The mysterious link between Covid-19 and sleep

 The coronavirus can cause insomnia and long-term changes in our nervous systems. But sleep could also be a key to ending the pandemic.

The newly discovered coronavirus had killed only a few dozen people when Feixiong Cheng started looking for a treatment. He knew time was of the essence: Cheng, a data analyst at the Cleveland Clinic, had seen similar coronaviruses tear through China and Saudi Arabia before, sickening thousands and shaking the global economy. So, in January, his lab used artificial intelligence to search for hidden clues in the structure of the virus to predict how it invaded human cells, and what might stop it. One observation stood out: The virus could potentially be blocked by melatonin.

Melatonin, best known as the sleep hormone, wasn’t an obvious factor in halting a pandemic. Its most familiar role is in the regulation of our circadian rhythms. Each night, as darkness falls, it shoots out of our brain’s pineal glands and into our blood, inducing sleep. Cheng took the finding as a curiosity. “It was very preliminary,” he told me recently—a small study in the early days before COVID-19 even had a name, when anything that might help was deemed worth sharing.

After he published his research, though, Cheng heard from scientists around the world who thought there might be something to it. They noted that, in addition to melatonin’s well-known effects on sleep, it plays a part in calibrating the immune system. Essentially, it acts as a moderator to help keep our self-protective responses from going haywire—which happens to be the basic problem that can quickly turn a mild case of COVID-19 into a life-threatening scenario.

Cheng decided to dig deeper. For months, he and colleagues pieced together the data from thousands of patients who were seen at his medical center. In results published last month, melatonin continued to stand out. People taking it had significantly lower odds of developing COVID-19, much less dying of it. Other researchers noticed similar patterns. In October, a study at Columbia University found that intubated patients had better rates of survival if they received melatonin. When President Donald Trump was flown to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for COVID-19 treatment, his doctors prescribed—in addition to a plethora of other experimental therapies—melatonin.

PETER CADE / GETTY

Eight clinical trials are currently ongoing, around the world, to see if these melatonin correlations bear out. Few other treatments are receiving so much research attention. If melatonin actually proves to help people, it would be the cheapest and most readily accessible medicine to counter COVID-19. Unlike experimental drugs such as remdesivir and antibody cocktails, melatonin is widely available in the United States as an over-the-counter dietary supplement. People could start taking it immediately.

Yet Cheng emphasizes that he’s not recommending that. Like any substance capable of slowing the central nervous system, melatonin is not a trifling addition to the body’s chemistry. Its apparent benefit to COVID-19 patients could simply be a spurious correlation—or, perhaps, a signal alerting us to something else that is actually improving people’s outcomes. Cheng thinks that might be the case. He and others suggest that the real issue at play may not be melatonin at all, but the function it most famously controls: sleep.

In fact, several mysteries of how COVID-19 works converge on the question of how the disease affects our sleep, and how our sleep affects the disease. The virus is capable of altering the delicate processes within our nervous system, in many cases in unpredictable ways, sometimes creating long-term symptoms. Better appreciating the ties between immunity and the nervous system could be central to understanding COVID-19—and to preventing it.

Throughout the pandemic, the department of neurology at Johns Hopkins University has been flooded with consultation requests for people suffering from insomnia. Rachel Salas, one of the team’s neurologists, says she initially thought this surge in sleep disorders was merely the result of all the anxieties that come with a devastating global crisis: worries about health, the economic impact, and isolation. Indeed, patterns of sleep disruption have played out around the world. Roughly three-quarters of people in the United Kingdom have had a change in their sleep during the pandemic, according to the British Sleep Society, and less than half are getting refreshing sleep. “In the summer, we were calling it ‘COVID-somnia,’” Salas says.

In recent months, however, Salas has watched a more curious pattern emerge. Many people’s sleep continues to be disrupted by predictable pandemic anxieties. But more perplexing symptoms have been arising specifically among people who have recovered from COVID-19. “We’re seeing referrals from doctors because the disease itself affects the nervous system,” she says. After recovering, people report changes in attention, debilitating headaches, brain fog, muscular weakness, and, perhaps most commonly, insomnia. Many don’t seem anxious or preoccupied with pandemic-related concerns—at least not to a degree that could itself explain their newfound inability to sleep. Rather it is sometimes part of what the medical community has begun to refer to as “long COVID,” where symptoms persist indefinitely after the virus has left a person. When it comes to sleep disturbances, Salas worries, “I expect this is just the beginning of long-term effects we’re going to see for years to come.”

