Rajinikanth in Bandipur Tiger Reserve, to feature in ‘Man vs Wild’ with Bear Grylls

Speaking to The New Indian Express, a senior forest department official said permission for the shooting has been given for six hours in a day for January 28 and 30 with a special guest each day.

Popular movie star Rajinikanth is now busy and so is Bandipur Tiger Reserve. The actor and a team of documentary makers from the popular international series Man Vs Wild are in the tiger reserve to shoot the documentary since Monday evening. The shooting is scheduled for six hours on Tuesday and again on Thursday.

After PM Modi, Rajinikanth to shoot ‘Man vs Wild’ with Bear Grylls. (Photo | PTI)

The series caught Indian attention after Prime Minister Narendra Modi shot for the series in the forests of northern India with British adventurer Bear Grylls.

Speaking to The New Indian Express, a senior forest department official said permission for the shooting has been given for six hours in a day for January 28 and 30 with a special guest each day. On Tuesday it is with Rajanikanth and on 30th noted Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar is also expected.

"Permission for the shooting has been given for Sultan Batteri highway and ranges of Mulleholle, Maddur and Kalkere ranges. They will be shooting in the non-tourism zones. If permission to was given to Wild Karnataka shooting, then this is also permitted and besides chief wildlife warden has given permission. Also, no tourism or regular forest patrolling and fire line creation activities will be affected. The shooting Wil be done under special forest protection and no one will be aware of the locations," the official said.

The permission for the shooting of films and documentaries inside forest areas of Karnataka is only increasing, the department must exercise caution, this will only lead to more man-animal conflict, said, conservationists. 

(Source: TNIE)

I miscarried a child 20 years ago, and I know the language we use really matters

Women’s traumatic experiences are made light of with weird, evasive language. No wonder so many end up with PTSD

It was the day before my nephew’s barmitzvah, almost 20 years ago, when family and friends would gather to celebrate my sister’s son’s coming of age. 

After nine years, my parents had just accepted my wife into the family: this was going to be an important moment for us as a couple. But it wasn’t the happy event I’d hoped for.

My wife and I had already told my parents – and others – that we were pregnant. I wanted a boy, and we knew his name: Eli. That day before the barmitzvah, I was due to have the all-important first scan where a heartbeat would be detected – but when I woke that morning I knew something was wrong.

‘Society has much to answer for on this. To be a family is seen by many as having children.’ Photograph: Alamy

Our friends enjoyed our good news and grieved with us in our sad news. Who do we protect if we remain silent?

At the hospital a scan showed the sac but no heartbeat. I was to return to the hospital on Monday but first had to go through an entire weekend of family celebration. I’d alerted my parents, telling my dad not to ask me to dance as I probably wouldn’t want to, so he danced with my wife instead – something I never thought I would see.

On Monday I was given medication to start the miscarriage. From hospital bed to my own bed, I was in the most excruciating pain, unable to get any relief. A day later I had a D&C procedure to remove anything that was left from my uterus, and that was it. Eli was gone. We were heartbroken. That was to be my only pregnancy.

Friends came to the rescue. Those who had miscarried were sympathetic and kind. Those who had given birth were very much aware of their luck. I am glad we previously shared our excitement about the pregnancy with those friends, regardless of any supposed 12-week rule – it meant they were there for us right from the start through to the end. Our friends enjoyed our good news and grieved with us in our sad news. Whom do we protect if we remain silent? We need to talk about miscarriage more – we need to talk to the professionals but also to each other.

Prior to treatment, because we were a same-sex couple, we had to undergo counselling to ensure we would be “good” parents. When I miscarried there was no counselling offered. Maybe this has changed now, but given my miscarriage and the experience of other people I know, it’s clear we need greater care and support. This is vital for our mental and physical wellbeing. 

Our bodies and minds have suffered a great trauma. We have been filled with pregnancy hormones, readying us to carry a child, to nourish it, watch it flourish and enter the world. To lose that causes tremendous distress. It’s not surprising then to read a study this week that suggests “one in six women who lose a baby in early pregnancy experience long-term symptoms of post-traumatic stress”. We need help.

