By Tara Narayan

IT’S still the New Year and I may wish all my readers of this now over 25 years old foodie column a most fruitful year 2025! May you find the fountain of youth and love forever, whatever that means! In my experience love is an emotion easily used and disposed and gen next has lost it…if you’re asking me life on earth is still “kalayug” (hell) for the many and “swargayug” (heaven, I’m coining new word here, okay) for the few.
It’s like we have a war on our hands between those who want to live happily ever after forever, and those who want to stay out of debt enough to put at least one or two decent life-giving square meals on the table for family and friends in need, and maybe a couple of treats of the whimsical kind to be happy enough to put a smile on faces instead of stressed out frowns.
It’s the beginning of 2025 and all around us we see how democracy is dying or dead; oligarchy is making inroads with a conglomerate of oligarchs or businessmen and businesswomen who want to run their own show to take over the world for profit, power and control…or something like that! My friend wholistic and holistic friend Darryl D’Souza of Earth Keepers Connect (actively campaigning for the triumph of the alternate schools of healing) tells me either we get our act together or die …in his book “Become Healthy or Extinct”). It’s either become healthy of extinct or become smart or be a slave forever!
EVEN more eloquently there is USA-based E-Mail inventor, MIT graduate several times over, crusader for justice, Dr Shiva Ayyadurai, educating us about a new diabolical khaas aadmi world cartel seeking to either enslave or kill us off — so that the world may arrive into a perfect kingdom of gods and goddesses on earth (freed of too many troublesome humans)! Something like that anyway, witness the vaccine wars to tamper and control the human immune system, the outright genocides with the super weapons of technology, millions bombed out of existence, no problem, something like that…if you’re asking me another world war is already taking place around us and we’re not horrified or able to do a thing!

All that on one hand and on the other hand I was wondering over the new year of 2025 if some much awaited by the common man King Midas will turn everything he touches to gold and who will pay the price for it? And who is this King Midas from East or West or Middle East who will restore the earth to its original garden of paradise status? Of course it may be a Queen Midas for all you know, or Queen Liberty herself who’s being treated very shabbily these days…will the world’s savior be in Christian or Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist or some other avatar?
DON’T ask me what’s all this, is this a food column? It’s a food for the mind column this week! Say, I’m hallucinating for lately end-2024 I was trying to imbibe some spiritual wealth for my soul at the feet of a newly discovered guru…a guru for the world’s millionaires, billionaires, trillionaires. Even the poor and humble need some spiritual guru’s guidance in a world getting more diabolically complicated and complex … everywhere it seems to me at least that we’re a sick world drowning to stay alive with the help of this or that new found addiction.
In the old days it was — and still is — tobacco, liquor, remember opium? It would seem the the recreation and procreation drugs these days are far more esoteric and laced with lots of music trance or otherwise…all kinds of people are chasing nirvana trails to stay alive. And finally enter social media, very definitely an addiction offering short cuts to entertainment and promises, promises, promises galore to arrive at where else but — riches beyond imagination. The vital question is, riches for whom? The already rich and famous, as if we don’t know.
Agree or disagree with me, everyone is engaged in looking for the fountain of youth no matter how much in denial we live, and the fountain of youth is a fountain dispensing money, oodles of it to buy, buy, buy…happiness! Who are these people who can buy happiness? I don’t know. I’m looking for the happiness of pure water…recently, I walked away from a five-star deluxe hotel with this new elixir in a shapely slip bottle of water from …er…the fine print on it says from a spring in Lucerne (Switzerland, “A product of Lucerne Water Pvt Ltd” and not for sale of course, with “water quality as per IS 10500:2012). A glass bottle and I’m crazy about glass bottles for poetic reasons!
Like glass bottles are going out of life to be replaced by plastic bottles increasingly…I don’t know why nobody is thinking of founding a glass bottles museum for tourism attraction! Glass going out of life is like some kind of a metaphor for all of us stuck at the bottom of the pyramid of the good life. I suggest you read up more of what Dr Shiva Ayyadurai’s says in his trenchant TruthFreedomHealth videos of a growing movement out in the USA and around the world.

