12ENTERTAINMENT

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2010

OMAN DAILY Observer

By Dibyojyoti Baksi

From 3 Idiots to Teen Patti, r madha-van is surely doing a different kind of cinema but he doesn’t want to experi-

ment with the genres. The multilingual actor says he just wants to work on good scripts but rues that these are hard to come by.

“I don’t want to experiment with gen-res, I just want to work on great scripts. I wish I had the luxury of saying that I have six scripts that are fantastic and let me see which one I want to do,” madhavan said in an interview.

“Finding one good script is a huge chal-lenge. So I do a film whose script comes and grabs me. once I finish that, I look forward to the next movie,” he added.

madhavan admitted that he follows his instincts while shooting although he goes through the necessary preparation to get un-der the skin of a character.

“I take all the information, I do all the rehearsals and the positioning and then I switch myself off completely. I forget what-ever I have learnt and let the instincts take over. Sometimes it is the cumulative effects of all but sometimes it is natural and totally different from what I have rehearsed to be,” said the actor, who shares screen space with Amitabh Bachchan in Teen Patti.

He is a huge fan of Bachchan and has be-come his devotee after working with him.

“I was a huge fan of mr Bachchan and

now I am his devotee. It’s his personality that made him stay in the industry for 40 years,” he said.

Directed by Leena Yadav, Teen Patti is an emotionally riveting and razor sharp thriller about greed and deception. releas-ing on February 26, it also stars Hollwyood veteran Ben Kingsley.

Asked about his character in the film, madhavan said: “I play a professor who wants to have the luxuries of life as soon as possible. So he makes certain compromises for which he has to make a lot of sacrific-es.”

The actor was recently seen in the super duper hit 3 Idiots. After the film, madhavan, who has always been choosy about his mov-ies, would go even slower.

“I am very choosy about my films. I don’t do a film just for the sake of money. I will continue to be choosy and I will go even slower now. I will wait for movies that are of equal calibre or have something, at least little bit, in respect to 3 Idiots. Teen Patti is one among them.”

Talking about his transition from a stu-dent in 3 Idiots to a professor in Teen Patti, he said: “Actually, I did the role of the pro-fessor first and then became a student. We actually finished Teen Patti before 3 Idi-ots.”

madhavan’s next project is director Aanand L rai’s Tannu Weds Mannu. It is a romantic movie and he has teamed up with Kangana ranaut in it. — IANS

Finding good scripts a challenge: Madhavan

AcTreSS Vidya malvade says she enjoyed working with Sid-dharth on the sets of their forth-

coming film Striker as they shared a very friendly relationship and often played pranks on each other.

“I have shot 98 per cent of the time with Siddharth and I must say he is a fine actor. He is very supportive and a fun guy to work with. He is not at all selfish and helped me during shoots.

“We share a very friendly relation-ship. I kept slapping him now and then. We are very comfortable in each other’s presence,” Vidya said over phone from mumbai.

Vidya, who carved a niche for her-self with Chak De! India, was last seen as minnisha Lamba’s mother in Kidnap. But in Striker she plays a college girl who belongs to a lower middle-class maharashtrian family.

“The name of my character is Devi Sarah. I play a college going student. Devi is a very straight forward and sim-ple maharashtrian girl. You would al-ways find her with books because she believes that by studying hard she can improve her family’s living standards.

She is a girl you would easily relate to as a friend, sister, girlfriend.”

“I could understand the role easily as I am a maharashtrian myself. I know how it is to start from scratch. my dad has also gone through the same strug-gle and by god’s grace we have been blessed.

“I am carrying a very toned look, not very glamorous. You will see me in sal-war-kameez, and neatly tied-up hair.”

Talking about her roles so far, she said: “I agree, I have done the most un-conventional roles. I have always done roles that excite me and even in future I will do the same.”

Apart from Striker, which is releasing tomorrow, she will be seen in director Kabir Sadanand’s Tum Milo Toh Sahi.

releasing in April, Tum Milo Toh Sahi is a tale of ordinary people at dif-ferent stages of life and how their inter-twined roots make them a tree.