After I miscarried, a friend who did have a child said to me, “Oh well, nothing’s changed for you, your life is the same as it was before.” We are no longer friends. Everything had changed.

Society has much to answer for on this. To be a family is seen by many as having children. Women are expected to procreate. The number of miscarriages some women go through before a live birth is shattering. Is this because as women we do not want to be seen as failures? The very formulation of the word miscarriage can denote a mistake, an error, a failure to meet the intended result. But it is not a mistake or a failure, it is just unlucky. It is simply an ending.

All of us – including the medical professionals – need to rethink our language around miscarriage. We should not camouflage what has happened and pretend it is something else in case we cause upset. We are already upset. 

Those cells and tissue are part of us, not some alien matter. Miscarriage is tough. Whether we miscarry at six weeks or 12 weeks or 23 weeks, the result is heartbreaking. Our minds and bodies are deeply distressed. We are grieving. We need proper care from those who are trained to give it, acknowledging our loss and offering space to heal.

My miscarriage was almost 20 years ago, but my wife and I still relive it. We still wonder who Eli would have grown into, how we would have raised him. We note his would-have-been birthdays every year. The pain never goes away completely. We cried for a very long time. We still cry. And we still talk about it. Because dialogue matters. It really matters. The right words matter.

(Source: The Guardian)

Scientists discover 'why stress turns hair white'

Scientists say they may have discovered why stress makes hair turn white, and a potential way of stopping it happening without reaching for the dye.

In experiments on mice, stem cells that control skin and hair colour became damaged after intense stress.

In a chance finding, dark-furred mice turned completely white within weeks.

The US and Brazilian researchers said this avenue was worth exploring further to develop a drug that prevents hair colour loss from ageing.

Men and women can go grey any time from their mid-30s, with the timing of parental hair colour change giving most of the clues on when.

Although it's mostly down to the natural ageing process and genes, stress can also play a role.

But scientists were not clear exactly how stress affected the hairs on our heads.

Researchers behind the study, published in Nature, from the Universities of Sao Paulo and Harvard, believed the effects were linked to melanocyte stem cells, which produce melanin and are responsible for hair and skin colour.

And while carrying out experiments on mice, they stumbled across evidence this was the case.

"We now know for sure that stress is responsible for this specific change to your skin and hair, and how it works," says Prof Ya-Cieh Hsu, research author from Harvard University.

'Damage is permanent'

Pain in mice triggered the release of adrenaline and cortisol, making their hearts beat faster and blood pressure rise, affecting the nervous system and causing acute stress.

This process then sped up the depletion of stem cells that produced melanin in hair follicles.

"I expected stress was bad for the body," said Prof Hsu.

"But the detrimental impact of stress that we discovered was beyond what I imagined.

"After just a few days, all of the pigment-regenerating stem cells were lost.

"Once they're gone, you can't regenerate pigment any more - the damage is permanent."

The mouse before pain was induced (top) and some time afterwards (bottom image)

In another experiment, the researchers found they could block the changes by giving the mice an anti-hypertensive, which treats high blood pressure.

And by comparing the genes of mice in pain with other mice, they could identify the protein involved in causing damage to stem cells from stress.

When this protein - cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) - was suppressed, the treatment also prevented a change in the colour of their fur.

This leaves the door open for scientists to help delay the onset of grey hair by targeting CDK with a drug.

"These findings are not a cure or treatment for grey hair," Prof Hsu told the BBC.

"Our discovery, made in mice, is only the beginning of a long journey to finding an intervention for people.

"It also gives us an idea of how stress might affect many other parts of the body," she said.

(Source: BBC)

One ping after another: Why everyone needs a notification detox

They tell us when someone has called, texted and WhatsApped us - even to drink water and exercise. Is it time to turn them all off for good?

