A sojourn in the woods

                           A sojourn in the woods

                                                         M.K.Kaw

Recently, I went on a visit to my daughter .She had been persuading us to take a few days off from the routine at Delhi and we succumbed  .She lives in a beautiful flat in Tata Sherwood , Basavanagar , Bengaluru.

The trip had a terrific start when searching for a cab at the airport and being confronted with unreasonable demands of Rs. 1700 and thereabouts, we sighted our daughter Iti looking for us. I must say it was a pleasant surprise and soon we were trundling along   at a fair pace to her house by the shortest route.

Raj and I never see the latest Bollywood releases because one has to take so many irksome steps and then see the artistic offering in a large darkened hall, surrounded by smelly strangers. You cannot repeat an especially emotion-laden scene, you cannot raise the volume when the romantic pair whisper sweet nothings in each other’s ears..

In my daughter’s house these rules do not apply. We were able to see the downloaded versions of latest offerngs and take cashewnuts and coffee while watching the drama.

As part of our itinerary, Iti and Rahul had laid on a five day trip to Coorg. Coorg is celebrated for its forests, cool air and its famous soldiers like Cariappa and Thimayya. The moment these names came up, I was inspired to tell my favourite tale of Sarswati river.How a great civilization was born on the banks of the river Sarswati. How a cataclysmic event destroyed that culture and dispersed the Sarswats across the sub-continent. How the Sarswat Brahmins were distributed to distant locations like Kashmir, Maharashtra, Coorg and Bengal. How all Sarswat brahmins were cousins. So we Kashmiri Pandits could boast of famous generals like Thimayya and Cariappa as our near relations.

We roamed in the dense forests of Coorg, where the trees were huge with large leaves which swished in the ever stormy wind and created the sound of music, as if there was a waterfall nearby. But when you ventured forth, gingerly clutching an umbrella in one hand, you were pleasantly surprised to discover that the whole melodrama was a creation of Nature.

So one afternoon, when we were invited to a guided tour of a coffee plantation, we went in the innocent belief that  it would be an idyllic  stroll over an evenly laid out smooth terrain where the walk would be like a saunter  over a woollen Persian carpet.

And I must say that it started well. The slim knowledgeable youth who introduced himself as Subba Rao, an executive with the coffee plantation, which was spread over 200 acres, appeared to be the ideal person to introduce a party of fifteen persons  to the plantation, where the air was overladen with the aroma of coffee and cardamom.  And the forest path had a soft, feathery touch to it and there was no mud or jagged stone to spoil the effect.

As we proceeded to survey the plants and Subba Rao waxed eloquent on the quality of the products of Coorg, the path became steep and damp and sharp-edged. Our feet were plastered with muck and gtime. I found it increasingly hazardous to negotiate the track. A stage came when my granddaughter Monal and son-in-law Rahul  literally carried me over the rough terrain.

Raj later told me that we looked like Mahatma Gandhi being supported by two girls when he went for an evening stroll. She would have photographed us, had it not been a stressful experience for her, with the fear that all three of us would come tumbling down.

Every time Subba Rao opened his mouth, I asked him a queation.’”When do we reach the terminal point of this tour?” Rao would make a face and deflect the question.  In the later stages of the tour, he pointed to the fat goats grazing so contentedly on the slopes,”Relax, Sir! A jeep is waiting for us and it will carry us back.”

The promise of that jeep sustained me  over the track which seemed to become steeper, muddier and more and more hazardous with every step. At long last Rao stopped and made his final peroration. He revealed that we would be greeted with a hot steaming cup of coffee when we reached the starting point.

 Everything happened as planned. The jeep came just half an hour late, we were shipped up that steep climb and the cups of coffee were there, though tepid and sweet. But one should not be ungrateful.  It will be long before I shall forget that sojourn in the woods

. Especially the fat ruddy leeches who made their bloody appearance in the hotel room when we took off our shoes and socks.

A False Step

                        A false step

It was December, on what was probably the coldest day of the year. I had just appeared on NDTV and was in a somewhat euphoric state of mind. The escort girl whispered something about going by a shortcut to the parking area where their vehicle was parked.

We started to cross a hall in which carpenters had been at work during the day

“Mind your step, Sir”, the girl whispered, even as I put my foot forward on a loose piece of timber and twisted something near the knee. That was the false step.

That one step cost me dearly, both in pain and expense.

I started limping a little. When it persisted, Raj insisted that I   consult a specialist. We decided to go to an Ayurveda clinic, and after a bit of research discovered Santhigiri in Malaviya Nagar. They had various kinds of   oil massage, as practised in Kerala. The vaid  in charge sold us two courses on rejuvenation and revitalisation, which would incidentally also rid me of the pain near the knee.

Three weeks later, I had undergone vigorous Kerala massaging and was Rs. 25,000 lighter in the pocket. Towards the end of the period I said I was feeling better, for fear that he might make me undergo a few more rejuvenation programmes.

After a while, I started seeing Swami Ramdev’s lectures on Aastha channel at 4-30 a.m. His yogic exercises helped me enormously in other aspects of life like getting up early, practising five different forms of meditation and some excellent exercises to become slimmer and generally tone up the body and mind.

But alas! The pain in the knee still persisted.

