IHT Rendezvous: Sharper Tongues in China's Year of the Snake?

BEIJING — The Snake is determined and smart, according to traditional Chinese beliefs. Today is New Year’s Day in China, the first day in the Year of the Snake, and a good day to ask: Will Xi Jinping, a “snake” set to become president in March (Mr. Xi was born in a Year of the Snake, in 1953) bring change to China?

Whether or not one believes in feng shui – the thought system based on geomancy, astronomy and folk wisdom of which the 12-yearly animal cycle is part – many here swear by it, and that makes the confluence of the man and the year important.

As the rational economist He Fan said last year, at the beginning of the Year of the Dragon: Feng shui may not be rational, but it is “symbolic,” “and that’s important, because that’s how China’s political culture works.”

So as ordinary people across the nation settle into their hard-earned, weeklong holiday amid the thunder of festival firecrackers, some are wondering whether recent calls by Mr. Xi to attack corruption and “criticize sharply” the ruling Communist Party will bring unwelcome shocks to members of the privileged classes in China, including the party, the government and state-run companies, widely seen as too powerful and too corrupt.

Skepticism about real change is rife, for sure, but signs say maybe, at least to some degree. And if that sounds woolly, it is because making predictions in China is notoriously difficult. Yet it is also important as the nation grows in international stature: As Bloomberg News notes, 2012 may have marked the year when China became the world’s largest trading nation. China was last the world’s biggest economy during the Qing dynasty, Bloomberg noted (though back then it didn’t focus on trade, Bloomberg wrote).

Some say the change has already begun, amid a deepening campaign against corruption announced by Mr. Xi after he was appointed general secretary of the party in November. The state’s anti-corruption warnings are being taken more seriously now than at any time in the past decade because they come from Mr. Xi, who is regarded as potentially a strong leader fast establishing his dominance, already the most eminent member of the seven-man Standing Committee of the Politburo, China’s inner circle of power.

One sign: Traditionally lavish end-of-the-year parties thrown by powerful state-owned companies, and thus paid for from the public purse, have been canceled in large numbers, causing great satisfaction among ordinary people as high-end restaurants in Beijing are suddenly available for traditional New Year family dinners. In previous years, getting a booking was impossible. This year, it’s not.

Another sign: a recent call by Mr. Xi for “sharp criticism” of the Communist Party.

“Chinese leader Xi Jinping has urged the Communist Party of China (CPC) to be more tolerant of criticism and receptive to the views of non-communists,” Xinhua, the state-run news agency, reported last week.

“The CPC should be able to put up with sharp criticism, correct mistakes if it has committed them and avoid them if it has not,” Xinhua quoted Mr. Xi as saying, adding that nonparty members should “have the courage to tell the truth, speak words jarring on the ear, and truthfully reflect public aspirations.”

The call has been – what else? – sharply criticized, in fast and furious microblog postings showing just how deep is the well of resentment against the state’s heavy hand in some quarters.

Shortly after 9 a.m. on New Year’s Day, Ai Weiwei, the artist, snapped on his Twitter account: “First sentence of the New Year, release all political prisoners.”

The South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper, gathered more acerbic responses:

The venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee: “Will you stop silencing and shutting down microblog accounts?”

Xu Xiaonian, an economics professor: “Will you stop censoring books and media reports?”

Chen Tongkui, an academic: “Will you stop press censorship?”

Wang Xiaoyu, another academic: “Can you not delete the comments on this microblog post?”

The real estate magnante Ren Zhiqiang: “Will you stop criminalizing people’s speech and sentencing them to re-education through labor?”

Cui Weiping, an academic: “Will you put an end to police harassment” of activists and netizens?

And yet, for many ordinary Chinese, there is hope. Incomes are rising, and there is a whiff of, yes, change in the air. In a recent, colorfully presented survey by TNS, part of Kantar, an information and consulting group, 88 percent of people surveyed in China were positive about the Year of the Snake, the company said.

As Mr. He said of last year, which saw the dramatic downfall of the political scion Bo Xilai, seen by some as a contender for Mr. Xi’s position, amid a murder and corruption scandal: “Something happens in every Dragon Year, even if it’s just a turning point.” Often, the real action begins a year or two later.

