Srinagar, Jan 21: A self-styled ‘Guide’ has duped at least 10 Kashmiri pilgrims, after taking money from them to show sacred shrines and places in Iran, Iraq and other countries, leaving them mid-way in Beirut, the capital city of Lebanon.
At least 10 pilgrims are stuck in Delhi this time, requesting Jammu and Kashmir Administration to help them return home as they are without money.
One of the pilgrims Ghulam Hasan Wani of Devar Yekmanpora village of Singhpora Pattan told the news agency Kashmir News Trust over the phone from Delhi that a Guide Syed Nasir from Harinara Pattan took Rs one lakh per person to help them in pilgrimage to Karbala and others sacred site.
“After performing pilgrimage, the guide left us mid-way in Beirut without informing us. He is still absconding. We suffered heavily as we were not having money with us. We sold our valuables including the earrings and gold chains of women pilgrims accompanying us. Somehow we have managed to reach New Delhi,” he said.
The pilgrims said that they have no money to return back to Valley as they have no money and are starving.
They appealed to LG Manoj Sinha led administration to help them in returning home and direct police to take action against the guide.
“We can’t narrate our sufferings in words. We are illiterates and yet he (Guide) left us in the lurch,” said a woman pilgrim. (KNT)
Born in California, Matthew Modine, 63, made his film debut in the 80s, sharing the best actor award at the 1983 Venice film festival for Robert Altman’s Streamers. In 1984, he played the title role in Alan Parker’s Birdy, and in 1987 he starred in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. Modine is Dr Martin Brenner in the hit Netflix series Stranger Things, and is currently playing Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird in the West End of London. He is married with two children and lives in New York.
What is your greatest fear? Having a great fear.
What is your earliest memory? We were having dinner and my cousin said we were eating my pet chicken, Susie. We adopted my mother’s sister’s children five days before I was born, after my aunt’s husband came home and shot her and then shot himself in front of the children. Gun violence in the US is not new.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? I would deplore feeling deplorable about myself.
What is the trait you most deplore in others? The inability to negotiate peace and truly forgive.
Describe yourself in three words Doing my best.
What do you most dislike about your appearance? It’s fascinating watching the sack of flesh I live in showing signs of wear. But I am grateful, each morning, to wake up in it.
What is your most unappealing habit? Procrastinating.
What scares you about getting older? Nothing. Better than the alternative.
Which book are you ashamed not to have read? Dante’s Inferno (in Italian).
What is the worst thing anyone’s said to you? “You can’t.”
What does love feel like? Like falling – endlessly – and then discovering you have wings.
Have you ever said “I love you” without meaning it? Of course I have. But it wasn’t because I didn’t want to actually make that person feel loved and appreciated.
Which living person do you most despise, and why? Trump/Putin. Same person. Egotistical, bombastic, selfish shites.
Which words or phrases do you most overuse? Stay positive.
What has been your biggest disappointment? My biggest disappointment would be living with disappointment. What a burden to be shackled to. I would be truly disappointed if I didn’t (as the song says) pick myself up, dust myself off, and start all over again.
How often do you have sex? Who’s counting?
What single thing would improve the quality of your life? Stretching.
Would you rather have more sex, money or fame? Well, I guess I won the lottery. Lucky me.
How would you like to be remembered? As a kind person who cared for others.
What is the most important lesson life has taught you? That we are all no more and no less than a single thread in a gigantic web of life. What we do and how we behave has repercussions for the entire web.
What happens when we die? Only dying will tell.
Tell us a joke Two peanuts were walking down the road. One was assaulted.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Srinagar, Jan 21: A self-styled ‘Guide’ has duped at least 10 Kashmiri pilgrims, after taking money from them to show sacred shrines and places in Iran, Iraq and other countries, leaving them mid-way in Beirut, the capital city of Lebanon.
At least 10 pilgrims are stuck in Delhi this time, requesting Jammu and Kashmir Administration to help them return home as they are without money.
