A trifle strident...

Something that knocks around my brain is an innocuous comment a friend made, "as a species we have forgotten how to eat."

In this health nut phase of mine, something I am wishing will be more than just a phase, like the violin turned out to be, the deeper I dig the more awed I am at the extent to which we, as a species, have forgotten how and what to eat, not to mention how we live.

We live in "camps", camps of frequently obese and overweight people who appear lean and svelte one day and inflated or bloated soon thereafter.  Some turn on an IV (intravenous) diet, some eat only cabbage for awhile, some turn to something called a General Motors diet and some eat like hunters and gatherers on a paleolithic diet without considering the lifespan of paleolithic man.

The last line of this Wikipedia passage probably underscores the hilarity of the paleolithic diet philosophy:

Overall, Paleolithic peoples experienced less famine and malnutrition than the Neolithic farming tribes that followed them.^[16][98] This was partly because Paleolithic hunter-gatherers had access to a wider variety of plants and other foods, which allowed them a more nutritious diet and a decreased risk of famine.^[16][18][58] Many of the famines experienced by Neolithic (and some modern) farmers were caused or amplified by their dependence on a small number of crops.^[16][18][58] The greater amount of meat obtained by hunting big game animals in Paleolithic diets than in Mesolithic and Neolithic diets may have also allowed Paleolithic Hunter-gatherers to enjoy a more nutritious diet than both Epipaleolithic/Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and Neolithic agriculturalists.^[98] It is also unlikely that Paleolithic hunter-gatherers were affected by modern diseases of affluence and extended life such as Type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease andcerebrovascular disease, because they ate mostly lean meats and plants and frequently engaged in intense physical activity ^[99][100], and because the average lifespan was shorter than the age of common-onset of these conditions.^[101][102]

 That's right, they were gone before any diseases could hit.  And did paleo woman really look like this, the heart disease, diabetes, blood pressure trifecta waiting to happen? My health insurance company would refuse to insure me if I aimed for this:

We met someone who, along with his seven year old daughter, was on this diet.  He told us that there was nothing but venison, obtained via a Pennsylvania supplier, in his freezer.  Perhaps some vegetables but really nothing else.  Really?  He defended against the lifespan arguments by stating that they cooked their food in their tiny little caves and inhaled a lot of smoke which is why they died early, not because of this so called paleo diet ("so called", in my opinion because I don't think the original paleo diet was so venison skewed,  they probably didn't just eat what they killed).

Each of these food camps are insistent and can present compelling reasons for their choices.

Intuition, however, always gets short shrift in this land we call our land.  We like standardized approaches, we like to force a framework on things.  We box everything within rigid outlines.  We like creating formulas and "bibles".  We then swear by our little handbooks so that we can set aside things like reasoning, logic and foresight.  It is compelling to be spoon fed a way of eating (Atkins), a way of living (The Secret), a way of thinking (any number of Dr Phil types getting richer by the minute).

So we have enough experts out there.  If something works for someone they decide that their singular insight can be packaged and sold in bite-sized pieces to all the blind, stumbling masses.  All sheep need shepherds.

Millions get minted on the basis of something that worked for someone.  One size fits all, what could possibly sell better?

Take the debate over whether three meals a day or constant grazing needs to be the norm, the healthier strategy.  There are as many dogmatic opinions and "bibles" here as there are people on the leanness and obesity karmic wheel!

Each person is different, each person's metabolic needs are different, their hereditary factors dictate their needs, their biochemical wiring dictates requirements.  One size can never fit all.

The only prevailing logic, the only decision driver should be the fact that all things are interconnected: your psychological state, your habits, how you adapt, how you grow, your very own personal circumstances.  Perhaps your post-prandial insulin spikes send the right neuro-transmitters through your system, perhaps some others need to minimize those spikes and keep them steady.  Perhaps some can only do well with a three-meal strategy while others need to graze throughout the day.  It can't be dictated through someone's idea of a one size health and nutrition blockbuster for all.

One size never fits all.  Not in life, not in nutrition.  "Schools of thought" simply skew thought.  We have to be our own monitors, our own judges.  We have to think for ourselves, be curious, be empirical and above all - be earnest.

An upstart

This world is new to me.  For decades I've been languishing under the rock of nonchalance and indifference to food related matters.  I ate things that were readily available in frozen boxes, I believed that three packets of sugar in my morning coffee were fine because I wouldn't add sugar to anything for the rest of the day (goes without saying that I would conveniently forget that cake had sugar or gulab jamuns had sugar as long as I told myself a slice or two won't hurt me, after all I wasn't necessarily on a three-square-meals-of-cake diet).

