You have heard about the Curse of the Mummy. Now read about the Curse of the "Mummyji"

Trust the Economist to provide the most intelligent and fact-filled yet engagingly written feature I have ever read on India's vexed saas-bahu relationship.

The headline is perfect: "Curse of the mummyji".

The intro is brilliant:

TIHAR jail in Delhi has a special wing just for her. Young women fear and revere her; their husbands seem crushed by her embrace. On television she is a sari-clad battle-axe. Books about her offer advice including: “Run, she is trying to kill you.”

The direct quotes are kept to a minimum, both in number and in length (unlike the long and often pointless quotes we skip in most Indian publications). Here's a sample:

An elderly woman in north India, laughing ruefully, recalls how, after her rural wedding, it took “three days to work out which man in the new family was my husband”.

By tradition, a wife accepted her saas’s tyranny. The life of Renubala, now an elderly woman, is typical. Married at “12 or 13”, she moved in with her husband’s farming family in Tripura, in north-east India. For three years she shared a bed not with him but with his widowed mother. “I was very scared of my mother-in-law, even when she was nice,” she remembers. “I would call her ‘ma-goshai’ [Godmother].”

Mrs Venugopal sees sex and shame behind such obsessive control. Mothers-in-law, she says, “don’t trust [daughters-in-law] to be faithful”, so they try to desexualise them, locking them up, fattening them up, phoning several times a day.

The transitions are smooth, which is the hallmark of good writing and, also, the hallmark of Economist writing. There's an easy flow to the whole three-page feature, and in no time at all, before you even realise it, you arrive at the concluding paragraph, which you have to admire for its ingenuity because it says so much about the saas-bahu relationship without saying too much.

Read the article in its entirety here to soak up the brilliance and to learn a few things, as I did, about Indian mothers-in-law.

PS: You will be shocked to read what happened to Renubala, the mother-in-law worshipper.

• Photograph courtesy: The Economist

MORE FROM THE ECONOMIST:

• "NOBEL CALLING": Brilliant idea for a feature, brilliantly executed

•  How PSY and "Gangnam Style" conquered the world

• Apologies, Economist-style 

• Corporate role models: Mother Teresa and (gasp!) Lady Gaga  

"NOBEL CALLING": Brilliant idea for a feature, brilliantly executed

In the week the Nobel Prizes are being announced, what kind of magazine article can you think of writing? After all, the awards are more than a hundred years old and everything that is there to say about the founder, Alfred Nobel, or his legacy in terms of the prize has been said already, probably many times over.

SEEING DOUBLE? THAT IS THE INTENTION.

So trust The Economist's cerebral quarterly, Intelligent Life, to come up with something exceptional. In the most recent issue, Tom Whipple finds out... wait for it... how the Nobel winners hear the good news.

There are three ways people receive the call. The most satisfying, for [Staffan] Normark [permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences], is when it is a total surprise. "Sometimes the person is completely silent. So totally that I don’t even know if they are still there. You can just hear him breathing." He notices his own use of the male pronoun. “It is still,” he says with a twinge of apology, "mainly men."

Sometimes the subjects of his research have an inkling that it could be their time; but when their phone rings, they try not to let themselves believe it. Serge Haroche (physics, 2012) was out walking with his wife when he saw a Swedish code appear on his mobile. "I realised it was real and it’s, you know, really overwhelming," he says. "I was lucky — I was in the street and passing near a bench, so I was able to sit down immediately."

And what is the third way? Find out for yourself by clicking on this link: "Nobel Calling" (that is such a brilliant headline too).

• By the way, since we're celebrating all things cerebral this week, read (also in Intelligent Life) this brief write-up on P.G. Wodehouse, that master of the English language, and his writing style: "P.G. WODEHOUSE'S ART OF THE COMMA".

