Alarm Over India’s Dengue Fever Epidemic

Enrico Fabian for The New York Times

A man at the Yamuna River, an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes. Filthy standing water abounds in New Delhi. More Photos »

NEW DELHI — An epidemic of dengue fever in India is fostering a growing sense of alarm even as government officials here have publicly refused to acknowledge the scope of a problem that experts say is threatening hundreds of millions of people, not just in India but around the world.

India has become the focal point for a mosquito-borne plague that is sweeping the globe. Reported in just a handful of countries in the 1950s, dengue (pronounced DEN-gay) is now endemic in half the world’s nations.

“The global dengue problem is far worse than most people know, and it keeps getting worse,” said Dr. Raman Velayudhan, the World Health Organization’s lead dengue coordinator.

The tropical disease, though life-threatening for a tiny fraction of those infected, can be extremely painful. Growing numbers of Western tourists are returning from warm-weather vacations with the disease, which has reached the shores of the United States and Europe. Last month, health officials in Miami announced a case of locally acquired dengue infection.

Here in India’s capital, where areas of standing water contribute to the epidemic’s growth, hospitals are overrun and feverish patients are sharing beds and languishing in hallways. At Kalawati Saran Hospital, a pediatric facility, a large crowd of relatives lay on mats and blankets under the shade of a huge banyan tree outside the hospital entrance recently.

Among them was Neelam, who said her two grandchildren were deathly ill inside. Eight-year-old Sneha got the disease first, followed by Tanya, 7, she said. The girls’ parents treated them at home but then Sneha’s temperature rose to 104 degrees, a rash spread across her legs and shoulders, and her pain grew unbearable.

“Sneha has been given five liters of blood,” said Neelam, who has one name. “It is terrible.”

Officials say that 30,002 people in India had been sickened with dengue fever through October, a 59 percent jump from the 18,860 recorded for all of 2011. But the real number of Indians who get dengue fever annually is in the millions, several experts said.

“I’d conservatively estimate that there are 37 million dengue infections occurring every year in India, and maybe 227,500 hospitalizations,” said Dr. Scott Halstead, a tropical disease expert focused on dengue research.

A senior Indian government health official, who agreed to speak about the matter only on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that official figures represent a mere sliver of dengue’s actual toll. The government only counts cases of dengue that come from public hospitals and that have been confirmed by laboratories, the official said. Such a census, “which was deliberated at the highest levels,” is a small subset that is nonetheless informative and comparable from one year to the next, he said.

“There is no denying that the actual number of cases would be much, much higher,” the official said. “Our interest has not been to arrive at an exact figure.”

The problem with that policy, said Dr. Manish Kakkar, a specialist at the Public Health Foundation of India, is that India’s “massive underreporting of cases” has contributed to the disease’s spread. Experts from around the world said that India’s failure to construct an adequate dengue surveillance system has impeded awareness of the illness’s vast reach, discouraged efforts to clean up the sources of the disease and slowed the search for a vaccine.

“When you look at the number of reported cases India has, it’s a joke,” said Dr. Harold S. Margolis, chief of the dengue branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Neighboring Sri Lanka, for instance, reported nearly three times as many dengue cases as India through August, according to the World Health Organization, even though India’s population is 60 times larger.

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

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DealBook Column: The Election Won't Solve All Puzzles

Here comes more uncertainty.

It may sound counterintuitive, but whatever the outcome of the election — whether President Obama or Mitt Romney wins — the economy and markets are likely to face more uncertainty, not less, over the coming year.

“Uncertainty” has become the watchword over the last several years for many chief executives, politicians and economists as an explanation — or perhaps an excuse — for the economy’s slow growth, for the lack of hiring by business and for the volatility in the stock market.

“The claim is that businesses and households are uncertain about future taxes, spending levels, regulations, health care reform and interest rates. In turn, this uncertainty leads them to postpone spending on investment and consumption goods and to slow hiring, impeding the recovery,” a group of professors from Stanford University and the University of Chicago wrote in a study that found “current levels of economic policy uncertainty are at extremely elevated levels compared to recent history.” (The professors have created a Web site, policyuncertainty.com, where you can track the “uncertainty” levels.)