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Michigan, Kansas go down as run continues

There goes another one, and another one.

No. 3 Michigan, fifth-ranked Kansas and No. 11 Louisville all lost on Saturday, continuing a perilous stretch for the Top 25.

The Wolverines became the third top-three team to fall this week when Ben Brust hit a tiebreaking 3-pointer with less than 40 seconds left in overtime, leading Wisconsin to a 65-62 victory. Brust also tied the game at the end of regulation with a heave from just inside halfcourt.

That's just the way it has gone lately for the top of the poll.

No. 2 Florida lost at Arkansas on Tuesday night, and No. 1 Indiana dropped a 74-72 decision at Illinois on Thursday. This should be the sixth straight week with a different No. 1 in The Associated Press' Top 25, which would be the second-longest streak since the first AP poll in 1949.

The Jayhawks have dropped three straight games for the first time in eight years after they lost 72-66 at Oklahoma.

"It hasn't been a good week for us by any stretch, but let's be real," Kansas coach Bill Self said. "We were ranked No. 2 in the country seven days ago, and you don't go from being a good team to a bad team overnight.

"We've had a couple of bad outings, but we're still a good team."

The current string of No. 1 swapping is the longest since 1994, when Arkansas, North Carolina, Kansas, UCLA and Duke alternated at the top seven straight weeks — the longest streak since Saint Louis debuted as No. 1 in the initial AP poll.

But it isn't just the teams at the top that are having trouble. Top 25 teams all over the country are getting knocked off by unranked opponents.

According to STATS LLC, Top 25 teams lost to unranked teams 36 times from Jan. 17 to Feb. 6 this season, most in at least 17 years.

Louisville lost 104-101 in five overtimes at No. 25 Notre Dame on Saturday night. It was the longest regular-season game in Big East history.

The Irish trailed by eight with 46 seconds left in regulation.

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For Families Struggling with Mental Illness, Carolyn Wolf Is a Guide in the Darkness

When a life starts to unravel, where do you turn for help?

Melissa Klump began to slip in the eighth grade. She couldn’t focus in class, and in a moment of despair she swallowed 60 ibuprofen tablets. She was smart, pretty and ill: depression, attention deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, either bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder.

In her 20s, after a more serious suicide attempt, her parents sent her to a residential psychiatric treatment center, and from there to another. It was the treatment of last resort. When she was discharged from the second center last August after slapping another resident, her mother, Elisa Klump, was beside herself.

“I was banging my head against the wall,” the mother said. “What do I do next?” She frantically called support groups, therapy programs, suicide prevention lines, anybody, running down a list of names in a directory of mental health resources. “Finally,” she said, “somebody told me, ‘The person you need to talk to is Carolyn Wolf.’ ”

That call, she said, changed her life and her daughter’s. “Carolyn has given me hope,” she said. “I didn’t know there were people like her out there.”

Carolyn Reinach Wolf is not a psychiatrist or a mental health professional, but a lawyer who has carved out what she says is a unique niche, working with families like the Klumps.

One in 17 American adults suffers from a severe mental illness, and the systems into which they are plunged — hospitals, insurance companies, courts, social services — can be fragmented and overwhelming for families to manage. The recent shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., have brought attention to the need for intervention to prevent such extreme acts of violence, which are rare. But for the great majority of families watching their loved ones suffer, and often suffering themselves, the struggle can be boundless, with little guidance along the way.

“If you Google ‘mental health lawyer,’ ” said Ms. Wolf, a partner with Abrams & Fensterman, “I’m kinda the only game in town.”

On a recent afternoon, she described in her Midtown office the range of her practice.

“We have been known to pull people out of crack dens,” she said. “I have chased people around hotels all over the city with the N.Y.P.D. and my team to get them to a hospital. I had a case years ago where the person was on his way back from Europe, and the family was very concerned that he was symptomatic. I had security people meet him at J.F.K.”

Many lawyers work with mentally ill people or their families, but Ron Honberg, the national director of policy and legal affairs for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said he did not know of another lawyer who did what Ms. Wolf does: providing families with a team of psychiatrists, social workers, case managers, life coaches, security guards and others, and then coordinating their services. It can be a lifeline — for people who can afford it, Mr. Honberg said. “Otherwise, families have to do this on their own,” he said. “It’s a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week job, and for some families it never ends.”