Three years ago, Aishah Iqbal had just qualified as a doctor and was finding it a “steep learning curve”. She often felt overwhelmed at work – and whenever she took out her phone and saw “all these messages coming up”, she felt worse. “It was very easy to get distracted from why I’d pulled my phone out, or to feel like there were so many people that I needed to reply to immediately.”

When we talk about the fragmenting effect of technology on our attention, or the dopamine hits that keep us refreshing our feeds as if they are buttons on fruit machines, we are often thinking about notifications: the pings, pop-ups and glowing red dots that pull us back into our phones, and push us from app to app.

A 2016 study by Deloitte found that people check their phone, on average, 47 times a day – often in response to alerts. Composite: Guardian Design Team

According to one small study conducted in 2014, mobile phone users receive an average of 63.5 alerts every day, with most viewed within minutes – whether the phone is on silent or not. A 2016 study by Deloitte found that people check their phone, on average, 47 times a day – often in response to alerts. It is hardly any wonder some people are undergoing a notification detox.

These might be messages from friends, family, your boss or your bank. They might be breaking news alerts, or reminders to drink water or meditate, or simply apps alerting you to their presence on your phone. (Turn those ones off, right now.)

Regardless of what the notifications say or if you opted to receive them, the cumulative effect can be overwhelming. Over the course of a day, notifications are an interruption, affecting your focus and performance.

A 2015 study from Florida State University found that, among students sitting a test that required their sustained attention, any audible interruption from their phone negatively affected the results. Just hearing the ping of a notification was equally as distracting as actually taking a phone call, suggesting to the researchers that “mobile phones can disrupt attention performance even if one does not interact with the device”.

‘“Addiction” gets tossed around all the time, but when we call it what it really is – a distraction – it becomes something we can do something about, and there’s no one to blame.’ Photograph: milindri/Getty/iStockphoto

It is that sense of being derailed that is increasingly leading people to turn off all (or nearly all) of their notifications. As Iqbal noticed the effect pop-ups were having on her peace of mind and productivity, she took action. “I turned everything off, and I felt better for it. That was something I could control: the distraction coming from my phone.”

Iqbal, 28, now works as a paediatrician in Leicester. She is also a certified personal trainer and uses social media as a core part of her business. She manages this by only enabling badge notifications (a red dot on the icon on the homescreen, one of the least obtrusive options) for WhatsApp and one of her email addresses. She says she is less inclined to waste hours passively scrolling Facebook or Instagram after being diverted there by an alert, and she no longer feels she has to reply to messages instantly. “It hasn’t crossed my mind to turn them back on.”

It is only relatively recently that turning off notifications has been an option at all. After proudly publicising the 7.4tn notifications pushed through its servers in 2013, in 2018 Apple introduced features to grant users more control over how and when they were interrupted, such as a “do not disturb” function to help them “stay in the moment”. Google has rolled out similar “digital wellbeing” features for Android. Even Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, owned up to having “gutted” his own notifications, and encouraged all iPhone users to do the same. “It’s not something that is adding value to my life, or is making me a better person.”

But what if it is not the technology, but ourselves that is the problem? Nir Eyal, a behavioural design expert and author of Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life says that the leading causes of distraction are internal triggers: uncertainty, stress, anxiety and fatigue. Rather than reckon with them, it can be easier to blame technology. Developers’ tactics to get us to use their apps are good, “but they’re not mind control. A lot of people like to think we’re puppets on strings. ‘Addiction’ gets tossed around all the time, but when we call it what it really is – a distraction – it becomes something we can do something about, and there’s no one to blame.”

Rather than relying on willpower, Eyal favours a system (in his case, almost a microschedule) to get ahead of diversions before they happen. He says sometimes we might blame an alert from our phone for distracting us, when really we were not focused or being productive in the first place. “It’s not just about turning off notifications, it’s about knowing what you want to do with your time. You can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it is distracting you from.”

Tinkering with tech also saves us from having to confront a more grim possibility: that even if it was taken off us entirely, we would still find means of distracting ourselves.

