Discovery Channel Magazine India 2015-01 Vol. 1 No. 12

THE BYGONE GLORY 28 CROWD PSYCHE 42 WHEN POMPEII FELL

HOW PANIC AFFECTS MOBS

THE SPOOK FACTOR 54 TINY TECH 86 BUILDING HORROR MOVIES

SCIENCE ZOOMED OUT

JANUARY 2015 I `150

C H A N N E L M AG A Z I N E I N D I A

WILD WAYFARERS

FOLLOWING A 2,000 KMS WILD TRAIL THROUGH NORTH TANZANIA PG 70

EDITOR'S LETTER

C H A N N E L M AG A Z I N E I N D I A Editor-in-Chief Aroon Purie Group Chief Executive Officer Ashish Bagga Group Synergy and Creative Officer Kalli Purie Editorial Director Jamal Shaikh Managing Editor Abha Srivastava Sub Editor & Feature Writer Adii Dande Art Director Piyush Garg Asst Art Director Rahul Sharma Designer Kishore Rawat

Impact (Advertising)

Group Business Head Manoj Sharma Associate Publisher (Impact) Anil Fernandes Senior General Managers Kaustav Chatterjee (East), Jitendra Lad (West), General Manager Shailender Nehru (Bangalore), General Manager Velu Balasubramaniam (Chennai)

Business

Head Marketing Neeraj Chaturvedi AGM-Marketing & Circulation Ajay Mishra Chief Manager, Operations GL Ravik Kumar Marketing Managers Kunal Bag, Anuradha Rana Production Anuj Jamdegni

News stand Sales

Chief General Manager D.V.S. Rama Rao General Manager (National Sales) Deepak Bhatt Deputy General Manager (Operations) Vipin Bagga Regional Sales Manager (North) Manish Kumar Srivastava Regional Sales Manager (East) Joydeep Roy Regional Sales Manager (South) Arokia Raj L

DISCOVERY NETWORKS ASIA-PACIFIC

Editorial Board

President and Managing Director Arjan Hoekstra EVP and GM, South Asia Rahul Johri VP, Marketing, South Asia Rajiv Bakshi VP, Programming Charmaine Kwan VP, Marketing Magdalene Ng

Editorial (Novus Media Solutions) Editor Luke Clark Design Director Richard MacLean Chief Subeditor Josephine Pang Staff Writer Daniel Seifert Photo Editor Haryati Mahmood Senior Designer Bessy Kim

Subscription/Customer Care

Email: [email protected] Phone: +91 120 246 9900 Mail: Discovery Channel Magazine India, A 61, Sector 57, Noida 201 301 VOLUME 1 NUMBER 12

Discovery Channel Magazine reserves all rights throughout the world. Reproduction in any manner, in whole or part, in English or other languages, is prohibited. Discovery Channel Magazine does not take responsibility for returning unsolicited publication material. • Published and distributed monthly by Living Media India Ltd. (Regd. Office: K-9, Connaught Circus, New Delhi – 110001) under license granted by Discovery Networks Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd., 21 Media Circle #8-01, Singapore 138562. • All Discovery Channel logos © 2014 Discovery Communications, LLC. Discovery Channel and the Discovery Channel logo are trademarks of Discovery Communications, LLC, used under licence. All rights reserved. • The views and opinions expressed or implied in Discovery Channel Magazine do not necessarily reflect those of Living Media India Ltd., MediaCorp Pte Ltd or Discovery Networks Asia-Pacific, including their directors and editorial staff. • All information is correct at the time of going to print. • All disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of competent courts and forums in Delhi / New Delhi only. • Published & printed by Ashish Bagga on behalf of Living Media India Limited. Printed at Thomson Press India Limited 18 - 35, Milestone, Delhi Mathura Road, Faridabad - 121 007, (Haryana). Published at K - 9, Connaught Circus, New Delhi - 110 001. • Editor: Jamal Shaikh

04 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

DISCOVERY IS THE SPICE OF LIFE As I write writethis thisletter lettertoto you, I’ve you, I’ve just finished watching just finished watching a special aepisode specialwhere episodeDiscovery where Discoveryadventure Channel adventure Channel star Bear star Bear Grylls takes Hollywood Grylls takes Hollywood toyboy toyboy Zac on Efron on a 24-hour Zac Efron a 24-hour adventure adventurethrough throughthe thewild. wild.

The episode begins in dramatic fashion: with a helicopter jump that propels the young actor into a dense jungle with a parachute attached to his back (no tandem here!) and Grylls for company. Over the course of the day, the delicate-looking star rappels down uneasy slopes, scavenges for food, eats dead reptiles, and even undertakes a death-defying waterfall crossing on a weak-looking rope strung across a cliff. This was no boy-band stuff; and however much of a Hugh Jackman fan I may be, as I watched this adventure unfold, Zac Efron was my new hero of the hour. The thing about life is that it works on demand; it stops unfolding the minute we hit Pause. Without the thirst for adventure, for knowledge, to travel and discover, we run the risk of becoming small-statured ‘toyboys’ in our own eyes. On the other hand, if we push ourselves to the limit, ask questions and go all out to get answers and results, we come across new reasons to keep us going. I’m happy to say that this first issue of 2015 will give you enough fodder to kickstart that adventure right away. First up is a travel feature like no other: ‘The Wild Things’ (p70) traverses 2,000kms

in Northern Tanzania following the paths of wild beasts that could put the ‘big five’ to shame. ‘Ashes to Ashes’ (p28) takes you back to 79AD, replaying key events following a volcano that erupted and disrupted a town near Naples in unexpected little ways. And the story ‘The Living Crowd’ (p42) studies the psychology behind crowd behaviour, a subject more relevant to an overpopulated India than other parts of the world. For those up for a scare, turn to ‘The Fear Factory’ on p54, that will unravel why horror stories make you break into a sweat, yet keep you entertained so much. Meanwhile, Mr Grylls, my 2015 challenge for you is to do what you did with Efron to that kid sensation called Justin Beiber. The adventure you instill may finally make him a man.

Jamal Shaikh Editorial Director

twitter.com/JamalShaikh instagram.com/JamalShaikh facebook.com/JamalSShaikh

ISSUE 01/15

CONTENTS DEPARTMENTS

FRONTIERS

GOING EMO

12

What do WhatsApp users, the White House and the Japanese all have in common? NEWS

CAVE ART

14

Asian painters may have toppled their European cousins to claim the oldest evidence of art ADVENTURE

ANIMAL TAMING

16

Six simple tricks to turn an octopus into your pet and make a crocodile stop leering at you

18

Pack your sunblock, a few dates and windshield wiper fluid. Why? We're headed to the desert

20 24

HORIZONS

TEA FANTASY

24

Feast your senses with tea sommelier Anamika Singh’s array of fancy brews that have been inspired by her travels and musings

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE WOW 10 BUILDING "CASTELLS" IN SPAIN TAKES TEAMWORK, AND A MASTERY OF HEIGHTS

NEWS 14 KEYBOARDS OR TOUCH SCREENS - FIND OUT WHAT'S THE BEST DATA ENTRY METHOD FOR YOU

THE GRID 13 THE BLOODHOUND SSC, BEING DESIGNED BY BRITISH DESIGNERS, AIMS TO BE THE FIRST 1,000 MILES PER HOUR CAR

WILD TAMERS 16 YOU CAN MAKE AN OCTOPUS CATATONIC BY HOLDING IT UPSIDE DOWN IN YOUR PALM, AND THAT'S NOT ALL!

06 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

NATURE 18 IN THE ISLAMIC FAITH, THERE ARE 99 NAMES OF ALLAH KNOWN TO MAN. WHAT HAVE DESERTS GOT TO DO WITH THAT? NAIL FAIL 20 IS THIS ONE OF THE CREEPIEST PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERIMENTS EVER?

18 HISTORY 22 BE A PART OF A "BLOODY" BANTER WITH THE CONQUERER, THE KHAN OF KHANS - GENGHIS KHAN WHAT'S ON 95 THE TIGER SISTERS OF TELIA, REDISGN MY BRAIN, INSIDE THE ANIMAL MIND, TETHERED, AND A LOT MORE...

COVER IMAGE CORBIS

OBSESSIONS

FEELIN’ HOT

54

8 08 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

86

70

FEATURES ISSUE 01/15 HISTORY

WALK THROUGH HISTORY

28

Meet a man who walked the dirty streets of Pompeii, the day this Ancient Roman hub was wiped off the map PSYCHOLOGY

MASS EFFECT

42

28

42

A peek into what exactly happens to a mass gathering when panic strikes. How things can go awry, and how it can be managed SCIENCE

FRIGHT NIGHT

54

Why do we break into a sweat and get the creeps while watching a horror movie? Is your fear genetic or are film-makers successfully freaking you out? COVER STORY

THE GREAT MIGRATION

70

The epic march sees millions of beasts chasing life-giving water across Africa. But they are followed by death-dealing predators TECHNOLOGY

SIZE MATTERS

86

Small is smart, sexy and strong. A peek into the world of nanotechnology to find out just how...

11 09 JANUARY 2015

PHOTO ALBERT GEA/ REUTERS

COME TOGETHER The formation of human towers, known as castells, is a tradition in Catalonia, in Spain. Built traditionally at local festivals, the castell is considered a success when it is formed and unformed without falling apart. Here, Castellers Colla Joves Xiquets de Valls start to form a human tower during a biannual competition in Tarragona city. Interestingly, castells were declared by UNESCO in 2010 to be among the “Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity”, which is a scheme to encourage local communities to protect intangible cultural heritage and the local people who sustain these forms of cultural expressions. Among the many others included in this list is the Turkish coffee tradition, Mariachi music from Mexico, the Argentinian tango, Tibetan opera and the Jultagi tightrope walking technique from Korea. 10 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

WOW

11 JANUARY 2015

ISSUE 01/15

ILLUSTRATION QUENTIN GABRIEL

FRONTIERS

FACE VALUE WHEN AN EXPRESSION IS ACTUALLY WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS! A messaging app named Emojli was released in 2014, which only allowed emoji chat. Think smiley faces, hearts and other wordless symbols. Now, Facebook is rolling out its own style of emojis, called Facebook Stickers, for comments. All these smiley faces are making brands see dollar signs. For instance, the Facebook Messenger app released a set of customised emojis for the cinema release of the The Expendables 3. Emojis have come a long way since they were invented in pager-era Japan in 1995. Research shows Whatsapp users send an average of 96 emojis a day. The

12 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

White House even released an economic report using emojis. But in a day-to-day sense, we already know how vital they are at modifying communication. Sending “Come to dinner, your grandmother’s here! ” is sweet. Sending “Come to dinner, your grandmother’s here” is unsettling. We’re likely to see more of emojis, but it’s doubtful they will reach critical mass and strangle words completely — particularly when it comes to more complex concepts. What would an emoji for schadenfreude (the German word for enjoying someone’s misfortune) even look like?

DISCOVERY

THE GRID AMERICAS

EUROPE

MIDDLE EAST/AFRICA DESERT DUCKFACE Like

SELFIE SABOTAGE

STOP THE CLOCK

Apple and Facebook, two of the biggest brands in the world, are pretty male-centric. In each company, seven out of 10 staff members are male. In an effort to attract more women, both companies are reportedly offering an “egg-freezing” service, theorising that this will help women to have babies when they are older, without sacrificing their career. In the US, egg-freezing costs about US$10,000, plus US$500 per year for storage.

PEST CONTROL The maximum prison sentence for social media trolls who spread “venom” online may soon quadruple in the UK — proof that these trolls are no longer seen as a mere annoyance. Justice secretary Chris Grayling recently announced that trolls could be jailed for up to two years. The maximum custodial sentence is currently six months. He told press the measure “marks our determination to take a stand against a baying cyber-mob”.

GAME ON! “Just imagine if

SAY WHAT? Looking for an umbrella that will never blow inside out? Take a look at a product called Sa. The brainchild of the New York design firm Nooka, a Sa looks origami-ish — because it is. Instead of an internal metal skeleton, the Sa’s inner and outer canopies are plastic layered and pyramid shaped. Never flipping in the wind, it will never open accidentally; magnets in the panels ensure it stays closed. It arrives in March 2015 for US$69.

THE PHWOAR CAR To call it a simple “kit car” would be an insult. The Bloodhound SSC, currently being designed by British engineers, aims to be the first 1,000 miles per hour car in the next year or two. To do so, it’s got to be tough. It will have to withstand temperatures near 3,000 degrees Celcius burning out of its rocket engines, generating 21 tonnes of thrust. No wonder it’s made out of 3,500 individual components.

WET ONES Never, ever give

FRIENDLY COPS

Gal Viharaya is one of the holiest sites in Sri Lanka. Blooming in the ancient city of Polonnaruwa, this rock temple is dedicated to Buddha, and has stood for nearly 900 years. But thanks to its popularity with tourists, it has a very modern rule: no selfies allowed. The site’s four giant Buddha statues are the holiest area of Polonnaruwa. Visitors must approach barefoot, and cannot turn their back on the statues. Hence, no self-portrait shots.

we could engage workers with work as much as games engaged people.” Wise words from Mike Cooper, CEO of Australian media agency PHD. Speaking at Spikes Asia, in Singapore in 2014, Cooper argued that tweaking work tasks into play could transform businesses. “Work is a game so badly designed that you have to pay people to play it,” Cooper snorted. “The CEO of any organisation needs to start to think like a game designer.”

a “wet willy” to a policeman. This childish act involves wetting your finger and sticking it into a victim’s ear. Riley Swearingen, on leave from the Air Force, decided to do so anyway, sticking both spit-covered fingers into a cop’s ear. The officer did not see the funny side, and the 24-year-old was sentenced to three days jail. He got off lightly — assault involving a bodily fluid is a felony in Minnesota that can land you in jail for three years.

POLICING

DESIGN

SOCIAL MEDIA

A S I A- PAC I F I C

STRANGE AND SERIOUS EVENTS FROM ACROSS THE WORLD

Fast Cars

A TIMELINE OF THE WORLD LAND SPEED RECORD. MEASURED OVER 1.6 KILOMETRES

1902 124 KPH 1898 63 KPH

1927 326 KPH 1914 199 KPH

Stockholm police are being praised for their handling of a supposed “break-in”, reported by an 11-year-old who was home alone. The call turned out to be a false alarm but, as the local police posted on Twitter, “He was afraid and the patrol stayed. Helped with the maths homework.” Days later they posted, “Nobody needed help with maths homework last night. People learned other lessons instead. From the school of hard knocks.” 1965 893 KPH 1935 484 KPH

1970 1001 KPH

all reasonable people, selfies make us want to claw our eyes out. Except when they involve what looks like the world’s happiest camel. Recently, a group of three Egyptian twenty-something lads took a group selfie at a camel camp — not knowing that a guffawing animal was photobombing them. #Camelfie is now trending on social media, and with good reason. Check out the happy snap below. #DCMlovescamels

EYECOPS Dubai’s police

force just gets cooler and cooler. We’ve previously reported that they drive around in supercars like Lamborghinis and Ferraris (they have to, in order to catch speeders rocketing around in similar autos). Now, they have blinged up their faces, adding Google Glasses to their uniforms, in order to send a live feed to operations, identifying wanted cars by their number plate, and photographing traffic violations. 1997 1,227 KPH

(THE RECORD STILL STANDS)

13 JANUARY 2015

NEWS NEWS BLOOD MONEY ISIS IS AMONG THE WORLD’S WEALTHIEST TERRORIST ORGANISATIONS ACCORDING TO NEW FIGURES FROM THE US TREASURY DEPARTMENT

US$1 MILLION A DAY

AMOUNT OF MONEY ISIS MAKES FROM BLACK MARKET SALES OF OIL TAKEN FROM SEIZED OIL FIELDS

US$8 MILLION A MONTH

AMOUNT OF MONEY ISIS MAKES FROM EXTORTION OF LOCAL BUSINESSES

US$20 MILLION

AMOUNT ISIS MADE IN 2014 FROM RANSOMING KIDNAP VICTIMS

HANDS OF TIME

A wane and a doodle from more than 35,000 years ago

At well over 39,000 years old, it is likely the oldest work of art known to man — and it’s just been discovered in caves in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Lining the limestone walls are dozens of hand stencils and paintings of animals, which the ancient inhabitants likely hunted. The find is mindblowingly exciting for more reasons than one. Cave paintings this old had previously only been found in Europe. Maxime Aubert, an archeologist at Griffith University in Australia, shared his findings in the journal Nature. As he explained, the Sulawesi find “allows us to move away from the view that Europe was special. There was some idea that early Europeans were more aware of themselves and their surroundings. Now we can say that’s not true”. For another thing, the hand stencils have also been dubbed “proto-

graffiti” — allowing spraypaint-wielding taggers to feel just a little closer to the dawn of human intelligence itself. But perhaps most interesting is how spread apart in time the Sulawesi artworks are. The oldest stencil is at least 39,900 years old. That waving hand

Marine Mystery Solved sits next to an ancient “pig-deer”. Likely the oldest figurative depiction in the world, it is 35,400 years old. Other paintings in the cave are 27,000 years old — proof that humans were in here doodling 13,000 years apart. In modern terms it would be like your Twitter update sitting next to a self-portrait of your descendant drawn 100 generations from now. In a world where we increasingly make our artistic marks on a touchscreen, uploaded to an ethereal internet, it makes you wonder, will any of your handiwork still be around 40,000 years from now?

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Underwater archaeologists identified a shipwreck found in “astonishing condition” in Canadian waters as the long-lost HMS Erabus. The vessel set sail from England in 1865 in search of the fabled Northwest Passage.

Type It ONE FINGERED PECK

TWO FINGERED PECK

TOUCH TYPE

Is it fastest fingers first or are you a bit of a slow starter? “You want to teach your kids to touch-type. They’ll bless you for it later. Or they’ll hunt and peck like electro-chickens for the rest of their days.” John Sutherland, Professor, University College London, waxing lyrical there. These words ring very true to us. A design member of our team is of the hunt and peck school, and types very sluggishly. Pleas to buy him a touchtyping course fall on deaf ears, and its possible he’s waiting for computers to become fully voice-activated. With keyboards giving way to touchscreens, who knows what data entry methods lie ahead? Which typing style are you? It might be slow, but of these three visualisations of typing styles, the one fingered peck looks the prettiest.

ADVENTURE ESSENTIAL LIFE SKILLS

Quote Unquote

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN SCI-FI WRITER

TAME THOSE ANIMAL INSTINCTS Battle a bear, stroke a shark to avoid turning into chow for the beasts!

CHICKEN

A chicken can be hypnotised by placing its head flat on the ground, and then drawing a line outward from its eyes along the ground. The fowl will instantly enter a catatonic state lasting for

CROCODILE

The Nile crocodile has the strongest bite force on the planet — when it is clamping its jaws shut. The muscles that open the jaws are so weak you can immobilise them with a big rubber band. Or for added irony, crocodile clips. 16 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

LOBSTER

Have you somehow blundered into a Three Stooges sketch, as you hop and squirm as an irate lobster clamps its claw over your nose? Hold the opposite claw shut — this will often cause the animal to release its grip.

BEAR

Ever met a big brown bear like a Grizzly? Most experts say you should play dead. Approached by a black bear? Stand your ground and shout. But brown bears can be black, and black bears can be brown so, er, good luck telling the difference.

OCTOPUS

In the 1920s, a Dutch zoologist discovered you could make an octopus catatonic by holding it upside down in your palm. He even changed hands, noting that it showed,"no more reaction than if it had been a football.”

SHARK

Like chickens, sharks can be induced into “tonic immobility”, a dreamlike state. Stroke a leopard shark on its sensitive snout and it will go limp. Killer whales have even been seen holding sharks upside down until their prey suffocates.

“A human being should be

able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialisation is for insects” He sounds like an annoyingly gifted man, and in a way Heinlein was. Together he, Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov were the “Big Three”, a trio of writers who penned some of the most influential science fiction of the 20th century. This dizzying list is from his 1973 novel Time Enough for Love, featuring a man who lives for 2,000 years. Wow, if we lived for two millennia we could probably invade Sicily while making homemade pesto too. But we’re stuck with an 80year lifespan, so most of our time is spent trying to figure out how to install our new printer and chew with our mouths closed.

PHOTOS CORBIS (MAIN); THE HEINLEIN PRIZE TRUST (ROBERT HEINLEIN)

IMAL SIX ANING M A T S TRICK

3 TO FOR DEOLS SURVI SERT VAL

SCIENCE HOT STUFF

DESERTS

The shimmering mirage. The baking wind. Shifting sands. Incalculable desolation. We are drawn to deserts, marveling that such monstrously harsh landscapes can exist on the same planet as massage chairs, whipped cream and jacuzzis. Would you believe that the seasonal salt marsh, The Grear Rann of Kutch, located in Gujarat, India, and Sindh, Pakistan, stretches to about 10,000 sq.m. It is one of the largest salt deserts in the world. This is also one of the hottest regions in the country, with summer temperatures peaking to as much as 49.5 degrees celcius. However, the winter temperatures drop down dramatically to below zero degree celcius.

A LETTER

In 1815, American ship captain James Riley and his crew ran aground off the coast of the Sahara, and were captured by local slavers. Riley told them a desperate lie — that he knew a man who would pay handsomely to free the crew. They were marched hundreds of miles through the desert, drinking camel urine to survive. Upon arrival, Riley penned a note to “The French, English, Spanish or American Consuls” appealing for rescue, and they were freed.

Eyes have an inner lid so thin they can see through it to protect from blowing sand

Skin only begins sweating at temperatures above 41 degrees Celsius

In the First Gulf War, 1,848 American M1A1 Abrams tanks were deployed. Only nine were destroyed during Operation Desert Storm — but not by Iraqis. Seven were shattered by friendly fire, and two purposely wrecked to prevent capture

1,600 square

kilometres

WINDSHIELD WIPER FLUID

SHIPS OF THE DESERT WHY CAMELS ARE PERFECT

9

Henry Morello should have been a goner when he got lost in the Arizona desert in 2011. He was 84, and his car had slid into a ravine. While daytime temperatures weren’t too bad in February, the nights were bitterly cold. He stuck to the vehicle, but had little water. His solution? Drinking the windshield wiper fluid. He was found after five days, and doctors pondered why Morello hadn’t snuffed it — the fluid contains methanol, a poison that can blind you.

of China’s land turns to desert every year thanks to climate change and clearing the land of vegetation. That’s an area equivalent to the city of London

6

In just six hours, the world’s deserts soak up more energy from the sun than humans use in a year

5.6°C

The Cape ground squirrel of the Kalahari carries a parasol at all times. Its bushy tail can reduce body heat by nearly six degrees

Nose covered with stiff hair so they can forage among rough vegetation

DATES

With just three ripe dates, you could survive for nine days in the Sahara, a Tuareg tribesman told a reporter from CNN. “You eat just a date skin on each of the first three days, and for the next three days you eat the meat. Then you suck one date stone each day until day nine.” Tuaregs chew without their teeth meeting — a defense against eating food where every mouthful is gritty with sand.

