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We all knew to expect hot flashes, maybe even some prostate issues. But nobody ever warned us about these aging-related things:

1. You will want to nap more.
Naps, it turns out, aren't just for cranky toddlers. It is popularly believed that our need for them returns, in earnest, in our later years. But while you may feel the need to sleep through the NFL game on TV every Sunday, that's not related to aging. The core of the problem is more likely your inability to sleep at night.

People over 65 can take more than 30 minutes to fall asleep. They often sleep less deeply and wake up during the night. Many older adults get sleepier earlier in the evening and wake up earlier in the morning. But poor sleep and the need to nap are not symptoms of aging; they are symptoms of something else going on with your body that is preventing you from sleeping. It's vital to figure out what that something else is. Sleep patterns change as we age, but disturbed sleep and waking up tired every day are not part of normal aging. People over 65 need about the same amount of sleep as younger adults -- seven to nine hours a night.

2. Your face can still break out like a teenager's.
While most aging skin tends to dry out, adult acne can be a case of junk-in/junk-out. Like with teenagers, breakouts in adults can often be traced to hormonal fluctuations. Acne is a clogged follicle or pore. It begins when the pore is blocked and the sebum or oil in your skin can't work its way out. Bacteria forms, followed by inflammation. Adult acne can sometimes be triggered by hormonal shifts, food and improper cleansing that allows oil buildup.

3. Cataract surgery is a treatment of last resort, even if you hate wearing glasses.
You probably bought your first pair of drugstore reading glasses somewhere around age 50. From there, you wound up with the optometrist recommending you wear glasses when you drive. And then somewhere around 62, you realize that you have an assortment of eyewear for computer use, reading, watching TV, driving at night and driving during the day. You have glasses on every horizontal surface, and generally have a pair stuck on top of your head. You never go anywhere without your glasses and wonder why you can't just go and have cataract surgery done -- like now -- to be able to see once again.

Well, you can't. A cataract generally starts very small and grows gradually larger and cloudier. Doctors prefer to wait until the cataract interferes significantly with your vision and lifestyle. Some cataracts never really reach the stage where they should be removed. If your cataract is interfering with your vision to the point where it feels unsafe to drive, or doing everyday tasks is difficult, then it's time to discuss surgery with your doctor. Cataract surgery is the most commonly performed type of surgery in the United States; it just isn't done lightly.

4. Hot flashes can last until you are 65.
A recent study found that 42 percent of women 60 to 65 years old still have menopausal hot flashes. For many, the hot flashes are occasional and mild, but for some, they remain really troublesome, said the study published in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS). Sexual symptoms also remain a problem for more than half these older women. The study included 2,000 women aged 40 to 65.

5. If you are older, this winter has been really cold.
In between those never-ending hot flashes, older people really feel the cold -- which hasn't made this winter all that wonderful for them. Sometimes, it's a sign of a medical problem like hypertension or diabetes. Sometimes drugs, like beta blockers, decrease the heart rate which can reduce blood circulation to hands and feet. Thyroid conditions also can impact people's ability to regulate their body temperature.

But healthy older people feel colder too. Older people are more likely to have slightly colder body temperatures than younger ones.

What do you think? What about aging has surprised you? Let us know in comments.

Beer and neuroscience -- an unlikely combination, you might think, for anything other than a collegiate shooting the breeze over drinks. But in my field of study -- olfaction -- they can be tightly intertwined.

I work to uncover the neural mechanisms of how we learn about a new odor. The parallels between olfactory research and beer start with some basics: They have overlapping chemistry terminology ("esters", "volatile compounds"), and the craft of brewing beer camouflages as one application of the scientific method, with plenty of trial-and-error and hypothesis testing.

No, it's not your imagination. Beer isn't something that smells good to most people at first. In fact, just a few years ago, I actually disliked beer. But since then, I've slowly amassed a mental library of styles and flavors that I've encountered, those I like, and those I'll pass on next time. These learning experiences are not unlike the ones of brewers or chefs or perfumists. Important to my work, we know that even things that once smelled or tasted repulsive can come to be pleasurable. So how do we form new odor representations, and how are they affected by learning and experience?

Three ingredients (besides water) make up your average beer: grain, yeast, and hops. Grains are prepared before you brew, yeast is added as you brew, and hops can be added while or after your brew. At each of these stages, a brewer relies heavily on his or her senses. Many scientific experiments, along with anecdotal evidence, have revealed mixed findings.