Come Wednesday morning, we should know who our president will be. But the uncertainty hardly ends there.

Almost immediately after the elections, the next big talking point on Wall Street and in Washington is going to be the now infamous “fiscal cliff,” a series of automatic tax increases and spending cuts that was the result of a Congressional compromise reached last summer and is to take effect on Jan. 1, unless Congress finds an alternative. Some economists say the tax increases and spending cuts in the existing agreement could shave as much as 4 percent off G.D.P. if they are not renegotiated. Already, executives say that the uncertainty over the outcome of the fiscal cliff is causing them to hold back from making new investments.

But the greatest likelihood is that the fiscal cliff isn’t going to be resolved soon at all —the betting line of the political cognoscenti is that no matter who wins, Congress will find a way to kick the issue down the road, perhaps as far as the fall of 2013, providing a new cloud of uncertainty over the economy.

For investors, the fiscal cliff includes a tax increase on dividends (making them the equivalent of ordinary income, on which rates could rise to as high as 39.6 percent) and capital gains (up to 20 percent from 15 percent). In a note to clients sent out on Sunday night, Goldman Sachs said that it expected the rate for both dividends and capital gains to be negotiated to 20 percent in either a second Obama term or a Romney presidency. But more important, Goldman noted that when similar tax increases were on the table in 1970 and 1986, “the S.& P. 500 posted negative returns in the December prior to implementation as investors locked in the lower rate.” December, the report said, “has the second-highest average monthly return” since 1928.

Many investors have already begun selling stocks and companies in anticipation of tax increases. Speculation was rampant last week that one of the reasons for the timing of the sale of George Lucas’s company, Lucasfilm, to Disney for $4.1 billion in cash and stock, was the impending changes in tax policy. (Mr. Lucas has said that he plans to donate a majority of his wealth to charity.)

Once we get past the fiscal cliff, if we do at all, there is Europe. Remember Europe? The issues in Greece and Spain have managed to stay off the front pages during the election run-up, but they have not gone away. Some economists have argued that things have gotten worse. Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, who will face election in 2013, said on Monday that the fiscal crisis in Europe was likely to last at least five years. “Whoever thinks this can be fixed in one or two years is wrong,” she said.

And don’t forget the Middle East. That “uncertainty” for the world — and the global economy — isn’t going away anytime soon either. Questions about a possible attack on Iran will persist under either candidate.

And finally, there is Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, one of the biggest uncertainties of them all. As I reported in this column two weeks ago, the greatest likelihood is that Mr. Bernanke will step down at the end of his term in early 2014 no matter who wins the election.

It’s possible — though unlikely — that his departure could happen even sooner if Mr. Romney wins. Over the next year and a half, Mr. Bernanke’s future as the Fed chairman will feed a sense of uncertainty among investors who have become accustomed to his easy money policies. If President Obama wins, he is likely to appoint a successor to Mr. Bernanke who is dovish on monetary policy, and more likely to keep printing money as Mr. Bernanke has, a strategy that comes with its own risks. If Mr. Romney wins, he may appoint a more hawkish chairman, a move that could create a different sense of uncertainty about how the Federal Reserve will unwind itself from Mr. Bernanke’s policies.

None of these issues are new. President Obama took office facing a fiscal policy dispute that was not and probably could not be settled given the gridlock in Congress. No solution is in sight for Europe’s problems. Tension in the Middle East is escalating as fast as nuclear technology. And the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy is at its most opaque since the Reagan administration.

All of which shows that the comedian Jon Stewart is more on target than ever with the cheeky title of his election coverage on “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central. Carrying on a tradition, it is known as “Indecision 2012.”

Update that to 2013, and it’s good for another year.

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Global Update: Polio Eradication Efforts in Pakistan Focus on Pashtuns

Michael Kamber for The New York Times

Polio will never be eradicated in Pakistan until a way is found to persuade poor Pashtuns to embrace the vaccine, according to a study released by the World Health Organization.

A survey of 1,017 parents of young children found that 41 percent had never heard of polio and 11 percent refused to vaccinate their children against it. The survey was done in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and the only big city in the world where polio persists; it was published in the agency’s November bulletin.

