Writer-journalist Johann Hari brings himself into the Ozempic conversation, taking readers through the risks of obesity, its causes and eects, and what the drug does
Decades ago, at the Centre for West Asian Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University, it was a well-established practice to invite serving and retired diplomats to speak to students and researchers. The writer rst met the diplomats he writes about in his new book, Nehru’s First
Recruits, at the JNU seminars. One of the “rst recruits” was Mirza Rashid Ali Baig who had to plan New Delhi’s welcome to visiting Soviet dignitaries Premier Bulganin and General Secretary Khrushchev in 1955. An edited excerpt:
1955 was the year of Indian diplomacy; it’s when New Delhi emerged as one of the most-visited capitals of the postcolonial world.
This was also the year of a turnaround in India-Soviet relations. In June that year, Prime Minister Nehru had visited the Soviet Union for the rst time. He had allowed the Soviet Union to open a diplomatic mission in Delhi years ago, but bilateral relations between the two were far from what it could have been because of Joseph Stalin’s sceptical attitude towards India. That year, General Secretary Khrushchev, successor to Stalin, was to visit India along with Premier Bulganin. The Soviets had given a grand welcome to Nehru, and the understanding was that the Indian welcome would have to match that of Moscow.
Dicult task
This was a dicult task. India had been hosting big foreign visitors since at least the Asian Relations
Conference of 1947, but the visit by Soviet leadership was another matter. Nehru was the rst major non-communist leader to visit
Moscow and his successful tour proved that Winston Churchill was wrong in saying that the Soviet Union was behind an ‘iron curtain’. The visit of the Soviet leadership to India was therefore going to be a momentous occasion.
The protocol division of the Ministry of External Aairs drew up plans for welcoming ocial guests. But the division needed to be revitalised to welcome leaders from a superpower. The task of drawing up the hosting plans thus fell on the second head of the protocol division — Mirza Rashid Ali Baig. The challenge before Baig was of a dierent order. The scale of the welcome often indicated the importance of the visit, and the leader of the Soviet bloc could not just be welcomed through ocial ceremonies — that would be insucient. The entire capital of India had to be worked up to a festive spirit to make the eort worthwhile. M.R.A. Baig began planning the visit that would begin a festival.
Tribal and classical show
A major challenge before the Indian hosts was the fact that Indians did not have a unitary culture to showcase. Soviets paid a great deal of emphasis on cultural shows for foreign delegates, and the Indians felt it was necessary to showcase something spectacular to impress the Soviet guests. The problem was, however, that India did not have one form of art, as every part of the country had something unique to oer. The responsibility of planning for the cultural show thus fell on Baig’s wife, Tara.
She chose a spacious part of the Rashtrapati Bhavan, which was not hitherto used, and a large stage was erected for the performance. Earthen lamps were lit, and two performances depicted the dance forms of tribal India and classical Indian dance forms. The performance took place in the backdrop of thousands of diyas, and the atmosphere turned ecstatic as Mrinalini Sarabhai took the stage.
India was a newly independent country, and public enthusiasm was high because of the popularity of the Soviet Union; hundreds of thousands of people lined the roads across the city — from the airport in Palam to the central part of the city in Connaught Circus. People sat on the roads as they waited for the Soviet leaders and threw owers on the way. This was the rst visit to a non-Soviet Asian country by the Soviet leaders, and it was spectacular.
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Support on Kashmir
It was during this time that the Protocol Division and the PWD came up with the idea of oral designs to welcome the guests. Among the many ideas was one to create the
ags of the guest country with owers. Gigantic oral ags of India and the USSR were placed on prime roundabouts in the Lutyen’s zone of New Delhi so that the motorcade carrying Khrushchev and Bulganin could see them. The high point of the visit was the public welcome, which was led by PM Nehru at the Ramlila Maidan, the meeting point of Old and New Delhi.
Most importantly, during his stay in India, Khrushchev spent two days in Kashmir, where he declared that Jammu and Kashmir belonged to India. The Kashmir dispute had caused a great deal of embarrassment for India since the beginning, and the support from Khrushchev came at a crucial moment for the Nehru government. If the purpose behind the spectacular hospitality was to impress the Soviet guests and get them to sway to the Indian tune, then Baig had succeeded in achieving his goal.
Excerpted with permission from HarperCollins.