One of the pilgrims Ghulam Hasan Wani of Devara Yetalampora village of Singhpora Pattan told the news agency Kashmir News Trust over the phone from Delhi that a Guide Syed Nasir from Harennarah Pattan took Rs one lakh per person to help them in pilgrimage to Karbala and others sacred site.
“After performing pilgrimage, the guide left us mid-way in Beirut without informing us. He is still absconding. We suffered heavily as we were not having money with us. We sold our valuables including the earrings and gold chains of women pilgrims accompanying us. Somehow we have managed to reach New Delhi,” he said.
The pilgrims said that they have no money to return back to Valley as they have no money and are starving.
They appealed to LG Manoj Sinha led administration to help them in returning home and direct police to take action against the guide.
“We can’t narrate our sufferings in words. We are illiterates and yet he (Guide) left us in the lurch,” said a woman pilgrim. [KNT]
Jammu, January 21: The Lieutenant Governor, Manoj Sinha has strongly condemned the blasts that have taken place in Narwal, Jammu this morning. Senior police officials briefed the Lt Governor about the blast and on the state of investigation. He called for urgent steps to identify and take action against those responsible.
“Such dastardly acts highlight the desperation and cowardice of those responsible. Take immediate and firm action. No efforts should be spared to bring the perpetrators to justice,” the Lt Governor told the security officials.
The Lt Governor has offered heartfelt sympathies to those injured. He also announced relief of Rs. 50,000 to those injured in the incident. The Lt Governor said that the administration would ensure best possible treatment and extend every help required by the families.(GNS)
A decade has passed, but at last the star of the internet meme showing a boy glancing sideways in confusion with a cup in his hand while standing in line at a Popeyes is capitalizing on his viral fame.
Dieunerst Collin, an 18-year-old player for the football team at Lake Erie College in Painesville, Ohio, can finally cash in on his online fame thanks to a change in policy from an organization which governs collegiate sports in the US that in 2021 enabled student athletes to earn money from sponsorship opportunities.
“The moment that made us a meme – we didn’t ask for it,” Collin said in a social media video that Popeyes posted last week announcing that the fast-food chain had signed him to a deal that would feature him on billboards and other advertisements. “But don’t worry little man, we didn’t let it stop us.”
Collin became internet famous when he was nine and went to Popeyes to pick up a family pack of chicken, biscuits and fries in Irvington, New Jersey. A stranger who believed Collin resembled a boy who was known on social media at the time for his dance moves pulled out his phone and started recording him while he stood in line holding a cup of lemonade.
Baffled as to why the stranger was recording him, Collin shot over a sideways look. The stranger then published the clip on Vine, the defunct video-sharing application. It went viral and has been used countless times on social media, typically paired with captions declaring discomfort or obfuscation.
Collin’s family initially resented the viral image. They tried to get it scrubbed from the internet, and he was annoyed people would call him by the name of the dancing boy whom the stranger thought Collin looked like.
“I just never thought it would get that big,” Collin said, according to a CNN report published on Friday.
Yet Collin ultimately embraced the meme’s enduring popularity. When he helped his high school win a New Jersey state championship in football in 2021, he posed with the trophy and a side-eyed expression that harkened back to his history as a meme star, local news outlet NJ.com reported.
“From Popeyes to state champion!” a Twitter user wrote in a post containing a picture of Collin’s meme and of him holding the trophy he won with his school.
Collin once again went viral thanks to that tweet, which was shared widely. Only this time, he ended up with an endorsement deal.
On 8 January, after enrolling at Lake Erie to play football and study communications, Collin used his Instagram account and a screenshot of the viral state champion tweet to write a message to Popeyes.
“I just wanna talk business,” Collin wrote, his appeal to Popeyes being boosted by other prominent social media users.
By 12 January, Popeyes signed Collins to one of the so-called name, image and likeness (NIL) deals that the NCAA legalized less than two years ago.
“From memes to dreams, Dieunerst and Popeyes will grace social media feeds once again,” said a statement from Popeyes about the endorsement deal.
