title: Warcraft

text: The Alliance has been present in some form in all "Warcraft" games. In all three real-time strategy games, the Alliance are the protagonists of their campaign, and are one of the two main protagonist factions in "World of Warcraft". They are also the primary antagonists of "" and the orc campaigns in "". The Alliance began in "Warcraft II" when the human kingdoms and demihumans strategically united to fend off the conquering Horde. Thus they are enemies to the Horde. The Alliance has evolved over the course of the franchise, losing allies and gaining new members, but the Alliance has endured over the years. They are united to uphold their common noble ideals and are bound together by a sense of brotherhood forged by all the battles they've endured together. The major races of the Alliance are the humans of Stormwind, the High Elves, the Night Elves of Teldrassil, and the Dwarves of Ironforge. Other races who have joined or allied with the Alliance include the Gnomes of Gnomergan, the Draenei of Outland, the Worgens of Gilneas (creatures that resemble hunched over werewolves), and the Tushui Pandaren. The Alliance is led by a military commander who coordinates the military actions of all the races in the Alliance. The title for this position depends on the rank of the individual (e.g., Anduin Lothar was a knight and his title was Supreme Allied Commander. Varian Wrynn is a king and his title is High King). This title may require an aspect of diplomacy or has strong political clout as the other leaders can choose not to commit their forces to the commander if they dislike the commander's leadership. Though how much forces and resources are contributed to the war effort is left to each individual leader's discretion, when the military commander issues a call to arms, all races of the Alliance are expected to contribute.


title: Warcraft

text: In the first two Warcraft games, the Horde is made of the orcs under the command of the Burning Legion and are enemies of the human led Alliance. The orcs attempt in both games to conquer the human kingdoms. Eventually the Horde was defeated, most of its leaders killed, and the orcs placed in internment camps.


title: Warcraft

text: The third Warcraft game, Reign of Chaos, details the orcs shaking off both the chains of the Alliance, and the corruption of the Burning Legion. The Horde expanded their ranks by forging alliances with the Blood Elves, the Forsaken, the Goblins, the Huojin Pandaren, the Tauren, and the Trolls.


title: Warcraft

text: In 1999, "Next Generation" listed "Warcraft" and "Starcraft" as number 32 on their "Top 50 Games of All Time", commenting that, "While "Warcraft" did not create the realtime strategy genre, it made it appealing to a broad audience. "Warcraft II" went on to refine the genre. Easy to play, nuanced in design, a pleasure to look at, and often a laugh riot, "Warcraft II" was nearly perfect."


title: Tech N9ne

text: Aaron Dontez Yates (born November 8, 1971), better known by his stage name Tech N9ne (pronounced "tech nine"), is an American rapper. In 1999, he and business partner Travis O'Guin founded the record label Strange Music. He has sold over two million albums and has had his music featured in film, television, and video games. In 2009, he won the Left Field Woodie award at the mtvU Woodie Awards.


title: Tech N9ne

text: His stage name originated from the TEC-9 semi-automatic handgun, a name given to him by rapper Black Walt due to his fast-rhyming chopper style. Yates later applied a deeper meaning to the name, stating that it stands for the complete technique of rhyme, with "tech" meaning technique and "nine" representing the number of completion. Despite minimal mainstream success himself, he has featured many mainstream artists on his albums including E-40, Ice Cube, Three 6 Mafia, B.o.B., Twista, Busta Rhymes, Kendrick Lamar, Lil Wayne, T-Pain, Snoop Dogg, The Game, Wiz Khalifa, CeeLo Green, T.I., 2 Chainz, Corey Taylor of Slipknot, Eminem, Logic, and Boyz II Men.


title: Tech N9ne

text: Yates was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri. He began rapping at a very early age, and would rap the letters of his name in order to remember how to spell it. His father Carlton Cook was estranged from the family and his mother suffered from epilepsy and lupus when he was a child, which emotionally affected him and inspired him to "search for God". He would explore abandoned buildings with his best friend, hoping to catch a ghost on film. He attended Southwest High School in Kansas City.


title: Tech N9ne

text: Early in his career, Yates was a member of a group formed in 1991 called Black Mafia. He saw glimpses of success in the group 57th Street Rogue Dog with their single "Let's Get Fucked Up." As a member of the group Nnutthowze, Aaron Yates signed with Perspective Records in 1993. However, the group disbanded soon after being released from the label. Yates signed with Qwest Records briefly before moving to JCOR Records.


title: Tech N9ne

text: In 1997, Yates joined the group the Regime, which was formed by rapper Yukmouth. The following year, he was featured on the soundtrack for the film Gang Related. Yates appeared on the song "The Anthem" by Sway & King Tech in 1999, which also featured artists RZA, Eminem, Xzibit, Pharoahe Monch, Jayo Felony, Chino XL, KRS-One, and Kool G. Rap. Later that year, he and business partner Travis O'Guin founded the record label Strange Music.


title: Tech N9ne

text: In 2001, Yates released the studio album "Anghellic" on JCOR Records. After disputes arose about the promotion of the album, Yates and his label severed ties with the JCOR with a deal that allowed them to retain the rights to the album. The next year, he released "Absolute Power", under a 50–50 joint venture between Strange Music and M.S.C. Music & Entertainment (which was founded by former Priority Records head Mark Cerami). The album debuted number 79 on the "Billboard" 200. The album's sales are said to have tripled following a campaign, going by the name of "F.T.I." was started by the rapper and his label. The campaign, which asked music listeners to legally download the album free through the artist's own website was in response to the anti-downloading campaign by the RIAA.


title: Tech N9ne

text: In 2006, Yates released the album "Everready (The Religion)". The following year, he released "Misery Loves Kompany". Yates announced that the album was the first in a series of "Tech N9ne Collabos" albums that feature a wide range of guest appearances.


title: Tech N9ne

text: The following year, Yates released the album "Killer". That September, he exceeded one million album sales over his entire catalog. Yates remarked of the accomplishment that, "It just reminded me of all the work we'd done in the past, up until now [...] I don't think it's sunken in yet. I've been celebrating for the last two days because that's a hell of an accomplishment. I've been planning success all my life. I'm not even a bit surprised, I'm happy about it. That just means I was right." Yates released his second "Collabos" album, "Sickology 101", in April 2009.


title: Tech N9ne

text: Yates later performed at the Rock The Bells 2009 Festival and the tenth annual Gathering of the Juggalos. That October, he released "K.O.D.", an acronym for King of Darkness. The album featured a dark overtone, as Yates was dealing with the illness of his mother. An EP of new songs over unused beats from the "K.O.D." album was released in 2010 as "The Lost Scripts of K.O.D.". Later that year, Yates released his third "Collabos" album, "The Gates Mixed Plate". In October, he released his second EP "Seepage". On December 23, he released his first mixtape "Bad Season".which was later released in retail CD form with a modified track list and without DJ Scream. On June 7, 2011, Yates released "All 6's and 7's". The album features several hip-hop artists as well as rock artists including B.o.B, E-40, Snoop Dogg, Hopsin, T-Pain, Jay Rock, Mint Condition, Busta Rhymes, Twista, Lil Wayne, Yelawolf and Deftones and many others.


title: Tech N9ne

text: In 2011, Yates told 411mania.com that after "All 6's And 7's" he planned on releasing his fourth album in the "Collabos" series titled "Welcome to Strangeland", featuring guest appearances from everyone on Strange Music, followed by the long-awaited K.A.B.O.S.H. and 816 Boyz albums. Then, in July 2011, Yates said in a blog post that Rick Ross has agreed to do a song with him for the K.A.B.O.S.H. album and that he is also hoping to have a collaboration with Jay-Z on that album. In the same blog post, he said that the K.A.B.O.S.H. album will be a rock album. In another blog post several weeks later, he confirmed that he will begin work on the album after completing "Welcome to Strangeland". Following his tour, he announced that he was about to begin work on "Welcome to Strangeland" and "Klusterfuk", confirming producers for both projects. ¡Mayday! is to entirely produce "Klusterfuk". He said he will then begin work on the K.A.B.O.S.H. album.


title: Tech N9ne

text: Tech N9ne is featured on Lil Wayne's ninth studio album "Tha Carter IV" on the song "Interlude". The track features a verse from Tech and Andre 3000. During a radio interview with Funkmaster Flex in August 2010, Wayne stated that he and Tech N9ne formed a "brotherhood" when Yates visited him in jail. In a later interview, Tech N9ne claimed that he thinks the song will "awaken a lot of other people that wouldn't usually look [his] way" and "teach all the new fans how to become technicians."


title: Tech N9ne

text: In an interview with "Underground TV" posted on Tech N9ne's blog, Tech N9ne spoke about his 2012 plans, confirming the release of Klusterfuk, the "K.A.B.O.S.H." album, and an untitled solo album to be released in 2012. He was featured on the song "Edge of Destruction" (which also features Twista) that appears on Machine Gun Kelly's first studio album "Lace Up".


title: Tech N9ne

text: On September 18, Tech N9ne released an EP titled "E.B.A.H." (Evil Brain Angel Heart). On October 30, Tech N9ne released an EP titled "Boiling Point". He announced his thirteenth studio album would be titled "Something Else" and would be released on June 25, 2013. The first song released from the album would be "B.I.T.C.H.", an acronym for "Breaking In To Colored Houses", which features rapper/singer T-Pain. The album would end up being released on July 30, 2013, to universal critical acclaim. The album, which is broken up into three portions — Earth, Water & Fire, features guest appearances from B.o.B, Big K.R.I.T., Cee Lo Green, the Doors, Game, Kendrick Lamar, Serj Tankian, T-Pain, Trae tha Truth, Snow Tha Product, and Wiz Khalifa, among others including several artists from Tech N9ne's Strange Music imprint. The album was supported by two singles, "So Dope (They Wanna)" and "Fragile".


title: Tech N9ne

text: Tech N9ne announced a new "Independent Grind" tour in January 2014, which included Freddie Gibbs, Krizz Kaliko, and Jarren Benton. The tour dates were announced on January 30, 2014, and the tour ran from April 9 until June 28, wrapping up in Kansas City. Also in 2014, Yates released Strangeulation, the fifth album in his "Collabos" series and fourteenth album overall.


title: Tech N9ne

text: In April 2015, Yates confirmed that Eminem will be featured on a song titled "Speedom (Worldwide Choppers 2)." The song was released on April 20, 2015, as a single supporting his then-upcoming album, "Special Effects", which was released on May 4 of the same year. The rapper says Eminem collaborated on the track, free of charge, in exchange for Yates to guest on a track of his for an unknown project. Yates says he was "flabbergasted" that Eminem respected his music so much.


