Good food versus bad food… key to making lifestyle changeovers. Today there is a growing organic farming movement in Goa showing us the way to improve health parameters. The challenge is on for a stronger immunity and happier world without Covid-19 fears! Eat local, eat organic, eat fresh and patronise a minimal lifestyle.
BY TARA NARAYAN
FOOD for thought this week post the 51ST International film festival of India which has come and gone! I’m thinking that since we need food for the mind (as much as food for body beautiful) constantly, how about Goa and IFFI town Panaji housing a permanent international film festival of India running all the year around and especially at INOX and Kala Academy auditoriums?
Okay, make it a weekend IFFI so that one may see qualitatively better international cinema in Goa all year round! Imagine the job opportunities which will come up and yes it would bring back cinema viewing as a pleasurable leisure activity of the very best kind and not of the pass time variety if you know what I mean. Would this revive cinema watching on the big screen for a younger generation (older generation being already a captive audience)?
Well, this is just a thought by way of food for thought for my friends at the Entertainment Society of Goa and Department of Film Festivals, speaking for myself I’d welcome a selection of world class IFFI films all the year around in Goa for sure. It would take the stress out of viewing films only once a year when IFFI comes around! The big question is of course will it be financially viable? Why not and even more so? This would do much to revive filmmaking and cinema viewing, I mean proper and are respectful cinema viewing — not the cursory in between off and on thing we do with our bloody hand phones and computers!
Look, the monied class does not need to venture out to see films. My upper crust of relatives and friends all have a room in their homes outfitted with all the entertainment works – large LCD wall screens, ear phones, other appropriate digital gizmo stuff and it is here they entertain in style evenings while watching the latest crème de la crème films past and present which they can command a call away. Plus, there’s staff to do the catering for what to drink and eat while the children or the adults are watching a film! Then many of my friends watch films day and night on Netflix. Entertainment is increasingly happening in the privacy of homes and farm houses with extended family and friends, don’t we know that?
So that just leaves out only the middle classes who too surely have a right to be entertained even if it is best that they prefer to step out of a cramped, distracting home domain top if they want to see a film in peace. So we have movies at multiplexes and cinema halls but tickets are not exactly cheap for the young and not so rich who may not be happy living on cloud number nine upwards to 15 and more even if they want to for whatever it is worth. Forget our two or five percent utopia.
I days say here in this foodie column that public funds could be better spent to enable our aam aadmi to access films in the relative safety and security of multiplexes at nominal prices (not killer ticket prices with popcorn added on) – it could be a private-public venture to bring the best of world cinema to aam aadmi (subtitling in language of choice?) Mind you it is high technology usage I’m talking about here in proper cinema auditoriums…sort of bring back movie watching on the big screen. It will also give the movie industry a huge fillip in the right direction! Not this endlessly coffee table masala-filled escapist movies of commercial-dom which zap and brainwash our minds …(sigh)…or maybe we haven’t grown up enough to sweep in all these changes to live for in our life!
FACT is it is not IFFI which went hybrid this year. The Covid-19 scares have turned our old normal to a new hybrid normal which many of us young and not so young are coming to terms with and finding it hard to adjust to. The sweeping changes required tax us, making many question the raison d’etre of life and how we want to live it within agreeable or disagreeable parameters. Less than happy choices are being forced on us like or not. And what if pandemics become a way of life? Will vaccines become a way of life? All this notwithstanding I am suggesting IFFI all the year around in Goa, it would do much to boost the rusticating film industry which goes into many categories nowadays and yes, documentary making is finally arrived in a class of its own, an imaginative documentary film is preferable to a long winding nonsensical film to shatter one’s senses.
I HAVE come to the conclusion that of all changes demanded of us in our changing times, the hardest to do are lifestyle changes. Look, I can’t even change the ways in which I eat and neither can many of my friends who are so non-vegetarian that their systems are becoming acidic – from too much eating of refined carbohydrates and animal proteins and very little enzyme rich salads and vegetables carbohydrates. Plus, sedentary professions glued to screens in and hand and office at home or out of home have eliminated the normal to and fro walking many engaged in routinely…we prefer to cruise around in our two-wheelers, four-wheelers and chauffer driven limousines!
And yet we have such wonderful local al fresco markets and organic markets and farm fresh produce being offered in retail and wholesale all around at foodie WhatsApp sites and Facebook! Goa has several farms which have gone 100% organic and here one may source country chicken, goat meat, desi eggs (albeit Rs160 plus per dozen) and all the greens, veggies, fruit (including boran, starfruit, carambolam, etc).
One thing I’m surprised about is that all our Covid-19 fears have not made us start cooking from scratch at home but instead many of us with money to burn are engaged in buying food from out from a brand new plethora of kitchens good, bad, ugly! Being corona virus times there’s umpteen talk about changing our eating habits from atrocious to being more health conscious, boosting immunity, eating to live and to die, etc, etc. However, many of us are still eating to die naturally!
Naturally then BP is high or low, HDL fats at an all-time low, there is too consumption of salt in pickles, sauces and tomato ketchups, and also in cooked foods which we like salty and more salty…we feel virtuous if we’ve chucked refined white sugur for all the new packets of jaggey powder and cubes which various supermarkets put on their health food shelves these days.
Sure jaggery is a more honest primary sweetener and we’ve been listening Luke Coutinho telling us in his Facebook talks that jaggery promises super doses of iron, calcium, trace minerals, etc, be sure to sweeten everything we put in our mouth with jaggery instead of sugar. We forget that even the honest sweetness of the jaggary powders of sugar cane or tadgola or coconut palm or date khajur are high in carbohydrate calories and one may consume them only within limit…mega consumption of carbohydrates is leading to all the insulin resistance and eventual diabetic scenarios of nervous and arterial damage; your loving doctor may prescribe painkillers and other drugs but remember all the drugs of mainstream Allopathy work on the law of diminishing returns. Plus, we get addicted to all these colorful sleaze ball tablets…these days I’m thinking I should take Dolo painkiller daily because it eases my joint pains and I walk more easily then!
My doctor also says your blood pressure is careering between 140 and 160 and please take Ecosprin and Seloken to see if my HDL can be improved….or else one of these days don’t call him if I suffer a stroke! Well, I grant you our doctors are a long-suffering lot when their patients flout prescriptions but don’t do a thing to change their rotten lifestyles of consuming white bread and white rice morning, noon and night smothered in spiced up veg or non-veg curries, fried nonsense and a ton of confectionery temptations. So it goes. Mind over matter and matter over mind. The heart of the matter is lifestyle changes are easy to talk about but hard to do for a myriad reasons dumb and stupid. Nevertheless don’t give up on improving the quality of your lifestyle, every little change helps!