Her colleague Arun Venkatesan has been trying to get to the bottom of how a virus could cause insomnia. He focuses specifically on autoimmune and inflammatory diseases that affect the nervous system. Initially, Venkatesan says, the common assumption among doctors was that many post-COVID-19 symptoms were due to an autoimmune reaction—a misguided, targeted attack on cells of one’s own body. This can happen in the nervous system after infections by various viruses, in predictable patterns, such as that of Guillain-Barré syndrome. In the days after an infection, as new antibodies mistakenly attack nerves, weakness and numbness spread from the tips of the extremities inward. Disconcerting as it can be, this type of pattern is at least identifiable and predictable; doctors can tell patients what they’re dealing with and what to expect.

By contrast, the post-COVID-19 patterns are sporadic, not clearly autoimmune in nature, says Venkatesan. The symptoms can appear even after a mild case of COVID-19, and timescales vary. “We’ve seen a number of patients who were not even hospitalized, and felt much better for weeks, before worsening,” Venkatesan says. And the findings aren’t limited to the brain. At Northwestern University, the radiologist Swati Deshmukh has been fielding a steady stream of cases in which people experience nerve damage throughout the body. She has been looking for evidence that the virus itself might be killing nerve cells. Hepatitis C and herpes viruses are known to do so, and autopsies have found SARS-CoV-2 inside nerves in the brain.

Still, she believes, symptoms are most likely due to inflammation. Indeed, the leading theory to explain how a virus can cause such a wide variety of neurologic symptoms over a variety of timescales comes down to haphazard inflammation—less a targeted attack than an indiscriminate brawl. This effect is seen in a condition known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, sometimes called chronic fatigue syndrome. The diagnosis encompasses myriad potential symptoms, and likely involves multiple types of cellular injury or miscommunication. In some cases, damage comes from prolonged, low-level oxygen deprivation (as after severe pneumonia). In others, the damage to nerve-cell communication could come by way of inflammatory processes that directly tweak the functioning of our neural grids.

The unpredictability of this disease process—how, and how widely, it will play out in the longer term, and what to do about it—poses unique challenges in this already-uncertain pandemic. Myalgic encephalomyelitis is poorly understood, stigmatized, and widely misrepresented. Medical treatments and diagnostic approaches are unreliable. General inflammatory states rarely respond to a single prescription or procedure, but demand more holistic, ongoing interventions to bring the immune system back to equilibrium and keep it there. The medical system is not geared toward such approaches.

But this understanding of what is happening may also offer some hope. Although the technical details are clearly thorny, there is some reassurance in what the doctors are not seeing. When nerves are invaded and killed, the damage can be permanent. When nerves are miscommunicating—in ways that come and go—that process can be treated, modulated, prevented, and quite possibly cured. Although sleep cycles can be disturbed and damaged by the post-infectious inflammatory process, radiologists and neurologists aren’t seeing evidence that this is irreversible. And among the arsenal of ways to attempt to reverse it are basic measures such as sleep itself. Adequate sleep also plays a part in minimizing the likelihood of ever entering into this whole nasty, uncertain process.

A central function of sleep is maintaining proper channels of cellular communication in the brain. Sleep is sometimes likened to a sort of anti-inflammatory cleansing process; it removes waste products that accumulate during a day of firing. Without sleep, those by-products accumulate and impair communication (just as seems to be happening in some people with post-COVID-19 encephalomyelitis). “In the early stages of COVID-19, you feel extremely tired,” says Michelle Miller, a sleep-medicine professor at the University of Warwick in the U.K. Essentially, your body is telling you it needs sleep. But as the infection goes on, Miller explains, people find that they often can’t sleep, and the problems with communication compound one another.

The goal, then, is breaking out of this cycle, or preventing it altogether. Here the benefits of sleep extend throughout the body. “Sleep is important for effective immune function, and it also helps to regulate metabolism, including glucose and mechanisms controlling appetite and weight gain,” Miller says. All of these bear directly on COVID-19, as risk factors for severe cases include diabetes, obesity, and sleep apnea. Even in the short term, getting enough deep, slow-wave sleep will optimize your metabolism and make you maximally prepared should you fall ill. These effects may even bear on vaccination. Flu shots appear to be more effective among people who have slept well in the days preceding getting one.