title: Tech N9ne

text: On May 4, 2015, Tech N9ne released "Special Effects" to critical and commercial acclaim. The album features guest appearances from Corey Taylor, B.o.B, Lil Wayne, 2 Chainz, T.I., Hopsin, E-40, Yo Gotti, Audio Push and Eminem along with fellow Strange Music artists Krizz Kaliko, Big Scoob and Ces Cru.


title: Tech N9ne

text: In addition, a "Special Effects" tour began in early April 2015. Tech is joined on tour by Murs, Chris Webby, Krizz Kaliko, Zuse, and King 810.


title: Tech N9ne

text: On November 20, 2015, Tech N9ne released "Strangeulation Vol. II", the sixth album in his "Collabos" series and 16th album overall. The album features the entire roster of Strange Music at the time along with JL, Ryan Bradley, and Tyler Lyon. On January 11, 2016, Tech released a remix of Marilyn Manson's song "The Beautiful People" for Dr. Dre's The Pharmacy on Beats 1 radio. In spring 2016, Tech N9ne went on tour with fellow Strange members for another Independent Powerhouse Tour.


title: Tech N9ne

text: In December 2016, Tech N9ne released his 17th album, "The Storm", the followup to his 1999 debut album "The Calm Before The Storm".


title: Tech N9ne

text: In January 2017, Tech N9ne announced his seventh Collabos album titled "Dominion", released April 7, and stated plans to release a second album in his Collabos series the same year. In March, Tech began the Strictly Strange '17 tour with fellow Strange Music artists. The same month, Tech announced on radio station GoMN plans to release his next solo album, "Planet", in 2018. On June 20, 2017, Tech earned his first platinum record in 18 years for "Caribou Lou." Tech N9ne released the eighth Collabos album, "Strange Reign", on October 13, 2017, marking it the second album release that year.


title: Tech N9ne

text: On March 2, 2018, Tech N9ne released "Planet", making this his 20th studio album. On April 19, 2019, Tech N9ne released "N9na", making this his 21st studio album. Nearly a year later, on April 10, 2020, his 22nd album, "Enterfear" was released. On July 29, 2020, he was featured on "CMFT Must Be Stopped", a single by Slipknot vocalist Corey Taylor. On October 23, 2020, Tech N9ne released a new project titled "Fear Exodus".


title: Tech N9ne

text: On October 8, 2021, Tech N9ne released an album titled ""Asin9ne"". The album features guest appearances from Lil Wayne, Mumu Fresh, Snow Tha Product, Russ, E-40, X-Raided, as well as wrestler turned actor Dwayne Johnson.


title: Tech N9ne

text: Tech N9ne features on fellow Kansas City area musician Samantha Fish's 2021 album "Faster", rapping on the song "Loud".


title: Tech N9ne

text: Yates is known for his dynamic rhyme schemes and speed rap abilities known as the Chopper style. Soren Baker of VH1 states that Yates' techniques "showcase his wide-ranging, mind-blowing flows." Baker characterizes Yates' earlier work as "apocalyptic music, which discussed abortion and infidelity as much as his rapping prowess." Allmusic reviewer Jason Birchmeier calls his style "bizarre hardcore rap."


title: Tech N9ne

text: Yates stated that he purposely creates flow patterns in order to sound like a percussion while he raps. After hearing an instrumental he would come up with different kinds of patterns and then "fill in" the actual lyrics.


title: Tech N9ne

text: Yates says that he is influenced by old school hip hop, and specifically cites N.W.A, Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions, Eric B. & Rakim, Schoolly D, and Just-Ice. He is also interested in other genres of music, and lists The Doors, Jim Morrison, Led Zeppelin, Elton John, AC/DC, Metallica, Floetry, Outkast, CeeLo Green, and Gnarls Barkley as influences. He has remarked generally that "I love beautiful music, beautiful music no matter what type".


title: Tech N9ne

text: Yates' songs have appeared in the films "Born 2 Race", "Gang Related", "Alpha Dog", "Our Heroes: The 25 Best Black Sports Movies (Ever)", and "The Life of Lucky Cucumber". Yates was originally set to score the entire film "Alpha Dog", but the studio decided to replace some of his music with more commercially known songs. In 2009, his song "Let's Go" was used in an online promotional short film for AXE body spray. Yates also appears as an actor in the films "Vengeance" and "". Yates starred in the musical "Alleluia: The Devil's Carnival", which had a limited theater release July 2015. On November 25, 2015, Tech released "Shine", a song for the Jaco Pastorius documentary, "Jaco".


title: Tech N9ne

text: Several of Yates' songs are featured in the video games "Madden NFL 2006", "The Crew", "EA Sports MMA", "25 To Life", "WWE 2K18", "EA Sports UFC 3", and "", in the latter of which Yates is an unlockable character. In 2009, Yates and label mate Krizz Kaliko appeared in a promotional video for the "Fight Night Round 4" video game.


title: Tech N9ne

text: Yates' music has appeared on the television shows "Dark Angel", "I'm From Rolling Stone", "My Super Sweet 16", "The Hills", "Spike Guys' Choice Awards", and "Warren The Ape". In 2008, his song "Earthquake" was featured on an episode of MTV's "America's Best Dance Crew" in which the crew had to visually convey the title of the song in their performance. On the August 15, 2009 Strikeforce event, , MMA fighter Gilbert Melendez entered the arena to Tech N9ne's 2006 song "The Beast" for his bout with Mitsuhiro Ishida. His song "Riot Maker" was used as the official theme song for Total Nonstop Action Wrestling's 2010 "Hardcore Justice" pay-per-view. Yates also appeared on the 2011 BET Hip Hop Awards in the BET Cypher with B.o.B, Machine Gun Kelly, Kendrick Lamar, and Big K.R.I.T.


title: Tech N9ne

text: In 2013, Tech N9ne's song "Demons" appeared in the pilot episode of "Ironside". On June 24, 2014, Tech N9ne appeared on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" to perform "Fragile", "He's A Mental Giant", and "Stamina". In late 2014, Yates appeared on "Wild n Out" as captain of the Black Team.


title: Tech N9ne

text: In May 2015, "Give It All" from the album "Special Effects" was used during Inside the NBA's "Tip-Off" for Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Finals.


title: Tech N9ne

text: In May 2018, it was announced that Yates had teamed with Boulevard Brewing Company, a brewery based in his hometown of Kansas City, to create a new beer. The beer was released on June 18 in the Kansas City, Wichita, Denver, and Oklahoma City markets. The beer is named Bou Lou as reference to his song "Caribou Lou", which is also a cocktail with overproof rum (The song specifically mentions Bacardi 151, which has been discontinued.), Malibu, and pineapple juice . The beer is a wheat beer with pineapple and coconut flavors. On July 9, Bou Lou went on sale in the St. Louis market.


title: Tech N9ne

text: Yates was married in 1995, but separated in 2005. Yates filed for a divorce in 2015 and it was finalized in November 2017, 12 years after they were initially separated. Yates is an avid supporter of Kansas City culture and the metro area's pro sports teams, including the Kansas City Chiefs, Kansas City Royals, and Sporting Kansas City. Before the Chiefs played in the game, he released a song titled "Red Kingdom".


title: Coma

text: A coma is a deep state of prolonged unconsciousness in which a person cannot be awakened, fails to respond normally to painful stimuli, light, or sound, lacks a normal wake-sleep cycle and does not initiate voluntary actions. Coma patients exhibit a complete absence of wakefulness and are unable to consciously feel, speak or move. Comas can be derived by natural causes, or can be medically induced.


title: Coma

text: Clinically, a coma can be defined as the inability consistently to follow a one-step command. It can also be defined as a score of ≤ 8 on the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) lasting ≥ 6 hours. For a patient to maintain consciousness, the components of "wakefulness" and "awareness" must be maintained. Wakefulness describes the quantitative degree of consciousness, whereas awareness relates to the qualitative aspects of the functions mediated by the cortex, including cognitive abilities such as attention, sensory perception, explicit memory, language, the execution of tasks, temporal and spatial orientation and reality judgment. From a neurological perspective, consciousness is maintained by the activation of the cerebral cortex—the gray matter that forms the outer layer of the brain—and by the reticular activating system (RAS), a structure located within the brainstem.


title: Coma

text: The term 'coma', from the Greek "koma", meaning deep sleep, had already been used in the Hippocratic corpus ("Epidemica") and later by Galen (second century AD). Subsequently, it was hardly used in the known literature up to the middle of the 17th century. The term is found again in Thomas Willis' (1621–1675) influential "De anima brutorum" (1672), where lethargy (pathological sleep), 'coma' (heavy sleeping), "carus" (deprivation of the senses) and apoplexy (into which "carus" could turn and which he localized in the white matter) are mentioned. The term "carus" is also derived from Greek, where it can be found in the roots of several words meaning soporific or sleepy. It can still be found in the root of the term 'carotid'. Thomas Sydenham (1624–89) mentioned the term 'coma' in several cases of fever (Sydenham, 1685).


title: Coma

text: Many types of problems can cause a coma. Forty percent of comatose states result from drug poisoning. Certain drug use under certain conditions can damage or weaken the synaptic functioning in the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS) and keep the system from properly functioning to arouse the brain. Secondary effects of drugs, which include abnormal heart rate and blood pressure, as well as abnormal breathing and sweating, may also indirectly harm the functioning of the ARAS and lead to a coma. Given that drug poisoning is the cause for a large portion of patients in a coma, hospitals first test all comatose patients by observing pupil size and eye movement, through the vestibular-ocular reflex. (See "Diagnosis" below.)


title: Coma

text: The second most common cause of coma, which makes up about 25% of cases, is lack of oxygen, generally resulting from cardiac arrest. The Central Nervous System (CNS) requires a great deal of oxygen for its neurons. Oxygen deprivation in the brain, also known as hypoxia, causes sodium and calcium from outside of the neurons to decrease and intracellular calcium to increase, which harms neuron communication. Lack of oxygen in the brain also causes ATP exhaustion and cellular breakdown from cytoskeleton damage and nitric oxide production.