Collin has declined to discuss the terms of his deal with Popeyes.
But Popeyes has now put up a billboard with pictures of him then – in line all those years ago – and now in his home town of East Orange, New Jersey. The chain has urged followers to “keep an eye out for other fun [Collin] content”.
Collin told CNN he is – if nothing else – proof of one truism: “A lot can happen with the power of the internet behind you.”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Ayòbámi Adébáyò was was in her early 20s when the bus she was travelling on from her job in an engineering institute took a detour to avoid rush-hour traffic in the Nigerian city of Ife. “We cruised through this neighbourhood that was really impoverished, where I hadn’t been before. I remember being astonished that it was there. This was a city I’d been living in since I was about eight and I didn’t know anything about it at all,” she says. She took the memory with her when, shortly afterwards, she flew out to the UK to embark on a new life as a writer.
The ramshackle district, so different from the one in which she had grown up as the daughter of a hospital doctor, gave her a setting for one strand of the second novel that fans of her bestselling debut Stay With Me have spent six long years waiting for. Well, it’s been a busy time, she says over Zoom, from her home in Lagos. Not only did she have to manage the globe-trotting demands of becoming the new star of Nigerian literature, feted in the New York Times, and interviewed in both the Paris Review and Vogue, but she also got married and gave birth.
It’s 10am in Lagos when we speak, and she breaks into a doting smile as her son, now nine months old, tries his best to attract her attention from the sidelines. She delivered the final version of A Spell of Good Things less than a week before he was born. “It was right up to the wire. I think everyone was a bit surprised that I finished it,” she says. Begun before the publication of Stay With Me, while she was still doing her MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, it is a very different sort of novel. Where Stay With Me told a closely focused story about the impact of childlessness and sickle-cell disease on the life of a young couple trapped in the husband’s traditional family, A Spell of Good Things deals with political corruption, social injustice and domestic violence. It has a big cast of characters, and is charged with an explosive satirical energy as it brings the personal and the political crashing together.
A Spell of Good Things is also set in a different period of Nigerian history – not the military dictatorship of the early 1980s under which the troubled marriage of Yejide and Akin plays out in Stay With Me, but in the chaos of a newly restored democracy in the early years of the new millennium. In one strand, the family of a young boy called Eniolá struggle to survive after his history teacher father loses his livelihood, and his mental health, to devastating cost-cutting layoffs in schools. In another – informed by the experiences of Adébáyò’s own sister as an overworked junior doctor – Wúraolá, the daughter of a wealthy family, attempts to square her parents’ traditional expectations with the life of a modern career woman. Their paths cross in a tailor’s shop where Eniolá sweeps the floors and Wúraolá’s glamorous mother sweeps in to arrange the dresses for her daughter’s betrothal ceremony.
From early childhood Adébáyò, who was born in 1988, absorbed a family interest in politics. “We would go to church on Sundays and pick up four papers and spend the rest of the day reading them and talking about what was going on.” She recalls the excitement leading up to elections: “I remember becoming more aware of the structures of power in Nigeria, and being excited for myself about voting for the first time. Then thinking: ‘Well, what did that mean?’” For her own family, some things had improved in the new democracy, because her mother had a job, as a doctor, and had only two children to feed. But it was a very different story for those directly affected when the redundancies were made across Osun State, where the family lived. The new state government didn’t think humanities subjects were necessary, she explains. “A generation of teachers in the public school system were just retrenched overnight. I had a friend whose mum was one of them, and she suffered with depression for a long time after that. There were families with two teacher parents who both killed themselves,” she says. In A Spell of Good Things, Eniolá’s resourceful mother is reduced to begging from her more successful siblings, who are contemptuous of her “idle” husband. As the family’s poverty deepens, Eniolá loses his place at his private school with disastrous results.
