Leaves from experience

About five years ago, I was diagnosed as having diabetes. After the initial shock, I didn’t have the slightest clue of how I should go ...

About five years ago, I was diagnosed as having diabetes. After the initial shock, I didn’t have the slightest clue of how I should go about tackling it. Fortunately, I came across a great doctor whose first advice to me was to lose weight. He then told me that I was indeed fortunate to be diabetic in India, for there are in this country many antidotes that literally grow on trees.

The problem is that we are uneducated about and unaware of the importance of the herbs and plants around us. If only we were, as children, made aware of the importance of the jamun, karela, neem, and methi seeds, we may all have been much healthier.

His words turned me into a goat (in fact people did start inquiring whether I had been one in my last birth!). I got into the habit of plucking the leaves of the neem and jamun, at every available opportunity, and stuffing them into my mouth. Today, I cannot resist the temptation of stopping by a roadside jamun or neem tree and helping myself to the leaves on offer.

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Then my diet got transformed. It now rotated around around methi seeds, bhindi and karela, daal ka atta and black tea (milk is on the “avoidable” list for diabetics). Of course, once in a while there was a departure from such “health food”, but I had become so addicted to my special diet that I actually missed eating my simple, home-cooked fare after a while.

The doctor also drilled into my diabetic head that it was never too late to reverse an old lifestyle and diet pattern, and — yes — about the importance of traditional practices like Yoga and the Daily Walk. No hi-fi gyms can ever match the simplicity and health giving attributes of a plain, simple constitutional in a nearby park. He also stressed on the importance of music. None of those jazzed up blasts from Bollywood, but classical music with its ancient moorings — whether it was Sufi or Bhakti or even film songs of an era when melody reigned, the music of the fifties, sixties and even seventies.

The doctor’s advice came as a reality check. It made me wonder why we have become so unaware or so uncaring about traditional practices that we have almost forgotten them; that even while health giving substances are available all around us, we can no longer recognise them and gain from their attributes. In fact, we may never have rediscovered them if the West had not done so before us, and made it appear as the done thing.

So useful were the lessons that my doctor taught me that I found that diabetes — a condition that would normally have horrified one — was turning out to be an opportunity to connect with the natural world and ancient wisdom, and feel a great deal better in the process.