The Ritz-Carlton, Santiago

(column by Pooja Priyadarshini)

Having been featured in the Robb Report’s ‘Best of the Best’ and the prestigious Condé Nast Awards list, the Ritz-Carlton, Santiago means class in every sense of the word. Also rated the Best Hotel in Mexico, Central & South America by Travel + Leisure Magazine this year, the Ritz stands proud, snuggled by the plush and most opulent locales of El Golf.

THE VIEW: With the most beautiful surroundings imaginable, courtesy the towering Andean Mountain range adding to the grandiose, the Ritz-Carlton, Santiago offers a view that one would want to savour for a lifetime… Besides, the glittering city which looks more like a spread, studded with diamonds in the evenings, elevates its magical magnificence to newer heights.

ARCHI TYPE: 205 guest rooms, 7,440 square feet of Health and Fitness Centre and about 9,207 square feet of meeting and conference space, all jazzed up with floor to ceiling windows and state-of-the-art facilities, are the best one would have come across!

BON APPÉTIT: Be it the Turbot with Garden Vegetables or the pan-fried spiny Lobster, which also happen to be the two specialities of the ultra stylish Adra restaurant, it’ll leave your senses in hunger pangs even on a full stomach! The delectable Mediterranean cuisine coupled with 365 varieties – one for each day of the year – of assorted white and red wines and a pastry buff et forms the divine platter.

AROUND THE CORNER: Go for some skiing to beat the chill of the winter or for some beach sport, if you’ve got your sunny side up all the time!

FROM UNDER THE CARPET: Pollution and the occasional (but heavy) smog can be a dampener for the free spirited, who prefer the outdoors to the luxury of their plush hotel rooms.

IN ESSENCE: The glitz of the ‘Rtiz’ will bedazzle even the most pernickety ones!

(End of Pooja Priyadarshini column)

Ignorance is bliss, or is it?
Smoking & sun-bathing: A tale of two atrocities…

(column by Ashish Pratap Singh)

Throughout the history of the world, there have been instances when the existence of our species has been greatly compromised. Be it the Great Fire of London that gutted almost this entire historical city and claimed over 10,000 lives. Or the Indian drought of 1900 that wiped out more than one million inhabitants from the face of our nation. But the trend that has comparatively only set in recently is, for the lack of a better word, alarming. What we are witnessing is a wave of people so enamoured by the lifestyles they lead and the societies that they live in, that they are pushing themselves towards eradication, and the pity is, without even know they’re doing it!

Societal gatherings have become less about catching up and more about being in sync with the trends (read drinking, smoking etc). In fact, smoking has become like a mandate at all parties which are unimaginable without free-fl owing alcohol. Take the insatiable desire for a perfectly tanned bronze skin, for instance. Th e ‘white-skins’ have, for as long as one can remember, have gone to unthinkable limits to tan their pale skins to look more attractive. What they, however, did not give heed to is the pigmentation that is caused by overexposure to the sun. The International Agency for Research on Cancer has discovered that malignant melanomas of the skin and of nonmelanomatous skin cancer are caused by exposure to the sun. They also determined that skin cells are more likely to turn cancerous when exposed to intense sunlight for short periods (such as sun bathing) than when exposed to radiation over a prolonged period of time (say for someone staying in Africa). Thus, people with light coloured skin vying to get a sexy tan are at a greater risk than people with dark skins. But what is more shocking than this discovery is the steady climb in melanoma since the mid ’90s to a mind-numbing 40%, meaning we’re deliberately walking the plank.

Smoking is another evil that is taken up more as a habit to impress peers and friends than anything else. At first, the body almost always rejects the foreign element, smoke, in the lungs. But repeated attempts at forcing to inhale cigarette fumes makes the lungs accept it. But the cost of this social acceptance is atrociously high. Nicotine, that is found naturally in tobacco, is more addictive than heroin and when inhaled, it moves deep into the lungs and getting absorbed quickly into the bloodstream. Nicotine affects our heart and blood vessels, the hormonal system, metabolism, and our brain. During pregnancy, nicotine freely crosses the placenta and has been found in the umbilical cord blood of newborn infants. Over time, the smoker reaches a certain nicotine level and then smokes to maintain this level of nicotine. In fact, nicotine, when inhaled in cigarette smoke, reaches the brain faster than drugs that enter the body intravenously. And then there is a barrage of health issues. Nearly everyone knows that smoking can cause lung cancer, but few realise it is also a risk factor for many other kinds of cancer as well, including cancer of the mouth, voice box (larynx), throat (pharynx), oesophagus, bladder, kidney, pancreas, cervix, stomach, and some types of leukaemia. Besides, smokers are twice more likely to die from heart attacks than non-smokers. Women over 35 years who smoke and use birth control pills are in a high-risk group for heart attack, stroke, and blood clots of the legs.