All of this leads back to the basic question: Is one of the most glaring omissions in public-health guidelines right now simply to tell people to get more sleep?

The only health advice more banal than being told to wash your hands is being told to sleep more. But it’s a cliché for a reason. Sleep fortifies and prepares us for any given crisis, but especially when the days are short and cold, and people have little else they might do to empower and protect themselves. Monotonous days can slip people into depression, alcohol abuse, and all manner of suboptimal health. It may well turn out that standard pandemic advice should be to wear a mask, keep distances, and get sleep.

That’s easier said than done. Asim Shah, a psychiatry and behavioral-sciences professor at Baylor College of Medicine, believes sleep is at the core of many of the mental-health issues that have spiked over the course of the year. “There’s a complete lack of structure. That has caused a huge disturbance in the sleep cycles,” he says. “Usually everyone has a schedule. They get sunlight and they generate melatonin and it puts them to sleep. Right now we’re seeing people losing interest in things, isolating, not exercising, and then not getting sleep.” Depression and anxiety make insomnia worse, and the cycle degenerates.

This may be where melatonin—or other approaches to enhancing the potent effects of sleep—could be consequential. Russel Reiter, a cell-biology professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, is convinced that widespread treatment of COVID-19 with melatonin should already be standard practice. In May, Reiter and colleagues published a plea for melatonin to be immediately given to everyone with COVID-19.

If the world of melatonin research had a molten core, it would be Reiter. He has been studying the hormone’s potential health benefits since the 1960s, and tells me he takes 70 milligrams daily. (Most bottles at the pharmacy recommend from 1 to 10 milligrams.) After we spoke, he sent me some of the many journal articles he has published on melatonin and COVID-19, at least four of which appeared in Melatonin Research. He blithely referred to them as “propaganda” and noted that he has been studying melatonin since before I was born (without asking when that was). “I know melatonin sideways and backwards,” Reiter said, “and I’m very confident recommending it.”  

The majority of sleep scientists, though, seem to agree that the most crucial interventions that facilitate sleep will not be medicinal, or even supplemental. The general recommendation is that getting your body’s melatonin cycles to work regularly is preferable to simply taking a supplement and continuing to binge Netflix and stare at your phone in bed. Now that so many people’s days lack structure, Shah believes a key to healthy pandemic sleep is to deliberately build routines. On weekends, wake up and go to bed at the same time as you do other days. Take scheduled walks. Get sunlight early in the day. Reduce blue light for an hour before bed. Stay connected with other people in meaningful ways, despite being physically distant.

Even small daily rituals can help, says Tricia Hersey, the founder of a nap-advocacy organization called the Nap Ministry. Light a candle. Have a cup of tea in a specific place at a certain time. “Repetitive rituals are part of what makes us human and ground ourselves,” she told me. They’re also perhaps the most attainable intervention there is. Wherever you are, Hersey says, “you can daydream. You can slow down. You can find small ways to stop and remember who you are.”

To her, feeling in control over sleep is important precisely because order is lacking in so many other parts of life for so many people. Year over year, there are significant sleep disparities across the U.S. population. The amount and quality of sleep we get depend on our environment as much as, if not more than, our personal behavior. Socioeconomic status and quality sleep chart on parallel lines. The most effective way to improve sleep is to ensure that people have a calm and quiet place to rest each night, free of concerns about basic needs such as food security. The pandemic has brought the opposite assurances, exacerbating the uncertainties at the root of already-stark disparities.

As the quest for sleep falls only more to individuals, many are left to think outside the box. That has included, for some, dabbling in hypnosis. Not the kind of hypnosis where you’re onstage and told to act like a chicken, but a process slightly more refined. Christopher Fitton is one of a number of hypnotherapists who have spent the pandemic creating YouTube videos and podcasts meant to help put people to sleep. Fitton’s sessions involve 30 minutes of him saying empowering things to listeners in his pleasant, semi-whispered voice. He tells me he is now getting more than 1 million listens a month.

