Tuesday, January 28, 2025

Rules for good health

Isn't it obvious? 

Eat unprocessed or minimally processed foods that are nutrient dense. 

Eat lots of vegetables and fruits

Eat whole grains, but keep reducing the proportion of grains in your diet, grains are not really good for you

Eat lots of butter and ghee

Milk and milk products are not good for you, but butter and ghee are the exception. 

Have oils in moderation, but only cold pressed oils 

Have natural sea salt or rock salt, not manufactured salt, that whole thing about added iodene in salt being essential is a big scam 

Reduce white sugar to close to zero. Have gud ( organic) or other kinds of locally produced sugars, but in moderation 

Avoid all processed foods - say that 100 times, repeat that every day in your prayers. Any food made in a factory is processed food

Let your diet be mainly plant based and whole foods based. Organic is preferable. 

If you eat meat, limit its consumption. And remember, meat cuts that you pick up in the supermarket which have long shelf life are deadly carcinogens. Buy freshly killed free range / grass fed / equivalent meat only. 

Have fermented foods in your diet. Curd, pickles, kimchi, dosa, idli, are all fermented foods. Every culture and cuisine traditionally has its own variety of fermented foods. 

Buy only what grows 

Cook at home or buy from a source that cooks fresh food like your neighbouring auntieji 

Remember that spices are a storehouse of nutrition

Include superfoods in your diet. Some of them are: amla, moringa powder, carrot juice with other veg juices raw and in small quantities, nimbu,  dates, honey only raw unprocessed non-Agmark variety from a trusted source, herbal teas

Have Ayurvedic supplements, some examples are : chyavanprash, dasamoolarishtam, shilajit - each of them comes with a short set of rules on when and how to have. 

Get sunlight, early morning ( upto one and a quarter hours after sunrise, early AM say 11 am, and evening sunlight 

Walk barefoot on natural ground for at least twenty minutes every day 

Avoid shoes, wear chappals 

Keep moving. Stand instead of sit. Sit on the ground instead of on a chair. Keep the energy in the body moving, don't let it stagnate 

Sleep on the floor on a chathai ( mat made of natural material), and if in a cold place with a thin cotton razai on top. Avoid high tech mattresses. 

When it comes to exercise , prioritise flexibility first, followed by cardio ( walking, swimming, etc) and then by weight bearing / strength exercises, like calisthenics. Avoid exercising with gym machines that exercise specific muscles, they are harmful; dumb bells and kettle bells may however be ok 

Avoid taking any health advise from doctors or nutritionists trained in the allopathic school

When you have an acute or life threatening condition, head to the nearest hospital. But for all chronic issues and to regain your health, read all the rules above 

This is just a top of the mind recall - for those who are subject to my daily barrage of posts this will be an n time repeat - but the rules will remain the same, they are age old treditional wisdom combined with common sense. The ad nauseum repetition helps either to revise and revisit, or furthers your resolve not to read any of my posts 

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, or a 'trained" health professional. But I have good gurus, there are many of them out there. Nothing that I am saying here is original or of my own invention.

Slowly, we are losing the ability to cope

 

Times are such that everyone wants to be "safe", and eliminate all risk from their lives. 

There is a fundamental flaw in this kind of approach. Everything that you do has a consequence or reaction, and going to any one extreme will result in unforeseen outcomes. 

Let's take a few examples. 

In any gated community in Bangalore today, there are security systems and apps so that no one enters without prior approval. The place is kept insulated from any outside influence. Things have come to such a pass that people panic if someone rings their doorbell. Children cycle on the podium which is a vehicle free zone, on bicycles with extra wheels so that they don't fall, wearing helmets and knee pads! 

How well adjusted will the children growing up in this environment be, and how will they cope with the outside world tomorrow? Forget children, I see a reluctance among adults staying in these communities to cope with the world outside. Slowly, we are losing the ability to cope. 

