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  • Much food for thought

    Much food for thought
    2025/06/27
    "Our food has completely changed in the last 30 years. This has totally changed our gut physiology, our gut microbiome, and has caused silent inflammation in the gut. Issues like reflux and bloating are caused by a gut that isn't functioning well. Also, if you don't eat the right type of food, your body is incapable of making the neurological chemicals called neurotransmitters that are required for stable mental health. That correlation is not discussed in modern medicine though it is the cause, many times, of these mental health issues. Adding a drug is just symptomatically managing it. Instead of just depending on drugs and therapy, people can go back and connect it to what is wrong with what they are eating. When you trade nourishing food for, say, burgers and junk food and even things that aren't considered junk like white rice and wheat, you are nutritionally depleted. That's why people are unable to have robust systems physically and psychologically. The reason we are now seeing so many autoimmune diseases is because 70 percent of the immune system sits in the gut. If you're eating the wrong food, you're telling the immune system to keep its guns always at the ready. And so, the poor guy is always hyperactive and always creating a reaction instead of only being activated when there's a fungal or a bacterial infection. Food has a real connection to conditions like ADHD, Alzhiemers and bipolar disorders. All forms of mental health conditions are dependent on what you're eating. There is absolutely no denying that correlation." - Manjari Chandra, author, Brainwashed by your Gut talks to Manjula Narayan about everything from mindful eating and toxic foods to the uptick in PCOS among Indian women and the urgent need for the nation to fight conditions like diabetes and cancer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    54 分
  • The original mother of many tongues

    The original mother of many tongues
    2025/06/21
    "One thing that's become abundantly clear from the ancient DNA revolution of the last 10 years is how important migration has been in the history of our species. So, of course, there has been hybridisation, cultural, genetic, linguistic. There is no such thing as a pure people, pure culture, pure language. Genes, culture and language do not map neatly onto each other. This book was a huge amount of work because the only way you can tell the story of Proto Indo European [the ancestor of Latin and Sanskrit and their daughter languages including English, German, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi and many, many others] is by combing the fields of linguistics, archeology and genetics. It's very fast moving and the point of writing the story now is that it's had this huge impetus from genetics" - Laura Spinney, author, Proto; How One Ancient Language Went Global talks to Manjula Narayan about the ancestor of the Indo European family of languages, the Yamnayas, the birth and death of languages, the great migrations out of the Steppes, the Harappan script, multiethnolects and why AI might be great for predicting language change Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    56 分
  • Of raab, kadhi and more

    Of raab, kadhi and more
    2025/06/13
    "Food is not just for nutrition but also for the soul" - @neelakaushik and Shibani Sethi, editors, 'Flavours of India talk to @utterflea abt the 40k strong Gurgaon Moms community that's contributed the family memories and recipes in this book Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    50 分
  • Of unforgettable soundtracks and an emotional core

    Of unforgettable soundtracks and an emotional core
    2025/06/05
    "In Raj Khosla's films, songs were storytelling devices. They didn't just push the narrative forward; they were also narratives by themselves. They had a beginning, a middle and an end, and the way they were shot, the way relationships were portrayed, and the way situations were brought in... It is an art that Guru Dutt taught Raj Khosla and which he then brought out in a way that really connected with the crowd." - Amborish Roychoudhury, author, 'Raj Khosla; The Authorized Biography' talks to Manjula Narayan about the life and art of the maker of such commercially successful and vastly different popular Hindi films as CID (1956), Do Raaste (1969), Main Tulsi Teri Aangan Ki (1978) and Dostana (1980). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 時間 5 分
  • Greed, greenwashing, and the perils of convenience

