Health, Mind, Beauty and Relations

Nomophobia has been named as Cambridge Dictionary’s word of 2018. While the word itself might sound unfamiliar, the phenomenon it describes is one we can all relate to.

According to the dictionary, nomophobia means “a fear or worry at the idea of being without your mobile phone or unable to use it”.


Its meaning can be derived by examining the word itself, which is a combination of “no”, “phobia” and “mo”, in reference to a mobile phone, leading the phrase to mean “no mobile phone phobia”.

While nomophobia is not a scientific term, it’s one that has become increasingly popular among researchers in recent years as technology addictions are now more prevalent than ever before.

It’s sometimes referred to as “smartphone separation anxiety”, though it rarely has anything to do with a fear of not being able to make phone calls or send text messages.

Cambridge Dictionary revealed that nomophobia had been selected as “the people’s word of 2018” in a public vote that called on its blog readers and social media followers to choose from a shortlist of four words they thought best summed up the year.

Just as nomophobia reflects the anxieties of the times, so do the other three words on the shortlist.

For example, ecocide, which is the noun describing “the destruction of the natural environment of an area, or very great damage”, feels apt given the increasing concerns about deforestation in the UK and around the world.

Also on the shortlist is noplatforming, which refers to “the practise of refusing someone an opportunity to make their ideas or beliefs heard publicly because you think these beliefs are dangerous or unacceptable”.

Gender gap was also on the dictionary’s shortlist, referencing “a difference between the way men and women are treated in society, or between what men and women do and achieve”.

Although, given everything that’s happened this year with regards to the pay gap and other measures of inequality, we doubt this is a phrase whose use will die out in 2019. THE INDEPENDENT


Nomophobia means a fear or worry at the idea of being without your mobile phone or unable to use it

Bandra-Worli Sea Link photo

Mumbai will have its footprint on Nasa’s New Horizon spacecraft’s trajectory while executing a nail-biting historic flyby of the most distant and ancient object in the solar system, Ultima Thule, around 11am (IST) on Tuesday. The reason: The person who is playing a key role in navigating the spacecraft to this object, discovered just four years ago, is a Mumbaikar.


Shyam Bhaskaran of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was born in 1963 at a clinic in Matunga. Bhaskaran, who has navigated a number of Nasa missions, spoke to TOI on Sunday, recalling that he stayed at Kenilworth, Pedder Road, which housed officials of the department of atomic energy. “My dad was with BARC,” he said.

Bhaskaran, who attended preschool at Kemps Corner, said he remembered playing with friends in and around Kenilworth. “I had a tricycle and I used to pedal it around the area.”

He left for the US in 1968, but returned to Mumbai in 1981 to meet relatives. “I found it was a really big city, full of life and crowded. I will certainly revisit in the future,” he said.

SPOTLIGHT ON 2 PIOS WHO KEEP MUMBAI FLAG FLYING HIGH OVERSEAS

An eight-year-old PIO boy is one of the smartest people in Britain, having entered Mensa with an IQ of 152 at the age of four.


Arav Ajaykumar, from Leicester, whose parents moved to the UK in 2009 from Mumbai, also just got a gold award and the top marks in his school for the Primary Mathematics Challenge, a logical reasoning test organised by the Mathematical Association.

His mother Varsha Ajaykumar, who was raised in Bandra and used to work as a radiologist at the Advanced Radiology Centre in Andheri, said the Primary Maths Challenge is aimed at older kids in years 5 and 6. “He is in year 4 but because he is so advanced the school let him appear for it. We were not expecting him to get the highest score in school,” she said.

Arav was born in the UK and at the age of two could count to 1,000. He told TOI: “I like maths because there is only one right answer. I was shocked when I got the result and then I was really happy. I was pretty nervous when I sat for the Mensa test, but I did not find that one difficult, it was quite easy.”


‘Don’t want Arav to became a geek’

When asked what he did apart from maths, he said: “I like to play chess and ride my bike if the weather is good. I would like to be a chess grandmaster one day.” Arav plays in the U9 Leicestershire county chess team.

The secret to being good at maths is “practising a lot”, he said and the secret to being good at chess is “understanding why your opponent does something”. The only subject he said he does not excel at at school is sport. “I like playing cricket. I just don’t like football or rugby,” he said. Arav now has one-toone tuition at his school to make sure he remains stretched.

Outside maths, Arav enjoys normal children's activities like playing video games, watching TV and Bollywood movies and reading. But he also has a penchant for solving puzzles and sums. Once he had to say exactly where 0.5678 would be on a line in a maths game and he got it exactly correct.

“He has always had a liking for numbers,” Varsha explained. “When he was about 15 months old, he would keep observing these toys with digits on them. Then he started counting very early. At 17 to 18 months he could count to 20. When he was three he joined pre-school nursery and the other children were learning to count to 10 and he could already count to 1,000. The teacher asked him to read from a book and he could read a whole passage. That was when we took him to an educational psychologist.” The psychologist, Dr Peter Congdon in Solihull, who organised Arav’s Mensa test, wrote in his report that when Arav was four he had the reading ability of an 8-year old, the spelling of a 7-year old and the maths ability of a 10-year old and that his IQ was in “very superior range at 99.5 percentile” and that he was “of very superior general intelligence”.