Many of Ms. Wolf’s clients declined to be interviewed for this article, but the few who spoke offered an unusual window on the arcane twists and turns of the mental health care system, even for families with money. Their stories illustrate how fraught and sometimes blind such a journey can be.

One rainy morning last month, Lance Sheena, 29, sat with his mother in the spacious family room of her Long Island home. Mr. Sheena was puffy-eyed and sporadically inattentive; the previous night, at the group home where he has been living since late last summer, another resident had been screaming incoherently and was taken away by the police. His mother, Susan Sheena, eased delicately into the family story.

“I don’t talk to a lot of people because they don’t get it,” Ms. Sheena said. “They mean well, but they don’t get it unless they’ve been through a similar experience. And anytime something comes up, like the shooting in Newtown, right away it goes to the mentally ill. And you think, maybe we shouldn’t be so public about this, because people are going to be afraid of us and Lance. It’s a big concern.”

Her son cut her off. “Are you comparing me to the guy that shot those people?”

“No, I’m saying that anytime there’s a shooting, like in Aurora, that’s when these things come out in the news.”

“Did you really just compare me to that guy?”

“No, I didn’t compare you.”

“Then what did you say?”

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Boeing 787 Completes Test Flight

A Boeing 787 test plane flew for more than two hours on Saturday to gather information about the problems with the batteries that led to a worldwide grounding of the new jets more than three weeks ago.

The flight was the first since the Federal Aviation Administration gave Boeing permission on Thursday to conduct in-flight tests. Federal investigators and the company are trying to determine what caused one of the new lithium-ion batteries to catch fire and how to fix the problems.

The plane took off from Boeing Field in Seattle heading mostly east and then looped around to the south before flying back past the airport to the west. It covered about 900 miles and landed at 2:51 p.m. Pacific time.

Marc R. Birtel, a Boeing spokesman, said the flight was conducted to monitor the performance of the plane’s batteries. He said the crew, which included 13 pilots and test personnel, said the flight was uneventful.

He said special equipment let the crew check status messages involving the batteries and their chargers, as well as data about battery temperature and voltage.

FlightAware, an aviation data provider, said the jet reached 36,000 feet. Its speed ranged from 435 to 626 miles per hour.

All 50 of the 787s delivered so far were grounded after a battery on one of the jets caught fire at a Boston airport on Jan. 7 and another made an emergency landing in Japan with smoke coming from the battery.

The new 787s are the most technically advanced commercial airplanes, and Boeing has a lot riding on their success. Half of the planes’ structural parts are made of lightweight carbon composites to save fuel.

Boeing also decided to switch from conventional nickel cadmium batteries to the lighter lithium-ion ones. But they are more volatile, and federal investigators said Thursday that Boeing had underestimated the risks.

The F.A.A. has set strict operating conditions on the test flights. The flights are expected to resume early this week, Mr. Birtel said.

Battery experts have said it could take weeks for Boeing to fix the problems.

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India Ink: Newswallah: Bharat Edition

Himachal Pradesh: Heavy snowfall for three straight days in the hill state has shut down several arterial roads in the interior areas on Thursday, affecting vehicular traffic, according to an IANS report on the NDTV Web site. In Shimla, a popular holiday destination, at least 10 people, most of them tourists, were injured while walking on the slippery roads, the report said.

Sikkim: The ecologically rich state, located in the lower ranges of the Himalayas, will host the International Flower Show from Feb. 23 to 27, according to an IANS report cited in the Hindustan Times. The state is home to almost 5,000 varieties of flowers, and Sikkim’s state government is keen to promote floriculture and related activities as an important source of livelihood in the coming years, the report said.

Assam: A review committee decided to sign off on the government’s decision to block 306 Twitter accounts after last year’s ethnic clashes in the Kokrajhar district of Assam, the Press Trust of India reported. The committee observed that the accounts could inflame religious tensions in the country.

Gujarat: On Wednesday, a candidate for a local village election in Gujarat’s Sabarkantha district was arrested, along with his manager, for allegedly forcing 100 people to put their hands in boiling oil to prove their loyalty to him, The Hindu reported. The candidate, Dinesh Parmar, who lost the election, had allegedly told the people that their hands would not be burned if they had indeed voted for him.

