Table Manners

Food is a basic part of all our lives. For some, it is a defining factor, due to its shortage, or excess, or due to our growing world obsession with food as a cultural interest. There’s a lot of etiquette and modes of behaviour when it comes to sharing food that varies from culture to culture, family to family, and much of this we pick up as children when we aren’t really thinking about it, or when we’re being told what to do. For example, I grew up in a family where it was made clear always that things needed to be shared. If you were eating something you offered it to everyone else. What was there was evenly split and that was that. But that’s not necessarily everyone’s experience, or even the ‘right way’. It is just one way, and one that is practical when resources are not unlimited. Increasingly, I think urban people are growing up imagining that resources are unlimited. We must all have everything and now, not a practical way of looking at the world, but this sense of entitlement is at an all time high and food, being one of the most biologically easy things to obsess over, also gets treated the same way.

Entitlement leads to all out greed and so you will often observe tiffs over food, even in strata of society where there is no shortage of it. Food becomes a competitive sport among children and mostly among adults, which is where the children learn it, let’s not forget. Most siblings will have stories of competitiveness over food and most adults continue that into adulthood, albeit with the delusion of more sneakiness or subtlety. They’re not subtle.

Invariably, in the great food wars that break out silently across tables, floors, fine china, cheap plastic cutlery and every other possible culinary stage, someone either eventually gives in, or is less competitive and let’s others have their way. Know it or not, you are on one of the sides to that equation. Over a bag of French fries, a box of cake slices, a plate of food, are you the one who attacks first and picks the largest piece, or are you the type to wait, to specifically try to take a modest helping, to give others a chance to pick? Choosing food is actually a great indicator of character, I find, and you can sometimes tell more about people over a dinner table than you can over years of small talk and deep discussion. Such things can’t be read into from one stray incident, but most of us have consistent behavioural patterns when it comes to food. When we talk, we usually show what we want to show, but when it comes to eating and such basic instinctive needs, our social filters are less effective. What do you say about yourself when there is slice of cake to be picked off a plate? Something to consider the next time you’re sharing a meal or a snack.

Team work

I really hated group projects in school and college. It always meant one or two people did all the work and the rest just pretended to be doing something until they didn’t have to do anything any more. That was almost my universal experience on the subject and perhaps it was because I was always one of the former group. Of course, ask any of my group mates and I’m sure they’ll tell you they carried the whole group on their back down a flight of flaming stairs personally. But then most people are likely to rewrite such things in their heads, so we’ll forgive them their one and only exercise in imagination.

I remember one particular class where a group of five of us had two weeks to research and prepare a 15-minute presentation. The idea was for the team to decide a topic, break it apart, let the individuals research and prepare their own piece, and then the actual performance would be a coordinated effort, each speaking for 3 minutes or thereabouts. A relative piece of cake. As the two weeks passed, and group meetings made it more and more clear than no one knew what they were doing or even the material that they had supposedly researched, the final day saw me standing up there for 15 minutes, alone, with slides made by me, covering the entire topic. You see, I was flexible, and frankly that presentation wasn’t even a blip in my busy schedule of proper design-projects that kept me working into the early mornings at the time, but the inflexible always take advantage of that. Our group was penalised a little for everyone not presenting, but the mild penalty didn’t really bother me much and the rest of the group probably got a better grade for their “work” than if they would have actually opened their mouths in public. Such is life if you want to ‘get the job done’ over assigning blame, but it’s easy to make a habit of it.

There’s an other aspect about working with others that is important to realise, from offices to families, from colleges to creative collaborations, and I touched on it glancingly with the bit about burning flights of stairs before. In the average team, you have one or two people who actually do everything, the rest will pretend and keep delaying until time has run out and the one or two have no choice but to shoulder the extra burden. After all, they now know more than everyone else; It’s only logical. At this point, or even before, the light-weights will talk, and boy will they talk endlessly! The stories they will tell, the theories they will spin about the intricacies of the work at hand (which they didn’t do and aren’t doing). These people will likely go and write the book about the work that they didn’t do, and it will surely be filled with a lot of large words and lofty concepts. It will also include stories of how they saved the day by carrying the entire team down a flight of burning stairs on their backs.

The ‘system’, whether it be education or employment or industry, is often set up by those who talk, not by those who do. They’re the ones who have enough time to set up the rules and make all those neat little labels on coloured paper while others were shouldering their actual responsibilities. The system will often tell you about ‘playing well with others’, which is usually their way of telling the ones who work to do so quietly and not spoil their delusions of indispensability. As a person who works, you might go along with the charade at times, and sometimes you might not, but it is useful to really dig deep into your self and find out which side of teamwork you fall on. Do you talk too much, or do you do too much? Because I’m sorry to break it to you, but the majority of us talk too much.

Making Time

Of all the resources that you can be flexible with, your time is the most precious, and also the most often and casually exploited. This becomes doubly true if you go through most of your life wearing the label of freelancer. Like it or not, in most people’s heads, this translates to ‘jobless and sitting at home with infinite time on your hands’, and they will often treat you accordingly. The same can be said when you are on vacation, and since my life is usually divided between freelancing and rarer bouts of being on vacation, I know a bit about this topic.

I think time is important. I think people should be on time and keep to agreed schedules and appointments and such. I also think our modern world is too anal-retentive about the subject, and selectively and hypocritically so. In the real world, stuff does happen, even to the most conscientious of us; Tyres go flat, traffic gets blocked, there are emergencies, and some days are just not your days. All these things, I think deserve to be shown a bit of flexibility on some occasions. If someone is stuck in traffic everyday and keeps you waiting an hour, then you have a problem.

During my days of more actively chasing every stray comment about someone needing a ‘designer’ — I use the quotes because what they usually needed was a nanny-slave — I’ve done my share of waiting for people to show up, or even waiting for people to open the door to their office and simply let me in, usually not for any good reason. When it comes to work and business, there is a lot of power-play surging under the surface, a sign of feeble and insecure minds, the same that are secretly declaring war over a dinner plate. People seem to think it’s impressive and intimidating to make you wait in some ways. I just think it’s childish, but needless to say the population of the childish above the age of 10, is not to be underestimated.

If you are a flexible person, everyone else in the world is always much busier than you. It doesn’t matter if you run a nuclear power plant, or a 24-hour cat delivery service, somehow, people with 9-5 jobs where they extensively update Facebook have no time when you need it. Try to make any shared plans, and they are bound to be cancelled or postponed several times, because you take it. Try to get them to commit to a casual meetings, and you’d think a United Nations disaster-relief feasibility team needs to get involved before their schedule will be clear enough for you, mostly because you take it, and also because you will say yes immediately and adjust around your priorities when they call you on a whim. Which kind of creature are you? Are you always waiting and twisting your schedules around others? Or are you the one making people wait and juggle?

Being Understanding

Being flexible starts off on a more basic level, that of empathy. The ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. If you think in that particular way, it’s not always easy to take everything people do as a dire personal affront. It makes you understanding, not just in the practical worldly issues of food, time and work, but also on a more abstract human level. Human beings are complex creatures and our ability to think abstract thoughts have made us both extremely adaptive and also messed-up. Our thoughts and motivations are often at war with themselves and it is quite a miracle that most of us maintain a modicum of sanity.