Varsha who moved to the UK from Juhu because her husband Ajaykumar Maliyakkal landed a job in the NHS as a consultant radiologist, said she had mixed feelings to discover her son was a genius. “Children like this constant stimulation. He keeps us on our toes. We don’t want him to become a geek ,” she said.

Fortunately Arav has plenty of friends. “He is friendly and very humble. He does not show off,” Varsha said. “We have no clue who he has inherited this from. I don’t have anyone good at maths in my family so I have no idea what he can do with it in the future either,” she added. “Maybe he will be good at coding and algorithms.”

Nasa mission challenging: Scientist
About the challenges involved in navigating the mission, he said that compared to the flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015, Ultima Thule which is nearly six billion km from Pluto, would be easier since there are no objects around. “But it was not without challenge because we have never done such an encounter of an object which was unknown, small and dark. Finding the object is difficult,” he explained. Ultima Thule is a traditional name of distant places beyond the known world.

On January 1, the New Horizons spacecraft will be flying 3,500 km above the surface of Ultima Thule. This distance is three times closer to how far it was from Pluto.

Bhaskaran said that at 4am on Sunday, the navigation team, after a meeting, concluded that with regards to navigating the spacecraft, everything looked good.

While it’s a known fact that a healthy diet and exercise are important to maintain good health, a latest study has shown just how much they actually benefit the brain, and even possibly reverse effects of ageing. In a study, researchers led by James Blumenthal, a professor in psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center, found that even among a group of older people who already show signs of thinking problems, exercising regularly over six months and eating more healthy can improve performance on cognitive tests.

The 160 people began the study showing thinking skills that were similar to people in their 90s — 28 years older, on average, than they actually were. The volunteers were divided into four groups. One group participated in an aerobic exercise program, another was assigned a low-sodium diet, a third was asked to exercise and change their diet at the same time, and a fourth control group was provided educational sessions about how to improve their brain health.


The group that exercised and changed its diet at the same time showed the greatest improvements in cognitive tests after six months. They improved their test scores by nine years, to resemble those of people 84 years old. The control group showed a continued decline in their brain test scores, and the researchers did not see a significant benefit from either exercise or change in diet alone. “The bottom line is that it’s not too late to derive benefits from exercise,” says Blumenthal.

The fact that the group following both the exercise and diet programs showed the greatest benefit suggests that the two interventions may work together to improve brain health, Blumenthal says. “We saw evidence that exercise and the diet together are better than nothing,” he says. “We showed you can get improvements in function that can reduce and certainly improve neurocognitive function, and possibly even postpone development of dementia late in life.”

Filmmaker Aditya Dhar ,director of the upcoming film URI: The Surgical Strike, which is based on the Indian Army’s surgical strikes against Pakistan, feels that stories of the country’s soldiers deserve to be told on the big screen. Talking about how he ended up making a film on India’s secret military operation from 2016, he says, “I was doing a film with Karan Johar called Raat Baki, which had Fawad Khan and Katrina Kaif as the leads. The moment we were supposed to go on floors, the Uri attacks happened and Pakistani actors were then, not allowed to work in Hindi films. Since Fawad couldn’t come back to India, the film went into a limbo. Soon after, my attention was drawn towards the surgical strikes by the Indian Army. I am a Kashmiri pandit and I have been hearing about terrorism since childhood. We have been directly and indirectly affected by it, too. I always had interest in the military as I wanted to join the army. When I started researching, I realised that it’s one of the most incredible, covert and well-planned military operations to have been carried out in India. The Indian Army does so much for our country and making a film for them is the least we can do as filmmakers. They deserve love and respect from each and every citizen of India, for the sacrifices they make for us.”

Ask him if there was enough material for him to base his screenplay and how he managed to put the story together and he adds, “There was lot of reference material already available in the public domain, but I had to do a lot of research, too. I spoke to several retired army personnel and we were able to construct the story based on all that. Once the first draft was ready we shared it with the PR wing of the Indian Army and they gave us valuable feedback and their point of view. Within four months of the surgical strike, I was ready with the script of the film.”


The film features Vicky Kaushal as the lead and talking about the actor’s dedication filmmaker Aditya says, “Being a first-time director, I wasn’t sure if an established actor would be keen on working with me and I also needed an actor who could completely dedicate himself to the film. He had to train for five to six months. There was military training, the actor had to gain weight for the role and also look like an army Major, who could supervise a team of 80 people. Vicky at that time was shooting for Raazi and Sanju hadn’t released, either. I was keen on casting him, because he has incredible potential. He is hungry to prove himself and the way he has pushed himself during the preparation for this role has been incredible.”

It’s been a busy year for Daisy Shah and the actress is glad that her career is on fast track. Earlier this year, she was a part of the ensemble cast in Race

3. The film garnered massive attention from the fans and Daisy’s dialogue from the movie, ‘My business is my business, none of your business’ went viral on social media, too. Just after that, she also took part in the Da-bangg tour in the US and Canada. She performed with Salman Khan, Katrina Kaif, Sonakshi Sinha and Jacqueline Fernandez on an international stage. Ever since, Daisy has been busy travelling around for work commitments and she’s going to have a working New Year, too.


A trained dancer, she will be seen performing in Chicago for an event on New Year’s Eve. She will be grooving to her hit tracks from Jai Ho and Race 3 for this event and the promos have already created a lot of buzz on social media. The young actress is also currently preparing for next project, which she will announce soon.