Hypnotherapy is meant to slow down the rapid firing of our nerves. Similar to guided meditation or deep breathing, the intent is to stop people from overthinking and allow sleep to happen naturally. As you listen to Fitton saying banal things about the muscles in your back or asking you to envision a specific tree in a specific place, “the aim is to get into a relaxed, trancelike state, where your subconscious is open to more suggestion,” he says. Then, when he tells you to sleep, your brain is less likely to argue with him about how you’re too busy, or how you need to worry more about why someone read your text message but didn’t reply.

Hypnotherapists such as Fitton provide tools to ground yourself, ultimately in pursuit of being able to do it unassisted, sans the internet. (It’s better not to bring your phone into your bedroom anyway.) Focusing involves practice; the trancelike state rarely happens easily, and no single way works for everyone. Some experimentation is usually needed. Apparently it still is for me. While listening to one of Fitton’s recordings, I couldn’t fully escape the image of him in his home office speaking softly into his microphone, reading an ad for Spotify, just as alone as everyone else.

But regardless of whom you trust to help relieve you of consciousness, now seems like an ideal time to get serious about the practice. Draw boundaries for yourself, and sleep like your life depends on it. Hopefully it won’t.

(Source: The Atlantic)

Writer retreats to a Kabul that lives only in his memories and books

 FOUR large clocks tick out of sync, puncturing the silence of his Soviet-built apartment. A half-burned candle sits next to a stack of books. A small television is covered in soot.

This is where Rahnaward Zaryab, Afghanistan’s most celebrated novelist, locks himself up for weeks at a time, lost in bottles of smuggled vodka and old memories of Kabul, a capital city long transformed by war and money.

“We live in a vacuum, lacking heroes and ideals,” Mr. Zaryab reads from his latest manuscript, handwritten on the back of used paper. The smoke from his Pine cigarette, a harsh South Korean brand, clings to yellowed walls. “The heroes lie in dust, the ideals are ridiculed.”

The product of a rare period of peace and tolerance in Afghan history, Mr. Zaryab’s work first flourished in the 1970s, before the country was unraveled by invasion and civil war. Afghanistan still had a vibrant music and theater scene, and writers had a broad readership that stretched beyond just the political elite.

“Art, culture and literature have been forgotten completely,” said Rahnaward Zaryab. Credit... Bryan Denton for The New York Times

“I would receive letters from girls that would smell of perfume when you opened them,” Mr. Zaryab, who is 70, remembered fondly.

Mr. Zaryab’s stories are informed by his readings of Western philosophy and literature, the writer Homaira Qaderi said. He was educated on scholarships in New Zealand and Britain. But his heroes are indigenous and modest, delicately questioning the dogma and superstitions of a conservative society.

“He is the first writer to focus on the structure of stories, with the eye of someone well read,” Ms. Qaderi said. “We call him the father of new storytelling in Afghanistan.”

But after he became the standard-bearer for Afghan literature, Mr. Zaryab was forced to watch as Kabul, the muse he idealized as a city of music and chivalry in most of his 17 books, fell into rubble and chaos.

Some of the chaos has eased over the past decade, but that has caused him even more pain. He loathes how Kabul has been rebuilt: on a foundation of American cash and foreign values, paving over Afghan culture.

“Money, money, money,” he said, cringing. “Everyone is urged to make money, in any way they can. Art, culture and literature have been forgotten completely.”

FOR some Afghans, though, there is tragedy in the fact that one of their most renowned and enduring writers has largely withdrawn into his own memories, unable or unwilling to visualize a new identity amid a confusing and traumatic time for his country.

“Zaryab is enchanted by the past that to him is a symbol of the ideal life,” the critic and poet Mujib Mehrdad said. “He can’t disconnect from that past, he lives in the past.”

For his part, Mr. Zaryab insists that he is still looking at the problems of the day, though at times his allegories go unrecognized.

In one of his latest novels, a pompous gallant from Kabul’s old city in the early 1900s gives up his mundane routine after a chance meeting with a wise bird who introduces him to the philosophy of Socrates. He is thrown into meditation and soul-searching.

Mr. Zaryab says the bird is a symbol of the enlightenment push here in the early 20th century, and in the book, it is ceaselessly hounded by the city’s rulers and clergy — a clear and continuing theme in modern Afghanistan as well.

“Unfortunately, no one understood that part,” he said. “They thought it was an imaginative fantasy.”

For someone who reveled in his early fame, and whose international peers became global voices, translated across languages, the disconnect from an audience has not been easy.

