish me luck.” Julie held back her tears and said, “I love you, Joel. Good luck.” But she had little hope he would find his birth mother. Now, after years of wondering about—and weeks of desperate searching for—a woman he could barely remember, in a country where he couldn’t speak the language, he is sure he has somehow found that needle in the haystack. Thanks to a well-meaning stranger, he is about to be reunited with his long-lost birth mother.

THREE DECADES EARLIER, on the morning of 25 July 1985, Linda Rio looked in on her five-year-old son and

watched as he slept soundly in their modest home in Quezon City on the outskirts of Metro Manila. “I’ll let him sleep,” she thought as she watched his tiny chest rise and fall. The single mother gathered her purse and set out to her job as a dressmaker at a nearby clothing factory, leaving her son in the company of a flatmate.

An hour or so later, he awoke, jumped out of bed and began looking for “Ma”. He searched through the house and when he couldn’t find her, began panicking. This was unlike her; they travelled together daily to her workplace, taking the colourful public transport vehicles known as jeepneys [a jeep customized and converted into a taxi].

A photo of Joel, at five, taken on his arrival at

the orphanage. He was adopted 18 months later.



When he realized she was gone, he darted out into the street to find her. Dodging strangers, stray dogs, jeepneys and delivery trucks that filled the busy street, he looked everywhere for her. But she was nowhere to be found. His eyes filled with tears as he wandered the busy back streets of Quezon City. Ma! he said to himself. Where are you?

Eventually, he arrived at the sprawling, jam-packed Muñoz Market, where he walked along aisles crowded with hundreds of vendors hawking everything from just-slaughtered chickens to freshly caught fish, to trussed-up, squealing piglets. The chaotic sights and sounds—the huge, flashing knives chopping up food and customers shouting out requests to vendors, as well as the pungent, often sickly-sweet aroma of the food on sale—assaulted his senses.

He began crying as he walked aimlessly through the crowded aisles in his flip-flops, shorts and singlet, hoping to catch sight of his mother. After hours of searching and penetrating deeper and deeper into the maze-like market with no sign of Linda, the tiny, shy five-year-old realized she was gone and, frighteningly, knew he was now lost as well.

A local jeepney driver named Jose Manselo spotted the boy crying and curled up into a ball near the back of the cavernous market. He instantly knew something was wrong, but the child was too terrified to say

more than that he was lost. Manselo took him to his home and then to the police station. But the most the terrified five-year-old could tell the police was Ma was a dressmaker and Papa was a jeepney driver.

Meanwhile, Linda had returned home for lunch and was shocked to find that her son was missing. She looked around the neighbourhood and even rushed back to the clothing factory, thinking he might have gone there to find her. But no one had seen him. She and several friends searched everywhere for him and she eventually took off from work to look for her son full-time. She even went on local radio stations, pleading with listeners to help find him. But no one had seen the five-year-old.

Weeks, then months, passed with-out news. It was as if he had vanished.

THEY ARE AS TALL AS TREES. They look like white ghosts, thought Joel, as he looked up at the towering—and very white—figures of George and Julie de Carteret at Manila’s RSCC orphanage, which he had entered some 18 months earlier. And they smell funny, he thought.

The Australian couple had come to the Philippine orphanage to meet Joel because they were interested in adopting. Julie had not been able to become pregnant, but she and George had been desperate to start a family.

Joel had been too young to know his mother’s name and, because



no one had come forward to claim him, had originally been declared a ‘foundling’—an ‘unknown child’—and was severely malnourished. Then, after social workers exhausted every method they knew of to find his parents, he was eventually declared

‘abandoned’. He was now eligible for adoption.

At first he cowered behind the orphanage’s social worker but soon came to feel at ease with both George and Julie. They had such kind eyes and their warm, soothing voices relaxed him. When a social worker asked Joel if he wanted to go to Australia, he immediately shook his head “yes”. After a year and a half of loneliness he once again had a home and new, loving—and very tall—parents.

O n c e s e t t l e d i n t o h i s n e w Melbourne home, Joel flourished. Although he couldn’t speak a word of English, he became fast friends with the children on his street, loved playing cricket and learnt English

by watching Australian television. Often Julie would marvel as she watched him listening to a popular nightly quiz show, repeating many of the random words he heard the TV host say.

In his first year of school he would stubbornly stumble through his ‘show and tell’ talks, bravely searching his memory for just the right word as his classmates looked on. His teacher once told Julie, “Joel is one very, very determined little boy!”

Julie and George were thrilled with the way Joel adapted to his new home and the Australian way of life, which was so very different from his hardscrabble existence in the Philip-pines. Nevertheless, there were hints that something was brewing beneath his smiling exterior. One day about six months after coming to Australia, Joel asked Julie, “When am I going to turn white?”

Another time, when he was 10, he asked Julie as she was cooking dinner,

“So, when are we going to find my Mum?” Julie was startled but sat Joel down and told him that, as much as she wished it weren’t so, neither she nor the Manila adoption agency knew Joel’s surname, his mother’s or where she lived.

“I’m sorry, love,” she told him as she held his tiny brown hands in hers.

“But there’s no chance we could ever find your mother. I wish we could but it’s just not possible. But I can tell you this; she loved you very much.”

IN HIS FIRST YEAR OF SCHOOL, HIS

TEACHER ONCE TOLD JULIE, “JOEL IS ONE

VERY, VERY DETERMINED LITTLE BOY.”



L I N D A H A D N E V E R

given up looking for her son. However, her visits to the barangay (local government office), the police, her announce-ments on Manila radio stations and her constant searching had turned up nothing. She even handed out flyers printed with Joel’s picture that said ‘missing boy’ and included her address as well as the contacts for the barangay. Nothing.

Wherever she went, she scanned the faces of children, wondering if one of them might be her long lost son. His birthdays were especially hard. Each year Linda would invite family and friends to celebrate his birthday and pray for him while they dined on the dish he loved so much— roast pig and Chinese noodles. Every birthday included laughter and tears.

