Focus Wellness

  My passion for driving always stuck with me since I got behind the wheel. Being myopic from a young age, I always wanted a clear windscreen on my car. Driving safely and being responsible for my passengers and the others on the road demanded clear driving conditions. Wiper blades are the most sensitive part of a motor car. Being exposed to nature, they wear out fast. Heavy monsoons at my place add to the woes of wet driving conditions. I replace them quite often as I have to see the road ahead clear. Nowadays, quality has deteriorated due to the increasing costs. Anyway, I replaced it on schedule. In two weeks, streaks appeared when the blades started to wipe. It bothered me as it was sooner than expected. I worried about the streaks made by the sooner worn-out part of the wiper. The road ahead was again not clear. The two streaks ran parallel and were almost at my eye level, blurring my vision of the road. I pondered for a while. Wasn't I too focused on the two little streaks ma...

 After a recent flu, I found myself having a dislike for tea. I was surprised because tea had always been my favorite. Homeopathy selects medicines based on many individual traits, and I looked up in my repertory for a medicine that had an aversion to tea. I had it, and it relieved me of the flu very fast. But in the next few weeks, I saw another peculiar thing happening to me. I wasn’t enjoying the tea I made. I was weak after recovering from the flu. I wanted something to brighten me up. But tea from my regular tea shops was as tasty as before, maybe more. I was bemused.  Curiosity made me a bit restless. Darjeeling tea made with grass-fed cow milk boiled in water drawn from the well boiled with utmost care did not taste as sweet as the ones from the shops. I started my thought journey from the hills, where the tea was plucked, to the sink, where I washed my teacup. Voila, in a matter of seconds, I found it! The tea, sugar, milk, cups, teapot, and my poor old stove were not ...

 The fishy smell from the bamboo baskets hit my nose at the edge of the railway platform. My friend said fishing is one of the leading businesses in Mangalore. It is a port city.  I nodded, smiling at my childhood memories of Vizag Port and the morning fish smell wafting through the balconies of our home in Maharanipeta.   We were in the town of Golli Bajji for two days. That evening, we downed Ideals chocolate daddies and carrot halwa soaked in ice cream. Later, a literary stroll inside the Sapna book house. That night was reserved for a national meeting, and in a loo break, my eye caught a neon. It was an uptown place. I took a peek inside to see the nightlife in Mangalore. The place was a reflection of the affluence in that city. Rich spirits adorned the shelves, cocktails costing the earth spewed on the oaks and the chairs by people who made statements of fashion houses from across the globe. The rain-soaked morning was lazy, but I didn't want to miss my morning ...

It was a referred case, and so I had to be double careful. Covid had changed all norms of consultations. Over the phone, they said few problems, and as the patient couldn't come to my clinic, the father and son duo decided to come over for a detailed talk. It was a case of cerebral degeneration. They had lost hope with many systems of medicines and came to me as a last resort in Homeopathy. Spending a huge chunk of their life in a state in India away from their hometown for their livelihood they came down to their place with a lot of dreams after retirement. The mother was the one who was affected and so the whole family was shattered. At this stage, I too knew that only conservative management of the most distressing symptoms would be the only solution. But that was not the actual problem before me.  The mother was an excellent homemaker and a great cook churning out mouth-watering dishes to the whole family even on ordinary days. She would throw in her best during family occasion...

Doctor, may I hold your hand? As it was not one for a handshake, this request did intrigue me. Before granting his wish, I felt I needed to know the reason. The quest of finding it led to an unfurling of that boys bringing up. The youngest to two elder siblings and, with his father an expatriate, he grew up amid three women; two sisters and a doting mother. During the consultation, he disclosed to me that he never felt attracted to women. He wanted to live with a man whom he could choose when it was time. The parents who accompanied him for a later session were hell-bent on not allowing such a marriage as their religion never allowed it. They couldn't bear the shame inflicted by society. Delving deep into his mind, he revealed the reason why he couldn't accept a woman as his life partner. He had never seen his daddy love his mommy, and they would always quarrel in front of him whenever his father came on leave to live with them. The revelations of the parents were furthermore s...

From the mundane brown and beige uniform, it was an entry to a world of colours when we went for the school tour to Ooty, Bangalore, and Mysore. Even though we pulled out the best from our closets, something was missing. College, too, was no exception. An Armani or the local footpath t-shirt didn't make a difference as the white apron over it cloaked the colours beneath it. We couldn't go beyond a point to showcase our fashion tastes. We had a code. Few teachers used to scold us if we didn't dress up to the dignity of our profession. School and college tours were a break and a breather from the hectic schedules. And we had to look like romantics as tours was the time when most cupids struck. So we had to add to what was missing to complete the effect. The addition was mostly a borrow or an authoritative steal from mother, elder sibling or cousins, sometimes even friends. I remember borrowing my cousin's floral shirt for the school tour. That pattern was a rave in those ...