Mr. Zaryab still enjoys minor celebrity status in public, and it once inspired him to try to reconnect to fans through a Facebook page. But he soon considered it a waste of time: Their interest was superficial, he felt; they were not after a deeper understanding of his work.

“In reality, I write for myself,” he said. “There is something inside that needs to come out, otherwise it bothers me. Not important whom I write it for.”

Born in the Rika Khana neighborhood of old Kabul in August 1944, Mr. Zaryab was one of three children. Neither his mother nor his father, a china trader, could read. A large age gap between him and his siblings meant that he grew up mostly a lone child.

After graduating from Kabul University with a degree in journalism, he went to Wales for postgraduate studies. His first job after his return was as a crime reporter for Zhwandoon Magazine, one of the prominent publications at the time. He sought the job because the details of the crime scene gave him inspirations for his stories, Mr. Zaryab said.

He continued to work as a reporter and editor for newspapers and magazines, as well as taking senior positions in the Culture Ministry, even after his fiction found acclaim.

Mr. Zaryab at his home in Kabul, where he shuts himself in for weeks at a time. Credit... Bryan Denton for The New York Times

When the civil war intensified in Kabul in the 1990s, Mr. Zaryab was briefly exiled to France; his wife and three daughters remain in Europe, not wanting to return to the violence and uncertainty of Afghanistan. After the Taliban were toppled, he returned to his old apartment in Kabul with more than 650 pounds of books and about $22 in his pocket, he said.

The city of his youth, of his stories, however, no longer existed. “I have this attachment to this place, I don’t know why,” he said. “I know there is poverty here, lies, hypocrisy, but still my heart is here.”

LITTLE of a readership culture remains these days, even in Kabul. Bookshops are saturated with bootleg copies of Iranian books. Local authors make no money from publishing their work. In return for a manuscript, Mr. Zaryab gets a number of copies from the publisher to distribute to friends.

Consider his latest work, “Qalandar Nama,” a collection of minimalist vignettes that he submitted in return for 150 free copies. The book has sold only 100 copies in the three months since its publishing, said the publisher, Wasim Amiri. In contrast, Mr. Amiri picks off the shelf a slim collection of poems by Fazel Nazari, a young poet from neighboring Iran. In its 32nd reprint over five years, the book has sold more than 80,000 copies.

Since Mr. Zaryab’s return, his daily routine has been simple, much of it spent reading and writing in his sixth-floor apartment. In the mornings, he goes for a walk around the block. If the air is too polluted already, he does yoga at home.

In the afternoons, a driver picks him up for his part-time job: For two hours a day, he edits news for Tolo TV, the country’s largest private channel. When he disconnects from the world during his weeks of solitude, his employer understands.

Mr. Zaryab’s desire for solitude has roots in his childhood. He fondly remembers walking alone along the Kabul River. “It had beautiful, clear water at the time,” he said. “Fishermen would fish with nets, not hooks. I would spend all my day along this river.” Not only has the river changed, he lamented, but also the city’s people. In a shrine on the same river, a mob recently accused a young woman of blasphemy and beat her to death in daylight. They dragged her body to the riverbed, now filled with trash, and set her on fire.

“In old Kabul’s Rika Khana, one shopkeeper had said something rude to a little girl once. Without a collective decision, the residents stopped buying from that shop and he was forced to move,” he said. “Do we have such people anymore? Today, they kill a girl and then burn her.

“How could I not be attached to the past?”

(Source: NYT)

‘It will take more than a lifetime to clear the Himalayas of all trash’

 Since 2016, Pradeep Sangwan has been picking up the garbage you left behind in the hills of Himachal

Mountain tourism makes up around 15 to 20 percent of the global tourism industry. Mountains directly support 12 percent of the world population, most of which is in developing countries. Mountains provide 60 to 80 percent of the world’s freshwater. 

Why then do we do what we do to our mountains? Why do we leave tons of trash every season? Do we realise the enormity of the waste management problem up in the hills? Pradeep Sangwan did and set up Healing Himalayas, a foundation that’s dedicated to purging our mountains of all plastic and garbage by promoting purposeful travel.

Pradeed Sangwan at a clean-up drive in Malana village, Himachal Pradesh.