Adébáyò started her own secondary schooling at one of the public schools to which Eniolá is consigned, because – though most families who could afford to sent their children to fee-paying schools – the university circles in which her parents moved had social principles. Her mother had been educated in one. But the demoralisation of the early 2000s was so bad that even those teachers who survived wouldn’t always bother to turn up for classes, so after two terms Adébáyò was moved to a private school. “There were casualties that happened in that window of time that I wanted to sit with in this novel,” she says. “Sometimes I think, in relation to Nigeria, that there are so many small tragedies that the collective consciousness can’t process all of them, and they just keep happening and falling away.”
For all its concentration on the difficulties of day-to-day life in the west African country, the novel rings with the confidence of a literary culture that has commanded the world stage for decades now. Each of its four sections is introduced with epigraphs from the work of writers she admires: Teju Cole, Helon Habila, Chika Unigwe and Sefi Atta. By her early teens Adébáyò had already read most of the classics in the Heinemann African Writers Series, which her mother would buy from the university bookshop. “She said to me: ‘If you’re going to be a writer, you need to read all this.’” But Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe were of a different generation. “I remember the first time I walked into a supermarket in Ife, and I saw [Atta’s] Everything Good Will Come. It was the first contemporary Nigerian fiction I had ever come across,” she says.
“I had the privilege of growing up on a diet of literature from Nigeria and from other parts of the continent, alongside classics from the British Council library which my mother used to take me to. I didn’t know what ‘winter’ was when I was six or seven, but I had read all these books set in it. I had no idea what ginger beer was for a long time.” This mixed literary heritage means that in her own novel she is unafraid to leave food names, fashion styles, or commonplace phrases in the Yoruba dialect of Ijesa, without explanation. “I feel that it’s possible for all these things to exist together, because that was the world in which I existed as a reader.”
Adébáyò at home in Lagos. Photograph: Tomiwa Ajayi/The Guardian
At Obafemi Awolowo University, in Ife, an inspirational professor introduced her to the work of Tsitsi Dangarembga, giving her the Zimbabwean writer’s semi-autobiographical novel, Nervous Conditions, about growing up in postcolonial Rhodesia. “It’s still very precious to me. I think it’s upstairs,” she says. “It’s one of those books that made me think: ‘Oh my god, this is what I want to be able to do.’” She’s reluctant to talk about an African literature. “I think that what many writers find constraining is the way it is then read in a limited way, in terms of imagining what the work can do, and is doing, and all the levels at which it is working. You are worried that you might only be read for some kind of anthropology, which is not necessarily what you’re trying to do.”
At university she met a fellow aspiring writer Emmanuel Iduma, and they bonded over the exchange of books and ideas. They kept in contact when she moved to the UK to study at UEA. When, after 14 years of friendship, the couple finally married in 2020, they had played it so cool that many of their friends were unaware that they were even romantically involved. Denied a traditional wedding by the pandemic (“we had less than a hundred people, which is tiny by Nigerian standards”), they decided to share their news in a sweet exchange of love notes and photographs on Instagram. He cited Roland Barthes and the soundtrack to their first wedding dance (Patrick Watson’s Sit Down Beside Me), while she quoted James Salter and CP Cavafy: “And, for me, the whole of you has been transformed into feeling.”
Novelists are not usually the most clubbable of people, so was it a shock to find it picked up in the press? “We’re both relatively private people – I think I’m probably private to the point of being secretive,” she admits, “but it was this overflow of joy. Our birthdays are within days of each other, and it was the first birthday we were sharing as a married couple, so we just decided we would celebrate each other in this way. And I’m quite glad that we did. It was such a wonderful moment for both of us.” They did go on to have a big extended family celebration when restrictions were lifted, she adds. Though, since her father’s death back in the 1990s, her immediate family circle has been small – just herself, her mother and her younger sister – there are plenty of more distant relatives on both sides: “I didn’t know half the people there.”