Rajasthan: A village council in Rajasthan’s Bikaner district decided to impose a fine on those who consumed alcohol or hunted animals, the Press Trust of India reported. At a meeting of the village council, it was decided that the penalty amount would range between 1,000 rupees and 11,000 rupees (about $19 to $206).

Karnataka: About 26 members of Bangalore-based women’s rights groups were taken into custody Tuesday but were later released, The Hindu said. These activists held demonstrations in front of the Raj Bhavan, or the governor’s mansion, to protest the central government’s new laws to deter violence against women, which the activists said ignored important recommendations by a government-appointed committee.

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Bryant leads Lakers over Bobcats 100-93

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Even though Kobe Bryant and the Lakers were able to escape with a 100-93 win Friday night over the Charlotte Bobcats, the Los Angeles star was left feeling "irritated" after the game.

Irritated at his team's shot selection.

Irritated at his team's selfishness.

And especially irritated that the Lakers needed to overcome a 20-point deficit to beat the NBA's worst team.

"We have to play the right way," Bryant said. "When we have shots available, we take them. If we don't, move the ball on. It can't be about individual touches. It can't be about that."

Still, the Lakers won.

Bryant shrugged off a scoreless first half — he attempted only two shots — to finish with 20 points, eight assists and seven rebounds and the Lakers improved to 4-2 on their road trip heading into Sunday's game in Miami against the Heat.

Bryant didn't come out for warm-ups to start the second half.

But he was there to provide the spark the lackluster Lakers needed in the third quarter. He scored 14 of his points in the final period, including a driving layup with 40 seconds left to push the lead to five and help seal the win.

"In the second half I got in position where I could catch it and turn and shoot it a little bit," Bryant said. "They were reluctant to double team because we started knocking down some shots. I think that makes the game a lot easier."

Steve Nash and Earl Clark each had 17 points and Dwight Howard had 12 points, all in the first half, and 11 rebounds for the Lakers (24-27).

Howard played his second straight game despite nursing an injured right shoulder.

"Continuity," Howard said when asked of the Lakers offensive woes. "We have to do a better job of spreading everything out and moving and getting everybody involved. When we do that, we are pretty good."

Byron Mullens and Gerald Henderson each had 20 points for the Bobcats, who have lost six straight.

Charlotte led 71-51 in the third quarter, but the Lakers stormed back behind a 9-0 run. They cut the lead to one on a driving layup by Bryant with 6:06 left in the game and Antawn Jamison gave the Lakers their first lead with 4:46 remaining on a left-handed finger roll in the lane.

The Lakers took the lead for good at 92-91 when Jodie Meeks made a 3-pointer with 3:02 left in the game.

Lakers coach Mike D'Antoni wasn't pleased with the overall effort, but liked that his team bounced back after a 116-95 loss to the Boston Celtics the night before.

"We just got to be able to put our earplugs in, or mufflers on, or blinders on," D'Antoni said. "It's like the Kentucky Derby with horses, just get those blinders on and just get out there and run.

"We have so much stuff going on out here that every little thing is blown to bits and whether it is right or wrong or blown out of proportion it is. But, it affects us. It is a distraction. It saps energy. We got to be able to just close that out somehow."

The Lakers have been unpredictable this season, particularly on the road where they were 8-17 coming into this game.

Before Friday night's game against Charlotte, D'Antoni was asked if the Bobcats were a dangerous opponent for his team.

"We're playing, aren't we? (Then) there's a danger," D'Antoni said with a laugh. "If they play the national anthem, we're in danger."

He was right.

The Lakers started slow, looking out of sync just as they have for a good portion of the season as pick and rolls turned into turnovers and layups on the other end.

Nash had four early turnovers and Howard threw a pass across court that hit the side of the backboard.

The Lakers turned the ball over five times in the game's first eight minutes and fell behind 20-9.

Bryant missed his only two shots in the first half, his slowest start since March 31, 2012, when he went three quarters without scoring a point before beating the New Orleans Hornets on a game-winning shot.

The game was similar to earlier this season when the Bobcats led by 18 in Los Angeles only to squander the lead.

