I’ve taken an enormous liking to a browser called Maven for iOS. It isn’t new but it’s just gotten an update and lots of new features.
The one I’m most delighted with, given my eyesight problems, is the ability to increase text size on any web page. You can normally not do this on a Google search results page, for example, all you have to do is tap on a settings option to enable a text increase a mini toolbar and then use it with any web page. If that doesn’t do it for you, touch the Reader button and the page will go into Readability mode from where you can apply some of Readability’s usual options of text size, alignment and dark, light or sepia background.
But there are other things that are unique and exclusive to this browser. One of them is a beautifully-designed track-pad. it stays out of the way at the bottom of the screen and yet it’s always just within reach. It has a little red button that you can pull gently to scroll the page up and down, and sideways. For continuous scrolling while you read you can just keep it pulked downwards slightly. You can disable and re–enable the track-pad with a touch.
There are two jog dials tucked into little notches on the right side of the screen — and you’ve got to admit that’s not something you see everyday in a browser. One of these lets you adjust brightness on the fly. You know, for when you’re browsing in a dark corner? Or out in the hot sun because you’re a bit crazy.
The second jog dial lets you flip through your bookmarks, rather prettily, actually. This is so you don’t have to trouble yourself to go to a bookmarks pull-down menu. Nice innovative touches that would be quite in other apps too.
We’re not done with Maven’s features yet. You can go private with your browsing, you can share stuff — no surprises there — and you have a download and a password manager. If you feel up to an in-app purchase of $0.99 to add to the app’s $1.99, you activate an ad-blocker.
And we’re still not done. There are two big features still to go. If you’re a multi-tasker, you can split the screen into two. You can watch a video and look up something on a website at the time. What fun. And there’s costomisable gestures. So… You could condigure the track pad to bring up the text-sizer on a double-tap, for example. I haven’t figured out all of the customizations yet.
All the web pages you look at become a train of thumbnails at the bottom of your screen. You can put them, and a few controls and settings also in the same area, out of sight.
Innovative browser, all in all, and I’ve abandoned Dolphin for it. Well, who told Dolphin to crash every few minutes, on both the iPad 2 and the new iPad.

Back when I started buying and reviewing dance DVDs, there weren’t quite that many of them. I remember so many were “no-frills” productions made at home with one or two being barely visible. At that time, it was easy to tell one good DVD that stood apart from the others.

But this has now all changed. Thinking aloud, I’d like to invite opinions on how to rethink ratings. It isn’t possible to go back and change them on Amazon, and here, on this blog, I’ve mischievously avoided them. I believe that everyone who’s accustomed to reading what I write has a pretty good idea of what I’m saying between the lines. But for a while I’ve been feeling it isn’t fair to new readers at all. Or maybe to anyone. So what can one do now to make the ratings more indicative of a video’s quality? Here are some of the complicating factors:

There are more DVDs

Some of the producers who ruled the landscape seem to have faded into the background. But World Dance, Hollywood, CheekyGirls and many dancers individually have been bringing out more DVDs than they did a few years ago. That changes the equation. There’s more to compare against.

Quality has improved

DVDs now are slickly made, or if not, are so carefully targeted at the exact niche that wants them, that they have a different benchmark of value. This is perhaps the biggest problem – if I can use that word here – in rating. I look at a new DVD, well made, lovely sound, nice camera work, good material, and I look at an older one that’s nowhere near as good, but that was wonderful at that time. How does one give them both the same rating without confusing buyers who may see both available?

Producers have set new bars

Video producers change the game by doing things like giving a four-disk set for the price of one. Or two. By giving you hours of content on one disk. By giving you exactly what you want because they listen to potential customers. And then, when they fail to meet thei

r own new standards, they stand to get lower ratings. Is a Tribaret or Tribal Revival as worthy of a top rating as Rachel Brice’s Serpentine? Is Crash Course in Belly Dance as deserving as Killer Ziller?

There are other variables, of course, such as how well a dancer performs off the DVD. Presentation style vs content.  Whether a DVD is meeting the expectations its marketing hype created, etc.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on rating dance videos.