    Greed, greenwashing, and the perils of convenience
    2025/05/30
    "All materials come with an environmental impact but plastics are worth singling out as they have turbocharged our desire to consume and our reliance on disposability. Consumer goods companies are the ones we should be looking at. They make decisions about what we see on supermarket shelves, what we see in our homes. I hope this book makes people feel that we do have the power to change things because these companies want us to like them. They are very sensitive to how their reputations play out among consumers. Scientists have been sharing concerns that endocrine disrupting chemicals found in plastics could be impacting everything from our ability to procreate to mental health. Ultimately, it also comes down to policy, to pressing companies to pay to manage the waste created by their packaging. If a big consumer goods company is choosing to use a sachet, they should be paying a commensurate amount to find a way for those sachets to all be picked up even if it costs billions of rupees, and if they are selling a product that is difficult to recycle, they should be paying an environmental tax that reflects the cost of what they are putting out there." Saabira Chaudhuri, author, 'Consumed; How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic' talks to Manjula Narayan about everything from overconsumption, the harmful chemicals that leach out of packaging, and microplastics that are hazardous to all life to being a more mindful consumer and why there is still hope Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    54 分
  • Remembering not to forget

    Remembering not to forget
    2025/05/23
    "I'd never attempted a memoir. For me, writing something so personal and putting it out there for the world to see was difficult because I was reliving those days. But that's when I realised, I don't want to forget those days. A lot of people want to move past grief. You want things to be normal. But there is no normal after this. This is the new normal and I have to learn to live with it. My husband and my mother in law became statistics of the COVID wave but they were so much more. Like love, grief is universal and everyone experiences it in some form or the other. I wanted to make the book a medium for me to put down my grief for myself and my children but also for those who want to be able to look at their own grief too. I felt that I could articulate my grief so I should. Those who cannot articulate their grief feel like they have found a voice through this book" - Andaleeb Wajid, author, 'Learning to Make Tea for One' talks to Manjula Narayan about survivor's guilt, family ties, the exhaustion that comes with writing a memoir about loss, and how different it is from writing fiction for young adults Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    52 分
  • Of trances, theta states, and shamans

    Of trances, theta states, and shamans
    2025/05/17
    "Every part of India has shamans; you could say its part of folk culture. They call Himachal Dev Bhoomi because every village is home to several deities. Every village also has its main deity and a shaman, who is the medium of that deity. He can communicate with that deity when he goes into a divine possession trance that is ritually invoked. The villagers communicate with their devis and devtas for everything and in pooch sessions, the shaman or goor will answer questions as the deity. To a westernised mindset, this sounds like superstition. But you cannot ignore the lived experience of millions of people across centuries and say 'Yeh bakwas hai; this is nonsense!' Scholars like Sudhir Kakkar and Oliver Sacks accepted that the sacred healing rituals of shamans are far more effective than modern psychotherapy because they take the whole field of the person - family community mythology - into consideration" - Documentary film maker and author of 'Shamans of the Himalayas', Anu Malhotra talks to Manjula Narayan about the strong connection that villagers in Himachal have with their local deities, divination, altered states of consciousness of shamans, and how the belief system persists despite the onslaught of modernity and migration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    55 分
  • Of spiritual churning and identity umbrellas

    Of spiritual churning and identity umbrellas
    2025/05/09
    "Any place where a guru goes and spends time becomes a dera; it gets a sacred connotation. Deras are reflective of our larger tradition of argumentation, philosophy and contestation. In India, there is nothing singular about our world; everything is very plural. So, any sort of broad brushing or monolithic thinking about deras is unhelpful. All deras are not Dalit. But I was surprised to see Gail Omvedt's Seeking Begumpura at one. Some are doing very much for Ambedkarite thought. They have a lot of Ambedkar in their libraries and their sanctum sanctorums too have big portraits of Ambedkar alongside their religious iconography. Ravidassias constantly tell me that Sant Ravidas is their spiritual guru but Ambedkar is their political one. All this made me take deras very seriously. " - Santosh K Singh, author, The Deras; Culture, Diversity and Politics talks to Manjula Narayan about the varied character and caste and class affiliations of the deras of Punjab, Haryana and Himachal, the Ad-Dharmis, the Ravidassia deras of Punjab and the grand Ravidas temple in Banaras, the connections between the local and the global, and also the great need for sociologists to get their ideas out into the wider world beyond the Academy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    50 分