“Come on everyone, help me sort it out,” Sangwan recently said through his social media. It’s not enough so far. Seems to me this lifetime isn’t enough, but if we are in it together, I see the light at the end of the tunnel,” said the eco-warrior as he sent out a picture of him sitting amid a pile of trash.

On a much less optimistic note than his Instagram post, he tells Condé Nast Traveller, “It will take a lifetime to clear the Himalayas of all the trash. In fact, it would be quite an achievement to be able to accomplish this in a lifetime.”

This photograph was taken in Malana village in Himachal Pradesh, famous for the high-quality marijuana that’s grown here and, according to Sangwan, one of the filthiest villages in the hills. Stay away from garbage, and let the trash be where it is—that’s the kind of education and mentality that people here have, he says. And we can’t blame them entirely either. The nearest recycling unit is four hours away in Manali.

The photo of Pradeep Sangwan at Malana village that went viral.

Since founding Healing Himalayas in 2016, Sangwan and various volunteers have collected over 800 tonnes of waste from the mountains of Himachal Pradesh—around seven times the weight of a blue whale or eight times the weight of a Boeing C 32-A military aircraft. That’s four to five pickup trucks-full of filth every month—1,400kg of plastic waste along treks and 2,200kg from biodiversity parks around Shimla and Manali.

Sangwan’s academic background in Arts doesn’t back what he does today. Born and raised in Haryana and a graduate from Chandigarh, he’s been an avid traveller since his college days. It was a chance encounter with a shepherd on a trek up to Spiti that pushed him to dedicate his life to the mountains and lead as sustainable a lifestyle as possible. Today, he’s instrumental in organising cleanliness drives in the remotest villages of Himachal Pradesh spreading awareness about the need for waste segregation, partnering with ragpickers, local panchayats and forest departments to set up and operate waste collection centres and encouraging so many others to join his cause.

Clearing trash on a trek to Kheerganga up Parvati Valley.

Healing Himalayas releases its calendar of treks and campaigns early in January, inviting volunteers. The foundation operates primarily in Parvati Valley in Kullu district as well in the biodiversity parks around Shimla and Manali.

There’s hope

Non-biodegradables like PET bottles, glass waste and the debris of chips and packets of other snacks all return to a location after Sangwan and his team clear it. However, he firmly believes that there’s been a change in the past four years. “While it doesn’t sustain, the amount of garbage reduces. If there were 100 bottles earlier, the number drops to 60 to 70,” he says.

“There’s no rocket science formula to tackling India’s solid waste management problem, but there are louder voices today about responsible travel. Fearing lower tourist footfall, local communities earlier stayed silent about littering, but that’s seeing a gradual change, too.”

A massive pile of garbage in Malana village, Himachal Pradesh

The way forward

Thanks to the influence of social media, everyone wants to be a traveller today, but few want to travel with a purpose, Sangwan says, though no one party can be blamed for the state of the Himalayas. “Local communities and tourists have a 50-50 responsibility towards safeguarding the environment. Travellers have to respect the ecology of a place, and those earning from them are equally accountable for taking care of the destination,” he adds.

Pradeep Sangwan with bags of non-biodegradable waste collected in Spiti, Himachal Pradesh.

Lack of infrastructure and manpower in the local administration are major constraints in the  waste management system up in the secluded parts of the hills. The need for small-scale waste collection centres here needs the same push that the establishment of a school, temple or clinic would, Sangwan says. Healing Himalayas is in the process of setting up such waste collection centres in various districts of Himachal Pradesh. It aims to have at least 10 of these operational by 2022.

Coming up with and implementing small-scale solutions is the first priority for the foundation. It conducts door-to-door campaigns to make people aware of the need for waste segregation and use of plastic alternatives, involves ragpickers in the collection of recyclable waste and helps provide villages with the infrastructure required to dispose non-biodegradable material. Sangwan and team also try to bridge the gap between local communities and administrations (forest and tourism departments and panchayats) to get them all involved in making their own land the pristine expanse it once was.

(Source: CN Traveller)

This Tamil Nadu artist turns drab doors into colourful and memorable ones

 KR Santhana Krishnan’s doors adorn the homes of several popular personalities, including Kamal Haasan, Pa Ranjith, Kanimozhi and J Jayalalithaa.

