What is this man carrying on his head? Excessorexia!

A York University study found that one in every five persons in Britain has an obsession with wanting more than he already has—a complex that is called "excessorexia." The study says that due to a general increase in national wealth, images of flawless faces and perfect bodies, and the promotion of stylish homes, expensive cars and fashionable clothes as must-have accessories, an increasing number of people feel that they simply don’t come up to society’s high standards and fall prey to this illness, says Aruti Nayar.

Let us hear it....
Straight from the heart
by A.J. Singh
CAN you and your life-mate reveal to each other who you really are? Can you talk about your strengths and weaknesses, hopes and fears, successes and failures?

For them the pastures were grey, not greener
by Cookie Maini
I find that every visit abroad leads to a resurgence in my patriotism, as I brace myself to face the tirades of the NRIs against the mother country. They condemn the rotten infrastructure, the declining values, the manipulative tendencies of the people, they feel they cannot accept anything back home at face value.

Keeping Protima’s dream alive
by Priya Pandey
WHEN one-time Bollywood actress-turned-dance teacher, Protima Gauri Bedi perished in an avalanche on the way to Mansarovar Lake in 1996, many took it also to be the death of Nrityagram — the dance village she had nurtured almost single-handedly at Hessaragatta, near Bangalore.

Musings on immortality
by Sansar Chandra
MY esteemed mother, although a semi-literate middle class woman had a knack of using proverbs in her routine conversation, as best as she could. A veritable store house of these proverbs, she would extract them at will and exploit them to authenticate her point of view. One of her most pet aphorisms of which she took advantage, of, more often, was — Maran mool te jeevan labh, which meant: Death is the reality and life is only a profit.

Creatures of leisure
Of maharajas’ idiosyncrasies
by Abhay Desai
It is more than a month since Nepal woke up to the carnage in Kathmandu. Even in neighbouring India, which is accustomed to the whims and madness of maharajas over centuries, the tragedy is still unbelievable. For a 29-year-old crown prince to gun down his family is nothing short of horrifying.

BRIDGE: Scope for subtlety
by Omar Sharif

DREAM THEME: Dreaming of the rain
by Vinaya Katoch Manhas