People must realise that saying no to a drink that their boss is mindlessly pushing in their direction is wiser than they would have thought. A drag here or a drag there from a cigarette just to be included in the smoking-circle-talks can be the thin red line between life and an agonising slow death.

(End of Ashish Pratap Singh column)

Bidding bye bye to Baiji
We might have lost the Yangtze River dolphin for ever!

(column by Rahul Chaudhary with inputs from Swati Hora)

Just what price are we ready to pay for growth and prosperity? Well, from the way events have unfolded in the not-sodistant Chinese backyard, the answer seems a resounding ‘anything’. To cut a long story short, Baiji or the Yangtze River dolphin, thought to be, until recently, a highly endangered species, has gone ‘functionally’ extinct. What’s appalling, and perhaps ironical, is that the fascinating creature for long regarded as a symbol of peace and prosperity in Chinese tradition and nicknamed – the ‘Goddess of the Yangtze’ has merely been reduced to a mere name.

Hunted for food and skin, and thanks to the rapid growth during the ‘Great Leap Forward’, the Baiji’s days had appeared numbered with experts having sounded alarm bells for the Yangtze dolphins. Unfortunately they’ve been proved right. Even on repeated surveys of the Yangtze not a single Baiji was spotted. So what exactly went wrong? Says Dr. Sandeep Behra, WWF India Dolphin Conservation Project Head, “Over exploitation of the river and construction of dams and barrages has resulted in the Yangtze dolphin’s depletion.” So does that mean the Indian river dolphins could face the same threat too? “In 2005, 1,100 dolphins in the Indus and less than 2,000 in the Ganga were reported. Conservation needs to be taken up seriously, else the fate of our dolphins would not be too different from the Yangtze’s,” asserts Dr. Behra. “In a nutshell, both quantity and quality (river flow & level) are critical for dolphin survival which is affected by the construction of dams and barrages. Being mammals, they are at the top of the aquatic food chain process and their extinction will affect the entire food chain system”. Let’s hope, unlike everything else, we don’t compete with our neighbour on the fate of our dolphins!

(End of Rahul Chaudhary with inputs from Swati Hora column)

The ‘catch’ in the catch
A fishing tournament where nothing’s fishy!

(column by Tareque Laskar)

For anglers and sport fishing enthusiasts alike, this is the ‘Super Bowl’ of all fishing tournaments! Into its 35th year now, the US Virgin Island Blue Marlin Tournament is held every year in the ‘Blue Marlin Fishery’ region of the Virgin Islands. Instituted initially to spread the word about the bounty of Blue Marlins (one of the most prized catches for an angler) that can be had in this region, the tournament has grown into a modified format following a ‘catch and release’ philosophy where the Marlins caught are released back into the ocean unless it happens to be a world record catch. Subsequently, it became the first fishing event in the world to release Blue Marlin. Though unique, the tournament’s approach raises some interesting questions about the sport of fishing. The releasing of the Marlin back into the water is great from a conservationist’s point of view (only three Marlins have been put on dock since the introduction of the ‘Modified Release’ scoring format) but the catching techniques (the hooks used for instance) could still cause harm to the fish.

The participants every year compete for serious amounts of cash in the individual, boat & crew categories, and this event which is nicknamed as ‘Boy Scout’ (because the money generated by the first tournament was donated to benefit the Virgin Islands Council of the Boy Scouts of America) remains on top of every angler’s wish-list. The format sure is an added motivation to do something good and have fun at the same time. As of today it attracts the best of the best anglers from around the world just as the Virgin Islands angler Chuck Senf had envisioned when he started it in 1972. Want to give something back to nature and hunt for a little personal glory? Go fish... where else but at the US Virgin Islands Atlantic Blue Marlin Tournament!

(End of Tareque Laskar column)