In A Spell of Good Things the buildup to a traditional betrothal ceremony is the plotline that brings everything – and everyone – together, illuminating a strong understory about the role of older women in family life. As in Stay With Me, mothers rule their households with rods of iron, even while kowtowing to the men. “My mother is a very strong influence in my life,” she says, “and when I observe my family in Nigeria, in particular, I think the mothers are incredibly powerful. The question is how that power is allowed to assert itself and what ways it is camouflaged as a sort of performance. I wanted to write about Nigerian women of that generation, born at some point in the 60s, because I am fascinated by the contradictions in the way they had to move through the world. They placed a lot of importance on marriage because you had to be married to exist in society.”
Her own marriage is a mixed one: Iduma is Igbo and they are raising their son to be trilingual in Yoruba, Igbo and English. In a country that still bears the scars of a bitter civil war, this remains a big deal in some quarters, as was made clear to Iduma a few days before Christmas while he waited to pick up his sister-in-law from the airport. “There was this weird interaction with someone who was saying to my husband: ‘How can you be married to a Yoruba woman, when it is not your language?’ So people do still remark on it.”
Her sister has followed their mother into medicine, working at a hospital in Norwich and providing a convenient foothold in the UK for Adébáyò . Now that she has a child it’s not so easy to flit around, living the life of a footloose literary star, so the family are planning to decamp to East Anglia for the novel’s publication. A Spell of Good Things paints such a bleak picture of the violence and inequality of her homeland that I wonder if she is ever tempted to emigrate like her sister. But, she says: “I think that Nigeria will always be home. It’s frustrating and complex but I do feel some sort of commitment to the country.” It also has the advantage of being a land without winter, thousands of imaginative miles from the snowy landscapes that dominated her early reading, though with harmattan winds that coat the landscape in dust. “I stepped out this morning, and it was really nice,” she says. “Actually, I think it’s my favourite season.”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Not long after the Philadelphia Eagles were installed as seven-and-a-half-point favorites over the New York Giants for their NFC divisional playoff game on Saturday night, skepticism began seeping through this passionate-yet-gloomy sports town – as it always does.
Seven-and-a-half points, great. But, wait. Can we beat the Giants three times this year?
The fans had to know. Proper statistics needed to be Googled, stories needed to be chased. The findings looked conclusive: Since the NFL-AFL merger in 1970, a team that had won two regular-season games over another team has won 15 of 24 playoff games if they met again in the playoffs. San Francisco beat Seattle last Saturday for the third time this season.
All that would seem to be good news for the Eagles (14-3), who manhandled the Giants (10-7-1) on 11 December, 48-22, then held off the Giants three weeks later, 22-16, to break their first losing streak of the season, and earn valuable home-field advantage through the NFC playoffs.
Jalen Hurts, the versatile and imperturbable Eagles’ quarterback, returned from a shoulder injury in the rematch and looked fine, even though Philadelphia thinned the playbook to limit Hurts’s exposure. It helped that New York, who were locked into a playoff berth, rested several starters, including quarterback Daniel Jones and running back Saquon Barkley.
However, more Philadelphia fans than you’d think looked at the 15-of-24 stat another way: But those series-winning teams compiled a 1.000 winning percentage in the regular season – but were only .625 in the playoffs! See? Their chances actually decrease! MAYDAY!
Marcus Hayes wrote a column, anyway, that was published on the front page Tuesday of the Philadelphia Inquirer. THE PLAYOFFS ARE LINING UP FOR EAGLES, read the all-uppercase headline. His first paragraph: “The Eagles got lucky on wild-card weekend. They watched an overrated Giants team beat a mirage in Minnesota.”
“The Eagles demolished them early in the season,” Hayes later told the Guardian. “The Giants finished 2-5-1. The Eagles have an advantage at every position. And fans love to fabricate worry. Teams sweep about 70% of the time. Also: Eagles had a bye in the first round of the playoffs.”
The Minnesota Vikings, the Giants’ victims in the first round of the playoffs, were indeed Nordic, Lite: The Vikings won 13 of 17 regular-season games despite being outscored by their opponents by an aggregate 427-424. (The Eagles beat the Vikings during the season.)