You have people like Richard Paterson, also called "The Nose", who purportedly can identify the region of Scotland a whisky is from just by smell alone. A study from my lab showed that prolonged exposure to a particular odor improved differentiation among related odors. For example, repeated experiences with a floral-like smell allowed the subjects to become floral "experts." This finding was underscored by neural activity changes in brain regions involved in olfaction.

But our sense of smell does not operate in a vacuum. Consider another study in which 54 wine students at the University of Bordeaux were asked to describe the odor qualities of a red wine. They used an overwhelming number of red wine descriptors, such as "prune", "raspberry", or "red currant". As it turns out, the red wine was simply a white wine that had been dyed red, revealing just how much our other senses can affect olfaction, even in trained experts. Another study found that participants rated the same odor differently depending on whether it had been labeled "cheddar cheese" or "body odor". These results highlight the magnitude of sensory and cognitive interactions on stimulus perception.

Work from various olfaction labs has suggested that odor representations exist as brain activity patterns, with different odors evoking unique patterns of activity. These representations are malleable according to this research, but a key question remains: How do these patterns form and encode learned information?

My current research looks at the development of novel odor representations by pairing ambiguous odors (mixtures that we have created) with pictures of similarly unfamiliar fruits and flowers (such as dragon fruit or silver vase plant). By creating these original representations through category associations, we can examine how the brain learns and codes olfactory information through activity patterns. Results of this study will help us understand how we learn about olfactory associations, and how this information is shaped through experience. It also provides a basis for how we learn to categorize information from a complex and dynamic environment.

From this work, I hope to gain insight into how the brain incorporates newly learned information to guide behavior. It might help us to understand the abilities of a whisky or wine expert, but it also sheds light on how important smell is for any kind of learning, whether it's in the lab, or in the bar.

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Across the globe, 805 million people are struggling with hunger. But that figure could be significantly reduced if female farmers just had the same rights as their male counterparts.

Now that more men in rural areas are taking jobs in cities, about half of all farmers are women who produce more than half the world's food, according to World Watch. Yet, despite their increasing roles, women farmers are often deprived of such basic rights as land ownership, which keeps them from producing to their full potential.

The situation is so uneven, in fact, that if male and female farmers had equal access to resources, food output would increase to a point that it could pull 100 to 150 million people out of hunger, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. (FAO) concluded in a report released in 2011.

But it's not just land ownership that women farmers are getting excluded from.

Women own fewer working animals and often don't control what they earn from the small animals they do own. They have less education and are less likely than male farmers to use such modern advancements as seeds, fertilizers, pest control measures and mechanical tools, according to the FAO report.

"Women are the backbone of rural societies," International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) President Kanayo Nwanze said at an International Women's Day event in Rome on Friday. "Rural women need more opportunities to participate, improve their skills, gain access to assets and be involved in agricultural production and marketing."

As part of its roadmap to reach its goal of full equality worldwide by 2030, U.N. Women stressed the need to revise discriminatory economic practices that keep women from thriving financially.

According to FAO, for example, just 10 to 20 percent of landowners in developing countries for which data are available are women.

Even when women do possess land, they're often granted poor-quality plots and their tenure is still insecure.

In its exhaustive report, U.N. Women said removing discriminatory laws that interfere with women's ability to inherit and own land should be an "urgent priority." In the agricultural sector, it called for giving women greater access to technologies, information and resources.

A number of nonprofit groups have long been working to make these goals a reality.

Landesa, for example, partners with governments to create laws, policies, and programs to help secure land rights for the world's poorest people. Since 1967, the organization has helped more than 100 million underserved families.

The group has a specific arm that focuses entirely on developing policies and programs that help women obtain land rights.

1% for Women is another group that works to promote the rights of female farmers.

It collaborates with businesses that commit 1 percent of their net profit to microcredit loans for women in agriculture around the world.

These monetary boosts give female farmers the leverage they need in order to expand their businesses and output.

Esther, a farmer from Eldoret, Kenya, secured a loan from the organization in November that was critical in bringing her to the next level.

The mother of five runs a 7-acre farm and focuses predominantly on producing milk and maize. She has also invested in poultry farming and other side businesses, according to the group's website.