After a while, Raj happened to talk to a neighbour’s daughter at a wedding. The girl inquired politely why uncle was limping. When Raj unburdened her soul, she promptly revealed that she was now running a physiotherapy clinic at N Block, GK I.

Very soon thereafter we were at Meera Kak’s Clinic and I was booked for a course , which after a suitable neighbourly rebate cost us Rs. 15000 per course.

I must say in retrospect that Meera’s formula for combating pain is a composite one. She uses all the known techniques, like exercises in the gym, yogic asanas, hot and cold compresses, special contortionist postures    by her dedicated and muscular team of female wrestlers

..They even went to the extent of teaching me how to walk.

The girl prompted: ” Keep your neck straight, inhale a chest size of 56, look at a point 200 yards ahead, order your legs to take a long step,  lift your right foot up and put it smartly forward and mentally sing the lines “Nanha munna rahi hoon, desh ka sipahi hoon…”

Two courses later, I had tired of the whole regimen and lapsed into sleeping at home and a course of benign neglect. One day, Papoo came to our house and saw me limping. He waxed eloquent on the merits of Anand Purohit, who had magic fingers and made your pain disappear instantly. He had cured his tennis elbow in no time.

I succumbed to Papoo’s propaganda.Anand manipulated the leg, the calf etc .and on my third visit asked me to ascend the stairs. I did it with ease.Anand flashed his famous smile and said, “it is as I thought. There is nothing wrong with the knee. You have only to order your leg to move.”

My wife , who has always suspected that I have no pain and  it is all a figment of my imagination concurred fully with him. After eight sittings each costing Rs. 800/- I gave up the treatment.

My latest experiment is with a young dedicated architect who practices Sujok,the Korean art of acupuncture. This is Parul Maheshwari who has converted his basement in Saket into a physiotherapy clinic. He claims that the Sujok is the most complete system of therapy invented by man. He takes a computer snapshot of the patient’s nervous system through an Accugraph and then measures the progress over a period of time.

My initial accugraph gave me a composite score of 65%. In the last two months, the score has come up to   92% Thus there is great improvement.

“sBut the pain in the knee still persists,” I whine, at which comment he flashes a smile. ”You will see the improvement. Let the nervous balance in the body be first restored.”

Parul does not charge a fee. So I still visit him religiously at 7 a.m. every morning.

What do I have to lose?

The choice of a profession

The choice of a profession

My grandson Shashank is in ClassXI ,going on  to Class XII. This is the critical time when children have to choose their profession. In our days the options were limited; One naturally drifted towards a profession, either following the family tradition or abiding by the wisdom of the elders. When it came to our children, the youngsters had already started asserting themselves. We wanted them to enter the civil service, but they were singularly unimpressed by their experience of my life style. My daughter became an engineer MBA and my son a cardiac surgeon.

Then came Bill Gates, Mark Zuckenburg and Steve Jabs and being a school or college dropout became fashionable throughout the world. In India, ‘Three Idiots’ represented the great divide. Parents became apprehensive about imposing their career choices on their children; there was always the implicit threat of suicide in the air.

Shashank at first plumped for commerce, then shifted gear to history, then to international affairs. The latest bombshell he lobbed at his parents was politics. When asked for a clarification he explained that he did not mean good old “political science”, he wanted to join active politics. My daughter almost fainted away.

Shashank was directed to discuss the matter with his nanu (i.e. poor me). I had no intention of confronting youth power head on. I only sought clarifications. When he said politics, what exactly did he mean? Would he enter the rough and tumble of electoral politics, first in the municipal ward, then graduating to higher positions of MLA, MP, Minister, Chief Minister etc?

He was exceedingly mature for his age. His model was Kanhaiya Kumar, the president of the Students] Union in Jawahar Lal Nehru   University.He had studied his career graph in depth. You had first to emerge as a student leader and then force the Govt. to arrest you for sedition. This route appeared to be easy and replicable.

Kanhaiya’s recent career showed how a nonentity could be catapulted overnight  to the status of a national celebrity, just because of a concentrated dose of attention from the electronic and print media.

I must say that the young man had learnt his lessons well .I wondered how he could be dissuaded from this calamitous course of action .I reminded him of the special skills and background that successful politicians had necessarily to boast of .      Kanhaiya Kumar hailed from a poor family of Bihar . Narinder Modi was a Chaiwala’s son. Both spoke Hindi with great fluency ,with Modi having picked his linguistic skills from his long stint as a R S S pracharak .

Did he not notice how Kanhaiya had been a fond bed-fellow of undesirable elements like Maoist extremists and Kashmiri separatists? Would Shashank fel comfortable with mouthing of anti-national slogans of  the kind shouted in the JNU campus on 9^th February?

Shashank would always be saddled by the overwhelming burden of the patrician credentials of his parents and having been student of a public school , his proficiency in the manipulation of the Hindi language was nothing to boast of .

On top of it he would have to locate his political career in the state of Karnataka of which he knew very little . He would have to be a master of  Kannad.

As our conversation proceeded, I could see that Shashank’s initial enthusiasm for politics as a career had waned considerably .Latest reports from Bengaluru indicate that Shashank might persuade himself to take up something more classy like international affairs or  inclusive politics as a subject of study .

 For the present, we are keeping our fingers crossed!