Mouth lined with thick skin, it allows them to eat thorny plants common to deserts

Why do camels look so superior? In the Islamic faith, there are 99 names for Allah known to man. Muslim nomads believe that only camels know the 100th name — hence their proud expressions.

HALF THE AMAZON

The Amazon rainforest couldn't survive without the Sahara. The dust of the African desert is carried across the ocean and to South America. It’s packed with nutrients that help fertilise the soil of the Amazon basin. Much of the dust stems from Bodele depression - an area in Chad that is one of the dustiest spots on earth. It fertilises a landmass the size of the USA. Mother Nature, you are just full of surprises!

PHOTOS GETTY IMAGES (DESERT, DUST STORM)

Facts about barren lands that occupy thousands of acres!

OBSESSIONS NEWS IT'S ALL IN THE MIND

Champagne Wishes

Many restaurants design their menus with psychology in mind — engineering text and placement to make you pick the priciest items. Here are a few crafty tricks:

` NO ` A lack of currency marker distances you from the reminder that you are spending money

SCATTERING PRICES

Instead of placing prices in a run-on column, scattering them around the page discourages patrons from comparing costs. And spending big

NO WHOLE NUMBERS

NAIL-BITING END TO A BITTER EXPERIMENT

`9.99 feels cheaper than `10, and prices ending in .95 are said to feel “friendlier” still

Read to know how scientific experiments should never be conducted!

Psychologist Lawrence LeShan thought he had a crackerjack way of getting people to stop biting their nails — subconscious sleep learning. So in August 1942, he visited a boy’s summer camp in New York, found out which campers had nail-biting habits, and assigned them the same cabin. He recorded the phrase, “my fingernails taste terribly bitter,” and played it on a phonograph nightly — until the record player broke. Instead of quitting his mission because of faulty equipment, LeShan went back to basics. He stood in the doorway and repeated the phrase 300 times a night. After subjecting the kids to 16,000 suggestions, 40 percent of the youngsters had quit the habit, versus none in the control group. LeShan declared the experiment a success — discounting the fact that if a strange man mutters, “my fingernails taste terribly bitter” in the dark until he’s hoarse, you’ll do pretty much anything to get him to stop. Forget about sleeping, let alone sleep learning. LeShan’s experiment is now regularly taught in university as how not to conduct a social psychology experiment. 20 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

MAKE IT POP

Special dishes may nestle below a photo, have a dotted box painted around them, or sit next to an icon like a chili pepper or heart

CLEVER COMPARISONS

As one expert explains: “By putting high-profit items next to the extremely expensive anchor, they seem cheap by comparison.” Hey presto: the `950 lobster seems crazy, whereas the `649.95 salmon feels like a good deal

EVOCATIVE DESCRIPTIONS

Fancy wordplay or even naming a dish (“Grandma’s gooey brownies”) can increase sales by 27 percent

HISTORY LIVE LONG AND PROSPER

FOUR FAMOUS FIGURES WHO CHANGED THEIR ORIGINAL NAME

MARK TWAIN IS SAMUEL CLEMENS

BEN KINGSLEY IS KRISHNA PANDIT BHANJI

HO CHI MINH IS NGUYEN SINH CUNG

PAC-MAN IS PUCK MAN*

*changed so that vandals wouldn’t deface his name to — well, you can guess

IN CONVERSATION WITH

Ghengis Khan

AB CHA LOODY TW CON ITH THE QUE RER

Quote Unquote Ghengis Khan Killed John Wayne The Hollywood star best known for his cowboy roles acted in a 1956 film called Conqueror, where he played Khan. It’s been called one of the worst films of all time, and it filmed near a radioactive testing site in Utah. About 25 years after they filmed, 91 of 220 cast and crew had been killed, including Wayne.

DCM Greetings O Khan of Khans! GK: What is up, buddy. Sorry, I was told I come off as intimidating, so I was trying to tone it down a bit. Buddy. DCM Nah, who could be intimidated by a man who ruled the Mongol empire, largest land empire in history, stretching from Poland to Korea and Siberia to Vietnam? You seem pretty laid-back. GK: Thanks! Yes, and I only had to kill about 11 percent of the world population to do it. [Awkward silence] GK: But I gave something back to the world. I had a pretty huge harem of, ah, girlfriends you’d call them, and today about 0.5 percent of the world population are my direct descendants. DCM Sounds like many of us should be calling you “Papa K”. Before becoming ruler, you were named Temujin (man of iron). Then you ascended to Ghengis Khan (ruler of limitless strength). Apart from all those names being terrific aliases for a gangster rapper, what would you say is the secret to your military success? GK: Speed. Mongol archers were the greatest

22 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

in the world. They could fire on horseback with devastating accuracy, and move across the plains of Central Asia as fast as the rays of the rising sun. To feed while we marched, we would drink mare’s milk, or make a small slit in a horse’s neck vein and drink blood. DCM Bloodthirsty indeed. Though murderous, you’ve also been praised as the man who united East and West, and created a horse-based postal relay system. And then you died — how? GK I took an arrow to the knee. DCM And your burial, it’s said, was top secret. Tell us about that. GK To conceal the location, my burial party killed anyone they encountered. Then they, in turn, were killed by soldiers, who were then put to death. DCM It’s also said that a baby camel was buried near you, so that if your grave did need to be found, the mourning mother could lead your family to the tomb. GK You can’t make an empire without breaking some eggs, buddy.

SENECA THE YOUNGER ANCIENT ROMAN PHILOSOPHER

"It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it... Life is long if you know how to use it."

HISTORY FORTUNE TELLING

FUTURE TENSE

In the early 1900s, French artists illustrated a series called France in the Year 2000, imagining what the 21st century would be like. At first glance, their imaginings seem ludicrous. Or do they?

FLYING POSTMEN = AMAZON DRONE DELIVERY

CLEANING MACHINES = IROOMBA

OSCARS LOOT

As we speak, the voting begins for the films that will eventually become the nominees of the 2015 Academy Awards. Let’s hope Leonardo DiCaprio wins something next year. He’s been nominated for an acting Oscar five times and never won, so much so that the press have made it into a bit of a joke. But how sorry should we feel for Leo, or indeed, any Oscar loser? As a consolation, nonwinners walk home with a goody bag. And not just any goody bag: the 2014 edition was valued at over US$55,000 (and some report that it was closer to US$85,000). For reference, the average American annual household income is US$51,900.

2013 value: US$47,802.

Included: Rouge Maple (US$120) maple syrup, supposedly “the best you’ve ever tasted”

2012 value: US$62,000.

Included: Thermarobe (US$178.99), a wirelessly heated luxury robe

2011 value: US$75,000. MECHANISED CLOTHES-CLEANERS = MODERN DRY-CLEANING

EGG-HATCHING MACHINES = INTENSIVE CHICKEN BREEDING FARMS

Included: Virgin Galactic suborbital space flight model (US$2,000)

PHOTOS CORBIS (MAN IN SUIT); GETTY IMAGES (SWAT TEAMS) ICONS: ADAPTED FROM THE NOUN PROJECT (GOOD AS GOLD) INTERVIEW ILLUSTRATION: CHRIS EDSER AT ILLUSTRATIONROOM.COM.AU

SOME OF THE GOODIES INSIDE THE 2014 GIFT BAG (ALL US$)

UNDERWATER SPORTS = UNDERWATER HOCKEY (INVENTED IN BRITAIN, 1954)

WHEELED COMBAT = MONSTER TRUCKS AND TANKS

AERIAL SURVEILLANCE = PREDATOR DRONES

WHALE-BASED TRANSPORT = NOT YET

Chocolatines Savory Wine Flight Pairing, $80 Halo Natural Pet Food Meal Donation to Rescue or Shelter and Products, $6,142.89 Max Martin Shoes, $750 Slow Watch, $290. Dosha Pops Herbal Tea-Flavored Lollipops, $35 Blossom Blends Tea, $49.95 Hydroxycut Products, $38.96 Narrative Clip, $279 Polar Loop, $109.95 Steamist Total Sense Home Spa System, $2,560 Jitseu Handbags, $279 Rouge Maple Products, $280 10 Sessions with Huntley Drive Fitness, $850 Visit with Celebrity Acupuncturist/ Nutritionist Heather Lounsbury, $500 Slimware Dinnerware, $59 M3K Beauty Products, $100

23 JANUARY 2015

HORIZONS NEWS FINE DINE

TEATIME STORIES

The Indian love for tea needs no introduction. Adii Dande talks to tea sommelier Anamika Singh, who has taken her passion to another level

TEA SOMMELIER ANAMIKA SINGH

For Anamika, growing up in Darjeeling and being the daughter of one of India’s finest tea tasters, Abhai Singh, everything began and ended with tea, quite literally. This, with an inherently sensitive palate for the beverage, worked just perfect for her.

MAKING CHOICES

Anamika has worked with her father for over 23 years, and always knew what she wanted to do even as a child. However, taking it beyond the traditional business of manufacturing, exporting or retailing was her dream. “After completing school, I had to make a choice,” she confesses. “Either it was moving to Delhi for college or continuing with my “tea WHAT MAKES YOU THE BEST AT IT

• • • •

lessons” while living in Darjeeling. My father, of course, gave me the freedom to make my own decision,” she shares, adding that she took “the road less travelled” purely out of the want to do something very different. For her, the fact that there were hardly any ladies in the male-dominated tea industry only added more appeal to it. For some time, she worked with J. Thomas & Co. Pvt. Ltd., a huge auction and tasting house, where she could fine-tune her skills. Even then, her father was like a full-time teacher, and home literally proved to be school, where she was expected to make notes, ask questions, discuss and learn. Nearly two decades of steeping in the whole experience, conducting numerous tea tastings and high-tea events, gave birth to Anamika’s dream venture, Anandini Himalaya Tea.

ENDLESS EXPERIMENTS

Setting foot in the industry wasn’t as easy as one would’ve imagined. “There were strict rules that I had to follow to perfect my palate and skills. No onion and garlic, no smoking or drinking while tasting teas, were just some of them,” Anamika shares, as she talks about her perfectionist father. However, her continuous experiments with various infusions and blends are something that really help her evolve everyday. “Europe has a vast market for fine teas.

BEING OPEN TO EXPERIMENTING PASSION FOR TEAS AN EXCELLENT PALATE WILLINGNESS TO TRAIN THE SENSES

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I was really keen on bringing it back home… not just the tea, but also infusions of flowers and herbs that are abundantly available in our country — something that most of us aren’t even aware of!” she says. So she began trying out other blends, whilst bearing in mind the individual character of each ingredient and how well it could be married with the base tea.

BESPOKE TEA EXPERIENCE

Her endless experiments and the desire to create a unique experience for the tea-lover have resulted in some fantastic infusions. For instance, the Christmas Tea has a mix of spices to warm you up with a “festive” feel or the lavender and lemongrass infusion to instantly refresh and relax you. A trip to Kashmir introduced her to cockscomb flowers, which inspired her to create a unique infusion along with saffron and cardamom. Anamika shares that a person’s mood inspires her to create the perfect blend for them, which is the next thing on her mind — having a customised tea experience for her clients in her three-monthold quaint little tea room, Resonance.T by Anandini, in Delhi. The ambience is pristine white, echoing what Anamika feels tea should be about — relaxed sipping rather than hurried gulping.

ASPIRING CONNOISSEURS

“I do this only because it’s my passion,” she smiles, adding that commercialism completely kills a profession. “I cannot plan 10 tasting events and 15 workshops in two days! There has to be the right space to deliver the best. WHAT CAN DESTROY YOUR CAREER

A REC NAMIK OMM A END S

ROGAN JOSH+ Autumn tea infused with rose petals and lemon balm QUINOA SALAD WITH PINE NUTS+ Green tea infused with fire-balm bush and mint GRILLED FISH WITH LEMON BUTTER+ Handmade flowery green tea CHICKEN MARSALA+ Oolong tea 72% CHOCOLATE VANILLA BEAN TRUFFLES+ Pinewood smoked tea Also, I sincerely believe in educating the tea-lover rather than simply promoting my brand,” she adds. She says that anybody with a love for tea can aim to be a tea sommelier. It is all about training the palate. But nothing can beat hands-on experience and the desire to experiment. And even if it doesn’t work out, there are other allied professions that you can get into - consulting and tasting for tea estates, restaurants and hotels, conducting workshops to educate the tealover, marketing, are a few. “If you go for some training in the West, it suddenly becomes a big thing in India. But I feel one should stick closer to one’s roots. There is so much to learn from in our country! There are a few institutes coming up and many tea estates offer training too,” she suggests. • HAVING A CLOSED MIND • OBSESSION WITH BEING IN THE LIMELIGHT • COMMERCIALISM

FEATURES 70

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PAGE 28 RELIVE THE TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS OF POMPEII PAGE 42 CROWD PSYCHOLOGY, NOW AT YOUR FINGER TIPS PAGE 54 BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE PERFECT HORROR MOVIE

PAGE 70 AN EPIC MARCH THROUGH THE WILDS OF NORTHERN TANZANIA PAGE 86 FROM FASHION TO FOOD, NANOTECHNOLOGY IS HERE TO STAY

42

28

86

27 JANUARY 2015

NICE BREAD, STINGY BAKER

PAPA WAS MURDERED HERE

BEST GARUM IN POMPEII

A M P H I T H E AT R E

T H E PA L E S T R A, A P L AC E FO R S P O R T S 28 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

PHOTO GETTY IMAGES

A RECENT STUDY OF THE BONES OF ROMAN GLADIATORS SHOWS THAT THE ATHLETES ATE A MAINLY VEGETARIAN DIET (CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNTS REFER TO THEM AS HOREARII OR ‘BARLEY EATERS). TESTS ALSO SHOW GLADIATORS CONSUMED A ‘RECOVERY DRINK’ TO PROMOTE HEALING. THE TONIC’S MAIN INGREDIENT? PLANT ASHES

STEFANO’S FULLONICA

THE GUY WHO LIVES HERE OWES ME MONEY

PRETTY BARMAIDS GALORE!

POMPEII

ASHES TO ASHES

IN AUGUST, AD 79, AN ANCIENT ROMAN TOWN, NEAR MODERN NAPLES, WAS WIPED OFF THE MAP BY THE VOLCANO VESUVIUS. DANIEL SEIFERT RE-ENACTS KEY EVENTS AS A MAN WHO WAS THERE, TALKING ABOUT RIOTS, WINE, WOMEN AND THE END OF THE WORLD 29 JANUARY 2015

A FRESCO FROM THE VILLA OF THE MYSTERIES, SECOND HALF OF 1ST CENTURY BC, POMPEII PREVIOUS PAGE: A REPRODUCTION OF A VIEW WITH THE THEATRE, FROM THE HOUSES AND MONUMENTS OF POMPEII, BY FAUSTO AND FELICE NICCOLINI, VOLUME IV, ESSAYS IN RESTORATION, PLATE L, 1854-1896

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POMPEII

Salve, friend. Come to hear my story, have you? Well then, sit with me. Share my wine — you won’t find finer on Earth, and there is nothing like the chill of liquid tickling your throat as you sit in the sun. You might need a drink if you want to hear this tale, mind. There’s blood and belching, fumes and fear — the kind of fear that splinters your heart when the world itself has up righted itself. All you can do is cling to the grass and pray to the gods to stop the madness, take it from me. They’re funny creatures, the gods. I can say that now, in the comfort of this lovely garden. I don’t think they’ll be throwing me out once they’ve let me in. Funny, yes. Three times, the gods have visited horrors upon my city. No need to tell you what city this is, I can see it on your face. You already know its name. Pompeii.

PHOTO GETTY IMAGES

I:

GORGONS WERE WELLKNOWN FIGURES IN GRECO-ROMAN MYTH. THESE TERRIFYING FEMALE CREATURES HAD SNAKES FOR HAIR AND COULD TURN A MAN TO STONE. SOUND FAMILIAR? MEDUSA WAS ONE OF THEM

My first memory is, alas, of my father dying. I was five years old, and I doubt you’d find a happier child in all of Rome. My father was sneaking me out to watch the gladiators. “Not a word to your mother,” he whispered, “or I’ll thrash you ‘til your behind looks like a gorgon’s face.” A wink, and he had me up on his broad shoulders. It was the crowd that was the problem, that day. Apart from the many excited residents of Pompeii, there were hundreds of people who had come up from Nuceria, a nearby settlement. A bad lot, sons of back alley wenches, the lot of them. They had no love for our town, nor we for theirs. Not that this stopped them spitting in our streets and drinking our wine. As I gawped at the crowd and the colours in the amphitheatre, I had no inkling about what was to come. My father sat with his arm around me, pointing out the gladiator types. There was the retiarius, flinging his fisherman’s net over an enemy before skewering him with a trident. The thraex, though comic in his heavily padded legs, wielded a wickedly curved sword that could cut the smile right off your face, warned my father. 31 JANUARY 2015

PHOTOS GETTY IMAGES; NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY IN NAPOLI (BAKERY PAINTING)

“Why are so many of them fat?” I complained. “Think, boy,” he said, drumming his fingers affectionately against my forehead. “More fat means more protection from a cut…” The rest of his words were lost in a growing roar, as the crowd began to jostle in the heat. Curses and fistfights began to trickle down the amphitheatre stairs. Some hooligans — I couldn’t tell if they were locals or Nucerians — had grown bored already, and started an argument. Within a few heartbeats the violence had spread. Stones thunked against the benches, daggers sprang into hands as if from nowhere. With a wail, someone was thrown with force down into the dusty arena, startling even the gladiators. Emboldened, the troublemakers boiled down to the centre, as if to show that they could put on a better fight than the professionals. One wag had snatched up the palm leaf awarded to a victorious gladiator. He crowed with pleasure until someone sliced off his wrist and picked the palm up, hand and all, to crow even louder. The panicked audience swarmed up to escape the raptors, and were trampled. I spied a sneak-eyed youth open the abandoned cage that held wild dogs for the next fight. He let them out with a laugh, which was quickly

II: UNDERWORLD

AN ORNATE BRONZE HELMET BELONGING TO A THRAEX-CLASS FIGHTER FOUND IN POMPEII’S GLADIATOR BARRACKS. IT IS TOPPED BY A GRIFFIN, A MYTHICAL MONSTER

strangled when they leapt, howling, for his mid-rift. My father gathered me up to leave, shouldering his way to the exit. My teeth clicked painfully against his shoulder as he ran, and I was just about to ask him to put me down when he gasped, and fell to his knees. Hot liquid pumped out of his throat, thick and shockingly red. A sneering thug wiped his knife against my arm as he stepped over us to join some comrades in the real fun. The last thing I remember is a Nucerian woman, her face caked with dust and glowing with hate, eagerly thrusting the sign of the evil eye at me and my now-still father. She held a trampled, tiny sandal against her cheek — a child’s sandal, but I couldn’t see the owner. “Gods curse your city for this.” She got her wish.

The riot shocked Rome, as you can imagine. Emperor Nero was not best pleased. Us Romans like our violence in the arena, not spilling out of it. The Senate, in its wisdom, banned the gladiatorial matches in Pompeii for ten years. They were dark times for me and my mother; she couldn’t cope when father perished. She died of a broken heart in a few short months, though I’m sure tipping a skinful of wine into herself day after day didn’t help matters either. And so I took to the streets, graduating from a wide-eyed brat to a hardened street rat in just a few years. It was a good thing too, because three years after the riot, the gods did indeed take their vengeance on us. They shook the earth like a landlady whipping a mouldy blanket free of lice — and we were the lice. The faces of statues crumbled grotesquely. Buildings seemed to shudder and melt like ice. A flock of 600 sheep perished from a miasma that drifted up from the angry earth. If that doesn’t make you believe in Pluto’s power seeping up from the underworld, absolutely nothing will.

CITY RECORDS



LIKE BOXERS COUNTING BELTS FOR VICTORIOUS BOUTS, WINNING GLADIATORS KEPT THE PALMS THEY RECEIVED FOR WINNING A MATCH. MANY WERE ALSO DULY REWARDED WITH MONEY, AND LIKE MODERN SPORTSMEN COULD EARN LUCRATIVE SUMS ENDORSING PRODUCTS SUCH AS OLIVE OIL. THE PRODUCERS OF THE MOVIE GLADIATOR EVEN CUT A SCENE WHERE RUSSELL CROWE DOES THIS, FEARING IT WOULD BE THOUGHT UNREALISTIC

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

THE ROMAN EMPEROR IS PERSONALLY LINKED TO THE INVENTION OF ICE-CREAM, AS HE HAD SLAVES FERRY SNOW FROM THE ITALIAN MOUNTAINS AND FLAVOURED WITH FRUIT JUICE AS A DESSERT. HE ALSO CONSTRUCTED A 30 METRE-HIGH STATUE OF HIMSELF NAMED THE COLOSSUS NERONIS. NEARLY EQUAL IN HEIGHT TO THE STATUE OF LIBERTY, IT’S THOUGHT TO HAVE BEEN DESTROYED IN THE FIFTH CENTURY. IN AD 127 THE STATUE WAS MOVED TO STAND PROUDLY NEXT TO THE COLOSSEUM, GIVING THE AMPHITHEATRE ITS NAME. IT TOOK 24 ELEPHANTS TO SHIFT IT

POMPEII

THE SENATE, IN ITS WISDOM, BANNED THE GLADIATORIAL MATCHES IN POMPEII FOR 10 YEARS. THOUGH THREE YEARS AFTER THE RIOT, THE GODS DID INDEED TAKE THEIR VENGEANCE ON US

A FRESCO FROM POMPEII, DEPICTING A RIOT IN THE AMPHITHEATRE BETWEEN THE PEOPLE OF POMPEII AND NUCERIA. FROM THE NAPLES, MUSEO ARCHEOLOGICO NAZIONALE, ITALY

Is it any wonder that people lost their wits, especially when the town reservoir cracked, sending an ocean of drinking water to flood the broken streets. It meant good pickings for an urchin like me, though. I stole into a bakery moments after the bread-maker howled out, a cloud of flour still hanging in the air. Grim and alone, I scarfed four rolls of bread (each imprinted with his name: “Celer, slave of Quintus Granius Verus”), content that if I were going to die, I would die with a full belly. Yes indeed, the elements were against us that day. Earth, air, water — not fire, though. That came later.