Orphaned at the age of five, Sir James Monmouth was sent away to Africa where he was brought up by a “Guardian.” For most of his life he traveled, following in the footsteps of his childhood hero, Conrad Vane. Now he is back in England where he wants to settle down, find out more about Vane, and write a book. But what happened was very different…

Wherever he turned, Monmouth got veiled warnings. People took one look at him and told him to go back – wherever. But this only made him more determined to find out more about his hero, Vane. Strange hints about the explorer being evil incarnate half-surfaced. So did connections between his family and Vane. As he tried to discover the story of Vane, Monmouth found he was being followed by ghosts and strange happenings. When the trail led to his childhood home and the one surviving relative, evil was altogether upon him.

But I won’t tell you what happened. Unfortunately, neither will the book. Susan Hill’s The Mist in the Mirror is thick with old, old ghost story atmosphere – just like The Woman in Black. It’s fantastic if you want to be pleasantly spooked out. It’s richly descriptive and not easy to put down as you are drawn in deeply into an England where chilly rain and chilling ghosts wrapped everything in folds of mystery.

By the time the book ends, you have to shake yourself to dispel the mists of this story. Now if only there was a story… but everything hangs in unexplained tendrils, rushing against you like cobwebs…

Okay, I’m getting carried away. The thing is there are all manner of loose ends, though I must say there’s something nice about that. I so enjoyed the atmosphere I didn’t care that everything wasn’t explained finally, in black and white. Let it stay the color of old cobwebs, I say. Great book.

So I got to thinking why it was that it was such a task, larger than itself, inside of my head. I realized, somewhere along the dance learning journey, that the restrictions, structures and expectations are all self-made. There will be as many kinds of practice formats as there are dancers. I have a faint recollection of someone from the bellydance video group putting up a detailed format for a practice session. But I never used it. Your dance session has got to be yours alone, even if you pick up tips from someone else.

Picking a video

Obviously you have to select a DVD that takes you to the next linear step in your learning. If you’ve focused on the basic shimmy, naturally you may now want to take up drills for the other frequently-used shimmies. But your practice plan should also take into account what you want to do, and how you’re feeling right at that time. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t.

A couple of years ago I created a beautiful impressive spreadsheet with a foolproof plan for practicing. It was all balanced and logical. No dancer can afford to just give up on islations and drills – so there was a good measure of that. Nor can you set aside the overall dance conditioning which happens in some of the long warm ups we have. On the other hand, some of these sessions can be so huge, you don’t even get to the combinations and choreographies. And then, what happens to all the icing-on-the-cake stuff, like pretty arm moves, pauses, poses, accents, etc?

So, my spreadsheet had a good percentage of everything I wanted. I admired my spreadsheet. So did everyone else. Even my boss saw it and was awfully impressed, convinced I had an orderly project-oriented mind.

It never worked. I don’t know where that Excel sheet is now.

What I had not factored in at all is the stuff I want to do. And that can change from day to day. No matter how brilliant my plan, it can get completely thrown if I don’t factor in new DVDs. It kills me to get a juicy new DVD and put it away for someday later.

So, I realized that it’s important to let the videos pick themselves, at least sometimes. As ong as you roughly keep an eye on the big picture and don’t go off track with your overall learning plan, it’s best not to over-structure and over-think. Of course, there are also people who respond very well indeed to tight structure. Think about the kind of learner you are and work with that, not against.

My plan included a perfect mix of everything – An x amount of tribal isolations, dance conditioning, a combination or two from a new video, an ongoing choreography…. All of that had to be in addition to hardcore exercise like yoga and pilates and cardio and sculpting. It soon became more hard work than fun. I often found I had fallen into a gap and couldn’t stick to the plan because the plan didn’t take this into account. Or, I would have to go out somewhere and this would throw off my dance schedule so that I’d find myself doing dance conditioning more than I did any combinations. On top of that is the problem that you have to do some kind of warm up anyway – and can’t altogether neglect your basic exercise.

Too much to do

Even when I pick a video to work with, the video itself can have its own plan. My mind, in trying to be systematic and disciplined, would plan a linear attack on the DVD, starting from the beginning and not letting go until I had worked through to the end. Again, that doesn’t always work. It does beautifully for choreographies, but not for videos that include entire different segments.