As I was receiving his symptoms, he said that I spoke good Hindi. Hearing his comment made me laugh deep down in my heart. Setting up my practice after graduation, I had a lot of immigrant labourers as patients; poor them were finding it hard to meet a doctor with whom they could communicate their symptoms effectively. They were so happy seeing a doctor who could "fluently" speak with them in Hindi.  At school, I never understood a single word of what my Hindi teacher taught. It wasn't her fault at all. I was a hundred percent dyslexic when it came to Hindi. Not a single word entered my head nor, would anything come out from my mouth. She used to cane and coax me a lot with total futile results. I barfed out what I had somehow pushed into my grey matter on to the answer sheets and barely managed to pass. Later, my graduation days in English literature was where I met Bollywood through DDLJ and Rangeela, and lo, I was learning Hindi through the language of love in the film...

Without an iota of doubt, you should say that 2020 was a great year. You just witnessed a year that will go down in history books as one of the greatest faced by humans ever since recorded. There have been wars and pandemics before covid 19. But this one got faced by a generation, especially millennials, who had never encountered such things. Yesterday, few were forwarding memes with the apprehension of even using 'happy' to wish the new year. 2020 was, indeed, a great year where new normals got established. Every single human being on this earth got affected, even the remotest humans living on isolated islands. This pandemic has taught us some great lessons. Of them, the most significant I feel is we should not think much of our future. Just think of how we can survive the present. That will bring peace of mind. And whenever you look back, don't forget to say wow! 2020, you made me strong.  And from me, it is a happy new year to all of you.

"It is too cold!" calls my wife when my kid son joins me in my morning walks. December mornings are pretty cool at my rustic home. Our pet dachshund Rana has his share of morning exercise along with us. Both of them are too playful, and I have to keep a watchful eye, or else they might pull each other's leg on my blind eye. Occasionally they go to the backyard, and suddenly there is silence. I call out both names with no response. On hurrying my pace, I get to see either the dachshund bathed in the cold tap water; the poor one grabbed by the collar with no chance of escape.  Or else both of them rolling in the mud. That silence is a sure sign that they are up to some mischief. Most episodes of the silence of a kid are a sure escapade to mischief. There is an initial moment of anxiety for the parent. It transforms into a (dis)heartening sight of a Picasso on the Teflon coated drawing-room wall.  Silence has an array of emotions. It is haunting when we lose someone in the f...

The father and son are one example; the daughter-in-law and mother-in-law being another. It may be due to my never-ending fascination for planes and fighter jets that I feel that the struggle between these two resemble dogfights. Yes, a dogfight is close air-to-air combat. One aircraft is already airborne and thinks it is the master of the skies. In comes, the friendly, but the already airborne one's radar detects it as an enemy. Alas! Dogfight ensues until one has to fall. The Mig 29 father has been the breadwinner of the family all the while. His Sukhoi son grows up, marries, gives two grandchildren for the family to cradle and play. Both have their roles to play in defending the family. But in the mental combat for mastery of the family skies, both their radars get locked as enemies. The same is for the C 130 J Super Hercules (mother-in-law). She has been master of the kitchen skies and can't even think of an Apache Helicopter coming into her space to test its airworthiness ...

Why words when there is 'the' glance? Confused eh!  It is the husband's friend's party. The lady already bored into three hours of faking smiles with not-so-familiar faces, with just a glance sends out a swarm of messages. It's time to leave; you've had enough drinks, enough of gobbling up all the fried fish and pastry desserts. The list goes on with just a look. Good heavens. It is so powerful - The GLANCE. Do you remember the first one? It must have been in school or college, more for the lucky cupid struck ones and not much less for the others too. The glance was very much longed for then and never did strike a sour note. It always accompanied a missed heartbeat and would feel bad if they couldn't get one when desired. Cruising through the sweaty lanes of our lives, we tend to lose the fantasies of our emotions and settle for the realities of it. It happens in most families.  The glance is powerful. It is so because spouses use it the most, and they are n...

There is one person in every family who is subject to this. For many, it may be the only place of Zen, an escape from the mundane; but the moment they enter to answer nature's call or to scrub away a day's dirt and sweat, bang goes the knock on the door. Bang, not knock! Where is my wallet? Where is my toy? Questions accompanying the knocking goes on like these. The female as mother or wife is subject to this more often, with a few male counterparts also occasionally enjoying this adventure. This poor victim gets no time to freshen up, whereas others spend up to hours in the same place with a handheld gadget connected to high-speed wifi and no bangs to bother them. This member of the family is characteristic. For them, the cake suddenly turns too sweet when it does not suffice for the children if they ask for more than what was their fair share of the portion.  These members are easily spotted when they come for public functions along with their families. They are the odd man o...

As kids, our trips to the Ramakrishna beach at Vizag defaulted munching into roasted corn ears. The other delicacies of those days on display by the beach hawkers were puffed rice mixture and clean-cut slices of raw mango sprinkled with a rainbow of spices. The corn ears dressed in that secret spicy mix was magic to the taste buds of us kids. Life moved on with an uprooting from Andhra to my hometown in Kerala. We missed the sights and smell of those favorite beach snacks. Last week en route my daily commute, I was surprised to see a big heap of raw maize ears beside a roadside fruit vendor. It was a never before rare sight at my place.  How come such an abundance of corn all at once? And that too at a place where neither it is a staple nor a snack? Somewhere along the consumer end, few links were missing. It didn't take much time for me to figure out. Lockdown measures had halted all cinema theatres, multiplexes, and lo all the popcorn lay strewn all over the street as maize ears....