“Wherever he is,” she told her sister on one of Joel’s birthdays, “I know he is in a good place.”

She hung his picture on her closet door so it would be the first thing she saw every morning when she awoke. Linda also kept his bicycle at the clothing factory and thought of him every time she saw it leaning against a wall. He had loved riding it around while she worked, and as she once told a co-worker, “I’m waiting for the day he comes back to ride it again.”

THROUGHOUT HIS YEARS in Australia Joel often thought of his birth mother and wondered what had happened so many years ago. He remembered her loving smile and the way she would wipe away his tears with her ever-present handkerchief when he cried. Then darker thoughts would bubble up. He sometimes wondered if he had been abandoned and once told a friend, “What if my mother wanted nothing to do with me and had left me at the orphanage?”

In 2000, Julie took him, then 18, and his sister, Grace, born to Julie and George after they adopted Joel, to the Philippines, where they toured the country and visited the orphanage Joel had lived in some 16 years earlier.

While he was excited —and moved to tears—to revisit his former home, he was dismayed to find that social workers there knew nothing about his parents or where he may have

Five-year-old Jo-Jo began his frantic search for his

mother in the busy streets outside Muñoz Market.



lived. Joel wanted to revisit the Muñoz Market, where he had been found by jeepney driver Manselo, but Julie felt it was a high crime area and much too dangerous to visit. Joel fought back, but Julie put her foot down, telling him again, “It’s just not safe, Joel!”

However, the three of them pored over the telephone directory, looking for any Manselo listing. There was nothing. After they searched the directory Julie told Joel, “I’m so sorry. I don’t know where else we

could look for him.” She saw how disappointed Joel was, but thought to herself, Maybe now he will realize how difficult, how fruitless, it would be to keep looking for his birth mother.

But this first-time visit to his home country was also very moving for Joel. Surrounded by brown-skinned people who looked like him, he told Julie during their trip, “For the first time in my life, I really feel I fit in somewhere. Everyone looks like me.” His eyes filled with tears and he felt a catch in his throat, but continued, “Mum, I’m not an outsider here.”

It was a visit to a Thailand orphanage in 2015 that helped convince Joel, by then an accomplished, 34-year-old documentary film-maker, to search for his biological mother. While he was filming the orphanage for an Australian-based charity, a small boy walked up to him and grabbed his hand. He seemed to be about five or six, the same age Joel was when he entered the Manila orphanage. The Thai boy tugged at Joel’s hand and led him into the dormitory to proudly show him the bed he slept in.

As the tousled-hair orphan showed Joel the few toys he owned, memories came flooding back. I slept in a bed like this, Joel thought as he listened to the boy chattering away in Thai. We both lost our parents. I wonder ...

On the flight back to Australia he couldn’t get the memory of the little Thai orphan out of his mind. As he would admit later, “I suddenly realized I needed to answer so many questions. Who was I? Where did I come from? Who am I? I knew what I had to do.”

IT’S A MILD DECEMBER morning in 2016 and Joel has come to the Muñoz Market in Quezon City, the very same market he was lost in—and rescued from—some 30 years ago. He’s returned to the Philippines with a film crew, a translator and a dream. He’s come to find his birth mother.

As he walks through the chaotic collection of food and merchandise vendors, he and his translator show

“FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE, I REALLY FEEL

I FIT IN SOMEWHERE,” JOEL TOLD JULIE.

“EVERYONE LOOKS LIKE ME.”



a picture of Joel as a five-year-old to as many people as possible, asking,

“Lost boy? Do you know anyone who lost a five-year-old boy in 1985? Missing boy?”

Everyone shakes their head and turns away.

Joel keeps in touch with Julie, reassuring her that Muñoz Market is safe and that, “just as importantly”, he feels that he “fits in”. He tells her,

“I may not speak the language, Mum, but at least I look like everyone else here. And everyone is trying to help me. So don’t worry about me.” Julie

is relieved that he is safe and sound and also is happy that Joel is forming a bond with the country he was born in. “Be safe,” she tells him.

Joel plasters the flyers that include his picture with the headline, “Do you know him?” in the languages English and Tagalog and a local contact tele-phone number everywhere. Hoping to enlist the aid of Manila-based radio or television stations, Joel knocks on doors to tell his story but is rebuffed.

“There are so many missing children and so many stories,” he hears time and time again from media outlets.

“Sorry, but we wish you luck.”Undaunted, Joel and his team

keep coming back to the market, questioning countless stallholders, seeking out anyone who may have been working at Muñoz Market decades ago. After days of negative responses and false leads, Joel and his team suddenly hear about a vendor who has worked at the market for years. He calls Julie: “Mum, this might be the break I’ve been hoping for!”

They track down the man, Badan Pisngot, who confirms that he has sold household wares at his modest stall at the market since the 1980s. Joel hands him the flyer he has showed to so many other people and his translator asks if he knows anything about the boy in the picture. “No,” he replies as he shakes his head. “I don’t recognize the boy.” But Joel urges his translator to keep questioning the man.

Eventually, after some more skilful prodding, Pisngot remembers, “But ... there was a woman who lived around here and lost her son in the 1980s. He was about five or six, I think.” Joel begins shaking as he hears the news. But the grey-haired Pisngot seems reluctant to reveal any more and returns to rearranging his stall’s pots and pans and plastic buckets. His translator advises Joel to back off, afraid of alienating Pisngot.

After a number of visits from Joel

“THERE WAS A WOMAN WHO LIVED HERE

AND LOST HER SON IN THE EIGHTIES,” SAID THE VENDOR. “HE WAS

ABOUT FIVE OR SIX.”



over the next two weeks, Pisngot drops the bombshell:

“I think I know who your mother is ... Her name is Vicky.” That evening Joel calls Julie in Melbourne and tells her, “This could be it. I think I’ve found her!”