Part of the mechanism that helps us stay on the mental straight-and-narrow is not an internal one. Social interaction is in many ways our steam valve. We make friends and share things even with strangers because it helps us cope. In communicating, our internal idiosyncrasies are robbed of their sharp edge and we continue functioning normally and without the cares that would overwhelm us without any outlet for our thoughts and worries.

For sharing though, you need people who are not just as enthusiastic to share, but are even more enthusiastic to listen, to understand, to empathise. These listeners are not as common as you’d think, even though they hold such a crucial role in human society. Think about your own life and friends, how many of them would you trust with your thoughts? Your real inner thoughts, not the stuff you say at people to make conversation. I would hazard a guess that that list of people is closer to one or a very small number rather than many.

Listeners need to be understanding, because they cannot be judging what they listen to all the time, and even if they are, they can’t express it to the person trusting them to listen. That would remove the effectiveness of the listener in the transaction. The peril of being a listener, however, is that if you think most people have it tough finding someone to talk to, you as a listener are going to find it exponentially tougher. Most people don’t want to listen to the listener. More likely, they aren’t even really capable because their relationship with the understanding listener was formed largely because they had things to say and he/she was an understanding listener. The deal was never that the favour would be reciprocated, or even could be.

Don’t get me wrong, those who listen well usually like to listen. It fills a need in their lives too, to absorb and understand and comprehend and help. But, listeners are just as fraught with internal conflict as anyone else and even they sometimes have enough of being a resource of understanding. Then there is the fact that the listener is automatically in the position to see patterns of behaviour and recognise when someone is being an idiot in whatever they are thinking, or complaining about, or worrying about. Understanding calls for kid-gloves and mild suggestions rather than full-frontal attack on the motivations of the person sharing their mental secrets, but sometimes a sort of understanding fatigue does set in and all of us who depend on others to listen must always appreciate that burden. We take it for granted too often that they will always be there for us, even when we are not for them.

Personal Space

In my home town of Bombay, there is common refrain in the local dialect of Hindi that says “adjust karneka”. Basically “One must adjust/accommodate”, a sound piece of advice in a city with 20 million people, where personal space is a luxury you are not always allowed, certainly not in public transport. The trains in the city are a phenomenon that defies description and I’m sure breaks all sort of records for number of untrained contortionists that can be fit within a closed container, but I’ll speak more about the buses run by BEST, which are both wonderful in their convenience and ubiquity, and are also a great exercise in studying the adjustments and impositions people make on each other’s personal space.

I love the buses in Bombay, they are rudimentary, simple, airy, cover almost every nook and cranny of the metropolis with startling efficiency, and they just work. Of course, there is as much of an important human element involved in this sort of travel; You interact more with the users of the service than the providers of it and a lot of patterns and unsaid rules get formed out of the chaos. First off, the dos and donts in a bus in Bombay seem to vary based on location, with the more pragmatic office crowd in the centre of town being a lot more adjusting and live-and-let-live than the sometimes hostile and petty familial crowds of the suburbs; It is a strange dichotomy, but very apparent at times.

When I was very young, I remember being told of a time when the buses in Bombay had abolished the system of reserved seats for women. There were still a few seats up front for the disabled to be given preferential access to the door at the front of the bus, but I remember my Mother telling me that public feedback and gotten rid of the women’s special seats because in a teeming culture with no broad segregation of the sexes, it complicated travel to unacceptable levels. But then that was probably sometime in the 70s. Obviously that wouldn’t last. Over the following decades, the reserved seats have been increasing. There’s a block for women, some for senior citizens, the original few for the disabled and the rest (the actual majority in number) need to scramble for what remains, because anything with a label on it is always in danger of being claimed by someone, often wrongly, out of sheer entitlement. That in my mind has been the biggest shift, a move from a culture of social courtesy and adjustment, where a seat would be offered to a woman or someone elderly through deference or request, to a culture of entitlement. Respect being demanded, not commanded. This isn’t understanding any more, this is enforcement with threat of consequences. Threats don’t make us more understanding, they make us disgruntled.

In general, however, things are extremely smooth on the bus as long as most of the passengers have seating. It’s when the standees collect and grow in the aisle that the human element becomes more interesting and challenging. Technically, a bus is rated to carry a certain number of standing passengers and no more. Practically, as with most things in Bombay, transport and space functions at levels of load much beyond the the call of duty. Buses do get packed, to levels that would alarm those that value their personal space, but the whole exercise goes surprisingly well, or as well as it can under the circumstances.

The central aisle in a regular BEST bus is not a grand boulevard. It can comfortably let two average sized Indians pass each other, in 1972. Today, it would only accommodate one average sized McDonald’s junkie. Additionally, at rush hour, the increasingly above-average-sized urban Indian must deal with being either one of the two rows of standing passengers pressed against the sides of the aisle, or the lone acrobat trying to make their way down the aisle, pretty much running the gauntlet between plump persons, heavy handbags, angry commuters, and a sliver of hope at the end of the human tunnel. There are those that make way and those that are inconsiderate, both in the ones hanging on for dear life and those trying to walk through the mass of humanity.

Even if you do get a seat, there are adjustments to be made and those who are civilised and those who aren’t. During rush hour there is a lot of adjusting to be done with those standing over you in the aisle and sometimes leaning over you, out of necessity to let someone pass behind them, or out of sheer exhaustion. Some of this you need to allow for, as a sensible person, because you know that in their position you would not have a choice just as they don’t, but some of it is also simply people being insensitive or not caring. You can understand the occasional handbag that will bump you in the head as someone passes by, see it in the right light and you will even smile at it, I have. But some people do walk by with no regard for their fellow passengers and that’s not a good thing. There are even those who will stand in the aisle and lean on the side of your seat, and will let go of all responsibility of holding themselves up in anything resembling a standing position, until you’re practically bent over in your seat for having to adjust to their laziness; That’s not a good thing either. And then there’s the person you’re sharing your seat with and how they might be good and stick to their side of it, or assume the whole thing was actually for them and you are merely intruding. It takes all types.

Speaking of sharing seats, this reminds me of an observation I need to make about the back seats of cars and penises. No, no, it’s really not what you think. Whatever gender you might subscribe to, have you noticed the startling ability of some men to always instantaneously grow a large penis when they are sharing the back seat of the car with two other people? That’s the only explanation I can think of why they need to keep their legs wide apart enough to take up half the seat and force their co-passengers to squeeze into the space that remains. I only point out men because it is a more common phenomenon with them (ignoring the real or metaphorical penis), but I suspect it is largely social conditioning that allows them to do that while most women still prefer to sit in a more (and I use quotes for a reason) ‘lady-like’ stance. I also suspect that as gender conditioning becomes less of a black and white issue, such imagined tumescence will begin to plague the female population as well. Besides, lets not forget the scientific fact that any three people of female persuasion can and will block corridors of any width no matter how modest their individual girths might be when they are walking together. Flexibility and inflexibility in sharing spaces with other human beings is everywhere to be seen. Are you the kind to make way for people or the one who’s constantly elbowing people into submission?

Saying yes

Being accommodating is partly hard-coded into us as social animals. It is the encouragement of our social systems to be a good ‘team player’ and that often involves accommodating the needs and demands of others. This is why we, as a species, have an inherent fear of saying no to things and this is why marketing works. Having said that, we are quite hypocritical about this issue. We seem to have no trouble saying no to some things, like pesky charity representatives, but have an inordinate amount of trouble with other things, like that limited special offer on TV for the combined refrigerator and vacuum-cleaner with free lifetime supply of garlic mayonnaise. Our propensities are often selective and convenient.