"We had them down pretty much the whole game," Bobcats guard Kemba Walker said. "You know, they made a really good run. Kobe made a lot of good plays, made the right passes and guys just made shots."

NOTES: Bobcats rookie Michael Kidd-Gilchrist returned to action Friday after missing two games with a concussion. ... At halftime Bryant had five rebounds, two assists and no points. ... The Bobcats had been one of three teams with a .500 or better record all-time against the Lakers, but fell to 8-9 with Friday night's loss.

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In Nigeria, Polio Vaccine Workers Are Killed by Gunmen

At least nine polio immunization workers were shot to death in northern Nigeria on Friday by gunmen who attacked two clinics, officials said.

The killings, with eerie echoes of attacks that killed nine female polio workers in Pakistan in December, represented another serious setback for the global effort to eradicate polio.

Most of the victims were women and were shot in the back of the head, local reports said.

A four-day vaccination drive had just ended in Kano State, where the killings took place, and the vaccinators were in a “mop-up” phase, looking for children who had been missed, said Sarah Crowe, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Children’s Fund, one of the agencies running the eradication campaign.

Dr. Mohammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s minister of state for health, said in a telephone interview that it was not entirely clear whether the gunmen were specifically targeting polio workers or just attacking the health centers where vaccinators happened to be gathering early in the morning. “Health workers are soft targets,” he said.

No one immediately took responsibility, but suspicion fell on Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group that has attacked police stations, government offices and even a religious leader’s convoy.

Polio, which once paralyzed millions of children, is now down to fewer than 1,000 known cases around the world, and is endemic in only three countries: Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Since September — when a new polio operations center was opened in the capital and Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, appointed a special adviser for polio — the country had been improving, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization. There have been no new cases since Dec. 3.

While vaccinators have not previously been killed in the country, there is a long history of Nigerian Muslims shunning the vaccine.

Ten years ago, immunization was suspended for 11 months as local governors waited for local scientists to investigate rumors that it caused AIDS or was a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls. That hiatus let cases spread across Africa. The Nigerian strain of the virus even reached Saudi Arabia when a Nigerian child living in hills outside Mecca was paralyzed.

Heidi Larson, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who tracks vaccine issues, said the newest killings “are kind of mimicking what’s going on in Pakistan, and I feel it’s very much prompted by that.”

In a roundabout way, the C.I.A. has been blamed for the Pakistan killings. In its effort to track Osama bin Laden, the agency paid a Pakistani doctor to seek entry to Bin Laden’s compound on the pretext of vaccinating the children — presumably to get DNA samples as evidence that it was the right family. That enraged some Taliban factions in Pakistan, which outlawed vaccination in their areas and threatened vaccinators.

Nigerian police officials said the first shootings were of eight workers early in the morning at a clinic in the Tarauni neighborhood of Kano, the state capital; two or three died. A survivor said the two gunmen then set fire to a curtain, locked the doors and left.

“We summoned our courage and broke the door because we realized they wanted to burn us alive,” the survivor said from her bed at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital.

About an hour later, six men on three-wheeled motorcycles stormed a clinic in the Haye neighborhood, a few miles away. They killed seven women waiting to collect vaccine.

Ten years ago, Dr. Larson said, she joined a door-to-door vaccination drive in northern Nigeria as a Unicef communications officer, “and even then we were trying to calm rumors that the C.I.A. was involved,” she said. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars had convinced poor Muslims in many countries that Americans hated them, and some believed the American-made vaccine was a plot by Western drug companies and intelligence agencies.

Since the vaccine ruse in Pakistan, she said, “Frankly, now, I can’t go to them and say, ‘The C.I.A. isn’t involved.’ ”

Dr. Pate said the attack would not stop the newly reinvigorated eradication drive, adding, “This isn’t going to deter us from getting everyone vaccinated to save the lives of our children.”

Aminu Abubakar contributed reported from Kano, Nigeria.

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John E. Karlin, 1918-2013: John E. Karlin, Who Led the Way to All-Digit Dialing, Dies at 94

Courtesy of Alcatel-Lucent USA

John E. Karlin, a researcher at Bell Labs, studied ways to make the telephone easier to use.

A generation ago, when the poetry of PEnnsylvania and BUtterfield was about to give way to telephone numbers in unpoetic strings, a critical question arose: Would people be able to remember all seven digits long enough to dial them?