When Joel meets Vicky the next day, she is wary until Joel shows her a picture of him and 12 other little boys taken at the orphanage in 1985. Vicky instantaneously points to Joel in the picture and breaks down, sobbing and crying.

“That’s Dante! That’s my Dante!” she wails. Joel wraps his arms around her, and mother and son hold each other tightly as their tears flow.

“Dante,” she murmurs through her tears, “My Dante.”

She is convinced that Joel is her missing son, Dante, whom she lost near the Muñoz Market so long ago. She wipes her tears away and points to her nose, then to Joel’s, laughs and says, “Same. Same!”

JOEL IS ON an emotional roller coaster. Against all odds he has located his biological mother and for the first time in his life he is on the road to answering the question that has nagged him for so long: Where did I come from?

He calls Julie and tells her the good news: “I think I’ve found her!” Initially speechless, Julie laughs and tells Joel,

“If I had known it was going to be this easy, I would have gone back with you years ago!” Joel tells her, “Mum, I needed to do this myself.” Remember-ing how determined Joel has always been, Julie tells him, “I know, Joel. I am so proud of you.”

Then, a question arises. During their first meeting, Vicky mentions that Dante was born in 1983 and disappeared some six years later. Joel is stumped. He was born in 1980 and, according to the orphanage’s records, went missing in 1985. Could Vicky have her dates wrong?

He tells himself that nailing down dates in the Philippines can be tricky, and she could easily be mistaken. Besides, Vicky looks so much like him. However, even though Joel has become so confident that he has finally

Joel in Australia with his adoptive mother, Julie,

and sister, Grace, who was born after his adoption



located his birth mother, he needs to be 100 per cent certain. He asks her to take a DNA test.

WEEKS LATER the DNA results from a laboratory in Japan arrive. Joel nervously opens the report from the testing service and quickly scans to the bottom of the first page. It reads,

“Probability of relationship: Zero per cent.” Vicky is not Joel’s biological

mother. The harsh reality hits Joel and Vicky hard. As he will later explain, “I wanted so much to believe. I was crushed.”

So was Vicky. She collapses into his arms when she hears the results. He lovingly strokes her hair and also decides on the spot to continue his search. Indeed, having come so close, he is now more determined than ever to keep searching for his mother. “I need to keep going,” he tells a friend.

He calls Julie with the news, telling her simply “It’s negative”. She is devastated for Joel. She had long feared that he was going to get

his heart broken trying to find his biological mother and wanted to urge him to come back home. But she knew better. Joel had always been determined and persistent, ever since he had been that little brown-skinned, five-year-old boy struggling to learn English. She knew he would not give up his search this easily.

After Joel calls her—even though she knows what he will say—she asks him, “Well, what happens now, Joel?”

Without skipping a beat, Joel replies, “You know, I have to get out there and start looking all over again.”

Says Julie, “I knew you’d say that.”

ALTHOUGH JOEL HAD BEEN turned down many times by media outlets in the Philippines, once producers at the GMA Network, one of the largest radio and television networks in the nation, heard that he might be close to locating his birth mother, they began to cover his story. Joel was invited to talk about his search on radio. A film crew from Kapuso Mo, Jessica Soho [international title: One at Heart, Jessica Soho], starring the Philippines’ equivalent of the US’s Oprah Winfrey, began working on a three-part television documentary after they learnt that Joel had located Vicky. It was titled ‘Jo-Jo’s Search’, using a common local nickname.

The media coverage had come just in time. Joel and his own team had left no stone unturned at the Muñoz Market and the surrounding neighbourhood, but now that Vicky’s

THE HARSH REALITY HITS JOEL AND VICKY

HARD. AS HE WILL LATER EXPLAIN, “I WANTED

SO MUCH TO BELIEVE. I WAS CRUSHED.”



DNA test had come back negative, they were anxious to have a wider, national platform to tell Joel’s story.

Joel jumped at the chance to tell—and retell—his story. He cooperated with Jessica Soho’s team, offering them some of the documentary footage his own film team had shot since his arrival in the Philippines. He appeared on a popular drive-time radio show hosted by GMA’s vice president Mike Enriquez and told of his quest to find his biological mother. Joel’s hope was that someone who was listening to his radio interviews or watching Soho’s multi-part television documentary could help.

Someone was watching. A m a z i n g l y , L i n d a, w h o s t i l l

celebrated her son’s birthday every year and never stopped praying that he would be safe, watched the first part of the three-part documentary on Joel’s search as she sat in her Quezon City home. She was intrigued by the story of the lost boy but she also found it painful; it brought back so many memories of her own loss.

When she saw that the young E n g l i s h -s p e a k i n g m a n i n t h e documentary, who seemed to be around the same age as her long-missing son, had found his birth mother, she quickly turned off her television. Later she would confess, “I was so jealous and sad at the same time. I couldn’t watch any more. That mother had found her son but mine was gone.”

She never learnt that Vicky’s DNA test turned out to be negative and that Joel was still looking for his mother.

THE GMA NET WORK was flooded with emails after the first instalment of their documentary about Joel aired. Most were from well-wishers or were requests for help in locating other long-lost children. However, one email immediately grabbed the attention of the show’s producers. Filipino expatriate Dolly Arcaido, who had moved to Japan decades ago, had watched the first episode of the documentary on cable TV, and it had jogged her memory. She explained that her mother had a friend who had lived in a house in Quezon City, not far from the Muñoz Market. That woman’s five-year-old boy had disappeared around the time Joel said he did. The woman’s name, said Dolly, was Linda.

She emailed the network pictures of Linda and her son from the early 1980s and added astonishing details. She said that Linda had been a dressmaker and that the man she was seeing after her husband left was a jeepney driver. She had no idea where Linda lived now but she also said that the little boy’s name was Joel, which was a common name in the Philippines.

