Tag Archive for ‘Lifestyle’ at Asian Window

Tag Archive for 'Lifestyle'

The fertility tourists

Published

on July 30, 2008

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The ads are brazen: ‘healthy young women – superovulated exclusively for you!’. The fees are half those of UK clinics (‘flights and hotel included!’). And the industry is unregulated, leaving doctors free of legal and ethical constraints. No wonder more and more Europeans are going to India for fertility treatment. Raekha Prasad reports in The Guardian:

Ekatrina Aleksandrova, 42, flew to India for fertility treatment

At the end of last year, Ekaterina Aleksandrova boarded a plane in London and flew to Mumbai. It wasn’t her first trip there – she is a management consultant and often goes abroad on business. But this time she went to have five embryos implanted in her womb. A couple of days later she flew back to Europe. While on business in Hong Kong in January, she discovered she was pregnant with just one embryo.

For Aleksandrova, 42, this was the culmination of a six-year struggle to become a mother. She divorced at 29, and hadn’t been in a serious relationship since she was 34. “I always wanted to have a child but the men kept saying, ‘Why don’t we travel?’” she says. “It wasn’t that I was obsessed with my career, I just couldn’t get men to be a father.”

First, she tried to adopt in Germany, where she holds citizenship, but that didn’t work out. Then, in 2004, she moved to the UK to take advantage of this country’s more liberal attitude to single women who need IVF. She spent £18,000 in less than three years, trying and failing to conceive at a private Harley Street clinic. When she finally conceived in India, Aleksandrova was in a state of “shock and disbelief”.

Inside the world of UK Muslim women

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on June 2, 2008

in Society and Women

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A major survey – carried out by Muslim women’s magazine Sisters and Ummah Foods, a halal food business – shows most want to marry their soulmates and enjoy high street fashion, while keeping a delicate balance with their Islamic values. From The Observer:

She wants to marry her soulmate, shops in Primark, TK Maxx and Topshop, and dreams of starting her own business. Meet the typical Muslim woman in Britain today.

A thousand women throughout the country have responded to the biggest lifestyle study of Muslim women undertaken in the UK. It appears to show that Muslim women have established a delicate balance between a desire to live a contemporary lifestyle and tap into consumer trends while sticking to values underpinning the Islamic guide to life.

The survey shows that 58 per cent of Muslim women do not think the racial background of a partner matters, although two-thirds believe it is very important for their man to be knowledgeable about Islam.

Click here for Sisters Magazine

Sex and Indians

Published

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on April 30, 2008

in Sexuality

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According to a Durex Sexual Wellbeing survey, Asians are clear losers when compared to rest of the world. Only 46% Indians experience an orgasm almost every time they have sex. Couples from China and Hong Kong are the least likely to reach orgasm during sex, while the Italians and Spanish claim to have no problems climaxing (achieving orgasms 66 percent of the time). Other Asian countries such as Japan (27 percent) and Singapore (36 percent) ranked poorly

However, while 55% of Indian males almost always climax during sex, women get a worse deal with only 26% almost always achieving orgasm.

Click here for Durex survey:

Goa: A creaky paradise

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on March 14, 2008

in Society

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“Forty years ago, Goa was a trip. Now it’s also a business, a disease,” writes Sudeep Chakravarti in Hindustan Times. Chakravarti’s novel, Once Upon a Time in Aparanta, set in present-day Goa, will be published later this year.

Two days ago, a friend and I were breakfasting at a chic café in Baga, a bizarre Goan confluence of the digital hippie, Indian yuppie and those whom I simply call Charter Jack and Charter Jane – “Oi, mate!” and chips with everything. A French couple, replete with tattoos, wearing worn clothes, BO, and a girl of about six came and sat by us, burnt some charas, rolled a joint, and began to fumigate the vicinity. My friend, a Goan preparing to adopt a girl, was outraged at the couple’s nonchalance in doing something so openly in Goa that would land them in jail in their own country, besides possibly placing their daughter under State care.

“I can’t believe these guys,” she spat. “They should be whipped. And this Scarlette,” she continued, “how could her mother leave a 15-year-old girl by herself in this day and age, in an area known to be unsafe, known for drugs and raves and what not and go away on her travels? Would she do that in England? No. But this is Goa, right? So now the girl is dead.”

Scarlette Eden Keeling, flower-child of a flower-parent, is dead, after allegedly being on an extended trip of substance abuse, after allegedly being raped by a manager of a shack at Anjuna beach. Less than an hour’s drive north of where I live, in Panjim, Anjuna was once the eastern extremity of Woodstock.