Esther said that the loan would allow her to secure more land space and farm supplies once the request was granted.

"Women in agriculture play a critical role in shaping our future, and need access to greater resources," Laurie Benson, 1% for Women founder, told Food Tank, a group that fights hunger and poverty. "The ripple effect created from supporting women in agriculture is truly felt around the world."

"The Jerome Project" began in 2011, when artist Titus Kaphar was researching his father Jerome's prison records. Kaphar, who was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and currently lives between New York and Connecticut, creates artwork that, both aesthetically and thematically, sews together past and present in a rough and sometimes violent reworking of history. When looking into his father's history, he was surprised to find 99 men, also incarcerated, who shared his father's first and last names.

And just like that, the project was born. The series consists of oil portraits of the various Jeromes, based on their mug shots, juxtaposed against gold leaf, a nod to Byzantine paintings. Each face is partially submerged in tar, with the amount of tar vaguely corresponding to the amount of time the subject spent in prison. The tar also restores some privacy to the faces that was long denied them, while simultaneously alluding to the way their reputations were ruined as a result of their incarceration. The paintings appear both like royal portraits and long lost images drowning in garbage and gunk, the subjects' mouths no longer able to communicate while the eyes speak volumes.



Jerome II, 2014 © Titus Kaphar. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

"What is the impact of our criminal justice system on our conception of democracy itself?" Kaphar asked in an interview with Hyperallergic. "What does it imply about us that we so easily strip the freedoms of our citizens of the values that we hold most sacred as a nation?"

Though the project was embarked upon years ago, its recent showing at the Studio Museum in Harlem illuminated its correlation with recent current events involving police killings of unarmed persons like Eric Garner and Michael Brown. However, to Kaphar, the project isn't historical or contemporary, but, sadly enough, continually relevant. "To some degree, all of my work is affected by current events, even the pieces that speak directly to historical moments," he explained in an earlier interview with The Huffington Post Arts.

"I think history is kind of like a sometimes visible, sometimes invisible armature on which the present is constructed. All history becomes interesting when we can see how the past affects our present. There's a piece in the 24th street space that speaks to this. The Black Power movement of the 1960s was symbolized by a closed black fist. I'm struck by how the current movement of resistance is symbolized by two raised, open hands. In the painting 1968/2014 the simple act of placing these contrasting gestures side by side reminds me that history doesn't remain in the past."

Jerome (Set) © Titus Kaphar. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

In 2014, Kaphar began a continuation of the series titled "Asphalt and Chalk," in which he drew multiple Jeromes with chalk on asphalt paper, layering their faces until they bled together beyond recognition. He started the works after feeling the Jerome Project was not over, and slowly realized it may never be. "Although it may sound like hyperbole, because of the personal nature of the Jerome Project, I've been dealing with this body of work for most of my life," he told The Huffington Post.

"The more I understand the criminal justice related issues that the Jerome Project highlights, the more I believe pessimistically that these are issues that our country will be addressing for some time. I don't know what my response will be to it in the future, but I plan to continue the investigation." Perhaps one day Kaphar's project will no longer be so achingly pertinent to today's current events, but until then, his artwork aptly communicates what is sometimes too devastating to put in words.

See a preview of the Jerome Project below and continue reading for more of Kaphar's striking work, on view earlier this year at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York.

Woodblock printing and the innovation known as moveable type have their origins in China. Around 600 AD block prints appeared on the scene, perfected on paper toward the end of the Tang dynasty. You could say, then, that the Chinese innovators of the seventh to 10th centuries were some of the world's earliest typography masters.

Twenty-first century artist and professor Hongtao Zhou knows this. His recent project, "Textscapes," is as much an homage to their past ingenuity as it is a tribute to the progress made in design since.



Unlike the printers of yore -- who used wood from date and pear trees, carving out their characters with knives before inking the block and setting the words to paper, Hongtao uses a 3D printer to craft his art. Despite the obvious differences, he sees a parallel. "Printing technology was first created in ancient China to reproduce text using woodblocks," he reiterated to HuffPost via email. Three-dimensional printing, he asserts, echoes these older methods, with its additive process used "more often to create objects instead of duplicate text."

