By Tara Narayan

VISITING with my mother dear in Juhu, Mumbai, means I can renew my old love for walking down Juhu Beach at the crack of dawn. It makes such a difference to have a long open space like a beach at one’s doorstep in an unhealthy, polluted, big-time city like Bombay which has become Mumbai. For me Juhu Beach is a saving grace and each morning’s walk is like a social education. There are the familiar faces which if you don’t see for a couple of days you know automatically have gone with the wind (I’m missing one sweet old lady’s face this time). There are a few who smile and greet you while there are a few who walk with grim, dogged effort (because the doctor ordered a walk every morning and evening), there’s a group of young athletes in the making; senior citizens trim and fit or well-fed and hearty (the successfully retired businessmen of Juhu-Vile Parle…after their walk in tandem they sit around on plastic bucket seats and exchange family notes loudly or quietly depending on each personality type!) and there are senior citizens gone to seed with obesity and shuffling along for dear life. There’s the odd Bollywood filmstar (without the war paint on you can barely recognize them) and the rich, beautiful and bold who step out for a walk attired in the very best attire for walking from Los Angeles, so much so, you want to tell them to stop so that you can gawk at their clothes! Great faces, great bods, great legs. If you’re visiting Bombay and Mumbai it’s worth dropping in on Juhu Beach in the early morning hours for a treat in lifestyle all the way down society’s hierarchy.

Just before hitting 6 a.m. the sky with its fading shimmering stars turns a perfect shade of sapphire, and then fills up with non-descript sketchy or fluffy clouds which briefly turn to tender petal pink so exquisite that even as you take them in appreciatively they’re gone. Walking down Juhu Beach I always think that the sky blooms open like a celestial flower, differently every dawn. Soon it’s full scale day light and the walk props me up for the rest of the day. I love Juhu Beach with gratitude for all the pleasure past, present and future. And hate it when post-Ganesh Chaturthi the beach becomes a passageway of washed-up broken idols, masses of plastic litter and dead fish all the way. The festival of Ganesh Chaturthi has become loud, hedonistic and environmentally unfriendly, it’s outlived its purpose; and an obsessive passion for Ganpati Bappa has been reduced to a lifestyle statement!

HEALTH AND FITNESS
BUT THIS for a Juhu Beach on better days. It’s amazing how health and fitness meet together most agreeably. Shailesh and Pallavi Thakkar are still there with their Shri Siddhivinayak and Amrutpan Kendra fresh herbal juices e.g. bili patra, neem ras and karela juice, tulsi sudha, ginger lime, aonla, kokam, aniseed, mint…and the soups: tomato, carrot and garlic; drumstick; mixed veggie; spinach. From a humdrum middle struggle to riches is their story right here courtesy Juhu Beach, today they have several herbal juice centers running at various gardens around the Western suburbs of Mumbai (Alas the quality of their juices have gone down while prices have gone up). A stone’s throw away is ISKCO devotee Sudhir Pande’s Health First impromptu set-up also dispensing his range of fresh herbal juices and oil-free soups (more economically priced at Rs.7 per juice and Rs.15 per soup), he makes an excellent almond soup (Rs.30) and greets everybody with a “Hare Krishna”, he also packs up a portion of moong sprouts and cooked sweet corn kernels for you if you want to make a soup at home.

And there’s a new face. That of O.P. Agrawal who turns up on Sunday mornings in his car to promote his Ganesh Wheat Products “Sattu” - “a complete whole gram instant food”. Basically a take-off on the protein-rich roasted besan or gram flour food of the Bihari rikshawallahs of Calcutta or Kolkatta, but in this case a superior updated product with its health credits detailed on the packaging…“Chana Ganesh Sattu cures chronic constipation, helps to remove acidity, protects from sunstrokes, reduces menopause trouble symptoms, helps to preserve kidney function, beneficial for diabetic control, helps to maintain blood pressure, it purifies the blood, helps to reduce weight…4 or 5 tablespoons of Ganesh Sattu added to a glass of water with salt and roasted cumin seeds as per taste makes healthy sharbat”! Well, tall claims or not, this is a health product worth looking into. Mr. Agrawal says that although roasted gram flour is the 90 percent key ingredient, his formula also includes 10 percent of “my trade secret” ingredients! So here is yet another enterprising health food or as I call it back-to-nature or back-to-tradition business. I wish Mr. Agrawal and daughter well.

What else. There’s also a van with Dosti Organics painted on it and they’re selling organically grown produce, I cannot resist buying some karela (bitter gourd), dudhi (slim and tender bottle gourd), plain gourd (“galka” in Guju) and a papaya. If it’s organically grown produce, I want it. From the sound of it this Dahanu-based Dosti Organic Farms is a sterling effort in the right direction i.e. promoting better drinking and eating habits for better health. More and more farmers in Maharashtra at least are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel of poverty and suicides. I hope. A message on the Dosti Farms carry bag (unfortunately a plastic carry bag) says, “Thank you for buying this product, produced without using poisonous pesticides and other agrochemicals. Organic production processes conserve precious natural resources like biodiversity, land and water, of our beloved mother earth.” Yes, amen to that.

LARGER & BETTER
AS ALWAYS I notice with every trip to Mumbai that the organic and health food movement is growing larger and better, that means more and more people are relating the ways we drink and eat to the their own good health and the complex dynamics of the finite good earth. Respect and love it and it will provide bountifully, poison it and it will in turn poison us back! Tit for tat. A crime against nature is really a crime which rebounds on the human of the species (the one species which I sometimes think Mother Earth can do without)…if you ever get to see Akira Kurosawa’s profoundly and exquisitely prophetic film “Dreams”, make time to see it. I like to think that the film is basically about all the crimes we have committed on the good earth. It’s a film I could see over and over again till it is embedded in my consciousness….it deserves to be translated in the Indian languages, better promoted and better seen.

All this is to say I’m having an exciting time in suburban Mumbai discovering all the latest health-conscious foodie stuff which even ordinary grocery stores like Champion Foods down M.G. Road in Vile Parle (East) or noted fast Indian snacks chain Camy Wafer are beginning to stock e.g. oil-free khakra in a wide array of flavours, all kinds of home-made dry and wet chutneys, nutty fudge or chikki with jaggery (instead of sugar), wholegrain bread loaves, an array of baked snacks (as against deep-fried)… “Ma’am, please try this chivda, it’s baked and 100 percent oil-free!” the promotion guys cry. Here in Mumbai’s upmarket and middlemarket and downmarket foodland there’re a zillion snacks and foods good, bad, terrible, retailed on a day-to-day basis. A whole lot of imported foods too of course including packaged soya milks, Japanese tofu, dry fruits, a whole range of organic produce put out by more and more entrepreneurs. One of these days let me tell you about “Stugar” stevia sugar, “the natural sweetener” available in India for the first time. It’s a herb from the rain forests of the Amazon which offers an extract which is 100 to 300 times sweeter than the “white poison” or chemical refined white sugar! From all accounts the enlightened world over folk are switching over to…green stevia sugar! Bottomline: The future belongs to health-conscious foods and the folk who get their first will have a rags to riches future in a class of their own.

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