Hello Healthful, Goodbye 2021!

2021 was a year of big changes in my personal and professional life. But am most grateful to it for showing me, why and how to prioritise my Health, above all else.

Circa May 2020

It all began with the pressure cooker misadventure. This is a story (one of many!) that begins during the Great Lockdown of 2020. That was the time I spent over 100 days in absolute isolation in a rented 3-bedroom DDA flat in Jasola Vihar, New Delhi.

My sense of Time was as warped as Dali’s melting clocks, and the day’s “agenda” was to move my bed and sleep paraphernalia from the master bedroom to my study, after having had a nice meal.

I had cooked some dal. My chai was ready too. At the corner was a fruit basket with some freshly bought oranges – so the tiny kitchen had steam chugging from the cooker and a heady mix of aromas – masoor dal, cardamom chai and oranges. There were dishes piled high, that formed a small mountain from the sink and spilled over onto the counters.

And in that very tiny kitchen, dirty dishes left unattended spelled D-i-s-a-s-t-e-r.

Somehow, while lifting the giant 5-kg pressure cooker off the stove, I tripped over a stray spoon that had made its way to the floor. To prevent knocking my head hard on a storage cabinet door and my ankle from twisting, I flailed around to hold onto anything solid and ended up dropping the pressure cooker.

CRASH! CLANG-CLANG…Bang, Boom. Thud.

And then followed the deafening silence that was the Great Lockdown again.

The heavy metal had narrowly missed quashing my foot.

But because the pressure cooker’s lid was already off, the hot dal had spilled all over. For about 10 seconds, I felt a scalding near my instep, but that pain quickly became numb.

I was numb with horror at the chaotic sight before me, and then overcome with an even more horrifying apprehension that the mess was not going anywhere.

The spilled dal. The stains all over. The inexhaustible pile of dishes. The whole kitchen, in fact. It all needed a deep clean TODAY, and I was the only one who could do it.

The rest of that day went by in utter misery. I began to clean but had to “take a break” every 10 minutes. Every time I had to bend, swab and scrub anything– my arms ached. All my muscles were sore. The slightest movement had them silently screaming in agony.

I would try and sit on my haunches, for maximum efficiency to scoop and move things, but would end up collapsing onto the floor. My knees and calves would give way, as if I were boneless. I was giddy and tired, and hungry too. And remained covered in mess and water for the next few hours.

All I really did that day, was clean the kitchen and do the dishes. But it felt like I had run a full marathon.

At some point, during all that – I found myself saying it out loud to no one “This is ridiculous. You are just 33 for Christ’s sake – but you are exhausted as a consequence of literally, doing nothing!”

Even as Covid-19 was just about making its way into India – there was something already knocking around my conscience. My body was sending me little signals that my brain could not ignore anymore. There were sharp jolts of pain as if I was being struck by a Stinging Hex (Harry Potter, anyone?) - every time I needed to physically move, more than what I had become habitually accustomed to in those months. And if I allowed myself to be brutally honest– not just those months, but those years of living in the Nation’s capital, while working at desk and hunched over a laptop all the time.

The harsh truth was that I had entered my thirties, like many other urban Indian denizens - plagued by a sedentary lifestyle that took over every other aspect of my life.

I had never considered my health to be the gift that kept on giving. I never thought twice about how incredibly privileged I was, to have had a healthy body that was free from any ailments or diseases.

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You see, I am not a physical being. In fact, I detest exercise.

Even as a child, I avoided sports. I was terrible at team sports and always used my overactive imagination to make up some legitimate excuses to avoid any physical activity.

Alas, I am the only child of a single parent who loves sports, games and physical exercise. My mother is someone who was a champion sportswoman and mountaineer, and is also someone who is very disciplined about being fit and active all her life.

I am, to put it quite frankly, just not.

This contrast in the pair of us, even though we look alike, is very blatant – and a running joke in our family. Often, my mother would come to my school PTA meetings and all my teachers would greet her enthusiastically, remarking at how I was a very well-behaved and academically oriented pupil. And my mother would retort – “But what about Sports? Can you encourage her to do some sport?!”

Chip-of-the-old-block (at least this time!)

Luckily, my love for Mother Nature has enabled us to have some common ground – my Ma and I both love walking, hiking and trekking. The water baby in me also enjoys swimming, snorkelling and diving too.

But living in any Indian metropolis, and factoring in convenience and outcomes – implied that such physical activity is not an everyday occurrence. Thus, exercise and anything concerning my health always took a backseat.

Which is why if you hinted back in December 2018, that fast-forward to three years ahead, all my priorities would be calibrated towards leading a more physically active lifestyle – I would have laughed. I would have in fact, bellowed with laughter and made some sarcastic comments about my “love” for exercise.

But here we are in December 2021 and as I reflect the year gone by – the biggest outcome or change that emerged was that I became more healthful.

Mind you, a lot of momentous things happened this year:

• I moved back to Bangalore after 15 years and have decided to call it ‘home’.

• I launched this blog, which was a long-standing dream and have been moulding myself into a writer.

• My personal style and wardrobe changed.