What were the chances? Could Linda be Joel’s birth mother? Or would this lead, like so many others, prove to be another dead end?

When Joel saw the pictures and


It could not be anyone else.” The search was back on.

A R M E D W I T H T H E t h re e -decade-old photograph of Linda with him cradled in her lap, Joel returned to the same streets in Quezon City he had canvassed before. “Do you know this woman?” he asked everyone he could, “Her name is Linda.” He went back to the Muñoz Market and showed the pictures to stallholders. N o o n e r e c o g n i z e d t h e picture of the woman in her early 20s. Joel realized that so much time had passed that the chance anyone would recognize Linda were slim. But he kept showing her picture.

Undaunted, he went on radio again, telling his story time and time again, asking if anyone knew— or remembered—anything about Linda. On Mike Enriquez’s radio show he spoke directly to Linda: “This is Joel, your lost boy who went missing in 1985. All I want to do is just to meet you and know who you are and to let you know that I actually turned out okay.”

He spoke movingly on Jessica Soho’s national television show, again addressing his long-lost mother: “No matter what happened in the past, I hope we can put that all aside, just reconnect and let you know that I have been blessed.” He blinked back a tear

learnt what Dolly had said, he broke out in goosebumps. “What are the odds?” he asked his team. “She looks like me, she was a dressmaker and her son’s name was Joel!” But he soon calmed himself down, remembering how disappointed he had been with Vicky’s failed DNA test. This time he vowed to go slower and keep his emotions in check. As he said, “I don’t want to get all my hopes up and have them shattered again.”

However, after Julie received the picture of the woman holding her young child, she had no doubts. She shot back an email to Joel: “That’s you, Joel! I’d recognize you anywhere!

Linda holds Joel, age three, on her lap in the

house where they lived, surrounded by friends.



he drove his small delivery truck to drop off an order, Amado Rio was listening to Mike Enriquez’s morning radio show. As he heard Joel tell his story about his search for Linda and the dead ends and twists and turns he had encountered during his time in Manila, he suddenly realized that his wife Herminia, whom he had married nearly 25 years ago, might be the woman Joel is looking for. He knew she had lost a son decades ago, before they met. But, he wondered, who was ‘Linda’?

Amado was hesitant to mention Joel’s story to his wife. He remembered how upset she had recently gotten while watching the GMA documentary about a lost boy who eventually found his birth mother. He even recalled her turning off the show before it ended. Nevertheless, the next morning he asked her, “Were you ever called Linda?”

“Yes, long ago,” she told him.Amado paused, then walked over to

Herminia and held her hand, saying, “I think your son is looking for you.”

IT IS A LITTLE PAST ELEVEN in the morning on 9 February 2017, and Herminia Rio is riding through the traffic-clogged streets of Quezon City in a van supplied by the GMA Network. She has been unable to sleep for the last 24 hours, ever since she contacted the network and told them that she was ‘Linda’, the mysterious woman in the photograph.

and added, “I can’t move on with my life without knowing that you exist.”

He followed up the few leads that trickled in. One said Linda had been spotted living as a squatter in the notoriously dangerous Manila North Cemetery in La Loma.

Joel, his crew, and a security detail staked out the cemetery for days, asking if anyone had seen Linda. No

one had. On one of his interviews he ended his message to Linda by saying,

“I would really love to meet you and am praying that you want to meet me as well.” When lead after lead turned up nothing, doubts began to creep into Joel’s mind. What if Linda abandoned me? What if she has no interest in meeting me? he wondered. Or is she out there somewhere living rough, destitute? Is she dead? He fought against these dark thoughts, trying to stay positive, hoping against hope that he would eventually locate his mother.

WHILE DRIVING THROUGH the busy streets in a suburb outside Manila, dodging jeepneys and jaywalkers as

DOUBTS BEGAN TO CREEP INTO JOEL’S MIND.

“WHAT IF LINDA ABANDONED ME? WHAT IF SHE HAS NO INTEREST

IN MEETING ME?”



“I need to stop crying.” A few minutes later, after wiping her eyes dry and breathing deeply to calm herself, she spots Joel standing on a street corner. He is awaiting her and surrounded by a television crew and interested bystanders.

Even at a distance she recognizes him instantly. It is Jo-Jo, she says to herself. Her son, whom she has not seen in 30 years, is now standing only a few feet away. She feels her heart beating faster as she walks over to him. Clutching pictures of Joel as a five-year-old in her left hand, she shyly, nervously approaches him and asks,

“Are you Jo-Jo?” He answers, “I am,” and

When the television producers came to her home and showed her a picture of Joel at five years old, she had bro-ken down. “My Joel,” was all she could manage. Then, after showing them other pictures of her and Joel from the early 1980s, she convinced them that she was Joel’s birth mother. Between sobs she asked, “Where is Joel? I want to hug him!”

Now she is on her way to meet the man whom she is sure is her long-lost son. As the van rounds a corner where she is due to meet Joel for the first time, she again breaks down in tears. “Please give me a minute,” she asks one of the television producers.

Joel with Julie and Herminia. Julie filled Herminia in on Joel’s life in Australia.



THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT

We told our kids that we are no longer saying ‘shut up’ because it sounds

mean and can hurt people’s feelings. So our kids are getting creative. Our

nine-year-old daughter was talking and talking, and our six-year-old son

couldn’t take it anymore and said, “Silence, you peasant!”

CANDY AND ERIK CISNEROS, hu�ngtonpost.ca

While taking my son for a walk around the park, he told me I had to

carry him. When I asked why, he said, “My feet are bored.”

Source: women.com

soon as she saw the video, which she reports she has watched “time and time again” of Herminia wiping away Joel’s tears, she knew Joel had finally found his birth mother, because “only a mother would do that”. Since be-ing reunited with Joel, Herminia has met his adoptive mother Julie, who has filled her in on Joel’s life in Aus-tralia, and Herminia has visited them both in his adopted home. Dur-ing his search, Joel also located his biological father, who now lives in the United States.

