Which car is my neighbor going to buy, what is cooking in his house, what happens in her bedroom, her future plans and how much wealth he has accumulated, are the questions that will interest most of us. Even animals pry into the neighbors’ dens when opportunity avails.

The next is the unending interest in the personal world of celebrities—movie stars, singers, sportsmen, writers—although we do not know them in person, yet their ritzy lives fascinate us no end. Depending on our likes or dislikes we even secretly wish good or bad for them respectively.

The next is the incessant world of education, which is thrust upon us (the lucky ones) quite early in life and if circumstances are sunny, we carry on until we earn a respectable education, a white collared job and the blissful status quo until the end of life. The curiosity of things here is part forced and part the result of the pushiness.

Often times we let pass an essential nosiness, which is the knowledge of the “self”. From beginning to end we define ourselves by our name; our relationship with others—mother, brother, sister, daughter, wife, husband; the health card number, sin card, driving license, you know.

The inevitable questions—Who am I? Why am I here? What purpose does my presence serve in the world? Possibly dreary topics for reflection, all the same the ideal matter for prying. If only…

Inquisitively Yours,
Manjit

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Some studies in the recent past have held out such hope. In one of the studies, yoga practice has been shown to have improved a general sense of well-being and easing out discomfort in breast cancer patients. Participants registered 12% increase in their well-being as compared to the control group. In another study, scientists found that lymphoma patients who practiced Tibetan yoga for seven weeks went to sleep faster, slept longer, had better overall well being and used less sleep medication as compared to the control group which did not practice yoga.

Ordinarily yogic exercises may just seem a bunch of slow-motioned twist or turns practiced to a mellow music but they are based on century-old model of health and wellness, something which science is beginning to unravel now.

For one, yogic exercises are passive but mindful. One pays attention to the progress of a posture through carefully directed attention. That is what, apart from other things, may be helpful in helping people regain their sense of well-being and comfort. This directed attention on the body and emotions redefine personal relationships with one’s own body and helps to ease out fear of death and desperation associated with the feeling of ‘why me’. When faced by personal mortality, as cancer tends to drive one to that realization, people recoil into fear and despondency which complicates the physical pain and horror related to the disease.

Ancient Indian texts describe five sources of distress (Kleshas) which disturb mental quietude and well-being (Telles & Visweswariah, 2006*). These five factors are: (i) lack of knowledge (avidya), (ii) a sense of ‘I-ness’, (iii) strong preferences, (iv) strong dislikes and (v) fear of death and to lesser degree of anything which appears threatening.

As you can see, the sense of ‘I-ness’ or ‘why me’ is considered one source of distress in ancient philosophy. This might be, as it seems, one source of cognitive distortion that complicates the pain, coping and the recovery process. As people do not have accurate knowledge of the real nature of physical body (which they consider a solid and a sophisticated machine), they get trapped into a false sense of ‘self’ conveyed through sensory perceptions.

One major problem with that perception is that when we come to consider personal wellness solely on the basis of lack of illness in physical body, any threat to it from an illness devastates our feeling of well-being. Furthermore, this ego-identification with perishable physical body tends to distort our sense of self—and we are consumed with terror of disease and mortality. This is the first time we face death or its possibility and because we have never known our self beyond the body-identification, disease means the end of everything. That is what scares people even more than the disease itself—the fear of death.

In yogic philosophy, wellness is not related as much to the soundness of physical body or lack of disease as to the integrity of the mind-body-spirit axis. It reminds people that material things are perishable; that physical body is inherently subject to disease and decay.

This line of understanding helps to reshape personal perception about physical body and its pain process and bring people out of their catastrophic sense of failure and pessimism, thus giving the immune system a breather to initiate healing process. This emotional relief might be able to induce relaxation and deepen the quality of sleep. Previous research has also confirmed that a better quality sleep can beat cancer.

Yoga, through its passively directed attention and movements, could be helping participants in redefining their relationship with their own physical and mental body, thus opening the possibility of experiencing well-being while being struck with a terrible disease such as cancer.

*Telles, S, & Visweswariah, NK (2006). Comments to: Health Realization/Innate Health: Can a quiet mind and a positive feeling state be accessible over the lifespan without stress-relief techniques? Med Sci Monit., 12(6)

Originally published in The Health Q.