Take Blanca’s Sensual Bellydance, for example. I have a personal attachment to that video because I had discussed it with Blanca before she conceptualized it, trying to butt in with my own ideas. In fact, the name was mine! The title actually triggered off a plan in her head and she said oh wow, and went into hibernation to work on it, turning out different from what I’d suggested but oh so much nicer. My involvement in a handful of videos all came from the fact that I wanted something that was not the basic isolations and yet not a tough Egyptian choreography. I wanted what I thought of as “slow moves” at that time. But anyway, when her video arrived, I was frothing with excitement and dropped everything else to work on it. But I didn’t have the patience to go through the entire warm ups, movement flows, and so on. Against my better judgement, I went straight to the choreography and patiently began to work with it.

I think it took me a few weeks. I made myself obsessed with that choreography and let it take over my life. My practice was no longer restructured to the practice hour. I would sometimes just get up and go into one of the moves. A flourish or an S-curve turn… whatever. I learnt the choreography so well that I was then able to dabble with the flows as and when I felt like it.

When you have a big video on your hands, but you really really want to work with it, just dive into whatever part of it you’re comfortable with – and go.

Pick an old one

I also found that because of long gaps in practice forced in by the circumstances of life, I often had to start from scratch on many things. At such times, I think picking something I was already very familiar with really helped. For example, I need to “re-condition” right now, and am in some ways bored with Asharah’s video which I’ve worked with so many times. But it’s the one video that brings it all back and I often default to it. The workout has become second nature and instead of worrying about what comes next, how a movement is done, I just have to listen to the audio in the background and go ahead and dive into the workout.

The same is true of choreographies and combos. If you’re coming at it after a gap, try a round or two of a known and loved choreography and see if this helps you with a new one by recalling your choreo learning skills. And yes, that too is a skill.

I’m currently on the hunt for a new combinations or choreography DVD to work with and am taking too long to pick one. So, I’m going to pick up maybe Luscious and get it flowing while I continue to go through my collection to select something new.

Sticking to it

Each of us learns so very differently. I leant a lot about learning a choreography when I worked with Sahira’s Arabian Nights some seven years ago. I figured out that your pace of learning isn’t always consistent. In the beginning, I wanted to only dip my feet in, working with a few of the moves, rather than entire combinations. But then, having conquered that and got an idea of the style, I gathered momentum and the pace picked up. Pretty soon, I pushed everything but the basic warm up out and focused only on the choreography. I really stuck to it and somewhere at the back of my mind, like my dance had its own central nervous system or something, I was always practicing. The practice included putting that amazing piece of music into my iPod and listening to it nonstop. I soon knew the music well enough to anticipate the next note and accent – which really really helped. It’s this that got me out of the counting habit, in fact. I was doing it internally, sub-consciously. So, suspending all other formats for practice for that short time, really worked at that time.

What is your approach to your practice sessions? Do you plan? Do you find yourself fighting your own restrictions and structures? Or are you one of those people who can be perfectly happy with a watertight plan? I would love to hear about your experiences.

What you do is pick a background. There are a few preset backgrounds – and I rather like black because it makes the art work stand out and be “lit up”  — but you can choose your own color from the selector as well. Next, you choose a brush. There are 20 preset brushes, but again, you can create your own.

The type of brush is actually the same; just a swirly netted sort of pattern, and it’s the colors that vary. That’s sad because it would have been fantastic to have different lines and textures to truly complicate matters.

Once you have everything selected, all you have to do is move your finger around and watch the absolute magic unfold. The pressure you use makes a different to the look, as does the speed with which you brush. If you swipe and hold, you’ll find the pattern and lines take on a life of their own and you can then see why it’s called Flow. They fill up and the spectrum of colors unfolds, if the brush is made up of more than one color. You can get some hairy looking effects if you’re not careful and controlled and that part takes some practice.

Those who know how to draw should be able to do wonders with Flowpaper and I can see that some definitely do because there’s a Flickr group showing off users’ artworks. Oddly, the app itself doesn’t share with the Flickr group and only with Facebook and Twitter. Also email and your camera roll, of course.