Neither Vicky’s long-lost son, Dante, or Jose Manselo, the taxi driver who rescued Joel from the Muñoz Market, have been located, but Joel has pledged to keep searching for them. He is working on a documentary based on his own story that he hopes will bring awareness to adoption and help adoptees, as he says, “write the blank pages of their own narrative”.

smiles nervously back at her. Then he asks, “Are you Herminia?” She nods. For a brief moment both say nothing. Then Herminia, too overcome to say anything else, starts sobbing and falls into Joel’s arms. Words are unnecessary as mother and son wrap their arms tightly around one another and cry.

The television cameras catch the warm embrace and also the moment that will touch the hearts of millions of television viewers. Wrapped in each other’s arms, Herminia notices Joel crying and gently wipes away his tears with her handkerchief, just as she had done so often more than 30 years ago. At long last, against all odds, her son has come back home.

Editor’s Note: A DNA test confirmed what Herminia and Joel already knew; that she is his biological mother. Ju-lie needed no such confirmation. As

1Daylight Saving Time The idea of fiddling with the clock has

been around since antiquity, but it was not until World War I that governments around the globe offi-cially adopted daylight saving time. Why? To conserve resources such as fuel and extend the workday for the war effort. The Germans and Austro-Hungarians did it first, in 1916, and the Allies followed shortly after. To clear up confusion

BY JACOPO DELLA QUERCIA

about the concept, The Washington Times used a comic strip to explain the first ‘spring forward’ in the United States in 1918.

2Wristwatches Timepieces known as wristlets were sold

during the 19th century. However, they failed to take off with men until World War I demonstrated their superiority to pocket watches in battle—particularly for military


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13 Surprising Innovations From The First World War


to keep British officers warm and dry. Today, many trench coats (yes, that’s why they’re called that) come with flaps and rings that were originally created for securing pistols, map cases and even swords.

6Zippers Originally known as a slide fastener, the zipper

wasn’t mass-produced until the First World War, when the US mili-tary requested them for flight suits and money belts, which were a necessity for US sailors because their uniforms didn’t have pockets.

7Women’s Suffrage Suffragists had won victories throughout

the western United States by 1917, but their support for and involvement in the war effort advanced their cause considerably. With the endorsement of President Woodrow Wilson, the 19th Amend-ment to the US Constitution was ratified in 1920.

8Disposable Sanitary Pads Made from wood pulp, the

Kimberly- Clark com pany’s ‘cellu-cotton’ became a staple in military hospitals as a more absorbent and less expensive alternative to cotton bandages. When the war ended, the company’s executives learnt that army nurses had used cellu-cotton as sanitary napkins, and an affordable new product was born.

leaders who were co ordinating precision attacks. By the war’s end, an entire generation of young men either had a wristwatch or wanted one for Christmas.

3Blood Banks Blood transfusions date back

to the 1600s, but doctors rarely performed them before World War I, when they were accomplished by transfusing

blood directly from one person to another. Capt. Oswald Robert son, a US Army Reserve doctor consulting with the British Army, recognized the need to stockpile blood before casualties occurred. In 1917, he helped establish the first blood bank on the western front.

4Hollywood With so much of Europe in the line of fire, the

European film industry had to scale back dramatically. That opened the door for the Americans. Holly wood was still in its infancy, but its stu-dios soon made fortunes producing wartime propaganda. The war itself provided material for countless movies in the 1920s and ’30s, including Wings, the winner of the first Oscar for Best Picture.

5 Trench Coats While Charles Mac intosh invented weather-

proof outerwear about a century before World War I, Burberry and Aqua scutum modernized the design

1 3 S U R P R I S I N G I N N O VAT I O N S F R O M T H E F I R S T W O R L D WA R


9 Plastic Surgery World War I left thousands of men scarred

and maimed. British army surgeon Harold Gillies and his colleagues performed more than 11,000 opera-tions, mostly on soldiers suffering from facial wounds from gunshots. Gillies was knighted for his efforts and ultimately became known as the father of modern plastic surgery.

10 Drones It’s hard to imagine drones in the skies just

15 years after the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Nevertheless, when the US Navy tested the first Curtis N-9 Aerial Torpedo on 6 March 1918, unmanned aircraft became a reality. (Alas, we would have to wait almost a century for drones that could deliver pizza.)

11Soya Dogs In 1918, in Cologne, Germany, Mayor

Konrad Adenauer applied for a patent for his novel way of preserv-ing meat: mixing sausage with soya

flour. Although not strictly vege-tarian, the method had staying power. Soya products are now a multi-billion- dollar industry.

12 Pilates After World War I broke out, circus performer

Joseph Hubertus Pilates was interned for being a German national. He used the time to perfect an exercise routine he’d developed that involved rigging springs to hospital beds, according to the Pilates Foundation. Today, millions of people practise Pilates in studios around the world.

13Modern Passports In hopes of restoring tourism through-

out Europe, the League of Nations issued guidelines for uniform passports in 1920. The standard documents were to include a cover embossed with the issuing country’s name and coat of arms—the same basic look they have today in almost every country, including India.

GOOD EVENING, OFFICER

In college, a friend set me up on a blind date. I wasn’t in a

great mood, because I had received a tra�c ticket a few

hours before. My day got worse when my blind date turned

out to be the cop who’d given me the ticket.

@LINDACHILDERS1

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Many species die off without a trace. If humans are to leave a lasting record, we’ll need to make sure our DNA survives

How to Make it as a Fossil

EVERY FOSSIL is a small mira-cle. Only an estimated one bone in a billion gets fossilized—preserved for thousands, even millions of years—as Bill Bryson notes in A Short History of Nearly Everything. By that calculation, the 327-odd million people alive in the United States today [for example]will leave a fossil legacy of only 67 or so bones. That’s a little over a quarter of one human skeleton.