That said, accommodating people isn’t always about someone selling you something, even if an idea. Often it involves making changes in what you want to do, for friends and family, or changing plans or dreams or hopes for someone else’s and to suit some one else’s hopes and agendas. Flexible people do this all the time, but so do cowards and it is often difficult to draw a clear line between the two. I’ve talked before about how saying no is important and how it’s also important to say it well and without losing control, but it does get to a point where the decision to say no is crucial above all else, and how it’s done and to whom need to be ignored. Flexible people can often let their own accommodating tendencies get the better of them and being accommodating while resenting it is not very accommodating at all. You must learn to say no, and others must learn to hear it. It serves everyone well.

On the subject of flexibility, I claim no moral high-ground; I am on the inflexible side of many situations more often that I’m happy with, but that doesn’t change the fact that such divergent behaviour exists and can be seen in you and around you. While flexibility is an important element in society, it is also one that is too often taken for granted, and for that exploitation, the flexible have only themselves to blame. Be flexible, because I think it’s the right thing to do, the human thing to do in most situations, but to make it your blind and default reaction to the world with no regard for whether or not those around you have earned your understanding is an inhuman and automated choice.

If you think you’re flexible, I applaud your work in the world, but flexibility is the ability to adapt and adjust to every situation and need, and sometimes that need is to be inflexible so that others may realise their mistakes, see their inflexibilities, or just realise the existence of the many crutches you provide. If you’re the ever flexible kind, growing a back bone is always a good idea. On occasion, scare the hell out of the cowardly horde by displaying yours. Out of the blue, choose the largest piece of cake, refuse to carry their weight in a team, cancel on too often changed plans and appointments, tell them they’re being stupid when they share their unrealistic worries with your patient ears, stand up and sit tall and unaccommodating to seat hogs and every other manner of insensitive co-traveller on your journey in life; Say no.

And if you’re one of the cowardly horde — Yes, we all like to think we are sacrificing angels, but most of us are in this category on most occasions — You’ve been getting too many free rides for too long. Wake up. Flexible people can stretch a lot, but they don’t always have to and without them you’d likely be lying flat on your face, both literally and metaphorically, in many of life’s situations. Temper your ways, because you won’t like it when they snap back, and you’re not flexible enough to take it.

Samir

How do you see life? Is it easy or difficult?

That is the all-encompassing question I was posed by my friend Sinduja during a recent chat. The question wasn’t completely out of the blue, because I had just posted this little nugget on Twitter:

One basic choice from which all differences in opinion branch out into their varied flavours, is whether or not we assume life must be easy.

She and I have these occasional discussions of thought and belief, and very often we agree to disagree on things. She was wondering if our disagreements could also be traced back to that basic assumption I had spoken of. So, I attempted to clarify my thoughts on it.

I don’t see life as difficult and full of suffering, but I don’t assume it is meant to be easy either, because I’ve seen that it isn’t always so. You just deal with life as best you can, without killing yourself over it. When you accept that it’s not always convenient, I’ve found that things work out smoother. Having said that, I am often willing to take the difficult road to do something I want to, or to make a choice I believe in. However, many people go through life with the contrary view and steep themselves in their own sense of suffering.

How do differences of opinion arise out of these opposing viewpoints about life?
To explain my take on that, I needed a example to test it on. It just so happened that before we switched to this slightly more weighty topic, there had been some banter about the fact that the world of media and entertainment is full of unfair competition. I made the point that this could be a fact on some level, but most of what you think about it is an opinion, a judgement. If you think life is supposed to be easy and that is the natural way of things, then you assume that life is meant to be fair, and therefore human interactions must be fair. So if there’s anything that’s not completely equilateral about any dealings, that makes it unfair. Based on that train of thought, competition in the media world is horribly unfair and inhuman, and bad for society. It’s certainly a valid opinion.

On the other hand, if you don’t think life must necessarily be easy, then you accept that life is also not always fair, within the human understanding of that concept. Nature is not always fair; Its rules are often cruel and cut-throat, but at the cost of smaller interactions a larger balance is maintained, which might not meet the human measure of fairness. This perceived balance is often hard for people to believe in, because we tend to think in human terms. Nature maintains many balances. Material balances, energy balances, resource balances, are all built into the way natural systems work and fit together, but does it maintain human philosophical balances? Hell no! Because those were invented by us as our own conceptual framework of how things ought to work.

When we think of how things should work and impose this view on something as unfathomable to us as the Universe itself, we’re still thinking of making things easier. If you belong to my school of thought, you can’t be expecting it to be easier. This doesn’t change events, but it does change how you react to them. When you come across an unfairness, you accept that sometimes that’s the way it is. You try to find a way around it rather than wasting the time you would worrying about the fact that it is unfair. This doesn’t mean you need to reduce or curtail your humanity, or ignore the gross injustices that irk you, but in this mode of thinking, where life isn’t obliged to be easy, you are a little more accepting of imperfection.

The fact of the matter is, imperfection by human measures exists, and we are all unfair and imperfect. We like some people more than other people; We’d do more for them than the others. Technically, that’s unfair. We choose to do things that are easier rather than things that are better. That’s unfair. We try to become better and wealthier and more powerful that others. That’s unfair. It’s all unfair. And often in trying to ignore the fact that we ourselves might be imperfect, we rail against the World, life and existence about these imperfections which we guiltily share. Instead, to accept it and work within that framework while still trying to be a decent person makes you behave and believe differently. I don’t know if it’s always better, but it is different.

I have come to realise this difference in attitude over time. I talk to many people of varying ages and backgrounds, and I often disagree or agree with them in small or big ways. I realised that all their complaints, or in my mind excuses, come from the fact that they are expecting, even demanding, that the Universe be fair and life be easy. It’s like it’s their constitutional right from existence. I don’t think that way and hence we differ.

This imperfect, and possibly unjust, view of existence is a hard one to accept. Our moralistic tendencies make us yearn for a perfect Universe built in our imagined perfect image. The human realm works on manufactured rules and we come to expect that everything must work according to those ideals, since there can’t be any greater or superior ideals, both in terms of morality and power or influence. Our Utopia is one in which everyone follows the rules.

Yet, looking at it another way, existence is a sort of Utopia, if you are willing to accept it as such. It is infinite possibilities. But when anything is possible, that includes random things that are bad and you don’t like. This might not fit your view of the perfect World, but your view is based on the starting assumption that it’s all meant to be easy, and so you’re expecting Utopia to be easy. But if you believe it’s natural to have a mix of good and bad, then your definition of Utopia and perfection skews in a different direction.

Ultimately, it’s not about belief. Reality isn’t always good; That’s a fact. You can’t change that by believing everything is good and fair by human standards. Expecting something that is clearly untrue only leads to a lot of disappointments, but accepting the facts allows you to steer around the rough patches with your wits intact, in the least. Our ideas of utopia, morality and perfection are based on an artificial ideal of a stable non-changing system. Such a system would be easy, because the rules would never change and you would always know what to expect. In reality change is inevitable and change is rarely easy.

In practice all of these musings come down to one very simple thing. There is life, the universe and everything out there, right now, outside your window and inside it too. Sometimes random stuff happens. Sometimes it’s bad. When it does, you have a choice of questions to ask yourself. You could ask:

Why did this happen to me?

Or you could wonder:

How do I deal with this now?