Artist KR Santhana Krishnan — better known as “Doors” Santhanam — will tell you that his ancestral house in Edappadi, a town in Salem district of Tamil Nadu, had 82 doors. But that was not why the 43-year-old artist picked up his brush and began illustrating a doorway for the very first time in the late 90s. When Santhanam began first, about 20 years ago, it was by chance; an innovative idea he thought of while pursuing his Bachelors in Fine Arts at Kumbakonam. Now, two decades later, he is still on the same relentless pursuit of painting doors, which may have crossed 1,000 in number by now. “Not to boast, but I don’t have any of the doors I have painted with me right now. They have all been bought by patrons,” he tells TNM.

Up until 2004, Santhanam was painting doors, trying to capture all of its facets but a specific incident from that year changed his outlook. “I got a call from the gallery where some of my paintings were displayed. Someone wanted to meet me,” he recounts.

From this encounter, Santhanama gained an important perspective, he shares. “The person had come from the United States along with his children and had chanced upon my painting that was exhibited in the Vinyasa Gallery at the Music Academy. He was stunned to see that it was his ancestral house from Kumbakonam and was curious to know about the painter,” Santhanam explains.

“But even while I was standing there, he began pouring his memories to his children. It was a trip down memory lane and that was when it struck me that my paintings were not just works of art but they contained stories. It brought out the nostalgia in the viewer,” he adds.

But from being just figurative models that captured architectural details, Santhanam’s doors went on to take a deeper meaning.

Of the many comments that Santhanam has received from his patrons —  most of who are living outside the country — the most endearing to him are when he was told that they are conversation starters. Buyers attach a deep sense of nostalgia with Santhanam’s doors that end up becoming not just a piece of meaningful art but personal art for its viewer.

“I have painted doors from across the country. “In those days, people had the habit of keeping doors open, unlike how it is in the cities. You can see how the house breathed in air through these doors and the open mitham (a courtyard of sorts) and how it exhaled through the backyard that usually had the garden. It is a beautiful concept,” he shares.

“Ideally, the format of the doors are the same. I add some details to it with door numbers, geographical location markers like corporation markers, etc. But I make sure there is always a good pop of colour. You can find it in the way I dress. I love colours and would always like to keep everything I am associated with very colourful,” he adds.

From starting to illustrate simple doors in watercolours, Santhanam has constantly been reinventing his style within the constraints of the door. In one minimalistic bright-yellow door peeks a flower-patterned zari set against purple in a typical Kancheepuram weave, with a pop of blue in the heavy-looking lock that hangs below.  Then there is a leaf-green door set against a deep-red wall with fading traces of Rajput painting on its transom. One can also find film posters on the walls. From canvas and mixed media in wood three-dimension to Thanjavur style relief painting, there are life-size doors and the world they open up are limitless.

Santhanam’s doors adorn several popular personalities’ homes. From actor-politician Kamal Haasan, director Pa Ranjith to politicians like Kanimozhi and former Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa. Kamal Haasan, in fact, once said, who once told him, “Everyone needs a door, don’t they?”.

When asked if his door adorns the house of another popular figure from Edappadi, Santhanam adds with a chuckle, “No, but I know him (Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami) quite well. I have ridden with him on his Bullet when I was a young boy. 

Back then, he used to sport a moustache just like Singam Suriya.”

The artist, who recently moved to Kumbakonam, has built a stunning homestay with the doors as their theme, which also doubles as an artist residency. “I have been very dedicated to this idea,” he tells TNM.

Twenty years on, Santhanam is never tired of painting doors. “People have made fun of me, asking if I ever get bored with doors. I’ve never been bored,” he says.

He recounts the moment when Telangana-based artist Thota Vaikuntam came up to him during one of his shows and gave him a word of advice. “He said: ‘You are a beautiful artist. Everyone would want to confuse you. Take me for example. They keep asking why I keep drawing a woman’s face. But keep doing what you’re doing, unless you yourself are bored of it’.”

Santhanam remembers those words and adds, “I’ve never grown tired of it.”

(Source: TNM)

Manmade objects now weigh more than all living things on Earth

 Humans churn out about 30 gigatons (30,000,000,000 tons) of material every year.

• The study compared estimates of the planet's total biomass (the mass of all living things) with anthropogenic mass, which includes all human-made materials.
• Every year, humans are bringing materials into the world at a higher rate.
• Concrete is the single biggest contributor to anthropogenic mass and it's a major source of greenhouse-gas emissions, suggesting that finding more sustainable alternatives could help curb climate change.