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Versions of the former headline abounded recently after a groundbreaking research article on marine biodiversity was published in the journal Science. “Kiss your fish and chips goodbye” was another popular heading, as were takes on “No more fish in the sea.”

On one hand, this kind of alarming headline could be potentially beneficial because it highlights the urgency of a dire situation in our oceans. Without that sense of urgency, no one will act to prevent a disaster from occurring and we really could lose most of our sea life. On the other hand, such headlines personally make me want to bury my head in the sand or stick my fingers in my ears and sing choruses of “La la la, I can’t hear you.”

When news is so depressing and on such a huge scale, it can make individuals feel powerless. And when people feel powerless, they tune out. That’s not how change happens.

Interestingly, the actual title of the research article published in Science was “Impacts of biodiversity loss on ocean ecosystem services.” The point about the potential for catastrophic declines in sea life abundance was a relatively minor one in the study, used to highlight the urgency of the need to change the way we manage our oceans. The main thrust of the article was much more interesting.

That thrust was the importance of biodiversity in maintaining healthy marine ecosystems. The international study, headed by researcher Boris Worm out of Dalhousie University in Halifax, looked at a variety of marine ecosystems and how well they handled stress. It concluded that the more diverse an ecosystem is, the better it is at dealing with stresses such as overfishing.

Biodiversity has long been seen as an important factor in the stability of land-based ecosystems. More biologically diverse ecosystems on land tend to be more stable, helping to secure the continued functioning of the entire system. This was the first comprehensive study to find the same is true for water-based ecosystems, discovering a consistent pattern across 32 small-scale experiments and through reviews of 12 coastal ecosystems.

The conclusion has major ramifications for the way we manage our fisheries, which still tends to be based on individual fish stocks, rather than the ecosystems in which they are embedded. According to the new study, we’re going about it all wrong. If you want to protect individual fish stocks, you really need to protect entire ecosystems.

Unfortunately, that story isn’t very newsy. Disappearing seafood is. Without the news hook of the dire predictions for the future of seafood, the article may not have made the front page, or any page at all in the popular press. So, either by chance or by design, the report’s authors rolled out their study baited with the sweet smell of disaster.

And reporters took to it like sharks to a chum line, resulting in headlines around the world. Most newspapers and television stations stuck to the “total collapse” angle, often ignoring the biodiversity story altogether. More thoughtful journals, however, did focus on the actual thrust of the study – fisheries management and biodiversity. In its news pages, Science used the headline “Global loss of biodiversity harming ocean bounty,” for example, while The Economist ran with “New research points to a better way of protecting fish stocks”.

Whether the popular press stories were motivational or paralyzing remains to be seen. But the fact remains that right now, the spectacular and the spectacularly awful make headlines. In the news game, the rest is just details. That puts the way the mainstream press reports news at odds with the way people become motivated and makes social change even more difficult than it already is.

Originally published on November 24, 2006

Dr. David Takayoshi Suzuki is distinguished Canadian geneticist who has attained prominence as a science broadcaster and an environmental activist. He is also a co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation.

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Even with an interview being conducted on limited time, it's easy to drift into a free-flowing, non-bookish conversation with her: about the very filling lunch she just had at Swagath (an ill-advised way to start an afternoon that will be spent talking with journalists); about how Delhi's food culture has changed since her childhood days, when the Punjabi-Chinese at Golden Dragon qualified as fine dining. Later, when she marvels at debutant writers getting younger and more publicity-savvy (“isn’t it disgusting!” she stage-whispers in jest), it's possible to forget she's an author herself. She doesn’t go to book parties or publishing events, she says; the thought of writers putting their personal email IDs on their websites makes her wide-eyed.

Besides, I never do succeed in wheedling out why it took her seven years to complete a second novel after Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998) - this in an age when publishers warn authors that there mustn’t be a long gap after the first book. Desai's faraway expression suggests she isn't quite sure herself what she was up to. "I suppose I was working and reworking the second book a lot," she says vaguely.

But that she isn’t casual or laidback about her actual writing becomes obvious when we start to talk about this second book, the just-published The Inheritance of Loss. She enthusiastically relates anecdotes, expresses her disappointment that so many characters and incidents didn’t make it to the final draft. “At one point I had something like 1,500 pages of notes,” she says, “and it was a real struggle to hold it all together and then pare it down.”

