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piqer for: Global finds Health and Sanity Doing Good
Bangalore-based Rashmi Vasudeva's journalism has appeared in many Indian and international publications over the past decade. A features writer with over nine years of experience heading a health and fitness supplement in a mainstream Indian newspaper, her niche areas include health, wellness, fitness, food, nutrition and Indian classical Arts.
Her articles have appeared in various publications including Mint-Wall Street Journal, The Hindu, Deccan Herald (mainstream South Indian newspaper), Smart Life (Health magazine from the Malayala Manorama Group of publications), YourStory (India's media technology platform for entrepreneurs), Avantika (a noir arts and theatre magazine), ZDF (a German public broadcasting company) and others.
In 2006, she was awarded the British Print-Chevening scholarship to pursue a short-term course in new-age journalism at the University of Westminster, U.K. With a double Masters in Globalisation and Media Studies from Aarhus Universitet (Denmark), University of Amsterdam and Swansea University in Wales, U.K., she has also dabbled in academics, travel writing and socio-cultural studies. Mother to a frisky toddler, she hums 'wheels on the bus' while working and keeps a beady eye on the aforementioned toddler's antics.
A Post-Modern Ministry: Is Loneliness A By-Product Of Individualism?
It sounds like something straight out of Harry Potter’s world, yet it is anything but magical. The UK government recently appointed a ‘Minister of Loneliness’, quite the official stamp of recognition for years of research showing that loneliness is slow poison.
Loneliness – the deep kind, which saps one of all energy, which sits like a boulder on the chest, which lasts for months – is the health equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day and a risk for premature death. In Britain alone, more than 9 million people have reported being “often or always lonely” while a 2012 study estimated that between 20 and 40 per cent of aged Americans experience frequent and intense loneliness.
The announcement has redirected focus on loneliness and this article especially does a good job of collating all the ill-effects of this ‘post-modern’ disease. Not only does it comprehensively show how the bodies of lonely people are different from those who aren't so lonesome, it also discusses how loneliness can be a precursor to high blood pressure, chronic inflammation, sleep disorders as well as immunity and stress related ailments.
All this makes for a sad commentary but does not explore the reasons for this epidemic. The reasons are precisely what this article delves into. The author discusses how loneliness might be the “negative corollary” of individualism—our need to break free of traditional restraints, our exercising of greater choice over our work, beliefs, sexual orientation etc. We haven't managed to find substitutes for the sense of community that institutions like the church and family provided. Moreover, neo-liberalism emphasizes free choice (quite rightly) but sometimes inadvertently ends up portraying attachments as “obstacles to freedom”, thus adding fuel to the fire.
As the author says, if we are to genuinely address the issue, we ought to dig deep into its causes and understand why our societies are ‘generating’ loneliness—and not merely create ministries.