So, there are lots of interesting things you can do with Flowpaper. You could use a photograph or another artwork as your background and then decorate it with swirls from Flowpaper The nice part is that some of the brushes give the feeling of light, so if the photo is on the dark side, it can look most interesting with the addition of interesting swipes and lines from Flowpaper You can easily put in a fireworks effect, for example. Or write something in lights. You can’t get an actual even flat light leak because the results in Flowpaper are in netted lines. I can tell you I’d have been thrilled if I could have used it to make my own light leaks… I really think light leaks bring magic to a photograph. In some of the Flowpaper drawings here I’ve used a light leak from another app – mostly LensFlare and Plastic Bullet. Sometimes the light leak throws light on the lines of the art work and makes it look quite mysterious and interesting.

You could also use Fowpaper to make interesting wallpapers for your iPad or iPhone. Well, for anywhere, as long as you export it to that device.

I took my iPad to an evening with friends of mine and they were quite rightly fed up of me constantly looking down to make more flowy drawings even though I insisted I was fully involved in the conversation. They’re threatening to invite the iPad next time and skip me. Ouch.

The right to free speech, both offline and online, has been mired in a tangle of issues for the past few weeks. No one needs reminding of the numerous instances they have focussed on — from the political to the religious to the nonsensical. But the question of the licence to say and do what you like online saw a recent resurfacing when Mr. Sibal raked it up, calling for some kind of regulation of content by the social networks because there was obnoxious and offensive material being churned out. And the latest in the saga of speech is Twitter’s new tweet censoring policy, which has outraged many.

There are obviously many positions on whether the social web should mean free speech. At one end of the spectrum are users who believe that the Internet is synonymous with free expression. But take pause for a bit and see if you think hardened criminals from within a prison taunting their victims on Facebook is acceptable. Consider whether you think pro-Nazi posts on the social networks (still found without much effort searching) should remain. And there’s worse, of course, but many netizens’ belief that the Internet will cleanse itself and automatically ignore or weed out the rot, may not be founded in practicality.

At the other end of the spectrum of free speech are those people who will react at the slightest imagined provocation. Just go up on the terrace and try shouting ‘I love Bombay’ a few times. Because the agenda is control. The already complex problem of what our rights should be on the Internet are further muddled by the different motives coming into the fray. Those who have a vested interest in gaining or retaining power are obviously uncomfortable with opinion becoming rampant online without their blessing. They would far prefer to manipulate it, not hesitating to use the same medium and social networks to push their own opinion.

But there are some things that the power mongers should realise. Online, they’re dealing with a more aware audience. People who have access to different ideas and influences, people who have really made the Internet what it is, and most importantly, people who have found their voice. Barging in to silence them will only mean they will find another way. Discontent may be expressed on the Internet; it isn’t born because of it. Trace it back deep enough and it comes from what is happening in everyday lives. Trample on people hard and long enough, and no Twitter censorship of tweets will prevent the repercussions; but only delay them.

As far as Twitter goes, in agreeing to hide tweets in countries where a request is made to do so, is only safeguarding and furthering its commercial interests.

That brings us to the other set of powers — the “sovereigns of the Internet”, as they’re sometimes called; the big companies that also want to control everything. The tussle, here too, is that companies often act without the buy-in of their users — users without whom they are nothing. It’s not unthinkable that there should be repercussions there too. How Twitter’s selective untweets will work, is not yet clear, but of course, workarounds are already being posted online.

On top of all this, we have allowed ourselves to live in an age of fear, where t turns out our speech is not half as free as we thought it was. This is because the threat of violence can always hold it to ransom. This is by no means a byproduct of the Internet, but a reality on the ground. Neither authorities nor netizens nor citizens have managed to do anything about this. And so, “hurt sentiments” can be called up any time to curtail freedom of expression. Your art is not my art. Your religion is not my religion. Your temple is not where I would go. New agendas, new misconceptions, new time-wasting reactions make a messy scenario worse. The world is not of one mind and no one agrees on what is right and what is wrong. How do we expect to decide it for the Internet? And the ever-present question: who is to decide it? But decide it we must, because just as we need some regulations to get along n society, we need some agreement on what goes on the internet.

Not the laws and rules rotting in government archives, but rules made by stakeholders who want to shape the Internet to be a shade better than ‘real life’ sometimes is. What those rules will be, I can’t say. As they say on Facebook, “It’s Complicated.”

mala@pobox.com, @malabhargava on Twitter
(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 13-02-2012)

Even though I’ve been reading books about Would War II since I was a teenager, Melting Point by Roger Collins was a shocker. For one thing. it was from an unusual perspective. Engineer Albert Stohl worked for a company that built and installed crematoriums at the factory of death, Auschwitz. It wasn’t easy, you see, to get rid of so many millions of bodies.

