Mon: Good News for Our Democracy.

Hindus' Should Hin-Don't

A sex scene in the Hollywood movie Oppenheimer featuring a line from a Hindu holy scripture has sparked online outrage in India, with one official calling it a “scathing attack”.

The biographical drama about US physicist Robert Oppenheimer, played by actor Cillian Murphy, opened in India on Friday to positive reviews, reportedly raking in more than $3m at the box office there in two days.

The film tells the story of Oppenheimer, who is often credited as the “father of the atomic bomb” for his role in producing the first nuclear weapons.

Religious text quoted in sex scene
One scene showing Oppenheimer with his lover Jean Tatlock, played by Florence Pugh, has sparked outrage online.

The scene features the protagonist reciting a verse from the Bhagavad Gita, considered the holiest of Hindu scripture, just before sexual intercourse.

Murphy reads the line, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”, the quote which Oppenheimer reportedly recalled when the first nuclear bomb was detonated.

In various interviews, Oppenheimer, who died in 1967, spoke of his interest in the religion. He had also learned Sanskrit, the sacred language of Hinduism.

“This is a direct assault on religious beliefs of a billion tolerant Hindus,” Uday Mahurkar, a senior official at the government’s Central Information Commission, wrote to the film’s director, Christopher Nolan, on Monday.

“It amounts to waging a war on the Hindu community,” Mahurkar said in the letter, a copy of which he posted on Twitter, and urged Nolan to cut the scene.

Judge not, that ye be not judged.

Rafiq Tamboli would have been 33 years old now. Or maybe he still is. His wife doesn’t know if he is dead or alive. Nobody has seen him for at least two years.

A resident of Qureshi Nagar in Mumbai’s Kurla locality, Rafiq worked as a driver transporting meat for a couple of traders in the animal industry.

On June 4, 2021, he received an assignment to pick up meat from the city of Daund in Pune district of Maharashtra – about 250km (155 miles) from Mumbai, the state capital.

After loading the meat in his truck, Rafiq embarked on a five-hour journey back home at about 9pm. He called his wife, Reshma Tamboli, just before he started driving.

“It was a normal conversation,” the 35-year-old told Al Jazeera. “I asked him if he had had dinner. He said he would in half an hour or so. That was about it.”

Little did Reshma know that it would be their last conversation.

At about 10:30pm that night, Rafiq’s truck was intercepted and stopped by cow vigilantes on the highway near the village of Ravangaon in Daund. He has not been seen since then – neither alive nor dead.

What happened after that is anybody’s guess.

When Rafiq did not return that night, Reshma frantically started calling him. The phone was switched off.

When he did not return even three days later, she went to the local police station in Mumbai’s Chunabhatti locality to file a complaint.

“The police called the man Rafiq worked for,” Reshma said. “That’s when he told us that his truck was intercepted by cow vigilantes in Daund.”

The moment she heard that, her heart sank.

Since 2014 when the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, cases of mob lynching under the pretext of protecting cows, considered holy by some Hindus, have been rising in India.

Critics believe the cow vigilantes, who are organised, often armed and once found on the fringes of society, have become mainstream after they started enjoying the BJP’s political patronage.

Finally, He Can Go See Barbie

Dr. Alfonso Sabater pulled up two photos of Antonio Vento Carvajal’s eyes. One showed cloudy scars covering both eyeballs. The other, taken after months of gene therapy given through eyedrops, revealed no scarring on either eye.

Antonio, who’s been legally blind for much of his 14 years, can see again.

The teen was born with dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa, a rare genetic condition that causes blisters all over his body and in his eyes. But his skin improved when he joined a clinical trial to test the world’s first topical gene therapy. That gave Sabater an idea: What if it could be adapted for Antonio’s eyes?

This insight not only helped Antonio, it also opened the door to similar therapies that could potentially treat millions of people with other eye diseases, including common ones.

Gene therapy eyedrops restore boy’s sight. Similar treatments could help millions

Sabater, director of the Corneal Innovation Lab at the eye institute, said gene therapy eyedrops could potentially be used for other diseases by changing the gene delivered by the virus. For example, a different gene could be used to treat Fuchs’ dystrophy, which affects 18 million people in the U.S. and accounts for about half the nation’s corneal transplants.