Nilli Lavie, a professor of psychology and brain sciences at UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, says her research has established a clear link between people being distracted by their mobile phones and low mood – but a very strong association was also recorded with a wandering mind in general.

Another line of research has led Lavie to conclude that susceptibility to being distracted is in fact a trait – Lavie calls it “attention distractability” – that varies within the population. Though it is not yet known if, for instance, it is influenced by genetics, it is an established component of research into attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). You may not meet the clinical criteria for ADHD, but if you fall higher on what Lavie calls “the inattention spectrum”, you will be not only more vulnerable to distractions, but more consumed by them.

Lavie, like Eyal, is deeply sceptical of the argument that the problem is technology: “It’s very easy to just mute it, right?” she says. Instead there is a “generalised issue of distractability”. “Obviously mobile phones do come through as a large source of distraction, but our studies also showed it’s a wider issue.”

For example, says Eyal, people feeling overwhelmed might locate tech as the source when really it is their attitude to work – or their employer’s. If your boss was to call you on a landline late on a Friday night, asks Eyal: “Is it the telephone that’s at fault or the company culture that allows for that type of behaviour?”

Employees of Slack, a corporate instant messaging platform that is often cited as a source of “notification spam”, are told not to use it after hours or on weekends, says Eyal – the message from the top being “work hard and go home”. It may not be notifications that we need to manage, but expectations: those of other people, and our own.

‘I think the notifications were symbolic of the expectation that other people had of me.’ Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

When Melissa Webb, a secondary school teacher in Lincolnshire, changed jobs three years ago, her new employer’s always-on culture exacerbated her anxiety and depression to the point where she had what she terms a “breakdown”. The constant emails from parents, students and colleagues manifested as notifications – “an enormous trigger” for her at that time, she remembers.

“When you’re going through mental health problems, day-to-day life is really difficult, and you might not be in the space to properly respond to someone,” she says. “I think the notifications were symbolic of the expectation that other people had of me.

“You suddenly became aware that you need to be a good employee, good colleague, daughter, partner, friend. It linked into this thing of ‘I can’t be all of these things to all of these people; I can’t manage this workload, this social life.’ It was too much. Sometimes the content of them doesn’t matter – it’s just the feeling that you can’t escape.”

Webb, 29, is now a self-employed illustrator. She has 43,000 followers on Instagram, with whom she has frank conversations about mental health. “I’ve had very few people in real life that I’ve been able to do that with,” she says. “I never moan about tech – tech is amazing. It’s the reason why, in the last three years, I’ve been able to earn money despite not being able to be in a normal workplace.”

Her notifications, however, remain mostly switched off. “It’s so simple, but it’s so helpful. It’s that feeling of being in control of your time and your energy and your emotions, which I think is really important.” Iqbal actively guards those boundaries too. About a month ago, Instagram started alerting her to direct messages. “That went off straight away. I don’t know why it happened – but it was a reminder of why I’d turned it off.”

(Source: The Guardian)

20 years ago, Indian TV shows were so progressive. What in the world has happened to us now?

The other day, when my internet connection was being a pain, I switched on the TV after really long. Big Boss. Nope. Click. Super Dancer with Shilpa Shetty. Click. Sasural Simar Ka. *facepalm*

It's sad to see Indian television becoming synonymous with regressive saas-bahu sagas and pointless reality shows.

One of the major shifts that took place on Indian television was one person who denoted an era of her own - Ekta Kapoor. Unfortunately for us, she struck gold with the concept of family shows being held together by a lead woman character. These women were created to tick all the attributes of some regressive ideal of the beti, bahu, biwi. The purpose of their lives seems to be to be sorry for everything happening around them.

Indian television also has become the den of reality TV shows where anger, expletives, flaring tempers sell more than any of the talent hunt. So we see a bunch of middle-aged men fighting over whether an upcoming singer will have roti in his house after the show gets over. It's good entertainment for the audience as we see foul-mouthed judges give it to each other. And that's that. 