The machinery had to be built to do the job on a scale never imagined before. It took many iterations to get it right, and even then there were many breakdowns. Stohl, at first only believed he was doing his bit during the War. What was really going on became brutally clear not at face, but in a slow painful realisation. Literally face to face with the truth, there was no alternative but to go along. Either that, or die.

This stunning first novel, fiction but all too real, has page after page of technical detail of white hot crematoria that struggled to keep up with the overload of the last few months of the war. And each detail proves horribly riveting as one reads on and learns what it took to keep the mass murder going. Somehow all the minutia made it mare real, this time and place where killing was the job so many went to each day, just like one goes to the office.

Stohl tells his daughter and her family the horrible truth of those years in hell many decades later, and only because his dying wife makes him promise to do so. And with her, you too wonder whether you would be able to understand and forgive. Difficult, yet for the first time I at least begin to see it from another point of view.

]]> http://malabhargava.com/moviesdocumentariesbooks/melting-point.html/feed 0 http://malabhargava.com/people-matters/a-quiet-cry-for-help-part-ii.html http://malabhargava.com/people-matters/a-quiet-cry-for-help-part-ii.html#comments Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:23:26 +0000 Mala http://malabhargava.com/?p=2234 ...Read the Rest]]>

A school kid named Jeff was in the gym lifting weights. Close by, also getting his daily dose of exercise, was Kim, one of the most popular teachers in the school. After they were done for the day, Jeff toweled himself off, picked up his things and cheerfully as ever said, “I’ll see ya tomorrow”, and left.

Two hours later, Kim got a phone call to say Jeff had killed himself. No one had the faintest warning.

A phase, but painful
Revealing very little on the surface, kids really know how to keep their inner world secret. But that doesn’t mean adults shouldn’t reach out to them – with or without a sign. Instead, parents often write off tell-tale signs or subtle cries for help as a “teenage syndrome”. They expect teenagers to be moody and mixed up and feel that the only thing to do is wait it out until the phase passes.

It’s easy enough to miss signs of distress or dismiss them as meaningless. But if they were that meaningless, suicide in children wouldn’t be going up as it is today. If they want to help, grown ups have to leave no stone unturned to be sensitive and caring. A child acting strangely or coming up with unusual misbehavior shouldn’t infuriate a teacher or parent, but alert them to check whether all is indeed well.

Helping hands at school
Teachers at a school far away in Ohio, learned this the hard way. At Hamilton High, the suicide rate among children reached an alarming level. When in a short time, four children killed themselves, the school decided they just had to do something to prevent this from happening ever again. Their efforts are documented in a film I saw recently – also called A Cry for Help.

We don’t have good enough figures for India, but according to this film, in the US nearly one in seven children consider committing suicide. And one in 14 actually attempt it and ore than once. Another horrifying statistic is that parents fail to pick up on the signs in 90 percent of the cases. As our own culture becomes increasingly urbanized and stressful, we have to face the possibility that we may have similar incidences in India.

The principal of Hamilton High said that he would not take responsibility for children committing suicide. But he would do everything possible to prevent it from happening. The school created a crisis team and they brain stormed and came up with a range of activities that they put into effect. One was to use a special sign, which would mean “I hear you” or “I understand you”. For a period regularly, they would put up painted hand signs on the doors of various teachers’ rooms. These “helping hands” meant that the teacher would be ready to drop everything to talk to a student. For one day each month, the team would get all kids to go through a set of exercises that helped them open up about their feelings. For example, anyone from a group who had ever felt bad at a negative comment about their appearance would “cross the line” to go over to the other side This symbolic move would help children feel less alone and talk about their experience. Another great exercise was “If you really, really knew me…” in which children would come up with something they never told anyone. In the film, a child said: If you really knew me, you would know that I never knew my dad. The school had other special days like “character day” or “challenge day” when they would use innovative exercises to get children to connect better with each other and offer comfort to one another.