Did you take Ozempic?” entertainer Barbra Streisand asked actor Melissa McCarthy, on an Instagram post, now deleted, revealing two things about the world we live in (besides her boomer self still guring out the tiresome everyone-sees-everything nature of social media). Her comment, in late April, revealed that a) irrespective of body-positive movements “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” as model Kate Moss said once, and that b) Ozempic, a drug used to treat diabetes for 18 years, is now being prescribed for weight loss. Several celebrities, including Oprah Winfrey and Elon Musk, have spoken about taking meds to lose weight (not just Ozempic).
It is in this context, and in a world that’s getting fatter — 1 billion people lived with obesity in 2022 as per a Lancet study — that Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benets and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs, has been researched and written. Writer-journalist Johann Hari has this way of bringing out a book on an idea whose time has arrived. But it’s not just his timing that’s right — share prices of companies developing drugs to curb obesity are rising — it’s also his style of looking at both the big and the little picture. “This is a mass experiment, carried out on millions of people, and I am one of the guinea pigs,” he says on page 20.
Balanced formula
It is hard for a writer to put themselves into the story and not succumb to preening as the lead character. It is harder to bring in family and friends without over-emotionality, but Hari does all of this without boring the reader. Perhaps the balance comes from his journalistic training. “I’m not an expert,” he says a few times, while talking about the book to The Hindu. “I’m a journalist who goes on a journey to speak to the experts, to speak to all kinds of dierent people, to try to get to the bottom of what’s going on and with these drugs.”
There is a formula to his books, of course. He brings himself into the narrative (he is on Ozempic here), along with people he is close to, visits experts (he’s travelled the world doing that) and takes readers through the science, simple enough for someone with a class 10 understanding of it. “The drug seemed to change more than the patients’ bodies. It seemed to change their minds,” he says at the beginning of the book, not weighing people down with complex knowledge on the brain-gut axis immediately, but introducing it later.
There’s a similar style with Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression — and the Unexpected Solutions and Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention.
In the 323-page Magic Pill,
Hari remains endearingly vulnerable through his admissions and conversations with friends: “I had dinner with a friend one night, and as
he shovelled
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some breaded chicken schnitzel into his mouth, he said to me: ‘I don’t get it. Why don’t you lose weight the normal way? Why don’t you go on a diet and exercise instead?’ He was only asking what I had been thinking at the back of my own mind.” This openness makes the drug companies’ responses sound all the more stilted, like they’d been put through several hawk-eyed lawyers.
Going beyond science
Through the 12 chapters, an introduction and conclusion, Hari uses the bio-psycho-social transdisciplinary model of interconnectedness to look at various aspects of the drug, including what it could do to those with eating disorders. He takes the reader through the physical risks of obesity and what the drugs do: positively, “cause the people who use them to lose between 5 and 24 per cent of their body weight”; neutrally, that the eects “were coming from manipulating a tiny hormone named GLP-1 that exists in my gut and brain”; negatively, “scientists disagree on even basic aspects of it.”
He also goes beyond science, to why we’re becoming fatter in the rst place, why we aren’t able to take the weight o (and it’s not about greed or the lack of willpower), and why we may need obesity drugs after all. He talks about an experiment done by a scientist, involving rats. The rats were rst fed regular, healthy food, and then introduced to an American diet of very-sweet-very-salty “manufactured food”. Their “natural nutritional wisdom” crashed, he says, over a call from London: “They no longer knew when to stop. They just compulsively overate and quite rapidly became obese.” Then the professor withdrew what we call ‘junk food’. “He thought, well, they’ll eat more of the healthy food than they used to, and that’ll prove that it expands your appetite. That’s not what happened. What happened was much weirder. Once they’ve had the American food and it was taken away, they refused to eat the healthy food at all. It was like they no longer recognised it as food. They preferred to starve. It was only when they were literally starving that they went back to eating it.”
Everyone should read Hari’s book, especially those who determine whether a cart selling fruit be ‘allowed’ at the street corner or a supermarket selling ultra-processed packaged foods.
Magic Pill is an honest look at a complex situation, where changing food systems meet burgeoning medical companies, and people are crushed in between.
I lost a stone and a half
[on Ozempic] .... My body fat percentage fell from 32% to 22%. It was the fastest and most dramatic weight loss of my life .... I felt lighter and quicker on my feet, and that boosted my con dence enough that I started to strut a little .... But I was surprised to notice that, at the same time, I also felt disconcerted and out of sorts