Hongtao's font brings text to life, turning subject matter concerning landscapes, cities or figures into visual aberrations that actually appear like architectural pieces. A letter becomes a city, a story becomes abstract sculptures. Printing during Imperial times resulted in a beautifully carved block, while Hongtao's 3D printing results in "Textscapes."



"These documents make reading interactive for a general audience... [it's] knowledge as well as art," he added. "This series of work has text variations of braille, language characters, calligraphies and number systems to bridge the text and its visuality in architecture, landscape, portraits and abstract matters."

Check out a preview of the series here and head over to Hongtao's website for more information.

Other participating artists and designers involved with "Textscapes" are Tyler Francisco, Rhealyn Dalere and Chin Fang Chen from the School of Architecture at the University of Hawaii-Manoa.

The U.S. economic recovery is in full force. February marked the 12th consecutive month of job growth above 200,000, with U.S. employers adding nearly 300,000 new jobs. But an even more promising sign of recovery is the jump in Hispanic employment. A front-page article in Sunday's New York Times points out that the unemployment rate for Latinos has finally returned to its pre-recession average and job growth for Hispanics is outpacing other groups. This is good news for everybody, since Hispanics and Blacks were two of the communities hardest hit by the recession. The fact that not only Latino but also Black job growth in recent months is outstripping that of the job market overall means the recovery is more complete, more widespread, and more sustainable. But before we declare mission accomplished, let's take a closer look at the economic recovery and the Latino employment picture.

The good news is that Latino unemployment is declining because more Latinos are working. As has historically been the case, Latinos are more likely than other workers to be employed or actively seeking work. Last month, the Latino labor force participation rate was 66 percent, compared to 63 percent for Whites and 61 percent for Blacks. Throughout the recovery, NCLR has highlighted several growth industries where Latinos are overrepresented, including restaurants and temp firms, home care, and retail. The revival of the construction industry in particular, where Latinos make up one-quarter of the workforce, is one industry that is helping the unemployment rate bounce back. Job gains in construction are also visible to those who do not work directly in construction, helping to build overall confidence among Latinos that the broader economy is improving. More work is probably the main reason that Latinos experienced a small, though significant, decline in poverty in 2013 when no other group experienced a change.

Whenever there is good news about Latinos, we brace for an attack from those who seek to blame immigrants for their own economic woes, despite the fact that the article confirms what we and many others have been saying all along--the Obama administration has engaged in an unprecedented amount of immigration law enforcement. But as Noam Scheiber points out, it's U.S. citizens, not immigrants, who are the primary Latino beneficiaries of the job growth in the economic recovery. Many people are surprised to learn that U.S. citizens are now the majority of the Latino workforce. Additionally, U.S.-born workers either benefit or are not affected at all when immigrants find work. In the article, Giovanni Peri, a well-respected expert on the economic effects of immigration, sums up the virtuous cycle this way: "More construction workers generates the need for more supervisors, more managers to coordinate them, more contractors to give them work."

But while the availability of jobs is improving, more needs to be done to raise the quality of those jobs to ensure that the benefits of the economic recovery are more widely shared. In a poll conducted by NCLR last summer, a majority of Latino voters said that they have not seen improvement in their household finances since the Great Recession. Fifty percent added that they are worried that they may not have enough money to pay their basic bills. Indeed, wages are growing slowly, but Latinos are more likely to earn poverty-level wages. This stems in part from a long-term trend in which wages have not kept pace with worker productivity. A White House report points this out directly: "In 2014, average real wages for production and nonsupervisory workers increased 0.8 percent after increasing 0.7 percent in 2013. Although not sufficient, these increases are a marked improvement from the 2000s, including the pre Great Recession years of 2001 to 2007, when real wage growth averaged 0.5 percent a year." In addition, there has been a marked rise in part-time work--even among workers who would rather work full-time.

Clearly the U.S. economy is moving in the right direction, but more needs to be done to build on the gains of hard work to ensure that all workers reap the benefits of the improving economy. These include:

• Raising the federal minimum wage to restore its value to keep a full-time working family out of poverty. This should be at the top of Congress's agenda.


• Stepping up enforcement of labor laws, including basic health and safety protections, to make sure that workers do not pay with their lives--as many Latino workers do--for a day's wage.


• Making permanent the 2009 expansions of the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, which keep 16 million people out of deep poverty.