And yet, Philadelphia fans are diehard worry-fabricators. They have material. The Eagles won 13 of their first 14 games but have not played well since the first Giants game. Hurts, it turned out, was hurting in the last game against the Giants. Nick Sirianni, the Eagles’ head coach, has never won a playoff game – although, in mitigation, this is only his second year in the role.
“Well, there is that fatalism. It is part of the fabric in the city since 1964,” the longtime Philadelphia sports-talk host Glen Macnow, referring to the Phillies’ epic late-season collapse in that year’s National League pennant race, told the Guardian. “I would have hoped that the World Series win in 2008 and the Super Bowl in 2017 would have washed that away. But it’s back.
“It’s funny. I think Philadelphia fans were much more comfortable being the underdog in 2017 than they are being the favorite this year.”
Eagles fans largely took over MetLife Stadium for Philadelphia’s 48-22 over the Giants in their first meeting last month in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Photograph: Al Bello/Getty Images
In 2017, the Eagles (13-3) won home-field advantage for the NFC playoffs but were made the underdogs in games against Atlanta and Minnesota because quarterback Carson Wentz had torn up his knee in the 13th game of the regular season. The Eagles, behind backup Nick Foles, won both games, then toppled the favored New England Patriots in Super Bowl LII.
The Eagles got a big kick out of that slight themselves, pulling on Halloween dog masks after the victory over Atlanta. Philadelphia fans scooped up “Philadelphia Underdog” T-shirts after Halloween dog masks disappeared off the shelves of novelty stores in Philadelphia.
The 2022 Philadelphia Phillies, too, became beloved underdogs, claiming the final playoff spot in the 160th of 162 regular-season games, then eliminating three favorites – St Louis, Atlanta and San Diego – before losing in the World Series to the Houston Astros.
Howard Eskin, another longtime sports-talk radio host in Philadelphia, tried to calm down the populace by pointing out on Twitter that playoff teams playing their third straight game on the road, which the Giants will do this weekend, have a 10-37 record since 1990.
Eskin is an accomplished pot-stirrer, though, and he’d earlier mentioned the playoff record of teams that had swept a regular-season opponent. So the first comment on his 10-37 tweet came from someone with a Phillies logo as an avatar: “All the pressure is on the Eagles. No one expects the Giants to win. They have nothing to lose, but to come out and play hard.”
But the Eagles are 2-2 since the first Giants’ game, outscored by six total points. Lane Johnson, the impenetrable Philadelphia right tackle, plans to play Saturday, but he has missed two games with a torn abdominal muscle that will require off-season surgery.
There was just too much to worry about. Then Fox Sports announced that Joe Davis will be providing the play-by-play for Saturday’s game. Davis, the Philadelphia media quickly pointed out, called many of the Phillies’ games in their World Series march.
And then the NFL announced Wednesday that the officiating crew led by Clete Blakeman will call the Eagles-Giants game. The Eagles, it was noted, are 13-1 in games that have been called by crews led by Blakeman – including the 11 December Philadelphia victory.
The horizon was brightening for Philadelphia fans, indeed. But they still need to play the actual football game. The fact that the game starts at 8.15pm gives Eagles fans all day to get lubricated for the game, true. But they also have all day to fret over a cruel downfall, too.
The Inquirer primed the pump by running another front-page story Friday with this teaser: With the Eagles a playoff favorite, Philly finds itself in a weird and wonderful place. Can we handle it?
“By Sunday morning, the answer to CAN NICK SIRIANNI WIN A PLAYOFF GAME??!! needs to be yes, or the entire region will lose its mind,” the veteran Philadelphia sports reporter Les Bowen posted on his Facebook page.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Something strange happened to me last year. On five or six occasions, I needed the money for something – a plane ticket to see someone I love, a daunting credit card bill, a vital item that needed replacing – and I’d think, “If only I could afford this, everything would work out.” Then, within a day or two, I’d be offered a piece of work that would pay that exact amount to the pound, or I’d be able to travel with work to exactly the place I wanted to go. It was a lucky and auspicious 12 months.