I choose to ask the second question, on most occasions. Do you? Because which question you choose to ask yourself, in good times and bad, really comes down to the same thing.

How do you see life? Is it easy or difficult?

Samir

I was quite surprised it had survived over four weeks. No one had been watering it during that time, and yet it had weathered the dry spell. I was sure that with a little care, it would spring back into as much of of bloom as you can expect of a small herb growing in a small pot, indoors in a desert.

Thinking back, I realised that we had done some things to prepare the basil plant for our long absence, and we had cared for it quite well even before the trip was imminent, all of which are sure to have contributed to this survival story.

1] Strengthening the roots

The basil plant was originally bought at a supermarket’s fresh herbs section. It came in a tiny, token pot filled with soft peat and fertilizer, with the plant bursting out into a plastic wrapping.

We’d learnt from experience that the tiny pot would not sustain the plant for long, so at some point Vishal removed the plant from its peat mixture, mixed the peat with some regular soil we had from prior indoor gardening experiments, and re-potted it in a larger pot. All this occurred on spread out newspapers on our living room floor while watching some entertaining television, of course. Plants really appreciate good television.

That was a good move, because after the few days of acclimatisation the plant became much healthier and started to look like an actual living thing, rather than the sterile perfection we brought in from the supermarket. The roots now had more space and more balanced soil to work with. A strong foundation to grown on.

2] Plugging all the leaks

A week before we left on holiday, we decided it was wise to use up all the basil leaves the plant had to offer. The plant had been bought primarily for food rather than as decoration and it would have been a shame for it to go to waste, if it died during our trip. So in the days leading up to the trip, every home-made batch of pasta, sandwiches and salad received a healthy garnish of basil. By the time it was time to leave, the plant was bare, save for the tiny shoots sprouting at its tips.

Plants use some water to grow and survive, but a large percentage of that water is lost to the air through evaporation. Most of that evaporation occurs through the leaves. The leaves are the most vulnerable part of the plant. This is the reason plants in cold climates shed their leaves for winter, and also why plants in deserts often get rid of leaves completely.

By clearing all the leaves from the plant, we reduced the avenues for water loss, so what water was there was used better and lasted longer.

3] Creating a reservoir to fall back on

We didn’t over-water the pot the week before we left. In fact, I don’t think it was watered at all for the last few days. By the last day the soil surface was dry and flaky, which likely resulted in even lesser loss by evaporation.

Ten minutes before we left for the airport, however, I used a jug of water to fill the 2-inch deep plastic box in which the pot sits. The drying soil in the pot would pull in as much as it needed from below, but the surface of the soil would still remain dry enough to not choke the roots of the plant. Also, the soil would always be more efficient at absorbing water than the air would, so little would be wasted.

4] Preparing the right atmosphere

The rest of the water in the jug was used to fill an old one-litre ice-cream tub that also sits on our window sill. It’s filled with water to humidify the air, which can be very useful when you live your life in closed air-conditioned spaces. Dehydration due to the dry air is a very real problem.

On this occasion the ice-cream tub of water was even more useful, because I also drew the full length curtains shut in front of the little window ledge. This created a tiny space between the window and the curtain which would remain well humidified by the water trough. The curtain is hardly an impermeable barrier but even loose divisions are often enough to create a little protected piece of atmosphere. It would have taken at least 10 days by my estimate for that water to fully evaporate, during which time the plant would have enjoyed a well humidified atmosphere in its little room behind the curtain. The effect probably lingered for even longer.

5] Living and learning

You can’t repeat the same actions and expect different results. Which is why this, our second basil plant from the supermarket, was replanted in a larger pot over a television session in the living room. Our first basil plant, survived an onslaught of very hungry aphids from a chrysanthemum plant we got from IKEA a few months ago. The chrysanthemum slowly died away from the aphids, which were probably there when we bought it, but the basil survived. It seems aphids don’t like the taste of basil sap in their diet. Eventually though, that basil plant did wither and die, probably from the lack of space and resources in that tiny supermarket pot of peat.

We learned our lessons, and didn’t waste the left overs from our failures. The chrysanthemum came in a larger pot with some real soil in it, so the chrysanthemum soil was mixed with the peat and our second basil plant found a new and bigger home to grow in. That reuse of old resources and the more balanced soil to grow in probably played a big part in our little fighter surviving the long drought while we were away on vacation.

Three weeks later, the basil plant is still going strong. The tiny leaflets that were a bit shrivelled at the tips have now begun to grow and spread out into the sun. The stalks have taken on a better colour, and there are signs of rejuvenation all around. It will be some time before the plant bears fruit, or in this case usable garnish, again, but the future is hopeful. None of which would have been possible without a little thought and nature’s talent for frugality when she needs it.

Samir

Impatience is a bad thing. When it’s a general impatience, directed at the nebulous World, it appears to be a more socially acceptable frustration, but a true, deep impatience with yourself is a sure sign that you’re slipping.

Impatience with yourself makes you do all sorts of stupid things to break the dead-lock. You take rash decisions and force progress, or at least what you think is progress, in the hope of pushing the cart that is your personal existence forward ever so slightly.

We’ve all been told the cart is going somewhere, that it has a destination and that the destination is awesome. Where and when that destination is imagined to be varies based on the individual’s beliefs. Some are waiting for the pinnacle of achievement to slowly fade in from the mist on the horizon, some are waiting to be swallowed by the approaching darkness at the end of the road, because beyond the darkness is salvation. To them this cart-ride is just one long shopping trip to make sure they are well equipped for the real journey. Some are just waiting for something to happen. Anything.

We wait, sometimes with patience but mostly with a healthy amount of loathing at the sky and the rocks that they would have us delay that ultimate, if elusive, gratification. And then there is the healthy loathing for ourselves, for not being able to push the cart faster. Impatience is a bad thing, and an impatience with yourself will almost certainly cause you to slip.

The fault lies not in the sky and the rocks, but in the silly creatures pushing the ragged cart down the narrow, difficult road, while doing the least fruitful thing they can, waiting. We wait for something we do not really know, we wait for something we couldn’t recognise, yet impatiently we wait. We ignore the path, and the sky, and the trees, the wild grasses dancing like the tide in the breeze, the solidity of the cart in our hands, the intoxicating scent of wet wood and Earth as they meet and part, the refreshing rain on our faces, the fascinating travellers we greet along the way, the bounty of fruit in our cart, the slow rhythmic music of the wheels skipping over the frequent pebbles in the mud.

All that we ignore, and we wait, for our salvation, for our victory, for our deliverance into better times, for our release, never once questioning the sense of the path we have taken, never once consciously choosing another cart to push, never once stopping to enjoy the stars. Instead we blindly push, and drink to forget the pains of walking blindly on uneven ground, and consume to satisfy an un-named craving, and sleep to forget our sorrowful punishments at the hands of the rocks and the sky, and dream. We dream of the sorrow and the suffering of days gone by, and the pleasure and joy that awaits us in some unfathomed future. Then we wake up, we placate the sky with some mutterings to make up for the curses we will hurl at it when the day gets hotter, we kick a few rocks in frustration, and in a half stupor of food and drink and dreams, we push the tottering cart and wait impatiently.

Samir

After my write-up on the philosophy of Hinduism, I got a fair bit of interest from people wanting to know more on the issue. Wendi was preparing to do an ethics presentation on Hinduism and stumbled across my article during her research. She sent me a few questions she had on Hindu beliefs, one of which was about the Hindu take on spiritualism and the afterlife.

