How Patanjali missed a great brand name
And is Xiaomi just an Indian company that accidentally sounds Chinese?
1 by 9: Ramdevisir
A former BJP MP says smearing ghee in your nostrils and keeping a cut onion in the room can stave off COVID. A yoga guru decorated with the Padma Bhushan says smiling can build immunity for COVID. And Gujarat was working on an ayurvedic medicine using cow’s milk, butter, ghee, dung and urine.
So, should you really be surprised that Baba Ramdev has announced the “first Ayurvedic-clinically controlled, research, evidence & trial based medicine for COVID19”. A tablet called Coronil.
While scientists and pharma companies are scrambling for a vaccine after six months of the coronavirus outbreak, Ramdev says:
“We conducted a clinical case study and clinical controlled trial, and found 69% patients recovered in 3 days and 100% patients recovered in 7 days.”
The questions are obvious and they have been quick in coming: on how many Corona patients has this drug been tested? With whose permission? Which lab has certified its efficacy? How has the price been fixed?
Tenzing Lamsang, the editor of The Bhutanese newspaper, holds the mirror to Indians.
Equally obviously, the answers will not be coming so quickly.
After all, these are “highly dangerous claims the exploit the vulnerable”, when doctors themselves say the majority of patients recover in “5-15 days” without taking any anti-Corona medicine.
But thankfully, the world is not full of cynics, and Madhavan Narayanan pays the best compliment to the desi genius of making a killing.
But while Acharya Balkrishna, the 99.92% owner of Patanjali, was burning the midnight oil for the “first and foremost evidence-based ayurvedic medicine”, the Chinese were back at their old game: eating un-satvik things.
2 by 9: It’s the economy, stupid
COVID and Ladakh have taken all of India’s attention in the last few weeks, but away from the limelight, the economy is in deep crisis. Even a benevolent newspaper like The Hindu, for instance, has had to show the door to employees in Mumbai.
This video of a protest at a factory in Bangalore that supplies goods to the garment manufacturer H&M shows that, as always, women will be the worst hit.
While India cancels rail orders placed with Chinese companies, breaks Chinese TVs, and stops eating noodles to protest the killing of Indian soldiers in Ladakh, the blowback against China is taking a farcical turn with demands for the country of origin to be displayed on products sold by e-tailers.
In a globalised world, things are not so easy to categorise. The Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi says it is an “Indian” company: 99% of the phones it sells here are made locally, it has seven plants, employs 30,000 people, of whom 95% are women.
3 by 9: Plumb in front
#NewIndia, in the eyes of many, is becoming a Hindu Pakistan. But Imran Khan, who came to power promising a #NayaPakistan is reverse-swinging it right into India’s pads. And there, like here, the wind is blowing against thinkers and intellectuals.
Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy, 70, the Ramanujan-loving physicist and mathematician, who teaches at Lahore’s Forman Christian College, has been informed that his contract won’t be renewed when it comes up in 2021. And Mohammed Hanif, the acclaimed author of The Case of Exploding Mangoes, has been fired from Karachi’s Habib University.
Sadanand Dhume reads Dr Hoodbhoy’s case as a “defeat for Pakistan’s brave and beleaguered liberals, and a triumph for obscurantists and Islamic fundamentalists.”
Dr Hoodbhoy would have loved this naked display of rationalism during the solar eclipse on Sunday.
4 by 9: Not happening
As India burns its candle at both ends with all its neighbours, Tanmaya Tyagi has a fine cartoon up on Instagram.
But are the returns beginning to diminish for Narendra Modi on social media, or has the Opposition learnt to play it better than the BJP?
Prabhu Chawla, the former editor of India Today, put up a poll on whether the PM’s words could be trusted: 58% say no.
5 by 9: Singer, not the song
Sushant Singh Rajput’s death has prompted some heavy-duty soul-searching, finger-pointing, name-calling and nudge-nudge-wink-winking on nepotism in Bollywood. But it is not just actors who are at the receiving end.
Last week, the singer Abhijit Bhattacharyya alleged that the casting couch was more prevalent for men than women in Bollywood. Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.
And now Sonu Nigam has used the “M” word to describe the T-series chief.
6 by 9: Shape of you
Explaining complicated things in life using the metro maps is a fun pastime (see a post-apocalyptic map of Prague Metro here or an art nouveau of Paris Metro here ). But Indian cities, barring Delhi, have a long way to go.
India in Pixels has a nifty view of how the metro worm is moving and a worm it really is given the speed at which it is being built in cities like Bangalore.
8 by 9: Don’t try this at home
So you think your kid is naughty? This is what a real stunt is.
And this is how they shoot a stunt in movies.
And, finally
FaceApp, the face-changing Russian app which gave people a glimpse of how they would look in 50 years, is back with a new gender-swapping filter. And despite privacy concerns (what data does it collect? what does it do with it?), people have gone for it.
Mahua Dey uses it to see how pretty the Indian men’s team would look.
Today I learned
IFB stands for “Indian Fine Blanks”. The home appliance maker was founded in Kolkata in 1974 by Bijon Nag with the German company Heinrich Schmid, writes Soumyadipta. The Nag family still holds a 75% stake. It is now based in Bangalore.
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