The good news is that Latinos and other communities are finally benefitting from the protracted economic recovery. It will be even better news if we make policy changes such as those above and make the investments necessary--as well as enacting comprehensive immigration reform, which will end wage abuse and put all workers on a level playing field. We need to secure this still-fragile recovery among communities of color by maximizing what they can earn, create, and contribute to further benefit our economy and the well-being of all Americans.

By Ambassador Melanne Verveer and Sarah Degnan Kambou

"I was in the field when they came. They came out of nowhere and they took me away, into the bush. I was just a child. They stole us away. They stole our innocence. They stole our lives from us."

These are the words of Espérence, a girl taken from her family when war erupted in her village in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. And we know that there are tens of thousands more like her around the world. From villages in Northern Nigeria, to refugee camps in Jordan and Turkey, to communities fleeing their homes as a result of natural disasters, conflicts and crises are devastating the lives of men, women and children.

Conflict razes more than homes and cities. It dismantles social systems, leaving girls like Espérence particularly vulnerable to displacement and exploitation. In these settings, girls remain acutely vulnerable to physical and psychological abuse, rape, forced marriage, unwanted pregnancy and premature death. For adolescent girls living in these conditions, harassment and abuse are daily occurrences; basic safety is never taken for granted and fear is one of life's few constants.

And yet, adolescent girls are powerful tools in building a better future. Ignoring or overlooking their rights and needs compromises any chance for long term sustainability and security. Joblessness, disrupted education, and untreated mental and physical wounds today are tomorrow's peace and security problems. Moreover, we cannot possibly respond to these needs without talking with girls themselves.

We must shelve piece-meal approaches that neglect the expressed needs of adolescent girls and have subsequently proven to be woefully inadequate in mitigating their risk. Rather, the global community must move to a more effective approach - one that is girl-centric, comprehensive and integrated, and one that reduces risk and nurtures leaders for post-conflict societies.

Fundamentally, global leaders and policy makers must take a strong, principled stand against organizations, entities and individuals who are perpetrating violence, creating mayhem and devastating the lives of all citizens, but targeting adolescent girls in particular. Agencies entrusted with protecting civil society and the public good must condemn heinous, barbaric acts, such as forcing young girls to marry or act as sex slaves.

These global platforms are absolutely critical in focusing the world's attention, and indeed resources, toward improving the lives of those living through conflict and crisis. But they are not enough. Above all, the global community must help societies marred by conflict and crisis to build up the community's resilience to resist the further spread or a resurgence of a conflict.

What stands in the way of advancing a girl-centered strategy when responding to conflicts and crises? First, we lack critical information. Research documents how adolescent girls are faring globally, but these findings are reflective of more stable settings. Second, the media coverage of girls in crisis - from the Chibok Girls in Nigeria to girls in refugee camps in Jordan, to sex slaves held under ISIS - far too often sensationalizes coverage of girls' horrific circumstances. Instead, the media must take a broader view of girls' realities and report back on the rebuilding of lives and communities after the traditional media cycle for crises has ended.

Third, civil society groups, who are often frontline responders in crises, represent an under-tapped resource in building knowledge on how to address the needs of adolescent girls. Field staff trained to work in post-crisis settings can play an important role in facilitating critical reflection and documenting evidence that will inform policy and programs moving forward.

Fourth, those who have perpetrated violence against women and girls often emerge from conflict with impunity, or even as powerful leaders of new regimes. We must use law and policy tools at our disposal to ensure those who are responsible for perpetrating violence against girls are held to account. Moreover, we must pioneer new tools, which specifically advance the rights and lift up the voices of girls and women who have survived. We must work together to establish a new policy agenda for girls in crisis, which not only protects them from violence and exploitation in such instances, but also advance their rights.

In all spheres, let's not move forward without the active involvement of girls themselves, who, through lived experience, are deeply familiar with difficult and dangerous times, and are knowledgeable about practical solutions that will meet immediate needs and prepare girls for the day when crisis abates and communities rebuild.

Each and every one of us has the power to say this is not the future we want for adolescent girls like Espérence. Let's start today.

Ambassador Melanne Verveer is the Executive Director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, and former Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women's Issues.

Sarah Degnan Kambou is the President of the International Center for Research on Women.