Vaccines are taken for every flu, with annual "updates". Now vaccines, like every drug, have side effects. In the case of vaccines, the vaccine itself is a shitload of poisons being dumped directly into your bloodstream. We think this will keep us "safe"! What is actually happening is, we are losing our natural immunity, every vax we take weakens it, and we are reaching a state where we are convinced that a common cold is a deadly illness to run away from. We are weakening by the day, and we are slowly losing the ability to cope. 

Parents get paranoid if their children are missing for ten minutes or step out of the gated enclave. Contrast this with the way we grew up, our parents didn't even know where we were at any time, and there were no phones then. "Oh no," you say, "the world is much more dangerous now... etc etc". Sure. Maybe. I don't know. But I do know this. That world  is the world our children are going to step into. If the animal that has been raised in a zoo is suddenly released into the wild, it goes and gets itself killed. Our children are slowly losing their ability to cope. 

Most parents do not want their children to drive a motorbike, they directly want to graduate them to cars. Reason? Motorbikes are not safe. Sure, I can't dispute that, but can you really insulate yourself and your children from all the risk out there? 

Slowly, we are losing the ability to cope. We are now reaching a stage where even the normal problems of day to day life seem like unsurmountable challenges. We are beset by germs from all sides. Thieves are forever ready to break into our homes.  There is danger in the air! Safety, we need to be conscious of safety! There is danger all around. 

See, I told you, we need to be careful. Vigilant. Forever on guard. Fearful. 

There you go. That state of mind is a self fulfilling prophecy.

Friday, January 24, 2025

How to keep your head in all the chaos


People say all kinds of things, there are divergent viewpoints, you don't know what is right, your head is spinning! 

How to deal with this situation? 


The thing is to ignore what everyone says, and build your own conclusions from ground up. 

Most people do not like to think or reason. They will blindly accept whatever is being fed to them. It actually doesn't matter which side they are on, both sides in any debate are like that. 

Therefore, for most people, what works is, pick the view / book / guru / ideology they are comfortable with, and stick with it. 

Pray five times a day facing a particular direction and heaven is assured! Sure. 

Observe vrat for 40 days, then visit this temple, and heaven is assured! Sure. 

Those who lay down those guidelines for people to follow, hopefully are evolved souls, who understand the second order and third order consequences of their prescriptions. 

When those people who lay down those rules are venal politicians, morally deficient warlords, or big businesses whose only objective is to make money, is when things start turning ugly. 

People being people will still blindly follow what the institutions tell them. Which is why one of the first things the powerful do is to capture the institutions, like Bureaucracy, Judiciary, Media. 

Then they apply the rules that Goebbels turned into an art form for the Nazis. Repeat their lies often and in so many different ways that people start believing it's the truth. 

The individual who is not taken in by this propaganda either because he knows better or because he is immune to hypnosis, watches bewildered as the world around him goes mad. When he dares to point it out, and most will not dare, he is in danger of getting lynched. Because people don't like anyone who tries to shatter a shared collective illusion. 

The sane individual is one who, as everyone around him is losing their heads, keeps his composure, and charts his own path. 

The sane individual who is wise does this unobtrusively and quietly. The sane one who is foolish tries to convince others of his point of view. That is not a wise thing to do, no herd likes an outlier if he is too vociferous in his protestations. Outliers are tolerated to an extent so long as they keep their mouth shut.

For the outlier who thinks who knows better, and I find myself in this situation sometimes, a sobering thought is to think of himself as the inmate in the lunatic asylum, who, looking out at the passers by, thinks they are all mad, little realising that he is the one who is in the asylum!

Friday, January 10, 2025

The dangers of Masking

With the HMPV drama, masking is once more a thing. When I call someone I have to hear a full minute of "wear masks, follow social distancing" kind of nonsense before the call goes through. 

Sigh, there we go again! But then, we always knew that Covid was only a trailer. There are more, many more to  come. 