More recently, I was chatting with a friend in Mexico who had a similar query. The amount of Spanish literature about India seems to on the rise in recent years, so a curiosity about the culture is a natural side-effect. She wanted to know about the Indian belief in past lives, and my take on it. My replies to both these questions, one academic and one more personal, was broad enough to be of general interest, so I thought I’d share my thoughts here.

The Hindu view on the afterlife is that the essence of life is immortal and cannot be destroyed. As with all things in the Indian belief system, this basic idea can be interpreted and understood on many levels. The very religious view is that the individual soul survives intact and is reborn in another form. The more philosophical interpretation could be that that life energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but can only be converted from one form to another. How much of each of those opposing ingredients you wish to put into your own personal afterlife sauce, is entirely up to you.

Rebirth is said to be based on the concept of Karma — a distillation of past actions, behaviour and thought. In the most simplistic way, you could think that your next birth depends on whether you’ve been bad or good. That’s how many understand it, but the philosophical thought is more complex. It considers all of physical life to be a sort of audio-visual-experiential tempering ground for the soul. The soul is born and reborn in various forms and as various things, so as to gain all the experiences it needs to come to a true realisation of the nature of existence, i.e. enlightenment. This is also thought to be based on Karma, but here the process is not considered as one of punishment, but rather of evaluation. The soul decides what experience it requires as a next step in its progress towards enlightenment, and then takes that step.

All generally agree that once enlightenment is reached, the soul is freed from the imperative to be reborn and take physical form. It is then finally one with the ultimate soul/God/the universe/or whatever you want to call it. That’s where the Buddhist concept of Moksha come from. Liberation.

When chatting with my Mexican friend, her questions about what I was describing brought up some interesting contrasts that don’t come up in detached philosophical musings like the one above. I was telling her about the Hindu belief that people, animals, and all life is born and reborn, depending on your thinking and behaviour in your current life. For example, predominantly greedy and inhuman thoughts might lead to a birth as an animal, a creature of instinct. But, nothing is permanent, with each life you learn, hopefully improve, and are born in higher and higher forms until you achieve nirvana &mdash the same enlightenment I described before &mdash you understand how it all works, and you are freed from the cycle.

This was a more ground-level description of what regular people believe, free of philosophical detachment. Her counter-question was interesting. She said that if you´re reborn as an animal, for the animal´s life you would not be aware, as animals don´t think. So how could you behave well to be reborn in human form? Or are you just a human in an animal´s body? That’s a question that would have never occurred to me, but it is a very valid one if you believe that the human soul is unique, which is the basis of all the Abrahamic religions (Catholicism, Judaism, Islam). By contrast, most Eastern religions generally believe in the soul being common and equal across all life. Human beings might largely be more developed souls, but other life has a soul too. This fundamental difference in thinking is part of why there are so many vegetarians in India. It comes from that belief that ending any life too early, and especially an animal one that is closer to the human level of consciousness, is to stop its development prematurely and prolong its time in the cycle.

Of course, there is much commonality in the thinking about the afterlife across all religious thought, even if the details vary. It all comes down to your behaviour in life, with the afterlife serving as reward or punishment. My friend had the same thought about her beliefs and the concepts of heaven and hell. She did, however, detect the abstractness of what I was saying in comparison, so she wondered whether I thought I would be reunited in any way with my loved ones when I died. Now, this is one of those points where what we believe depends on how comfortable we are with the dissolution of ourselves in the larger scheme of things. It’s safe to say the the philosophical stream of Hindu thought thinks of reuniting of souls after death in a more abstract way. That is to say, the specific personalities we take on in life may not survive the transition, but souls that have been close in their lives will recognize each other. Maybe not always thinking of each other as mothers and fathers and sons and daughters, but just as kindred spirits. It comes from believing that the soul or spirit is the real thing, and the person is merely a temporary costume.

I myself am not completely sure of what I believe, because I like to think beyond blind belief. Either way, I look at all the different ways of seeing and interpreting this existence of ours, and I find it all very fascinating. While being part of Life, what life is remains one of the greatest mysteries, not just to the philosopher but even to the most rigorous scientific minds. So it comes as no surprise that the end of life garners so much attention from us. How do we understand the end of something that we can barely begin to explain in the first place? A mystery within a mystery, and perhaps so it shall always remain, no matter what we choose to believe.

Samir

Questions of philosophy vs religion are as old as the human ability to question. Today people wonder about the balance of power and reconciliation between science & religion. It’s a valid issue to think about, but to get a better handle on the subject, it might help to look at the relationship between religion and science’s great-grandfather, philosophy.

My friend Paul always puts interesting questions to me. After tackling truth, this time we were having a conversation about how I reconcile religion and philosophy from an Indian or Hindu perspective. Some interesting points came up, which I have not seen expressed often, so I thought I should share my thoughts here. Indians take much of our own way of thinking for granted, but the fact is, the relationship between religion and philosophy in India has always been quite unique when compared to the West.

There are many levels of religious devoutness in every faith. I do come from a Hindu family, but this is where definitions get complicated because “devout” is a nebulous term when it comes to Hinduism. If you look at the Hindu faith from the eyes of someone from one of the other major religions or the majority of the modern followers, then devout would mean people who are strict followers of the ritual side of the religion. By that measure my family is not devout, although my Dad’s family (at least at the time of his parents) was from that vein of the faith.

The question of reconciling philosophy with Hinduism is a tricky concept to communicate, but I will try. If you have any Hindu friends of the kind who will not look at you strangely if you asked them about religion and philosophy in their culture, they will likely tell you that connecting with philosophy is easier to deal with in Hinduism. But, that “easier” is their particular understanding of their faith. As far as my personal understanding is concerned, in Hinduism, there is no reconciling to be done with philosophy at all. The thing about Hinduism is that at its core it can barely qualify as a faith or religion in the same mould as the other major faiths, especially the Abrahamic religions.

In some forgotten past, Hinduism might have started as simple nature worship but it soon grew into much more, and ultimately into a complex philosophical system. The strange and slightly unique aspect here is that it didn’t do so by discarding its more colourful naturalistic and mythological aspects, but rather by simply building upon them. The idea of philosophy and logic as being this sterile discipline separated from belief, parable, and faith was a Greek concept and not an Indian one.

The term Hindu is actually a descriptive label coined by the Arabs for the people who lived beyond the River Indus. So the very concept of the “religion” of Hinduism is an external imposition which has eventually become accepted by even the “Hindus” themselves. The original name for this philosophy or belief system or whatever you wish to call it, was Sanatana Dharma. Dharma is the same concept as, and the source of, the Buddhist idea of duty, but really that word just does not have an adequate translation in English. It means duty, belief, life, and in its broadest connotation simply “the way”. So Sanatana Dharma would translate to something like “The Ancient Way” or “The Eternal Way”, and even those are gross simplifications.

The Indian culture has always been pluralistically monolithic, if that makes any sense. Let me explain. In India before the coming of the Islamic invasions and Catholicism, we don’t really seem to have had a very strict idea of Religion-A, Religion-B etc. Rather we just had one large body of belief we simply called “Dharma”, which encompassed the vast variety of supporting and conflicting belief systems. They were still all part of the greater Dharma, and the concept of there being many valid paths was one that held great importance.