And that's when I drowned in my own thought about what happened to Indian television? It was decent growing up with the Malgudi Days, Byomkesh Bakshis of my time. And then everything went to shit.

Back in the '90s, TV shows were so much more progressive. Shows like Hasratein portrayed real women with shades of gray. 

Compare the regressive drivel we watch with some of the shows from the 90s like Hasratein which showed a woman leaving her husband to start a relationship with her married boss, was something way ahead of its time and the audience accepted it with equal maturity.

And now where we see a Simar turning into a fly and taking her revenge on the vamp of the family, we had the progressive Astitva around 2000. Astitva showed a career-oriented woman marrying a man almost a decade younger to her. 

Today one of the highest rated shows is Naagin - which shows a woman shape-shifting into a serpent. Compare this to Mandira Bedi's gig as Shanti, a journalist who digs up the dark secrets from the past of two Bollywood professionals. How have we got more regressive with our leading women?

Women in Ekta Kapoor's shows don't seem to ever have a life of their own. Their entire universe seems to revolve around their husbands or their in-laws. But 23 years ago (yes, before Sex and the City), Tara portrayed women and their friendships, which are closer to reality.

Around the same time there was Banegi Apni Baat. It had realistic characters, and beautifully portrayed different relationships: mother-daughter, friends, lovers. This show had a great cast and some poignant performances. R. Madhavan started his acting career with this show. 

How did the rib-tickling humor get replaced by cross-dressing men laughing on cue?

There was the era of the Dekh Bhai Dekhs, Hum Paanchs and the Family No. 1s - where we saw seriously good actors like Naveen Nishchol, Farida Jalal, Ashok Saraf and even Kanwaljeet Singh participate in the tomfoolery. That has now been replaced by The Kapil Sharma Show, which is home for most Bollywood stars who come to promote their films. 

And they are welcomed by a bunch of cross-dressing men who crack jokes and laugh when an alarm called Navjot Singh Sidhu rings. Along with this is the Great India Comedy Circus which makes fun of it's overweight host by routinely comparing her to a buffalo. What happened to good ol' slapstick humour which can be dumb and still amusing?

Today's shows exist in this bubble of unreal melodrama. What happened to relatability?

 While most of today's soap operas claim to give us a picture of what goes on inside the middle class family, it doesn't even come close to something that a Wagle Ki Duniya achieved in the 90s. The show which starred a little known Bollywood actor called Shah Rukh Khan, spoke about the everyday mishaps a middle class Indian family went through. 

The same decade even had Mungerilal Ke Haseen Sapne, where a man afraid of his domineering wife and his boss becomes a braver version of himself. Only in his dreams though. Why has all that charm been replaced by this template of a north Indian middle-class family which has the same sort of characters, face the same kind of problems and look painstakingly generic.

Today we have nothing in the league of Just Mohabbat and Hip Hip Hurray. Show-runners have slowly wiped out all the shows for young adults.

The 90s had shows like Hip Hip Hurray, Just Mohabbat which addressed most adolescent issues with its own tinge of humour. Hip Hip Hurray followed a bunch of school kids going through the angst of growing up, Just Mohabbat dealt with an upper middle-class kid dealing with the pressures of having working parents. The kid copes with it by confiding in an imaginary friend by his side.

Shows like those have now been replaced with drivel like Dare To Date, Roadies and Splitsvilla, which aim at giving youngsters an 'opportunity to prove themselves' while other youngsters look on with amusement.

What have we done? How did we get here?

We've been bitten by the vicious bug of catering to the audience. Show-runners are so convinced that the TV audience comprises of an audience which cannot appreciate cerebral content, that they have begun tailoring products to the mass preference, while the masses keep complaining there is nothing else to watch. It's a cycle.

And it can be broken by the show-runners themselves, if they take a leap of faith and try to make content which challenges the audience. The transition will be slow, but it is worth aiming for.

(Source: Scoop Whoop)