Set in the mid-1980s in Kalimpong, high in the northeastern Himalayas, The Inheritance of Loss centres on three people and one dog living together in an ancient house named Cho Oyu. There's the embittered, reptilian judge, lost in his chessboard and in his memories: of a youth spent at Cambridge many decades earlier; of humiliation in a foreign land. Staying with him (in this order of affection received) are his beloved dog Mutt and his 17-year-old granddaughter Sai, who was orphaned as a child. The judge's cook, who manages the household, and a few neighbours scattered around the area, round off the cast. As the story unfolds, insurgency is growing in the region: the Indian Nepalese want their own country or state, a Gorkhaland where they will not be treated as servants; young boys, trying to be men, roam the mountainside looting houses, collecting ammunition. Their predicament is contrasted against that of Indians settled abroad (the cook's son Biju, stumbling from one job to the next in the US, in a humorous parallel narrative).

Reading Inheritance, one initially feels it could have been shorter - with many characters, and a narrative that leaps around in time and space, it occasionally gets unfocussed. But Desai’s descriptions of the things she had to leave out (the back-stories of characters who seem shadowy in the final draft, for instance) are so vivid, it’s possible to wonder instead if a longer version of the book might have been more effective.

Why did she choose Kalimpong as a setting? “I spent parts of my childhood there, at an aunt’s place,” she explains (in a house called Cho Oyu!), “and I wanted to capture what it means to grow up in such a fascinating environment, with such wonderfully disparate people." The first stirrings of insurgency were being felt at the time, she recollects, “but at that age I had no real understanding of the issues involved. I was concerned only with my own world.” Some of this reflects in Sai’s character in the book; the petulance of the lover’s spats between her and Gyan (a young man readying to join the insurgents’ ranks) reminds us that they are essentially children caught in events way over their head. “I wanted to depict how we never really try to understand what life is like for other people.”

Desai was 15 when she left India - she lived in England for a year and has been in the US since then - and it’s tempting to pigeonhole her as another NRI writer obsessed by themes like dislocation (something that certainly runs through Inheritance). In person, however, she comes across as someone who’s never really felt out of place no matter where she’s been. She’s pleasingly unselfconscious about the topic of immigrants, joking (again from the outside, as if she isn’t personally involved) about the various kinds there are: “those who throw up their hands at the difficulties - and, at the other end of the scale, those who are expert at playing the ethnic card, accentuating the character traits they are expected to have, and thereby making a success of their lives”. Like Biju’s worldly-wise friend Saeed Saeed, one of the many characters in Inheritance she would have liked to give a bigger stage to.

She’s so fond of relating stories - about the rodent population in Harlem, for instance, which led to the formation of a “Neighbourhood Rat Committee” - that it’s no surprise when she promises not to dally as much over her next book (possibly a novel set in New York) as she did with this one. “It might make more sense,” she concedes with a laugh, “to spread the stories out over many books, and publish them more frequently!”

Writer’s voice, redux
In blog-related discussions in the past I’ve mentioned how much scope there is for misunderstanding when you know a person only through their writing - hence the phenomenon of readers taking a post dead seriously when it was written in a facetious vein, or extrapolating a rigid, all-encompassing worldview from a single throwaway sentence. Interviewing Desai was similar in a way. I had half-expected to meet a very solemn Indian Author Settled Abroad, keen to pontificate about the plight of people who have no place to call their own. But this was a nice surprise.

(Photo credit: Priyanka Parashar)

Originally published on Jabberwock. Reproduced here with permission.

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In The Da Vinci Code, the sequel to Angels & Demons, the erudite, reluctant Robert Langdon is once again poked and prodded into action. This time he is running for his life, racing against – and from – two misguided members of a real life Catholic organization known as Opus Dei. Teamed up with an alluring, insightful young woman, he must discover and decipher the Da Vinci Code, a series of symbols left by a group with a secret as old as Christianity itself. This unlikely duo must find and protect the secret before it is either revealed or lost forever.

With every novel, Dan Brown’s research becomes more interesting; his characters gain depth and his plots become more involved. Don’t be put off by the first few pages of The Da Vinci Code. Although they bear a striking resemblance to the beginning of Angels & Demons – the late night urgent phone call, the gruesome multiple murders, the alluring, intelligent woman whose learned father-figure has just been murdered – The Da Vinci Code is thoroughly entertaining. Is it formulaic? Yes. Is it boring? Not for a moment.

