Tag Archives: india

Travel

India: God’s own country, Ayurveda and living your life’s purpose

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Varkala, Kerala

A gem! Beautiful nature, good food (Kerala is known for its vegetarian and seafood cuisine), nice people, yoga classes for those who care, ayuverdic clinics for those curious about medicine, just want to get a good massage or need to talk to a doctor. I haven’t been to a city of Varkala Itself because Varkala Cliff where we stayed was more than enough for me and I really wanted to get the most of it. Kerala is also known as the most educated state currently ruled by a Communist party.  It is a home to a religious mix of Hindus, Christians and Muslims. Kerala as a state has been marketed as “God’s own country” for its natural beauty.

I went to a yoga class along with other students who practice yoga either for personal satisfaction or professional reasons. Some people in my class were yoga instructors from other countries getting additional training.

Russian is somewhat spoken in Varkala cliff area, thankfully much less than in Goa. For those who are under impression that everyone in India speaks English – you are so wrong! Only those who receive very good private education speak English and that excludes taxi drivers,  restaurant waiters and most hotel personnel.

The most significant and transformative part of my trip was meeting with an Ayurvedic doctor. I have a skin rash on my palm, which has been coming and going for sometime now. I wanted to discuss that, plus, I am in general very curious about non-traditional medicine, nutrition and other matters that are good for a temple of my soul. So, my yoga teacher took me to Dr. Innocent (that’s his real name).

The first question I got asked is “what do you eat?”

Me: for breakfast I usually have eggs…Dr Innocent: oh… you will have to change your diet completely

Here my nutrition world tilts. I tell him I am not a big meat eater and I eat eggs to compensate for protein I am not getting. The doctor gets into an explanation of human body types and cooling/ heating properties of any food. For example, cucumbers are cooling and I should eat them while chicken egg is heating and to be avoided, however, I can eat a duck egg because a duck egg is cooling.

My Ayurvedic diagnosis is that I have pitta (fire) imbalance and that means I have to eat foods with cooling properties. The specific food I should avoid is:

  • Tomatoes because they are acidic (goodbye pasta napoletana!)
  • Cheese
  • Yoghurt only for lunch with a little honey – it is acidic (while I have been eating yogurt thinking it is the healthiest food on planet Earth)
  • Sour cream because it is heating (cream is cooling, so, cream is allowed)

In addition, I should avoid spicy and oily food – I am cool with this.

Other interesting takeaways:

  • Honey +  Hot water = Poison. Goodbye hot tea with lemon and honey, it turns out I have been poisoning myself my whole life.
  • Self -massage should be administered daily in a downward swiping directions. If you have no time for a full body massage, at least you should massage your head, ears and feet daily.
  • If you have difficulties falling asleep at night,  take a glass of milk (not hot!) with honey before a bedtime.

I bought Ayurvedic medication which I will take for at least 3 months, herbal body oil for cooling “the fire”,  coconut based herbal head oil  + now I am on a diet.

So, after we discussed my medical matters I was still reluctant to leave and started leading the conversation in a direction that would satisfy my curiosities. I start with “Why is your name Innocent?”.

Dr. Innocent: because my father named me so (smiles)
Me: are you Christian?
Dr. Innocent: No, Hindu
Me: do you believe in a cast system?
Dr. Innocent:  No. If I give the same medicine for the same condition to people from different casts and it cures both of them, how can there be a cast difference between people?Me: how did it happen that India developed its Ayurvedic traditions? Think of it, every oil you use contains so many herbs prepared in a certain way. To come up with just one medicine probably required years of research…
Dr. innocent: that still remains a big question. Back in the days, ages ago, people lived very peacefully because they knew that they had to live their life’s purpose. When you live your life purpose, you have a focus and maybe those people had a focus on medicine.

As we talk I learn that Dr. Innocent (the man is in his thirties, maybe early forties) has 3 degrees – in zoology, applied microbiology and medicine. After trying different things he eventually came to Ayurveda which is something his family has  been practicing for over 500 years. Sometimes his patients pay him, sometimes they don’t, like a recent foreign patient who promised to wire the money for the treatment but he hasn’t done it yet. Then he adds calmly and with a certainty “but he will, one day the money will come”. The important thing is not about money, it is about living your life purpose and his life purpose is to treat people.

Voila!

As a side note, in Air India’s in-flight  magazine I read that India’s spiritual revenue is estimated to be 30 billion dollars a year. That is all sorts of ashrams, astrologers, yogic training,, etc. 30 billion dollars a year spent on learning one’s  life purpose and making the most of it!

 

Travel

India: Mumbai and Pune. Wedding part.

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To those who have been asking me  “so, how was India?” and especially to those who repeatedly told me “you are crazy” (for going to India) I devote this and probably two more posts.

Mumbai

My main reason for coming to India was my friend Abhiraj’s wedding. Since I am coming all the way to India, I added a vacation to the wedding part.

