The Ritual of Eating

After a very long time, I had the good fortune this morning of eating phulkas directly off the fire.  Being a foodie at heart, but a healthy eater by practice, I normally avoid using butter or ghee.  But the piping hot phulkas brought back of those eaten in my childhood with home made ghee on it.  A foodie cannot resist such temptations, but making a concession to healthy eating, I liberally smeared two phulkas with Nutralite (manufacturers are you listening?  You could consider giving me a small percentage off your sales for voluntarily promoting your product!!!!!) and ate it with piping hot mixed vegetable gravy (cauliflower, capsicum, potato, peas, carrot, beans and soya paneer).

To say my soul was touched would be an understatement of the day.  "Annadaata sukhi bhava" automatically sprung to mind.  It was a sudden reminder of the original meaning and sentiment behind these seemingly simple Sanskrit phrase which is so loaded with gratitude and fulfillment.  When I said it today, it came from the bottom of the heart and I really understood not only the literal meaning, but also the full contentment and joy that brings out the blessing for the one provides us food.

Talking of which I was also reminded of a Marathi prayer which we are taught to say before every meal in childhood.  It goes:

Vadani kawal gheta naam ghya Srihariche
Sahaj hawan hote naam gheta phukache
Jeevan kari jivitva anna he poornabrahma
Udarbharan nohe janije yadnya karma

This is a prayer which reminds you to remember the Lord when taking every morsel of food. It says, taking the name of the Lord while eating makes eating an act of offering or a "havan".  Anna (or food) is the complete God principle which bestows life on the living.  Remember eating is not just an act of filling your stomach, it is a yagnya karma.

If we were only to remember this everyday, it would help us to respect our stomachs and bodies and offer good, nutritious and healthy food instead of just overloading and stuffing ourselves silly.

It reminds one to sit quietly in one place in a happy frame of mind with family and/or friends and eat every morsel of food with gratitude to the ones who helped put this food on your plate and with consideration for the body which needs it as fuel.  Treat your stomach with due respect, not as a dumping ground.  Treat the food which you get with the same respect.  Don't waste food.  There are many who are not so fortunate as you.

Let us first thank God for having given us rains that helped the crops, the means to buy our food, the farmer who sowed the seed and harvested the crop, the bread winner who earned us the food and the one who toils in the kitchen to put the food in edible form on the table.  

Adding Insult to Injury - Labelling a Problem Psychosomatic

Ms. Sharma walks into the doctor's office.  She is around 18 years old.  She has been having a lot of aches and pains in her back.  The doctor (the family doctor) who has been looking after the family since she was around 5, examines her and prescribes some mild pain killers.  She takes them.  The problem repeats itself after some time.  The same routine follows.  This happens time and again.  The doctor tells her some exercises for her back.  She does them, but the pain persists.  The doctor asks her to get some X-Rays done.  Nothing abnormal shows up.  

So next time Ms. Sharma comes back with the complaint, she is told it is psychosomatic - it is in her mind.  She is probably stressed out about something and hence her muscles are in spasm.

Ms. Sharma is unhappy.  She smarts under the verdict that it is all in her mind.  She finds it unfair that she has to suffer the pain and on top of that be told that there is nothing wrong.  Could it be possible that the X-Ray was not properly read?  Is there something that is not showing up on the film?  It makes her feel like she is being labelled a hypochondriac.

The years go by.   By the time she reaches the age of  36 - 37, she finds herself occasionally getting locked when she lies down.  She is unable to turn to her side or get up.  There is no pain as such, except the usual muscular pain.  Within a couple of minutes, she is slowly able to turn and get herself up.  She is now up and back to her usual self.  She forgets about the episode.  It repeats itself a couple of times.  Each time, she gets up and gets down to business.  CTs and MRIs do not show any problem.

After a few years, she starts to feel a pain at one point on one side of her spine.  Turning to that side is painful.  The pain varies in intensity from day to day.  Sometimes the pain is more intense at other times.  CTs and MRIs when repeated still show nothing.  So she ignores the pain.  She has learnt to shut up and carry on - she does not want to be told again that it is all in her mind.  She does not want anyone to think she wants an excuse to shirk work.  She still carries on with her normal activities.  She is a very busy person who flits from one office to another - she is a consultant.  She normally goes everywhere on her scooter.  One day when going down the stairs in a bit of a hurry, she misses a step and slips down, landing on her back on the landing.  She gets up and manages to carry on with her work.  But it has come as a bit of a shock.  She also has a few falls from her scooter when she is knocked down by some other vehicle, pushed to the edge of the road onto a pile of sand by a speeding bus and so on.  

Gradually her pain increases and starts to spread round the hip.  Then it spreads down the leg.  It becomes increasingly difficult for her to manage her work with the pain.  Her work involves a lot of standing and sitting for long hours every day.  Eventually one MRI shows that she has a condition where the joints in her spine are wearing out.  That is causing pressure on the nerves and hence the radiating pain.  She tries to manage with that for a couple of years.  Following a few smaller procedures which do not give any significant relief, she has to go in for a surgery.  