In the naughts, British-born novelist and author Rana Dasgupta was thrilled to call Delhi his home -- a city still buzzing with possibility after India’s 1991 entry into the world of market-driven capitalism. Today, he raises concerns that India’s economic rise has come with massive inequality, environmental destruction, and potential social unrest.


In Part 2 of an interview with the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Dasgupta shares his view of the contradictions and tensions of India’s economic and political scenes. What does it mean that pro-business Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi was elected prime minister in 2014, while Arvind Kejriwal, a firebrand social activist who speaks for the poor, easily won a second term to lead the nation’s capital in Delhi? How does India’s warlike capitalism co-exist with its deeply democratic spirit? What are the biggest challenges for India going forward?
Lynn Parramore: As the American middle class grows increasingly insecure, how is India’s new middle class faring? How do you view its economic status and political presence?
Rana Dasgupta: India plugs into the global system at a later stage, so the wealth, security, and confidence the American middle class gained through the 1950s and 60s is probably never going to happen.
A few decades ago, for instance, many college graduates in America and elsewhere worked in or even owned bookshops —small businesses that usually didn’t rise to big corporate levels. Then big chains came in and bought many of them up, and then Amazon replaced this entire system with new one in which there was a very highly paid, business-owning minority and lots of minimum wage work.
Is globalizing India going to start with all those little bookshops and then go through the entire same process? No, it’s going to go straight to the end—with the book packing and delivery labor and the people at headquarters doing the marketing and financing. The form of capitalism that’s coming in India will never have the kind of promise that it had in 1950s America, even from the outset. America had to make various concessions to its working majorities for many reasons. The economy was growing so fast over the Second World War it was just better to settle disputes: give the workers what they want and get them carrying on producing.
With the spread of global capitalism elsewhere, the business owners are more careful about giving way concessions because they’re starting off in a much less profitable kind of enterprise. They get the call center work and so on from the U.S. because of low costs, and have to be very careful about offering bargaining power to workers. They can’t start bargaining over the length of the working week or wages because the business will go under very quickly. They actually expect that India will become too expensive at some point and they’ll have to move to Bangladesh or wherever, but the costs of moving are high, so they want to put it off as long as possible.
In America, at the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century workers were campaigning for security, to be looked after when they were sick and in their old age and so on. In India, and I suspect in lots of other places in the world, all these kinds of securities were associated with socialism. In capitalism, it’s assumed that no one is going to take care of you — and even in the Singaporean version of capitalism, the Asian values take care of all that social stuff. So it’s pure business. You take care of your sick parents, not the state. People don’t expect these securities, and the system has been set up to make sure that that kind of thing doesn’t happen. Wages are very seductive — people say, look, I can earn like a thousand dollars a month when my father earned maybe 200 dollars. Amazing! But I don’t have health insurance or old age insurance. People can buy themselves a mobile phone and that helps win certain political battles because middle class people can function very well at the everyday level and travel and do lots of things their parents couldn’t do. But this masks the fact that they’re very insecure.
LP: In what ways has globalization impacted notions of democracy in India?
RD: One shouldn’t imply that there’s no argument about these things, even among elites. There’s a lot of debate, and to some extent the election of Modi as prime minister and the election of Kejriwal, who just won a second term as Chief Minister of Delhi, are signs of this.
What is democracy supposed to do for us? Is it just about making sure that big businesses continue making lots of money? The answer is not clear. Some people think that the best thing for India is lots of dynamic big business. It’s assumed that this creates lots of dynamism in the economy generally, and it also gives a sense of symbolic power to India, which is important to people who feel that the country has been historically marginalized and treated with contempt. We would like to have our Microsofts and so on.
Modi makes a lot of his masculine power, the width of his chest and things like that.  He’s an authoritarian figure who is clearly anti-democratic in a lot of his instincts, and also very charismatic. He presents himself as vegetarian, frugal, and uncorrupt. He’s got this contemporary slant on Hinduism that is all about being personally hygienic in his habits, working very hard, and being devoted to development in business. Modi is actually married, but he’s always claimed to be a single man, because sex is one of those appetites he wishes to disavow. It’s like he wishes to say I don’t eat meat, I don’t have sex, I’m not interested in pleasures, women, and so on. I’m just working for the people. I don’t take money, I’m not corrupt. I started as a tea boy. I’m Hindu and I’m going to make India great. That combination of things is very attractive to some people. It’s about big business and a masculine, pure figure leading it.