“The movie brings out very sweetly the spice of life. It stars Nana Patekar, Dimple Kapadia, Suniel Shetty, mohnish Behl etc. It was an extraordinary experi-ence to work with such senior actors,” Vidya said. — IANS

AFTer struggling for years to explain why some apparently healthy babies die suddenly in

their sleep, a study published on Tuesday singles out serotonin deficiency as a key culprit in sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) or cot death.

researchers at children’s Hospital Boston found that infants who died of cot death, which is the leading cause of death in babies under the age of one in the United States, had significantly lower levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin and the enzyme that helps make it in their brainstems.

SIDS babies also had fewer serotonin receptors in the brainstem, another indi-cation that there was a problem with the babies’ systems, according to the study, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAmA).

Brainstem serotonin controls invol-untary functions such as heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature and breath-ing.

The researchers who conducted the study believe that SIDS claims babies’ lives because the serotonin-deficient brainstem, which works with no back-up during sleep, fails to spring into action to alert the infant when it is faced with a life-threatening challenge while asleep.

“When the baby is awake, the brain-stem works together with other systems — in the forebrain, the cortex — to con-trol functions like heart rate and breath-ing,” David Paterson, one of the lead au-thors of the study, said.

“However, when the baby is asleep, the higher functions in the brain switch off, so the brainstem system itself is sole-ly responsible for controlling all these functions,” he said.

If the infant has a serotonin deficiency, and if there are other SIDS risk factors such as the baby sleeping on its stomach and rebreathing its own breath, which contains more carbon dioxide, the sero-tonin system in the brainstem could fail

to detect a problem and ‘tell’ the baby to take action, Paterson explained.

“If the serotonin brainstem system is not working properly, the baby might not respond to this challenge and die,” Pater-son said.

The findings of the small study, which looked at tissue from 35 babies who died of SIDS, five who died suddenly of other causes and five who were hospitalised with chronic oxygenation problems, marked a step forward in the fight to end cot death, which has stumped doctors for decades.

earlier studies which found that the risk of cot death increased when a baby is laid on its stomach to sleep had sparked campaigns around the world to get par-ents to lay their little ones in their cribs for the night on their backs or sides.

The campaigns initially met with suc-cess, but then the overall SIDS rate lev-elled off and has stayed steady for years.

Following this latest study, the re-searchers say the next step would be to devise a test to identify infants with a serotonin brainstem defect and develop

treatments to correct serotonin deficien-cy.

But they stressed that while the study provides strong evidence for a biological cause of SIDS, it also shows that other factors, such as stomach-sleeping, can aggravate the risk of cot death.

of the 35 SIDS infants in the study, 95 per cent died with at least one risk factor and 88 per cent died with at least two.

Until scientists have come up with a test and remedy for serotonin brainstem deficiency, parents can do their part to re-duce the danger of their baby dying sud-denly in its sleep by removing SIDS risk factors from the infants’ environment, said neuropathologist Hannah Kinney, who led the study.

“During pregnancy, there is no safe level of alcohol a mother can drink and no safe level of smoking, either firsthand and secondhand.

“Until 12 months of age, babies should sleep on their backs in a crib with a firm mattress, and without toys, soft pillows, excessive blanketing or excessive cloth-ing,” she said. — AFP

Low serotonin linked to infants’ sudden cot deathGAIL Donnelly’s classmates nicknamed her “Knobby”

because she was so skinny, all her bones seemed to poke out from under her skin.

But when Donnelly turned 27 that once knobby frame disappeared under mysteriously ballooning weight. Her diet hadn’t changed, she was still walking several miles a day, but she gained 50 pounds in just six months.

Her doctor thought the cause was ovarian cysts. It took 10 years and two surgeries before a new doctor accurately diag-nosed her with polycystic ovary syndrome (PcoS).

Symptoms of PcoS in women often show up in adoles-cence and may include irregular periods and excess hair on the face, chest or back — all caused by high levels of male hormones.