Parents from poor families “cited lack of permission from family elders,” said Dr. Anita Zaidi, who teaches pediatrics at the Aga Khan University in Karachi. Some rich parents also disdained the vaccine, saying it was “harmful or unnecessary,” she added.

Pashtuns account for 75 percent of Pakistan’s polio cases even though they are only 15 percent of the population. Wealthy children are safer because the virus travels in sewage, and their neighborhoods may have covered sewers and be less flood-prone.

Pashtuns are the largest ethnic group in next-door Afghanistan, where polio has also never been wiped out. Most Taliban fighters are Pashtun, and some Taliban threatened to kill vaccinators earlier this year. Two W.H.O. vaccinators were shot in Karachi in July.

Rumors persist that the vaccine is a plot to sterilize Muslims. But the eradication drive is recruiting Pashtuns as vaccinators and asking prominent religious leaders from various sects to make videos endorsing the vaccine.

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Global Update: Polio Eradication Efforts in Pakistan Focus on Pashtuns

Michael Kamber for The New York Times

Polio will never be eradicated in Pakistan until a way is found to persuade poor Pashtuns to embrace the vaccine, according to a study released by the World Health Organization.

A survey of 1,017 parents of young children found that 41 percent had never heard of polio and 11 percent refused to vaccinate their children against it. The survey was done in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and the only big city in the world where polio persists; it was published in the agency’s November bulletin.

Parents from poor families “cited lack of permission from family elders,” said Dr. Anita Zaidi, who teaches pediatrics at the Aga Khan University in Karachi. Some rich parents also disdained the vaccine, saying it was “harmful or unnecessary,” she added.

Pashtuns account for 75 percent of Pakistan’s polio cases even though they are only 15 percent of the population. Wealthy children are safer because the virus travels in sewage, and their neighborhoods may have covered sewers and be less flood-prone.

Pashtuns are the largest ethnic group in next-door Afghanistan, where polio has also never been wiped out. Most Taliban fighters are Pashtun, and some Taliban threatened to kill vaccinators earlier this year. Two W.H.O. vaccinators were shot in Karachi in July.

Rumors persist that the vaccine is a plot to sterilize Muslims. But the eradication drive is recruiting Pashtuns as vaccinators and asking prominent religious leaders from various sects to make videos endorsing the vaccine.

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Silicon Valley Objects to Online Privacy Rule Proposals for Children

Washington is pushing Silicon Valley on children’s privacy, and Silicon Valley is pushing back.

Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times

Phyllis H. Marcus, a lawyer for the F.T.C., is leading a team that is updating a privacy rule to require more parental consent.

Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter have all objected to portions of a federal effort to strengthen online privacy protections for children. In addition, media giants like Viacom and Disney, cable operators, marketing associations, technology groups and a trade group representing toy makers are arguing that the Federal Trade Commission’s proposed rule changes seem so onerous that, rather than enhance online protections for children, they threaten to deter companies from offering children’s Web sites and services altogether.

“If adopted, the effect of these new rules would be to slow the deployment of applications that provide tremendous benefits to children, and to slow the economic growth and job creation generated by the app economy,” Catherine A. Novelli, vice president of worldwide government affairs at Apple, wrote in comments to the agency.

But the underlying concern, for both the industry and regulators, is not so much about online products for children themselves. It is about the data collection and data mining mechanisms that facilitate digital marketing on apps and Web sites for children — and a debate over whether these practices could put children at greater risk.

In 1998, Congress passed the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act in an effort to give parents control over the collection and dissemination of private information about their children online. The regulation, known as Coppa, requires Web site operators to obtain a parent’s consent before collecting personal details, like home addresses or e-mail addresses, from children under 13.

Now, federal regulators are preparing to update that rule, arguing that it has not kept pace with advances like online behavioral advertising, a practice that uses data mining to tailor ads to people’s online behavior. The F.T.C. wants to expand the types of data whose collection requires prior parental permission to include persistent ID systems, like unique device codes or customer code numbers stored in cookies, if those codes are used to track children online for advertising purposes.