LP: What segments of the population are uneasy with his brand of politics?
RD: Modi has been conspicuously unsympathetic to lots of people who are very uneasy for various reasons. He is uninterested in the environment, and that makes people uneasy – in Delhi for instance no one can breathe. The water’s polluted and the ground is polluted. A lot of Muslims are very uneasy because there is a quiet subtext of a Hindu purification of the nation. There’s also this very fascist undercurrent that Modi is too intelligent to actually state, but there’s a widespread feeling that he gives assent to it to some extent. A lot of women are uneasy about this very masculinist talk of India, coming at a time when women’s security is conspicuously under threat. There’s also labor —he has withdrawn or declared his lack of interest in a lot of the safety nets that were extended by the Congress Party to the poor. He basically has a neoliberal, trickle-down idea of how the economy works.
With Modi’s huge election victory, a lot of people felt that India was supporting most the authoritarian capitalist way. But there’s another idea held in reserve which calls into question all of that — an idea of a much more radical democracy that comes closer to the people and makes the poor visible in its language. Kejriwal is part of that. The broom is the symbol of his party, the sweepers, the poorest people. He’s also interested in fighting corruption and reinventing democracy. For him, democracy is not about very remote people surrounded by enormous security and the kind of accoutrements of the most imperial British power.
Kejriwal famously operated out of his tiny apartment in an unglamorous section of East Delhi. But he’s a guy who has been brought in to run Delhi just a few months after Modi’s victory, so this signals that both political currents are alive and well, that the jury is out on how politics and capitalism fit together in India. Modi can’t be too confident when in his own backyard in the capital, a tiny rival party won massively. He should be aware of putting up too many posters of himself and becoming too much of a one-party state kind of leader, because in the background there is this other, very different possibility.
I think it’s to some extent Kejriwal’s victory is a backlash or a warning. India does have a deeply democratic spirit. That is the deepest thing about Indian culture.
LP: Sounds like people in India don’t really like political extremism, but how do they feel about economic extremism?
RD: I think that one of the things that happens in these kinds of countries is that people are a bit naïve about economic extremism. They take a long time to recognize it for what it is. Economic extremism could lead to political extremism because in the worst kinds of scenarios in India we could have enormous class warfare. We might have just so many people whose lives become unsustainable in the countryside arriving in the cities and realizing that they have nothing to do there and that they don’t have water to drink, and stuff like that. We might have big turbulence in the cities and then there would have to be some kind of political solution.
LP: What do you hope for India’s future? Can the democratic spirit survive the continuation of the kind of war-like capitalism you’ve described?
RD: I think and hope for more moderate solutions.  After all, this is a democracy. Poor people have more votes than rich people. The poor in India have an immense resilience, so things can get very bad before it has any political effects. They are incredibly networked. When people in the cities don’t have anything, the people in the countryside take care of them. So there’s a lot of slack in the system even when people are in very dire situations. But ultimately if, say, 500 million people can’t feed themselves or survive, or they just don’t have anywhere to go because the countryside is just full of factories and real estate, then they convert. Hopefully there will be political ideas that have enough quality that these situations can be resolved.
There is the potential for immense wealth creation in India in the next 40 or 50 years, so there will be money and resources to redistribute and resources and as long as the tides of poverty and violence are not too catastrophic, then I think probably the system can readjust itself. Right now, within India, without anything else happening outside, there’s enough prospects for growth. In 40 to 50 years, economies of the West are going to be in dramatic decline, and in the longer term, I think the global system as a whole will face some sort of crisis and that will affect India, too. But in the medium term, India has pretty good growth prospects and hopefully there’s the quality of leadership and ideas that can redistribute some of that wealth and find livable solutions to some of these problems.
But inequality and the environment are going to be massive in Indian politics. Really, no one is talking about water, but giving 1.3 billion people clean water to drink is becoming very difficult. And you can’t survive for very long without it, so if a city of 25 million people — and there are at least two Indian cities that have that kind of number — has no water, the effects are immediate. When there’s no housing the effects could be years away, but when there’s no water, there are water riots immediately. People who don’t have it will steal it because they have to.
So water could be one of the triggering events in Indian cities for how a sort of mini-political revolution might happen and realization on the part of the middle classes that there is actually a wider world that is up against its limits.