Brown's gift is the ability to work academic subject matter into exciting, accessible stories. There are so many interesting details in The Da Vinci Code that they have incited a virtual treasure hunt for more information. Sales of scholarly works on these subjects have been invigorated as a result of this novel. These include Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent and The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince.

For academics, the more scholarly works would be recommended but for those who enjoy intelligent fiction with a thriller plot, The Da Vinci Code is great reading.

Originally published on Populist Books. Reproduced here with permission.

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Not that the commercialization of Christmas has totally taken over Mexico, but it seems that Santa and Rudolph might be slowly gaining over the Holy Family and the Three Kings.

Once upon a time, there were precious few images of Santa Claus in Mexico, and Gene Autry's rendition of "Rudolph the Red Nosed Raindeer" was not heard blaring over store loudspeakers, drowning out "Ave Maria," and "The Little Drummer Boy." Mexican children would leave a shoe under their bed praying for a holiday treat like a small toy or a candy, from the Three Kings on January 6th, Three Kings Day.

Now, it could seem that greed might be casting its shadow over the story of Bethlehem, except for one very important thing: Las Posadas is still observed in Mexico. That cannot be underestimated, nor can it be commercialized.

Legend has it that Las Posadas came to Mexico via the Spanish missionaries, as a sure-fire, very dramatic way to impress the birth of Christ upon the Mexican people, targeted for conversion. No matter how it arrived, the beloved tradition of Las Posadas is an experience so profound, so spiritually uplifting, that it's a privilege to take part in, even to merely observe, the honored ritual.

Las Posadas begins on December 16th and continues each night through Christmas eve. On evenings during the Posada season, people gather to pray before a "nacimiento" -- a Nativity scene.

They form a candlelight procession, usually led by a priest, with guitar-strumming musicians, and children portraying Mary and Joseph; often "Mary" is riding a burro. The procession continues down a selected street of private casitas before which various Nativity scenes are depicted with living, motionless people, as still as statues, barely breathing, honored to have been chosen.

Christmas carols (villancicos) are sung by all in the procession, and the songs ask for "posada" or shelter at the "inn." At each doorway, they are turned away, and move on to another house, another door, another rejection. This continues until Christmas eve, when at last "Mary and Joseph" are not turned away, but are welcomed into the Inn.

After a rosary is said by all, the Christ child, usually a life-size doll and occasionally a real baby, is placed on a bed of straw in the "Inn."

After Midnight Mass, there's a fiesta with music, hot fruit punch, sugar cane, oranges, and candy. Pinatas are expertly smashed by happy children who scramble for the sweets which rain down upon them on this holiest of nights, "Noche Buena."

Perhaps the Christmas tree has replaced the traditional nativity scenes in many Mexican homes, and Santa and Rudolph can be found in the stores today, but most Mexicans still hear "Campana Sobre Campana," -- Bells over Bethlehem -- and, for another year, Mexico will know the true spirit of Christmas.

Originally published in Texas Escapes. Reproduced here with permission.

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In 1923, Vladimir Jabotinsky—one of the founders of Zionism—wrote ‘The Iron Wall,’ an essay that laid out a direct comparison between expropriation of the Arabs with the genocide of the indigenous people of North America.

“There can be no discussion of voluntary reconciliation between us and the Arabs, not now, and not in the foreseeable future,” wrote Jabotinsky. All well-meaning people long ago understood the complete impossibility of arriving at a voluntary agreement with the Arabs of Palestine for the transformation of Palestine from an Arab country to a country with a Jewish majority. Each of you has some general understanding of the history of colonization. Try to find even one example when the colonization of a country took place with the agreement of the native population. Such an event has never occurred

Israel’s actions in the Middle East receive public support from the heads of state of Canada and the US because both are involved in the same type of behaviour.

Canadians rightfully decry the deaths of hundreds of Lebanese civilians under Israeli military attacks, but there is no public outcry over the 2,374 on-reserve accidental deaths in Alberta between 1983 and 2002 recorded by Health Canada. Half of these deaths were suicides, while almost all involved addictions. This is just in Alberta; multiply these numbers by the entire landmass known as Canada and you have a staggering ongoing death toll.