Fast forward to this cold, hard January, and nothing is unbearably bad, but I wouldn’t quite say anything is going especially “well” either. Living and working alone, when your major social interaction of the day is bitching about your problems with the nicest man at the coffee shop who always gives you extra stamps on your loyalty card, disappointments can begin to cut rather than scratch.
All of which is to say that I am the ideal candidate for the latest social media trend promising to improve your life: “lucky girl syndrome”. In reality, it’s not new at all – it’s generation Z girls repackaging the new age concept of manifestation, in which you think about something you want as if you already have it or have achieved it, and then it supposedly happens. “Great things are always happening to me,” you say, and then great things happen to you. In a way, it’s similar to what I was doing last year without realising it. And it’s not surprising that videos about this have gone viral on TikTok at the beginning of 2023 – in a month defined by bleak weather and the feeling that the year hasn’t yet taken shape.
Most of the videos are uncommonly smug. A lucky woman tells an out-there tale of how she and her boyfriend manifested a house (they hadmoney for a deposit, and put it down on a house). Her advice is that we should “be fucking delusional and believe in yourself”. I can be delusional – I’m a romantic and a writer, two of the most mad and unrealistic things to be – so I decide to give it a try in a bid for a lucky 2023.
I’m well-versed in manifestation. In my teens and 20s I used to make “vision boards” and try manifesting specific things. I’m not sure how deeply I believed in it, but I do think that manifestation can work, in its way – not through mystical forces, but because it means you’ll be looking for the positives, you’ll notice them more and maybe even begin to shape your life around the good things within it. Science agrees: people who have clear goals are more likely to achieve them. Being optimistic: generally good for you.
But manifestation is probably also damaging – it promotes a relentless focus on the self and self-actualisation. When people are seeking luck, it’s luck for money, fame and romantic relationships, for me, myself and I. It joins a host of spiritual activities that younger generations are reinventing as a form of “wellness” – we now have random teenagers and girls in their early 20s with handles such as “hotdopepriestess” who read Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret and are now doing tarot card readings and selling workshops on how to manifest wealth. These are the same businesses that people within the spiritual community have run for decades but they are now marketed by and to a younger generation. Perhaps this was the natural progression for the wellness industry in a declining economy: lacking the financial means to make ourselves happy, we’re now turning to the supernatural for help.
As I tell myself that I am a lucky girl, I too begin to feel smug. It’s simple, low effort – I don’t even have to think about what exactly I want, it’s just great things. I hope that if I keep saying it to myself something notable will happen between the time I am commissioned to write about the syndrome and filing the article. The hours are passing and nothing. Maybe I will manifest missing my deadline. I look at the view outside, across a purple sky and then through some usual windows to see the same people I always see, fussing about their families. There’s a couple hugging in their kitchen. A shadow of loneliness falls across my chest and I think how awful England feels at this time of year. But: great things are always happening to me.
So I message a friend and we joke about the mantra that great things are always happening to me and I check my email. A piece of work has been confirmed, which means I will be able to leave the country imminently. What if another strange, lucky year really could happen?
Hannah Ewens is features editor at Vice UK and author of Fangirls: Scenes From Modern Music Culture
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
The absence of Keith Pelley as the DP World Tour’s year got under way in Abu Dhabi this week was explained by the man himself in a note to players. “Unfortunately, the majority of my time has been, and is being, occupied in preparing for next month’s arbitration hearing,” said the chief executive of the European Tour Group.
In February, Pelley’s business will face off with LIV rebels who believe they should retain the right to play on this platform in addition to their own. Pelley said: “The hearing is also taking up a considerable amount of time for several other senior members of our staff, as well as a significant amount of financial resource, all of which in the ordinary course of things would have been more usefully deployed across our business to further benefit all our members.”
That remark irritated Lee Westwood, who criticised “propaganda” being used against him and his fellow LIV converts. Pelley’s comment was harmless enough; his organisation views LIV as a competitive rival, one with a bottomless cash pit which could plunge golf’s traditional ecosystem into irrelevance. A jab or three back is fair.