What's the weight of all human-made stuff—products, infrastructure, buildings—created each week? According to a new study published in Nature, the answer is roughly equivalent to the body weight of all people on Earth.

The study marks 2020 as a tipping point: This year, human-made mass (or anthropogenic mass) will exceed the planet's total biomass, which is the mass of all living things. Currently, humans are churning out about 30 gigatons (30,000,000,000 tons) of material a year, and for decades that rate has been growing at a fast clip.

Landfill Credit: aryfahmed via Adobe Stock

In 1900, for example, anthropogenic mass was just 3 percent of biomass. But every 20 years since, that ratio has at least doubled, gaining pace in more recent decades as industries have been using more geological materials like metals, minerals and rocks.

To measure anthropogenic mass and biomass, the researchers combined previous estimates generated through computer modeling, field surveys and stock-flow modeling, an approach commonly used in macroeconomics research.

It's hard to determine precise figures; imagine trying to weigh all the cars, trees, whales, butterflies, and bacteria across the planet. Making matters more complicated are water and waste.

The researchers didn't include waste in anthropogenic mass estimates, nor did they include water in biomass estimates. 

Without waste and water included in estimates, anthropogenic mass probably won't exceed biomass for another two decades.

These ballpark estimates highlight humanity's heavy-handed impact on the planet. Our influence is so great that some scientists think we've entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene

In 2000, the atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen proposed that human activity has ushered us into a new geological epoch.

An epoch is a subdivision of geologic timescale. These broad categories help scientists think about changes on Earth over long periods of time. Currently, Earth is considered to be in the:

• Cenozoic Era — 66 million years ago
• Quaternary Period — 2.6 million years ago
• Holocene Epoch — 11,650 years ago

The Holocene Epoch began at about the time when the planet was warming, glaciers were melting, and humans were beginning the agricultural revolution. Scientists like Crutzen argue that it's worth distinguishing the Holocene from our present human-driven epoch, the Anthropocene. (Anthro meaning "human", cene meaning "new".)

Proponents of the concept note that human activity has caused marked changes and damage to the planet, including the sixth mass extinction, the pollution of oceans and the atmosphere, and large-scale changes to the planet's terrain through agriculture, dwellings and industry, which currently cover 70 percent of land.

Not all scientists agree with the idea, and it hasn't been officially accepted by the geological community. These critics generally argue that while humans have left a mark on the planet, it's not significant or observable enough to warrant the creation of a new epoch. And some take issue with the political motivations that may underlie the concept.

"The proliferation of this concept can mainly be traced back to the fact that, under the guise of scientific neutrality, it conveys a message of almost unparalleled moral-political urgency," wrote the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk.

Still, the researchers behind the recent study said the findings give "a mass-based quantitative and symbolic characterization of the human-induced epoch of the Anthropocene."

Concrete

But never mind the Anthropocene or Holocene debate: It's clear that humans are producing a ton of stuff, and that stuff eventually becomes waste. So, what are policymakers and scientists supposed to do with this information?

The recent findings don't necessarily hold an answer, but they do highlight the single largest contributor to total human-made stuff: concrete. It's the most widely used material on Earth, and also one of the main culprits in emissions of greenhouse gas.

A 2020 study published in Nature found that, in terms of total emissions contributions, concrete production is responsible for "7.8% of nitrogen oxide emissions, 4.8% of sulfur oxide emissions, 5.2% of particulate matter emissions smaller than 10 microns and 6.4% of particulate emissions smaller than 2.5 microns."

"If we invented concrete today, nobody would think it was a good idea," said architectural engineer and panel member Michael Ramage, an architectural engineer and member of Architecture of Emergency, at a 2019 summit. "We've got this liquid and you need special trucks, and it takes two weeks to get hard. And it doesn't even work if you don't put steel in it."

In 2018, the Global Cement and Concrete Association issued six Sustainability Guidelines to encourage better practices for the 30 percent of the cement and concrete production companies it represents. Still, it's unclear the extent to which the industry could make itself more sustainable.

One sustainable alternative building material to concrete is cross-laminated timber, which is as strong as concrete, but is able to store carbon, which could help lower the carbon footprint of buildings.

(Source: Big Think)