While one may debate the amount of responsibility parents have over children versus how much teachers have, there’s no escaping that school can be ground zero for problems to surface. In our schools, teachers are overworked and underpaid. They have a huge number of students in each class and are hard put to it to complete their main job of teaching, let alone worry about their students’ personal problems. Still, I do believe that a warm and positive attitude could help immeasurably.

Preventing suicide
Dr Kavita Arora, child and adolescent psychiatrist working in Delhi, says that children are actually surprisingly open to help. They very much want someone to get them out of the helpless and the out-of-control state they find themselves in. Here’s how some of them describe how they have felt when in depression:
It’s like being tortured by your own brain.
A negative energy just compresses you.
I didn’t really want to die, but I just had to stop that feeling.
I felt I just had to get out of it somehow

Dr Arora says that in her experience, parents who are alert to their kids being in trouble, immediate take charge, even rallying the whole family round successfully. The children, desperate for help, respond. In particular, kids do well with a mentor or someone they feel they can confide in any time they want to.

Coping skills
Depression in children is probably not chemically different from that in adult, Dr Arora explains. They respond to the same medicines that adults do. But more than medication, it is therapy and the teaching of coping skills that helps children in trouble.  In fact, if we don’t give a child some inner strength, values, and coping skills at the most formative time of life, then any amount of physics, maths and chemistry isn’t going to matter and we, in effect, are failing them. Since kids who are prone to depression could experience it again in later life, it is the coping skills that will best prepare them. Children, luckily, are more resilient than adults and get better if help of the right kind is given at the right time.

Learning important life skills is even more important when parents are themselves having any sort of problems, either with their own depression, with each other, or with work and home stresses.

You only have to scour YouTube or other social sites to see the clues to how young kids are feeling, but rather than violate the privacy that is so important to them, the adults in their lives need to put their heads together to find creative ways of helping. Could there, for example, be a way to help online, where kids love to hang out? Along with being keen to ensure that children are living the lives parents and teachers expect, it’s important to give them solid life skills, warmth, security and the confidence that they are unconditionally loved and a helping hand when they cry for help.

It’s not possible to cut and paste solutions from the US into Indian schools, but have a look at the sources from PBS and the Cry for Help film and see if it can help shape ideas for use here. Should you have a child in crisis and need to get help for your child, try Children First at childrenfirst@in.com

For those of you who think of depression as an adult problem, or worse still, an adult weakness, here’s a shock:

Even infants can get depressed. Yes, it’s tough to imagine what a tiny baby, who hasn’t even seen the world immediately around yet, has to get depressed about, but that’s what has been observed.

As young as that!
What you would see on the outside, keeping aside other physical problems, is a baby who looks sad (with or without crying), doesn’t interact readily with people, and who’s slow to react. Alertness, curiosity, wonder, spontaneous bursts of delight, energy etc are muted. There are other signs, of course and because a baby can’t explain, it’s easy to mistake one problem for another. Still, mental health professionals believe they have identified distinct signs of depression.

Depression occurring that early lends support to the belief that the cause is a bio-chemical imbalance. That much-ridiculed “chemical locha” Bollywood likes to scoff at. It’s also been seen that the babies of depressed mothers are more prone to depression. Whether the baby picks this up from the mother, or whether this is the result of biological factors, is not fully understood.

Seeing the recent national focus on suicide in older children or teens, I thought it was a good time to examine depression in children more closely. Every parent needs to know more about this subject.

My secret world
To get an expert view, I spoke with Dr Kavita Arora, child and adolescent psychiatrist. As we chatted, I was reminded of my own niece who tragically hung herself from a fan when she was just a little girl in school. Pretty young thing with her whole life before her. The family was shell-shocked and at a loss to understand what would drive her to suicide. She hadn’t done very well in a physics exam recently, but was that any reason? I will never forget what her grandfather said: there has to be something very wrong with a society in which a grandfather must light the funeral pyre of his young granddaughter.

Only later did they find scribblings in her diary and notebooks that were clearly a cry for help. The problem is, on the surface, she really seemed no different from usual except for asking one or two odd questions about whether one could die from jumping off the roof of their house, and how one should donate one’s eyes after death.

And that’s the mystery of depression in children. It doesn’t look the same as it does in adults. Children have a secret world of their own to which adults are usually not privy. Even though we think we know them very well, there’s much going on in their heads that we are clueless about.