Such nonchalance is expected, I learnt, for someone at least a decade, or even two, younger than me, in fact it is apparently an attractive representation of the state of being youthful, youthfully svelte and carefree.  Much to my chagrin, this thought was confirmed in a random line from a Michel Houellebecq novel called, "The Map and the Territory":

"...standing in front of the Salad Bar where a few middle-aged women calculated, sceptically, the calorie content of the ingredients on offer."

These days I am often found, eyes agog, in organic food store aisles, reading nutrient labels, I just never thought I was screaming out my biological age in this act of nutrition consciousness! Why must such consciousness be treated as a middle-aged affliction? I guess that could be the subject of another rambling post.

For now, let's just say, I am really feeling the result of the changes I have made.  It's as though every cell in my body is singing hallelujah at my having come to my senses.  It's shedding all the fat it clung to as a comfort blanket in a formerly nutritionally challenged environment.

I started my day today with a berry bonanza smoothie.  I blended together every berry imaginable with almond and cashew cream, water, ice cubes and some honey and it was probably the best thing I had ever tasted.  I am certain I have never felt such tissue-level, deep satisfaction from anything else I've ever ingested.

Energized by the smoothie I tried my own twist on a veggie omelet.  I whipped up my great tasting organic brown eggs with thinly sliced sweet orange peppers, added in a dash of garam masala, some sprinkles of garlic and parsley, a dash of sea salt, a tiny bit of the same almond-cashew cream that was used in the aforementioned smoothie and then made an omelet out of it all.  It is tasting amazing, I am eating it as I write.  Who in their right mind waits for 45 years before making room in their grocery budget for sweet orange peppers? No one, I imagine. 

That's what makes me a parvenu to this right-eating strata of society.  The people who are the Mayflower elite of this strata weren't "health nuts", "rabbit-food eaters" or food activists.  They were right.  So many of these right thinking people are my friends here (none of them will be tagged, it is, after all, embarrassing to announce to the world how much of a troglodyte one has been).  

They solved the food mystery eons ago. Now they'll pat me on my head in a patronizing way, saying things like better late than never, and try this, try that, you don't know the half of it...etc.   I realize I don't.  But being empirical about this whole thing is so much more satisfying than digging for or seeking advice.  

Basic biochemistry in laymen's terms (readily available on Google), knowledge of the Kreb's Cycle (also readily at one's service via Wikipedia) and realization that all human organs talk to each other via certain neuro-transmitters that signal well-being or need, almost in zero and one like sequences of response or lack of response, that's about all one needs in order to get this whole thing right.

Nutrient label reading middle-aged person and proud to be a newly minted one!

Kali ghata chhaye

Kali ghata chhaye

Yeh kaun aaya

Yeh kaun aaya

Ae ishq ye sab duniya wale

Ae ishq ye sab duniya wale

"Keep a diary. It might keep you."

So we learn here that we should keep a diary.  It will keep us.  Cryptic advice.  It will keep us sane, whole, wits intact, what?  But forgetting about the latter, it is indeed good advice. Over the years I've accumulated so many fancy journals, leather bound, artsy covers, cloth bound, you name it, we've owned it.  Inaugurating them and filling up the first page was always a very satisfying experience.  It was an experience matched in satisfaction only with finding an old diary whose pages were filled by someone else.  Oh yes, few things come close to the pleasure of snooping and wondering, while snooping, if the author intended secrecy or was hoping that their journals would be discovered and that through their journals they would in turn be discovered, remembered, understood and immortalized.

I've stopped buying those journals now.  These are different times and our lives are ostensibly public (ostensibly because we only share cherry-picked moments and I doubt any of our virtual friends have the desire or the inclination to wonder about that which is not being said online).  We share the highlights of our days with others hoping to either stress the ways in which we are different or to find consonance.

So if we must keep a diary, so that it "keeps" us, we can keep it in a blog and drop the coy bit about storing our innermost thoughts in the pages of some journal that would then be stashed away in some drawer somewhere, begging to be found by friends, relatives, future generations, etc.  A song comes to mind:



Tu aa ke mujhe pehchaan zara (Come find me)

We digress.  But then again, we are so very prone to musical digressions.  Every thought snags on a song.