• Am becoming more adept at being a lone woman in a city, and reject the various labels that get attached me by heteronormativity.

• But what makes 2021 special is that I learned that there is one thing that REALLY matters.

Something that is bigger than my blog, better than earning money, more cherished than travel, more desired than love, greater than friendships and perhaps, valued as much as, or even more than my family. And that is Good Health & Well-being.

Big city-gal with Small adventure dreams!

Am phrasing “being healthier – physically and mentally” as such, because it is a concept that am borrowing from the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly, SDG 3.

Health has now become the leading ‘factor’ in all my decision-making, and that is an irreversible phenomenon. And for this alone – to the year that is 2021 – am forever grateful.

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What lead to this, and how, you may ask?

Well, post the pressure cooker misadventure, it became apparent that my lack of physical activity needed immediate correction.

I moved out of New Delhi, permanently in July 2020 and moved in with my mother in Ahmedabad for a while. This translated into a morning routine that just encompassed a daily physical activity.

A 30-minute walk with her, soon became a 90-minute daily routine of making sure I did at least 10, 000 steps a day. There was a local hiking group that I could become a part of – and could track my own progress, especially when I compare my first hike after years of inactivity to the last one where I could easily keep up with the leader.

My diet changed entirely to home-cooked meals and the pace of my life became slower, but more measured. Am not someone who is fussy about the food I eat – but there was something I could observe as a mere consequence of the slow-paced life.

Instant food is very good at making you believe that you have satiated your hunger, but all it does is leave you with the real cravings for later. Whether, it is nutrition or emotion, one needs to put in the work to find balance and stay healthy.

The real ‘wake-up call’ was the brutal second wave of the pandemic in India.

March – May 2021 are months that I never want to re-live again, despite all the hard-hitting lessons that came with it. Anyone can argue on the severity of the health calamity with numbers and statistics to support their political view. But I recollect those months in terms of the real people, I knew personally who died. And it was not their time to go.

There were health terms that I had to become intimately familiar with – such as co-morbidities, Non-communicable Diseases (NCDs), Oxygen Saturation levels, incidence and prevalence etc. I cannot even calculate the hours spent on learning about the vaccination options and then finding a vaccine centre to get my vaccine.

When your health, or the health of a loved one becomes severely compromised, one notices just how worthless everything else becomes.

We perceive just how mortal we are; how precious and frail life is!

All the birthdays and greetings that followed the pandemic’s second-wave, had me sincerely wishing people “a healthful year” ahead.

Thereafter, money spent on health became an investment and not an expense.

I went for a holistic yet intensive detox regimen, in October 2021 that took an entire two weeks away from my ‘habitual’ life. I wrote about that experience in rich detail as an email to my subscribers, and thus I will not repeat it here.

But let me briefly outline what that entailed:

• An Ayurvedic detox is not the same as a de-addiction treatment or plan. I had erroneously assumed that as I am a teetotaller, non-smoker and a vegetarian by choice, the detox would be an easier ride for me. It really wasn’t. The program was an intense one both physically and mentally.

• A combination of Iyengar (Medical) Yoga + Ghee therapy + Ayurveda treatments were prescribed specifically as it catered to my body type and constitution. I gained a lot of insight into how much your body can self-heal if you just treat it a bit better.

• I lost 4.8 kilos of weight 10.4 inches in two weeks, but paradoxically gained a significant amount of upper body and core strength. It felt like I had actually de-aged!

It was worth every rupee and something I shall consider doing from time to time – whenever my body sends me those little signals again.

There is a reason why there aren't many pictures of me doing Yoga!

Nowadays, for 5 days a week, I have a dedicated Yoga instructor who comes right up to my doorstep (if need be!) to guide me through an hour of exercise. It is still painful and I have always wondered how all the ladies in the Yoga adverts look so serene and calm while doing the asanas. At the end of the hour, I usually look like a ghoul.

But I can already see how much my physical wellness has improved in the past months.

There are many days that I wish to skip Yoga, spend hours on the couch, go back to ‘anytime meals’ and just binge on anything, anytime and anywhere. Am only human after all.

But something about the lived experience of this year has me constantly remembering this epiphany which struck me back in April this year:

From about 20 feet afar, I watched the body of our well-loved neighbour in Ahmedabad, being literally thrown and stashed away into a bio-medical waste bag. No last rites, no contact and no goodbyes allowed. The shock wore off and the tears dried eventually, but the promise I had made to myself stayed with me -

“Your body has been very kind to you so far; Now it’s your turn to be kind to it!”

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Thank you for reading!

As 2021 comes to an end, I wanted to share something that is a personal reflection of the year gone by. Here's wishing you a very healthful and joyous 2022!

Anyone interested in knowing more about the Detox Program at the Ayurveda Treatment centre I visited this October, do drop me a comment and I will gladly forward you the email with all the details!

P.s. The website and co-ordinates of the place is KARE Ayurveda & Yoga Retreat, Mulshi Pune

What was the biggest reveal or lesson of 2021 for you? Am eager to know if there were any significant changes in your life, or whether you discovered something extraordinary even in the mundane. Am all ears - let me know in the comments below!