A PAINTING OF A TYPICAL BREADSTALL WITH LOAVES STACKED LEFT A LOAF OF BREAD CARBONISED BY THE VOLCANIC ERUPTION BEARING THE STAMP OF CELER, A BAKER. WHEN THE RUINS OF POMPEII WERE UNEARTHED, MANY LOAVES WERE FOUND STILL IN THEIR OVENS, ABANDONED BY THEIR TERRIFIED MAKERS

33 JANUARY 2015

III: FILTH AND FRESHNESS

PHOTOS GETTY IMAGES; MARIE-LAN NGUYEN (VULCANUS STATUETTE)

If you ask me what I remember most that summer, 20 years after the riot in the amphitheatre, 17 years after the earthquake, it’s this: it was hotter than Vulcan’s armpit. Not surprising, perhaps, considering it was the month of Vulcanalia, when we honoured our god of fire and the forge. Though we didn’t honour him enough, it seems. I woke to a shaft of sunlight burrowing into my right eye, causing a dormant hangover to flame to life. Groaning, I rolled out of my kip. It was a nice little fox den I’d made of hay and rags, tucked into a small shrine still unrepaired from the earthquake. I shared it with a feisty colony of fleas. Up until a few days ago I’d also shared it with a friendly street dog or two — but most of them seem

to have skulked out of the city recently. It seems they knew what was coming. The people were worried, too. Farmers tramping out of the countryside complained of dry wells. Waters that still flowed began to reek of sulphur, and dead fish bobbed placidly to the surface. Tremors buzzed the ground intermittently. People began to mutter, though not loudly, about memories of the earthquake. Pompeii was a city as yet only half-recovered from that disaster, believe me. Still, it meant there were more than a few hidey-holes for street people like myself. We might have sat like a jewel on the coast, heaving with business and garish holiday homes of the elite — but scratch any Roman city, and the poor and wretched tumble out of the wound. Even the salt-heavy breezes of the Mediterranean couldn’t hide the stench of our city, I thought one day as I tiptoed across a lane. A good Roman road it might have been, but its tightly meshed cobblestones were still choking with filth, deposited by innumerable cattle, mules and horses. Small wonder engineers had placed small quartz eyes in the road.  At night these eyes twinkled out, friendlylike, reflecting the moon and acting as a beacon. Once, a litter bearing some

CITY RECORDS



VULCAN, SON OF JUNO AND JUPITER, WAS THE GOD OF THE FIRE AND FORGE. ALONG WITH HIS WIFE VENUS, HE FATHERED THE IMPISH GOD OF LOVE, CUPID. VULCAN ALSO REPRESENTED THE DESTRUCTIVE POWER OF VOLCANOES. HIS CHIEF FESTIVAL, VULCANALIA, WAS HELD ON AUGUST 23, AND SAW THE HEAD OF EACH FAMILY THROWING SMALL FISH INTO A FLAME TO AVERT DESTRUCTION BY FIRE. IN AD 79, VULCANALIA WAS HELD JUST ONE DAY BEFORE THE ERUPTION OF VESUVIUS. MEANWHILE ANOTHER TOWN DEVASTATED BY THE VOLCANO WAS NOT SAVED BY ITS NAMESAKE: HERCULANEUM, NAMED AFTER THE GREEK HERO HERCULES. LOCATED IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOUNTAIN, THE CITY WAS THE FIRST TO BE WIPED OUT

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POMPEII

A FRESCO FROM POMPEII, DEPICTING A RIOT IN THE AMPHITHEATRE BETWEEN THE PEOPLE OF POMPEII AND NUCERIA. FROM THE NAPLES, MUSEO ARCHEOLOGICO NAZIONALE, ITALY

overweight aristocrat and his mistress tramped past my kip. As his slaves huffed and puffed, his droll voice brayed out of the curtain, “I tell you darling, it’s as if someone had plucked the stars out of the sky and laid them among us mortals.” “It’s also a handy way to avoid sinking your foot into manure,” I called out to the lovers. “Not that you’ve ever walked the streets!” His cutting, highly anatomical reply rather offended his would-be conquest, I think. I smiled at the memory as I tiptoed over the stepping stones that dotted the road — another measure to escape soiling your sandals. I passed Stefano’s Fullonica, one of the town’s busiest laundries. Though the hour was early, slaves were already tramping clothes in wooden vats,  their feet sloshing with water and the urine that purified Roman wool. Stefano himself



A FRESCO DEPICTING A CLOTH LAUNDERER FROM POMPEII. HERE, SLAVES ARE ENERGETICALLY THRASHING CLOTHES CLEAN WITH FOOT POWER. GIVEN THE UNPLEASANT NATURE OF THE CLEANING AGENT, IT’S NOT HARD TO IMAGINE THAT EVEN THE CLEANEST AND WEALTHIEST OF ROMANS SMELLED FAINTLY LIKE AN UNCLEANED URINAL

THOUGH THE HOUR WAS EARLY, SLAVES WERE ALREADY TRAMPING CLOTHES IN WOODEN VATS, THEIR FEET SLOSHING WITH WATER AND THE URINE THAT PURIFIED ROMAN WOOL was nowhere to be seen, so I did my civic duty, relieving myself in one of the many hefty clay pots left dotted around town. These were then picked up by grateful fullers, though not always. They tended to avoid the reeking pots lingering outside taverns. Apparently it doesn’t clean as well; who knew?



A FRESCO DEPICTING A CLOTH LAUNDERER FROM POMPEII. HERE, SLAVES ARE ENERGETICALLY THRASHING CLOTHES CLEAN WITH FOOT POWER. GIVEN THE UNPLEASANT NATURE OF THE CLEANING AGENT, IT’S NOT HARD TO IMAGINE THAT EVEN THE CLEANEST AND WEALTHIEST OF ROMANS SMELLED FAINTLY LIKE AN UNCLEANED URINAL

35 JANUARY 2015

So vital was the flow — forgive the pun — of this liquid gold that Emperor Vespasian, who died just weeks before, had imposed a tax on urine. The fullers liked to tell the story of how his son, Titus, grumbled about the disgusting nature of such a tax. Vespasian had thrust a shiny denarius coin under his son’s nose. “Pecunia non olet,” he said imperiously. “Money does not smell.” I suppose you’re allowed to be imperious when it’s your own face on the coin, eh? My stomach now grumbled loudly. Sadly, my purse was as empty as my belly. Perhaps I could do something about it, if Valeria was on duty at my favourite tavern.

IV: FISHING FOR A MEAL

PHOTOS GETTY IMAGES (FORUM BATH, TAVERN, CANTHARUS)

“Valeria my dove, please! I’m hours from death,” I whined. “Good. You’ll stop bothering me then, scoundrel. Vai! Leave me alone.” I must have been off my form. Usually the serving girl at Posca’s Tavern melted like butter at my charms. She’d been sneaking me morsels for months, as well she should. I’d been walking past her place of business one day when I saw a group of young thugs pestering her. I knew

one of them, Scipio, a cocksure animal who thought he was Hercules himself, just because he’d knifed a drunkard or two in his time. Panting and pretending to fear for my life, I’d run into him as he leered at Valeria. “Scipio, help! Legionaries, around the corner,” I babbled. “Caught me trying to cadge a ring. They will crucify me. Hide me!” “Clear off, dog,” he muttered, and beat a hasty retreat with his cronies. As if he would ever risk his skin for anyone. “I think such a fine performance deserves a heavy meal for a skillful actor, don’t you, divine girl?” I smiled at Valeria, watching them scuttle away. She had duly complied, but now her memory of past heroics seemed to grow dim. Time to pull the last arrow from my quiver. “Stop me if you’ve heard this one. So there was this stupid astrologer, see…” She pretended to ignore me, and refilled one of the four pots in the stall with fresh olives. Gods, that intoxicating smell! I tried not to drool. “And he cast a horoscope for a sick boy. After promising the mother that the child would live until he was old and grey, he demands payment, right? She says, ‘Come tomorrow and I’ll pay you.’ And he says…” She was biting her cheeks, a smile trying to worm its way out of her mouth. A good sign. “He says, ‘What! But what

if the boy dies during the night and I lose my fee?’” She turned abruptly, her shoulders vibrating madly. “You laughed! You owe me a meal, divine one,” I grinned triumphantly. “You’re a fool,” she giggled loudly, and slathered a dollop of garum onto some bread.

I STROLLED INTO THE FORUM BATHS. I MAY BE A MANGY STREETDOG, BUT, LIKE MANY A ROMAN, I VIEW PUBLIC BATHS AS AN ESSENTIAL RIGHT OF A CITIZEN What’s that? You’ve never had garum? By Jupiter, you haven’t lived! There are men who call Pompeii home who have made millions, their entire fortune, on the stuff. A wretched vagrant like myself can’t hope to describe it and do it justice. Thick fish innards, fermented in salt, dried in the warm sun. Perfection! A bit of an acquired taste, maybe, but as my mother used to say before she died, hunger is a fine spice for any meal. Of course, she

CITY RECORDS



A GOLD COIN BEARING A STOIC-LOOKING EMPEROR VESPASIAN ON ONE SIDE, AND THE GODDESS FORTUNA ON THE OTHER. THEY WERE EQUAL TO 25 SILVER DENARII. THE BASIC PAY FOR A ROMAN LEGIONARY WAS 225 SILVER DENARII

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

THE REMAINS OF A TAVERN. THE HOLES WOULD HAVE HELD SLOTTED AMPHORAE (CLAY VESSELS) BEARING SNACKS OR WINE FOR HUNGRY VISITORS



THIS IS AN ACTUAL JOKE FROM PHILOGELOS (THE LAUGHTER LOVER), A COLLECTION OF 265 GRECO-ROMAN JOKES. DATING BACK TO AD 5, IT’S CONSIDERED THE EARLIEST JOKE BOOK IN HISTORY. IN 2008,

POMPEII

A FRESCO FROM POMPEII, DEPICTING A RIOT IN THE AMPHITHEATRE BETWEEN THE PEOPLE OF POMPEII AND NUCERIA. FROM THE NAPLES, MUSEO ARCHEOLOGICO NAZIONALE, ITALY

BRITISH COMIC JIM BOWEN PERFORMED A SELECTION OF THE JOKES AT A LONDON COMEDY CLUB. “ONE OR TWO OF THEM ARE JOKES I’VE SEEN IN PEOPLE’S ACTS NOWADAYS, SLIGHTLY UPDATED,” SAID BOWEN



also said that we would all meet again, me, Papa and her. So what did she know? Things were looking up as I wandered into the Forum, chewing happily. Wiping grease off my mouth and onto my sickly grey tunic, I peered at one of the bright stone walls. Squinting in the late morning sun, I looked for fresh entertainment. Visitors might boast of trying Pompeii’s fine wines, apt to give you a plentiful hangover; or the beauty of a coastal sunset. But for my money, you need only look to our walls. What isn’t jotted on them isn’t worth knowing, I say. We’re great scribblers, us Romans. Weepy love notes, electoral notices, wry complaints — you can read the world writ small here. Aye, some graffito is wittier than others, I’ll admit. “When you are dead, you are nothing,” declared one genius. “On April 19 I baked bread,” boasted another dimwit. Still, other examples caught my eye. Who could fail to sigh at the wisdom of, “Lovers are like bees in that they live a honeyed life.” Meanwhile, brightening up the walls of an inn someone had scrawled a drunken self-portrait and a happy cry that made me smile: “Cheers! We drink like wineskins.” Chuckling at a new tale painted outside one of my city’s many brothels (“She has taught me to hate dark-

A RICHLY DECORATED CANTHARUS, A METAL CUP USED FOR DRINKING WINE THAT WOULD HAVE GRACED A NOBLEMAN'S TABLE

haired girls. I shall hate them, if I can, but I wouldn’t mind loving them.”) I strolled into the Forum Baths. I may be a mangy streetdog, but, like many a Roman, I view public baths as an essential right of a citizen. You’ll find them across the empire, even as far away as Britannia — and from what I’ve heard of that frigid wasteland, you’d need a good steam now and then just to stop you from opening your wrists with a knife. More importantly, you won’t find a better place for gossip. The chatter here trickles as freely as spring water. Having shucked my tunic into a wooden locker I sat in the tepidarium where men of all walks sat. Compared to the baking noon heat outside, this was indeed a pleasantly tepid temperature. It was heated by braziers that cast a friendly glow on the vaulted ceiling, making the stuccoed family of fauns and gods dance. Nearby, two businessmen were massaged by their slaves, sniffing about this gigantic arena being built in Rome. Apparently they didn’t think much of this vulgar Colosseum, when our own 20,000-seat amphitheatre would do just fine. Clearly neither owner was the trustworthy type, either. Each had tattooed their name into the property that was quietly rubbing them down with fragrant oils.



THE SCRIBBLE NEXT TO THIS BIG-NOSED POMPEIIAN CARICATURE READS RUFUS EST — THIS IS RUFUS. IT’S NOT CLEAR WHETHER THE SUBJECT OF THIS GRAFFITI WAS PLEASED WITH HIS UNFLATTERING RENDERING

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OPPOSITE RIGHT CASTS OF VICTIMS FROM POMPEII. THE CITY WAS BURIED AFTER THE ERUPTION OF MOUNT VESUVIUS (THIS PAGE) IN AD 79

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POMPEII

It’s a cruel life, I tutted to myself. Worse still, my hangover wasn't abating. Then suddenly, the air itself seemed to crack like a whip that snapped at my ears — and life became crueler still.

V:

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VULCAN AWAKES

For a moment, we all gaped at each other. Then the trembles intensified. Dust shimmered down from the roof. I skipped over the marbled floors, grabbing up my tunic and shouldering my way outside, dressing as I moved. Others had not had such foresight, with more than a few patrons barreling to the exits still disrobed and slick from oil. My eyes were otherwise occupied. Vesuvius. All of my life it had sat there, high and dumpy as a sour mound of flour. It had rumbled sure, like a guard dog in its sleep, more than a few times in the last few sunrises.

But mostly I ignored it. There was no ignoring this. Its cone was belching forth an obscene speckled cloud that coated the blue sky. More and more seeped up and out, oily and branching out like a dead tree. Higher it rose, until my neck cricked trying to take the sight in. At this point, the city was still silent, in shock. Then the heavens opened — though it felt more like a gift from hell. Grey matter pattered down upon the cobblestones, coating my hair, dancing in the wind. I had to shake some from my locks and taste it before I recognised the sour taste. Ash. There were murmurs, then. A mother tightened her hold on her gaping toddler and trotted home, her sandals slapping against stone. As ash continued to sink down, turning us all into grotesque grey-haired mourners, I could tell we were all pondering the same thing. Should we stay or go? Within a few hours, the concussive thunks striking the city answered that question for many. I was shuffling, dazed, around the Forum.

Suddenly an old woman pitched back with a woof of surprise, her head cracking against a column. Next to her, a small rock from above that had smacked her eye. More stones fell, drumming down into the ground. Most weren’t as large, but they sent the populace into their homes. Or at last, screeching and howling out of the city. At first I was with the latter group: when a ship sinks, act like a rat and flee, No? I had no worldly possessions to gather up, so I fell in with a crowd who had run to the port. Like many, I’d snatched up a few rags of cloth, balled them together and tied them to my head. It was a comical, feeble protection from the stinging stones. Looking over the wall and to the sea, my mouth went dry. By now, so much evil material had rained from the mountain that the port was blocked. And the sea — the ocean itself had retreated shyly, like a cat struck by a master. Even from the top of the steps leading to the port, I could spy fish left in the sand, flailing and gasping their last.

A POMPEIIAN FRESCO DEPICTING ITS LANDSCAPE AND SEASIDE. AS A PORT CITY, POMPEII TRADED GOODS FROM AROUND THE MEDITERRANEAN — AND PERHAPS BEYOND. A STATUETTE DEPICTING THE HINDU GODDESS OF LASKSHMI, THE INDIAN GODDESS OF BEAUTY WAS FOUND IN THE RUINS

BY NOW, SO MUCH EVIL MATERIAL HAD RAINED FROM THE MOUNTAIN THAT THE PORT WAS BLOCKED. AND THE SEA HAD RETREATED SHYLY, LIKE A CAT STRUCK BY A MASTER

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VI: THE END

We retreated to a tavern back in town. We weren’t the only ones. There was a flood of wailing families streaming into the countryside — but the roads were choked, wagons rolled back and forth over the

quivering roads. Nobody knew where to go. Many simply thought they could wait out the cataclysm, as if it was a fever that would break. It did break, of course. But as we know, fevers can kill you before then. By now, houses were becoming overwhelmed by the ash, doorways barely peeking out from the greyness. This was but a small problem compared to the larger chunks of pumice that were now punching down, cracking walls and destroying weaker structures. Libo and I ran through the dark like kids in a rainstorm, headed for an inn I knew. The landlord, Salvius, had six teeth in his head and a face no mother could love — but his place did have something I liked: a thick roof. Once inside, I lit a candle and huffed onto a bench. I poured some watery wine from a clay jug decorated like an animal. It was a fox that glared at me, wine dripping from its jaws. I stared back, rubbing the dark drop between my gritty fingerpads. Libo and I sat in silence, listening to the winds and feeling the thump of pumice resonate in our chests. A small squeak, and a rattle from a jar on the table caught my eye. I lifted the lid and took out a dormouse, which stared at me brightly. Perhaps he wanted me to place him back in his warm jar, implanted with a small runway he could

scamper in, where he was regularly fed with acorns and walnuts to fatten him up. Where of course, he’d be killed and served fresh as an expensive snack.  I stroked the soft back of the mouse, and felt its heart hammer against mine. It made me sad, wondering how many beats he and I had left. Libo started to pray quietly, fervently, to Venus, our socalled protector of Pompeii. Eventually, I forgot he was there. Eventually the candle died down. Eventually I slept.

IT WAS NEAR IMPOSSIBLE TO WALK MORE THAN A FEW AIMLESS STEPS IN THE HAZE, WITHOUT MY LUNGS PROTESTING. I PRESSED MY PALM AGAINST A WALL, DIZZY. MY CITY WAS DYING, BUT IT STILL MADE SOUNDS I woke some hours later, my face plastered against the rough wood of the table. My new friend the mouse was tickling my nose, as the ash tickled my ankles. The

PHOTO CORBIS (MAIN)

“By the Furies,” murmured a hollow-eyed man next to me. “There’s nowhere, nowhere safe.” We grabbed for each other reflexively as the earth buckled. The wind, the water, the air, all were now turning against us. It was like the earthquake of my childhood, sprung back to life. And it looked like fire had joined in the melee this time, too. As I turned back to the mountain, the cloud had darkened. It was veined with hot golden cinders, and sparkling with flashes of lightning. By now the heavens were more cloud than sky. I watched, agape, as my shadow disappeared from the ground. The plume had strangled the afternoon sun. The world was a shadow now. Where does one run when there’s nowhere to run to? “What’s your name,” I asked the quivering man who still gripped my arm. “Quintus Darius Libo,” he said, and his sour breath overwhelmed even the sulfur that stung my nostrils.”

CITY RECORDS



DORMICE SUCH AS THIS ONE WOULD HAVE BEEN STUFFED WITH MEAT AND BAKED, AND DRUNK WITH WINE — ALTHOUGH ONE SIDE EFFECT OF VESUVIUS IS THAT ITS ERUPTION DECIMATED VINEYARDS IN THE REGION, DISRUPTING ROMAN WINE TRADE FOR YEARS

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

HOW DID FIGURES OF ANCIENT ROMANS LONG DECEASED COME TO BE SO WELL PRESERVED? THOSE WHO FELL VICTIM TO THE SEARING HEAT WERE COVERED IN VOLCANIC ASH AND, OVER THE YEARS, THE ORGANIC MATTER OF THEIR BODIES DECOMPOSED. A TECHNIQUE INVENTED BACK IN THE 19TH CENTURY SIMPLY SAW ARCHAEOLOGISTS POURING PLASTER INTO THE SHELL, CREATING ASTONISHINGLY DETAILED CASTS. OVER 1,000 BODIES HAVE BEEN RECOVERED FROM POMPEII, AND HUNDREDS FROM THE NEIGHBOURING TOWN OF HERCULANEUM. BUT AS ONE THIRD OF POMPEII AND TWO THIRDS OF HERCULANEUM REMAIN UNEXPLORED, ACCORDING TO THE BRITISH MUSEUM, IT REMAINS TO BE SEEN HOW MANY BODIES ARE YET TO BE FOUND

ARCHAEOLOGISTS NAMED THIS MAN "THE MULETEER" OR MULE DRIVER AFTER A MULE WAS FOUND NEARBY. THE FIGURE WAS FOUND CROUCHING ON THE GROUND IN POMPEII LIKE A BEGGAR

POMPEII

door was open, and Libo had clearly fled in a panic some hours before. Stumbling out, I blinked at a world seemingly leeched of colour. It was as if someone had covered my eyes in a thin veil. Where a fountain had once trickled with water, a pyramid of ash stood. The sun must have recently risen, but its rays couldn’t sink through the ash-thickened air. It was difficult to walk on the soft material that carpeted the ground, harder still to breathe without fragments choking my mouth. I ripped a strip off the awning outside the inn, wrapping it around my face. The falling rocks had stopped, for now, and a few other citizens were wrenching open their doors to see what today would bring. Those who hadn’t been brained by collapsing roofs, anyway. I know now what it would bring — death. The fever had yet to break, the worst was yet to come.  It was near impossible to walk more than a few aimless steps in the haze, without my lungs protesting. I pressed my palm against a wall, dizzy. My city was dying, but it still made sounds. Wails of half-crushed victims echoed from ruined buildings. The tintunabulum, the wind chimes that hung from most corners continued to tinkle merrily. Valeria’s stall had one. I wondered where she was now.

My palm rested against some graffiti. I squinted to take it in, and as I read I started to laugh. “Nothing is able to endure forever / Once the sun has shone brightly, it returns to the ocean / The moon grows smaller, who just now was full / The savagery of winds often becomes a light breeze.”  A fiery breeze was plucking at my own back, getting stronger. Out of the corner of my eye, Vesuvius was blossoming like a tar spill. Its cloud rushed towards the city, and already I could feel the heat as it flew to embrace me.