In the pacified stage of colonial oppression, the resistance turns inwards and becomes self-directed. Better to die, or to live under the influence of drugs and alcohol, than to struggle hopelessly in a trapped and tortured situation. Incarceration rates are high, unemployment is high, disabling addiction levels are high, educational outcomes are low, health is poor; and all this happens in an environment micro-managed by Canada’s Indian and Northern Affairs Department. Canadians lament the Israeli pass system for Palestinians, the bantustans, and the military control of the Arab population, but these were all aspects of Canada’s Indian policy—written right into the Indian Act—between 1876 and 1960.

Things being what they are, the most effective place for well-meaning Canadians to protest Israeli actions is right at home, under their own feet. Canada's elected government can actually do something about this situation, unlike its capacity to right wrongs in the Middle East.

Five contested sites of power -- namely race, gender, class, authority and ecology -- come together in the indigenous struggle for survival in Canada. From north to south, the indigenous peoples of the Americas are leading the resistance to the global colonial madness. If Canada can be pulled out of alignment with the US/UK/EU sphere of influence, and into the Turtle Island-wide indigenous sphere of influence, it will have more impact on the Israeli/US Middle Eastern project than any amount of hand-wringing or fist-waving about a colonial project half a world away.

Why alter the colonial arrangement? Canadians will not act out of pure altruism; you need to see the money. Canada’s GDP is over the trillion-dollar mark; $1.3 trillion in 2004 and $1.4 trillion in 2005. What if, instead of the current colonial arrangements -- where a legal fiction called ‘The Crown’ holds root title to all lands, and the state exercises totalitarian control over Indigenous Peoples through the Indian Act -- we go into a straight business relationship?

‘Fee simple’ (the term for the current property rights regime where people ‘own’ property while the Crown retains the underlining title) could be left intact, except with root title transferred from the Crown to Indigenous Peoples, and with the introduction of an annual royalty or rent to be paid to Indigenous Peoples, based directly on Canada's GDP. A two per cent royalty on Canada’s GDP would be about $28 billion, which could be paid through the foreign debt repayment section of the federal budget. No new money has to be raised from taxpayers. Scrap the Indian Act, terminate the Department of Indian Affairs, and save about $12 billion that is currently pouring into that black hole built to hide corruption. Indigenous Peoples can establish an international trust fund that we will manage ourselves.

It’s a business arrangement. Theft and murder is the business that organized crime is in; it doesn’t have to be the business that the nation of Canada is in.

The most effective place for well-meaning Canadians to protest Israeli actions is right at home, under their own feet.

Originally published in The Dominion

Stewart Steinhauer is an internationally-known stone sculptor who lives on the Saddle Lake Cree Nation in Alberta, where he was born and raised. He is the author of Voice from the Coffin, a book about life on the Rez.

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If we practice eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, soon the whole world will be blind and toothless.
—Gandhi

Desire embellishes the objects on which it rests its wings of fire.
—Anatole France

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
—Tolstoy

One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.
—Sophocles

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2. Approbate
a) To approve officially
b) To refuse officially
c) Degenerate
d) None of the above

3. Bejewel
a) Set in a jewel
b) Jutting out
c) To adorn with jewels
d) None of the above

4. Chutney
a) Hodgepodge
b) A kind of spicy gravy
c) Both A& B
d) None of the above

5. Despot
a) A thug
b) A ruthless king or ruler
c) Mentally unsound
d) None of the above

6. Fusillade
a) Ill-tempered
b) Continuous discharge of arms and ammunition
c) Related to conflict
d) None of the above

7. Magnanimity
a) An act of miserliness
b) An act of generosity
c) An act of violent outburst
d) Both A & C

8. Promptitude
a) Promptness
b) Intentional delay
c) Sense of urgency
d) None of the above

9. Rustic
a) Obscene
b) Related to rural
c) Ill-mannered
d) None of the above

10. Zing
a) A kind of medicinal herb
b) Related to Mao Zing Dynasty
c) Vitality
d) None of the above

Answers
1. (c) 2. (a) 3. (c) 4. (b) 5 (b) 6 (b) 7 (b) 8 (a) 9. (b) 10 (c)

Your Score
8-10 Excellent
5-7 Good
1-4 Need improvement

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