Like most other days when I pick a website to perform my usual daily vivisection at work, I picked TIME one day. Realisation #1, TIME is part of CNN. Realisation #2, the website is like a cave, you keep digging and digging and you wont be surprised by the stories you find, its literally a detailed TIMEline, they do a great job of making a soft copy of every issue that comes out. Ok, so I ended up on the TIME website by chance and I started going through their hoards and hoards of pictures of the week. Then I ended up on the page that shows all the cover pages that ever came out, they have this drop-down where I could select "india", the idea was to see what about India caught the world's attention over the years - the answer is a lot of politics, the whole rise and fall of the nehru lineage and in the recent times, the outsourcing saga.
I read a bunch of the interesting cover stories from the early 21st century and late 20th, and I should say the articles are totally food-for-thought. Things I remember on the top of my head,
* how women are choosing careers over babies
- how they do it (go till 40 and become very satisfied and successful and miss the idea of a family in the meantime)
- why they do it (call it a resurgence from the women oppression days, each have their own reasons, but mostly because the world is a cruel place and coming back after a 3-5 year break to work to start where you stopped just doesnt happen)
- when they regret it (when you reach 40 and realise that you are mostly either infertile or all the eggs you produce have too many defects)
- what they resort to (thanks to technology(?), in vitro fertilisation of course, artificial insemination, not only is the reproductive bio-clock ticking, but there is just no time to search for a man and fall in love with him, so we end up spending time with profiles of pictures looking for the right hair colour, profession, eye colour etc)
* how teen girls these days reach sexual maturity faster
- in america ofcourse all genetic transitions are first blamed on obesity. which is silly because i know this is happening not just in america but in india too.
- there is the 'how much harm environment can do'. This ofcourse no one can ever prove.
- then there is pesticides or non-organic non-natural food/crop
* how women got picker as far marrying a guy is concerned
- with power and independence comes the excuse to not compromise
- men in their 20s are just not ready, so if you do end up lingering around one, then you get him
- successful men in their 30s are already taken, because someone lingered for that long or the news about his awesomeness didn't get to 'me'
- the being-single-is-miserable taboo is fading fast. single mothers can have a great social life with a superb support system in the form of friends, relatives, colleagues, and family
- then there is the possibility of being a 'single mother' without a father-face at all (remember, in vitro)
* the power of yoga
- How yoga in the world of exercise today is the BSB/N-sync of the 90's, everybody loved it without knowing why. I love yoga too, because it keeps my body flexible, because I can not bend my knees and lay my palms flat on the ground by bending. Heck, I could possibly put my feet behind my head (reminds me of FRIENDS)
about India
*glorifying and doting on Gandhi, there is absolutely no dearth for that in any country's media. I have a love/hate relationship with anything Gandhian.
*Indira's blue star and the details of how she was killed. How Rajiv came into power and how he dealt with all the looming speculations about the start of a war from our beloved neighbour, Pakistan and US helping them with arms.
and other stories
*Congo's deaths out of malnutrition
*Brazil's newly found fuel sources (and lots of national confidence), Casas Bahia and other private organisations whose business plans are internationally acclaimed, brazil's economic uprise.
*America's high drop-out problem. America's bio-terrorism with anthrax. America's that and America's this.
I could really go on...
Posts