The first advice I ever got about diaries was that at its most basic level it needed to be an accounting of the day.  There are large chunks of my day that are repetitive.  It's surprising when I fire up MS Excel each morning and type in "=NOW( )" and it spits out a new date and time! I guess the date does change, if nothing else.  Sometimes Interstate 80 isn't a parking lot, this wasn't such a day.  I wake up, I drive some thirty miles, I immerse myself in various analyses and I drive back the same distance.  Those are the large repetitive chunks.

The things that do change however, and are really worth writing about, are the notes that bounce off the ostinato, so to speak.  These thoughts are often unrelated and they stay unresolved like scattered fragments that could be collected and molded into something of consequence if they weren't so fleeting, and as tantalizingly out of reach as those earth-like exoplanets we discover each day.

Today this song filled the sound theater of my car on my way to work:



And I wondered about the lyrics that suggest that our voices would stand the test of time while our names are obliterated or lost in its annals and our faces change beyond recognition.  I wondered if this was true.  I tried to think of all the loved ones I had lost, of all the friends who were friends once but are strangers now.  If it wasn't for the aid of a recording device, a constant replaying, would I remember the specific timbres of their voices, the cadences of their speech, their intonation, the sound of their laughter? I have my doubts.  I think I would do better with faces and would never forget a name.

Then I heard this song:



In this lyrically and melodiously supreme song there's a thought that the moon would reflect our pasts (yeh chand beete zamanon ka aina hoga) and the floating clouds would form the likeness of a face (bhatakti abra mein chehra koi bana hoga) and this thought transported me to places I have never been and moments I've never felt.

So I moved on to my own lame recollections of the things that stay on after we've lived our short lives, the things the moon or the giant sequoias have lived through.  I recollected something a friend wrote about the art of stretching and I thought of the static sequoias in their little corner of California countering my thoughts about their isolated and oblivious, though intact, state through most of recent history as they tell me they weren't "oblivious", that they heard it all through the whispering wind and the percussive branches.

Then my thoughts veered off to the idea of artistry and brushstrokes and the place where grace notes and tiny brushstrokes converge, where a little goes a long way and differences can be felt in infinitesimal degrees.

All this was yet another scattered reverie that helped me discern 12/19/11 from 12/20/11 and is now stored in this very public diary.

I get closer to ending the clattering of these keys with a final thought about the fungibility of our media.  Will the history of this era be the most accurate it has ever been, untainted by biased rewriting, because of videographic or endlessly documented virtual evidence or will the lack of backward compatibility in technology leave future generations guessing about the purpose of the iPhone carcasses they find littered at future archeological digs?

How it sounded over the years (1981-1988 continued...)

These years saw the return of Indira Gandhi.  As a child I was proud of the fact that India had such a personable and powerful woman prime minister.  She was always impressive to me despite what I heard about her tyranny and her abuse of power.  She always appeared energetic and purposeful unlike the Morarji and Charan Singh crowd of the years that saw Coca Cola disappear.  Who needed them running the country?  A woman who radiated power was so much more desirable.  It felt as though we were well-governed again.

1981 was the year of Silsila.  The Amitabh Bachchan and Rekha rumors were at their peak.  Every magazine that the magazine wallahs delivered at home were grabbed for the latest on this particular rumor.  I refused to believe them.  I was never willing to entertain any negative thoughts about the people I liked and AB was on that list, despite Shaan.  But is was shocking to see a movie based on these rumors, it seemed to lend them some credence.  Everyone acting in it, with the exception of Shashi Kapoor and Sanjeev Kumar, was an affected party.  It appeared nothing short of audacious.  But the songs were memorable, the yellow tulips in Amsterdam amidst which the rumored lovebirds pranced, making them even more so.  Each song had to me memorized.  Each one became a part of our three-home sing-off.  There was Neela aasman so gaya, Dekha ek khwab to yeh silsile hue, Rang barse.

There was a sense of the nation fracturing a bit during these years.  Zail Singh was the President of India and I still remember his speech calling for national integration, "Hamein rash-ter ko ek suttar mein bandhna hai".  Doordarshan liked to hammer this message home whenever they could, stressing unity in diversity by playing this 1974 Films Division of India film over and over again:



Some names were often on the news, like Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale.  Some tensions were brewing, building, something was absorbing latent heat.