title: Coma

text: Twenty percent of comatose states result from the side effects of a stroke. During a stroke, blood flow to part of the brain is restricted or blocked. An ischemic stroke, brain hemorrhage, or tumor may cause restriction of blood flow. Lack of blood to cells in the brain prevents oxygen from getting to the neurons, and consequently causes cells to become disrupted and die. As brain cells die, brain tissue continues to deteriorate, which may affect the functioning of the ARAS.


title: Coma

text: The remaining 15% of comatose cases result from trauma, excessive blood loss, malnutrition, hypothermia, hyperthermia, hyperammonemia, abnormal glucose levels, and many other biological disorders. Furthermore, studies show that 1 out of 8 patients with traumatic brain injury experience a comatose state.


title: Coma

text: Injury to either or both of the cerebral cortex or the reticular activating system (RAS) is sufficient to cause a person to enter coma.


title: Coma

text: The cerebral cortex is the outer layer of neural tissue of the cerebrum of the brain. The cerebral cortex is composed of gray matter which consists of the nuclei of neurons, whereas the inner portion of the cerebrum is composed of white matter and is composed of the axons of neuron. White matter is responsible for perception, relay of the sensory input via the thalamic pathway, and many other neurological functions, including complex thinking.


title: Coma

text: The RAS, on the other hand, is a more primitive structure in the brainstem which includes the reticular formation (RF). The RAS has two tracts, the ascending and descending tract. The ascending tract, or ascending reticular activating system (ARAS), is made up of a system of acetylcholine-producing neurons, and works to arouse and wake up the brain. Arousal of the brain begins from the RF, through the thalamus, and then finally to the cerebral cortex. Any impairment in ARAS functioning, a neuronal dysfunction, along the arousal pathway stated directly above, prevents the body from being aware of its surroundings. Without the arousal and consciousness centers, the body cannot awaken, remaining in a comatose state.


title: Coma

text: The severity and mode of onset of coma depends on the underlying cause. There are two main subdivisions of a coma: structural and diffuse neuronal. A structural cause, for example, is brought upon by a mechanical force that brings about cellular damage, such as physical pressure or a blockage in neural transmission. While a diffuse cause is limited to aberrations of cellular function, that fall under a metabolic or toxic subgroup. Toxin-induced comas are caused by extrinsic substances, whereas metabolic-induced comas are caused by intrinsic processes, such as body thermoregulation or ionic imbalances(e.g. sodium). For instance, severe hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) or hypercapnia (increased carbon dioxide levels in the blood) are examples of a metabolic diffuse neuronal dysfunction. Hypoglycemia or hypercapnia initially cause mild agitation and confusion, but progress to obtundation, stupor, and finally, complete unconsciousness. In contrast, coma resulting from a severe traumatic brain injury or subarachnoid hemorrhage can be instantaneous. The mode of onset may therefore be indicative of the underlying cause.


title: Coma

text: Structural and diffuse causes of coma are not isolated from one another, as one can lead to the other in some situations. For instance, coma induced by a diffuse metabolic process, such as hypoglycemia, can result in a structural coma if it is not resolved. Another example is if cerebral edema, a diffuse dysfunction, leads to ischemia of the brainstem, a structural issue, due to the blockage of the circulation in the brain.


title: Coma

text: Although diagnosis of coma is simple, investigating the underlying cause of onset can be rather challenging. As such, after gaining stabilization of the patient's airways, breathing and circulation (the basic ABCs) various diagnostic tests, such as physical examinations and imaging tools (CT scan, MRI, etc.) are employed to access the underlying cause of the coma.


title: Coma

text: When an unconscious person enters a hospital, the hospital utilizes a series of diagnostic steps to identify the cause of unconsciousness. According to Young, the following steps should be taken when dealing with a patient possibly in a coma:


title: Coma

text: In the initial assessment of coma, it is common to gauge the level of consciousness on the AVPU (alert, vocal stimuli, painful stimuli, unresponsive) scale by spontaneously exhibiting actions and, assessing the patient's response to vocal and painful stimuli. More elaborate scales, such as the Glasgow Coma Scale, quantify an individual's reactions such as eye opening, movement and verbal response in order to indicate their extent of brain injury. The patient's score can vary from a score of 3 (indicating severe brain injury and death) to 15 (indicating mild or no brain injury).


title: Coma

text: In those with deep unconsciousness, there is a risk of asphyxiation as the control over the muscles in the face and throat is diminished. As a result, those presenting to a hospital with coma are typically assessed for this risk ("airway management"). If the risk of asphyxiation is deemed high, doctors may use various devices (such as an oropharyngeal airway, nasopharyngeal airway or endotracheal tube) to safeguard the airway.


title: Coma

text: Imaging basically encompasses computed tomography (CAT or CT) scan of the brain, or MRI for example, and is performed to identify specific causes of the coma, such as hemorrhage in the brain or herniation of the brain structures. Special tests such as an EEG can also show a lot about the activity level of the cortex such as semantic processing, presence of seizures, and are important available tools not only for the assessment of the cortical activity but also for predicting the likelihood of the patient's awakening. The autonomous responses such as the skin conductance response may also provide further insight on the patient's emotional processing.


title: Coma

text: In the treatment of traumatic brain injury (TBI), there are 4 examination methods that have proved useful: skull x-ray, angiography, computed tomography (CT), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The skull x-ray can detect linear fractures, impression fractures (expression fractures) and burst fractures. Angiography is used on rare occasions for TBIs i.e. when there is suspicion of an aneurysm, carotid sinus fistula, traumatic vascular occlusion, and vascular dissection. A CT can detect changes in density between the brain tissue and hemorrhages like subdural and intracerebral hemorrhages. MRIs are not the first choice in emergencies because of the long scanning times and because fractures cannot be detected as well as CT. MRIs are used for the imaging of soft tissues and lesions in the posterior fossa which cannot be found with the use of CT.


title: Coma

text: Assessment of the brainstem and cortical function through special reflex tests such as the oculocephalic reflex test (doll's eyes test), oculovestibular reflex test (cold caloric test), corneal reflex, and the gag reflex. Reflexes are a good indicator of what cranial nerves are still intact and functioning and is an important part of the physical exam. Due to the unconscious status of the patient, only a limited number of the nerves can be assessed. These include the cranial nerves number 2 (CN II), number 3 (CN III), number 5 (CN V), number 7 (CN VII), and cranial nerves 9 and 10 (CN IX, CN X).


title: Coma

text: Assessment of posture and physique is the next step. It involves general observation about the patient's positioning. There are often two stereotypical postures seen in comatose patients. Decorticate posturing is a stereotypical posturing in which the patient has arms flexed at the elbow, and arms adducted toward the body, with both legs extended. Decerebrate posturing is a stereotypical posturing in which the legs are similarly extended (stretched), but the arms are also stretched (extended at the elbow). The posturing is critical since it indicates where the damage is in the central nervous system. A decorticate posturing indicates a lesion (a point of damage) at or above the red nucleus, whereas a decerebrate posturing indicates a lesion at or below the red nucleus. In other words, a decorticate lesion is closer to the cortex, as opposed to a decerebrate posturing which indicates that the lesion is closer to the brainstem.


title: Coma

text: Pupil assessment is often a critical portion of a comatose examination, as it can give information as to the cause of the coma; the following table is a technical, medical guideline for common pupil findings and their possible interpretations:


title: Coma

text: A coma can be classified as (1) supratentorial (above Tentorium cerebelli), (2) infratentorial (below Tentorium cerebelli), (3) metabolic or (4) diffused. This classification is merely dependent on the position of the original damage that caused the coma, and does not correlate with severity or the prognosis. The severity of coma impairment however is categorized into several levels. Patients may or may not progress through these levels. In the first level, the brain responsiveness lessens, normal reflexes are lost, the patient no longer responds to pain and cannot hear.


title: Coma

text: The Rancho Los Amigos Scale is a complex scale that has eight separate levels, and is often used in the first few weeks or months of coma while the patient is under closer observation, and when shifts between levels are more frequent.


title: Coma

text: Treatment for people in a coma will depend on the severity and cause of the comatose state. Upon admittance to an emergency department, coma patients will usually be placed in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) immediately, where maintenance of the patient's respiration and circulation become a first priority. Stability of their respiration and circulation is sustained through the use of intubation, ventilation, administration of intravenous fluids or blood and other supportive care as needed.


title: Coma

text: Once a patient is stable and no longer in immediate danger, there may be a shift of priority from stabilizing the patient to maintaining the state of their physical wellbeing. Moving patients every 2–3 hours by turning them side to side is crucial to avoiding bed sores as a result of being confined to a bed. Moving patients through the use of physical therapy also aids in preventing atelectasis, contractures or other orthopedic deformities which would interfere with a coma patient's recovery.


title: Coma

text: Pneumonia is also common in coma patients due to their inability to swallow which can then lead to aspiration. A coma patient's lack of a gag reflex and use of a feeding tube can result in food, drink or other solid organic matter being lodged within their lower respiratory tract (from the trachea to the lungs). This trapping of matter in their lower respiratory tract can ultimately lead to infection, resulting in aspiration pneumonia.


title: Coma

text: Coma patients may also deal with restlessness or seizures. As such, soft cloth restraints may be used to prevent them from pulling on tubes or dressings and side rails on the bed should be kept up to prevent patients from falling.


title: Coma

text: Coma has a wide variety of emotional reactions from the family members of the affected patients, as well as the primary care givers taking care of the patients. Research has shown that the severity of injury causing coma was found to have no significant impact compared to how much time has passed since the injury occurred. Common reactions, such as desperation, anger, frustration, and denial are possible. The focus of the patient care should be on creating an amicable relationship with the family members or dependents of a comatose patient as well as creating a rapport with the medical staff. Although there is heavy importance of a primary care taker, secondary care takers can play a supporting role to temporarily relieve the primary care taker's burden of tasks.


title: Coma

text: Comas can last from several days to, in particularly extreme cases, years. Some patients eventually gradually come out of the coma, some progress to a vegetative state, and others die. Some patients who have entered a vegetative state go on to regain a degree of awareness; and in some cases may remain in vegetative state for years or even decades (the longest recorded period is 42 years).


title: Coma

text: Predicted chances of recovery will differ depending on which techniques were used to measure the patient's severity of neurological damage. Predictions of recovery are based on statistical rates, expressed as the level of chance the person has of recovering. Time is the best general predictor of a chance of recovery. For example, after four months of coma caused by brain damage, the chance of partial recovery is less than 15%, and the chance of full recovery is very low.