Where Westwood was on stronger ground was with his audible concern over the pull of the DP World Tour. The Abu Dhabi Championship, a $9m curtain raiser, features only one player from the world’s top 20. Rory McIlroy will add lustre to next week’s Dubai Desert Classic but Viktor Hovland will not defend his title. Major winners Jon Rahm and Matt Fitzpatrick, poster boys for European golf, are skipping the Middle East swing entirely. Has LIV, plus the demands of the PGA Tour, materially harmed the DP World Tour?
The answer, as with everything in this sport just now, is far from straightforward. The last set of accounts filed by the European Tour Group – for the financial year 2021 – showed cash in hand of £79m. Profit before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation was in excess of £17m. While the 2022 figures are unknown, this year will enjoy coffers boosted by the Ryder Cup in Rome. While other sporting bodies had their finances decimated by the impact of Covid, it is difficult to portray the European Tour’s business as anything other than strong. The situation has been helped by strategic alliance with the PGA Tour, which bought into and has subsequently increased their stake in the European Tour’s media production wing. Rank and file golfers have never had it so good.
“Look at the numbers,” says the Ryder Cup vice captain, Nicolas Colsaerts. “People just lose sense of reality. Take a step back and look at where we were five, 10 years ago compared to now.” This season, DP World Tour players will compete for a record $144.2m. Growth has been promised by Pelley, to $162m by 2027.
The HSBC Championship, currently taking place in Abu Dhabi, features only one player from the world’s top 20. Photograph: Ross Kinnaird/Getty Images
If the DP World Tour’s duty is to provide opportunity for a membership in excess of 400, that undoubtedly exists. As does a new minimum earning guarantee of $150,000 for anybody who competes in 15 tournaments. “When you get a tour card, you get a bill for a minimum of 80-100 grand for expenses,” says Marc Warren.
In BMW, HSBC and Rolex, Pelley has maintained long-term partnerships with illustrious companies. Hero MotorCorp, a huge backer of golf on both sides of the Atlantic, stepped in to the breach after Slync’s sponsorship of the Desert Classic collapsed. Broadcast deals, an ongoing problem for LIV, are a DP World Tour strong suit.
These are matters of commerce. There is also an emerging player element. “I think the European side of golf is in very safe hands,” says the 2018 Open champion, Francesco Molinari. “There’s loads of young talent coming through. Yeah, some weeks you’re going to get better fields than others. It’s not really anything different from the last few years. When you get to the top of the game, you play a little bit more in America, but we have got young European talent coming through.”
Still, the inability or unwillingness of so many top players to travel to Abu Dhabi or Dubai raises questions. “This is a great event but it has half the prize fund of 25-30 events around the world,” says Bernd Wiesberger, the 37-year-old Austrian, who hopes to continue to juggle LIV and the DP World Tour. “None of the top guys will play more than 18-20 events.” Wiesberger believes the world ranking standing of tournaments such as Abu Dhabi is “troubling.”
Worthy of question, too, is the failure of the PGA and DP World Tours to agree elevated status – meaning a purse of at least $20m – to any tournament in Europe and especially the UK. There are soft runs and competitions with no broader reach, although that has always been the case. Last year’s Scottish Open pulled a marquee field because of geographical proximity to St Andrews and the Open Championship; with the third major of 2023 taking place on the Wirral, East Lothian may suffer.
Speculation continues that Belgium’s Thomas Pieters, the defending champion in Abu Dhabi, will be coaxed to the LIV scene. Such a scenario would be a blow to Pelley but far from a fatal one. The chief executive has high-profile support. “We got sidetracked to thinking that $100m is normal,” says the 2019 Open champion, Shane Lowry. “Everybody is throwing out these figures that are just astronomical. As a tour, could this tour be better? We could all be better in anything that we do. But I think that with a steady growth over the next number of years, this tour will keep improving.” Different golfers are applying different metrics. Golf’s battle for hearts and minds continues apace.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
