headlines from a parallel universe
(intercepted from exo-universe 245e, which bears striking resemblance to ours)
Protests in Junapur after Oxygen Jihad cases surface
Junapur: Protests erupted in the Rehma area of Junapur on Friday after reports of oxygen jihad surfaced in the village. In response, the Junapur police have imposed Section 144(b) to prevent unwanted gatherings and maintain law and order. However, the increase in nationwide reports of oxygen jihad has put the residents on edge, creating a tense atmosphere in the small town. Videos have surfaced showing alarmed citizens holding secret meetings and taking oaths of revenge.
The term ‘oxygen jihad’ refers to an alleged practice where the religious minority targets the religious majority group by breathing out converted carbon dioxide in a religiously purified breathing space. The locals believe this Talibanizes the air, converting innocent civilians to the Abrahamic religion without their permission or knowledge.
According to local sources, several incidents of oxygen jihad have been reported in Junapur over the past four months. In one particular case, a Farhad after finishing his evening prayers came straight to the local market and started breathing around religious shops, and shops owned by the majority religious community. However, the man fled once the local priest noticed his allegedly sectarian respiration.
“This is a clear case of oxygen jihad, and requires immediate police intervention,” said one activist belonging to the Vishva Majority Religion Parishad. The local MLA has assured the public that the state assembly will introduce appropriate legislation to curb this problem.
Over the last two years, five Indian states have introduced laws against oxygen jihad, with penalties for religious exhalation ranging from fines to imprisonment. While civil rights groups and human rights agencies have decried these measures as an attack on individual freedoms and the rights of people to breathe openly, the government has dismissed these criticisms as a conspiracy to attack the age-old Indian tradition of tolerance and acceptance. The rise in these cases has also restarted the debate within the town about the limits of religious freedoms and the right to propagate one’s practices, especially that of insufflation. It remains to be seen whether respiration will ever become a secular activity like it used to be, or if communal forms of breathing will create further divisions within the nation.
APA Study: Public spaces behind the Rise in Cupid Personality Disorder
Scientists at the prestigious American Psychiatric Association have released a study confirming that frequent use of public spaces is the leading cause of Cupid Personality Disorder (CPD). The report, which was published alongside the seventh edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-7, also found the disorder to be more common among the unemployed, the unhoused and the vagabonds, making teenagers, artists and college students especially vulnerable.
The study comes just months after corporations across the world saw the sharpest gradual decline in their productivity, reportedly hit by the growing cases of CPD. According to the WHO, an estimated 7% of the population suffers from the disorder, a number considered low due to underreporting.
CPD is a relatively lesser known mental health condition characterized by the opening of specific neural pathways associated with addiction, including of drugs, often causing impaired decision making and acute narrowness of focus and productivity, manifesting itself as an extreme affinity towards another individual. Patients who suffer from CPD often describe themselves as being in love, seeking emotional and spiritual connections, and seeing the world in an increasingly romanticized manner. Leading psychiatrist, Dolos Ananke, claims cultural conditioning, cinema and a sense of escapism from the mundaneness of daily life that comes with CPD are the chief reasons it goes widely undiagnosed.
The effects of CPD on the economy are still being studied, although it is estimated that the losses to the GDP run in tens of billions. Patients of CPD report spending their time dreaming about the person they ‘love’, planning an often unviable life together, and taking decisions emotionally despite the material costs to them and their employer. These individuals are found wasting large portions of their savings on each other, instead of opting for rational choices like investments and wellbeing. Although several philosophers throughout history have decried ‘love’ as a madness, it is only in the past four years that the medical community has caught on.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), mental health is "a state of well-being in which the individual realizes their abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively, and is able to make a contribution to their community." None of these factors are necessarily matched by an individual who is in ‘love’. Although critics of the CPD model often argue that the free market economy is responsible for categorizing "love" as a mental illness, their hypothesis that anxiety could similarly be one day regarded as an individualistic disorder comes across as a fanciful notion that would only hold true in a parallel universe.
Progress has been fast in recent months. Several MNCs have now started providing free medication to self reporting CPD patients. Dooble, one of the biggest advocates of mental health in Silicon Valley, has started using AI to help people recognise early signs of CPD so they can get the pharmaceutical, institutional and technical support they need to lead a healthy individualistic and productive life.
With expanding research in this field, the APA study comes at the right time. It narrows down the causes of CPD as being primarily social, with unproductive interactions outside of work, often in the form of play and leisure, to be blamed. Ananke says she’s hopeful that DSM-7 will help shed light on its understudied effects, providing governments resources to litigate the restriction of public spaces in an appropriate, scientific manner. It remains to be seen how effective these measures will be in curbing the disorder.
New York: Times Square shuts, sending tourists into a frenzy
What happens when the world’s biggest holiday attraction takes a day off? Tourists at the famous Times Square found out yesterday as the location witnessed a power cut that affected everything from the billboards to the huge displays. The evident lack of advertising in the world’s most iconically commercialized space left locals and tourists alike in a frenzy.
According to City Daily, a visitor from Dallas expressed horror at New York's "black screens, glass buildings, and tar roads." Another tourist questioned how the city differed from Chennai when it couldn’t offer any visually mesmerizing festivities. Meanwhile, a local named Theo, who migrated to the city eight years ago for a lucrative Wall Street job, recalled the sight of homeless people with excrement-covered blankets walking around during the blackout. "Every great city is plagued by hobos," he said, "only New York was bright enough to blind you to them." These comments were made during the fourth hour of the blackout.
Within six hours of the outage, Twitter was flooded with reports of people experiencing suffocation, nausea, and, in some cases, psychosis. The situation became so alarming that good Samaritans could be seen playing Apple ads from the 80s on their laptops just to soothe strangers rushing around in a state of panic.
Leading neuroscientist Jenna Goodwin explains that advertising has become a way for humans to feel connected to their needs, desires, insecurities, and aspirations. Without them, the world can appear daunting and threatening, causing severe mental health issues.
While the cause of the outage hasn't been made public, Mayor Eric Adams quickly used his emergency powers to assemble a team of skilled military engineers to restore the commercial space within ten hours. Although Times Square is now as bright and glorious as ever, its cultural role in keeping citizens sane is certainly never going to be viewed the same way.
(This headline and news story is inspired by a unique and memorable comment a very interesting soul from New Zealand left under my Behuda Baat YouTube video called ‘How Ads are Changing Human Nature’. I personally think the comment is much better than this write up and you should immediately check it out, it’s in a reply to my pinned comment.)
Today’s newsletter first appeared in my new book, The Last Sunset of Colaba and other stories for the end of the world. If you liked the story, you can buy my book here: