Focus Wellness

The multitude of colours on a croton plant makes it an ornamental one for the garden. Shades of green, yellow, and red make them a sight to behold. They do have an occasional flower, but their leaves themselves are colourful to our garden. In the picture, you can see the croton with green and yellow leaves. The green is due to chlorophyll, which is the food manufacturing pigment of the plant. Yellow and red are due to the presence of different plant pigments called carotenoids. These cannot manufacture food, but that does not mean they are unimportant for the plant. They support the process of photosynthesis. And though they appear trivial, they are a very integral part. The same we can see in many families, both nuclear and joint. The greens are the ones who work to provide food for the family. The yellows and reds don't manufacture food but aid in the whole process that sustains the plant. The greens, at some point in their life, think that they are the only ones toiling. But is ...

"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....

Hundreds of people walk into the professional life of a doctor, but the moment they walk out of the consulting room, they are gone from the mind of the physician. Those with which we cannot arrive at a conclusive diagnosis lingers for some time till we succeed at the right one. After all, it's the life of a person we are working on; the space for error has to be zero. There was this medium frame, tall, wheatish woman, who always used to narrate her complaints with a smile on her face. It was for a mild fever she consulted me years back. Having found relief in my prescriptions, she brought her grown-up children for various mild and moderate ailments. Never in her, any visits have I seen an anxious face on her. Smiling, smiling, and always smiling. In any case, anyone would conclude that this woman has a happy life, especially a great marriage. On one such visit, she asked me if there is any treatment for alcoholism in Homoeopathy? "Definitely" was my reply and enquired who...