The story of Manon Lescaut is the classic saga of a young woman torn between love and money. It has inspired several operas and the Met returned its production of Massenet's lovely and popular Manon to the stage last night with a sterling cast led by Diana Damrau in the title role and Vittorio Grigolo as her one true love, Chevalier des Grieux.

Damrau, known mostly for her coloratura and Mozart roles, sails through the soaring dramatic passages of Massenet's luscious score. But it is the delicacy and sheer beauty of her heartbreaking pianissimo lines, especially in her Act 2 "Adieu, notre petite table," that evokes real sympathy for a character with undeniable gold-digger tendencies.

Grigolo, the dashing Italian tenor who scored a big success at the Met in the title role of "Les Contes d'Hoffmann" earlier this year, sings with passionate intensity throughout, his rich voice full of fervor, and his second-act Dream aria ("En fermant les yeux") a show-stopping moment.

In fact, Damrau and Grigolo make a fine pair of lovers, with some real chemistry that comes through in their several duets. Manon's third-act seduction of des Grieux as he is about to take religious vows (and delivering a zealous "Ah! Fuyez, douce image") is sultry, and their final death scene is a tender reprise of their ill-fated love affair.

Manon is Massenet's most popular opera and it is the most frequently performed operatic version of Abbe Prevost's novel, though Puccini's Manon Lescaut, which will have a new production next season at the Met, runs a close second.

The opera opens at an inn in town of Amiens where Lescaut is waiting for his 15-year-old cousin Manon to arrive by coach on her way from the small village of her birth to a convent. When she does, she is full of wonder at all the sights she has seen and recounts them in the lovely "Je suis encore tout etourdie" aria, liltingly and enchantingly sung by Damrau.

The bright lights of Amiens are alluring, and Manon, dressed in a country skirt, blouse, and jacket and wearing a straw hat, is captivated by the fine gowns the ladies at the inn are wearing. It's a variation of the age-old question: how are you going to keep 'em in the convent once they've seen Amiens?

But Manon is destined for brighter lights than Amiens. She rebuffs a rich old roue named Guillot who tries to hit on her at the inn, but when the handsome young des Grieux shows up on his way home to his father's estate, it's love at first sight and she runs away to Paris with him.

When next we see Manon, she and des Grieux are living in a garret, money running out, and des Grieux talking marriage. Opportunity knocks for Manon when de Bretigny, another rich man from the Amiens inn, proposes she come live with him. The prospect of a life of luxury and ease are too much and she leaves des Grieux, who is about to be kidnapped anyway by agents of his father, the Count.

But riches and all of Paris at her feet do not prevent Manon from feeling pangs of jealousy when she learns des Grieux is about to take monastic vows. She tracks him down at the church of St. Suplice and convinces him to run away with her one more time.

Once again, money begins to run low and Manon persuades des Grieux to go with her to a gambling club and risk all they've got left in a card game with Guillot. Des Grieux wins but Guillot accuses them both of cheating. Des Grieux's father gets him out but Manon ends up in jail and is about to be deported. Des Grieux tries to arrange her escape, but she has become ill in prison and dies in his arms on the road to Le Havre.

While these Manon performances are musically captivating -- Emmanuel Villaume leads a robust reading of the score from the magnificent Met Orchestra and fine all-round cast, especially Dwayne Croft's de Bretigny, join Damrau and Grigolo -- the 2012 Met production by Laurent Pelly is not without problems.

The time has been moved forward 100 years from the original late 18th century, though apart from the costumes you might not recognize the settings as Belle Epoque. The opening act is a doll-house configuration of Amiens, and the second act Parisian garret looks more like a cold-water walkup on the Lower East Side and is pushed so far upstage that the audience seems to be viewing the action from across the street. Even the final act's highway to Le Havre more resembles a mean street in some deserted big-city ghetto.

Some of the stage directions are so broadly histrionic they are almost risible. In the fourth-act Hotel de Transylvanie, which looks more like an underground speakeasy than a fashionable gambling club, Manon falls to the floor and begins scooping up banknotes, greedily clutching them to her breast, when the gendarmes arrive.

But the main attraction is still Massenet's wonderfully Romantic score and the Met has provided two bravura lovers in Damrau and Grigolo and a strong roster of singers to go with them to overcome any inconsistencies of the staging.