It’s a serious metabolic disorder and one of the major caus-es of hormonally related infertility, yet the disorder remains largely undiagnosed and unknown. About five million women in the US are affected by it.

“Women are told they are too fat and aren’t taken seriously for a long time,” said Andrea Dunaif, professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of medicine, who led the study.

“They go to an average of four doctors before they are diag-nosed. They have been to physicians who say ‘there is nothing wrong with you, don’t worry’,” said Dunaif. — IANS

Doctors overlook hidden causes of obesity among women

Book review: The New Asian Hemisphere

By John Richardson

KISHore mah-bubani’s The New Asian

Hemisphere is a book that should be widely read by those in “The West” and especially by Americans.

I have just finished reading one of those special books that pro-vides a new lens through which to view the world and crystallises thoughts previously held, but not crisply structured. It is intended for general readers and refreshingly devoid of internation-al-relations academic jargon. Its author, a long-serving Singapore diplomat, is founding Dean of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

The New Asian Hemisphere is subtitled, The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East. This is contrasted with the declining power of “The West”.

According to mahbubani, The West is defined, territo-rially, as the United States, canada, the 27 eU member states, Australia and New Zealand. more important, it is defined by a set of common values and interests that have shaped the post-1945 World order and now disproportion-ately dominate international political-economic institu-tions.

chapters address the rise of Asian nations (especially china, India and many Asean members), the relative de-cline of Western dominance and the degree to which hypo-critical, self-serving, ineffectual Western policies have alienated many of the 88 per cent of the world’s popula-tion who do not identify themselves with The West. This alienation is amply documented with references to survey data, collected by internationally respected organisations.

In a concluding chapter, mahbubani calls for a new practice of global leadership, based on “principles, part-nership and pragmatism.”

Perhaps I found The New Asian Hemisphere particularly engaging because the author’s no-punches-pulled-critique of The West and “Western pundits” highlights observations I have reached independently and in some instances writ-ten about in my blog and elsewhere. He characterises the invasion of Iraq as “a seismic error, one of the greatest acts of folly of our age”.

He scores the hypocrisy of agricultural subsidy pro-grammes, disadvantaging global south producers, that are 10 times greater than often ineffectual foreign assistance programmes intended to assist them. His critique of US opposition to regulatory regimes intended to mitigate glo-bal warming reminds us that when addressing problems arising in the global commons, “it is natural to expect the wealthier members of the global community to take greater responsibility.”

Those of us who pioneered the field of “Global model-ling,” first under the club of rome’s auspices, have been arguing this position, often to deaf ears, for more than 30 years.

Yet despite the critical tone of some chapters, I found The New Asian Hemisphere’s message to be empowering and hopeful, not only for people living in Asia but for those living in The West. The future world mahbubani envisions is rich, diverse, multi-polar and resilient. The development trajectory leading to that world is one that should be em-braced, not feared by The West.

He writes, “The end result of the powerful processes of de-Westernisation should, therefore, be the world moving towards a positive destination in which many rich ancient civilisations are reborn, adding to the cultural wealth of the world and unleashing new instincts of cultural tolerance and understanding.

‘‘The unpeeling of the layers of Western influence from around the globe could well lead us to a happier universe where we will have, for the first time in human history, several different civilisations at the same time, with si-multaneous explosions of knowledge and wisdom. All this could lift the human condition to a higher level than expe-rienced in any previous century.”

This is an important book for Americans, indeed all those in “The West” to read with an open mind. Its message should be taken seriously, discussed — and pondered.

* John richardson is Professor of International Devel-opment in American University’s School of International Service, Washington, Dc. His most recent book is Para-dise Poisoned: Learning about Conflict, Terrorism and De-velopment from Sri Lanka’s Civil Wars (2005).

De-Westernisation at full trot

Bewinda Sakthi Dev, 5 years

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names. Send in your baby’s picture and other details to: editor@omanobserver.com; featuredesk@yahoo.co.in

or Kids Corner, Oman Daily Observer, P O Box 974, PC 100,Muscat, Sultanate of Oman

Kishore Mahbubani