Healing Mohanam..

I read in Hindu sometime back that Apollo Hospitals, Chennai has a music therapy center. A call-center employee had recurring migraines and associated health problems. She was asked to listen to the Raga Mohanam 6 times a day whenever she felt a migraine come on. The lady reported 4 months down the line that she rarely ever had headaches now!

I was feeling super-stressed this morning. For lack of anything else to distract me, I started playing a Ragam Tanam Pallavi in Mohanam by TV Sankaranarayanan. I can swear that the moment I heard the initial notes of Mohanam, I could feel the stress draining out of me, literally. My neck muscles loosened up and I was feeling much more peaceful in a few minutes.

I have felt that hard-core music enthusiasts discount Mohanam as a Ragam. They extol the virtues of Bhairavi, Todi, Kharaharapriya et al. because of the scope offered for manodharma. But if you ask me, I'll take a beautifully sung Mohanam over any other Raga in Carnatic music! :)

Yoga Craze

I've become a Yoga freak. Initially, I tried a couple of Ayurvedic home remedies and they worked like a charm. Then, one day, I came home with a tension headache and read somewhere that Sarvangasana (Shoulder Stand Pose) cures tension headaches. I tried it and in a couple of minutes, I was feeling much better! So, I am officially now a Yoga fan. We got this BKS Iyengar book about Yoga yesterday and I am planning to religiously follow a Yoga regimen.

Of course, as with all fads that hit me, let's see if I actually follow this through to completion. But, this one, I really, really, really, really want to do be consistent!:)

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Work-arounds!

I was chatting with a colleague at work about a problem in our code. When I mentioned it, his immediate reaction was,

"So, what's the workaround?"

It surprised me because I was expecting more like, "So how do we solve this?"

I guess it is indicative of the times we live in. We are the generation that always wants "workarounds" instead of figuring out why something is happening. This seems to be especially true with health concerns. An acquaintance of mine has severe stomach ulcers. During a phone conversation, I asked him why he'd ended up like this. He just chuckled and said:

"Who cares why? I just want to know how to deal with it!"

Sometimes, I wish God had just made our body transparent; you know, like glass, so you can see through to the internal systems. That way, we'd be more aware of how smoking chokes our lungs in soot; Or how that pizza we're wolfing down is lining our arteries with fat; Or how that sweet donut we reach for every morning is just tiring out our pancreas; Or how our refusal to exercise is just over-working our heart.

I succumb to some unhealthy temptations too (my sweet tooth is one such) but I try to keep it balanced by working out and eating right most of the time. The human body is just an amazing piece of engineering and aesthetics. It is time some of us realized to give it some respect and admiration instead of working around it.

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