The idea is to preclude companies from compiling dossiers on the online activities — and by extension the health, socioeconomic status, race or romantic concerns — of individual children across the Web over time.

“What children post online or search as part of their homework should not haunt them as they apply to colleges or for jobs,” Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts and co-chairman of the Bipartisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, said in a recent phone interview. “YouTube should not be turned into YouTracked.”

The agency’s proposals have provoked an intense reaction from some major online operators, television networks, social networks, app platforms and advertising trade groups. Some argue that the F.T.C. has overstepped its mandate in proposing to greatly expand the rule’s scope.

Others say that using ID systems like customer code numbers to track children “anonymously” online is benign — and that collecting information about children’s online activities is necessary to deliver the ads that finance free content and services for children.

“What is the harm we are trying to prevent here?” said Alan L. Friel, chairman of the media and technology practice at the law firm Edwards Wildman Palmer. “We risk losing a lot of the really good educational and entertaining content if we make things too difficult for people to operate the sites or generate revenue from the sites.”

The economic issue at stake is much bigger than just the narrow children’s audience. If the F.T.C. were to include customer code numbers among the information that requires a parent’s consent, industry analysts say, it might someday require companies to get similar consent for a practice that represents the backbone of digital marketing and advertising — using such code numbers to track the online activities of adults.

“Once you’ve said it’s personal information for children that requires consent, you’ve set the framework for a requirement of consent to be applied to another population,” Mr. Friel said. “If it is personal information for someone that’s 12, it doesn’t cease being personal information when they are 13.”

Indeed, many of the F.T.C.’s proposed rule revisions have vocal detractors.

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Egyptian Vigilantes Crack Down on Abuse of Women

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

A self-appointed citizens patrol that tries to protect women on Cairo’s streets spray-painted a youth for identification last month.

CAIRO — The young activists lingered on the streets around Tahrir Square, scrutinizing the crowds of holiday revelers. Suddenly, they charged, pushing people aside and chasing down a young man. As the captive thrashed to get away, the activists pounded his shoulders, flipped him around and spray-painted a message on his back: “I’m a harasser.”

Egypt’s streets have long been a perilous place for women, who are frequently heckled, grabbed, threatened and violated while the police look the other way. Now, during the country’s tumultuous transition from authoritarian rule, more and more groups are emerging to make protecting women — and shaming the do-nothing police — a cause.

“They’re now doing the undoable?” a police officer joked as he watched the vigilantes chase downthe young man. The officer quickly went back to sipping his tea.

The attacks on women did not subside after the uprising. If anything, they became more visible as even the military was implicated in the assaults, stripping female protesters, threatening others with violence and subjecting activists to so-called virginity tests. During holidays, when Cairenes take to the streets to stroll and socialize, the attacks multiply.

But during the recent Id al-Adha holiday, some of the men were surprised to find they could no longer harass with impunity, a change brought about not just out of concern for women’s rights, but out of a frustration that the post-revolutionary government still, like the one before, was doing too little to protect its citizens.

At least three citizens groups patrolled busy sections of central Cairo during the holiday. The groups’ members, both men and women, shared the conviction that the authorities would not act against harassment unless the problem was forced into the public debate. They differed in their tactics: some activists criticized others for being too quick to resort to violence against suspects and encouraging vigilantism.  One group leader compared the activists to the Guardian Angels in the United States.

“The harasser doesn’t see anyone who will hold him accountable,” said Omar Talaat, 16, who joined one of the patrols.

The years of President Hosni Mubarak’s rule were marked by official apathy, collusion in the assaults on women, or empty responses to the attacks, including police roundups of teenagers at Internet cafes for looking at pornography.

“The police did not take harassment seriously,” said Madiha el-Safty, a sociology professor at the American University in Cairo. “People didn’t file complaints. It was always underreported.”

Mr. Mubarak’s wife, Suzanne, who portrayed herself as a champion of women’s rights, pretended the problem hardly existed. As reports of harassment grew in 2008, she said, “Egyptian men always respect Egyptian women.”