 My first day in Mumbai I spend soaking up Indian matrimonial festivities surrounded with some men but mainly women wearing their gorgeous sarees and finest jewelry, family members exchanging gifts, food blessing ceremonies which you probably get to see only in India, pre-wedding lunch (before the wedding family members are on a vegetarian diet only)  and a mehendi ritual which was a highlight for me.

Mumbai as a city is a beehive of millions, crazy traffic, no traffic rules with a survival on the road managed by horn honking. I only spent 2 days in Mumbai and that was enough for me, however, I am sure, for someone who goes to Mumbai for a longer period, they will discover things that are fascinating. 

Pune

I had to come to Pune because my friend’s wedding actually took place here – the bride is from Pune. The city is nicer, greener, more manageable, known for its universities, Osho’s meditation resort and a good night life (for those who care).

Indian weddings are set on a day considered to be auspicious by a guruji (friendly neighborhood priest) and usually start in the morning around 7:30-8 am. Yes, that early! The weddings end around 2-3pm.  Wedding rituals take place on a stage (so everyone can see) and are the longest part of the wedding. There was a part of the ceremony (as I was told a typical Maharashtrian  thing) in which every guest had to greet the newlyweds personally. I don’t know how many guests came to the wedding (maybe 300?) but the queue was long. My Indian friends did not feel like queuing and used my foreigner-ignorant-of-local-traditions status to cut in front of others from another end of stage :)))

Wedding photos

 

Pune photos

 

 

Travel

Why is India so dirty? A story by INDA hotel in Varkala

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I am back from a  both awesome and awful trip to India. Everything awful was limited to:

  • A traffic with an accompanying honking noise (Mumbai),
  • Air-pollution (again, Mumbai),
  • Over-population (felt the strongest in Mumbai),
  • Seemingly total absence of any traffic rules and traffic lights – you should have seen a cluster f@#$ intersection I found myself in my second day in … guess where? Mumbai!
  • And, finally, garbage on the streets all around India.

Awesome part can be summed up in one word – people. I am amazed how so many souls took time out of their lives to take care of me. I had a stranger giving me her time to walk me to a train station, to buy my ticket, to take me to a right platform and the right car (there are cars for men and there are cars for women) and to tell me “your stop is the very last one”. I had another stranger googling, making calls, writing down directions for taxi just because I happened to ask her “Where can I exchange dollars?” . The highlight of the awesome part was an Ayurvedic doctor I met in Varkala who shattered my world with his life philosophy and made me re-consider my diet and self-care regimen.

 

Photo taken from  “women only” car. In the background there are men hanging from “men only” car. Doors don’t close, you ride at your own risk.

 

Between two trains are small hills of trash.

 

However, this post is about garbage or rather what is being done with it based on what I was told by owners of InDa hotel in Varkala, Kerala. I made a hotel reservation via www.booking.com to find out upon my arrival that the hotel was managed by a young Ukrainian couple. I also found out that a lot of guests in InDa are  travelers from post-Soviet countries. To  be frank, I avoid places like that because the first thing that comes to my mind is all-inclusive Russian-speaking hotels in Antalya, Turkey. Not here! The people I got meet were those who travel for 6 months in a row, work online, study yoga to be able to teach it in some far away Saint Petersburg, etc. In addition to post-Soviet folks I met Greeks, Italians, French, Germans, Spanish… the list goes on.

InDa hotel’s chit-chat area

Now back to the garbage…. It is all over the place outside of the hotel like it is everywhere in India. When I dig  for a millionth time into logical reasons of  “why is it so dirty?” I learn from our Ukrainian hosts the following:

The government can not manage the garbage removal. Each hotel has to invent its own garbage removal strategy. In case of InDa hotel, for plastic, metal and glass waste they made arrangements with some Tamil guy who picks it up and sells it to someone else. Food and organic waste is picked up by another guy for his cows. Occasionally, a cow guy skips a visit and then the hotel uses its compost pit. What’s left is a non-recyclable garbage which is also taken away by someone for a fee.

Basically, what in a civilized country is managed by the government in this case is managed in a very civilized manner by the hotel’s management. This also explains why on the streets there is trash everywhere – well, the government has no resources to dispose of it.

One Saturday I saw an ad on the street for “Clean Varkala Day”. The same day I ran into a German guy who was cleaning a street outside of his homestay. We briefly spoke. He told me that he had been living in Varkala for 6 months going through a yoga training and yes, he believes that cleaning streets is something they (Europeans) must help with to keep Varkala clean and to show Indians a good practice. When I returned to the hotel I told our Ukranian hosts about “Clean Varakala Day”. They said, yes, the Europeans who live here organize such days. Only Europeans, sadly, participate in such initiatives.

I am thankful to live in a smaller country (30 million souls is a lot  easier to manage than a nation of 1.3 billion), thankful for our Communist past which put a lot of infrastructure in place, thankful for our Islamic heritage which values cleanliness, however, even in center city Tashkent which is known to be green and clean I often see plastic bags with trash along sidewalks while a garbage disposal bin is only 10 meters away. This makes me believe over and over again – it all comes down to people not caring about how they live.