And when, not long afterward, the dial gave way to push buttons, new questions arose: round buttons, or square? How big should they be? Most crucially, how should they be arrayed? In a circle? A rectangle? An arc?

For decades after World War II, these questions were studied by a group of social scientists and engineers in New Jersey led by one man, a Bell Labs industrial psychologist named John E. Karlin.

By all accounts a modest man despite his variegated accomplishments (he had a doctorate in mathematical psychology, was trained in electrical engineering and had been a professional violinist), Mr. Karlin, who died on Jan. 28, at 94, was virtually unknown to the general public.

But his research, along with that of his subordinates, quietly yet emphatically defined the experience of using the telephone in the mid-20th century and afterward, from ushering in all-digit dialing to casting the shape of the keypad on touch-tone phones. And that keypad, in turn, would inform the design of a spate of other everyday objects.

It is not so much that Mr. Karlin trained midcentury Americans how to use the telephone. It is, rather, that by studying the psychological capabilities and limitations of ordinary people, he trained the telephone, then a rapidly proliferating but still fairly novel technology, to assume optimal form for use by midcentury Americans.

“He was the one who introduced the notion that behavioral sciences could answer some questions about telephone design,” Ed Israelski, an engineer who worked under Mr. Karlin at Bell Labs in the 1970s, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

In 2013, the 50th anniversary of the introduction of the touch-tone phone, the answers to those questions remain palpable at the press of a button. The rectangular design of the keypad, the shape of its buttons and the position of the numbers — with “1-2-3” on the top row instead of the bottom, as on a calculator — all sprang from empirical research conducted or overseen by Mr. Karlin.

The legacy of that research now extends far beyond the telephone: the keypad design Mr. Karlin shepherded into being has become the international standard on objects as diverse as A.T.M.’s, gas pumps, door locks, vending machines and medical equipment.

Mr. Karlin, associated from 1945 until his retirement in 1977 with Bell Labs, headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J., was widely considered the father of human-factors engineering in American industry.

A branch of industrial psychology that combines experimentation, engineering and product design, human-factors engineering is concerned with easing the awkward, often ill-considered marriage between man and machine. In seeking to design and improve technology based on what its users are mentally capable of, the discipline is the cognitive counterpart of ergonomics.

“Human-factors studies are different from market research and other kinds of studies in that we observe people’s behavior and record it, systematically and without bias,” Mr. Israelski said. “The hallmark of human-factors studies is they involve the actual observation of people doing things.”

Among the issues Mr. Karlin examined as the head of Bell Labs’ Human Factors Engineering department — the first department of its kind at an American company — were the optimal length for a phone cord (a study that involved gentle, successful sabotage) and the means by which rotary calls could be made efficiently after the numbers were moved from inside the finger holes, where they had nestled companionably for years, to the rim outside the dial.

John Elias Karlin was born in Johannesburg on Feb. 28, 1918, and reared nearby in Germiston, where his parents owned a grocery store and tearoom.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, psychology and music, and a master’s degree in psychology, both from the University of Cape Town. Throughout his studies he was a violinist in the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra and the Cape Town String Quartet.

Moving to the United States, Mr. Karlin earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1942. Afterward, he became a research associate at Harvard; he also studied electrical engineering there and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

At Harvard, Mr. Karlin did research for the United States military on problems in psychoacoustics that were vital to the war effort — studying the ways, for instance, in which a bomber’s engine noise might distract its crew from their duties.

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India Ink: Five Questions for: Author and Filmmaker Laleh Khadivi

Laleh Khadivi is an author and filmmaker who was born in Esfahan, Iran, and grew up in California. Her first novel, “The Age of Orphans,” received the Whiting Award for Fiction, the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers Award and an Emory Fiction Fellowship, and it was translated into eight languages. Her latest novel, “The Walking,” will be published in March. Her debut documentary film, “900 Women,” premiered at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in 2001. India Ink interviewed Ms. Khadivi at the Jaipur Literature Festival.

What are the occupational hazards of being a writer?