But to return to water, I wish someone would ban the bottling of potable water in a world drowning in water tragedies around the world. Water should always be free, like air and the good earth which supports us all; yes, for free. Never mind that our entire food industry today is based on bottling and packing life in plastics.
This is not to say I didn’t drink the water from Lucerne and am wondering now what to do with the lovely bottle except to look at it for inspiration to live! Funny or not funny and so hypocritical, for a while it was nice to see water in a glass bottle instead of the zillions of plastic pet bottles today’s killer civilization patronizes…how much our consumerist world has changed from pro-life for the many to pro-life for the few!
SOME more food for thought in what is still the new year. I’m thinking my challenge this year is to just stay alive with my sanity and good humor intact. Yes, I’m also addicted to social media and lately what’s appalling me anew is the amount of Ayurveda products entering the marketplace online and offline, promising liberation from diabetes. The affliction most of us are dying from, the result of over-consumption and obesity. Say exhausting the human pancreas and the isles of Langarhans…anybody can tell you today’s sins of overconsumption and consequently obesity is endemic and this is to do with premature insulin resistance and soon diabetes if you don’t wake up from the slumber of poisonously sweet sleep.
Even as more folk are realizing that the fountain of healing (not to mention youth) is to be found in the alternative healing systems of the world. Ayurveda being on top of the list. Most everybody around the world has discovered Ayurveda as a preventive and even curative system of healthcare. Last week down town Panaji at the Vaidyaratnam PS Varier’s Arya Vaidya Sala of Kottakal outlet, where I regularly stock myself up on such agreeable things as camphor oil, raktha chandan soap, even chaywanprash (the tonic jam of Ayurveda, it’s hard to find the real stuff, most are surreal) and a few more things, I found a whole big group of Russians looking for such herbal powders as “ashwagantha” (Withania somnifera” which is Ayurveda prescribes to stressed out patients, apparently it works, I haven’t tried it out though); lots more herbals of course including Baba Ramdev’s favorite “giloy” (Tinospora cordifolia, an immune booster).
Well, the fame of Ayurveda has spread with many around the world anxious to do their own thing with it. Ayurveda has become commercial like never before, like it was never meant to be (in ancient India’s “sanskari” texts of old the learned vaid or doctor prescribed something more by way of a service for the poor and rich). Of course a lot of our old and modern-day guru or teachers of various vintage are responsible for this …serious students in the countries of the west including USA are now doing Ayurveda big time; along with offering spiritual connections with the divine (you may whitewash your soul as in “sau chooye kha ke haj pe chale” and so on)!
SINCE I’m more or less obese and insulin resistant (all my own fault) I’ve been taking an interest in all the anti-diabetic products out in the market, the latest promoted all over social media videos…it seems just plain old baking soda in a glass of water may clear your arteries of all kinds of calcification (both government of India in tandem with a certain famous children’s heart doctor, namely Dr Devi Shetty are on record about the wonders of this combo)…check it out, my dears and let me know of testimonies (not paid for please).
Recently, I’ve been mesmerized by a Kapiva Dia Juice promotional doing the rounds (manufactured in Bengaluru); there’s over social media promotions there’s also Krishna Herbal & Ayurveda natural blood sugar remedy featuring such super herbals featuring “methi, amla, karela, jamun, kutki, guduchi and 5 more” …or there are many ditto formulae which I’ll skip here, you get the idea. Prices for these host of anti-diabetic formulae (which are also heart medicines) move from Rs300 to Rs1,000 plus, plus and one may order online after reading reams and reams of convincing or not so convincing evidence.
Diabetic cures are growing by the leaps these days and being purveyed by many a come lately “vaid” in the name of healing mind and body, heart and soul. We know that body beautiful starts faltering and giving up when we forget how to drink, eat and live, even modern medicine tells us all bodily failings are due to some deficiency…be it just sunshine and love! Agree with me or don’t, the world is chasing the fountain of youth and health like never before and the stakes are high, both of the material and immaterial kind.
The only sorry story is a conglomerate of business people at the top of the pyramid of the good life. They control the profit margins of everything. Governments which are no longer governments (in the old democratic sense of the word) are driving the future and humanity into a collective suicidal wish…heard of mass suicide by lemmings in the wild? One may see it manifesting itself during year-end celebrations at events such as Sunburn EDM in Goa and repeat versions around the world.
Say a malaise rooted in the frustration of being human beings expected to live on the straight and narrow path of righteous living, instead of the ever broadening highways of adopting hedonism as a lifestyle. This is just to say sit on no fences in 2025. Make up your mind about where you belong – to Mother Earth or the monsters bedeviling her currently. She who is divine above all.