You can see a similar phenomenon in the sciences. Today the common wisdom is that Yoga is a bunch of bendy exercises from India that are good for you. In the original Sanskrit, it was simply Yog which translates to science or knowledge. This encompassed all scientific knowledge, specifically to do with human beings. One of the multitude of sub-topics in Yog was Hatah Yog meaning the Science of Discipline. That in turn comprised of various systems, one of which were the Asanas, the body positions and exercises that have today become popular as Yoga.

I hope you’re beginning to see what I mean. To try to understand Indian knowledge systems through the lens of Western faiths and philosophies is futile and only leads to misinformation. Sanatana Dharma became “Hinduism” over the millennia, possibly because the Indians kept getting asked by visitors what their religion was, their dharma. They probably didn’t quite understand the question because there was only one Dharma. So the concept of Hindusim took root. Then the Abrahamic religions came and asked them what their religious book was, and they didn’t quite understand that question either. To the ancient Indian, all books were “dharmic”, from the medical volumes of Charak to the love manuals of Vatsayana. So in later times, the Bhagavat Geeta was shoe-horned into the proceedings as our one true book. It is not.

The main thing to understand about Hinduism is that there is no minimum entry requirement, and you can forget what a few extremist zealots might say on the subject today. You don’t have to do anything in particular to be a Hindu. No specific prayers, no rituals, no mandatory temple visits. You cannot really be made a Hindu ala baptism (although in the last 2 centuries a Hindu “conversion” was invented as a counter balance to all the missionaries that went on a converting spree through the length and breadth of the land), nor can you be excommunicated (other than on a purely social level). At its core it is a highly evolved philosophical construct with an almost relativistic, quantum mechanical view of the universe, but at its surface level, you can satisfy yourself by simply paying homage to the Sun and the God of Rain. You can subscribe to either of those belief structures, or the vast range of mediums in between, and you’re still a Hindu, and no one can say otherwise.

Some ancient Indian literature actually tackles this subject. It mentions how some people only have the capacity to worship the creative force as humanised idols, all the way up to understanding the entirety of creation as one singular and differentiated entity, which is beyond the comprehension all but the most adept. The recommendation is to let each one worship, believe, and understand as per their own capacity, and using their own models and metaphors. An elegant system, I think, and one that has resulted in one of the longest continuous and unbroken systems of knowledge and faith in existence. The reason it never broke was because it was always adapting.

I don’t know if I’ve actually answered the original question about reconciling religion and philosophy, but I hope I have created a vague summary of the landscape of traditional Indian thought, a landscape where that question is simply irrelevant. India and everything to do with India is commonly misread and misunderstood by many, because unlike many other cultures you cannot grasp what makes it tick by scrutinising the details. Once you train yourself to see the forest for the trees, while also admiring that line of ants on the earth at your feet, simultaneously, you might begin to start seeing the world through Indian-coloured glasses.

Samir

Since when did everyone expect to get paid to be nice and do the right thing? Look around you, it’s happening as we speak. It’s not new, of course, it’s been going on a for a while. Right from the beginning of time, religion has been promising you good karma, a luxurious after-life with an attached bath, or at least a favourable promotion in the next life as compensation for being nice. That was all fine and good in a slightly abstract way, but the moment doing the right thing started to become worth your while in cold hard cash, we were doomed.

Just a few days ago I was at one of the large hypermarkets in town and saw some examples of this misguided strategy. The shop in question has started charging the customer a small token sum of money for every plastic bag they take at the checkout, to encourage the use of reusable bags. Also, to make it seem like they are doing it purely for the betterment of the environment, they offer you the money for the plastic bags back if you return them for recycling.

Sounds perfectly reasonable on the surface. But think about it. Most people are still going to pay the extra token money for the plastic bag, and consider it a small service charge. Then, very few people are actually going to take the trouble to collect up those specific plastic bags and return them to the shop for recycling. Even if the customer gives in the bags for recycling through other channels, the shop still gets to keep the money for that bag, which while small, is way too much for a single plastic bag produced in the hundreds of thousands. So the shop makes a good profit. Small amounts add up when multiplied by thousands of customers per day. All this rather than switching to more expensive biodegradable bags at their own initial expense, and then charging the customer. That would be really environmentally friendly.

In the same place they also have the system where you need to insert a coin to free a shopping trolley. The coin is returned to you when you deposit the trolley into the correct receptacle in the parking lot. This to prevent people from wandering away with the shopping trolley to carry heavy shopping to their nearby homes. And this is where the flaw in this ‘money saved or given for doing the right thing’ system becomes clear. If you’re living close by, maybe that one lost coin in the shopping trolley is a reasonable service charge to have the convenience of using a trolley to your doorstep, rather than lugging your shopping in many bags, which you also might have paid for.

As soon as you put a monetary value on doing the right thing or being nice, being bad now acquires a cost, which tells the average person that it’s ok to be bad as long as you are willing to bear the cost. It’s ok to use lots of plastic bags when you’re paying for the privilege. It’s ok to kidnap unsupecting shopping trolleys beyond supermarket parking lots when you’re paying for it with a coin. It’s ok to speed dangerously on the highway, as long as you’re willing to pay the fine.

And why not, really? After all, it’s ok to be a polluting industry as long as you are willing to pay for your institutional laziness and irresponsibility with carbon points. How can any of the above examples be considered any different when they are so much more harmless in scale?

Wake up zombie hordes! Being nice or doing the right thing was never meant to be worth your while. You do it because it’s the right thing to do. As soon as you incentivise good behaviour by charging bad behaviour, you are legitimising bad behaviour. When it’s ok to do the wrong thing as long as you pay the price, how can doing the right thing be priceless? And if being nice isn’t priceless to us anymore, then we’re doomed, because even the birds, the animals, and the trees understand that concept, and so much of nature works on that basis. The universe doesn’t do monetary penalties, green incentives, or karma points, it just sees the hand you were dealt and looks at how you dealt with it.

Samir

Is there such a thing as truth? A very complex question if you really think about it, and quite impossible to answer without trying to define what truth is. Ask a random group of friends the question “What is Truth?“, and you will be greeted by a variety of replies ranging from blank stares, to utter confusion, to concerned queries about your love life. After all, the truth is just the truth and that’s all there is to it.

A Question

I have always wanted this site to be a conversation rather than a lecture. I’m happy to say it has worked out quite successfully so far, with many people asking me questions through the comments and the contact form. Mostly it’s practical advice on photography, cameras, design etc., and it’s often something that requires a personal reply. But sometimes it gets more esoteric, and of more universal interest. A few days ago Paul J. Richardson left me this doozy:

Most formulations of shareable “knowledge” since Plato’s original JTB definition, are just knit-pickn refinements – ignoring of course, magical and illogical ones, such as implantation by God(s). How can we avoid circular reference back to knowledge when ‘proving’ (arguing) that truth exists or is possible?

Thanks for the question, Paul. I had to mull over this for quite long before deciding on how to answer it, so here goes.

A Story

A spider sits on a small web in the dark corner of a closet. Instinctively it awaits its prey. While it waits, it starts looking around and trying to make sense of it all. It is not a creature of the light, and is quite accustomed to stunning, killing and devouring any insects that get entangled in its trap without the need of light, but on occasion its world is bathed in brightness. It has found that almost like clockwork, twice in what we know as a 24 hour period, its tiny world is flooded with blinding yellow light from the star above. Immediately, one side of the heavens open and a large creature as tall as the universe appears, and seems to rummage through the heavenly bodies that hang in the sky. The creature’s vast limbs often eclipse the star, and then it goes away, either inserting or removing a heavenly body from the heavens. The fracture in the sky is then repaired, the star goes out, and darkness reigns again in the universe until the next cycle.