Depression? I’m kidding. I think that when you write, and that is the only thing you do and you don’t have another job you end up spending a lot of time alone in worlds of your creation and so that can make living in the world of reality a little bit difficult. I feel like, for myself and a few other writers I know intimately, going between those two worlds is often very difficult. You don’t have the ease with which to converse randomly at a dinner party when you’ve been writing a torture scene all day. You kind of have to step in and out of the things that you know are fiction and the things that you know to be real. Otherwise, writing is a pretty sweet job. You can’t really complain about it, you know.

What is your everyday writing ritual?

When I’m in the middle of writing a book, doing the day-to-day writing of it, I develop a ritual for that book, but it changes for each book. So I ideally would like to write every morning between 7 a.m. and noon if I can get those many hours –though I just had a son so this is not going to ever happen again. And then from noon until 7, do other things. And then I find the night very useful for writing so I write again from dark until when I go to sleep. At the end of the day, I’m a writer, and in the middle, a regular person.

Why should we read your latest book?

My latest book is about the effects of movies on the imagination. It’s about a lot of other things as well — political things and social things — but mostly it’s about a boy’s love of the cinema and what the cinema does to your desires. How if you only know one world – one particular village or one town – and you watch movies that happen halfway across the globe, how you are changed and how you suddenly think to yourself, “Oh wait, the Earth is bigger than what I know. How do I get to this other place?”

India has such a rich history of cinema, and Bollywood is all about spinning imaginary tales. They might not involve other places on the planet, but they involve other classes, other gender dynamics and other fashion.

It’s a book about that distance between where you are and what you see, and where you can be in cinema and how it changes what you want. It takes place partially in the Kurdish region of Iran and partially in Los Angeles.

How do you deal with your critics?

Ha! I’ve been trying to figure that out.

I think ideally the best way to deal with it is to just not read the reviews. Because with my first book I got these reviews, and some of them were great, and some of them were not. I realized that the ones that were great did not make me feel good — I didn’t celebrate it. And a bad review made me feel terrible. So there was nothing to win, nothing to gain from reading the reviews. Granted, your ego is very tempted to go and see what they are saying about your book, but you know if it’s good and where it’s not good and what the weak parts are.

If someone gives it a bad review and doesn’t like it, there is a good chance they just didn’t get it or it’s not their thing. If I was asked to review a book by John Updike, I would say terrible things, but someone else would give him the Pulitzer Prize. It’s a personal preference. Reviews are very bizarre – they are assigned to one reader and that reader might hate the Middle East. I see the intellectual background of where the reviewer is from – if they do not like Faulkner’s writing, chances are they are not going to like mine.

Why does the Jaipur Literature Festival matter to you?

One billion people – not all of them reading, but still a country of a billion people — you just can’t ignore that. There’s a billion universes going on in those people’s lives and communities, and I feel like because there is an English-speaking presence here and my books can be read without translation, I should go and help people get excited about them.

I have been blown away by the attentiveness and the eagerness of the audiences in Jaipur. I also think that beyond just engaging with readers, I think it’s important to engage with writers about writing and have public discourse about the life of the mind. Our world is increasingly not giving writers and thinkers and artists a place to do that, and so Jaipur is like this small little window to have discussions that are not about money, but about art or politics or inspiration. That’s important to me, and I think that’s important to the increasing readership of Indians.

(The interview has been lightly edited and condensed.)

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Illini buzzer-beater upsets No. 1 Hoosiers, 74-72

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (AP) — Tyler Griffey made the easiest and biggest shot of his career.

The senior forward took an inbounds pass and made a wide-open layup with 0.9 seconds to play to give Illinois a 74-72 victory over No. 1 Indiana on Thursday night, the fifth straight week the nation's top-ranked team lost.

Hoosiers coach Tom Crean, whose team has been No. 1 for a total of seven weeks this season, doesn't have a reason for the recent weekly changes on top of the poll.

"I can't answer that. I'm not sure," Crean said. "I just know that these games are 40-minute games. We played at a high level for most of the game."

The Hoosiers were in charge until the final 3 1-2 minutes when the Illini (16-8, 3-7 Big Ten) finally put together a run to take and then retake the lead.

"I know this, when we turn the ball over we're not very good," Crean said. "And the biggest difference tonight was 28 points off turnovers to our 16."

And nothing could have been worse for the Hoosiers (20-3, 8-2) than the way the game ended.