• Illustration courtesy: Intelligent Life/Noma Bar

• ALSO READ: "Corporate role models: Mother Teresa and (gasp!) Lady Gaga" (More brilliant writing from The Economist)

What happened when "A Beautiful Mind"
got the call from the Nobel committee

Senior media professional PRATIBHA UMASHANKAR commented via e-mail:

Thanks, Ramesh, for sharing this with me.

For me, the most wonderful way a Nobel winner got the news was when John Forbes Nash, Jr (Economics, 1994) got the news. The distinguished mathematician had been suffering from paranoid schizophrenia for years and he would wander around the Princeton University campus like a lost soul. Little did he know that a paper he had written about Game Theory for an economics course he had taken when he was 18 or 20 years old would bring him worldwide renown.

His theory had had far-reaching impact in many fields, such as psychology, politics, marketing, and, of course, behavioural economics. In fact, many people had adapted his Game Theory in several disciplines, and most had thought the originator was dead.

John Nash, too, was dead to the world.

Then, one day, an old colleague accosted Nash, who was walking around in bedraggled clothes around the campus, sat him down on a bench, and told him, "John, you will receive a call from the Nobel committee, telling you that you have won the Nobel Prize for Economics."

And the call came, but the great mathematician, sadly, had no idea why he had won a prize for Economics.

Later, he had a miraculous recovery, after more than three decades of suffering, and he was able to go and receive the Nobel himself, and give an acceptance speech. Such is the stuff modern-day myths are made of!

Nash sold the rights of his story, and the film based on his life, A Beautiful Mind, was made, with Russell Crowe (pictured) playing Nash. The reason he sold the rights was so that his son, who too is schizophrenic, would be provided for.

And to end this on a "Nobel calling" note, this year's Literature winner, Alice Munro, received the news about her much-deserved prize through voice mail.

How PSY and "Gangnam Style" conquered the world

If the Economist, that most cerebral of magazines, sees fit to devote space to Korean pop music and the antics of superstar PSY, that surely means K-pop has arrived.

PSY (also known as Park Jae-sang), the Economist writes, is having the time of his life:

On August 12th at a stadium in Seoul, the rap star’s concert felt like the only party in town. He entertained 30,000 fans for almost four hours. And this veteran of the South Korean charts has suddenly become popular in the West, since the video for his song “Gangnam Style”, in which he rides an imaginary horse around a posh part of Seoul, went viral on YouTube. The track even hit number one on the iTunes dance chart in Finland.

"Gangnam Style" is getting a lot of play on Facebook these days. Want to know why? Check out the YouTube video:

And read up on why K-pop is turning into an export success: "South Korea’s music industry: Top of the K-pops"

Apologies, Economist-style

Only in the Economist, which was first published in 1843 to take part in "a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress", will you find even the apologies to be brilliantly written.

Here's one from the August 18th-24th, 2012, issue:

CORRECTION: An article on drinking at work ("The boredom of boozeless business", August 11th) claimed that journalists at Bloomberg Businessweek could be disciplined for sipping a spritzer at work. This is not true. Sorry. We must have been drunk on the job.

And here's another from the April 7th-13th, 2012, issue:

CORRECTION: In our piece on California water last week, we claimed that a softball is four times the diameter of a tennis ball. In fact, it is only 50% bigger. Time we got out of our armchairs.

• Also read: "Apologising to readers".

• Also read: "Corporate role models: Mother Teresa and (gasp!) Lady Gaga".

When it comes to writing, experience is NOT everything

Here is a job ad in the latest issue of The Economist:

Vacancy: The Economist is hiring a finance writer to cover hedge funds, private equity and insurance. Experience is less important than the ability to write simply, insightfully and entertainingly. Applicants should send a copy of their CV, along with a 500-word article on this bit of finance, by June 15th to financejob@economist.com.

Now you know why The Economist, which was first published in September 1843 to take part in "a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress", is considered one of the world's best magazines.

• Also read: "Corporate role models: Mother Teresa and (gasp!) Lady Gaga".