According to scientists who specialize in taphonomy (the study of what happens after an organism dies), fossilization is so unlikely that fewer than one-tenth of one per cent of all animal species have ever sur-vived in a fossilized state. Only a handful, such as the well-known

female skeleton Lucy, [a 3.2-million-year-old prehistoric human species found in Ethiopia, Africa, in 1974] have been discovered.

If you’re determined to increase the chances that your humani corporis [human body] makes it for all eter-nity—or if you’re just curious to know how the select few survived—read on.

GET BURIED, AND QUICKLY

“To be preserved for millions of years, you must survive the first hours, days, seasons, decades, centuries and thousands of years,” says Susan Kidwell, a professor of

BY JOHN PICKRELL

FROM BBC.COM/FUTURE

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geology at the University of Chicago, USA. You don’t want your remains to be eaten and scattered by scavengers, for example, or exposed to the elements for too long.

Sometimes natural disasters can help, such

as floods that dump huge amounts of sediment or volcanic eruptions that

smother things in mud and ash. For example, drought

followed by flooding helped preserve dinosaur bones.

SKIP THE COFFIN

You want minerals to seep into your bones and essentially turn them to stone. This process, known as permineralization, can take millions of years but happens most rapidly when mineral-rich water imbues bones with things such as iron and calcium. A coffin might keep the skeleton nicely together, but it would interfere with this process.

FIND SOME WATER

If you die in a dry environment, once you’ve been picked over by scavengers, your bones will probably weather away. Better to get swiftly covered in sand, mud and sediment. The best places for that are lakes, floodplains and rivers, or the bottom of the sea. Caitlin Syme, a taphonomist at the University of

Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, recommends the Mediterranean—because it’s progressively getting shallower—or the Dead Sea, where the salt would essentially pickle you.

AVOID SHIFTING GROUND ...

If you make it through the first few hundred thousand years, congratula-tions! But your fossilization is not a done deal yet. Your fossil might still shift to such depths that it could be melted by the earth’s heat and pres-sure. Don’t want that to happen? Steer clear of the edges of tectonic plates, where the crust will eventu-ally get sucked under the surface.

... OR GO ROGUE

Alternatively, you could preserve yourself in amber. Some astounding fossils are perfectly saved in this gemstone made of tree resin; recent discoveries include birds, lizards, a baby snake and a feathered dinosaur tail in Myanmar. You could also be preserved in nature’s brand of asphalt, like the saber-toothed cats and mammoths at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, USA, or frozen in a glacier. If you were to make your final resting place in a cave, you would eventually become a mummy. If that’s your goal, pack your personal time capsule with items made from materials that don’t biodegrade, such as glass and some rare metals. Or just pack your mobile phone, which is made from both of the above.

BBC FUTURE (15 FEBRUARY 2018), COPYRIGHT © 2018 BY BBC, BBC.COM/FUTURE.

QuizBY PAUL PAQUET


15. A diamond may be

forever, but how many

years do you have

to be married before

you celebrate your

diamond anniversary?

ANSWERS: 1. The House of Bourbon. 2. ‘Unchained Melody.’ 3. West. 4. Margaret

Atwood. 5. Gravitational waves. 6. Grandmaster. 7. The Qing dynasty. 8. Lloyd.

9. Hungary, with nine gold medals. Its closest rivals, Italy and Britain, have four golds

each. 10. Face with tears of joy. 11. Singapore. 12. Camel. 13. Finland. 14. Bombay. 15. 60.

1. Sharing its name with a whiskey, which European royal house still holds power in Spain and Luxembourg?

2. The B-side to the Righteous Brothers’ 1965 single ‘Hung On You’ turned out to be their biggest hit. What was it?

3. Which is the only cardinal direc-tion not represented in the name of a UN member state?

4. Which acclaimed Canadian writer wrote a superhero graphic novel called Angel Catbird?

5. In 2016, the LIGO project announced which astronomical discovery, confirming a predic-tion Einstein made?

6. In 1978, chess player Nona Gaprindashvili became the first woman to attain what title?

7. What was the last Chinese imper ial dynasty, ruling from

1644 until it was replaced by the Republic of China in 1912?

8. What’s the middle name of architect Frank Wright, British prime minister David George and composer Andrew Webber?

9. Which country has won the most Olympic gold medals in water polo?

10. The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2015 was actually an emoji. Which one?

11. The award-winning Helix Bridge resembles a DNA helix and was built in which city’s Marina Bay area?

12. The hair of the Bactrian variety of which animal is used to make

luxury coats?

13. FC Santa Claus is a soc-cer club in the Kakkonen league in which country?

14. The code for the airport serving Mumbai is BOM. That’s because the city used to be officially named what?

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IT PAYS TO ENRICH YOUR

Word Power


1. life hack ('life hak) n.—A: identity theft. B: short bio. C: clever tip.

2. chiweenie (chih-'wee-nee) n.— A: chewy noodle. B: Chihuahua–dachshund hybrid. C: crybaby.

3. demonym ('deh-muh-nim) n.— A: impish child. B: floor model. C: name for an inhabitant.

4. harissa (huh-'rih-suh) n.—A: spicy sauce. B: hair dye. C: brash woman.

5. cryptocurrency (krip-toh-'kuhr-en-see) n.—A: classified information. B: digital money. C: unpredictable events.

6. beach cruiser (beech 'croo-zer) n.—A: amateur surfer. B: bike with wide tires. C: migrating shorebird.

7. Wanderwort ('wahn-dur-wort) n.—A: daydreamer. B: tofu sausage. C: far-travelling word.

8. poke (poh-'kay) n.—A: raw fish salad. B: online pest. C: rural town.

9. dumpster fire ('dump-ster fire) n.—A: total disaster. B: mass lay-off. C: rumourmonger.