1981 was the year dad visited Philippines and he brought back a gorgeous embroidered, wraparound skirt and top for me.  I was in love with this dress and wore it at ever special occasion.  The photograph below was one of those special occasions.  Mrs Gandhi was going to inaugurate the annual Science Exhibition at Teen Murti Bhavan and I was going to hold the plate with the scissors she would use to cut the ribbon.  There was excitement in the air.  I couldn't believe I was actually going to see her! And then I saw her, this powerhouse of a woman, so petite, so pink-cheeked and so much in awe of my Filipino dress!  Good times :)

 That was one unforgettable celebrity contact.

Life went on for the moment with more stellar performances from AB in Namak Halal and Shakti and catchy numbers like:

Aaj rapat jayein to hamein na uthaiyo 
Jaane kaise kab kahan ikraar ho gaya

There was also the Farooque Shaikh and Deepti Naval starrer Saath-Saath with stellar musical performances by the late Jagjit Singh and Chitra Singh:


Yeh tera ghar yeh mera ghar
Pyar mujhse jo kiya tumne to kya paogi
Yeh bata de mujhe zindagi

Tumko dekha to yeh khayal aaya
Kyun zindagi ke raah mein


I think Umrao Jaan was made around the same time - an amazing movie with an immortal songs and singing:

Dil cheez kya hai
In aankhon ki masti ke
Justaju jiski thi
Yeh kya jagah hai doston

Then came the movie Coolie.  I never saw it and am not sure if it had any songs worth remembering but it was the one where AB got gravely injured on the sets of this movie and a new actor, playing the part of villain - Puneet Issar - caught a lot of heat for it.

Meanwhile things kept heating up on the political front.  There were growing concerns about Sikh militancy and a separatist movement.  Indira Gandhi kept toughening up her stance.  Until we got to Operation Blue Star and the raid on the Golden Temple in Amritsar in early 1984.  The news on television, the newspaper headlines, were full of shocking images of the arms and weapons that had been stockpiled at this holy shrine.  Through it all there were the national integration messages still coming at us through every mass communication channel around us.

1984 was the college year and on October 31st, 1984 we were in an Economic History class with Mrs Mathur when our class was interrupted and she was called out.  She came to make the tearful announcement that Indira Gandhi had been shot.  Our class, stunned in disbelief, was dismissed and we were asked to go home.

The television was on all the time as we heard of the multiple rounds that her bodyguards Beant Singh and Satwant Singh had fired into her petite frame.  I had seen that petite frame.

The next several days were beyond being the darkest period in the history of Delhi.  Sikh homes were burnt, there were riots, killings, carnage everywhere.  We just stayed huddled inside, worrying about and praying for the safety of all our Sikh friends and acquaintances.

I wonder, as I recollect these times, if we are a scaled down representation of the Yugas from Hindu lore.   We start our lives in Satya Yug, the Dharma Bull on all four legs, all is well in our worlds (some fortunate worlds), we are not the actors or the initiators in our lives at this early, perhaps five year long stretch.

Then we get to the Treta Yuga of our lives - the world takes on a bilious green hue from certain angles, we become sensitive to slights, we fear certain things, certain people, but things are still more or less rosy.

Dwapar Yuga, we are in the 12-20 period of our lives and the world has disappointed us quite a bit more.  We've probably experienced every negative emotion by now, we've seen the evil in some people, we've acquired some shells to keep our innermost child safe and secure but we get a good sense of the darkness all around.  This is when we learn to take things in stride, if we're strong, because not doing so could destroy us.  We develop defense or offense mechanisms.  The bull is on two legs by now.

In this Dwapar phase of my life I saw the violence with which Mrs Gandhi was assassinated, I saw the ensuing genocide and in December of the same year, we saw the tragedy of Bhopal, thanks to the negligence and greed of the battery maker Union Carbide.

Two years later, after years of hearing about the Cold War, the "balance of terror", the escalation in nuclear arms we heard of the worst nuclear disaster in the history of human kind at Chernobyl.  This was the world we were about to inherit in all its rotting glory.

And then we arrive into the Kal Yug of our lives.  This phase doesn't end in five years.  We stay here for the rest of our lives, in the thick of it, riding a roller coaster of despair or euphoria on a one-legged bull.  It has its moments, its bright sparks but the periods of darkness are powerful and potent when they arrive.

Speaking of Kal Yug, there was a movie of the same name, perhaps 1981, directed by Shyam Benegal.   It was very well made, or so I thought at the time. Trying to track the modern story as though it was the Mahabharata was an interesting exercise.

All this time, I thought Kal Yug had one song filmed on Rekha but I was so very wrong; memory conflation at play.  The song I was thinking of was actually from the film Vijeta and I remember it well now.  The song was Man anand anand chayo.