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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.
The Envy Podcast: Why We Envy And What We Get Out Of It
It is an emotion that most of us don’t like to talk about openly. Most of us, except Homer Simpson.
Homer is unusually open and expressive about that miserable gnawing emotion all of us feel, sometime or the other. Envy. Unlike him, when we do talk about envy, we try to couch it in jest; we try to tell ourselves many lies about it. And we let it bother us. And keep bothering us.
This wonderfully entertaining and thought-provoking podcast examines this universal emotion in a way that it rarely has been. It looks at what purpose envy has (yes, it does), how it is an evolutionary inner alarm that points us to imbalances in our social hierarchy, and how if untended, envy can quickly turn malicious, prompting in us resentment, desire for revenge and entwining it with what the podcast poetically calls its ‘nasty sidekick’ schadenfreude.
Over a pleasurable hour, the podcast looks at envy in popular culture, from Italian composer Antonio Salieri’s vendetta towards Mozart portrayed in the Oscar-winning movie Amadeus, to Simpson’s resentment of his high-achieving neighbour Flanders in the famous American cartoon series, to the green eyes you and I develop sometimes when, for instance, we compare our microwaved mac-n-cheese to a friend’s pictures of her glazed salmon dinner.
Curiously, even primates pay attention to social ranking—who has less and who has more—and the podcast describes some intriguing experiments conducted on jealousy among monkeys. Little wonder then that humans are hardwired to notice inequality—we are intimately aware of where we stand relative to others and this in turn fuels our endless capacity for envy.
Further, the podcast has a refreshing take on how envy can drive us in fascinating ways—inspiring us positively, pushing us to work harder and if managed well, manifest as admiration. Altogether a great weekday-run listen – it is always good to peer into our dark side every now and then – that might help us stay sane in ways we didn’t realize were necessary.