title: Coma

text: The outcome for coma and vegetative state depends on the cause, location, severity and extent of neurological damage. A deeper coma alone does not necessarily mean a slimmer chance of recovery; similarly, a milder coma does not indicate a higher chance of recovery. The most common cause of death for a person in a vegetative state is secondary infection such as pneumonia, which can occur in patients who lie still for extended periods.


title: Coma

text: People may emerge from a coma with a combination of physical, intellectual, and psychological difficulties that need special attention. It is common for coma patients to awaken in a profound state of confusion and experience dysarthria, the inability to articulate any speech. Recovery is usually gradual. In the first days, the patient may only awaken for a few minutes, with increased duration of wakefulness as their recovery progresses, and they may eventually recover full awareness. That said, some patients may never progress beyond very basic responses.


title: Coma

text: There are reports of people coming out of a coma after long periods of time. After 19 years in a minimally conscious state, Terry Wallis spontaneously began speaking and regained awareness of his surroundings.


title: Coma

text: A man with brain-damage and trapped in a coma-like state for six years, was brought back to consciousness in 2003 by doctors who planted electrodes deep inside his brain. The method, called deep brain stimulation (DBS), successfully roused communication, complex movement and eating ability in the 38-year-old American man with a traumatic brain injury. His injuries left him in a minimally conscious state, a condition akin to a coma but characterized by occasional, but brief, evidence of environmental and self-awareness that coma patients lack.


title: Coma

text: Research by Dr. Eelco Wijdicks on the depiction of comas in movies was published in Neurology in May 2006. Dr. Wijdicks studied 30 films (made between 1970 and 2004) that portrayed actors in prolonged comas, and he concluded that only two films accurately depicted the state of a coma patient and the agony of waiting for a patient to awaken: "Reversal of Fortune" (1990) and "The Dreamlife of Angels" (1998). The remaining 28 were criticized for portraying miraculous awakenings with no lasting side effects, unrealistic depictions of treatments and equipment required, and comatose patients remaining muscular and tanned.


title: Coma

text: A person in a coma is said to be in an unconscious state. Perspectives on personhood, identity and consciousness come into play when discussing the metaphysical and bioethical views on comas.


title: Coma

text: It has been argued that unawareness should be just as ethically relevant and important as a state of awareness and that there should be metaphysical support of unawareness as a state.


title: Coma

text: In the ethical discussions about disorders of consciousness (DOCs), two abilities are usually considered as central: "experiencing well-being" and "having interest". Well-being can broadly be understood as the positive effect related to what makes life good (according to specific standards) for the individual in question. The only condition for well-being broadly considered is the ability to experience its 'positiveness'. That said, because experiencing positiveness is a basic emotional process with phylogenetic roots, it is likely to occur at a completely unaware level and therefore, introduces the idea of an unconscious well-being. As such, the ability of having interests, is crucial for describing two abilities which those with comas are deficient in. Having an interest in a certain domain can be understood as having a stake in something that can affect what makes our life good in that domain. An interest is what directly and immediately improves life from a certain point of view or within a particular domain, or greatly increases the likelihood of life improvement enabling the subject to realize some good. That said, sensitivity to reward signals is a fundamental element in the learning process, both consciously and unconsciously. Moreover, the unconscious brain is able to interact with its surroundings in a meaningful way and to produce meaningful information processing of stimuli coming from the external environment, including other people.


title: Coma

text: According to Hawkins, "1. A life is good if the subject is able to value, or more basically if the subject is able to care. Importantly, Hawkins stresses that caring has no need for cognitive commitment, i.e. for high-level cognitive activities: it requires being able to distinguish something, track it for a while, recognize it over time, and have certain emotional dispositions "vis-à-vis" something. 2. A life is good if the subject has the capacity for relationship with others, i.e. for meaningfully interacting with other people." This suggests that unawareness may (at least partly) fulfill both conditions identified by Hawkins for life to be good for a subject, thus making the unconscious ethically relevant.


title: DoReMi Market

text: DoReMi Market (), also known as Amazing Saturday (), is a South Korean variety show that airs every Saturday at 19:40 (KST) on tvN. From January 17, 2022, the program is available for streaming on Viu every Monday, starting from episode 195.


title: DoReMi Market

text: In each episode, a market from South Korea is featured and within it there are three types of food selected as its representatives. The cast and guest(s) have to play games and win to be able to enjoy the food. There will be a dressing theme concept for the cast and guest(s) to follow for filming of each episode.


title: DoReMi Market

text: For episodes 1–4, the program format is only three rounds of song dictation. From episode 5, the program format changed to two rounds of song dictation, with a Snack Time in between the dictation segments.


title: DoReMi Market

text: Song Dictation: Viewers can recommend songs (and the specific parts of the songs) on the show's official website for use in the show. The cast and guest(s) have to work together to note down all the correct lyrics that was being sung in a small part of the song chosen to play. For each song, they will be given only three attempts to get all the correct lyrics. For every failed attempt, the food will be consumed by Mukbang YouTuber Small-mouthed Haetnim.


title: DoReMi Market

text: For each attempt, a representative from the cast and guest(s) would go up and present their final answer, and if the answer is wrong, the representative gets the popcorn punishment.


title: DoReMi Market

text: Chances are available for use on all three attempts, with only the basic chances on the first attempt, and the chances from the Chance Board on the second and third attempts. On the second and third attempts, after using a chance, the part of the song is played again. The same chance cannot be used twice in the same round. Starting episode 201, for every episode, the chances from the Chance Board that were used in the first round cannot be used in the second round.


title: DoReMi Market

text: A new version of song dictation was introduced in episode 225, where it was played as a team match. Additional rules were put in place for only the new version.


title: DoReMi Market

text: Snack Time: Different from the Song Dictation segment, this is an individual battle where only the last placing cast member/guest would not get the snack.


title: DoReMi Market

text: Nucksal and P.O joined the show starting from episode 52 to replace Hanhae and Key, who were confirmed to enlist in the army on February 7 and March 4, 2019, respectively. Hanhae and Key officially left after episode 47 and episode 51 respectively, following military enlistments.


title: DoReMi Market

text: On October 20, 2020, tvN confirmed that Hyeri will be leaving the show, with her last episode expected to be in late November. In addition, Hanhae and Key were confirmed to return to the show, and Taeyeon will also join the show. Hyeri officially left after episode 134, while Hanhae and Key returned as fixed cast members in the same episode. Taeyeon joined the show from episode 135.


title: DoReMi Market

text: On February 10, 2022, it was confirmed that P.O will enlist in the Republic of Korea Marine Corps on March 28. P.O left the show after episode 208, following his military enlistment.


title: DoReMi Market

text: Each member has their own background music played during different segments of the program. Before the introduction of the Market, the BGM is "Very Nice" by Seventeen. It is usually followed by the guest's songs when the food or snack is shown. During the usage of the Fool Fool Boom Fool chance, "Twit" by Hwasa is being played as its BGM.


title: DoReMi Market

text: A One Shot is given to the cast member/guest who has jotted down the closest answer to the correct answer on the first listen, only on the first attempt of the song dictations. This is usually calculated by the number of correct characters (in Hangul) written down in comparison to the correct answer. While the One Shot is usually given to one person, there were instances where a tie between two or more people occurs; in this case, the people who got the highest number of correct characters will share the "One Shot".


title: DoReMi Market

text: The guests who got one shots in both rounds of song dictation in an episode would be placed in the Hall of Fame. As of episode 242 only eight guests are placed in the Hall of Fame, as listed:


title: DoReMi Market

text: A Perfect Game happens when the cast and the guests succeeds Rounds 1 and 2 both in the first attempt. The term "Perfect Game" was first used and seen as the editors' caption in Episode 14 following the first attempt success in both rounds of dictation. As a result of these episodes, Haetnim was unable to "steal" even one spoonful of food from the casts and guests, thus the term "perfect".


title: DoReMi Market

text: Seventeen, as a group, is the only guest thus far to be in both One Shot Hall of Fame and achieve Perfect Game.


title: DoReMi Market

text: The cast member(s) or guest(s) who won the snack first and last, and the cast member/guest who failed to win the snack from the Snack Time game are as listed:


title: DoReMi Market

text: In the ratings below, for each year, the highest rating for the show will be in and the lowest rating for the show will be in .


title: DoReMi Market

text: A web television spin-off of the program titled "Idol Dictation Contest" (아이돌 받아쓰기 대회) aired from May 21 until June 11, 2021, with videos totaling up to an episode released on Fridays at 15:00 (KST) for four weeks on TVING. It is known as the Idol version of the program. The spin-off stars Boom and Small-mouthed Haetnim as the non-playing cast members, together with Eunhyuk (Super Junior), Lee Jin-ho, Jaejae, Ravi (VIXX), Kai (EXO), Mijoo (Lovelyz), Lee Jang-jun (Golden Child), Seungkwan (Seventeen) and Choi Ye-na. The spin-off is slightly different from the main program, as it features only one round of song dictation and one Dessert Time game in each episode.


title: DoReMi Market

text: The show returned for Season 2, with Kai, Seungkwan and Lee Jang-jun not returning and Lee Know (Stray Kids) joining the show as a new cast member. In addition, there are idol guests appearing for this season. Each 3-part episode will be released on Thursday at 16:00 (KST) for six weeks on TVING from December 16, 2021.


title: DoReMi Market

text: The cast member(s) who got a One Shot (meaning that this cast member has jotted down the closest answer to the correct answer on the first listen, only on the first attempt of the song dictation) are as listed:


title: DoReMi Market

text: The cast members who won the dessert first and last, and the cast member who failed to win the dessert from the Dessert Time game are as listed:


title: The God of Small Things

text: The God of Small Things is a family drama novel written by Indian writer Arundhati Roy. Roy's debut novel, it is a story about the childhood experiences of fraternal twins whose lives are destroyed by the "Love Laws" prevalent in 1960s Kerala, India. The novel explores how small, seemingly insignificant things shape people's behavior and their lives. The novel also explores the lingering effects of casteism in India. It won the Booker Prize in 1997.


title: The God of Small Things

text: "The God of Small Things" was Roy's first book and only novel until the 2017 publication of "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness" twenty years later. She began writing the manuscript for "The God of Small Things" in 1992 and finished four years later, in 1996. It was published the following year. The potential of the story was first recognized by Pankaj Mishra, an editor with HarperCollins, who sent it to three British publishers. Roy received £500,000 in advance and rights to the book were sold in 21 countries.