The question is this.  Did she have something when she was younger, when X-Rays showed nothing?  How could they have been expected to, when even CTs and MRIs took so long to reveal the problem?  Once the problem was revealed, it was at the same spot where she was complaining about the pain.  So was that her imagination?  Was her habit of worrying causing pain at a site where a problem would be detected later on in life?  Was it a fair judgement when she was told it was psychosomatic?

While accepting that there might be conditions which may be psychosomatic, one has to accept that modern medicine and technology have their own limitations.  Just because one is unable to detect a problem, does not mean there is no real basis for the pain - that it is all in the mind.

How many patients suffer like this?  OK, no one is blaming the medical profession for not being able to help her.  That is the state of the art and one has to accept that.  But the least one can do is to give the benefit of the doubt and spare a person who is already in pain from such damning and mortifying judgements, and be a bit more compassionate  That is all one asks for..

Character Certificate

I am sure none of us here has forgotten the days when it was mandatory to get a "character certificate" when we left school to join college, or left college to join a job or wanted to apply for a scholarship and so on. And the words generally went "ABC XYZ has been a student of this school/college for the past XX years and has been an outstanding student. blahdiblahdiblah and to the best of my knowledge bears a good moral character".

Note the words "to the best of my knowledge" and "moral character". Highly variably definable. The first caveat shrugs off any responsibility for any inaccuracy in the statement or change in status of the said persons moral fibre . The second, according to me, badly needs to be defined. What does "moral character" mean? 

Does it mean that ABC did not indulge in theft, robbery, gossip. philandering ways, did not talk or look at members of the opposite sex, did not copy in the exams, did not tell lies (how could the person certifying this know - maybe that is why the first caveat), or just what? 

I am equally sure that almost all citizens of this country (except a handful of really hopeless cases) have collected at least 4-5 such certificates. I am sure all our netas have hundreds of them. Then why do we have so many problems (not natural calamities, but man-made problems) confronting us?

How come there is such widespread corruption, intolerance and blatant indiscipline in this country (i do not imply that it does not happen anywhere else - but as they say, people who live in glass houses do not throw stones). Is this any indication of a high moral fibre?

What happens when there is a natural disaster or major accident? We see a few people trying to help and others who utilize the opportunity to pocket some valuables and personal effects of the victims and others who see them do this but say nothing. We jump queues and fight over water at communal taps, try to get everything first. It is always me first. If anything goes wrong, we wring our hands, and blame everything and everyone in this universe from shani, the moon God and our neighbours for our misfortunes.

In this backdrop, a news item I read about the way the Japanese are conducting themselves in the face of an unrelenting spate of disasters is absolutely heart-warming and restores one's faith in human kind. The article talked about the resilience of the Japanese people in the face of the calamities. It stated that

Quote:

"unlike the scenes in natural disasters in Haiti and New Orleans, there is little anger, no looting. Food and electricity are in short supply, but neighbours are willing to share with others and are cutting back on energy use on their own to limit the need for rotating blackouts". Ron Provost, president of Showa Boston Institute for Language and Culture, a campus of the University of Tokyo says "These are tough, strong, strong people.... That strength and resilience are rooted in a culture that has historically relied on social organisation. People have opened up their homes to others . I heard someone say they had two bottles of water and gave one to someone else". On a daily basis - in tragedy and in good times - the Japanese have "come up with a system to accommodate each other. They are kind to the neighbours and look out for their neighbours That's why the crime rate is low. You see someone doing something and you go to the local police". Alex Thompson, a journalist with Channel 4 News, who was the only Western reporter to make it to the pulverised coastal town of Minami Sanrikuin his heart-rending account for Daily Mail wrote of the resilience of the Japanese people. "the first thing you notice is the silence which seems to hang over the place. There is no sound as we approach this once-thriving coastal town." The war correspondent who has covered more than 20 conflicts and several natural calamities says "I have never seen anything on this scale. There is no crying, no hysteria, no anger. It is in the psyche of the Japanese people to do what they have to do in silence and with dignity". - Bangalore Mirror, Wed, March 16, 2011

How the Japanese built up their economy after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and where they were after just 60 years speaks volumes for their character - more than a million words. The same is to be said of the Germans and more so for their "trummerfrauen". After the second world war, when the entire country was in shambles and when most of the men were taken prisoners of war or dead, it was left to the women of the country to rebuild it. And what a job they did of it! Talk of national character, talk of woman-power.


We as a country have miles to go before we can get anywhere there. Just a booming economy and a population of a billion, or a satellite sent up to the moon are no indicators of the state of a nation.

This, then, my friends is what speaks of the highest grade of moral fibre, which we, starting out with ourselves must strive to achieve before living up to all those "character certificates" we may have lying in our portfolios.