Mothers and monsters

In the media’s hands, Scarlett Keeting’s mother Fiona MacKeown has become a scapegoat for the middle classes. Madeleine Bunting in The Guardian, UK:

Compassion is not a response the media seem able to sustain. That small window that affords a degree of respect for the grief of the bereaved seems to shrink ever more, but even so the treatment of Fiona MacKeown, the mother of the 15-year-old murdered on a Goa beach, has plumbed new depths of harsh judgmentalism.

While MacKeown struggles to get the police to take on the case of her daughter’s killing, she has a second child lying in hospital in the UK with a broken neck from a car accident that happened shortly before her daughter’s death. This goes well beyond the platitude of a mother’s worst nightmare. Yet even such circumstances have not inhibited the torrent of criticism and contempt that has poured down on this woman’s head. Open season has been declared on every part of her family life, her parenting style and even her appearance. She is blamed for abandoning her daughter in a resort while continuing her travels; accused of a recklessly indulgent style of parenting; and criticised for her mode of grieving. Almost every article refers to her hair – it is “lank”, a “curtain” and, most unforgivably, grey.

Previously on Asian Window:

The Monk who has not read the Gita

Published

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on March 10, 2008

in Faith

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He has been described as the ‘Monk on a Motorcycle’ and is known to play Frisbee and dance at discos. Shekhar Gupta talks to Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, an Indian monk with a wide following, on NDTV 24×7:

Q: So what makes you different? What is it that sets you apart?

“See, I don’t come from any scholarship. I have not read the Vedas or the Upanishads. I just confess I have not read the Gita.”

Q: You ride a motorbike, you wear designer glasses, you drive a Land Rover, and you dance at disco parties. Is it part of your brand image? Or is it to say that you can be normal and spiritual (at the same time)?

“Being spiritual is being normal. If you are not spiritual, you can be handicapped. What you call spiritual is an experience that is beyond the physical.”

Finding Manhattan on India’s real estate map

Published

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on February 22, 2008

in Trends

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Aruna Viswanatha in Mint:

In the US, the trip might take more than a day, but in Bangalore, anyone can hop from Tribeca to Brooklyn, stop off at the White House, and head out to Melrose in just a few minutes.

The miraculous journey unfolds in a new housing development in Bangalore’s Electronic City named “Concorde Manhattans”, which sits on prime real estate across from a Wipro Technologies campus. While location is the major draw, developer Concorde Group is also betting that its American naming scheme will help attract Wipro’s globetrotting employees. “Manhattans is a brand associated with grandeur,” said the company’s marketing manager Alok Mishra.

When the native feels that parts of the city are not for him…

Published

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on February 6, 2008

in Society

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Ian Jack, former editor of Granta, in The Telegraph, Calcutta:

…30 years ago when I lived for a time in Notting Hill I felt reasonably at home there: it hadn’t filled with Porsches, hedge-fund managers, American bankers, corrupt Russians who cleaned up when the Soviet state collapsed. Now when I go west, I enter a different city. Walking down Holland Park Avenue the other day, watching nannies steer the children of the rich towards the cake shops, I thought this must have been how South Calcutta (the ‘White Town’) would have seemed to an inhabitant of Bow Bazar (the ‘Black Town’) in the 19th century. He could marvel at Chowringhee – all those horse-drawn carriages and English ladies with parasols! – but the prices and the people there would indicate that, in his status as a humble native, it was not for him. Perhaps when he got home he would say to his wife, “The money! I just can’t believe the money they have over there!”

In Nepal, the Maoists’ long journey to mainstream politics

Published

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on February 4, 2008

in Nepal

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In Outlook, Manoj Dahal interviews Prachanda, chairman of the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist.

In December 2007, Outlook featured a story on Prachanda (The Rado Maoist), chairman of the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist, on the remarkable change in his lifestyle after he emerged from the bush to join mainstream politics. The story said he sports an expensive Rado watch, travels in an airconditioned Pajero, loves his daily two pegs of Johnnie Walker whisky, and has been accused of promoting his children in the party hierarchy. On a cold January morning this year, the Maoist supremo, dressed in a trendy tracksuit, met Outlook’s Manoj Dahal and sportingly fielded questions on his new lifestyle, the problems revolutionary parties encounter in maintaining their ideological purity and India’s role in Nepal.

Excerpts:

Asian Window