Egypt’s new president, Mohamed Morsi, has presided over two holidays, and many activists say there is no sign that the government is paying closer attention to the problem. But the work by the citizens groups may be having an effect: Last week, after the Id al-Adha holiday, Mr. Morsi’s spokesman announced that the government had received more than 1,000 reports of harassment, and said that the president had directed the Interior Ministry to investigate them.

“Egypt’s revolution cannot tolerate these abuses,” the spokesman quoted Mr. Morsi as saying.

Azza Soliman, the director of the Center for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance, dismissed the president’s words as “weak.” During the holiday, she said, one of her sons was beaten on the subway after he tried to stop a man who was groping two foreign women. The police tried to stop him from filing a complaint. “The whole world is talking about harassment in our country,” Ms. Soliman said. “The Interior Ministry takes no action.”

For years, anti-harassment activists have worked to highlight the problems in Egypt, but the uprising seemed to give the effort more energy and urgency.

Asmaa Al Zohairy contributed reporting.

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The Mirror: Fears of Aging Color the Discussion of Gray Hair

I OFTEN think longingly of buying a wig. My newly bought hair would be the little black dress of wigs. It would be my hair, or rather, someone else’s hair, but it would look the way mine did at its best: raven, not too long, not too short, glossy, curly without frizz and easy to wear.

I still have that kind of hair, somewhere in my mind, and somewhere in the vague recesses of eternal hope, I expect it to return, just as I expect that with enough discipline, I will be able to get into shape such that I can again wear that cotton red strapless dress I only wore twice: to my engagement party and to interview Brian Wilson (though that history alone might justify my keeping it).

The hair that I now see in the mirror is inconvenient impostor hair. It is still dark, but it has a hint of shellac to it; its color is solid where there should be hints of light, and the tone only varies toward the ends, where, thinned and frizzed, a faintly electric red takes over.

I dye my hair, and every time I do, my hair dies a little. What age was already doing slowly to its texture, in addition to its color, the dying process is only exacerbating in some sort of vicious death-spiral, like the relationship between global warming and air-conditioning: the more one suffers from the first, the more one needs the second, which only exacerbates the first.

Here is what burns: Within weeks of the coloring, still there is the creep, the inexorable encroaching of gray at my temples that make me think, with uneasiness, of the word “distinguished.” I see those hints of gray and I think of aging male executives with drooping eyes, I think of Birkenstocks and faded Barnes & Noble canvas bags, and I think I should maybe have my hair colored again.

But wasn’t I just there? Wasn’t I just in there, politely making small talk with Arnulfo, a kind and talented colorist who asks me questions about how my hair has fared with the concerned, exacting tones of a good internist? Wasn’t I just there, opening my wallet to pay in cash so that my husband, who would not really care, does not know exactly how much I spend to stop that creep of distinguished gray? Wasn’t I just there, my heart rate elevating with every passing wasted minute, waiting out the slathering on, the processing period, the shampoo, the rinse?

I never think more about buying a wig than I do in those last 10 minutes at the hair salon, itching out of my skin, not only at my scalp. “I’ll just go out with it wet!” I invariably tell Arnolfo toward the end as he goes for a hair dryer. I try to keep the hysteria out of my voice. I am not sure I have succeeded. Arnulfo generally looks at me with that same medical concern, this time concerned more about my mental health than my roots.

The salon where Arnulfo works, Cristiano Cora, offers a seemingly miraculous hair dye that requires only a 15-minute wait, though Arnolfo told me sadly that it is not as short for people with hair as coarse as mine. And there are the temporary fixes: powder sprays and mascara wands for stray graying strands and the like. I have something that looks like a thick lipstick, only it is so dark brown it is almost black. If I suddenly notice I am looking too distinguished, I sometimes apply this magic wand of product furtively to my roots in the office bathroom. It smells faintly cloying, and makes me think of the powder my grandmother used to wear, a beauty trick I knew she used more out of habit than conviction.

My wand is designed to look like lipstick, but somehow instead of that making it seem less strange, it only reminds me how strange lipstick is, a highly packaged, pigmented formula applied to the face. My ambivalence about one heightens my ambivalence about the other, causing midday existential questions about mortality and identity when I am merely trying to tamp down some self-consciousness about messy-looking roots.