title: The God of Small Things

text: The story is set in Aymanam, part of Kottayam district in Kerala, India. The novel has a disjointed narrative; the temporal setting shifts back and forth between 1969, when fraternal twins Rahel, a girl, and Esthappen, a boy, are seven years old, and 1993, when the twins are reunited.


title: The God of Small Things

text: Ammu Ipe is desperate to escape her ill-tempered father, known as Pappachi, and her bitter, long-suffering mother, known as Mammachi. She leaves Ayemenem, and to avoid returning, she marries a man only known by the name of Baba in Calcutta. She later discovers that he is an alcoholic, and he physically abuses her and tries to pimp her to his boss. Ammu gives birth to Estha and Rahel, leaves her husband, and returns to Ayemenem to live with her parents and brother, Chacko. Chacko has returned to India from England following his divorce from an English woman, Margaret, and the subsequent death of Pappachi.


title: The God of Small Things

text: The multi-generational, Syrian Christian family home in Ayemenem also includes Pappachi's sister, Navomi Ipe, known as Baby Kochamma. As a young girl, Baby Kochamma fell in love with Father Mulligan, a young Irish priest who had come to Ayemenem. To get closer to him, Baby Kochamma converted to Roman Catholicism and joined a convent against her father's wishes. After a few months in the convent, she realized that her vows brought her no closer to the man she loved. Her father eventually rescued her from the convent and sent her to America for education. Because of her unrequited love for Father Mulligan, Baby Kochamma remained unmarried for the rest of her life, becoming deeply bitter over time. Throughout the book, she delights in the misfortune of others and constantly manipulates events to bring calamity.


title: The God of Small Things

text: The death of Margaret's second husband Joe in a car accident prompts Chacko to invite her and their daughter, Sophie, to spend Christmas in Ayemenem.


title: The God of Small Things

text: On the road to the airport to pick up Margaret and Sophie, the family visits a theater, and on the way, they encounter a group of Communist protesters who surround the car and humiliate Baby Kochamma. Rahel thinks she sees amongst the protesters Velutha, a servant who works for the family's pickle factory, Paradise Pickles and Preserve, and does extra chores for Mammachi. Later at the theater, Estha is sexually molested by the "Orangedrink Lemondrink Man", a vendor working at the snack counter. Estha's traumatic experience factors into the tragic events at the heart of the narrative.


title: The God of Small Things

text: Rahel's assertion that she saw Velutha in the Communist mob, causes Baby Kochamma to associate Velutha with her humiliation at the protesters' hands, and she begins to harbor enmity toward him. Rahel and Estha form an unlikely bond with Velutha and come to love him. Ammu soon gets attracted to Velutha mainly because of her children's love towards him, and eventually, they begin a short-lived romantic affair. Velutha is a Dalit, the lowest caste, meaning his romance with Ammu is forbidden, and culminates in tragedy for the family.


title: The God of Small Things

text: When her relationship with Velutha gets exposed by Velutha's father, Vellya Paapen, Ammu is locked in her room and Velutha is banished. In a fit of rage, Ammu blames the twins for her misfortune and calls them "millstones around her neck." Distraught, Estha and Rahel decide to escape. Their cousin, Sophie also joins them. During the night, as they try to reach the History House, an abandoned house across the river, their boat capsizes and Sophie drowns. When Margaret and Chacko return from a trip where they had gone to arrange Margaret's and Sophie's return trips, they see Sophie's corpse laid out on the sofa.


title: The God of Small Things

text: Baby Kochamma goes to the police and accuses Velutha of being responsible for Sophie's death. A group of policemen hunt Velutha down, savagely beat him for crossing caste lines, and arrest him on the brink of death. The twins, huddling in the abandoned house, witness the horrific scene. Later, when they reveal the truth to the chief of police Thomas Mathew, he is alarmed. Not unknown to the fact that Velutha is a Communist, he is afraid that if word gets out that the arrest and beating were wrongful, it will cause unrest among the local Communists led by Comrade K.N.M Pillai. Mathew threatens to hold Baby Kochamma responsible for falsely accusing Velutha. To save herself, Baby Kochamma tricks Estha and Rahel into believing that the two of them would be implicated as having murdered Sophie out of jealousy and would surely be incarcerated with Ammu. She thus convinces them to lie to the inspector that Velutha had abducted them and had murdered Sophie. Velutha dies of his injuries overnight.


title: The God of Small Things

text: After Sophie's funeral, Ammu goes to the police to tell the truth about her relationship with Velutha. Afraid of being exposed, Baby Kochamma convinces Chacko that Ammu and the twins were responsible for his daughter's death. Chacko kicks Ammu out of the house and forces her to send Estha to live with his father. Estha never sees Ammu again. Ammu dies alone in a motel a few years later at the age of 31.


title: The God of Small Things

text: After a turbulent childhood and adolescence in India, Rahel gets married and goes to America. There, she divorces before returning to Ayemenem after years of working dead-end jobs. Estha and Rahel, now 31, are reunited for the first time since they were children. They had been haunted by their guilt and their grief-ridden pasts. Toward the end of the novel, Estha and Rahel engage in incestuous sex, and it's said that "what they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief." The novel comes to an end with a nostalgic recounting of Ammu and Velutha's love affair.


title: The God of Small Things

text: Estha, which is short for Esthappen Yako, is Rahel's twin brother. He is a serious, intelligent, and somewhat nervous child who wears "beige and pointy shoes" and has an "Elvis puff". His experience of the circumstances surrounding Sophie's visit is somewhat more traumatic than Rahel's, beginning when he is sexually abused by a man at a theater. The narrator emphasizes that Estha's "Two Thoughts" in the pickle factory, stemming from this experience—that "Anything can happen to Anyone" and that "It's best to be prepared"—are critical in leading to his cousin's death.


title: The God of Small Things

text: Estha is the twin chosen by Baby Kochamma, because he is more "practical" and "responsible", to go into Velutha's cell at the end of the book and condemn him as his and Rahel's abductor. This trauma, in addition to the trauma of being shipped (or "Returned") to Calcutta to live with his father, contributes to Estha's becoming mute at some point in his childhood. He never goes to college and acquires a number of habits, such as wandering on very long walks and obsessively cleaning his clothes. He is so close to his sister that the narrator describes them as one person, despite having been separated for most of their lives. He is repeatedly referred to as "Silent" as he gradually slips into an unbreakable silence after he is Returned.


title: The God of Small Things

text: Rahel is the partial narrator of the story, and is Estha's younger sister by 18 minutes. As a girl of seven, her hair sits "on top of her head like a fountain" in a "Love-in-Tokyo" band, and she often wears red-tinted plastic sunglasses with yellow rims. An intelligent and straightforward person who has never felt socially comfortable, she is impulsive and wild, and it is implied that everyone but Velutha treats her as somehow lesser than her brother. In later life, she becomes something of a drifter; several times, the narrator refers to her "Emptiness". After the tragedy that forms the core of the story, she remains with her mother, later training as an architectural draftsman and engaging in a failed relationship with an American, elements of which parallel the author's own life story.


title: The God of Small Things

text: Ammu is Rahel's and Estha's mother. She married their father (referred to as Baba) only to get away from her family. He was an alcoholic, and she divorced him when he started to be violent toward her and her children. She went back to Ayemenem, where people avoided her on the days when the radio played "her music" and she got a wild look in her eyes. When the twins are seven, she has an affair with Velutha. This relationship is one of the cataclysmic events in the novel. She is a strict mother, and her children worry about losing her love.


title: The God of Small Things

text: Velutha is a Paravan, an Untouchable, who is exceptionally smart and works as a carpenter at the Ipe family's pickle factory. His name means white in Malayalam, because he is so dark. He returns to Ayemenem to help his father, Vellya Paapen, take care of his brother, who was paralyzed in an accident. He is an active member of the local Communist movement. Velutha is extremely kind to the twins, and has an affair with Ammu for which he is brutally punished.Velutha has one brother, Kuttapen, who is forever bedridden because of his paralysis from the chest downwards.


title: The God of Small Things

text: Chacko is Estha's and Rahel's maternal uncle. He is four years elder to Ammu. He meets Margaret in his final year at Oxford and marries her afterward. They have a daughter, Sophie, whose death in Ayemenem is central to the story.


title: The God of Small Things

text: Baby Kochamma is the twins' maternal great aunt. She maintains an attitude of superiority because of her education as a garden designer in the United States and her burning, unrequited love for an Irish Catholic priest, her relationship with whom is the only meaningful event in her life. Her own emptiness and failure spark bitter spite for her niece's children, further driven by her prudish code of conventional values. Her spite ultimately condemns the twins, the lovers, and herself to a lifetime of misery.


title: The God of Small Things

text: Indian history and politics shape the plot and meaning of "The God of Small Things" in a variety of ways. Some of Roy's commentary is on the surface, with jokes and snippets of wisdom about political realities in India. However, the novel also examines the historical roots of these realities and develops profound insights into the ways in which human desperation and desire emerge from the confines of a firmly entrenched caste society.


title: The God of Small Things

text: In addition to her commentary on Indian history and politics, Roy evaluates the Indian post-colonial complex, or the cultural attitudes of many Indians toward their former British rulers. After Ammu calls her father a "[shit]-wiper" in Hindi for his blind devotion to the British, Chacko explains to the twins that they come from a family of Anglophiles, or lovers of British culture, "trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps". He goes on to say that they despise themselves because of this.


title: The God of Small Things

text: A related inferiority complex is evident in the interactions between Untouchables and Touchables in Ayemenem. Vellya Paapen is an example of an Untouchable so grateful to the Touchable caste that he is willing to kill his son, Velutha, when he discovers that Velutha has broken the most important rule of caste segregation—that there be no inter-caste sexual relations. In part, this reflects how many Untouchables have internalized caste segregation. Nearly all of the relationships in the novel are somehow colored by cultural and caste tension, including the twins' relationship with Sophie, Chacko's relationship with Margaret, Pappachi's relationship with his family, and Ammu's relationship with Velutha. Characters such as Baby Kochamma and Pappachi are the most rigid and vicious in their attempts to uphold that social code, while Ammu and Velutha are the most unconventional and daring in unraveling it. Roy implies that this is why they are punished so severely for their transgression.


title: The God of Small Things

text: One interpretation of Roy's theme of forbidden love is that love is such a powerful and uncontrollable force that it cannot be contained by any conventional social code. Another is that conventional society somehow seeks to destroy real love, which is why love in the novel is consistently connected to loss, death, and sadness. Also, because all romantic love in the novel relates closely to politics and history, it is possible that Roy is stressing the connection of personal desire to larger themes of history and social circumstances. Love would therefore be an emotion that can be explained only in terms of two peoples' cultural backgrounds and political identities.