The spider in the corner doesn’t quite know what to make of it. It has spoken to some other spiders who have formed a cluster of webs on the other side of the small universe, and they believe this is all based on the laws of physics, the cycle of light and dark, the movement of the the heavenly bodies in and out through the fracture in the sky, and yes, even the creature itself. They have found that the cycle is not completely regular. There are some periods of long darkness when the skies never part, and at other times the fracture appears often and the universe is lit for long periods. They are still trying to come up with a formula which would explain all their observations. They figure once they find that single, all-encompassing formula for explaining it all, they will know the whole truth about existence itself.

The loner spider in the corner is not completely convinced by all this, especially since one half of the other spiders have started to worship their formulas, and the other have begun to worship the creature, while a small group continues to claim there isn’t actually any creature, just natural forces at work. The loner spider has his own theories and he likes to keep them to himself. He’s convinced the sky is alive. He is sure that if he deciphered the working and behaviour of the sky, it will all be clear. He will finally know the ultimate truth.

Jane Smith has different concerns. For one, she never gets a chance to clean her closet. She keeps her coat in there. Every morning she takes the coat from the closet before she goes to work, and puts it back in when he gets back in the evening. She’s always planning to clean the closet over the weekend, but since she rarely opens it during those days, it always slips her mind, and the closet remains untouched. She’s spotted some spiders in there a few times, but they don’t bother her too much. She believes in live-and-let-live and is actually thankful they’re getting rid of some of those insects for her. It must be such a simple life, she thinks, to live on instinct and natural drives alone, and not need to worry about the complications of life and work. No thinking, no questioning, and no wondering about the meaning of it all.

A Truth

My fragment of a story above was meant to put our search for Truth into perspective, and those of you who are masters of reading between the lines of tales have already spotted most of the issues the story of the spider in the closet brings up.

But first, some explanation of the question for those who aren’t familiar with philosophical jargon (I myself am only partially adept at it). Western philosophy is pretty much all based on the fact that the philosopher Plato had too much time on his hands to think of life, the universe, and everything, and he bothered to leave behind written records of what he thought of it all If not for him, this entire field would either be very different or simply not exist in any formal way.

Philosophers have many ways of defining and explaining truth, all of which are confusing, counter-intuitive and contradict each other, while using co-opted terms such as correspondence and coherence. I’m not going to go into that because it doesn’t much matter. Needless to say a lot of the explanation of what truth is has to do with facts. Things that are. You need to know facts to know the truth, which brings us to the question: What is knowledge?

This is where we come back to our good friend Plato. His explanation of knowledge has been the accepted official version for millennia in western philosophy and it is usually referred to as JTB. According to Plato, knowledge is Justified True Belief. He explains further, that for you to know something 3 conditions need to be met:

1. What you know is true
2. You believe it is true
3. You are justified in believing it is true

Have you spotted the problem that Paul is talking about? Truth is related to known facts, i.e. knowledge. But, Knowledge is defined based on what is true. If truth is factual knowledge and knowledge is based on truth, how does that explain anything? It’s a circular reference.

Now we come back to the story of Jane and the spiders and why I wrote it. If you apply Plato’s knowledge formulas to what each of the protagonists of that story think they know, you will find that they will mostly meet all the criteria with flying colours. Yet, the spider in the corner, the other spiders, and Jane, all seem to know a different version of things, and so they have different facts. Since they are all justified in their belief of these facts, they must all be true. But isn’t there supposed to be the one Truth, rather than the multitude? A sort of philosophical monotheism?

The problem is that philosophy hasn’t embraced a now basic fact in science. The universe is relativistic. Our experiences of the universe, our observations of it, and therefore our knowledge of it and truth itself is relative to our senses and our frame of reference. That doesn’t make the things we know less factual, but none of these facts individually can be considered the ultimate truth. You see and feel a solid computer in front of you, and yet for an electron your computer is a vast field of empty spaces it can stroll trough. Does that mean the computer isn’t solid? Well, it’s certainly not liquid! From your frame of reference it is absolutely solid. From another, it is not. For both you and me, and the electron, there can be no ultimate truth if we can’t agree on such basic facts. And we can never agree on basic facts as long as we are trapped within limited frames of reference.

Can Truth exist? Is an Ultimate Truth possible? That was Paul’s actual question and I have to say it is possible in a theoretical thought-experiment sort of way. But as far as I can imagine, it can exist in only one every special situation. We can never see the truth because we exist as a subset of existence as a whole, and so our frame of reference is limited. The same goes for the humble electron and the mighty Milky Way galaxy. We are all trapped in limited frames of reference no matter how vast the differences in scale.

If you want to believe in a personal God, a creator who some how created the universe and all that exists, then you must believe that he/she existed before the universe, which means there is more to existence than the universe. In which case, even such a God might not necessarily know the ultimate Truth. But if existence is the universe, and the universe is so complex as to be sentient in some way beyond our comprehension, and if this sentience is omnipresent in the entirety of itself, then the universe might know the ultimate Truth. The only way I can think of for Truth to exist is for a frame of reference to exist which is all encompassing and cannot itself be observed by anything external, because nothing external exists. Only existence itself being sentient and internally self aware in a way free of all scale, reference, and time can meet this criteria.

So, I would say the ultimate Truth is beyond us. We can strive for it, as we must, we can seek it, as we all should, and we might even touch upon it, glance it with our meager intellects and feel it in some vague way for a fraction of a second. But, I seriously doubt we can ever completely posses the truth. That possibility just doesn’t fit with the facts, or with anything we know and understand. And that at least is a truth, if not the truth.

Samir

The traditional definition of holistic health

Dictionaries and encyclopaedias define holistic health in a variety of ways to encompass different things, depending on how close to scientific and medical orthodoxy the editors stood. It comes down to looking at human health as the health of the whole individual rather than the well-being of parts. The variations come in while defining what makes up a whole individual. Some say it’s the whole physical human being who is so much more than the sum of various biological systems. Some claim it also includes the psychology of the individual. And some go further in wanting to heal the whole being, which involves the body, the mind, and the spirit.

These are all good descriptions, but what I’ve said here is a distillation down from a lot of mumbo-jumbo you will find everywhere. Some of it is good and true, but it’s all description and doesn’t tell you much about the essence of holistic health and why it’s a good or bad thing for you to take it seriously and practice it. When it comes to the less orthodox views of medicine, another term rears its head which must be dealt with, and the question that needs clearing is …

Is holistic health another name for alternative medicine?

Short answer: no. Once again definitions limit us, and this one is even more complicated. The term ‘alternative medicine’ is a pretty bad one, not only does it not describe anything, but even the semi-description it contains only tells you what it’s not. Alternative medicine is simply everything else. Here, of course, we are talking about everything else other than what can officially called Medicine: Allopathy, Western medicine, scientific medicine, modern medicine. You know, people in white coats, syringes, pills and stuff.