I am, if nothing, a practical person. I buy black dresses in quantity, ideally ones with three-quarter-length sleeves so that they are flexible for every season. I am not going for noticeably stylish; I am going for the easiest thing that will look the most put-together. I am going for clothing that is a form of invisible, and that is what I would like, in many ways, in my hair.

But that is the problem with hair once it starts to turn gray: there is no version of invisible. There is always the tell. To dye one’s hair is to confess to caring, to fighting age: it fools no one, although it reveals the effort to do so. It only tells the viewer that I am someone who is unwilling and unready to give in to the physical symbols of aging, which is its own social signaling. But not to dye one’s hair is to make a whole other statement: I am someone who does not care. And I am not ready for that one, either.

Susan Dominus is a staff writer for The Times Magazine.

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The Mirror: Fears of Aging Color the Discussion of Gray Hair

I OFTEN think longingly of buying a wig. My newly bought hair would be the little black dress of wigs. It would be my hair, or rather, someone else’s hair, but it would look the way mine did at its best: raven, not too long, not too short, glossy, curly without frizz and easy to wear.

I still have that kind of hair, somewhere in my mind, and somewhere in the vague recesses of eternal hope, I expect it to return, just as I expect that with enough discipline, I will be able to get into shape such that I can again wear that cotton red strapless dress I only wore twice: to my engagement party and to interview Brian Wilson (though that history alone might justify my keeping it).

The hair that I now see in the mirror is inconvenient impostor hair. It is still dark, but it has a hint of shellac to it; its color is solid where there should be hints of light, and the tone only varies toward the ends, where, thinned and frizzed, a faintly electric red takes over.

I dye my hair, and every time I do, my hair dies a little. What age was already doing slowly to its texture, in addition to its color, the dying process is only exacerbating in some sort of vicious death-spiral, like the relationship between global warming and air-conditioning: the more one suffers from the first, the more one needs the second, which only exacerbates the first.

Here is what burns: Within weeks of the coloring, still there is the creep, the inexorable encroaching of gray at my temples that make me think, with uneasiness, of the word “distinguished.” I see those hints of gray and I think of aging male executives with drooping eyes, I think of Birkenstocks and faded Barnes & Noble canvas bags, and I think I should maybe have my hair colored again.

But wasn’t I just there? Wasn’t I just in there, politely making small talk with Arnulfo, a kind and talented colorist who asks me questions about how my hair has fared with the concerned, exacting tones of a good internist? Wasn’t I just there, opening my wallet to pay in cash so that my husband, who would not really care, does not know exactly how much I spend to stop that creep of distinguished gray? Wasn’t I just there, my heart rate elevating with every passing wasted minute, waiting out the slathering on, the processing period, the shampoo, the rinse?

I never think more about buying a wig than I do in those last 10 minutes at the hair salon, itching out of my skin, not only at my scalp. “I’ll just go out with it wet!” I invariably tell Arnolfo toward the end as he goes for a hair dryer. I try to keep the hysteria out of my voice. I am not sure I have succeeded. Arnulfo generally looks at me with that same medical concern, this time concerned more about my mental health than my roots.

The salon where Arnulfo works, Cristiano Cora, offers a seemingly miraculous hair dye that requires only a 15-minute wait, though Arnolfo told me sadly that it is not as short for people with hair as coarse as mine. And there are the temporary fixes: powder sprays and mascara wands for stray graying strands and the like. I have something that looks like a thick lipstick, only it is so dark brown it is almost black. If I suddenly notice I am looking too distinguished, I sometimes apply this magic wand of product furtively to my roots in the office bathroom. It smells faintly cloying, and makes me think of the powder my grandmother used to wear, a beauty trick I knew she used more out of habit than conviction.

My wand is designed to look like lipstick, but somehow instead of that making it seem less strange, it only reminds me how strange lipstick is, a highly packaged, pigmented formula applied to the face. My ambivalence about one heightens my ambivalence about the other, causing midday existential questions about mortality and identity when I am merely trying to tamp down some self-consciousness about messy-looking roots.

