While you are enjoying your Sunday morning (possibly with coffee in hand?), I am in this prison of sorts where no coffee, cold water, electric fan, television or even talking is permitted and no, I am not on some reality show nor am I at a group therapy programme me or at a meditation centre for Kundalini awakening or such.
To cut a long suspense story short, I am at an Ayurvedic hospital (a purgatory to be precise) where I am expiating my sinful eating and living habits.
According to Ayurveda, all diseases are
a manifestation of the imbalances in the three doshas of Vatta, Pitta and Kafa (roughly gas, bile and phlegm) and once these three musketeers are evened out, the disease should also automatically vanish. Hence I am undergoing the Panchakarma treatment to detoxify and purge my body of all its dosha imbalances, which should eventually chase away my ailment. Thankfully, all this whitewashing is restricted to the body alone
while my soul can continue to be its dark, devilish self, delicious enough to write and lead a ‘Loony life’.
As such this archaic treatment is tough enough with its heavy dietary restrictions of no coffee, no oil, no spices, nothing-remotely-edible. What is weighing heavier is the Sanskrit these Ayurvedic doctors are spewing forth. For every question I ask, some verse from this Samhita or that Hridaya is thrown at me which makes me want to recite a
“Gurur Brahma” as a possible repartee to show them that “I too can talk Sanskrit, walk Sanskrit and laugh Sanskrit,” the same way Amitabh Bachchan and Rajnikanth spoke English with “the condition of the consideration of the injunction of the irritation... of the passion of the nation…”
Coming back to the treatment, I was told that once I got admitted I would be given “Sneha Panam” (literally ‘friendly drink’). Ha! A welcome drink at a hospital! What next? Would ill-clad girls dance to me after the promised massage (albeit with medicated oils)? As I eagerly awaited the drink, a lady came in bearing a steel tumbler, a longish piece of cloth and two cotton buds dunked
in some unguent.
“I have to blindfold you,” she said and my imagination simply exploded. Wheee! Long live Charaka and Sushruta. Long live ancient Indians and the age that facilitated the writing of a treatise like Kama Sutra. So on and so forth, I exulted as I permitted myself to be blindfolded. No sooner were my eyes bound than two oily cotton plugs were unexpectedly thrust into my nostrils. A smell that could make a skunk wither pervaded my
entire being. As I swooned in shock a glass was pressed to my lips. I perked up immediately, knowing that it was that promised welcome drink and eagerly opened my mouth when of all things ghee flowed into my mouth! Can you believe I was made to drink an entire glass of ghee?!!
“You call this Sneha Panam?” I shouted.
“Sneham means oily. This is towards
internal oleation of your body. This will help the toxins to dislodge from various sites in your body and move towards the alimentary tract,” they explained in shudhh Sanskrit.
“Tomorrow we shall give you a larger glass of ghee, okay?” said the lady. I could only weep.
To think that I have been here only a day and there are roughly three more weeks to go! Still, the loony spirit is alive and I shall (in true manner of a prisoner) write a day by day account of my stay here and find those gaps in this ordeal where I can laugh and share the laugh with my readers. So log on to www.jayamadhavan.blogspot.com to read more about the purging of Jaya Madhavan.