10. Silver Alert ('sil-ver uh-'lurt) n.—A: warning of a missing senior. B: notice of a price drop. C: ship’s distress signal.

11. kombucha (kahm-'boo-chuh) n.—A: fermented tea. B: modular furniture. C: gorilla species.

12. mansplain ('man-splayn) v.— A: mooch off a friend. B: brag about money. C: explain condescendingly.

13. piloerection (py-loh-ih-'rek-shun) n.—A: demolished building. B: bristling of hairs. C: new website.

14. gastroplasty ('ga-stroh-pla-stee) n.—A: culinary customs. B: stomach surgery. C: horrible crime.

15. cotija (koh-'tee-hah) n.— A: hard Mexican cheese. B: ball-room dance. C: poisonous snake.

The editors at Merriam-Webster added a whopping 850 words and definitions to the dictionary in 2018—including, appropriately,

wordie (‘lover of words’). Quiz yourself on these other newcomers, then look up the answers on the next page.

BY EMILY COX AND HENRY RATHVON

W O R D P O W E R


Answers

1. life hack—[C] clever tip. Here’s a simple life hack: Use dental floss to neatly slice up a cake.

2. chiweenie—[B] Chihuahua– dachshund hybrid. My kids like German Shepherds, but I’m partial to chiweenies.

3. demonym—[C] name for an inhabitant. The demonym for a native of Maharashtra is, not surprisingly, Maharashtrian.

4. harissa—[A] spicy sauce. After one bite of Maya’s lemon harissa chicken, my mouth was on fire.

5. cryptocurrency—[B] digital money. I don’t trust these cryptocur-rency fads; I’d rather write a cheque than pay with bitcoin.

6. beach cruiser—[B] bike with wide tires. Did you hear that Ashok started a business renting beach cruisers to tourists?

7. Wanderwort—[C] far-travelling word. The word orange is a classic Wanderwort, with roots in Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic.

8. poke—[A] raw fish salad. With tzatziki, acai and poke on this menu, I need a translator to order!

9. dumpster fire—[A] total disaster. “Today was such a dumpster fire—I lost my wallet, I fought with my wife and I got into a fender bender,” Sara moaned.

10. Silver Alert—[A] warning of a miss-ing senior. No need for a Silver Alert; we found Grandpa tinkering in the attic.

11. kombucha—[A] fermented tea. The new health food store sells kombucha by the litre.

12. mansplain—[C] explain conde-scendingly. Ramesh began to mansplain film history to his date, even though she had a PhD in the subject.

13. piloerection—[B] bristling of hairs. I dare you to read a Stephen King book without some serious piloerection.

14. gastroplasty—[B] stomach surgery. “Gastroplasty can help people lose weight, but it isn’t right for everyone,”

cautioned Dr Roy.

15. cotija— [A] hard Mexican cheese. Cotija is often described as a cross between feta cheese and Parmesan.

VOCABULARY

RATINGS

9 & below: so last year 10–12: up-to-date13–15: ahead of the curve

D’OH! GOOD ONE, HOMERAlso among Merriam-Webster’s new words is embiggen (‘to enlarge’). It was coined as a joke by the writers of The Simpsons, who had challenged themselves to invent two words that sounded real. The Springfield town motto is: ‘A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.’ The other invented word was cromulent (‘acceptable’), which has not had a life beyond the cartoon show—so far.

Dr Devika Rangachari is an award-winning children’s writer whose book, Queen of Ice, is on the White Ravens list. Her other books include Harsha Vardhana and Growing Up (on the Honour List of the International Board on Books for Young People). Rangachari has also received several prestigious academic fellowships for her post-doctoral work on gender in Indian history.

Me & My ShelfDEVIKA RANGACHARI’S FAVOURITE CHILDREN’S BOOKS

CARBONEL, Barbara Sleigh, Puffin Books, `299. Rosemary buys a broom and a cat, and is plunged thereon into

a quest to restore the king of cats, Carbonel, to his kingdom

and break the spell he is under. This book taught me as much

about magic as loyalty and friendship.


LET’S DO A PLAY, Uma Anand, National Book Trust, `20.

This was one of the first books I read that had a completely Indian context. I found its environment comfortingly familiar. A group of children decide to stage a play and this book documents their attempts to do so with gentle humour.

THE SIX BAD BOYS, Enid Blyton, Octopus Publishing Group,

`199. This tale of six children from differing social contexts— Bob and Tom from troubled homes and the model Mackenzie kids—introduced me to the manner in which backgrounds shape personalities and destinies. It is, equally, a powerful affirmation of the magic of friendship.

THE ELEPHANT, Alexander Kuprin, Hutchinson’s Books for

Young People, available for free on Internet Archive Books. Little Nadya, who is wasting away from a mysterious disease,

asks for an elephant and her parents are determined to fulfil her wish. This moving picture book made me understand that love can achieve the impossible.

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M E & M Y S H E L F

Book prices are subject to change.

—COMPILED BY BLESSY AUGUSTINE

UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE, Bel Kaufman, Prentice Hall Press,

`1,253. A young American teacher sets out to cultivate a love for literature among her students, confronts the realities of

teaching in a less-than-ideal environment and ends up influen-

cing the lives of her pupils in unintended ways. This epistolary

novel introduced me to humour in prose and to the fact that

teachers are also human!

MOIN AND THE MONSTER, Anushka Ravishankar, Duckbill, `199 Moin discovers a monster in his room—but it is a monster with feelings and idiosyncrasies and, therefore, lovable and annoying, in turn. I read this book as an adult but it taught me so much about the power of the imagination. It is also one of the funniest stories I have ever read.

A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN, Betty Smith, Arrow Books, `599. This poignant tale of an adolescent American who is determined to make something of her life despite her family’s

straitened circumstances was, perhaps, one of the earliest

books I ever cried over. It was my first acquaintance, in prose,

with hardship, sorrow and the wonderful ability of the human

will to triumph.