title: The God of Small Things

text: The story is set in the caste society of India, at a time when members of the Untouchable Paravan or Paryan caste were not permitted to touch members of higher castes or enter their houses. The Untouchables were considered polluted beings. They had the lowliest jobs and lived in subhuman conditions. In India, the caste system was considered a way to organize society. Roy's book shows how terribly cruel such a system can be.


title: The God of Small Things

text: Along with the caste system, readers see an economic class struggle. The Ipes are considered upper class. They are factory owners, the dominating class. Mammachi and Baby Kochamma would not deign to mix with those of a lower class.


title: The God of Small Things

text: However, Roy shows other types of less evident discrimination. For example, there is religious discrimination. It is unacceptable for a Syrian Christian to marry a Hindu and vice versa, and Hindus can only marry a Hindu from the same caste. In more than one passage of the book, the reader feels Rahel's and Estha's discomfort at being half Hindu. Baby Kochamma constantly makes disparaging comments about Hindus. On the other hand, there is discomfort even between Christian denominations as is shown by Pappachi's negative reaction when Baby Kochamma converts to Catholicism.


title: The God of Small Things

text: Chacko suffers more veiled racial discrimination, as it seems his daughter also does. His English wife's parents were shocked and disapproving that their daughter would marry an Indian, no matter how well educated. Sophie, at one point, mentions to her cousins that they are all "wog", while she is "half-wog".


title: The God of Small Things

text: The Ipes are very class-conscious and feel a need to maintain their status. Discrimination is a way of protecting their privileged position in society.


title: The God of Small Things

text: Betrayal is a constant element in this story. Love, ideals, and confidence are all forsaken, consciously and unconsciously, innocently and maliciously, and these deceptions affect all of the characters deeply.


title: The God of Small Things

text: Baby Kochamma is capable of lying and double-crossing anyone whom she sees as a threat to her social standing. This is a consequence of her loss of respectability after becoming a Roman Catholic nun to be close to Father Mulligan, despite her father's disapproval. Her fear is reminiscent of that of Comrade Pillai, who betrays both Velutha and Chacko to further his own interests and that of his political party.


title: The God of Small Things

text: The greatest tragedy is that of Velutha, the only truly non-corrupt adult in the story, who becomes the repeated victim of everyone's deception—from Comrade Pillai's to Baby Kochamma's, to his own father's and, most heartbreakingly, that of Estha, who at seven years old is manipulated into accusing Velutha of crimes that he did not commit.


title: The God of Small Things

text: Another important aspect of social discrimination that Roy deals with is misogyny, mainly through the character of Ammu. She often draws attention to the different opportunities on offer for women and men in India and the fact that, since Ammu has been married and divorced, she sees her life as effectively over. This is one of the main factors that influences her to start her love affair with Velutha. We also see her treatment by a police officer, who taps her breasts with his baton as "though he was choosing mangoes from a basket", commenting on objectification of women.


title: The God of Small Things

text: "The God of Small Things" is not written in a sequential narrative style in which events unfold chronologically. Instead, the novel is a patchwork of flashbacks and lengthy sidetracks that weave together to tell the story of the Ipe family. The main events of the novel are traced back through the complex history of their causes, and memories are revealed as they relate to one another thematically and as they might appear in Rahel's mind. Although the narrative voice is omniscient, it is loosely grounded in Rahel's perspective, and all of the episodes of the novel progress toward the key moments in Rahel's life.


title: The God of Small Things

text: The book is narrated in the third person. However, during a great part of the narrative, the reader sees everything through Rahel's eyes. This gives the reader special insight into the happenings and characters. Throughout the book, there are various moments that intersect. In one moment, everything is seen through a child's eyes, with a child's feelings and rationales. Later, the same facts, objects, and people are seen in a completely different light.


title: The God of Small Things

text: The story is set in the village of Ayemenem in the Kottayam district of Kerala, India. The main part of the plot takes place in 1969, a time of changes in ideology and influence.


title: The God of Small Things

text: India is a very complex society with various cultural and religious habits and beliefs. Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Christians, and Muslims share the same space. Society is divided not only by the very strict caste system but also by class consciousness. Many languages are spoken in India, but the higher classes make a point of speaking English, sending their sons to study in England and adopting certain English habits. Kerala itself, where the story is set, has a complex social setup, with Hindus, Muslims, and Christians displaying different lifestyles and traditions. It also has the largest Christian population in India, predominantly Saint Thomas Christians or Syrian Christians. In the Kottayam district, Christians are a majority.


title: The God of Small Things

text: Roy uses various techniques to represent the children's viewpoints and their innocence. One technique she employs is the capitalization of certain words and phrases to give them significance(i.e Because Anything Can Happen To Anyone). The children also restate things that adults say in a phonetic way, separating and recombining words. This echoes the children's way of looking at the world, distinct from the perspective of the grown-ups who surround them. Roy often uses metaphors that feature elements that are more prominent in the lives of children, such as toothpaste, secrets, or portable pianos. They place significance on words and ideas differently from the adults, thereby creating a new way of viewing the world around them. They pick up on certain feelings and ideas that the adults around them either fail or refuse to recognize, and give new significance to things that the adults ignore for their own purposes. The children use and repeat these phrases throughout the story so that the phrases themselves gain independence and representational meanings. Another way she plays with language is to join words together without punctuation, which we see in the description of the 'Orangedrink Lemondrink man' or 'bluegreyblue eyes'. This subversion of the usual rules of syntax and grammar not only places us in a child's view of the world, but it also draws attention to the role of language in colonialism. By corrupting standard use of English (the colonial language of India) Roy is rebelling against colonial influence still present in India, represented by characters such as Margaret Kochamma and Chacko who always speak correctly.


title: The God of Small Things

text: Roy also employs a disjointed, non-sequential narrative style that echoes the process of memory, especially the resurfacing of a previously suppressed, painful memory. The story of three different generations is told simultaneously going back and forth in time.


title: The God of Small Things

text: The uncovering of the story of Sophie's death, concurrently with the forward-moving story of Rahel's return to Ayemenem and reunion with Estha, creates a complex narrative that emphasizes the difficulty of the subject of the story and the complexity of the culture from which the story originates. Time is rendered somewhat static as parts of one narrative line are intertwined through repetition and non-sequential discovery. This is also part of the way Roy uses real-life places and people that she has shifted and altered for use in the story. The story's many elements come together to construct a diverse look at one instance of Indian culture and the effect of the caste system on life and love during a time of post-colonialism. As the children try to form their own identities, naming and renaming themselves in the process, Roy places in parallel the effect of the process by intertwining the past and the present.


title: The God of Small Things

text: This process also echoes the progression of the Indian people, like that of all cultures that try to find ways to maintain their traditions in a time of increasing globalization.


title: The God of Small Things

text: "The God of Small Things" is a work of fiction but some critics have tried to find autobiographical parallels in the novel, while at the same, warning against drawing any simplistic connections between the novel and the writer's life. Some of the similarities between Roy's life and that of the characters she creates include her own Syrian Christian and Hindu lineage; the divorce of her parents when she and her brother were very young; her return to the family home in Ayemenem after her mother's divorce; and her education in an architectural school, to name a few. Some critics also attribute the political awareness manifested in "The God of Small Things" to Roy's early life-influences from her mother, who was an activist and feminist.


title: The God of Small Things

text: "The God of Small Things" received stellar reviews in major American newspapers such as "The New York Times" (a "dazzling first novel", "extraordinary", "at once so morally strenuous and so imaginatively supple") and the "Los Angeles Times" ("a novel of poignancy and considerable sweep"), and in Canadian publications such as the "Toronto Star" ("a lush, magical novel"). "Time" named it one of the best books of the year. Critical response in the United Kingdom was less positive, and the awarding of the Booker Prize caused controversy; Carmen Callil, a 1996 Booker Prize judge, called the novel "execrable", and "The Guardian" described the contest as "profoundly depressing". In India, the book was criticised especially for its unrestrained description of sexuality by E. K. Nayanar, then Chief Minister of Roy's home state Kerala, where she had to answer charges of obscenity. The book has since been translated into Malayalam by Priya A. S., under the title "Kunju Karyangalude Odeythampuran".


title: The God of Small Things

text: In 2014, the novel was ranked in "The Telegraph" as one of the 10 all-time greatest Asian novels. On 5 November 2019, the "BBC News" listed "The God of Small Things" on its list of the 100 most influential novels. Emma Lee-Potter of "The Independent" listed it as one of the 12 best Indian novels.


title: The God of Small Things

text: In 2022, the novel was included on the "Big Jubilee Read" list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors, selected to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II.


title: The God of Small Things

text: In 2013, "Talkhiyaan", a Pakistani television series based on the novel, was aired on Express Entertainment.


title: A Very English Scandal (TV series)

text: A Very English Scandal is a British television comedy-drama series. The three-part 2018 serial is based on John Preston's 2016 book of the same name. It is a dramatisation of the 1976–1979 Jeremy Thorpe scandal and more than 15 years of events leading up to it.


title: A Very English Scandal (TV series)

text: The producers followed up "A Very English Scandal" in 2021 with the series "A Very British Scandal", about the Argyll divorce case.


title: A Very English Scandal (TV series)

text: In 1965, Jeremy Thorpe, a Liberal Member of Parliament, must contend with disgruntled ex-lover Norman Josiffe, whom he met in 1961 and had a relationship with for several years. Thorpe had met Norman when the latter was a 21-year-old stable boy in Oxfordshire and wrote many letters to him, which Norman kept. Norman, who could never quite hold down a job, particularly not after having lost his National Insurance card, was unstable and had a penchant for drama and self-expression, both of which proved increasingly hard to deal with. When Thorpe grew tired of Norman and insisted that he leave the house he had arranged and paid for in London, the young man began to make threats. Thorpe fears exposure and the end of his political career. His fellow Liberal MP, Peter Bessell, keeps Norman silent for the time being with small amounts of money. Norman also requests a new National Insurance card from Thorpe but his request is denied since it would link Thorpe to Norman.