I am, if nothing, a practical person. I buy black dresses in quantity, ideally ones with three-quarter-length sleeves so that they are flexible for every season. I am not going for noticeably stylish; I am going for the easiest thing that will look the most put-together. I am going for clothing that is a form of invisible, and that is what I would like, in many ways, in my hair.

But that is the problem with hair once it starts to turn gray: there is no version of invisible. There is always the tell. To dye one’s hair is to confess to caring, to fighting age: it fools no one, although it reveals the effort to do so. It only tells the viewer that I am someone who is unwilling and unready to give in to the physical symbols of aging, which is its own social signaling. But not to dye one’s hair is to make a whole other statement: I am someone who does not care. And I am not ready for that one, either.

Susan Dominus is a staff writer for The Times Magazine.

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Chinese Messaging App Gains Ground Elsewhere

BEIJING — Chinese Internet companies have long struggled to establish their products beyond the country’s borders. In 2007 China’s dominant search engine, Baidu, announced an ambitious plan to break into the Japanese search engine market; as of last year, the company said it had lost more than $108 million trying.

WeChat, a mobile messaging application created by Tencent Holdings, China’s largest Internet company, is aggressively trying to buck the trend and establish itself in the expanding global market for smartphone apps. Based on some analysts’ predictions, the company may actually have a shot.

WeChat is most often likened to WhatsApp, a smartphone application popular in the United States that allows users to send text, image or audio messages for free to other subscribers. But WhatsApp’s Chinese counterpart is quickly moving beyond simple multimedia instant-messaging. In the last few months, it has announced a steady stream of new features that many say surpass those offered by WhatsApp and Asian competitors like Kakao Talk and LINE.

“I use WeChat for messaging and group chatting, but I’ve also started getting into its social network,” said Kate Wan, a 29-year-old media professional in Beijing, referring to WeChat “Moments,” a feature that allows users to post pictures and update their online status. “It’s become a huge part of my daily life.”

Since the introduction of the application in January 2011, WeChat, known as Weixin in Chinese, has grown at a blistering pace. In September, Pony Ma, Tencent’s chief executive, announced that its user base had doubled to 200 million from 100 million in six months.

Tencent is vying to make WeChat the dominant global mobile messaging application. The app is available in eight languages, including Russian, Indonesian, Portuguese and Thai, and there are plans to expand into other languages.

“The Chinese Internet market is so set apart from other countries that we inside the industry refer to it as the Galápagos Island syndrome,” said Kai Lukoff, the editor of TechRice, a China-focused technology blog based in Beijing. “Domestic Internet products are extremely well adapted to the Chinese market, but they are way out of place for global users.”

But industry experts now argue that app retailers like the Apple iTunes Store and Google Play empower developers anywhere to reach consumers everywhere. The openness of these distribution platforms could provide WeChat with a conduit into the international smartphone market, some analysts say.

Duncan Clark, chairman of BDA China, a consulting firm that specializes in China’s technology and Internet sectors, said WeChat, with its sophisticated but easy-to-navigate interface and features, had the potential to overcome any lingering doubts in the West over the Made-in-China label.

“Many people are afraid of Chinese products, whether milk, cat food or Internet services,” Mr. Clark said. “But with the App Store, it’s hard to even know that WeChat is Chinese — it really levels the playing field.”

According to App Annie, a mobile analytics company based in Beijing, WeChat’s outward push is beginning to bear fruit. Based on download data from the first three quarters of 2012, the app is growing fastest in Southeast Asia, but it is making headway elsewhere, including Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

The most promising markets this year include Vietnam, Turkey, Thailand, India and Indonesia, with Russia and Saudi Arabia following closely behind.

While WeChat remains relatively obscure in the United States, where players like WhatsApp, Skype and Facebook Messenger dominate the mobile messaging market, analysts say WeChat registered nearly 100,000 new users in the United States in September alone.

“All of my Chinese friends use it here in North Carolina, whether to send group messages or to organize events,” said Zhang Xue, a student at Duke University Law School who is from the city of Harbin in China’s northeast. “I downloaded WhatsApp out of curiosity, but it’s not nearly as convenient as WeChat.”