We like to think of childhood and adolescence as a time of carefree innocence and fun, a time when there are no “real” problems to worry about. But inside the teen’s head, there’s a welter of painful worries: Am I normal? Is this how I’ll always be? Who am I, really? Why do I not feel in control? Why do I look like this? Does anyone really love me? Because it’s a time of identity formation, the teen is very vulnerable. Depression on top of all this can be a frightening experience, often leading to suicide.

What is there to get depressed about?
Why the depression, I asked Dr Kavita Arora. “In children and even young adults, the circuitry of the brain is still being formed. We think that all the real growing happens by the age of five, but there is in fact a second spurt of growth in adolescence when neurons are firing and pathways are being formed.  This formative time is one of special tumult and confusion and it’s what makes depression in teens so qualitatively different.”

Parents, teachers and other adults around often react with incredulity, and even indignation when a child is said to be depressed. Dr Arora was telling me how parents will say well, the child was just fine a moment ago, off to a movie with his friends: how can that mean depression? But in truth, whether the child is at a movie or with friends, at home listening to music, talking on the phone or writing in a diary – you don’t really know what he or she is feeling.

Many signs
Dr Arora says that parents should trust their instincts and be very alert when there’s a change – any kind of change – in their child. Some children withdraw and curl up into themselves, avoiding social occasions and interaction. Others suddenly seek out other people almost frantically, and even turn clingy. There could be a sudden heightened activity and even thrill seeking or risk taking. Or there could be a sort of freeze on activity. The tell tale sign however is that it’s a change over the previous.

Physically, there could be a change in sleep and appetite. Sleeping too much or too little, hardly eating or pronounced binge eating – any extreme and any change from before should alert the adults around. Depression could also show up as inexplicable physical symptoms; anxiety could do the same. A noticeable drop in performance at school should be another indicator that you need to check out what’s going on. Losing interest in one’s friends, hobbies, or in school could also be signs.

The more drastic signs of depression are when teenagers get involved in gangs, cults, become bullies or go so far as to cut themselves.  Getting mixed up with drugs and crime too ,of course, could be linked to depression.

The stress is not the cause
Everyone becomes sad in response to unfortunate experiences, but with biologically based depression, the stress is not the cause – the biology is. The stress is the trigger. Being beaten up or bullied at school, having a fight with a friend, going through a problem in a relationship, being upset with one’s parents, not getting good marks etc, are all stresses, but what makes one child able to cope with it and another not? Dr Arora says that the role of the stressors is more important in children because they’re still forming their identity and personalities. An underlying tendency towards depression can be called to the surface when a child faces a stressful event.

In Part II of this post, we’ll look at what can be done to help children who are depressed and are quietly crying out for help.

I wonder whether we Indians realize how fortunate we are. The main problems that occupy national attention right now are whether a controversial author can or cannot come for a literary festival, the all-important question of the army chief’s birthday, and whether a bunch of stone elephants should be covered up with cloth.  Oh, and what Priyanka Gandhi is wearing for the campaign. Are we not blessed to have no bigger problems to deal with?

As I struggle to keep the television on and get a little dose of news, I can’t believe the way the media is making a meal of each trivial issue and milking it for all its worth. Yes, I get that freedom of expression is severely and scarily under threat. I also get that the handling of the date of birth fiasco will set a precedent. But I also think that the extent of attention being paid to these issues – perhaps to make for entertaining viewing – is out of all proportion to the criticality. “Has India Failed Rushdie?” Think about whether India’s failed its own ordinary citizens.

In contrast, someone who’s been raped and lies unconscious, unprotected by those who are supposed to protect her, gets a mere minute on the airwaves. Someone should do the math sometime and see whether the media is even close to reflecting the importance of problems as they really exist in real life. And whether they have some responsibility to do so, considering how they shape opinion. Or erode thought, I might say, by sheer dint of repetition.

Is there nothing wrong with a system in which Swapan Dasgupta and Mani Shankar Aiyar trade insults for great entertainment while we never get to hear a shred of world news? Even BBC seems to cover India in a real sense, more than our own television channels do. (Well, except Top Gear). We’ve become a self-absorbed country, focused on the most absurd little things, while problems bigger than all the elephants put together, threaten every aspect of our lives.