Hastamudra

Shivpuri Colony

Varanasi

The stomping of Kanchan’s feet transports me back to my 17-year old being. Kanchan is my landlady. She is an accomplished Bharat Natyam dancer, teacher, and incidentally has a masters in music from BHU, as well as training in conflict resolution and political science.  She moves her hands perfectly, reflexively gesturing with one of the 28 mudras, or hand gestures, used in classical Natya, or dance.  She is an elegant, beautiful lady, and her laugh is captivating.

Dhai. Dhai.  She demonstrates. Her feet hit the ground evenly, creating a gentle but thunderous clap that is practiced and perfect.  I wander back to the pink mosaic-tiled floor of Jhorna-di, my teacher in Kolkata, and her demands that we place our feet properly to get the requisite sound. After one week of steady practice, I had learned how to sit on my haunches and pound my feet for the even thunder that is strong.

Kanchan smiles and explains the asanjukta hastadimudras.  Asanjukta means unjoined, or in this case, a single hand.  Hasta means hand and mudras are hand gestures.  

She tells the first, Hast-bhinaya (hah-stah-bin-a-yah), hand gesture. Pahtaka
(Pah-tah-kah) is the most basic position and has many uses: a flag, rain, a shower of flowers, cutting, pride, patting the arm, happiness, cutting a creeper.  Depending on the pointing of the fingers, different meanings are indicated.

Written as early as 100BCE, the NatyaShastra is the earliest known dance text and is designed in its 36 chapters to cover all aspects of medieval dramaturgy - dance, music, acting, costumes, stage construction and many other theatrical techniques. There are slokas that teach us each of the hand postures, their meanings and their uses.

Kanchan, who I now will call Bou-di, demonstrates the Utpalapadma, or Sola-padma, the full blown lotus.  Her lotuses are perfect. My hands, 30 years later, require some practice to remember what they knew so well.  The gesture enquires, 'who are you?', or indicates emptiness of information. The gesture is made by imagining you are encircling the underside of a watermelon. 

There are more to learn, she promises.  In time, I will show you them all.  Mridula, the protagonist of the novel I am completing, awaits… with open hands.

Forces of Nature

Shivpuri Colony
Lanka, Varanasi

Tonight I ate my dinner by moonlight. It was very romantic. Amid pearly clouds in a pitch dark sky, the moon dazzled, pleased to be of use.  This ambience was created by the eight hours of load shedding daily. Load shedding is the Bengali-English “Banglish” term for black-out, where the city decides to turn off the electricity to certain parts of the city in sequence for 1-2 hours, in order to shed the load of need for electricity.

In Benaras, one learns that electricity is a luxury, not a necessity, for life continues even without it.  One learns what is really important, how to time activities with the forces of nature and utilize light, wind, water, soil and sound in ways that support one’s needs. 

Life becomes very purposeful. It slows down to the pace of conscious accomplishment of small things, like having clean water and having a clean place to bathe.  One learns when to keep doors closed to keep out mosquitoes at sunset, and when to open the doors at sunrise to let in the breeze.  One knows to wash clothes in early morning if the sun is shining, and to shelter them on the verandah if there are cloudy skies. One knows not to hang clothes indoors because the dampness attracts mosquitoes. We sweep the window sills, then the furniture, then the floors in the morning after the cool air becomes warm, when the doors and windows close to shelter the room from the oncoming blistering heat.  We cover our beds to keep dust from settling, and we wash dishes immediately to keep ants – and in my case, monkeys – away.

What is impressive is that despite all these challenges, ambitious and intellectual people are accustomed to accomplishing what they need without letting the need for comforts get in their way.  They keep laziness at bay. Professors will teach class and delve into the material despite sweaty eyebrows and no AV aids. Doctors will see patients, in the heat of a crowded room, using only sunlight to guide their examinations. Sellers will sell their vegetables, and porters will port their packages.  Life moves forward, due to the amazing willforce of man that we call survival of the fittest.

Got Milk?

Lanka, Varanasi

Uttar Pradesh

Early in the morning, the naughty cows and bulls dance in the nearby forest of the Aaj House, bellowing their love tunes. Anyone sleeping with windows open will hear their calls.  In the morning rush hour traffic, cow, bulls, buffalos, and oxen move into the streets, as the traffic slows and is not as dangerous for them as the night-riders are.  People very respectfully drive around the cows, taking time not to touch them or provoke them.  An occasional servant will throw a basket of leaves, peels, and skin over the side of a rooftop, or out a window into a grassy pitch below, knowing this is a buffet for come bovine passer-by.

In this land of roaming cows, I have finally gotten my first glass of fresh, undiluted, non-GMO, non-Bovine Growth Hormone –injected, non-homogenized, non-pasteurized, non-“enriched with Vitamin A and D,” non-reconstituted milk.  It has a cream layer on top, is always drunk warm, and has a rich, sweet taste.  It is real M-I-L-K.

I have a lot to say about milk.

My father was a veterinarian, and we grew up with fresh, unadulterated milk. For several years of my life, cows lived upstairs from our penthouse on the roof. My mother would walk upstairs twice daily for a fresh supply and fill us with every possible recipe that can be made with milk. 

Milk, however, is villified in the USA. Vegans retort, “milk is for baby cows, not baby humans.” People are anti-milk and have created an industry of soy milk, rice milk, almond milk to replace their favorite dishes.  Many doctors tell patients they have milk allergy, or casein (milk protein) allergy and forever forbid them from the land of dairy, throwing in eggs somehow (?!) in that calculation.  

It is not the milk that is causing the problem. It is processing of the milk and our treatment of the cow. 

Ayurveda has great wisdom about how, when, and why to drink milk, but in its Sanskrit sutra, Ayurvedic wisdom is not yet accessible to westernized Indians and people in the West.
Pure cow milk provides Lactobacillus, bacteria that are symbiotic and healthy for humans. These bacteria can survive a soft boil and they are one of the best things that can come to reside in your gut.  The biochemistry of our gut and vaginal microbiome depends on the molecules produced by the Lactobacillus species which trigger cell-signaling pathways for absorption of nutrients.  

What does pasteurization do then to these little friendly critters? It explodes them with the sudden increase and decrease in temperature, allowing fast-forming water crystals to pierce their walls, leaving carcasses of Lactobacilli throughout the milk.  Of course, this happens with all the bacteria – good and bad – that are in the milk.  So the immunologist in me wonders how all these antigens and dead bacteria floating in my milk can be good for my immune system.

Ayurveda says milk is not to be drunk raw, … or hyper-heated. It is not to be combined with other cows’ milk; it is to be soft-boiled; ginger is to be added when a person has low digestive fire; turmeric is to be added when anti-inflammatory effects are required; and buttermilk made from yogurt is the best relative of milk and the best for medicinal effects in healing the gut.   

The proper pathway of making milk products is milk–>yogurt–>buttermilk–>butter–>ghee. 
There are many, many rules for how to use milk as a nutrient and as a curative medicine….  
 
When made properly, milk boosts Ojas (~immunity) the fastest of any substance, because it seems, our immune system responds to the cow antibodies quite well. I have been using home-made yogurt and buttermilk “takra”  to help people cure themselves of IBS for years. Cream is an instant coolant and soother for bites, bumps and boils; Ayurvedic energetics says it is not the temperature of the milk, but the inherent property of pure milk that makes it cool the body. 

The problem today is that we are processing milk in all kinds of ways without questioning its utility. Yes, Mr. Khurian of Amul used mass production and factory farming to help end starvation and Vitamin D-deficiency diseases.  But the techniques were developed without respecting Ayurveda’s wisdom, respecting animals, and before modern industry and medicine knew about the role of the gut microbiome.  With the new tyrannical farm laws in the USA, consumers cannot even report on the treatment of cows, the conditions of factory farms, and attitudes in farming. Beyond criticism, the cow lobby is now free to torture cows and feed their parts to other animals. In addition, one hundred years after these techniques are creating millions of jobs and supporting crores^ of people, noone wants reform and injection of new knowledge.  

The Ayurvedists are too quiet and too late.

If we really believe in evidence-based medicine, we should do a real study of what is left behind in the milk when it is pasteurized and homogenized and pooled with 10,000 other cows’ milk! We should also study what happens when we add sugar as a “natural” preservative.  Ayurveda’s pharmaceutic division, the field of Bhaisajya Kalpana, tells us how to cultivate, process, and store milk so that it remains therapeutic.  We could design a study and test the effects.  However, some dairy lobby will suppress the evidence.

Ayurveda believes in **practice-based** evidence, watching millions of people over thousands of years, drinking the products of milk that are properly cultivated and produced, and not suppressing the evidence. In America, studies have been done to show that homogenization of milk makes it difficult for the human gut and liver to separate the fat properly into an HDL, and thus it goes into an LDL. This physiology, mechanism and connection of homogenization to atherosclerosis and heart disease is well-known, but suppressed. 

Ayurvedic vaidyas don’t even get involved anymore in the argument of new techniques, because their clinical evidence is so strong that they don’t need to prove anything to anyone. They quietly go home, and drink their milk and feed their children and make their medicines only from pure milk.  If they are kind vaidyas, they bring you milk-sweets once in a while.
If you REALLY want to understand milk, go sit quietly in front of one of them, and l-i-s-t-e-n. 

You may see then that what we are drinking in most urban areas in the world is cow poison, not MILK.


^1 crore = 10 million