With 0.9 seconds left Griffey left defenders Cody Zeller and Christian Watford behind on an inbounds play from the baseline, took the pass from Brandon Paul and delivered the uncontested buzzer-beater for the Illini.

The shot sent hundreds of students onto the court — holding their collective breath as officials checked the replay to make sure the clock hadn't beaten Griffey — and Paul and fellow guard D.J. Richardson hugged and teared up with relief.

Illinois had lost eight of 11 since starting the season 12-0. The Illini had been ranked as high as No. 10 and were now falling to the bottom of the Big Ten.

Griffey, accustomed to struggling in recent weeks, seemed surprised with the ease he was able to make the game-winner.

"I just made a simple curl cut and left two guys behind me, and Brandon got off a heck of a pass," he said. "Zeller and Watford were both right in front of me and just kind of stayed there."

Crean, whose team just moved into the No. 1 spot after knocking off then-No. 1 Michigan on Saturday, said the play was a lot like the other breakdowns in the Hoosiers' game that let Illinois climb back from a 12-point halftime deficit.

"We didn't communicate," Crean said.

"They're very deserving of the win, they never gave in," he added, but he qualified that with, "We didn't put them away when we had the opportunities."

Indiana's loss drops them into a three-way tie for first in the Big Ten with Michigan and Michigan State. For the Illini, the win means a move out of 10th in the 12-team conference up into a ninth-place tie with Iowa.

More importantly, it's a potential lifeline for an Illini team that still has to face No. 18 Minnesota on the road Sunday and had been watching its season slip away.

"It was good to get back to having that toughness and togetherness and trust that we needed," Illinois coach John Groce said.

Illinois hadn't beaten a No. 1 team since a 2004 win over Wake Forest. But the Illini had won nine of the last 10 against the Hoosiers in Champaign. And this season, whatever else has gone wrong, Illinois has delivered against the big boys. Coming into Thursday night the Illini had already beaten three teams now in the top 15: No. 6 Gonzaga, No. 10 Ohio State and No. 14 Butler.

Richardson had 23 points for Illinois, Paul had 21 and Griffey finished with 14 points and eight rebounds.

Zeller led Indiana with 14 points, while Will Sheehey had 13, Watford 12 and Jordan Hulls 11.

Indiana shot 50 percent from the field (25 of 50), 52.9 percent from 3-point range (9 of 17) and 93 percent from the free throw line (13 of 14). The Hoosiers led by an 8- to 10-point margin for most of the second half.

And when 6-foot-11 Nnanna Egwu fouled out with just under 5 minutes to play, Indiana looked in control. Egwu is the only Illini player with the size to realistically match up with the 7-0 Zeller.

Watford made two free throws after Egwu's fifth foul and, at 69-59, the Illini looked done.

But with the clock under 3 minutes, Richardson went on a run of his own, first burying consecutive 3-pointers and then hitting a midrange jumper on the run to tie the game at 70 with 1:17 to play.

Oladipo's layup put the Hoosiers back on top with 50 seconds left, but Paul answered with two free throws, the first banked in, to tie the score again at 72.

With the clock under 30 seconds, Indiana had the ball for what would have been a last shot but Oladipo fumbled the ball. Richardson picked it up and sprinted down court. Oladipo slapped Richardson's layup out of bounds to set up the final play.

Groce credited Richardson for sparking the comeback.

"I thought he was absolutely terrific on both ends of the floor," Groce said. "He battled, he fought."

Griffey was benched several weeks ago after a blowout loss at Wisconsin. On a team that had lost its shooting touch, the senior forward had grown especially cold. And, though one of Illinois' bigger players at 6-9, he wasn't adding much to the inside presence the Illini desperately needed.

The play that brought him to life Thursday, though, had nothing to do with Illinois' late surge. Griffey hit a 3-pointer less than 4 minutes into the second half. He had missed 20 straight 3-point attempts, dating to the start of the Big Ten season.

"I said to myself, 'Finally,'" said Griffey, who said he has been doing so much extra shooting that he's had to have regular ice treatments on his wrist.

Groce said that, even after he benched Griffey, he never gave up on him.

"I just have told him numerous times here I believe in him," the first-year Illinois coach said. "I do."

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