VII: REUNION

This was it for little me, and whoever else was stupid enough to remain in the city. The heat cooked us instantly. Like leaves in a bonfire, we were consumed. No time for pain. Just a flash — and now here I am. You don’t know where we are? I told you no wine on Earth tastes like this. This is where my mother promised her, me and Papa would meet again someday. I haven’t found them yet, but the afterlife is a big place. I can wait. As for Pompeii, who knows? The city is gone, but perhaps not completely. Perhaps it will endure in its own way, forever.



A COPY OF THE HEARTFELT POEM THAT GRACED A WALL IN THE CITY

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THE LIVING CROWD FINE THEY DE CIETY’S F SO MANY O TS, BEARING EN KEY MOM TO BOTH EPIC S WITNES AND SWEEPING LY, RS NT DISASTE ET UNTIL RECE US ERIO ES. Y VICTORI THE WAY OF S O THE T N LITTLE I H WAS DONE IN AVE, H C E RESEAR AT CROWDS B TH THE WAYS TH HT RECALLS BO RY’S RIG ISTO CHRIS W ND LOWS OF H D FINDS HIGHS A HERINGS — AN GIVEN T E MASS GA EN CROWDS AR EY H H THAT W ESPECT THAT T BE R N E CA TH E, THEY DESERV CER PLACES FAR NI TO BE

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CROWDS

A PACKED CROWD LINES THE STREETS TO WATCH THE ESALA PERAHERA PARADE IN SRI LANKA

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It is May 2009 and Discovery Channel Magazine is at Anfield, the hallowed home ground of Liverpool Football Club, one of the most successful clubs in England. Liverpool has just gone up by three goals to nil, against an abject Newcastle side that’s facing relegation under the management of its former best player, Alan Shearer — the man who has only recently left a lucrative job on TV, to try and help out his boyhood team. Who thought of it? And how, within a couple of repetitions, did a crowd as big as a small town’s population all know what to sing and what tune to sing it to, without any rehearsal or detailed instruction? How, in short, did this sea of people all come to speak with one voice?

ll of a sudden, a chant develops. “You should have stayed on the telly,” the Liverpool fans sing, to the tune of the famous Cuban folk song “Guantanamera”. “Stayed on the tellllll-y. You should have stayed on the telly.” Granted, it is a bit cruel. But Shearer has the good 44 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

grace to stand up and grin in deflated acknowledgement of the crowd’s accurate barb. But here’s the thing. Where and how did that chant start? Around 40,000 people in the crowd, the Liverpool home fan contingent for a typical Anfield game, sang it in unison. But who started it?

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CROWDED SELVES

For centuries, the behaviour of crowds has captivated and fascinated people who study human nature: anthropologists, sociologists, and in particular armies and police forces, who have to deal with the consequences of such large-scale collective action. The central baffling point is this: we somehow seem to behave differently in a crowd. “When a certain number of individuals are gathered together in a crowd for the purposes of action, observation proves that, from the mere fact of their being assembled, there result certain new psychological

CROWDS

LIVERPOOL FANS SHOW SUPPORT FOR THEIR TEAM DURING A PREMIER LEAGUE MATCH AGAINST MANCHESTER UNITED AT ANFIELD STADIUM

characteristics,” wrote Gustave Le Bon in The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, in 1895. Back then, Le Bon wrote, “The age we are about to enter will be the ERA OF CROWDS” (his capitals). He didn’t seem to think it a good thing, either. For generations, he argued, governments had managed the rabble in their best interests without worrying too much about anybody’s opinion. And now this was all set to change. “Today the claims of the masses are becoming more and more sharply defined, and amount to nothing less than a determination to utterly destroy society as it now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive communism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn of civilisation.” He continued, ominously: “Their strength has become immense.” One could argue that the power of crowds had been in evidence long before Le Bon wrote, even in his native France. After all, what was the French Revolution, if not evidence of the power of a crowd? But 120 years on from his warning, was he right? In some senses, the power of the crowd has diminished since Le Bon’s time. But as we look around today, you could equally argue that the power of the collective is stronger now than ever. Just look at what crowds can do now. They don’t just urge on a football team or an Olympic sprinter. They don't just sing amusing songs at football matches. They depose governments, as happened time and again through the Arab Spring — the revolutionary wave of demonstrations, protests, riots and civil wars that swept through the Arab world from Tunisia to Egypt to Libya to 45 JANUARY 2015

CROWD BEHAVIOUR UNDER FIRE: HILLSBOROUGH

12:00

LIVERPOOL FANS, MANY WITH TICKETS TO THE TERRACES, HEAD FOR THE TUNNEL WHICH LEADS TO CENTRAL PENS 3 AND 4

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GATE C IS OPENED AND MORE THAN 2,000 FANS PASS THROUGH. MOST HEAD TOWARDS THE TUNNEL

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PLAYERS ENTER PITCH, CHEERS IN STADIUM TRIGGER A SURGE FROM FANS AT THE BACK. THOSE IN PENS 3 AND 4 ARE PRESSED AGAINST FENCE AND CRUSH BARRIERS

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CRUSH BARRIERS GIVE WAY, MANY FALL FORWARD FROM THE INVOLUNTARY RUSH OF THOSE BEHIND

15:00

MATCH STARTS, MORE FANS ENTER TUNNEL. POLICE OPEN GATES AT PENS 3 AND 4 TO RELIEVE PRESSURE

CROWDS

Syria from late 2010. And in a new, bodyless incarnation, crowds are changing commerce too: crowdfunding might not involve a thousand people shouting loudly in a public square, but it’s collective action shaping the future, nonetheless.

ALAN HANSEN LIVERPOOL DEFENDER “The first I knew of the trouble was when two fans came on to the pitch. As they ran past me, I told them, ‘Get off , you’ll get us into trouble’. “One of them shouted, ‘There are people dying back there, Al’. I could see some people trying to get over the fence but, because I was concentrating on the game, his comment did not really register with me"

15:06

A POLICEMAN RUNS ON TO THE PITCH AND ORDERS THE REFEREE TO STOP THE GAME. IN THE CHAOTIC AFTERMATH, SUPPORTERS TEAR UP ADVERTISING HOARDINGS TO USE AS MAKESHIFT STRETCHERS AND TRY TO ADMINISTER FIRST AID TO THE INJURED

ILLUSTRATION QUENTIN GABRIEL PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

FIREFIGHTERS WITH CUTTING GEAR HAD DIFFICULTY GETTING INTO THE GROUND, AND ALTHOUGH DOZENS OF AMBULANCES WERE DISPATCHED, ACCESS TO THE PITCH WAS DELAYED BECAUSE POLICE WERE REPORTING "CROWD TROUBLE" ALTHOUGH THERE WERE 44 AMBULANCES AT THE GROUND, POLICE ONLY ALLOWED ONE OF THEM TO CROSS THE PITCH AND ATTEND TO THE INJURED AND DYING FANS OF THE 96 PEOPLE WHO DIED, ONLY 14 WERE EVER ADMITTED TO HOSPITAL MOST VICTIMS DIED OF TRAUMATIC ASPHYXIA — THEY WERE PENNED IN SO TIGHTLY THAT THEY COULD NOT BREATHE

FOLLOW THE LEADER

One of the central themes of crowd behaviour theory is the idea of a loss of individual responsibility. Since everyone’s doing the same thing, why wouldn’t you do it too? One routinely sees this at Premier League football matches in England, where vile chants can take place at times, particularly directed at opposition players or the referee. Would most of the people joining in these chants say these things as an individual, to the person they’re shouting at? Of course not. But in a crowd, the unthinkable can momentarily become reality. One thing we can do in a crowd is forget who we are. At its benign level, this is just a sort of pantomime, a collective belonging. It’s all a bit of a game, is how it’s regarded in the primal world of sporting support. At its worst though, people can do terrible things when they feel they are somehow legitimised by the fact that many other people are simultaneously doing the same thing. The rise of Adolf Hitler might be cited as an example of this. Hitler made his name by making angry speeches in Munich beer halls, playing on the buried anger of many young Germans at the time. The evolution from this point, to the rise of the Nazi party took many steps, most of them based on fear. By outlawing opposition and dissent in order to strengthen power structures, the sense of the mob mentality, of people stirred up by beer hall

speeches, was a driver, at least in the early days. Violence around football is probably as old as the game itself. By the 1980s, this was characterised by informal organisations known as ‘firms’. In England in particular, these groups were rife and feared: the Millwall Bushwhackers, the Chelsea Headhunters, the Leeds Service Crew. These groups didn’t care much about football really. So what was happening here? One sociologist called this “ritualised male violence”, a return to the primeval, the herd or the mob.

MOST PEOPLE JOINING IN THE CHANTS AT A STADIUM WOULD ACTUALLY NOT SAY IT ALL AS AN INDIVIDUAL TO THE PERSON THEY ARE TARGETTING Equally though, crowds don’t inherently have to be violent. Think of the Mahatma Gandhi-led salt tax marches in India in 1930. Or the sit-in protests and well-dressed marches of the US Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and ‘60s. Here was living proof that acting collectively could create a positive outcome without a threat. This was the power of numbers on a more peaceful scale: as a British trade union advertisement used to proclaim, if you want to be heard, speak together. Sociologists divide crowds into the active (like mobs) and passive (such as audiences). Active crowds are divided further into aggressive, 47 JANUARY 2015

escapist, acquisitive or expressive. Aggressive mobs would include football hooligans, or the Los Angeles Riots in 1992; while acquisitive crowds would be competing for a scarce resource, be they bargains in a department store sale on New Year’s Day, or looters seeking food and water after Hurricane Katrina. Expressive crowds might be those at a rock concert or religious festival.

CROWDS DON’T HAVE TO BE IN ONE PLACE TO HAVE AN IMPACT. THANKS TO THE INTERNET AND MOBILE TELEPHONY, CROWDS CAN BE ANYWHERE, EVEN WHEN THEY’RE DISPERSED But it is the escapist group that perhaps shows crowd behaviour at its most frightening. An escapist crowd wants only to survive a danger. And there is one terrible recent example that nobody involved in it will ever forget.

REMEMBER THE NAMES

Back at Anfield, the game is over. As the 45,000-strong crowd of people file out of the stadium with remarkable speed, the mosaic appearance of a sea of people is replaced with a uniform red and white of the seats. On their way out, many fans walk past a large brown marble obelisk within the stadium’s grounds, an obelisk featuring a long, long list of people’s names carved upon it — each with their 48 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

FOR FA PE

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CROWDS

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AT THE HILLSBOROUGH STADIUM IN 1976, CROWDS SURGED RWARD, CRUSHING ANS IN THE FRONT ENS. SOME PEOPLE WERE PULLED TO SAFETY ON TO THE UPPER TIER, BELOW) FROM THE CRUSH THAT WAS PPENING BELOW. A OTAL OF 96 PEOPLE WERE KILLED

ages, many of them terribly young, alongside it. On April 15, 1989, a terrible disaster took place. Liverpool was playing Nottingham Forest in the semi-final of the FA Cup. In those days, one end of the ground was commonly devoted to standing on the terraces. At Hillsborough, it meant that tens of thousands of people would be packed in together in a big standing area such as the Leppings Lane end. In those days, because of football hooliganism in the 1980s, they were penned behind huge wire fences, with no way out onto the pitch. Thanks to an entrenched police cover-up in the aftermath of the disaster, it has taken 25 years to get to the bottom of exactly what happened at Hillsborough. There is little point now in throwing mud, except to say that the fans were largely blameless, and in fact often heroic, on that day. The blame instead lay with a combination of factors, from the state of the ground to poor planning, bad policing decisions and widely-held preconceived ideas about football fan behaviour. All of which led to a situation where far too many fans were crushed. Ninetyfive people died, many of them children. This is why Liverpool fans today often sign off their emails JF96, meaning “Justice For the 96”. DCM has talked with dozens of people who attended the game. What many of them describe was a terrible moment, when a crowd collectively realises something is badly wrong. There is no escape, absolutely no way out, and it’s quickly getting worse. Yet you, your neighbour, and the 10,000 people crammed into this tiny suffocating space, know you are all in danger. You realise

it, almost simultaneously, as one. It’s a panic as the crush increases and the air in the lungs runs out, because there’s no longer room for your chests to breathe in. In intense danger like this, we are utterly reduced. We cease to be individuals within the crowd, nor anything much other than animals, only caring about survival and that of any loved ones in there with us. It would be the same for people trying to escape a fire, or a crashed airliner, or one of the crushes that have occasionally blighted mass gatherings of religious pilgrims. A panicked and endangered crowd is a truly terrifying force. This is what sociologists mean by an escapist crowd. It must be among the most frightening things in the world.

MASS FELLOWSHIP

Yet even those who survived Hillsborough clearly remember, as they fought for their own lives, they tried to help others around them. As they felt themselves go under and tried to reach the surface of this horrible, surging swamp of bodies, they tried to pull others up with them. And this is another important point about crowds: while classical theory may tell you that it reduces human individuality, the evidence suggests that in times of extreme stress, it actually does not remove people of their humanity. Modern thinkers now try to consider crowds in a different way. Accompanying this article, Luke Clark interviews Dr Clifford Stott, a visiting professor at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. An expert on crowd psychology, he has been trying to inject more verifiable research into our understanding of crowd behaviour. Asked what

WHEN IT ALL GOES WRONG For the United Kingdom, one of the landmark events in crowd management, was the Hillsborough stadium disaster; which for many, including British crowd psychologist Dr Clifford Stott, provided numerous examples of the severe dangers of mismanaging crowds. Luke Clark asked Stott about calls to allow for "limited standing" in some British football grounds again, as happens in Germany. Was this a good idea, and under what circumstances? Hillsborough was a very important historical event, in terms of exposing so many issues that our conversation has touched upon. It happened because the police understood the crowd as a public order problem. So much so, that in their attempts to control the potential for disorder, they made the stadium fatally unsafe. Even when people were dying, they still couldn’t move away from the idea that this was an event that should be understood in terms of public disorder. So when people were climbing over the fences, the police were throwing them back in. Rather than recognise that, ‘Hang on a minute, this is not a public order problem, this is a public safety issue’, they couldn’t move from that view. This whole approach to crowds as a problem, is part of the problem. Where we see the responses to Hillsborough, those responses have very much been about trying to regulate crowds — trying to create an environment that’s safe, but equally undermines the capacity for disorder. While the argument is that we have all-seated stadiums because they’re safe, it is equally the case that to have a seat, you must have a ticket, which can be traced to a particular individual, who the CCTV cameras can help identify. That gives the police a greater control, which they don’t want to give that up. At the same time, the ability of stadia to host environments where people stand, safely, has been improved dramatically. It wasn’t standing in stadiums that killed people at Hillsborough. It was a whole array of problems, around the way in which the entire safety system within the stadiums was regulated. There was no proper licensing or evaluation of stadium infrastructure. And there was fencing. There were all sorts of issues that fed into why Hillsborough happened — which was essentially, a system failure. Now that these systems have been thoroughly revised, it’s perfectly safe for us to move to an environment now where people can stand in stadiums. There’s actually no reason we shouldn’t do that. But in England, we’re still not in a place where that is going to be made possible, at this stage. 49 JANUARY 2015

myth about crowds that he would like to debunk, Stott is clear. “It would have to be the idea that crowds are ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’. It’s this idea of mob mentality — the notion that where an individual becomes a part of the crowd, they lose the rational conscious control of their behavior. And that as a consequence, crowds are volatile, they’re unpredictable, and are places where irrationality occurs.”

IN THE ARAB SPRING, ORDINARY PEOPLE USED YOUTUBE VIDEOS TO CHALLENGE OFFICIAL VERSIONS OF EVENTS, USING TWITTER TO SPREAD THE WORD Stott says that both his studies, and those by others like him, indicate that these notions are incorrect. He argues that crowds, however angry they are, often have legitimate reasons for their anger. Secondly, studies show that crowds often don’t panic in emergencies. Thirdly, and this was a crucial lesson of Hillsborough, it is often us thinking in this way that totally impedes a sensible police response to a crowdrelated problem. Or more accurately, the crowd itself is often not the problem — but our reaction to it is. Generally one has to have some sympathy with authorities too, because understanding a crowd is often not easy. A crowd has no membership. You don’t have to do ask permission 50 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

to be a part of it. You just become it. And in that respect, crowds can grow and spread very quickly. The British Government once commissioned a study on crowd behaviour from the University of Leeds. It revealed some interesting findings. One was that it took only five percent of a crowd to change that entire crowd’s direction, meaning 95 percent of a crowd simply follow without realising what’s going on. This turned out to be true in non-human crowds too, such as birds and fish. This is something that those in crowd security try very hard to understand. Why does a crowd decide to do something? This decision might include anything ranging from home footy fans making up a song about Alan Shearer, to a group going from chanting, to storming a building. And indeed, there is an industry in this now. In the US, one wellknown member of it is a man called Paul Wertheimer, the owner of Crowd Management Strategies, whose first exposure to crowds was as chief of staff of the task force assigned to investigate the notorious crush outside a concert by English rock band The Who, at Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati, in December 1979. The Who had begun a sound check. People queuing outside believed the show was starting and pushed forward to get in. The staff, believing people were trying to enter without paying, kept a lot of the doors shut. And as a result, 11 people died in the ripples and waves of people that flooded through the mass of people. A man who wrote to Wertheimer’s task force as an eyewitness, observed: “The pound of the waves was

PROTESTERS OUTSIDE THE RASHTRAPATI BHAWAN, DEMANDING JUSTICE FOR THE 23-YEAR-OLD MEDICAL STUDENT WHO WAS BRUTALLY RAPED IN DELHI ON DECEMBER 16, 2012

HUNDREDS OF PROTESTERS MARK AND MOURN THE DEATH OF KHALED SAID AS THEY STAND ON KASR EL NILE BRIDGE IN ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT, IN 2010

CROWDS

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE EXTREMELY ODD

PHOTOS (MAIN) WWW.INDIATODAYIMAGES.COM; CORBIS, TEHRAN

THE GOOD

endless. If a wave came and you were being stood upon with your feet pinned to the ground, you would very likely lose your shoes or your balance and fall.” And people did. “They began to fall, unnoticed by all but those immediately surrounding them. People in the crowd 10 feet (3 metres) back from them didn’t know it was happening. Their cries were impossible to hear above the roar of the crowd.” Haunted by testimony like this, Wertheimer began advising venue operators and public safety officials on how to avoid tragedies like the one at The Who concert.

He and his team suggested banning festival seating for large indoor events, and that organisers should file a crowd management plan, just like a fire safety plan, only with a focus on getting in as much as getting out. National standards were not adopted as he had hoped, so Wertheimer set about documenting incidents and dispersing the information. He would go into potentially dangerous crowds and make note of what he saw. In particular, as the 1990s arrived, and grunge rock music with it, he would go into the so-called mosh pits. “Mosh pits are good places

The ‘mother gains super-strength to lift car off of her trapped child’ story is a well-known one. But large numbers of people can perform feats that are just as selflessly impressive, like lifting an entire train off a trapped victim. That happened twice in August 2014, at opposite ends of the planet. In Perth, Western Australia, morning commuters (pictured above) shoved a 43-tonne train off a man who was trapped between platform and track. Some weeks later, in Ireland, several commuters did the same when a schoolgirl’s leg was crushed by a tram.

THE BAD It’s not just protestors that are affected by group behaviour. Researchers from the University of California in Los Angeles found that men who walk with others in synchronised movements see “a purported criminal as less physically formidable than did men who engaged in this task without synchronising.” The study, which came out during the recent Ferguson riots in the USA, was particularly relevant to the time, said the UCLA in a release. “What if the simple act of marching in unison — as riot police routinely do — increases the likelihood that law enforcement will use excessive force in policing protests?”

THE ODD If you were a first-time visitor to a Gillingham Football Club game in the late '90s, you would no doubt walk away with many a question. Why would hundreds of fans in the Kent town turn up to matches with celery hidden in their trousers? And why would they then throw those sticks of celery onto the field, mid-play? The fans, it turns out, were not aiming for rival teams. They were aiming for their own goalie, the rather chunky Jim Stannard. He weighed in at 104 kilograms, a figure his fans clearly decided was rather high for professional sport. The celery sticks were their unsubtle suggestion that Stannard go on a diet. Celery was quickly banned from Gillingham games, with police frisking fans' trousers for the offending vegetable. 51 JANUARY 2015

to study crowd dynamics, because they reproduce in miniature the shock waves of large-scale crowd disasters,” as he told a profile writer from The New Yorker. One way or another, through psychologists like Stott and those who seek practical experience like Wertheimer, crowds are better understood today, and better handled. And like everything, they’re evolving too.

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guest list. It is believed that the highest funding achieved by a crowdfunding approach is US$40 million for online video game, Star Citizen. These days, technology is also instrumental in the assembly of crowds. Think of the flashmob: we’ve all seen the videos in a public space, where suddenly people all seem to start dancing in exact synchronicity, when moments earlier they appeared to be merely bystanders. The camera will cut to people who are not in on the joke, wandering

PHOTOS CORBIS (MAIN, TEHRAN TRAFFIC); GETTY IMAGES (PILLOW FLIGHT)

ROLLING FUNDER

Crowds don’t actually have to be in one place to have an impact either. Thanks to the Internet and mobile telephony, crowds can be anywhere, even when they’re dispersed. Consider crowdfunding. The interesting thing about crowdfunding is that it doesn’t need any two people involved ever to have been in the same room. This is a crowd in the vague, digital sense. And in a most wonderful form: strangers acting together to make something happen, just because they believe that it should. There are at least 450 or many more crowdfunding platforms now. They evolved from some unlikely geneses: one of the first examples was for the British prog-rock band Marillion, in which US$60,000 was raised by fans on the internet, to fund a US tour in 1997. The band had no involvement in the idea, but it was sufficiently impressed by it to fund the recording and marketing of several albums in this way too. Films have been crowdfunded too. Mark Tapio Kines financed his feature film Foreign Correspondents in this way, raising US$125,000. An early twist in the idea saw Electric Eel Shock, a Japanese rock band, raise money from fans in exchange for lifetime membership on the band’s

CROWDS

from 450,000 to three million in six months through the revolution, and now stands at five million.

UNDERSTAING CROWDS IS NOT EASY. A CROWD HAS NO MEMBERSHIP. YOU DON’T NEED PERMISSIONS, YOU JUST BECOME IT!

around bewildered at what is happening around them. Each participant will have arranged where to meet, and what to do, through the internet: an example of technology creating the crowd. In the Arab Spring, ordinary people used YouTube videos to challenge official versions of events, using Twitter to spread the word and to agree where to meet, then Facebook to share their experiences. According to researcher Emma Hall, Facebook users in Egypt rose

One Facebook page which drew attention was entitled “We Are All Khaled Said”, in reference to a young Egyptian man who died under unclear circumstances after being arrested in Alexandria in June 2010. Author Richard Lindsey says the page is “credited with aiding youth movements in organising and facilitating messaging and outreach to other populations, including the 18-day occupation of Tahrir Square,” he writes, in his study. That gathering in Tahrir Square provides a demon-stration of the power of the crowd, and came about in large part because of the power of the digital crowd as a spur.