Given this backdrop, it is good to reflect on the following: 

1. Are masks effective in stopping the spread of germs? If they really are, then it would have stopped the flow of air also, and you would be dead by now. 
2. The body has its own immune system to handle viruses, starting with the nasal passage itself. Trust it. 
3. Deep breathing equals health. Shallow breathing equals sickness. ( Read up on it if you don't believe me. Avoid reading any allopathic literature of course, they don't know their nose from their assholes).  Masks make you breathe shallow. Think about it. 
4. The dirty mask is saturated with your own exhaust, and you are breathing IN through that muck. 
5. The microplastics in the masks enter your lungs. 
6. The psychological effect of wearing masks are terrible. 
7. Masking is a psychological tool used by those in power to keep the population in perpetual panic mode. 
8. Those who are working, and especially heading, organisations which have espoused mask policies, will have huge cognitive dissonance in accepting any of this. 
9. Forget science, forget  medicine. What does your common sense tell you?

How a God is turned into a Demon

The Sun is considered as God in every pagan culture. Exposure to sunlight is necessary for good health, Vitamin D being only one of the reasons but a very important one in today's context. Of course, people know all about when and how much exposure to have, wearing turbans / caps, hydrating, cooling drinks, etc. 


Of course, such embedded traditional wisdom is bad for commerce. 

So what do the modern marketers do? 

1. Demonise the sun. Sun exposure causes cancer! Tan! Wrinkles! Skin that looks like parchment! 
2. Embed the fear deep, so that it becomes unquestioned dogma.
3. Put some cheap chemicals in tubes, which is of course bad for the skin ( the skin is a living breathing organ, and you ingest whatever you apply on it) , and convince people that it is good for them. Sun protection is just one example
4. Sell those cheap chemicals at obnoxiously high prices. Do this next time you buy any cosmetic. It is say 300 rupees for a twenty gram tube. That works out to 15,000 rupees a kg. Cold pressed coconut oil which is the best skin remedy in the world costs 450 rupees a kg.
5. Convince people that they need, as in NEED, the chemicals in the tube, in order to live. This thing, convincing people,  modern marketing is highly skilled in doing. As to the ethics of the marketing profession, that is a whole different story for another time. 
6. And then, you reach this stage. Where a "sunscreen" is considered "essential" even when you don't go out in the sun. See the billboards which say so"sunscreen not just for a sunny day, for any day!" 
7. And then people stop going out in the sun, and apply cancer causing chemicals on their skin by the shitloads( pun intended).


We live in an age where all the accumulated wisdom of the ages is being systematically erased. It only takes two or three generations for the process to be complete. 

It is not inconceivable that, fifty or hundred years from now, whoever goes out in the sun is arrested for endangering others since sun exposure can cause infectious diseases, which it will, since people will be so weakened with indoor life and being repeatedly vaccinated,  that they will have to live only in  artificial chambers. 

( Posted to my blog: https://www.dineshgopalan.com )

Sunday, January 5, 2025

Mumbai

Mumbai is no longer liveable.

I grew up in Mumbai, and though now in Bangalore, I  keep visiting Mumbai frequently. 

The city always lacked green spaces. People always had to commute long distances in conditions that are similar to prisoners being transported in cattle cars during World War 2.

Real Estate has always been expensive. People used to invest their life's savings and pledge fifteen years of future income to buy a pokey little flat in Dombivi ( a suburb fifty km away). Now, people invest their life's savings and pledge fifteen years of future income to buy a pokey little flat on the seventeenth floor of a highrise building that resembles an anthill in an anthill colony. 

People in Mumbai are earning more and more and spend more and more for getting basic necessities. Taxis cost 60 rupees a km. Paan ordered on Swiggy costs 75 rupees each. And so on. 

Traffic on the road does not move, period. 

Metros, monorails, underground trains, overground trains, and all kinds of "flyovers" and "flyunders" are being built for the ants to commute from one anthill to another bypassing the crowded roads clogged with more ants below. 

Whatever three storeyed buildings exist, are being demolished to build multistireyed buildings. On the same plot of land. Setback from the road is almost nil. Open area nil. Lung space nil. 

But why do you need all that? You can be born inside the ant hill, live inside, work inside, commute inside, reproduce inside, and die inside the anthill without ever seeing the sun or being out in the rain. 

The ants are happy living their busy busy lives. A former ant who is now living outside sees, and wonders, why would people want to live like this?