Tehelka's cover story this week, “The Invisible Dead,†is about malaria, which the magazine calls Chhattisgarh's silent killer. Officially, the story says, there have been no malaria deaths in the state this year; investigating such claims, the writers found what they call “a snare of lies and Stalinist statistics.â€
“Falciparum malaria is known all over the world to kill between 1-3 percent of its patients,†the story says. “Perplexingly, Chhattisgarh's reports seem to defy all medical odds.'' Data sent to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in New Delhi for 2007 indicated a death rate of 0.00002 percent in the state, according to the magazine, which estimates that Chhattisgarh's true annual toll is in the thousands.
“Malaria is not just a seasonal predicament in Chhattisgarh,†the story says. “It is its secret epidemic, and kills many more people than the Maoist insurgency. Deliberately or otherwise, everybody is blind to it.â€
In June, Tehelka lost a photographer, Tarun Sehrawat, to the deadly disease that he contacted during an assignment in the forest-dense state of Chhattisgarh.
Open magazine has a special film issue this week. Featured subjects include what Bollywood stars' Twitter feeds reveal about them, as well as “the hottest rain song ever†- it's Raveena Tandon's yellow-sari-drenched number in “Mohra,†if you were wondering. There's also a piece entitled “Tragic Heroes†about the relatively anonymous lives of Bollywood lookalikes. “In Hindi cinema, the job of a lookalike is not just to look like the original, but to do â€" in film parlance â€" the ‘undoable,' †the ar ticle says. A Shah Rukh Khan lookalike was asked to get drenched in paint for a commercial because the star himself had refused, according to the story. (Only in print for now).