ANTICIPATE THE FLOW

ABOVE A FLASHMOB GATHERS IN FRONT OF BERLIN'S BRANDENBURG GATE FOR ONE MASSIVE PILLOW FIGHT LEFT HEAVY TRAFFIC CAN VACILLATE BETWEEN FUNCTIONING CHAOS AND JUST PLAIN CHAOS

In the midst of researching this article, DCM visits Tehran, the bustling and traffic-clogged capital city of Iran. Heavy traffic is hardly unusual in Asia and the Middle East, and one finds functioning chaos on the roads in Jakarta, in Shanghai, in Mumbai or in Cairo. Yet Tehran really is something else. Cars barrel out of side roads, straight across eight-line highways jammed with buses, trucks and boxy

grey Iran Khodro family cars. They don’t slow down: nobody slows down, instead piling straight into the traffic at right angles, even though on the highway the cars flit abreast in twice as big a number as there are lanes to accommodate them. Despite it all, nobody so much as glances a wing mirror. The traffic keeps flowing. And this is one of the hardest elements of crowd behaviour to understand — we somehow manage to anticipate and adapt to what everybody else is doing. Maybe this also helps us understand our ability to speak together, which we discovered at Alan Shearer’s expense at Anfield. How did that example start? One guy in the crowd thought it was funny and started singing. He only got the first few words out, before everyone around him — through force of habit, and with the same anticipation as those drivers in Tehran showed — knew exactly the structure and tune he was using, and where it should go to next. By the second line, there were 50 people singing it; their neighbours heard, and by the third clause, there were a couple of hundred. Now, half a stand could hear it, so by its second repetition, there were a thousand, before eventually it was the rest of the stadium, a shared joke spreading out through music. It went far and wide like spilled liquid until everyone got bored. As quickly as it was there, the song faded and drained away, soon replaced by many more. It wasn’t such a warm moment for Shearer, but it was impressive, in its way. A reminder of the fact that, no matter how unique and individual we all think we are, we can be far stronger when we think and act as one. 53 JANUARY 2015

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HORROR STORY

The Fear Factory PHOTO EVERETT/CLICK PHOTOS

IT'S A WORLD OF CHAINSAWS, SCREAMS AND TERROR SWEATS. THANKS TO SOME FRIGHTENER LEGENDS, DANIEL SEIFERT BRAVES FAKE BLOOD AND CREAKY STAIRWELLS TO DISCOVER WHAT MAKES HORROR MOVIES TICK, DON'T WORRY - HE'LL BE RIGHT BACK

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PHOTOS: EVERETT/CLICK PHOTOS ( THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, THE EXORCIST)

JECT) IR WITCH PRO GES (THE BLA ); GETTY IMA E EXORCIST (TH RETT/CLICK PHOTOS EVE

The Assassin is ticking off his horror movie career highlights, and running out of fingers faster than a man juggling machetes. “Drenching about 60 girls in blood on Dracula: Legacy. Wrangling 1,000 snakes (yes, a thousand) on The Seeker: The Dark is Rising,” he notes. A brief dramatic pause follows, then his eyes widen as he thinks of yet another bloodsoaked memory worth sharing.

HORROR STORY

S praying gallons of blood in the combine harvester blade attack on The Collection.” And how could he forget, “Being killed on camera by Michael Myers at the beginning of Halloween: Resurrection.” His CV continues to trickle over us like a flood of ants on a tenday-old zombie. It has clearly been a busy time for terror over the past 25 years. We are jealous, though more than a little unsettled. As we tune back in, he is recalling some strange ‘behind the scenes’ memories that stand out in his mind. For instance, an awkward trip to Belgium: “Explaining to customs officials at the airport in Brussels why I had a fake severed doberman head in my luggage.” Yes, we can see how that might be awkward. Most people know this affable Englishman by the name Gary Tunnicliffe. But when you’ve spent this long dreaming up ever gorier on-screen deaths for one of Hollywood’s biggest studios, usually under the formal title of special makeup effects designer, nicknames like The

Assassin just sort of pop up. Tunnicliffe, aka The Assassin, continues to steamroll through his verbal vortex of simulated murder. He once made an extra shriek, and nearly faint, thanks to a fake throat that he slashed, just at the opportune time. And with a hint of justified pride, he notes that he once made director Wes Craven shout, ‘Gary just knocked it out of the park!’ on the first take of a kill scene on the set of Scream 4. He finally pauses for breath. “I could elaborate on all of those — and add about 30 more. But hey, we’d be here forever.” The jovial Tunnicliffe clearly loves his job. Horror movies give him the same thrill as rollercoasters, he tells DCM, meaning that he cackles just as demonically on a theme park ride as when he’s sitting with an audience watching one of the most recent blood fests he’s worked on. To many, that’s what horror movies boil down to — guts, knives, and stomach-churning thrills. But is there also something more primal going on when we submit ourselves to these filmic experiences? And can they even teach us something deeper about the nature of fear? To find out, we’re going to set off to some dark places and talk to people with a lot more blood on their hands. Industry professionals who, both on-screen and off, know just how to press that big red button inside of you — the one marked “terrified”.

TOP IN 1973 THE EXORCIST HIT CINEMAS, WITH A PROJECTILE VOMITING CHILD AS ITS EVIL CENTREPIECE ABOVE THE OMEN WAS RELEASED IN 1976 AND TERRIFIED AUDIENCES WITH ITS CENTRAL CHARACTER, A DEVILISH CHILD CALLED DAMIEN FAR LEFT THE 1990 INDIE MOVIE THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT TOOK JUST EIGHT DAYS TO FILM AND REINVIGORATED THE "SHAKY CAM" STYLE OF FILMMAKING

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OF INDIAN CHILLS AND THRILLS

DIRECTOR/PRODUCER VIKRAM BHATT What do you think makes horror movies work in India? Horror movies in India have always been a sub genre onto themselves, right from Mahal, Bees Saal Baad and many other superb classics. However, what our audiences like is not horror from the beginning to the end. They want a love story with the “horror” element being the villain of the piece. I have tried making Hollywood-style horror films too. But apart from a few pretentious critics, who claim to be the keepers of our culture, no else really likes them!

Raaz was and still is considered a fine example of horror cinema in India. It was a well-received horror movie after a really long time. What according to you was responsible for its success? Raaz had a great structure. It was basically about a woman who realises that to be a wife, only being married is not enough. One has to go a fair distance more to achieve that. It was basically a “Satyavan-Savitri” tale told in a horror set up. Add to that there was phenomenal music apart from its scary moments. Also, it was horror after a long time that took the genre seriously and did not want to just do a quick slipshod job. There were a lot of people who thought we were making a mistake when we started out making the film. But in the end our conviction set it apart. Of late, horror films are resorting to a lot of skin show… Horror films and sexuality have always gone hand in hand. But I believe that there is difference between that and sleaze. None of the films that I have directed have been about sleaze. Also, when we talk about evil spirits then vices and sins do come along, making sexuality an integral part of it all. Are we going back to the 1990s Ramsay brothers’ formula of having sex as an integral part of horror movies then? Why do we belittle the Ramsay brothers? They made some really good cinema. They had a formula and they had an audience for that formula. So, why talk down to that formula? Do we talk down to formulae…like Karan Johar or Yash Raj Films? If a person has an audience then what give anyone the right to come in between the audience and the filmmaker? 58 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE

We should start with one of the most famous horror movies ever filmed. Though it celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, its cachet has not dulled with time. And we can guarantee that you’ve heard of it: Head Cheese. No, wait. That was the original name for it, thankfully scrapped. You’ll know it, of course, as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. For non-fans, this film has seemingly become a byword for immorality, and a symbol of the crumbling of society. A troubled Robert De Niro watches it in Taxi Driver. A psychotic Christian Bale pumps out a thousand

sit-ups while it wails in the background in American Psycho. And yet The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (TTCM) has been named countless times as one of the greatest horror movies ever made. There are many reasons why. The 1974 tale practically invented the now tried and true genre of ‘teens go on road trip and get slashed to pieces by backwoods psychotics’. And it’s easy to see why Leatherface, the monstrously large villain — who rocks a suit and a mask made of human skin, all while wielding a ten kilogram chainsaw like a toothpick — has burned into our consciousness.

PHOTOS EVERETT/CLICK PHOTOS ( THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE

HORROR STORY

ABOVE THE US POSTER ART FOR THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. REPORTEDLY, WHEN IT WAS FIRST RELEASED, THE FILM WAS SO HORRIFYING THAT AUDIENCES WALKED OUT OF THE SNEAK PREVIEWS LEFT THE 2001 FILM RAAZ STOOD APART BECAUSE OF ITS SIMPLE STORY LINE, GREAT MUSIC AND THE UNEXPECTED SPOOKY MOMENTS SOMETHING THAT WAS SEEN ON SCREEN AFTER A LONG TIME

A real-life chainsaw was in fact the seedling for the entire movie. Director Tobe Hooper came up with the idea for the film in a packed hardware store, at the peak of the holiday season. Grumbling at the crush of shoppers, he spotted a rack of gleaming chainsaws. As he later dreamily recalled, “It occurred to me that if I started one of those saws, all those people would clear like the parting of the Red Sea.” The film’s shocking violence drew a backlash by some critics almost as vicious as the story itself. But they missed most of the artistry in TTCM that makes

it a classic with horror genre fans today. Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface, noted how one scene foreshadows the calm before the storm, the entry into nightmare land. In Chain Saw Confidential: How We Made America’s Most Notorious Horror Movie, he points out a close-up shot of a pocket watch with a spike in it. “It’s an interesting shot, a bit of Salvador Dali inserted into an entirely unexpected context”. It was also an allusion to Dali's The Persistence of Memory, a realm where time is distorted. Critics of the film were probably too disgusted to notice that Leatherface wasn’t merely a one-note emotionless beast, writes Hansen. He wears three masks, depending on how he feels. There was his ‘killing mask’; the face of an aged woman dubbed the ‘Old Lady’, and the ‘Pretty Woman’, which he wears to the table. Each of these represent something different to the character, writes Hansen. “Early on, Tobe told me that Leatherface wears different masks to express the context he is in and how he will behave — his state of mind.” When his compatriots drag the victim to the house, Leatherface dons his ‘Old Lady’ mask. He is quite happily “making dinner and being ‘mom’ for a while.” Later he puts on the ‘Pretty Woman’ to dress up for dinner. “In a way the masks are theatrical for Leatherface. They are performance.” It also makes him a creature with feelings and moods — far scarier than your average one-dimensional boogeyman. We are meant to realise that there is a man behind that dead skin. All this talk of human masks might also make you think that TTCM was an unrelenting gorefest. Even people who have seen it multiple times recall it as

being drenched in blood — and yet there’s comparatively little of it compared to some horror films. Why? In part, because all directors know the worst part comes as we imagine the act of violence. But also because Tobe Hooper, a first-time filmmaker, had no idea what he could get away with. So he called the Motion Picture Association of America, the organisation that awards movie ratings, over and over again. Aiming for a rating that would allow kids to see the movie, he would fling questions at whoever picked up the phone.

THE INDIAN AUDIENCE WANTS A LOVE STORY WITH THE “HORROR” ELEMENT AS THE VILLAIN OF THE PIECE, SAYS THE MAKER OF RAAZ, VIKRAM BHATT As he noted in a later interview, “I would say, ‘I know you can’t really decide anything over the phone, but I have to know. I have this scene where a girl gets hung on a meat hook.’ Long silence. ‘What could I do?’ Long silence. ‘I guess it would help me if there was no penetration shot.’ ‘That would be correct.’ ‘And no blood?’ ‘That would help.’”

BIOSHOCK

When hapless characters in a horror film get bludgeoned by maniacs, eaten by monsters or drowned by angry spirits, it reminds us that we humans are indeed frail characters ourselves. You’ll recall the shrieking strings of the shower scene in Psycho. Sound attacks us in the most direct way possible. You think light 59 JANUARY 2015

RIGHT WITH ALMOST NO GORE OR SPECIAL EFFECTS, STANLEY KUBRICK'S 1980 FILM THE SHINING SET A NEW BENCHMARK FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLERS BELOW HITCHCOCK'S 1960 MASTERPIECE PSYCHO WAS THE FIRST HORROR MOVIE HE EVER MADE

HIGH ART, LOW ART SOME EXAMPLES OF HORROR FILMS REFERENCING FAMED ARTWORKS INCLUDE:

SCREAM: THE GHOSTFACE MASK IS A COPY OF THE HOWLING FEATURES IN EDVARD MUNCH’S 1893 MASTERPIECE THE SCREAM (PICTURED ABOVE) THE EXORCIST: THE UNEARTHLY SOURCES OF LIGHT IN THE POSTER WERE INSPIRED BY RENEE MAGRITTE’S SURREALIST PAINTING EMPIRE OF LIGHT PSYCHO: EDWARD HOPPER, CREATOR OF THE FAMED PAINTING NIGHTHAWKS, HELPED INSPIRE THE LOOK OF THE SET, THE EERILY PERFECT BATES MOTEL

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travels faster than noise? Not when your mind is involved. A 1980 study found that visual cues reach the brain within 0.2 to 0.4 seconds while auditory signals, zip into the brain in just 0.08 to 0.1 seconds. As for the content of noises, “nonlinear sounds” are the key to making us edgy. The T. Rex roar in Jurassic Park was an ear-blasting mix of a baby elephant, a growling tiger and an alligator’s low-pitched growl. The Exorcist mashed up the droning of bees with slaughterhouse pig squeals. Sounds like these become examples of nonlinear chaotic noise, which we’re innately programmed to pay attention to. Daniel Blumstein, an expert on animal distress calls, noted the similarities between scary movie music and the screams of (appropriately named) yellow-bellied marmots. High-pitched, arrhythmic sounds automatically make us think our young are being threatened. Horror makers are in essence using Mother Nature’s tools for their own sneaky handiwork. Look at many movie tricks, and biology will lie behind them. Why is the Ghostface mask in the Scream series so unsettling? Or clown makeup? And zombie flesh? It is because in each case, the appearance of these lies in the ‘uncanny valley’, the part of the spectrum where a face is almost human, but not quite. Robotics expert Masahiro Mori coined the term in 1970, presumably unaware that his ideas about bots would apply equally to horror films. Why should we be scared when we watch a movie in the cinema, sitting in a comfy seat and surrounded by hundreds of like-minded people? Curiously, the answer might have something to do with your armpits. As the axe murder rampages onscreen, and your

body goes into fight or flight mode, the body starts to sweat. Researchers have found that smelling the sweat of a terrified person can increase our own feelings of fear. Our heart rate increases, and the amygdala, the part of the brain associated with fear, goes haywire. Scientists think that we are responding to pheromones in the fear sweat. So while the film lights the emotional match, as an audience, we fan the flames by pumping out chemicals that merely feed the frenzy.

MINISTRY OF YUCK

Speaking of sweat, let’s not forget the importance of disgust, one of humankind’s most basic emotions. The revulsion that kept us away from contagious sick people and rotting meat in the caveman era, is still at work when we cringe at Freddy Krueger’s steak tartare of a face. Doctor of anthropology Valerie Curtis, who jokingly calls herself a “disgustologist”, has studied the concept for 30 years. She can confirm that people all over the world are grossed out by the same things. It is in our DNA. Think of disgust as an organ, she suggested to Reuters last year. “It has a purpose, it’s there for a reason. Just like a leg gets you from A to B, disgust tells you which things you are safe to pick up, and which things you shouldn’t touch.” The 'don’t touch' items include things involving deformity, death, disease and dangerous objects. All of which are key ingredients that when combined, comprise your standard horror movie. It’s a principle that is at play in what many consider to be the first horror movie ever made, the 1896 short La Manoir du Diable. It’s hardly riveting, consisting of a parade of ghouls and ghosts popping

HORROR STORY

up as a hapless character cowers from corner to corner. But his silent attempts to recoil from the nasty spirits echo scary movies to this day.

E SHINING) PHOTOS (TH RETT/CLICK PHOTOS EVE

HIGH-PITCHED, ARRHYTHMIC SOUNDS MAKE US THINK OUR YOUNG ARE BEING THREATENED. HORROR MAKERS ARE, IN ESSENCE, USING MOTHER NATURE’S TOOLS FOR THEIR OWN SNEAKY HANDIWORK At its heart, horror boils down to something the animal in all of us understands — get away from the icky things! When the icky things do manage to nibble and dribble all over the hero, our systems go into overdrive, especially the brain’s mirror neurons. These are the reason why, if someone gets their finger lopped off, your own pinky starts to tingle. In one study, scientists at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands played a clip to subjects in an fMRI machine. It was the scene in Dr No, when 007 wakes up to a spider’s hairy legs slowly tickling his skin. “Watching the movie scene in which a tarantula crawls on James Bond’s chest can make us literally shiver — as if the spider crawled on our own chest,” the team revealed. Think about how powerful that fact is. We are literally placing ourselves into the shoes of the fictional character and feeling what they are feeling. When your 61 JANUARY 2015

Cannabalisimo!

Killer Machines Ozploitation

Kaiju

Telekenetics

Hagsploitation

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1980-99

1971-84

1950-70

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Cannabilism is one of mankind’s biggest taboos, so it’s not surprising cannibalismo films have drawn a lot of flack. But they too have their deeper message — Cannibal Holocaust director Ruggero Deodato says his docu-style film was a satire of overly bloody Italian news reports covering Red Brigade terrorist attacks.

From sophisticated examples where videotapes and phone calls spell death (Ringu), to schmaltzy B-movies where industrial laundry folding machines come to life (The Mangler), the killer machine genre shows that sometimes it’s best to take the batteries out.

Terrifying animals, wild weather and ominous open spaces: Australia’s got it all. The violent, cheaply made genre kicked off after the country introduced its R movie rating in 1971, restricting it to those over 18 years of age.

The Americans and Japanese are undisputed masters of the huge-monster movie. Where would the world be without dozens of Godzilla movies? At their heart, these flicks terrified a post-nuclear world, where radiation could supersize and mutate anything.

This mind-bending genre might feature a lot of troubled anti-heroes who go mad, but at its heart we all know we’d love to have these powers. The two-second ‘head explosion’ in Scanners is one of the internet’s most popular GIF images. Go on, we know you want to log on and see it.

Also known as the psycho-biddy genre, it’s light on gore but heavy on crazy old ladies. Because as anyone who’s seen their granny without her dentures knows, retirees can be very creepy.

Cannibal Holocaust Christine (1980) (1983)

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Razorback (1984)

The Host (2006)

Scanners (1981)

Strait-jacket (1964)

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Cannibal Holocaust’s ultra violence saw it banned in 40 countries. Deodato’s footage was so convincing that he was put on trial, accused of murdering his cast. He had to parade his actors in court to prove they were still alive.

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Guilty pleasure Maximum Overdrive (1986) not only stars the actor who voices Lisa Simpson, it also features a ridiculous plot, where every machine on earth comes to life after a weird astronomic event.

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0

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Mad Max (1979) featured a post-apocalyptic landscape and a quiet performance by future superstar Mel Gibson. He landed the role when he auditioned after a vicious bar fight, giving him a suitably bruised and battered look.

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About 20 percent of South Korea went to the movies to support their country’s 2006 hit The Host, featuring a very angry and tentacle-y sea monster.

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When the 2013 remake of Carrie came out, they promoted it virally by having a teenage girl angrily fling a man in a real-life café using only the power of her mind. And wire rigging.

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Joan Crawford acts her eyes out in the 1964 flick Strait-Jacket, a film with more high-pitched shrieks than a Bieber concert. It’s one of The 100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made in The Official Razzie Movie Guide.

ICONS FROM REDDIT: ROBOT BY MIKE HINCE; CIRCUIT BOARD BY COSMIN PETRISOR; CACTUS BY JASON TROPP; BARBED WIRE BY LUIS PRADO; MOHAWK BY KENNETH APPIAH; DINOSHARK BY WOLFF; OCTOPUS BY YULIYA PO; CAT BY MICHAEL A. SALTER; BRAIN BY GILAD FRIED; ELDERLY WOMAN BY ANUSHAY QURESHI; TREE BY SOPHIA LEE; WORM BY ANA MARÍA LORA MACIAS; ZOMBIE BY ANDREW LASKEY

Twelve Kinds of Horrorfying

Move over boring old slasher movies and traditional haunted house flicks. Here are a dozen horror sub-genres you never knew existed. And believe us, there are dozens more lurking in cinema’s dark catalogue. It’s a scary world out there...

HORROR STORY

INVISIBLE BY ANDREW CAMERON; KNIFE BY EDWARD BOATMAN; GLOVE BY JOSÉ MANUEL DE LAÁ; GORILLA BY NICOLE REGAN; FROG BY CHRISTY PRESLER; SPIDER BY MICHAEL SMITH; BRUSH BY YURI MAMAEV; BALLOON ANIMAL BY WHITNEY BOWERS; CLOWN BY SIMON CHILD; VHS TAPE BY MIKE WIRTH; CAMERA BY FERNANDO VASCONCELOS; MAN BY SIMON CHILD; COFFIN BY MISIRLOU

FRIGHTOMETER

TERROR CREEPS

GORE!

Parasitic

Giallo

Eco-Horror

Animated

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Proto-Horror

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Kids movies like Monster House, 9 and Corpse Bride might not feature overt scares, but you can’t tell us that the character animation and overall atmosphere aren’t creepy. We bet you wouldn’t watch them alone in the house. Animestyle films like Vampire Hunter D are even spookier.

We’re not talking docu-style movies, but actually nonfiction documentaries about the genre. Fans of The Shining should watch Room 237, featuring dozens of obsessive fans yammering entertainingly about what the film is ‘really’ about — like Kubrick supposedly faking the moon landing.

1975-86

1963-75

1995-2014 1995-2010 2000-14

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Slithery, eyeless beasts abound here. And just like a staple of serial killer horror where “the calls are coming from inside the house!”, the parasitic horror stems from the fact that “the monster noises are coming from inside me!” Brrr.

This Italian genre takes its name from the yellow pages of cheap paperback thrillers. They usually feature a trenchcoat-clad killer, mainly seen from the arms down as he stabs victim after victim — usually pretty women. Also known by the nickname ‘spaghetti slashers’.

Enter a world where Mother Nature herself is the enemy. Classics like The Birds and Jaws remain so powerful because no reason is ever given as to why the animals run amok. Others have a bit more of an eco message, implying that mankind is indeed to blame.

These are the unrated films from cinema's earliest days. They include the first ‘real’ Hitchcock film he ever made (in 1927) and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Think they’re not scary? Think again. The silent movie aspect makes them even more unsettling. You don't believe us? Many of them are free on YouTube.

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Night of the Creeps (1986)

Deep Red (1975)

The Birds (1963)

Coraline (2009)

Nightmares in Red (2009)

Nosferatu (1922)

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Every year, the crews at the AmundsenScott South Pole research station host a film screening of the 1982 sub-zero parasitic horror classic The Thing. Which seems like a great way to spread the virus… of fear!

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Just reading some of the titles of Giallo films provides a satisfying tingle — Death Walks on High Heels, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, Don’t Torture a Duckling. Ah well, they probably sound better in Italian.

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How did Hitchcock get the birds to swarm angrily over actress Tippi Hedren during one scene in his 1963 masterpiece The Birds? They were attached to her clothes by nylon. The final shot lasted a minute but took days to film.

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That bit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit when Judge Doom gets brutally mangled by a steamroller and his eyeballs fall out — to reveal manic, blood-red, animated ones. And this was a movie that was marketed for kids!

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Nightmares in Red, White and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film is an opus with interviewees reminiscing about everything from the 1910 adaptation of Frankenstein to Alien, Saw and Re-Animator.

Prime Cut

Nosferatu was a blatant rip-off of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, so courts ordered copies to be destroyed. Only one eventually survived, without which this classic would not be around today.

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CONTEMPORARY HORROR AUTHOR STEPHEN KING HAD A HAND IN THE ICONIC HORROR MOVIE CARRIE (1976)

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HORROR STORY

mirror neurons activate, you exercise your ability to be more empathetic, one of the cornerstones of human civilization ever known. To elicit that sympathy, The Assassin, Gary Tunnicliffe, feels that less is more. He has sat in test audiences and watched people wince slightly at a decapitation — then howl like banshees when someone rips their toenail off. It’s about building scenes that audiences can connect with, by showing them moments they have experienced. “No matter how great a decapitation is, you simply can’t imagine how it would feel.”

PHOTOS EVERETT/CLICK PHOTOS (CARRIE, FREEDOM FROM WANT, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS)

A GOOD SCARY MOVIE IS ALMOST LIKE A VICARIOUS, SAFE FORM OF INSANITY. A BUNGEE JUMP RATHER THAN A SUICIDE JUMP But we’ve all stubbed our toe, he says. And been to the dentist. “That’s why everyone cringes at Marathon Man. It’s a guy drilling into your teeth without anaesthetic. Just talking about it makes me uncomfortable,” he shudders. "Good horror taps into the deep recesses of our own reality."

SPIDERS IN CORNERS

Hungry for more horrific advice, we turned to Danny Draven, who has worked as a producer, director, writer and director on dozens of scary movies, such as Ghost Month, Reel Evil and Hell Asylum. After wearing so many hats for various films, he speaks from experience when he says a scary film starts with the writer, but ends in the editing room.

Draven began his career as an editor, primarily in horror and sci-fi. “I can tell you first-hand that an editor can make or break a scene.” Flub the timing of a sequence, and your lantern-jawed hero looks like a dimwit, he says, or a scare deflates like a weekold balloon. Curiously, when working on a film that he hasn’t directed, Draven always edits the scene first, then reads the script second. “I try to put my mind in the place of the audience, so when I cut a scene for the first time it stays fresh.” Asked what makes for good cinematic tension, filmmaking legend Alfred Hitchcock usually told two versions of the same story. In the first, a group of men are playing poker, casually chatting. Suddenly, a bomb explodes under the table, raining shrapnel, blood and wood everywhere. In version two, everything is exactly the same, except for one thing: you show the bomb to the audience beforehand. As anyone who has ever yelled, “Don’t go into the basement, you fool!” to an onscreen actress knows, the audience will be literally aching to warn the victims of their impending doom. “In the first situation we have given the public 15 seconds of surprise at the moment of explosion,” Hitchcock noted. “In the second case we have provided them with 15 minutes of suspense.” Draven juggled the same principles on a film he edited called. “I’ve found it’s best to edit a scene in a way that gives the audience time to let their guard down, or just enough time to scare them back to attention,” he says. Examples include opening a scene by revealing a spider hidden in a room, while the characters remain unaware. Or he might try a different tack, not showing the threat at all, then during a quiet

TOP ONE OF CINEMA'S CREEPIEST VILLAINS IS HANNIBAL LECTER, AS PLAYED BY OSCAR-WINNING ANTHONY HOPKINS IN THE 1991 FILM THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS LEFT IN THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, DIRECTOR TOBE HOOPER WAS INSPIRED TO SUBVERT THE FAMOUS NORMAN ROCKWELL PAINTING, FREEDOM FROM WANT, INTO A MUCH DARKER PROPOSITION (BELOW LEFT)

moment having the spider pop out to shock the audiences. Both techniques work, but a filmmaker has to decide which will improve the film as a whole. For him, editing is like putting together a big puzzle. “You just need to find the right pieces that click.” If editing can be a puzzle, shooting can be a real pain. Draven once had an actress in full monster makeup show up drunk, right before a scene. It was supposed to involve a complicated, blocked-out ritual. He could tell it just

wasn’t going to happen — so he made it a fight scene instead. “After talking privately with the sober actors, I called action, and let them duke it out for real.” How did it go? “I shot it, we wrapped on time. No one got hurt. The actress had a bad hangover and still doesn’t remember shooting that segment,” he laughs. What is on page, he wisely notes, isn't always what ends up on screen. Following the director’s tradition to not always let actors know what is going to happen, Draven has also 65 JANUARY 2015

shot scenes that involved real scares. “I didn’t tell the lead actress the monster would jump out with an axe during the take.” The monster blasted through the door like a juggernaut, and the actress sprinted off the set. His verdict? Best. Scare. Ever. “She claims to have peed her pants after,” he remembers wistfully. For every scene thereafter, she was genuinely scared, because she never knew when Draven would pull another stunt. “Each dark corner became a possible scare for her. It translated on film very well.”

IT IS MINDBLOWING HOW STANLEY KUBRICK MANAGES TO SCARE US IN THE SHINING, NOT WITH DARKNESS BUT IN A WELL-LIT HOTEL THE CRYING GAME

Some of the greatest moments of horror history have come about from directors toying with their actors like this. Much of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s power comes from the fact that Tobe Hooper’s cast really was strung out, afraid and irritable. Who wouldn’t be, filming in 40 degree Celsius heat for 12 to 16 hours a day? Because the events take place over 24 hours, the actors couldn’t change clothes. “They refused to let me wash the costume for 28 days, because they were worried about it changing colours,” Hansen later moaned to anyone who would listen. “I also couldn’t take off the mask — because they were scared it would rip.” David Konow, who wrote Reel Terror, a love letter to 66 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

the horror genre, agrees that such discomfort can often transform our viewing experience. “When you learn about how hideous the filmmaking conditions were, it makes the movie even more uncomfortable. Even without knowing this, you can tell how it had to be in that house, how bad it had to smell. It practically makes the movie three-dimensional.” Edwin Neal, who played the deranged hitchhiker, later said that his time on set was worse than his infantry tour of Vietnam. Perhaps that’s what compelled him to sneak into screenings of the film at the Village Theatre in Austin, Texas, and tap unsuspecting patrons on the shoulder, just as his character was cutting himself onscreen. Not surprisingly, it didn’t go down well. “They finally asked me not to come back anymore,” he notes. Six years earlier, Roman Polanski was messing just as cruelly with his star, Mia Farrow, while shooting Rosemary’s Baby. It was bad enough that Farrow had to play the expectant mother of a demonic child — now Polanski was making her walk into a busy Manhattan street into oncoming traffic. When Farrow rightfully expressed scepticism, Polanski patted her padded belly and said, “no one’s going to hit a pregnant woman.” Top prize of the director’s bullying Olympics though, has to go to Stanley Kubrick. On the set of The Shining, he kept up such a vicious campaign of intimidating actress Shelley Duvall, that her hair started falling out from stress. And there were so many retakes of her weeping, that her eyes eventually ran out of tears. She had to start keeping bottles of water nearby to rehydrate herself. And the legendary scene when Nicholson chops

through the bathroom door as Duvall wails helplessly on the other side? Not only did he heft a real fireman’s axe weighing 15 kilograms, he was also battering a proper wooden door. The set designers started with a lightweight prop, but thanks to his time as a volunteer firefighter, Nicholson demolished it in seconds. Kubrick shot that scene 60 times in three days. Imagining the 60 howls of “Heeeere’s Johnny!”, the weeping blisters that must have built up on Jack’s hands, the sheer amount of splinters and thwacks and hours of

ABOVE THE 1980 SLASHER FILM FRIDAY THE 13TH SCARED THE HECK OUT OF CAMP COUNSELLORS EVERYWHERE

HORROR STORY

repositioning and noise, Kubrick’s madness and the character’s start to blend in our mind. The artistry of what we see on screen fuses with the backstory. It’s still mindblowing that Kubrick manages to scare us not with darkness, but in a well-lit hotel. Movie evil mixes with real life evil, making the film twice as hypnotic. Such trickery has become par for the course in this genre.

PHOTOS EVERETT/CLICK PHOTOS (FRIDAY THE 13TH); GETTY IMAGES (DRACULA'S CASTLE)

MARKETING MURDER

It’s 1963, and you’re enjoying watching movie trailers in a cool, dark cinema. Then a pink-faced, besuited man steps into frame. “Ladies and gentlemen, you are about to witness some scenes from the next attraction to play in this theatre,” he mutters. He cautions that it should under no circumstances be viewed by anyone with a heart condition. “We urgently recommend that if you are such a person, or the parent of a young or impressionable child now in attendance, that you and the child leave the auditorium for the next 90 seconds.” Then, before anyone has time to even consider beating a retreat to the popcorn stand, the trailer for Blood Feast begins. A minute later and you’ve seen, in rapid succession, a woman’s tongue ripped out of her head, a dismembered body and a snake slithering around brains — all in lurid Technicolour. This was reverse psychology at its finest, and people queued for miles to watch the movie. Especially when some newspapers refused to even run adverts for it and police officers declared it obscene. Curiosity killed the cat, but only because the cat can’t help but be curious. Neither can we. Because when it comes to attracting attention, there’s no publicity like bad publicity.

The producers of The Last House on the Left even attached portions of scandalised reviews (“Can a movie go too far?”) to their posters. It was also one of many movies to use metaannouncements to toy with people. For instance, they borrowed a tagline first used by the 1964 horrors StraitJacket and Color Me Blood Red. To push the point, their posters blared: “To avoid fainting keep repeating, it’s only a movie.. only a movie.. only a movie..” Other films were more obviously spotlighting reality versus film. That was practically the entire plot of Scream. Director Wes Craven told press, “I think the very essence of the Scream films is that we break the rules.” In the first film, characters dryly note that whenever someone in a horror flick says, ‘I’ll be right back,’ they end up dead. Yet in Scream, the person that says that line is one of the killers, he notes. Really, Craven explains, these rules are more like clichés. “As soon as they’re stated in the Scream films, we almost always break them. It makes the audience not know what to expect.”

KNOCK, KNOCK

Pulling that off can be tricky, Danny Draven explains. As he well knows, horror fans can be the most rabid and hard to please viewers, considering their genre’s conventions are so well established. Giving them an experience that they haven’t yet had before is far from easy. “Don’t underestimate your audience, because they are usually much smarter than you,” he warns. But one trick always seems to work. It’s why the shark in Jaws (total screen time: four minutes) or the aliens in Alien (total screen time: three minutes, 36 seconds) still loom so large in our minds. We saw

THE TERROR MEISTER AUTHOR DAVID KONOW ON

CINEMA WITHOUT HITCHCOCK

“We certainly wouldn’t have modern cinematic suspense without Hitchcock, and without Psycho, we may never have had the modern horror film, in that he took it out of Dracula’s castle, and made the monster the quiet person next door. We probably would have had that kind of movie eventually, but not with the style and innovation that Hitchcock told the story.”

WHY SHOWERS ARE CREEPY “We’re naked, and we’re trapped in a corner. How can you get around somebody coming at you with a knife like that? Hitchcock could have made a murder anywhere terrifying, but you’re more closed-in in a shower than in a bedroom. You can make the shots in a bedroom tighter, and therefore more claustrophobic, but the shower is one of those places you’d least expect it. After seeing the movie, how many times have you looked through the curtain or the shower door, looking for that shadow coming near you?”

WHY STUDIOS LOVE HORROR “Tommy Lee Wallace, John Carpenter’s long time collaborator, who edited Halloween, told me the attitude with the major studios has always been: we win awards with drama, and horror is how we make money. I think a lot of people have dismissed it as kids' stuff, and that you can’t do anything serious with it, which is clearly not the case.” 67 JANUARY 2015

So we have a genre that is fun, involving, creative and twisted. But is it anything more than that? Like therapy, maybe? David Konow spoke to dozens of industry professionals in Reel Terror. As he explains to DCM, horror is basically collective fear, made easier. “Joseph Stefano, the late screenwriter of Psycho, told me: in a horror film you’re scared in a safe environment,” he says. You go in, yell yourself hoarse for 90 minutes, then come out refreshed. It’s a cathartic theory of drama as old as Aristotle. Hitchcock would also snort at the idea that his type of movie can make us want to commit horrible acts. He’s

WE

FREDDY

FREDDY KRUEGER (ABOVE). NORMAN BATES. JIGSAW. JASON VOORHEES. PENNYWISE. SAMARA. DAMIEN. CHUCKY. PINHEAD. DRACULA. HANNIBAL LECTER. WHAT ARE WE TRYING TO SAY WITH THIS ROLL CALL OF SOME OF HISTORY’S MOST INFAMOUS VILLAINS? IT’S THAT IN THE HORROR GENRE, THE EVIL GUY IS THE CHARACTER YOU REMEMBER. CAN YOU NAME ANY OF THE GOOD GUYS IN THESE MOVIES? WE DIDN’T THINK SO. AND WHEN THE POSTERS COME OUT, WHOSE FACE IS IN THE LIMELIGHT? FREDDY’S, BABY.

THE AUDIENCE WINCES AT A DECAPITATION SCENE AS OPPOSED TO YELLING LIKE BANSHEES WHEN TOENAILS ARE RIPPED OFF, ON SCREEN

As anyone who’s ever told a ghost story knows, freaking someone out properly, getting them to leave the light on at night, is no easy task. Crafting a horror movie is, in a way, the purest form of cinema. As Konow puts it, Jonathan Demme, the director who gave us Hopkins as Lecter, once said, every filmmaker would kill to do a movie like Silence of the Lambs. “Think about how many directors have always wanted to beat Hitchcock at their own game.” 68 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

ROMAN POLANSKI DIRECTED THE 1968 PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR FILM ROSEMARY'S BABY AND PREGNANT WOMEN EVERYWHERE WINCED

said to have tut-tutted that, in many types of films, murders are always very clean. “I show how difficult it is, and what a messy thing it is to kill a man,” he noted. Horror can also reflect larger elements of the world. Critics and viewers have read a lot into the horror genre. Ringu they say, captures our fear of technology. Final Destination is about the inability to accept death. The Fly mirrors our fears of age and degeneration. And postSeptember 11, Hostel, some said, was about America’s fear of foreigners. As we already know, us puny humans are programmed to be scared — fear keeps us alert and alive. But we need to aim that fear at something concrete, says Konow. Our modern worries, like work stress or whether our girlfriend is going to break up with us: those are the fears that hurt us everyday. And yet they’re too nebulous to really battle. It’s like trying to wrestle with a cloud. Not so in horror. “We can give our fear an object, then destroy it. Like a giant shark we blow to hell — or a demon we exorcise,” he says. In other words, a good scary movie is almost like a vicarious, safe form of insanity. A bungee jump, rather than a suicide jump. And when that bungee line yanks us right into the abyss, we learn something about ourselves. Watching Psycho, Konow says, we can ask some soulsearching questions about the troubled killer Norman Bates. “What could separate us from him and stop us from committing such horrible crimes? After all,” he adds, changing his voice an octave, and momentarily channeling the deranged hotel owner, “We all go a little mad sometimes.”

PHOTO EVERETT/CLICK PHOTOS (JU-ON: THE GRUDGE, ROSEMARY'S BABY)

only tantalizing glimpses of them. It’s curiosity at work. For Draven, the scariest thing always lurks behind the next closed door, activating our primal subconscious. “My imagination creates something that is far scarier. This is the most effective kind of horror.” David Konow couldn’t agree more, adding that what you leave out is just as important as what you leave in. “Like Miles Davis once said, it’s not what you play but what you don’t play.” Some movies, he explains, toy with us so expertly that they don’t show us anywhere near as much as we think we saw. Like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Silence of the Lambs. Heck, Anthony Hopkins turned his brief 17-minute performance as chianti-loving, fava bean-eating Hannibal Lecter into an Academy Award for Best Actor.

THE THEATRICAL RELEASE POSTER FOR THE 2002 JAPANESE HORROR FILM JU-ON: THE GRUDGE, WHICH SPAWNED AN AMERICAN REMAKE TWO YEARS LATER

HORROR STORY COVER STORY

FEAR BY NUMBERS

26

NUMBER OF TIMES THE ACTORS HAD TO RIDE THE ROLLERCOASTER IN FINAL DESTINATION 3, IN ORDER TO FILM THE MAIN PREMONITION SCENE

EIGHT

NUMBER OF DAYS IT TOOK TO FILM THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT

US$35,000

APPROXIMATE BUDGET FOR THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (SOME SOURCES QUOTE FAR LOWER). IT EARNED OVER US$240,000,000 IN THE BOX OFFICE, MEANING THAT FOR EVERY DOLLAR IT COST TO MAKE, IT EARNED BACK NEARLY 7,000.

200

NUMBER OF CALORIES THAT VIEWERS CAN BURN WHILE VIEWING A HORROR FILM, DUE TO THE BODY’S STRONG BIOLOGICAL RESPONSE

#1

HITCHOCK'S PSYCHO WAS THE FIRST HOLLYWOOD MOVIE EVER TO SHOW A FLUSHING TOILET

33 PERCENT

NEVER ONE TO PRAISE LIGHTLY, HITCHCOCK SAID THAT, “33 PERCENT OF THE EFFECT OF PSYCHO WAS DUE TO THE MUSIC”

FIVE WORDS YOU SHOULD NEVER SAY TO YOURSELF IN THE MIRROR: "CANDYMAN, CANDYMAN, CANDYMAN, CANDYMAN, CANDYMAN."

1965

BELA LUGOSI, THE ACTOR FAMED FOR HIS ROLE OF COUNT DRACULA, WAS BURIED, AT HIS OWN REQUEST, WITH HIS CAPE IN HIS COFFIN 69 DISCOVERY CHANNEL JANUARY MAGAZINE 2015

THIS IS AN EPIC MARCH OF OVER 2,000 KILOMETRES, WHERE MILLIONS OF WILD ANIMALS ARE ON A THUNDEROUS PATH THROUGH THE SERENGETI, IN NORTHERN TANZANIA. CAIN NUNNS GETS UP, CLOSE AND PERSONAL WITH ELEPHANT HERDS, RHINOS AND SPECTACULAR AFRICA

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PHOTO HEINRICH VAN DEN BERG

TRAVEL

WILDEBEEST CROSSING THE MARA RIVER TO GET TO BETTER GRASS AS THEY MIGRATE THROUGH THE SERENGETI

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“You have to manage expectations. It’s the wild. There are no absolutes or guarantees. You might be sitting in a car for five hours while your guide keeps you busy by pointing out birds and talking about shrubbery,” warned adventure travel agent Samantha Kelly, who sends punters to glaciers in Patagonia and river safaris in Borneo. And in my case, to the Great Migration in Tanzania.

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TRAVEL

OPPOSITE CROCODILE LIE WAITING DOWNSTREAM FROM WHERE THE WILDEBEEST CROSS. THIS YOUNGSTER TWAS SWEPT DOWN THE RIVER WHERE A CROCODILE KILLED IT

PHOTOS HEINRICH VAN DEN BERG

BELOW HERDS OF WILDEBEEST GRAZING ON GREEN GRASS

amantha Kelly's words should have been an ominous caveat, hanging in the air, thick and foreboding. I wasn’t listening. This was around two million wildebeest, zebra and antelope on an annual thundering voyage, driven by primal rhythm to breed and calf, and followed by the predators of the plains in the cradle of man. I was heading to Serengeti, Tanzania’s oldest national park, first declared a World Heritage site in 1979. And I was there to take part in a time-honoured battle of attrition. It is literally survival of the fittest, as herds of up to 40 kilometres in length pour through the plains, and plunge headlong into coffee-hued, crocodile infested waters, during an annual exodus that follows the short, sweet, spring rains — part of a seemingly endless quest for fresh water and nutrient-rich grasses. There are no alarm clocks

out here. It’s simply the rains that mark the start of the migration, and determine when the herds will move on to new pasture grounds. Indeed, some call this annual three-part drama of life, death and migration on the Serengeti and Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve the “Greatest Show on Earth”. They wouldn’t be far off. Undoubtedly the stars in the production of this 2,000 kilometre odyssey are the wildebeest themselves — the snorting, jittery, uncoordinated clowns of the plains. Its understudies are the herds of buffalo, elephants, giraffe, eland, impala and gazelle. Then of course, like eager diners at some almighty food conveyor belt, there are the predators: prides of lion, cheetah, leopards and hyenas, also profiting from this sudden abundance of plains grazers.

researched on the planet. In this primal and seemingly never-ending country, the world unfolds upon itself without interruption. It's a big emptiness, filled with everything and then some. But no matter how far you cover, you can never get enough of it. The Massai seem to know this best. For them, the Serengeti means the “place where the land runs forever”. Out on the plains, the sightlines really do stretch forever, and the heat is represented as waves on a distant horizon wider than the sea.

