By Tara Narayan

SEPTEMBER IS REALLY our most beautiful month with its dhoop-chao (now rain, now sunshine) weather and a lot of folk I know either turn vegetarian or fast on one meal a day during the month of Shravan, like I try to do and succeed on most days! Is it easy to fast? There are those puritans who will of course say that you’re hogging one meal anyway, so what’s so great about your fasting. Nothing great except that that when I do manage to exercise some discipline in my drinking and eating I just feel good. Don’t know about others but in the beginning I found it difficult to limit myself to one meal a day and I’ve understood that this is to do with living in an urban area and urban areas are areas of plenty where multiple foodie businesses thrive…the mass of people in our country don’t get much food in the countryside so they automatically eat less, mostly confined to what is cooked at home and much of the time in modest households it’s a sparten meal of rice or roti and a curry with one or two side dishes. The meal has to be shared with other members of the family. Men get first priority in the traditional patriarchal scheme of things….women eat later quite simply because oftentimes they have to be content with leftovers and crumbs and many women do it willingly for love of their husbands and children.

On the other hand in the urban landscape where development is concentrated there’s more of everything around and so superfluously so that we tend to hog and waste especially when it comes to drinking and eating. In the process we become prime examples of patronizing a lifestyle which breeds nothing but the diseases of our times like diabetes, heart disease, cancer. Somebody recently confided that a member of her family had been diagnosed with cancer of the stomach and she doesn’t really know what kind of treatment would suit the best….as a matter of fact 90 percent of heart diseases and cancers (and diabetes and arthritis) is rooted in our modern-day drinking and eating habits, presumably centered in our growing urban landscapes of plenty. Add to this a sedentary, comfy – all mod cons provided – lifestyle and naturally the over-indulgences of our lop-sided times set the stage for all kinds of diseases to flourish in the body.

Hotel Delmon offers Shravan Thali.

Frankly, I think when the body is plagued by disease — mind you, after a long phase of warnings which go ignored (most of us do not listen to our body) — the best thing to do would be to fast and work towards a lifestyle in tune with Mother Earth. Quit eating anything which is cooked or processed. Right, shut down your kitchen or use it only to create dishes which need minimal cooking...also go for a long walk morning and night to do some serious feeling and thinking. Call it soul-searching. Well, this would be my solution to any terrifying disease. I’ve never been able to understand why we wait for the demons of diabetes or heart disease or cancer to plague us before we follow “doctor’s orders” to cut down or eliminate oil, salt, sugar – all the refined and processed evils of our times – I mean, if these have been proven troublemakers over and over again in study after study, why can’t we eliminate them or at least minimise their use before disease strikes??? Like if they’re rotten for us when we’re diseased surely they’re as rotten even when we’re hale and hearty and in a perfect state of equanimity ??? Hey, why do we have to wait till the heart falters, the stomach refuses to digest any food (malabsorption sets in i.e. when the immune system packs up), the lungs decide you have tortured it enough, the liver – the toughest organ in the body – says enough is enough ….before we make sweeping changes in our drinking, eating, lifestyle habits? Before we quit smoking or chewing tobacco? Before we quit patronizing booze and the junk drinks of the marketplace.….

I mean, do we have to wait for doctor’s orders to become predominantly vegetarian (because meat is saturated with cholesterol-laded fat, far too refined), to cook and drink and eat less of all that which is refined to death e.g. refined oil, refined salt, refined sugar, refined flour, refined rice? By which time of course even if one is willing to make the changeover to a more eco-friendly and, therefore, health-friendly lifestyle, it’s more or less far too late and our days are numbered. But as long as there is life I say it’s never too late! Increasingly we drink and eat to keep the foodie industry in business and the medical fraternity in business. Increasingly, we are drinking and eating to die rather than to live in the best sense of the word.

SHRAVAN FASTING
DURING MY SHRAVAN-time one meal a day i.e. lunch, these are thoughts which run through my mind….is it easy to fast? Don’t laugh. For someone like me who is in love with food (as with life!) it is not. Not with all the temptations around in my urban landscape of plenty! It takes will-power, something most of us have very little off any way in our exploitative, humiliating, torturous times. If we exploit, humiliate and torture Mother Earth in a myriad ways with our urban lifestyles dedicated to the philosophy of plenty to drink, eat and squander….naturally, sooner or later, individually and collectively we will have to pay the price in terms of premature disease, suffering and death. Make the connections, my friends, make the connections. As that old song of Bob Dylan would say…the answers are blowing in the wind…it helps to just listen to your body, mind and soul and take it from there.

Actually, this week’s column has been inspired by a talk on “The prevention of heart disease and maintaining a healthy heart” by Dr. Mahadev D. Dixit at the NIO auditorium earlier this week. Dr. Dixit, who is the director of the KLE Heart Foundation in Belgaum came across as a pragmatic doctor and a good human being. I particularly liked what he said at the end of his talk about health being rooted in living in toto i.e. good health is not just about being fit alone e.g. “Doctor, I run five km a day so why have I got a heart problem?” Nowadays we tend to equate being fit with good health. Fact is being fit is just one part of good health and only if we live in toto i.e. completely, in the sense that we also feel, think, pray and act, in coordination and for the larger good of society and civilization, only then can we hope to reap peace of mind and good health as a by-product. If you’re asking me many of us today for reasons justified or unjustified, wittingly or unwittingly, are engaged in seeking the peace of the graveyard and this is reflected at individual and collective level! So why then should we hope to be healthy and happy as a society or civilisation??? As the good Dr. Dixit said, it is necessary to be good human beings if we want to reap good health.

I know some of you will sneer, all this is just for writing, ground realities are different. Sure, life is about perceptions and it is also full of choices…my humble appeal is on one of these beautiful days of September in Goa, make time to think about all these things beyond narrow self-interest and don’t just think, clean up your act if it is in need of cleaning up. This is self-interest in the best sense of the word.

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