Sikkim - Hypertense Taxpayers?

A few days ago, an old friend, a physician, shared a graph that got me puzzled.

It showed an NHFS-5 graph plotting percentage of men with diabetes and hypertension across Indian states. While he was concerned about Kerala being represented as a large dot far ahead of all the other states on these two ailments, it was a smaller green dot caught my attention - Sikkim.

How did this tiny north-eastern Himalayan state full of people who always seemed so healthy, relaxed and friendly top the charts for hypertension in India? 

Maybe I was being nostalgic about a trek in Sikkim more than a decade ago, of endless bowls of Thukpa washed down with Dansberg beer. That was a business trip to the main hospital in Gangtok, and these lifestyle diseases certainly did not figure prominently then. What had changed over the years? - was this something to do with the diet? 

Another graph presents a different different picture. This one maps a state-wise per-capita collection of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), and the big surprise here is that Sikkim was the leading state with an average contribution of INR32,568 from each of its ~ 600,000 citizens!

Perhaps this is a pointer to the rapid industrialisation that has taken place in Sikkim over the past decades, with all its attendant health problems. Or maybe there is no correlation at all between these two unrelated  indicators.

One thing is for sure - the numbers need to be examined more closely.

Misheard: I Love Goat Cheese! :)

What happens when the sublime meets the ridiculous? Maybe one of the things you get is goat cheese.

Carmina Burana (Songs of Beuren) is supposed to be one of the great compositions of western classical music. Written in the 13th century it was was famously set to music by the German composer, Carl Orff, in the 1930s and went on to become hugely popular as a score that set the mood for dramatic or cataclysmic situations. In India most people remember it as the background music for an advertisement featuring an aftershave lotion - Old Spice - with images of a surfer riding tumultuous waves, a pretty face, and a face splashed with a liquid that was supposed to be the 'mark of a man'.

Recently some creative genius on YouTube (or was it Tiktok?) posted a video with the title "You'll never listen to this song the same way again!". Sure enough it transforms this classic to a hilarious meme with these lyrics - 

I love goat cheese, Give me cookies!

They'll give us Gonorrhoea

This octopus, Let's give him boots!

Send him to North Korea!

As if to add to this cheerful confusion, a university choir has actually recorded  a performance  using these 'alternate' lyrics. So it takes a bit of digging to get the the original lyrics, and to figure out the specific lines that have been parodied. Perhaps these are the lines that go with the one who loves goat cheese - 

Sors salutis, et virtutis

michi nunc contraria,

est affectus, et defectus 

semper in angaria.

(English:  Fate is against me; in health and virtue, driven on and weighted down, always enslaved)

This is of course only one in a long series videos featuring misheard lyrics. There is one Russian folk song that has been doing the rounds as a Malayalam song, and Shakira's popular theme 2010 Football World Cup song, Waka-Waka, that does sound like Hindi slag for taking a bath at Charminar!

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* O'Fortuna - Misheard lyrics - https://youtu.be/pQEfxhvAy0c 

* Original - André Rieu - O'Fortuna - https://youtu.be/EJC-_j3SnXk 

* Original Lyrics + translation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Fortuna

* Story behind Carmina Burana - https://www.classicfm.com/composers/orff/guides/story-behind-orffs-carmina-burana/ 

* Russian song misheard in Kerala - https://youtu.be/_zEbRrV-flw

Revisited: Gupta Period Sculptures

Lighting changes everything. 

Last week I visited the Indian Museum in Kolkata after more than a decade, and I was struck by the way in which an improvement in the display of exhibits could bring about a qualitative change in the way people relate to them. It make you stop and observe more carefully, to spot variations in style that were missed out earlier, and to spend more time marvelling at the milieu, the social and cultural environment that enabled these artists to flourish. So much so that even a random visitor like me could begin to see clearly, for the first time, the differences between the various schools of art.

I was fascinated in particular by the earthliness and realism of sculptures created during a period that is known as the Golden Age of Indian Art - the Gupta Period (~ 100 to 500 CE). Quite unlike the idealised, supra-human versions of gods that are popular in modern iconography, here we see figures that look like  earthly, familiar, just like the the ordinary people who were walking past these exhibits in the museum. Sometimes the similarity is so striking it is hard to believe that these sculptures were created more than 1800 years ago!

Take for instance this panel of three pillars excavated from Bhuteshwara, near Mathura, in North India. On one side we have three lovely ladies  representing three Yakshis, and on the reverse you see scenes from the Jataka stories about the life of Bodhisatvas in their various incarnations.

Also unlike my visit a decade earlier, this time I was armed with the power of the internet on my mobile, so it did not take long to expand on the display tags, and learn that one panel depicted the Jataka tale  about Sibi, a king once celebrated for his righteousness.  This story is told in just three blocks on a single pillar - a little bird seeks refuge from a hawk, perched on the lap of the king; the hawk demands compensation from the king for having to give up its food, so the king cuts a part of his own to flesh to feed the hawk. 

The other two pillars seem to be from other stories though, featuring elephants and monkeys. Wonder where I could find some more details, not only about about the stories that have been sidelined here but also about the Gupta Period in general.

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* Indian Museum, Kolkata - Virtual Gallery -  https://indianmuseumkolkata.org/cmspages/virtual-gallery

* Google Arts and Culture - Life of Buddha in Indian Art - https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/the-life-of-buddha-in-indian-art/uwLycg_jrsTeKg

*  https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/38742