SUNBURNED PARADISE

It is the migration which literally allows the Serengeti to be the Serengeti. The entire continent is riddled with problems impacting on the survival of its great natural resources. Massive debt burdens, the weight of colonial yolk, war, famine, disease, the scarcity of fresh water and increased pressure from encroaching farmers boosting meat production for Africa’s burgeoning populations —

In 1913, great stretches of Africa were still unknown to the Western eye when American hunter Stewart Edward White set out from Nairobi. Pushing south, he recalled: “We walked for miles over burnt country. Then I saw the green trees of the river, walked two miles more, and found myself in paradise.” The area is one of the most photographed, filmed and

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SERENGETI IS TANZANIA’S OLDEST NATIONAL PARK, WHERE HERDS OF UPTO 40 KMS PLUNGE HEADLONG INTO COFFEE-HUED CROCODILE INFESTED WATERS Each year marks another endless cycle of hunting the rains, in a race for life that seemingly never ends. Once it is finished, it is almost time to begin again. Like a postman at the end of his route, the animals pause for a brief spell, before beginning the cycle. To the tireless mixed herds of wildebeest and zebra — a symbiotic relationship that is built on the wildebeest’s heightened sense of smell, and the zebra’s exceptional eyesight — migration seems to be a stronghold, amidst times of near-distress. Day and night, the movement of life on the plains hardly ceases, as the trudging lines move across the frame, like an exhausted army returning from war. 74 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

The plains in the southern finger of the park, an almost treeless expanse bar the luminescent yellow acacia that the locals call the fever tree (since it was once mistakenly thought of as a lightning rod for malaria), plays host to the herd from December to May each year. By mid-February, about 8,000 wildebeest calves are born every day. During their stay here, half a million calves will come kicking and snorting into the world. Despite their gangly gait, calves are born well equipped, and extraordinarily, can run as fast as their mothers within days of delivery. By around April or May, the rains then come to a screeching halt, turning the area into a semi-arid dust bowl. Then it’s time to head north. For all involved, the journey is beset with danger. For a start, there are the famous Serengeti lions — about 3,000 at the last count — to which can be added leopards and cheetahs, hungry hyena clans and monster crocodiles. Then from May to July the herd splits, with some heading north in a straight shot up the plains of the central Serengeti. Others will chart a course for the Western Corridor, and its black cotton soil covering the swampy savannah. In the north, open woodland and rolling flaxen hills stretch for miles, until they reach the Mara River on the border with Kenya. The migration then dips into southern Kenya, before crossing back into this area in November. With the beginning of the short rains in late October, the vast line makes its way back into the Serengeti. By November, the herds pushing south again are emerging from the northern woodlands in December — and onto

PHOTOS CLOCKWISE FROM MAIN CORBIS; GETTY IMAGES; HEINRICH VAN DEN BERG

all factors placing enormous pressure on its wildlife. For the wildebeest, the migration allows them to overcome food and water restrictions, and in turn disperse nutrients throughout a massive 388.000 square kilometre expanse of woodlands, hills, rocky outcrops and open plains. The herds fertilise plants, maintaining a dizzying array of flora, which in turn maintains the area’s insects and birds. And of course, the migration also provides food for the Serengeti’s lions, hyenas and fellow predators.

TRAVEL

LEFT AN AERIAL VIEW OF WILDEBEEST TRAPPED BY HIGH CLIFFS WHILE CROSSING THE MARA RIVER. EVERY YEAR THOUSANDS OF WILDEBEEST DIE WHILE CROSSING THE RIVER DUE TO STRONG CURRENTS OR CROSSING AT UNFAVOURABLE CROSSING SIGHTS BELOW AN AFRICAN ELEPHANT HERD BELOW RIGHT AN IMMATURE WHITEBACKED VULTURE

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MASSAI ARE A NILOTIC ETHNIC GROUP OF SEMI-NOMADIC PEOPLE LOCATED IN KENYA AND NORTHERN TANZANIA

their calving grounds again, completing the full circle.

BELOW BLACK MANED LION WALKING ON THE PLAINS

FRONT ROW SEATS

MASSAI KILL LIONS TO EARN THEIR HEADDRESSES, THE OLAWARU. IT IS A RITE OF PASSAGE THAT MARKS THE TRANSITION FROM BOY TO WARRIOR, AND SERVES AS A LASTING REMINDER OF THEIR BRAVERY There is no partition between the cabin and Brad Simpson, a highly skilled South African bush pilot. His is real flying. There are no automated computers here, it’s all done the old fashioned way — manually. Simpson uses pedals to change the flaps. He checks the dial to indicate its pitch, then banks hard right. “We’ll be over Ngorongoro Crater in about 20 minutes. I’ll try and drop down so you can have a look,” he says, with the nonplussed conviction of 76 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

a man who has seen all that’s below him a thousand times already. We fly over rolling emerald green farmland, and skim soaring mountain ridges, past semi-arid Massai country. Their circular abodes are ringed by sharpened spikes — like crowns of thorns warding off the nighttime raids of lions. But it is the lions that should fear the Massai, the solitary figures draped in vivid red who dominate the Serengeti and southwestern Kenya. They cut a lonely swathe, searching for grazing lands for their zebu cattle.

Massai kill lions to earn their headdresses, the olawaru. It is a rite of passage that marks the transition from boy to warrior, and serves as a lasting reminder of their bravery. Still we hurtle forward, over woodlands, grasslands, swamps — and finally Lake Manyara, stocked with pink clouds of flamingos on their own perpetual migration. The deep red and orange plumes, the result of photosynthesising pigments from the lake’s organisms, look like red blood cells separating and merging under a microscope.

Somewhere in the distance, the lake’s famous treeclimbing lions are lounging, aloof and disinterested. “Hemingway said he never knew a morning in Africa when he woke up and wasn't happy. Now I understand why,” remarks fellow traveller, Jerry Connelly, a 53-year-old Louisiana native with forearms the size of cricket bats. Ernest Hemingway’s fingerprints are all over this part of Africa. He helped plant the Great White Hunter

PHOTOS GETTY IMAGES (MASSAI TRIBE); HEINRICH VAN DEN BERG (LION)

We are in Arusha, a former coffee plantation at the foothills of Mount Meru. As our tiny Cessna 208 Caravan, a rugged 12-seat workhorse of Africa with a wingspan that feels like it’s a few feet, taxies along the airport’s runway. The 11.5 metre-long singleprop aircraft lurches forward, sucking the passengers, most of us in drab olive cargo pants, into our seats. Within seconds we are airborne, rising quickly over Arusha’s low skyline, dotted with lean-tos and rusted corrugated roofs. They look like burnt matchboxes.

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STEP INSIDE THE MIGHTY SERENGETI

There is an inherent magic to the word "Serengeti" — even those who know nothing of wildlife and nature have heard of it. The word stirs up age-old images of Africa, and makes even the most fervent couch potato among us itch for travel and adventure. But what exactly do we mean when we talk about the Serengeti, and what makes it so special? At its most basic, the Serengeti is a vast ecosystem that stretches across Kenya and Tanzania. Spanning a hefty 30,000 square kilometres, it rivals Belgium in terms of size. Hugely biodiverse, it is home to many of the continent’s most famed mammals, and well over 500 species of bird. So it's no surprise then that in 2006 it was named by USA Today as one of the ten natural travel wonders of the world. Nestled within the ecosystem itself is the much smaller Serengeti National Park. Established in 1951, the Park had its basis in the rather bloodthirsty actions of Steward Edward White. When White and a handful of hunter companions entered the area in the 1920s, they shot 51 lions — an action that perhaps spurred the colonial Brits to set up a game reserve that later spawned into the park. Yet while Big Five animals like the lions obviously garner the most camera clicks from the park’s annual 350,000 visitors, few know there is also a Little Five. As the Serengeti's official website (www.serengeti.org) teases, you can find these critters behind stones, hidden in the grass, and lurking high on an Acacia branch. “They may not be the charismatic mega-fauna that the Big Five are, but for the connoisseur of wildlife” who want an alternative safari, they are just as vital to spot to call yourself a true safari veteran. So who are the Serengett's little-known tiny dancers? If you can recall the Big Five, you are already halfway to knowing the Little Five. They are the ant lion and the rhino beetle (fierce insects), the elephant shrew (a mouselike creature), the buffalo weaver (a gregarious bird) — and not forgetting the leopard tortoise. This last reptilian member won’t scuttle away too quickly, making for a good photo, though they are quite shy. Should one retract its head into its shell with a hissing sound, don’t be alarmed — the noise is due to air popping out of its lungs. 77 JANUARY 2015

MOVE IT OR LOSE IT

TANZANIA

NORTHERN SERENGETI IKOMO OPEN AREA GRUMETI GAME RESERVE WESTERN CORRIDOR

CENTRAL SERENGETI

What can we learn about elephants from their dung? Plenty, including where they fear for their lives due to human activity. Analysis of their waste picked up varying amounts of glucocorticoid metabolites (stress hormones) in various locations. The results show that elephants feel safest in the protected zones of the Serengeti National Park where human hunting activity is illegal, as opposed to the Grumeti Game Reserve, where hunting is allowed during certain periods of the year. ELEPHANT POACHING HIGH RISK MODERATE RISK LOW RISK ROAD RIVERS 30 kilometres

MIGRATION MOVEMENT The Great Migration is kicked off by the annual rain patterns, as wildebeest, zebra, gazelles and impala move in a circular pattern, searching for fresh grazing and water sources. The average rainfall for each month is as follows:

NOV

JAN

MAR

MAY

JUL

SEP

AVERAGE RAINFALL: 111 millimetres

AVERAGE RAINFALL: 90 millimetres

AVERAGE RAINFALL: 130 millimetres

AVERAGE RAINFALL: 67 millimetres

AVERAGE RAINFALL: 13 millimetres

AVERAGE RAINFALL: 34 millimetres

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PHOTO HEINRICH VAN DEN BERG

romance of Africa within the collective minds of millions, after spending three months traipsing through the Serengeti and Kenya in the early 1930s. His time here inspired Green Hills of Africa. “All I wanted now was to get back to Africa. We had not left it yet, but when I would wake in the night, I would lie, listening, homesick for it already,” he wrote. “I loved the country so that I was happy as you are after you have been with a woman that you really love” Africa would stick with him, forcing him to return two decades later, after surviving not one but two plane crashes. Admittedly, that wasn’t a thought I wanted to dwell on three kilometres above the ground, being buffeted in our tin can cabin, like a kite that’s lost its master in a typhoon. We pass over streams of marching wildebeest, zebra and giraffes until the red dirt landing strip at Kogatende in the far northwest of Tanzania comes into sharper focus. Here, the mineral-rich red clay soil is omnipresent. It’s a musky copper red dust that filters through the high skies at sunset, smashing the sky in luminous yellows, purples and burnt orange.

What also comes into sharper focus now are the giraffes and zebra meandering around the runway, before finally being driven away by a park ranger’s vehicle, mere seconds before the wheels of our plane bounce to the dirt and screech to a stop. Imminent disaster avoided, we clamber down the stepladder, groggy and struggling to process what we’ve seen and where we actually are. “So this is Africa? Minus the screen and edit of Hemingway and the wildlife documentaries I’m addicted to,” Connelly quips. “All I can say is, the real life version is eminently better.” We are greeted by our own herd. A few dozen long-body Toyota Landcruisers — steeds of the luxury camps, where snap-happy travellers pay thousands of dollars a day to take in the spectacle. A giddy flock of pinkskinned, high-speed camera toting aliens decked out in camouflage gear, safari hats and $300 hiking boots, we must make quite a sight to the travelling wildebeest. As some queue for the bathroom, others chat and smoke cigarettes in front of a cinderblock wall, which along with corrugated iron is the most common building

material on the African continent, where people build homes in piecemeal fashion as and when they can afford them. On top of the wall, a buffalo skull the size of a ripe watermelon welcomes visitors. A hastily painted sign written on the bark of a sausage tree warns: “Please do not touch the animals.” It is a stark reminder that despite our bush-life luxury, this is far from a controlled environment. Our guide, Reggie Lema, a broad beaming trunk of a man from Legendary Expeditions, picks us out from the crowd. “Great landing,” he chuckles, extending a strong rough hand, before ducking back into the rangers’ office to rubber stamp our park permits. Within minutes, soldiers with resigned indifference, clasping AK-47s and smoking Sportsman cigarettes, wave us through. Only about 100 metres into the park, we spot a tower of five adult giraffes and their calves, tentatively pushing through a river laden with hippo — Africa’s stroppy river dwellers, and the resident number one killer of humans. For the lumbering adult giraffes, their 10 kilogram hearts pumping blood to their massive legs, now moving like train pistons, the concerns are borne out just a minute down the track: “I don’t believe this. You’ve been here five minutes and you’re already at a river crossing,” spits Reggie, a 42 year-old former taxi driver from the shadows of snowcapped Mt Kilimanjaro, the world’s highest freestanding mountain. Not that Reggie has climbed it. Nor have the thundering column of wildebeest now hurling themselves off a twometre drop into the muddy fast-flowing river. In the water, a six-metre long African crocodile, all

sinewy muscle and raw power, keeps its jaws agape. It is snapping slowly — and missing one wildebeest after the other, like a dog trying to catch flies with its mouth. These kicking, snorting, silver-grey, horntossing beasts are today our stars of the plains. We can hear the grunting noises they make, and as they pass by, feel the slow rumble of the herd, their hooves collectively thumping the ground.

FOR THE MASSAI, THE SERENGETI MEANS THE “PLACE WHERE THE LAND RUNS FOREVER”. IT IS A PRIMAL AND SEEMINGLY NEVER-ENDING COUNTRY, WHERE THE WORLD UNFOLDS UPON ITSELF Nothing sums up the instinctive rhythm of the migration more than a river crossing. In the crush of the Serengeti, they are dicey encounters, wrought with panic and confusion. As one surges to the front, others may follow. It's a frenetic, shotgun scattered process. And though the ambitious front-runners push through, wildebeest have no natural leaders, so they’ll often cross back and forth on the same day as they hunt the rains. “That’s it. They’ve stopped. That croc won’t eat today,” says Daniel, a supremely tall Massai in a Phat Farm T-shirt who makes a living working security at camps, and as a wildlife spotter on safari. Within seconds, the remnants 79 JANUARY 2015

ERNEST HEMINGWAY HELPED PAINT THE GREAT WHITE HUNTER ROMANCE OF AFRICA, AFTER SPENDING THREE MONTHS TRAIPSING THROUGH THE SERENGETI IN THE EARLY 1930S A 600 kilogram buffalo bull claims his spot at the creek, virtually undetectable except for the metallic reflection of his eyes in our torchlight. “I hate buffaloes. You can’t trust them, especially lone males,” warns Reggie, who likes to retell his own brush with death when a big bull knocked him out of a moving pickup truck, then proceeded to stalk him for the kill. Thankfully, Reggie found physical refuge in a fig tree, though the mental scars would remain. After a while, Reggie skulks off into the night, unfurling the same warning: “Do not trust that buffalo.” We sit in the dark, listening to nothing

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and everything under a carpet of blindingly bright stars — until the heavens part, and the pummeling rain which now pounds the hot, wet earth at our feet unleashes a rich and musky scent. It engorges our little creek within minutes. The rain will bring wildflowers in the morning. But better yet, it will also place us squarely at Ground Zero for the thundering herds. We fall asleep, convinced that the low guttural growls of a pride of lions we hear are just metres away. “Nah. They were a mile off,” says Nicholas Argusim, a 44- year-old camp steward from Arusha, over spoonstraightening coffee in the misty haze of early morning. “Out here, the sound travels, it's the same with the scents. There’s no ambient noise to break them up. Just nothing.” I stare out at the vast expanse before me. The acacias on a ridge half a mile away look like sun parasols on a tropical beach. A fleet of giraffe cuts through the mist and green expanse below them, as a splinter herd of wildebeest and zebra about 80 deep files across our sightline. After an hour, they keep coming. We have our own pressing rhythm to satiate, and set

off again in our Landcruiser, spitting dust behind us as a moderate breeze kicks up the sweet scent of fresh rain and ochre-colored mini tornadoes on our flanks, like children’s spinning tops. Reggie, or The Pastor as he is nicknamed, has inside information about a large elephant herd about 10 kilometres east of camp. We pass through a bushy woodland area, known for large groups of elephant. A pack of vultures spread their wings, as a zebra with a distended stomach groggily falls to its knees, another reminder of the constant cycle of life and death on the plains. Out here, yellow eyes in green flax, a scent in the air and a brief relaxation can spell a violent and horrible death. “I smell elephant,” Reggie says, before pointing to the utter devastation that a nearby herd has inflicted upon an outcrop of sausage trees. Their one-metre, fivekilogram fruits lie crushed and discarded near the scorched earth. Bush fires are as necessary as they are common in the Serengeti. “Elephants are total vandals,” says fellow tourist Ruby Lu, a bitingly sarcastic TV host and crime author from Taipei. “Look at what

they have done. What a mess. I bet they’re not even going to clean this up.” And then we spot them. About 30 in total, ranging from calves and younger females, to the massive matriarch who now staring us down as our jeep blocks her path. The Pastor doesn’t flinch, staring back at the matriarch himself before turning off our engine — almost daring her to charge. “Lets go Reggie! Lets go,” I implore, concerned by the shaking of her massive gunmetal head, not to mention the plumes of dust she is kicking up with her feet. The end of my sentence comes out awkwardly, with all the aplomb of a man attempting to take it all in stride, while knowing he has nothing to fall back on. Reggie just laughs, before turning on the engine and peeling away slowly. It pays to have a sense of humour on the Serengeti.

CREATING MEMORIES

We head eastwards and come across a pride of lions, eight adult females and six cubs, sunning themselves on a rocky outcrop. Our herd outnumbers them already — though they’re nonplussed. Reggie says the animals on the Serengeti tend to factor out the presence of human observers, during the daytime at least. “During the day, they know they’re safe. Poachers only work at night,” he notes as we pull up a few metres from the cubs and adult females, playfully batting them away. The shutter cameras are the only distraction to one of the most remarkable sights I’ve ever seen. I wonder aloud about our need to record everything as it happens — without allowing an experience to wash over us instead. A large, ruddy faced blonde woman in the next truck glares

PHOTOS GETTY IMAGES

of the herd abruptly turns its back on the dangers of the river, to feed on the billiardtable green expanse at its feet. With the river-crossing box ticked, we head to camp, a 12-tented compound complete with electricity, four-poster beds and hot showers. The dining tent comes equipped with dark mahogany tea chests, a 10-seat dining table and a fully stocked bar, which we make use of beside a campfire that borders a creek and watering hole.

TRAVEL

A PRIDE OF LIONS ON THE HUNT EARLY IN THE MORNING

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at me for a second, rolls her eyes, then refocuses her steelgrey camera. We round out the day by spotting a juvenile leopard, squeezed between massive slabs of ash coloured stone and rich green fig trees. The leopard is my kind of cat. Seldom seen, independent loners and super stealthy killers, they usually hunt at night and use tree lairs and overhanging rocks like this one to pounce upon their prey. As the sun fades below the horizon, we stare out at tall acacia trees dwarfing elephants in the foreground. It's the quintessential picture of Africa: romantic, majestic, beautiful.

PHOTO HEINRICH VAN DEN BERG

THE MIGRATION IS AN OUTLIER OF THE UNEXPECTED, IT IS A STRIPPED BARE REMINDER OF THE BIGGER PICTURE BEYOND US. AND IT TENDS TO STAY WITH ONE FOREVER The next morning, Reggie is a man on a mission: today we’re hunting for rhino. If we succeed, we’ll have seen the “Big Five”, which also includes lion, elephant, buffalo and leopard. But unlike the hunters that coined this collective term for the hardest creatures to shoot on foot, the only thing we’ll be shooting is photographs. We drive north to the Kenyan border, passing grunting, snorting warthogs, a nearly blind wild pig, which disturbingly appears at first purpose-built as leopard and lion food. Yet they are 82 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

WONDER NO MORE In the language of the tribal Massai people, Serengeti means "endless plain".The Serengeti Migration is the largest terrestrial mammal land migration in the world, and it was awarded a spot in the Seven Natural Wonders of Africa, in 2013, as determined by various experts from around the world, with a key focus on conservationists such as members of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The other Wonders which made the list are the Red Sea Reef, Mount Kilimanjaro, the Sahara Desert, Ngorongoro Crater, the Nile River and the Okavango Delta.

TRAVEL A LARGE HERD OF WILDBEEST GRAZING AND WAITING TO CROSS THE RIVER

OUT OF AFRICA

8 COLLECTIVE NOUNS A SHREWDNESS OF APES A GANG OF BUFFALO A TOWER OF GIRAFFES A BLOAT OF HIPPOPOTAMUSES A CACKLE OF HYENAS A LEAP OF LEOPARDS A CRASH OF RHINOCEROSES A STAND OF FLAMINGOS

1 IN 3 SUCCESS RATE

OF 1,300 LION STALKS OBSERVED IN THE SERENGETI

48 PERCENT

INVOLVED ONLY ONE LION (SUCCESS RATE: 17 TO 19 PERCENT)

20 PERCENT

INVOLVED TWO LIONS (SUCCESS RATE: 30 PERCENT)

32 PERCENT

INVOLVED THREE TO EIGHT LIONS (SUCCESS RATE: 30 PERCENT)

ONE LEG

FLAMINGOS STAND ON ONE LEG IN WATER TO CONSERVE BODY HEAT. A FLAMINGO STANDING WITH TWO LEGS WOULD LOSE 40 TO 70 PERCENT MORE BODY HEAT THAN A BALANCED ONE

14 COWS

AFTER MASSAI TRIBESMEN HEARD OF THE DEVASTATING 9/11 ATTACKS ON THE WORLD TRADE CENTRE, THEY DONATED 14 HEAD OF CATTLE TO THE UNITED STATES IN A GESTURE OF SYMPATHY — EVEN THOUGH MANY WERE UNCLEAR AS TO WHAT EXACTLY A SKYSCRAPER WAS. COWS ARE CONSIDERED SACRED IN MASSAI CULTURE

250,000

APPROXIMATE NUMBER OF WILDEBEEST THAT DIE DURING THEIR 800 KILOMETRE MIGRATION

AD 77

PLINY THE ELDER’S NATURAL HISTORY, PUBLISHED CIRCA AD77, POSITED THAT GIRAFFES WERE A MIX BETWEEN CAMELS AND LEOPARDS. PLINY ALSO INVENTED THE MYTH THAT THE ELEPHANT “CANNOT ABIDE A MOUSE” 83 JANUARY 2015

TRAVEL

exceptional survivalists, scampering into underground dens whenever threatened.

