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Vijay
Vats
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A
child goes overboard from a ship in the deep seas. A man immediately
jumps in and rescues the child. The man is hailed as a hero. What I
want to know, he says, is who pushed me in?
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Like
our guy in the story, I am still trying to figure out who kicked me
into health and a life of struggle. A paradox, a successful failure, if
you please! Satisfaction on achieving some of my goals in the field of
health and understanding how nearly each and every chronic condition
can be reversed.
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Failure
(due to the self-imposed restrictions of the media) to project my idea
of the unbelievable potential the human body has for healing. Even
Hippocrates, the founder of allopathy, and Hahnemann, the founder of
homoeopathy, had just one common dictat for their followers; do
not interfere when healing begins!
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When
my dog Bruno beat failing kidneys, DNA
newspaper published the story (20/08/05). When people with failing kidneys came
to me after reading the article, and after their kidney function
reversed to normal, neither DNA,
nor the sixteen other newspapers in Mumbai published the story. Dog
okay, publish: man okay, no publish.
The same happened in asthma.
When asthmatics, who participated in the yoga classes I used to
conduct, realized that the use of their steroid-laced
inhaler/bronchodilater had been reduced from every second day, to the
use of a non-steroidal/ordinary/beta2 agonist inhaler to just once or twice a year,
they wanted to scream from the rooftops. They went running to the
media, only to be stunned by a deafening silence.
The story was repeated with type2
diabetes. Most of them, including my wife and my
80-year-old mother learnt to comtrol it without medication. (Type1
diabetics need insulin injections.) This can go on, but let's get along
with my story.
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I
was leading the good life. Cars, chauffeurs, creature comforts, flush
with funds, scotch – the works, burning the candle at both
ends. And then, in late 1996, I could not stand up to take the elevator
from my seventh floor residence to my first floor office in the same
building. There was no hurt on my head and I had not had a fall. After
a battery of tests I was put on tranquilizers. I threw the medication
out after about three months and joined, very reluctantly, under
coercion from my wife and children, a yoga class started on the terrace
of my building. Whatever it was, the doctors never came ot a proper
diagnosis, was gone in three weeks.
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And
my life changed.
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I
went running to Guru Narendra Brahmachari (of Kripalu Yoga Ashram) who
was running the class and told him I would like to write about how I
became well, without any medication, when conventional medicine had
failed. You cannot understand that in a few hours, he told me, you need
to do my teachers' training course. I did the course (click to see certificate-12) and was the
only student with 100 percent attendance. Twice when the city was
inundated during the monsoons, nobody turned up, neither the students,
nor the teachers, and I was with guruji on a one-to-one basis from
morning to night. I believe the understanding I gained during these two
days give me an insight into what yoga is.
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Health
did not become just an obsession or passion, it became a madness. I
could not have continued to do justice to my earlier vocation and in a
heart-wrenching decision gave up my 27-year-old lucrative career as
publisher and editor of an automobile magazine, started by my father in
1948.
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I
was born on the seventh of January, 1947, in a village in Punjab, in
northern India, called Noordi, which is 16 kilometers away from the
Golden Temple in Amritsar. The village, I’m told, was a gift
by emperor Akbar to one of his generals, Nooruddin. The underground
passages leading outside the village were still intact when I last
visited the place 15 years ago. My father named me Vijay, which in many
Indian languages means victory, because India gained independence from
the British in 1947. I was educated and brought up in Bombay, now
called Mumbai.
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After
finishing my schooling from St Mary’s High School, then
affiliated to Cambridge University, I did my bachelors in commerce, and
diplomas in journalism and newspaper management. I was a below average
student ranking around 25th in a class of about 40 boys. The only two
exceptions were when I wanted an air-gun and a cycle. I had to come
within the first three. Both times I stood second.
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I
was a voracious reader and my mother had to cajole me to eat. The
Famous Five, Billy Bunter, Jeeves, Sherlock Holmes, Perry Mason,
Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Somerset Maugham, G K Chesterton, Charles
Dickens, Jack London and O Henri were some of the people who filled my
world. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which I consider a classic,
was read in school with some of the chaps masturbating in class. Later
on, both Hindi and Hollywood films were added to my staple diet.
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I
learnt to drive on a huge, shinning-black 1954 model Plymouth, without
the knowledge of my father, when I was in the sixth standard. In
college I drove a Standard Herald, a derivative of Triumph from
England. I won a few trophies in rallies and motor sport events. I was
among those who completed the 7000-kilometre Western India Automobile
Association silver jubilee rally in 1972 in my Herald. A snapped speedo
cable was the only fault at the end. After seven days of the
accelerator kissing the floorboard, that was no sweat. My speed orgasm
is a Porsche 911. If fairy tales do come true, my Maruti 800 may turn
into a prince!
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Before
I sign off, a word about the only true wonder in this world –
the human body.
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Whatever
your age, whatever your condition, whatever the health challenge you
are facing, you can always make a difference. Even if each and every
doctor in the world advises you to the contrary. Give your body a
chance to use its amazing in-built intelligence. Most times the results
are pleasantly surprising. Sometimes, like in Durge’s heart
bypass without surgery case, astonishing.
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The
biggest mistake we make in chronic diseases, is to use our intelligence
to override the supreme intelligence of our body. According to
me, the difference between success and failure in beating outright,
chronic conditions like heart disease, or gaining a stranglehold
control over conditions like type2 diabetes or asthma, is the four
letter word COPE. Just coping with the condition will breed failure and
suffering and you will remain enslaved to the condition, the disease
dictating the quality of life you live. Work hard to overcome the
condition, the hard work being required only initially. Later on, it
becomes just a routine. That is the one and only way. There is no magic
remedy. When you become the master, the rewards are worth it. It's a
pleasure just to be alive.
That, briefly, is my theory on tackling chronic diseases. Work hard,
only initially, to overcome, don't just COPE.
Life is a problem.
Those four words form the first sentence of psychiatrist Scot Peck's
book The Road Less
Travelled. It was on the New York Times'
top-ten best seller list for 90 weeks, ranking second only to the
Bible. Yoga gives you the mental strength to grapple with problems, to
keep your nose above the water.
Incidentally,
if you are confused about the values your children should imbibe, the
book offers a crystal clear blueprint.
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One
of my favourite authors, Robert Louis Stevenson, lived an extremely
productive life inspite of being afflicted by tuberculosis, incurable
during his lifetime. Life, observed the writer of Treasure
Island, is not a matter of holding good cards, but of
playing a bad hand well.
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