title: A Very English Scandal (TV series)

text: By 1968, Thorpe has been elected as the Leader of the Liberal Party and is the youngest man to lead the party in a century. He marries naive young Caroline Allpass and they have a baby boy. Norman has become more unstable; going by the name Norman Scott, although he gets on well with horses and dogs, he fails to keep a job or relationship, drinks too much and uses drugs. He calls Caroline and tells her about his past romance with her husband. She is stunned by this revelation.


title: A Very English Scandal (TV series)

text: Caroline dies in 1970, after swerving into on-coming traffic; Thorpe mourns her death. Bessell moves to the United States to escape his financial troubles. Norman continues trying to get a new National Insurance card and have his story be heard but with no success. Thorpe considers having him killed but the plans are repeatedly postponed.


title: A Very English Scandal (TV series)

text: In 1973, Thorpe marries Marion Stein, Countess of Harewood and continues to climb the political ladder. Unfortunately, Thorpe encounters Norman by chance, panics and tells David Holmes (an old friend from Oxford) to arrange for Norman's murder. Andrew Newton is hired for £10,000. He tries and fails spectacularly, only killing Norman's dog. Norman immediately reports the crime to the police and is convinced it was ordered by Thorpe.


title: A Very English Scandal (TV series)

text: This results in the 1976–1979 Thorpe affair. Newton is put on trial and convicted of attempting to do harm to Norman. Soon afterwards, Norman requests from the police two letters from Thorpe he had given them in the 1960s. Thorpe decides to forestall Norman by publishing the letters himself with his own version of events and resigns as Leader of the Liberal Party in May 1976. He runs for re-election to Parliament but loses his North Devon seat to Tony Speller of the Conservatives.


title: A Very English Scandal (TV series)

text: Thorpe, Holmes and two other accused co-conspirators are put on trial for conspiring to murder Norman. Thorpe hires George Carman, a combative lawyer, to defend him. In May 1979, the trial begins and the media reports its every detail. Norman testifies, explaining that what he mainly wants is his National Insurance card and to have his story acknowledged. Chief Justice Cantley is flagrantly biased and sides with Thorpe in his instructions to the jury, which finds Thorpe and his co-conspirators not guilty.


title: A Very English Scandal (TV series)

text: The end credits note that Thorpe never held another public office. He and Marion remained married until her death in March 2014 and Thorpe died nine months later. Bessell remained in the United States until his death in 1985. Norman is still alive, owns 11 dogs and still does not have a National Insurance card.


title: A Very English Scandal (TV series)

text: The first series was written by Russell T Davies and directed by Stephen Frears, with Hugh Grant starring as Thorpe and Ben Whishaw as Scott. The BBC television drama was first announced on 4 May 2017, with Grant already cast as Thorpe. Ben Whishaw was announced to join the cast in August, and the rest of the cast was announced in October. Along with the further casting announcement, Amazon took the US rights for the show.


title: A Very English Scandal (TV series)

text: Filming took place in London, Manchester, Buckinghamshire, Devon, Hertfordshire and South Wales. Although scenes were filmed outside the Houses of Parliament, the inner courts, interior hallways and staircase were represented by Manchester Town Hall, which is built in the same Gothic Revival style as the Palace of Westminster. The offices of Thorpe and other MPs were created at Bulstrode Park, a vacant country house in Buckinghamshire. The grounds of Bulstrode were also used for the night time assassination attempt scene set on Exmoor.


title: A Very English Scandal (TV series)

text: The town of Hertford was used as a stand-in for 1970s Barnstaple, while Saunton Sands in North Devon stood in for the California beach where Peter Bessell (Alex Jennings) lives in a seaside shack. Bridgend in South Wales stood in for Dublin, while Norman's period living in Wales was filmed in and around Monknash. The show was able to film in the lobby and exterior of the Old Bailey in London, where the show's climactic scenes take place. "A Very English Scandal" was the first production ever to be granted permission to film in Court One of the Old Bailey but they had to decline because of tight time restrictions and filmed the court scenes at a courthouse in Kingston upon Thames.


title: A Very English Scandal (TV series)

text: The series premiered on BBC One on 20 May 2018 and on Amazon Prime on 29 June 2018. The DVD was released on 2 July 2018.


title: A Very English Scandal (TV series)

text: "A Very English Scandal" received very positive reviews. On Rotten Tomatoes, it holds an approval rating of 97% based on 68 reviews, with an average rating of 8.80/10. Rotten Tomatoes's critical consensus reads, "Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw impress in "A Very English Scandal", an equally absorbing and appalling look at British politics and society". Metacritic gives the miniseries a weighted average rating of 84 out of 100, based on 17 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". In 2019, the series was ranked 76th on "The Guardian"'s list of the 100 best TV shows of the 21st century.


title: A Very English Scandal (TV series)

text: The real Norman Scott spoke out about the show's characterisation of him and its portrayal of his life. He told the "Irish News" that "Artistic license is fine but this isn't my story. And there's nothing funny about someone trying to kill you...I'm portrayed as this poor, mincing, little gay person ... I also come across as a weakling and I've never been a weakling".


title: Peyton List (actress, born 1986)

text: Peyton List (born August 8, 1986) is an American actress and professional model, known for roles on "Mad Men", "FlashForward", "The Tomorrow People" and "Frequency". She began her career on daytime television, playing Lucy Montgomery on the CBS soap opera "As the World Turns" from 2001 to 2005, before she went to primetime with regular roles on the short-lived dramas "Windfall" (2006) and "Big Shots" (2007).


title: Peyton List (actress, born 1986)

text: From 2008 to 2013, List had a recurring role as Jane Siegel in the AMC period drama "Mad Men". In film, she has appeared in "The Greatest Game Ever Played" (2005), "Shuttle" (2009) and "Meeting Evil" (2012). List also starred in the short-lived science fiction dramas "FlashForward" (ABC, 2009–2010), and "The Tomorrow People" (The CW, 2013–2014). During the 2016–17 television season, she starred as the lead character in The CW drama series "Frequency". In 2018, she had a recurring role in season 3 of the science fiction series "Colony". She also starred on a recurring basis as Poison Ivy in the Fox crime drama series "Gotham" (2018–2019), and voiced the character in the 2019 animated film "".


title: Peyton List (actress, born 1986)

text: List was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Douglas List and Sherri Anderson, but grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, with her sister Brittany List. She began her education at Cedarcroft pre-school and Calvert School, and then went to the Roland Park Country School in Baltimore. She studied ballet at the School of American Ballet in New York City.


title: Peyton List (actress, born 1986)

text: At the age of nine, she began a career as a model. Her first significant commercial appearance was as one of the "daughters next door" (together with her sister) in "Washington Square".


title: Peyton List (actress, born 1986)

text: List had a minor role in the HBO television series "Sex and the City" in 2000. The following year, she played a small part in an episode of "", and started a three-year run as Lucy Montgomery on the CBS soap opera "As the World Turns". She left the soap opera in 2005 and later appeared as Lucy Lane in an episode of "Smallville", and reprised her role on the final season in 2010. In the same year, she guest-starred on "Without a Trace", "", "", and "One Tree Hill".


title: Peyton List (actress, born 1986)

text: In 2006, List was a series regular on the NBC drama "Windfall", as Tally Reida. The series was canceled after one season, and List had a recurring role on the short-lived ABC drama "Day Break". During the 2007 pilot season, List was cast in another ABC series, "Big Shots", in which she played the role of Cameron Collinsworth, daughter of Dylan McDermott's character. The series also was canceled after one season. List also guest-starred on several television shows, including "Moonlight", "Ghost Whisperer", "", "Monk", "Hawaii Five-0", and "House of Lies". From 2008 to 2013, List appeared in a recurring role on the AMC series "Mad Men", playing Don Draper's fill-in secretary who later became Roger Sterling's second wife. From 2009 to 2010, List starred on another ABC series "FlashForward", as Nicole Kirby. In film, she appeared in "The Greatest Game Ever Played" (2005), "Shuttle" (2008), and "Meeting Evil" (2011).


title: Peyton List (actress, born 1986)

text: In 2013, List was cast in the female lead role of Cara Coburn on The CW series "The Tomorrow People". The series was cancelled after a single season. The following year, she had recurring roles in the CW series "The Flash" and in ABC's short-lived prime time soap opera "Blood & Oil". In 2016, she was cast as lead character in the CW science fiction police drama "Frequency".


title: Peyton List (actress, born 1986)

text: In October 2017, she was cast as Ivy Pepper, also known as Poison Ivy, in the Fox drama series "Gotham", taking over the role from previous portrayers Maggie Geha and Clare Foley.


title: Peyton List (actress, born 1986)

text: List shares the exact same name as a fellow actress, Peyton List (born 1998). The younger List was interviewed by "Access Hollywood", saying she uses Peyton R. List to avoid confusion. Union SAG-AFTRA's policy avoids actors with the same name; this instance went unnoticed. They appeared in the same scene—when the older List starred on "As the World Turns" as Lucy Montgomery. Years later, the younger List cited confusion when they stayed at the same hotel—they received daily call sheets and voicemails for each other. "IndieWire" noted the confusion appeared on the website Wikipedia, where both actresses's articles started out with exactly the same introduction text of: "Peyton List is an American actress and model." Both actresses provided voice performances for (2019).


title: North India

text: North India is a loosely defined region consisting of the northern part of India. The dominant geographical features of North India are the Indo-Gangetic Plain and the Himalayas, which demarcate the region from the Tibetan Plateau and Central Asia.


title: North India

text: The term North India has varying definitions. The Ministry of Home Affairs in its Northern Zonal Council Administrative division included the states of Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab and Rajasthan and Union Territories of Chandigarh, Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. The Ministry of Culture in its "North Culture Zone" includes the state of Uttarakhand but excludes Delhi whereas the Geological Survey of India includes Uttar Pradesh and Delhi but excludes Rajasthan and Chandigarh. Other states sometimes included are Bihar, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal.


title: North India

text: North India has been the historical centre of the Mughal Empire, the Delhi Sultanate and the British Indian Empire. It has a diverse culture, and includes the Hindu pilgrimage centres of Char Dham, Haridwar, Varanasi, Ayodhya, Mathura, Allahabad, Vaishno Devi and Pushkar, the Buddhist pilgrimage centres of Sarnath and Kushinagar, the Sikh Golden Temple as well as world heritage sites such as the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve, Khajuraho temples, Hill Forts of Rajasthan, Jantar Mantar (Jaipur), Qutb Minar, Red Fort, Agra Fort, Fatehpur Sikri and the Taj Mahal. North India's culture, Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, developed as a result of interaction between these Hindu and Muslim religious traditions. North India has the third-largest gross domestic product than any other region in India.