Alternative medicine encompasses all manner of wonders and blunders. It is true that many disciplines which fall under the umbrella of alternative medicine do take a more holistic approach to human health. Whether or not you believe in them, systems such as herbalism and homoeopathy take the mental state of the patient as much more of an important diagnostic input than modern medicine usually does. You can look further and find more esoteric arts like transcendental meditation and yoga which go further to consider even the elusive human spirit in their quest for health.

However, alternative therapies are not automatically holistic in their approach. While many encourage the holistic view, most succumb to the the need for human beings to look at everything mechanistically and find one-to-one relationships between health problems and solutions. For this reason, today herbalism and homoeopathy are often practised in a symptomatic way, to cure symptoms rather than curing the whole person and the root causes of disorders, as was their original mandate. So while part of the puzzle, alternative therapies are not equivalent to holistic health.

What it actually means to be holistically healthy

Holism is the belief that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That belief is the basis of holistic health, and we have adequate descriptions of what makes up this whole that must be treated: body, mind, spirit, and whatever lies beyond those pieces of humanity. We have also seen that therapies which integrate some of this holistic view of health do exist, but what is holistic health in practice, and how does one achieve it? That answer would give us some insight into this beyond the definitions.

With the development of scientific thought, we have learnt to divide and subdivide the universe into ever smaller and smaller slices, so that we might understand these pieces in isolation. This is what has lead to the symptomatic treatment of human health as the orthodox way. Systems, organs, tissue, cells, and enzymes can be measures, tested, and found to be within or outside the standard parameters. The psyche, the ego, the id, and above all the spirit are less obliging to our need to observe and measure. This makes holistic health very difficult, if not impossible, to completely outsource to experts.

All our advances in physical medicine have come by relinquishing the individual responsibility of our own health to others. If you want to talk of the whole, mind, and spirit, there is only one ultimate expert in the details of your health: you. There is only one person who can look at the big picture of your health, watch your diet, practice due diligence in what you eat, how you eat it, when you sleep, what you think, and how you feel. It’s all on you.

This can either be a scary though or an empowering one, but if you want to get any real insight into what holistic health actually entails, this is it. Holistic health is about you taking responsibility for your own health. Without that there’s nothing holistic about it. Modern medicine and the many other possible therapies at your disposal are irreplaceable tools in your arsenal, as are nutrition, hygiene and common sense. You can try to describe it in large complex terms all you want but that is what it comes down to. Holistic health is your health in your hands, with the guidance and the help of others. That is how it is meant to be, and that is how it can work well, but only if you take up the mantle as captain of your own well-being.

Samir

A big thank you to Pearl for the writing nudge.

Indians are festival gluttons. That’s not to imply that we all eat too much during festivals (only most of us do, not ALL of us), but rather that we have more commonly celebrated festivals that you can shake a large decorated Christmas tree at. Speaking of Christmas, the Indian equivalent in the realm of noise, public participation, and pornographic commercialisation would have to be Deepawali or Diwali (as it is more commonly referred to in the north of the country). That is what we celebrate today.

Now, as is customary for any writer or speaker introducing the topic of Deepawali to a general audience, I am obliged to incessantly repeat what the festival is about and regale you with a few canned phrases that will enlighten you about the significance of something distilled down from a few thousand years of history and culture. But wait, I needn’t bother because the honorable President, Vice President, Prime Minister, Shadow Prime Minister *cough* big cheese of the ruling party, and probably a miscellaneous collection of other political types have been so kind as to release statements meant for the Indian public that repeatedly tell us what that festival we all seem to be so compelled to celebrate is all about … in one or two redundant sentences. The generally agreed version seems to be that it celebrates the victory of light over darkness, which in turn symbolises the victory of good over evil. Yes, I know. It’s deep. I’m so glad the leaders of our country think it important to educate us on these matters so repeatedly. I am very much expecting to find a multiple choice question about the significance of Diwali on the ballot papers during the next election. After all, how can we be truly Indian without fretting over irrelevant exams?

While the politicians assure me the correct translation of the phrase “victory of good over evil” is “communal harmony”, down south people are celebrating their individuality and the preeminence of their ancient(er) culture by reminding us once again that while they are good sports and wish you a Happy Diwali today (The day of Laxmi Pooja – more on that later), they actually celebrated Deepawali yesterday (Naraka Chaturthi by the Hindu calendar). On that day, eons ago, Krishna killed the evil Narakasura, or maybe it was Kali who killed the evil Narakasura, or maybe it was the Goddess Durga who did the dispatching. No one seems to be quite sure, except about the fact that their version is more righteous than everyone else’s. Not to be out done, people in the North insist on calling Naraka Chaturthi “Choti Diwali” (Mini Diwali). My Diwali is bigger than yours.

Speaking of North India, aka Macho Land, they wouldn’t dream of basing their main festival on the victory of some vengeful superhuman woman over miscellaneous evil guy, so they insist it is the very day that Ram, of Ramayana fame, returned to Ayodhya after his many adventures and misadventures in the wild South. On the television news today I was informed that it all started when the people of Ayodhya lit up the city to welcome home their returning king and to celebrate his victory over the Demon King Ravana. I love it when people make unfortunate translations such as this one and eventually come to believe it themselves.

In the original Indian mythos, life exists in three realms (whether physical or spiritual is up to each person to decipher). Swarga (often translated as Heaven but not really) is the home of a race of super human beings called the Devas (often translated as Gods but not quite), Patala (often translated as Hell but not even close) is the home of the equally super human Asuras (often translated as Demons but not exactly), and Bhoomi (the Earth) is home to both human beings and all manner of other beings included the Rakshasas (also confusingly translated as Demons) who are actually meant to be nature spirits who inhabit the forests and the wilds. You can see the influence of Christian thought here, which made the Devil out of the playful Pan, but for Indians themselves to now consider the Rakshasa King Ravana as a “demon” while celebrating our wonderfully ancient culture (which we know nothing about) is truly sad and hilarious.

To confuse matters between Ram, Ravana, Krishna, Kali, Narkasura et. al., the second day of Diwali is also celebrated as Laxmi Pooja. For those who don’t know, a pooja is a ritual, usually directed at a particular deity. The Goddess Laxmi (pronounced Laksh-me) is the Goddess of wealth. Unfortunately, in our modern “enlightened” times, she has been reduced to the Goddess of riches, a major demotion from wealth, which signified so much more. On the day of Laxmi Pooja, people quite literally pray to and for money. The hardcore followers of the practice go so far as to not make any major purchases on the day, and hence keep the money from symbolically flowing away. Fortunately for the free market economy, they make up for this day of token level-headedness by going on a buying binge on all the days preceding it. Like Eid for the Muslims, or Christmas for the Christians, and Xmas for the cool folk, Diwali is an excuse for the urban Hindu to dig into their collection of fine vintage credit cards and live a life of blind consumption. And then there are the noisy fireworks that I am assured are “tradition” (that warrants a separate discussion).

This is the reality of Deepawali through most of the modern Indian world today. But, I have never considered myself a pessimist. Some where deep down in the dark recesses of the buying public there still exists some kernel of light. For what more do we need Deepawali to celebrate than light itself. We can marvel at the myths and revere the legends all we want, that is a healthy thing as long as we go beyond the fast food versions of the tales. But, do we really need Diwali to mean anything more than a few days in the year when we make night into day with our oil lamps and decorative kandeels(lanterns), our strings of cheap Chinese lights and faux LED oil lamps, and pay homage to the divine photon? It brings light into our lives, life into our universe, and beautiful sunrises over our horizons.

Happy Deepawali

Samir