WHAT KATY DID, Susan Coolidge, Vintage Classics, `250. Katy Carr would like to remain 12 but must navigate the bumpy journey towards adulthood. I was enchanted by Katy’s daring, awed by her strength in times of tragedy and excited by her eventual transition into a quietly determined young lady.

DADDY-LONG-LEGS, Jean Webster, Puffin Classics, `350. An orphan must write letters to her unknown benefactor as his sole

condition for sponsoring her college education. She blossoms in

her new environment. The novel delineates her journey to adult-

hood through her letters that also feature her enchanting line

drawings. This book was my introduction to romance.

THE SCHOOL AT THE CHALET, Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, Harper-

Collins Children’s Books, `5,412. The first in a 62-book series that follows the adventures of the students of the Chalet School,

this title deals with the school’s establishment in Austria. It was

my first acquaintance with Austrian culture. Rereading this series

as an adult is still a delight!

EntertainmentOUR TOP PICKS OF THE MONTH


Set in 1795 against the backdrop of British colonization, Thugs of Hindostan features Aamir Khan as a con man named Firangi and Amitabh Bachchan as the sea captain Khuda-baksh, aka Azaad. The film also stars Katrina Kaif and Fatima Sana Shaikh and will release in theatres on 8 November.

The snarky robot Chitti, played by superstar Rajinikanth, is being reassembled to save the day in 2.0.

Releasing on 29 November, the film is a sequel to Enthiran and will have Akshay Kumar playing the antagonist.

In The Crimes of Grindelwald, the second instalment of the Fantastic Beasts series, Grindelwald—played by Johnny Depp—escapes the custody of the Magical Congress. While the film hits theatres on 16 November, the screenplay, written by J. K. Rowling, releases as an illustrated book pub-lished by Hachette India the next day.

Films

The 14th edition of the

Men’s Hockey World

Cup will be held in Bhu-

baneswar this year.

Between 28 November

and 16 December,

16 teams will compete

for the coveted trophy.

West Indies will host

the ICC Women’s World

Twenty20 tournament

from 9 to 24 November.

In tennis, the finals for

the Fed Cup will take

place on 10 and 11 Nov-

ember in Prague.IND

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From left: A poster for The Crimes of Grindelwald; and Thugs of Hindostan.

SPORTS


E N T E R TA I N M E N T

The new US president keeps her cards close to her chest. With the Emmy-winning Robin Wright at the helm, the much-awaited series finale of House of Cards will premiere on Netflix on 2 November.

A carpet-exporter-turned-mafia-boss and his son feud over power, while an upright lawyer fights them both. Mirzapur will premiere on Amazon Prime Video on 16 November and stars Ali Fazal, Vikrant Massey and Pankaj Tripathi.

—COMPILED BY BLESSY AUGUSTINE

Streaming

Fox 8 is a day-

dreamer. And,

by hiding out-

side houses at

dusk and lis-

tening to chil-

dren’s bedtime

stories, he has

learnt to speak

‘Yuman’. Fox 8

(Bloomsbury)

is an enchant-

ing and darkly

comic fable of

human greed

and nature by

George Saunders, exquisitely

illustrated by Chelsea Cardinal.

At the end of Perumal Muru-

gan’s award-winning novel One

Part Woman, readers are left on

a cliffhanger as Kali

and Ponna’s love

for each other is

torn to shreds. Trial

by Silence and

A Lonely Harvest

(Penguin Random

House) are two

very different seq-

uels to their tale.

The government

tells the Gonds that

they have to leave

their village be-

cause a company

is going to mine

the hill next to it. The Gonds

oppose it, but how long will the

resistance last? Year of the

Weeds (Duckbill) by Siddhartha

Sarma is based on true events.

BOOKS

Robin Wright in House of Cards

All release dates are subject to change.

Studio


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Bhupen Khakhar’s life changed when he met veteran painter Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, who convinced him to attend the faculty of arts at M. S. University, Baroda, in

1958. Soon, Khakhar, a self-taught artist and a trained chartered accountant, became a central figure in the Baroda School of Art, a group of representational painters.

Khakhar’s canvasses were deeply personal and self-referential, touching upon same-sex intimacy. At a time when such relationships were taboo and criminalized,

his paintings were stark confessionals of a yearning for love and acceptance.

This artwork shows an influence of Indian miniatures in the depiction of space and perspective. The three figures in the painting include the artist, on the left,

and his friend Shankarbhai Patel on the right with a visitor. Other details appear inconsequential in comparison to the richness of the undetermined foliage, which

reminds the viewer of Henri Rousseau’s jungle series. — SUCHISMITA UKIL

AMERICAN SURVEY OFFICER, BY BHUPEN KHAKHAR

105.4 × 86.6 CM, OIL ON CANVAS, 1969


We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.TONI MORRISON,

N o b e l P r i z e - w i n n i n g n o v e l i s t

IN A WORLD DELUGED BY IRRELEVANT INFORMATION, CLARITY IS POWER.

YUVAL NOAH HARARI, h i s t o r i a n

Facts are facts and

will not disappear

on account of

your likes. JAWAHARLAL NEHRU, f o r m e r p r i m e m i n i s t e r o f I n d i a

Scenery is fine—but human nature is finer.JOHN KEATS, p o e t

Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.

LOUIS BRANDEIS, f o r m e r a s s o c i a t e j u s t i c e o f t h e U S S u p r e m e C o u r t

I tell every child I meet, “You have greatness inside you, and your job is to figure out what that is, dig it

out and give it to the world.”HENRY WINKLER, a c t o r

Beware of monotony; it’s

the mother of all the deadly sins.

EDITH WHARTON, n o v e l i s t

Anyone who is put on a pedestal is in a dangerous position because these are very narrow elevated spaces. One little dance, one drink and off you fall.TWINKLE KHANNA, a c t o r a n d w r i t e r

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Quotable Quotes

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