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Coptic Church Chooses Pope Who Rejects Politics

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

Coptic clergymen at a ceremony on Sunday for choosing a pope.

CAIRO — A blindfolded 6-year-old reached into a glass bowl on Sunday to pick the first new Coptic pope in more than 40 years, a patriarch who promises a new era of integration for Egypt’s Christian minority as it grapples with a wave of sectarian violence, new Islamist domination of politics, and internal pressures for reform.

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

The acting Coptic pope, before a banner of Bishop Tawadros, held up the names of other candidates to show that the selection was fair.

Speaking to the television cameras that surrounded him at his monastery in a desert town, the pope-designate, Bishop Tawadros, indicated that he planned to reverse the explicitly political role of his predecessor, Pope Shenouda III, who died in March. For four decades, Shenouda acted as the Copts’ chief representative in public life, won special favors for his flock by publicly endorsing President Hosni Mubarak, and last year urged in vain that Copts stay away from the protests that ultimately toppled the strongman.

“The most important thing is for the church to go back and live consistently within the spiritual boundaries because this is its main work, spiritual work,” the bishop said, and he promised to begin a process of “rearranging the house from the inside” and “pushing new blood” after his installation later this month as Pope Tawadros II. Interviewed on Coptic television recently, he struck a new tone by including as his priorities “living with our brothers, the Muslims” and “the responsibility of preserving our shared life.”

“Integrating in the society is a fundamental scriptural Christian trait,” Bishop Tawadros said then. “This integration is a must — moderate constructive integration,” he added. “All of us, as Egyptians, have to participate.”

Coptic activists and intellectuals said the turn away from politics signaled a sweeping transformation in the Christian minority’s relationship to the Egyptian state but also addressed a firm demand by the Christian laity to claim a voice in a more democratic Egypt.

“It can’t continue the way it used to be,” said Youssef Sidhom, editor of the Coptic newspaper Watani. “It is not in the interests of the Copts, if they are trying to speak for themselves as full and equal citizens, to have an intermediary speaking for them, and especially if he is a religious authority. I think the church has gotten this message loud and clear.”

In Egypt’s first free elections for Parliament and president, Christians voted overwhelmingly along sectarian lines, seeking to pool their votes around the most secular candidates — only to see their favorites fall under the Islamist tide. After the Muslim Brotherhood’s political party won parliamentary leadership and then the presidency, many Egyptians joked that the group put a candidate up for Coptic pope, too.

In recent interviews, intellectuals and activists, and churchgoers leaving Mass after the selection of the pope, all said they had concluded that Christians would have to build alliances with Muslims who shared their goal of nonsectarian citizenship.

“We are not the Muslim Brotherhood,” said Tarek Samir, a sales manager leaving the cathedral after the selection of Bishop Tawadros. “Politics is a dirty word to us, and we do not think it should be mixed with religion. But there are moderate Muslims who live the same life we do, who go to work with us, who live together with us, and if I am in trouble they will help me.”

Copts, often estimated to make up about 10 percent of Egypt’s 80 million people, trace their roots here to centuries before the birth of the Prophet Muhammad. They consider St. Mark their first pope; Tawadros II will be the 118th. In some ways, they are now at the spearhead of a challenge confronting Christian minorities across the region amid the tumult of the Arab Spring. In Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere, Christian minorities had made peace with authoritarian rulers in the hope of protection from the Muslim majorities. But now the old bargains have broken, leaving Christians to fend for themselves.

In Egypt, the revolution last year coincided with by far the deadliest 12 months of sectarian violence in decades, including the bombing of an Alexandria church weeks before the revolt, the destruction of at least three churches in sectarian feuds, and the killing of about two dozen Coptic demonstrators by Egyptian soldiers squashing a protest — the single bloodiest episode of sectarian violence in at least half a century.

Known as the Maspero massacre after a nearby television building, the slaughter elicited attempts by top generals to blame the Copts and scant sympathy from the main Islamist groups, crystallizing Coptic anxieties.

Mayy El Sheikh and Mai Ayyad contributed reporting.

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