Weekend reads: Deepika Padukone on her battle with depression, and more

Weekend reads: Deepika Padukone on why she took her battle with depression public and nine others
Indian actress Deepika Padukone. AFP

Here are the 10 interesting reads for this weekend from around the globe.

Bollywood celebrity Deepika Padukone tells why she took her battle with depression public, in The New York Times.

From the story:

"My mother looked at me and asked, "What's wrong?" But I had no answer. She asked me if I was having issues at work. She asked if my partner and I were doing O.K. All I could do was shake my head. After taking a moment to herself, she said, "Deepika, I think you need professional help." The psychiatrist's diagnosis was clinical depression. I had been so desperate that as soon as the doctor said, "This is what you have," I felt immediate relief. Finally, somebody understood what I was going through. Not knowing what I was experiencing had been the biggest struggle. The moment I had the diagnosis, my recovery began."

Criminals in uniform: Encounters should not be encouraged by political leadership, writes Julio Ribeiro, a retired IPS officer, who was Mumbai police commissioner, DGP Gujarat and DGP Punjab, in The Indian Express. "All stakeholders in the judicial process must sit across the table and take a decision to speed up the trials of rape and murder cases, at least. No encounters should be encouraged by the political leadership," urges Ribeiro.

Markandey Katju writes about the lawlessness of encounter killings, in The Wire. "Fake 'encounters' completely sidestep and circumvent legal procedures, as it essentially means bumping someone off without a trial," he says.

Is the National Register of Citizens for India a tool kit for Hindu Rashtra, asks Pamela Philippose in The India Forum. "The drive to re-introduce the Citizens Amendment Bill and the plan to prepare a nation-wide National Register of Citizens are both part of a larger strategy to re-engineer the India of plurality and diversity into a Hindu rashtra," she writes.

Will the North East 'exemptions' in the new Citizenship Amendment Bill meet their purpose?, asks Arunabh Saikia in Scroll.in.

The shocking mob-style execution of fashion designer Gianni Versace in the United State that appears to have been the crescendo of a cross-country murder spree that landed 27-year-old Andrew Cunanan on the F.B.I.'s Ten Most Wanted list. From the truth about Cunanan's childhood, through his free-spending days at the heart of San Diego's gay society, to the bloody crime scenes he left behind in Minneapolis, Chicago, New Jersey, and Miami, the author Maureen Orth follows the twisted psychological path that ended only when Cunanan turned the .40-caliber murder weapon on himself. Read the Killer's Trail, published by Vanity Fair in September 1997.

V Kumaraswamy profiles a few working class writers across India, in Reader's Digest. They pull rickshaws, sell tea, work as domestic help and as daily wage labourers for a living. They also bare their souls in their writings and touch many hearts.

The unending indignities of Alzheimer's. Jeneen Interlandi writes about her family that navigated the disease and its financial burdens, in The New York Times.

From the piece: "I can't have been older than 3, but I swear I remember that moment. I remember my father like that — young, and in love with his children, and their mother, and our little slice of the universe. He got a diagnosis of Alzheimer's in 2016. This year, his doctor told us that we needed to move him into a nursing home. By then, he had been expelled from the local senior center for wandering off too much and was refusing to attend the adjacent, slightly-higher-security dementia day care. The strain of caring for him without one of those support programs was too much for our mother to bear, the doctor said. And who could disagree?"

China's failed gene-edited baby experiment proves we're not ready for human embryo modification, write Dimitri Perrin & Gaetan Burgio in The Conversation.

Board of Control for Cricket in India president Sourav Ganguly seems more keen to sign on to the past than to the future and his attempt to dilute the Lodha panel recommendations is troubling, writes Suresh Menon in The Hindu.

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