title: North India

text: The languages that are official in one or more of the states and union territories located in North India are Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Dogri, and English.


title: North India

text: The Northern Zonal Council is one of the advisory councils, created in 1956 by the States Reorganisation Act to foster interstate co-operation under the Ministry of Home Affairs, which included the states of Chandigarh, Delhi, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, Punjab and Rajasthan.


title: North India

text: The Ministry of Culture established the "North Culture Zone" in Patiala, Punjab on 23 March 1985. It differs from the North Zonal Council in its inclusion of Uttarakhand and the omission of Delhi.


title: North India

text: In contrast, the Geological Survey of India (part of the Ministry of Mines) included Uttar Pradesh and Delhi in its "Northern Region", but excluded Rajasthan and Chandigarh, with a regional headquarters in Lucknow.


title: North India

text: The Hindu newspaper puts Bihar, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh related articles on its "North" pages. Articles in the Indian press have included the states of Bihar, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, and West Bengal in North India as well.


title: North India

text: The Tropic of Cancer, which divides the temperate zone from the tropical zone in the Northern Hemisphere, runs through India, and could theoretically be regarded as a geographical dividing line in the country. Indian states that are entirely above the Tropic of Cancer are Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and most of North East Indian states. However that definition would also include major parts of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand and West Bengal and minor regions of Chhattisgarh and Gujarat.


title: North India

text: In Mumbai, the term "North Indian" is sometimes used to describe migrants from eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, often using the term "bhaiya" (which literally means 'elder brother') along with it in a derogatory sense, however these very people are not considered North Indian by the inhabitants of Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Haryana and Rajasthan. In Punjab, they are often referred to as "Purabias", meaning Easterners. The Government of Bihar official site places the state in the eastern part of India. Within Uttar Pradesh itself, "the cultural divide between the east and the west is considerable, with the "purabiyas" (easterners) often being clubbed with Biharis in the perception of the westerners."


title: North India

text: One demarcation between northern and southern nations has been the Vindhya mountain range. In centuries past this sometimes formed a border during periods of imperial expansion, such as the one ruled by the Gupta emperor Samudragupta. The Vindhyas also find mention in the narrative of Rishi Agastya as a dividing feature between North and South India. The Manusmṛti also describes the southern limit of Aryavarta (i.e. the abode of the Aryans) as being defined by the Vindhya range.


title: North India

text: Several sources consider sizeable Muslim populations and deep-seated Islamic, Central Asian and Afghan influences to be defining characteristics of North Indian culture, both linguistically and culturally. Some of these influences are pre-Islamic, such as the Bactrian-originated Kushan Empire (modern day Afghanistan) that maintained twin capitals in Mathura (now in Uttar Pradesh) and Peshawar (in the present-day Pakistani Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province), as well as the Hun confederacies that periodically asserted their rule over large parts of North India.


title: North India

text: North India lies mainly on continental India, north of peninsular India. Towards its north are the Himalayas which define the boundary between the Indian subcontinent and the Tibetan plateau. To its west is the Thar desert, shared between North India and Pakistan and the Aravalli Range, beyond which lies the state of Gujarat. The Vindhya mountains are, in some interpretations, taken to be the southern boundary of North India.


title: North India

text: The states of Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Jammu and Kashmir also have a large forest coverage.


title: North India

text: North India lies mainly in the north temperate zone of the Earth. Though cool or cold winters, hot summers and moderate monsoons are the general pattern. North India is one of the most climatically diverse regions on Earth. During summer, the temperature often rises above 35 °C across much of the Indo-Gangetic plain, reaching as high as 50 °C in the Thar desert, Rajasthan and up to 49 in Delhi. During winter, the lowest temperature on the plains dips to below 5 °C, and below the freezing point in some states. Heavy to moderate snowfall occurs in Himachal Pradesh, Ladakh, J&K and Uttarakhand. Much of North India is notorious for heavy fog during winters.


title: North India

text: Extreme temperatures among inhabited regions have ranged from in Dras, Ladakh to 50.6 °C (123 °F) in Alwar, Rajasthan. Dras is claimed to be the second-coldest inhabited place on the planet (after Siberia), with a recorded low of -60 °C.


title: North India

text: The region receives heavy rain in plains and light snow on Himalayas precipitation through two primary weather patterns: the Indian Monsoon and the Western Disturbances. The Monsoon carries moisture northwards from the Indian Ocean, occurs in late summer and is important to the Kharif or autumn harvest. Western Disturbances, on the other hand, are an extratropical weather phenomenon that carry moisture eastwards from the Mediterranean Sea, the Caspian Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. They primarily occur during the winter season and are critically important for the Rabi or spring harvest, which includes the main staple over much of North India, wheat. The states of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand receive some snowfall in winter months.


title: North India

text: Northern Indian tradition recognises six distinct seasons in the region: summer ("grishma" or "garmi", May–June), rainy ("varsha", July–August), cool ("sharad", September–October, sometimes thought of as 'early autumn'), autumn ("hemant", November–December, also called "patjhar", lit. "leaf-fall"), winter ("shishir" or "sardi", January–February) and spring ("vasant", March–April). The literature, poetry and folklore of the region uses references to these six seasons quite extensively and has done so since ancient times when Sanskrit was prevalent. In the mountainous areas, sometimes the winter is further divided into "big winter" (e.g. Kashmiri "chillai kalaan") and "little winter" ("chillai khurd").


title: North India

text: The people of North India mostly belong to the Indo-Aryan ethno linguistic branch, and include various social groups such as Brahmins, Rajputs, Banias, Jats, Rors, Gurjars, Kolis, Yadavs, Khatris, Kambojs and Dalits. Other minority ethno-linguistic communities such as Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman and Austroasiatic exist throughout the region.


title: North India

text: Hinduism is the dominant religion in North India. Other religions practiced by various ethnic communities include Islam, Sikhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Baháʼí, Christianity, and Buddhism. The states of Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Haryana, and Himachal Pradesh are overwhelmingly Hindu. Uttar Pradesh is also majority Hindu, but it boasts a large Muslim minority as well. The union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh have a slight Muslim plurality, Jammu and Kashmir is 35% Hindu with Ladakh having a significant Buddhist minority of around 40%. The state of Punjab has a Sikh plurality 55% and is considered to be the homeland of Sikhism.


title: North India

text: Linguistically, North India is dominated by Indo-Aryan languages. It is in this region, or its proximity, that Sanskrit and the various Prakrits are thought to have evolved. The most widely spoken language in this region is Hindi. It has official status in the states of Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh as well as in the union territory of Delhi. Punjabi has predominance in the state of Punjab where it is the official language. It also has significant presence in the nearby regions. Urdu enjoys official status in Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir and Uttar Pradesh. Further north in Jammu and Kashmir, major languages are Dogri and Kashmiri. Languages like Bengali, Bhili and Nepali are also spoken in notable numbers throughout the region. A large part of North India is taken up by the so-called Hindi Belt, which here subsumes most of the Rajasthani languages, dialects of Western Hindi, Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Garhwali and Kumaoni.


title: North India

text: Several Sino-Tibetan languages are spoken in the Himalayan region like Kinnauri, Ladakhi, Balti, and Lahuli–Spiti languages. Austro-Asiatic languages like Korwa/Kodaku is also spoken in some parts of this region.


title: North India

text: The composite culture of North India is known as Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, a result of the amicable interaction of Hindus and Muslims there.


title: North India

text: Dance of North India too has diverse "folk" and "classical" forms. Among the well-known folk dances are the "bhangra" of the Punjab, Ghoomar of Rajasthan, Nati of Himachal Pradesh and "rouf" and "bhand pather" of Kashmir. Main dance forms, many with narrative forms and mythological elements, have been accorded classical dance status by India's "National Academy of Music, Dance, and Drama" such as Kathak".


title: North India

text: North Indian vegetation is predominantly Tropical evergreen and Montane . Of the evergreen trees Hollong Gurjan, sal, teak, Mahogany, sheesham (Indian rosewood) and poplar are some which are important commercially. The Western Himalayan region abounds in chir, pine, deodar (Himalayan cedar), blue pine, spruce, various firs, birch and junipers. The birch, especially, has historical significance in Indian culture due to the extensive use of birch paper () as parchment for many ancient Indian texts. The Eastern Himalayan region consists of oaks, laurels, maples, rhododendrons, alder, birch and dwarf willows. Reflecting the diverse climatic zones and terrain contained in the region, the floral variety is extensive and ranges from Alpine to Cloud forests, coniferous to evergreen, and thick tropical rainforests to cool temperate woods.


title: North India

text: There are around 500 varieties of mammals, 2000 species of birds, 30,000 types of insects and a wide variety of fish, amphibians and reptiles in the region. Animal species in North India include elephant, bengal tiger, indian leopard, snow leopard, sambar (Asiatic stag), chital (spotted deer), hangul (red deer), hog deer, chinkara (Indian gazelle), blackbuck, nilgai (blue bull antelope), porcupine, wild boar, Indian fox, Tibetan sand fox, rhesus monkey, langur, jungle cat, striped hyena, golden jackal, black bear, Himalayan brown bear, sloth bear, and the endangered caracal.


title: North India

text: Reptiles are represented by a large number of snake and lizard species, as well as the ghariyal and crocodiles. Venomous snakes found in the region include king cobra and krait. Various scorpion, spider and insect species include the commercially useful honeybees, silkworms and lac insects. The strikingly coloured bir bahuti is also found in this region.


title: North India

text: The region has a wide variety of birds, including peafowl, parrots, and thousands of immigrant birds, such as the Siberian crane. Other birds include pheasants, geese, ducks, mynahs, parakeets, pigeons, cranes (including the celebrated sarus crane), and hornbills. great pied hornbill, Pallas's fishing eagle, grey-headed fishing eagle, red-thighed falconet are found in the Himalayan areas. Other birds found here are tawny fish owl, scale-bellied woodpecker, red-breasted parakeet, Himalayan swiftlet, stork-billed kingfisher and Himalayan or white-tailed rubythroat.


title: North India

text: along the banks of the Ramganga River. It is India's first National Park, and was designated a Project Tiger Reserve in 1973. Situated in Nainital district of Uttarakhand, the park acts as a protected area for the critically endangered Bengal tiger of India. Cradled in the foothills of the Himalayas, it comprises a total area of 500 km out of which 350 km is core reserve. This park is known not only for its rich and varied wildlife but also for its scenic beauty.