THE LEOPARD IS A SELDOMSEEN, INDEPENDENT, LONER AND SUPER STEALTHY KILLER, WHO USUALLY HUNTS AT AND USES OVERHANGING ROCKS TO POUNCE UPON THE PREY We head over bristling springs and plains stocked with elephants, and hundreds of baboons, some with babies on their backs. In the

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middle of the road we run head first into three almost fully grown male lions — brothers who form a regal and handsome coalition of the hungry and ambitious. Thy are inseparable allies in their quest to hunt, protect territory and eventually find a breeding pride in this wild and broken country of granite kopjes, hidden valleys and open savannah. “You know you’re in a tough place when male lions feel the need to form a gang for protection,” Lu chuckles over the low hum of our Land Cruiser’s massive turbocharged diesel engine. We pull up on the long flaxen grasses of the Kenyan border and the Maasai Mara National Reserve — where cheetah supposedly hang out when they aren’t being the world’s fastest animal. One was clocked at 112 kilometres per

hour. To reach those speeds, they hunt in extremely short bursts, as the energy they expend causes them to literally overheat. Not so the lumbering tank of the bush. The black rhino has been decimated throughout Africa as poachers buoyed by astronomical prices in Asia for its horn have crushed resident populations. Cantankerous and shy, we spend hours scouring rocky mountain slopes trying to spot one — as black eagles soar over the hills around us. “That's it!” Reggie beams, pointing to an area 600 metres up the ruby red moonscape mountain. Through the binoculars, the rhino looks like a slab of rock. It’s not until it moves through the brush that its prideful albeit aloof size is served up to us. “I love my country. I’m so proud of what we have,” the Pastor chuckles.

Being here to witness this, it is now clear to me why so many have fallen for this part of the world. Ernest Hemingway, having had a taste of its outdoor expanse, was sold. “Now, being in Africa, I was hungry for more of it, the changes of the seasons, the rains with no need to travel, the discomforts that you paid to make it real, the names of the trees, of the small animals, and all the birds, to know the language and have time to be in it and to move slowly.” Beyond sharing his incredible country with guests, Reggie also plays witness to something far bigger than a mere holiday, or a country. The Migration is an outlier of the unexpected — a stripped bare reminder of the bigger picture beyond us. And as it did for Ernest Hemingway, it will stay with me forever.

PHOTO HEINRICH VAN DEN BERG

A HERD OF WILDEBEEST CROSSING A RIVER

TINY DA

IMAGE SPL/CLICK PHOTOS

SCIENTISTS WORKING IN THE EVER-EVOLVING FIELD OF NANOTECHNOLOGY PUSH AROUND MOLECULES, MAKE PARTICLES POWERED BY THE ENERGY RELEASED FROM BONE FRACTURES, AND CREATE MATERIALS THAT CAN’T BE SEEN WITH THE NAKED EYE. MICHAEL FRANCO TAKES A LOOK AT HOW THE SCIENCE OF THE MINUSCULE IS ANYTHING BUT SMALL-TIME

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NCERS

NANOTECH

YOU MIGHT KNOW IN THEORY THAT A NANOMETRE IS ONE-BILLIONTH OF A METRE, BUT SEEING AN ARTIST'S IMPRESSION LIKE THIS, FEATURING A NANOROBOT PERCHED ON THE HEAD OF PIN, GIVES YOU A SENSE OF SCALE 87 JANUARY 2015

IMAGE SPL/CLICK PHOTOS

Eight metres below the ground in Zurich, Switzerland, researchers are using high-end electronbeam systems to understand the properties of particles at the nano level — tiny bits of matter that can be as small as single atoms. At this scale, the slightest vibrations, electromagnetic interference, air currents, or temperature fluctuations can have monumental impacts on the work.

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THIS IS AN ACTUAL, UNRETOUCHED IMAGE OF A MICRO-SCALE SUBMARINE MADE BY MICROTEC, A COMPANY THAT PRODUCES MICRO SYSTEMS AND COMPONENTS FOR INDUSTRIES SUCH AS BIOTECHNOLOGY AND MEDICAL ENGINEERING. THE SUBMARINE WAS POSITIONED IN AN ACTUAL HUMAN ARTERY FOR DEMONSTRATION PURPOSES

NANOTECH

he facility in which they carry out their research — a “noisefree” lab at IBM’s Binnig and Rohrer Nanotechnology Center — is mounted on top of seismic blocks weighing 30 to 68 tonnes each, which are suspended on active air springs, decoupling the facility from ground vibrations. Each room is lined with nickel-iron alloy sheeting that functions as a force field against electromagnetic fields. To keep temperatures regulated, a ventilation system that generates minimal air flux keeps the climate steady to 0.1 degrees Celsius per hour. And because even the scientists' bodies generate roughly 100 watts of heat in addition to vibrations from movement (think about Gulliver stomping amongst the Lilliputians), they are kept out of the main experimentation room and work their equipment remotely. According to lab designer Dr Emanuel Löertscher, “In the field of nanotechnology, an increasing number of fabrication and characterisation steps dealing with the sub-10-nanometre (sub10nm) scale became very sensitive towards external disturbances, as they directly

interfere with the experiments. The noise-free labs have opened up a new range of experiments that we can now conduct.” Let us get some perspective. Just how big is something at the sub-10nm scale? One nanometre is equal to one-billionth of a metre, so if you made a tiny brick that measured 10 nanometres high, you would need about 10,000 bricks to equal the thickness of a sheet of paper. Put another way, your fingernails grow approximately one nanometre every second. The sub-10nm scale is important in nanotech research as it’s considered the size transistors will need to be, in order to handle future computer requirements. Once manufactured, it will be possible to fit 10,000 of them across the width of a human hair. While work at the nano level deals with the supersmall, the impact of the research can be enormous. Already, nano breakthroughs have improved everything from the medicines we ingest, to the windows we put in our homes, to the clothes we wear. Here’s a look at how the ultra small has big effects across our world.

MEDICAL APPLICATIONS

Nanotech research has been applied to the fight against cancer for years. Among other examples, there is nano-“popcorn” which helps doctors detect as few as 50 malignant prostate cells; a nanotube forest that can trap cancerous cells in the blood; and nano-“volcanoes” that can be used to deliver deadly drugs to tumours.

One of the more popular applications of nanotech in fighting cancer is to deliver metals, such as gold, to cancerous cells and then use a laser or other light source to heat the metal up, destroying the problematic cells. But getting the temperature precisely right can be a challenge. Now, researchers at Harvard University in the United States have invented something that might help solve this problem — tiny thermometers made from nanodiamonds. The diminutive diamonds are injected into cells using nanowires, and can read temperature fluctuations as small as 1.8 milliKelvin (0.0018 Kelvin, the equivalent of one-thousandth of a degree Celsius). Peter Maurer, a member of the research team, says, “Our nanoscaled temperature-sensing technique can be used to ensure that specific cancer cells are heated above a lethal temperature, while non-cancerous cells remain at uncritical temperatures.” Beyond little tech’s ability to fight the “Big C”, nanotechnology is being applied in other health fields as well, including the treatment of diabetes. A team of researchers from several different US institutes, including North Carolina State University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Children's Hospital Boston, has created an injectable nano-network that releases insulin naturally in the body when blood sugar levels rise. The network is created using positively charged coatings made from chitosan (found in the shells 89 JANUARY 2015

of shrimp) and negatively charged coatings made of alginate, which is usually found in seaweed. Nanotech has also been applied to help those suffering from osteoporosis, an oftenpainful condition that leads to small — and sometimes large — cracks in the body’s bones. Researchers at Penn State University and Boston University, in the United States, have come up with a way to use these cracks to power nanoparticles that deliver bone-repairing drugs.

PHOTOS SPL/CLICK PHOTOS (MAIN, SENSAPILL, SENSOR CHIP, NANO WIRE)

A NANOMETRE IS ONEBILLIONTH OF A METRE, SO IF YOU MADE A TINY BRICK 10 NANOMETRES HIGH, YOU’D NEED 10,000 BRICKS TO EQUAL THE THICKNESS OF A SHEET OF PAPER Yes, really. The nanoparticles are powered by tiny fractures inside the body. Dr Ayusman Sen, professor of chemistry at Penn State, explains how it works. “When a crack occurs in a bone, it disrupts the minerals in the bone, which leach out as charged particles — as ions

— that create an electric field, which pulls the negatively charged nanoparticles toward the crack.”

MILITARY APPS

You know those creepy warlocks in the TV series Game of Thrones who can project multiple versions of themselves? A scientist in Singapore has figured out how to do just that, using nanotechnology. It might sound like pure wizardry, but it is actually solid science. Dr Cheng-Wei Qiu, a physicist at the National University of Singapore, has developed a device consisting of eight concentric rings of plastic circuit boards coated with copper measuring 35,000 nanometres thick, or about a third the width of a human hair. When an object was placed inside the circles and the device activated, radar scans showed that the object appeared to have tripled, with one appearing to either side of the original. At the moment, the device only works in two dimensions and only with longer wavelengths like those emitted by radar equipment. But by using spheres instead of rings and shrinking the copper loops to 50 nanometres wide, Qiu believes the device could cloak items in the visible light spectrum. This means that planes and ships could appear to be in multiple places at once, making it difficult for enemies to know which to attack.

TOP SENSAPILL IS A DEVICE THAT CAN DETECT INTERNAL BLEEDING WITH AN INBUILT BIOSENSOR AND A WIRELESS TRANSMITTER. IT IS USED TO HELP DIAGNOSE A RANGE OF DISEASES ASSOCIATED WITH THE BOWEL ABOVE A SURFACE PLASMON RESONANCE SENSOR CHIP FEATURING A SQUARE OF GOLD FILM WITH MICROSCOPIC GROOVES ON ITS SURFACE. BIOMOLECULES SUCH AS PROTEINS CAN BIND TO THE FILM, CAUSING CHANGES IN THE WAY IT REFLECTS LIGHT. STUDYING CHANGES IN LIGHT REFLECTANCE CAN PROVIDE INFORMATION ABOUT THE BIOMOLECULE RIGHT THE LAYERED WALLS OF MULTIWALLED CARBON NANOTUBES REDUCE THE CHANCE OF UNWANTED CHANGES IN THE TUBES' MECHANICAL OR ELECTRICAL PROPERTIES

MORE SMART USES OF NANOTECHNOLOGY

Nano Everywhere

Nanotechnology is science, engineering, and technology conducted at dimensions of 100 nanometres or less. Although we often think of nanotech as cutting-edge, it's been around for quite some time, in some unexpected places.

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SWORDS THE SECRET BEHIND DAMASCUS STEEL SWORDS — FAMED FOR THEIR STRENGTH, SHARPNESS AND FLEXIBILITY — LAY IN CARBON NANOTUBES, WHICH MINIMISED THE EFFECT OF IMPURITIES THAT WOULD WEAKEN THE METAL OR MAKE IT BRITTLE

NANOTECH

DEATH TO MOZZIES Research by scientists in India may hold the key to a new way to kill mosquitoes. To study zebrafish, the scientists treated mosquitoes with special water-soluble nanoparticles of carbon (which glow), then let the fish eat them. In the process however, they noticed that above certain concentrations, the nanoparticles blocked the life cycle of the mosquito, killing the larvae. Plus, they observed that the fish seemed fine even after eating these "infected" larvae. With more research, this method could perhaps be used in water bodies such as ornamental fish ponds.

He says it might even be possible for a soldier to pull off the warlocks' trick. “If we could scale the frequency up to infrared or near-infrared light, if someone puts on a specially designed coat, people will see the original person and several versions along with him,” says Qiu. “Or you might imagine that when one guy puts on the coat, he disappears but appears in two other positions — left and right, with a slightly distorted shape, for example.” While Qiu’s device might make it difficult for enemies to strike soldiers in the field, the chance still exists that the warriors will take a hit. In that case, nanotechnology can still come to the rescue. In the United States, Dr Yu Qiao, a professor of structural engineering at the University of California, San Diego is working with funding from the US military to produce the world’s first nanofoam armour. It is created at the molecular level by combining two materials, and then removing one using a process known as acid etching. This creates a honeycombed foam with microscopic channels. The nanofoam is unique because it disperses the force of an impact over a wider range than standard foam, so it could potentially be incorporated into helmets or vests to protect soldiers in future from brain trauma or lung injury. The US Air Force is also getting in on the nano action. Its

ANCIENT ROMAN ARTISTRY

1960S MOVIES

THE ROMANS MADE USE OF NANOPARTICLES WHEN THEY CRAFTED A GOBLET 1,600 YEARS AGO. KNOWN AS THE LYCURGUS CUP, IT LOOKS PEA-GREEN WHEN LIT FROM THE FRONT, AND BLOOD-RED WHEN LIT FROM BEHIND. SHINY GOLD AND SILVER SLIVERS IN THE GLASS, JUST 50 NANOMETRES IN DIAMETER, ARE BEHIND THE EFFECT

THE 1966 FILM FANTASTIC VOYAGE SAW A TEAM OF PEOPLE SHRUNK TO ONE MICROMETRE IN SIZE (NO NANOMETRE, BUT CLOSE ENOUGH) BEFORE BEING DISPATCHED INTO A HUMAN BODY. THE TEAM HAD AN HOUR TO REMOVE A BLOOD CLOT FROM A SCIENTIST’S BRAIN, BEFORE REVERTING TO NORMAL SIZE

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office of Scientific Research, along with the US Department of Defense, is working with Dr Zhenqiang Ma, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to improve the sight of both pilots and soldiers. Ma, who is an electrical and computer engineer, has created curved night-vision goggles by employing nanomembranes of germanium, a metallic element that flexes better than the silicon normally used in such applications. He is also working on goggles that employ a unique nanomembrane that will make it possible to simultaneously see visible and infrared light. If the wearer’s field of vision is obscured by dust or smoke, they can still navigate the battlefield.

SPORTING FIELDS

In 2008, the vast majority of swimmers who won medals at sporting events worldwide — including the Summer Olympics in Beijing — did so while wearing Speedo’s LZR Racer bodysuit, specialised swimwear coated with waterresistant nanoparticles. According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, after 105 records were broken that year, 79 of them by people wearing the LZR Racer, the international governing body of aquatic sports, Fédération Internationale de Natation (more commonly known as FINA), finally banned the

suits in the midst of outcry against “technology doping”. While nanotech didn’t go over so well doesn’t mean it hasn’t greatly impacted sports. Nanoparticles help make golf balls fly farther, skis more slippery, bicycle frames lighter, and tennis racquets more powerful. Roger Federer won one of his Wimbledon matches using a Wilson nCode racquet. This series of racquets has reportedly employed nano-sized silicon dioxide crystals that fill the gaps between the racquet’s carbon fibres, helping to make the end product more powerful and durable.

AMERICAN RESEARCHERS HAVE COME UP WITH A WAY TO USE CRACKS IN THE BONE TO POWER NANO PARTICLES THAT CAN DELIVER BONEREPAIRING DRUGS Researcher Dr Joseph Wang says applying nanotechnology to sports isn’t about better equipment — it’s about a safer athlete. Wang and his team at the University of California, San Diego, in the United States,

MORE SMART USES OF NANOTECHNOLOGY PREGNANCY TESTS

"TEABAGS"

GOLD NANOPARTICLES IN SOME PREGNANCY TESTS WILL REACT WITH COMPOUNDS IN A PREGNANT WOMAN’S URINE AND PRESENT EITHER A RED (POSITIVE) OR BLUE (NEGATIVE) RESULT. A STORY ON THE INTERNET THAT WENT VIRAL TELLS A RELATED TALE: A WOMAN WAS CONFUSED WHEN HER PREGNANCY TEST PRODUCED NO RESULT. TURNS OUT SHE HAD URINATED ON AN IPOD NANO, NOT A PREGNANCY TEST

FOR LESS THAN A PENNY, A TEABAG-LIKE MATERIAL CREATED BY STELLENBOSCH UNIVERSITY IN SOUTH AFRICA PURIFIES DIRTY WATER. USERS PLACE THE BAG IN THE NECK OF A BOTTLE AND LET THE WATER PASS THROUGH NANOFIBRES AND AN ANTIMICROBIAL FILM

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NANOTECH

QUANTUM JEWELLERY

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TO MANIPULATE, SEE AND MEASURE MATTER AT THE NANOSCALE, SCIENTISTS HAVE TO USE ATOMIC FORCE MICROSCOPY, OFTEN UNDER ULTRA-HIGH VACUUM CONDITIONS. THE MICROSCOPE (PICTURED) IS USUALLY KEPT VERY COLD

December 2012 marked the debut of Gold Light, said to be the world's first gold-nanoparticle jewellery. According to an article in the Guardian, the spherical pendant essentially comprises a crystal shell holding nanoparticles of precious metals — mostly gold, with small, varying amounts of silver and platinum — suspended in two millimetres of water and detergent. The pendant changes colour when exposed to different types of light, and will display different hues if light is put in front (as compared to behind) it. The Guardian article quoted designer Roberto Carrascosa as saying, "The idea of Gold Light appeared in an informal meeting in 2010, in which I was shown that classic precious metals took on unexpected colours when reduced to nanoparticles and put in a solution." Also at the meeting was scientist Victor Puntes, of the Catalan Institute of Nanotechnology. Along with other collaborators, the duo began work on a project which would eventually produce Gold Light.

SALTINESS

BOTTLES

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU SPLIT A GRAIN OF SALT INTO SEVERAL NANOMETRE-SIZED PARTICLES? YOU INCREASE THE SURFACE AREA, OFFERING YOUR TASTE BUDS MUCH MORE FLAVOUR FOR MUCH LESS SALT. RESEARCHERS THINK THIS COULD CUT DOWN ON SALT CONSUMPTION, AS WELL AS THE NEGATIVE SIDE EFFECTS OF A SODIUM-HEAVY DIET

BEER BREWER SABMILLER INFUSES ITS BOTTLES WITH FLAKY NANOPARTICLES OF CLAY, WHICH EFFECTIVELY FILL UP SPACE IN THE WALLS OF THE BOTTLE. THIS HELPS STOP OXYGEN FROM GETTING IN AND CARBON DIOXIDE FROM GOING OUT, KEEPING THE DRINK FRESH

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NANOTECH

NANOTECH IN CLOTHES New research conducted at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory may now enable us to turn ordinary clothes into fully functioning electronic components. The researchers have found a way to print silver nanoparticles onto textile fibres, a method that gives cloth the benefits of built-in electronics while staying flexible and soft. Project leader Chris Hunt says, "The technique has many potential applications. One particularly exciting area is wearable sensors and antennas, which could be used for monitoring, for example checking on patients and vulnerable people."

NANOFOAM DISPERSES THE FORCE OF AN IMPACT OVER A WIDER RANGE THAN STANDARD FOAM, AND COULD ONE DAY BE USED IN HELMETS OR VESTS

“Lactate is an important biomarker, especially for monitoring athlete's performance,” says Wang. “But traditional lactate sensors rely on finger-stick blood, which is inconvenient during physical activity. This sensor conforms to the skin and can continuously assess 94

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lactate in perspiration through a non-invasive manner.” The tattoo-cum-measuring instrument works at the atomic level, explains Wang. “The sensor is modified with lactate oxidase, an enzyme that converts lactate into pyruvate while releasing two electrons. Carbon nanotubes with a large surface area facilitate the electron transfer and amplify the current. In this way, the dynamic change of lactate concentration can be easily observed.” Elevated lactate levels can indicate when an athlete has reached their threshold of exertion, or can show if he or she has any metabolic or physiological disorders.

SAFETY USAGE

In the 21st century, the biggest threats to our safety might come from the smallest places. Harmful biological agents can be slipped into public water supplies or released as gas on public transportation, and

many sensors aren’t strong enough to detect them. The work Dr Harald Plank is doing at the Graz University of Technology in Austria is set to change that. Plank and his colleagues have developed a highly sensitive nano sensor through the use of focused electron beam induced deposition. He explains, “Imagine a tube with water flowing through it and a small valve controlled by an operator. Now exchange the tube for nano grains of platinum measuring about two nanometres each, exchange the valve for carbon in between the platinum grains, and replace the operator with the gas molecules in the air.” The idea is that as certain gas molecules hit the sensor, they will create an electrical flow (the water in the above example), alerting the user to their presence. So far the device has been used to measure levels of nitric oxide, nitric dioxide

and carbon monoxide in the air, but it can be modified to detect other gases as well. Plank believes the device could also work in fluids. He says, “We have worked with a group which used a similar concept and special transducer which reacted on cancer markers in human blood.”

While this may sound amazing enough, Plank says the real breakthrough is that the device can be made with “nanoscale dimensions in almost all shapes, on almost all surfaces”. This means that the sensor could be incorporated into mobile devices, turning everyone with a smartphone into a toxicchemical watchdog.

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have designed an electrochemical biosensor in the form of a temporary tattoo that athletes can wear to monitor their lactate levels.

WHAT’S S ON THIS MONTH ON DISCOVERY CHANNEL

Tiger Sisters of Telia Tigers are solitary hunters. But in central India, four sisters rewrite the rules of tiger behaviour. Tigress Blood is a coming of age story of four sister tigers as they battle each other for control of their homeland. The four join forces to hunt cooperatively and take on dangerous prey. Instinct tears them apart. Blood ties them together. PREMIERES ON MONDAY, JANUARY 26 AT 9 PM

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Tethered Tethered literally ties two strangers together in the wild and proves you need to figure out how to survive each other first, in order to survive at all. Two opposing personalities will be left in the wilderness with nothing, locked together by a six-foot steel cable and forced to work together to find rescue. This is a survival challenge like no other. AIRS EVERY MONDAY TO FRIDAY AT 10 PM, STARTING JANUARY 19

Redesign My Brain The science of neuroplasticity has found that with specific training anyone can become smarter, increase their memory capacity, and reverse mental aging. Renowned TV celebrity Todd Sampson undertakes a scientifically endorsed training program to turn his ordinary brain into a “super-brain”. Redesign My Brain is a makeover show like no other— one where the design experts makeover the human brain! AIRS EVERY THURSDAY 9 PM, STARTING JANUARY 8

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WHAT'S ON

How Do They Do It? We rarely consider many of the objects that make up our modern world – pepper spray, Mumbai’s monorail, the musical instrument - sitar, street lights and more. Go behind the scenes to discover how to do the things and make the things that form the world that we live in today. AIRS EVERY MONDAY TO FRIDAY AT 8 PM, STARTING JANUARY 12

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WHAT'S ON

Inside The Animal Mind Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be an animal? This series gives startling and revelatory answers. Combining jaw-dropping demonstrations of animal’s abilities with revealing photography, Chris Packham travels the world to uncover the secrets of the animal mind. AIRS EVERY WEDNESDAY AT 9 PM, STARTING JANUARY 21

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