• Home
• /
• Lifestyle
• /
• Letters to WKND Editor

Points Of View

A space to share your feedback. Over to you.

Best Letter
Getting a Big Boost
In the words of Balzac, "Coffee glides into one's stomach and one's ideas advance in column of route like battalions of the Grande Armée." The salutary effects of coffee have finally been established by scientific consensus after decades of vilification flowing from anecdotal evidence. The jitteriness, cramps, generalised anxiety and sleep disorders some people experience have not stood up to randomised, controlled trials, unlike the creative and cognitive boosts caffeine imparts.
Typing this, as it happens, with a freshly brewed cup to my side, I think there are certain critical points that need to be looked at. Like any stimulant in the history of mankind, caffeine elicits a host of withdrawal symptoms and tolerance build-up. The very adenosine receptors mentioned in Get Creative With Coffee (August 14) are theorised to cause this, as the brain produces more of them in compensation for the effects of coffee. Thus, like every drug, as time goes by, we need more and more of it to experience the same potency.
The withdrawal from having all these extra receptors means that without coffee, we are more fatigued than normal.
All this assumes that the coffee being drunk is black. With the addition of sugar and milk, like in most frappuccinos or caramel macchiatos, comes a whole other litany of health concerns. Of course, moderation helps avoid any serious issues, but in this age of accessible information, it is only fitting that we know the facts behind our consumption, whether they relate to scientific data or the environmental cost of habitat destruction in coffee-producing countries.
Second only to oil now as a traded commodity, coffee has been a valuable asset in some of history's most significant achievements, and will remain in that position for centuries to come.
 Congratulations on your winning entry, Devki Mulani! We'll be in touch soon.
Underrated Act
Tabu is my favourite actress - till date - in Bollywood. One day, while en route to our annual vacation, we saw her at Mumbai airport during a stopover. My heart skipped a beat and I ran over with a book to get her autograph. She smiled at me and signed quickly.
The Bollywood article (Why Mainstream Success Eludes Tabu, August 14) beautifully describes what an elegant, affirmative and poised woman she is, and will always be. She has a dignified presence on celluloid that not many actresses in mainstream cinema have.
Tabu has never given many interviews nor has she appeared at numerous awards functions. In one Koffee with Karan episode, director Mira Nair praised Tabu for her performance in The Namesake, saying that the movie would change her life, that people were going to see her in a new light, and a string of roles would come her way. I did think that, finally, we were going to see much more of this magnificent performer.
But in a recent interview, Tabu said that directors were too "lazy" to cast her in different roles, and sadly, she has never been offered the right roles at the right time.
Aparna Jeyaraman, by email
Face Forward
"Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder" is getting harder to justify these days. How can we believe this when we clearly live in a world where beauty is characterised as being fair or a size zero, and normal women feel the need to conform to such attributes, let alone a woman whose beauty has been ravaged by an act of brutality?
It's people like David Alessi (Reconstructing Faces, Changing Lives, August 14) that give a ray of hope to many such women. Dr Alessi and his wife Deborah not only help them remove facial scars, but also help eradicate the scars of violence from their hearts and minds by providing them with rehabilitation assistance. I couldn't help feeling immense admiration for this husband-wife duo who could have focused on minting money from the rich, through cosmetic surgeries. Instead of just beautifying people who think they're plagued by facial flaws, Alessi and his wife also take time out for the actually tormented people. What contrasts of humanity they must have to deal with: as one comes to heal their fragmented life, the other is just there in a bid to 'upgrade' themselves.
Schahzad Amin, by email
We live in a time when taking beauty to the next level has reached perilous extents. It is alarming when youngsters all over the world blindly follow trends that may harm their well-being permanently; case in point - the recent lip plumping trend that had teenage girls randomly injecting fillers into their lips, blissfully ignorant of the consequences.
So, it was refreshing to read Reconstructing Faces, Changing Lives (August 14), about medical practices being used ethically and for the purpose of improving lives. Plastic surgery and cosmetic enhancements have become all the rage now, and that's fine where it is absolutely required. However, if it's just a fad or whim, where do we draw the line and address the more serious issues that are usually the root of such obsessions - low self-confidence and self-esteem?
Valiny Rodrigues, Abu Dhabi