On my best fun-feet !

If asked, as a physician that I am, to define ‘feet’, I would have had to come up with something like “the lower extremity of the vertebrate leg that is in direct contact with the ground in standing or walking.” And if tailoring had been my profession, which it is not, my reply would have run something like “a unit of length in the U.S. Customary and British Imperial systems which is equal to 12 inches (30.48 centimetres).” But what if I were a combination, of sorts, of the two in a literary sense, let’s say a “doctor of humour (literature)” asked to create a tailor made trappings on the subject of ‘feet’ ? How should my elaboration of the theme have shaped up on full stitching? Let’s take a look at it from the feet up!

The ‘feet’, being the grounding component they are in the human life & body, can have a certain pivotal proclivity all of their own to lending themselves to plural connotations when it comes to an aspiring ‘philosophical humourist’ (like myself) attempting to use them as a theme to gain a foothold in the world of the published word. And when the window of opportunity is truly small, it makes sense to think on one’s feet while putting one’s best foot forward to get one’s foot in the door. Instead of sitting at the feet of powers that be (read: the editor) – a practice no self-respecting man of letters, on either side of the footwear, enjoys these days – it pays much better to get off on the right foot by accepting the literary challenge, without so much as letting the grass grow under one’s feet, lest one may be considered to have feet of clay or worse still, two left feet!

The anecdotal value of feet, so replete in our literature, can be a good starting point. Feet worship, the age-old popular tenet of Hindu way of life which finds a prominent mention in the Ramayan – with Bharat according the pride of place to Sri Ram’s padukas (footwear) on Ayodha’s empty throne during latter’s vanavaas and Sri Ram himself effecting Ahilya’s redemption with a touch of his divine feet – are a case in point so familiar to many of us. And then there is Kamal Amrohi’s extolling of Pakeezah Meena Kumari’s feet in thespian Raj Kumar’s immortal words: “Aapke paaon dekhey. Bahut haseen hain. Inhe zammen par mat utaariyega. Maile ho jaenge!” (Happened to espy your gorgeous feet. Beseech you refrain from grounding them lest they be soiled!). Poignant examples of the human heart itself being the seat of the feet for the pious and the paramour!

Another truly remarkable example of an interesting play on deciding the seat of the feet comes to my mind as memories of a fun game of musical feet that I used to observe Brahmarishi Subhash Patri ji, an eloquent scientist-turned-spiritual-master from Andhra Pradesh and one of my lead mentors on my path to self-remembering way back in 2002, play with his newly acquainted followers.

It was, and I believe still is, literally impossible for a follower to touch his feet, attempting the feat after being immensely impressed by his very fluent & witty discourses on meditation (invariably started with a “You are God also, albeit Gods in amnesia and thus in need of self-remembering” exhortation that’s a modern day recapitulation of ‘Aham Brahmasmi, Tat Twam Asi’ ) without getting their own two feet touched back by him purposely grinning like a comic buffoon. The flustered beneficiaries of his ‘feet touching back‘ would almost invariably conclude that they had perhaps erred in not doing their feet touching fervently enough and would go for a re-doing, often to the point of prostrate kowtowing, only to find Patri ji respond back in the kind yet again. This will continue for a few rounds, with older followers like me watching the familiar rib tickling drama from the sidelines, until the newbie follower would give up in exasperation. However, not before Patri ji would burst out giggling to alleviate their misery with a kind & gentle: “But you haven’t been paying attention to my ‘You are God also’! Now why would God need to touch God’s feet? Let’s make use of a hug, handshake, hello or namaste as per your preference.” This never failed to find him a permanent seat in the hearts of all his enthralled ‘fans’ – yes that’s what he preferred to call his followers/devotees!

Now having succeeded with this ‘pedi-gogical route to pedagogy’ approach for getting the first weekly piece published in my column (Laughter Medicine – the fun & frolic way to wit-n-wisdom), do I get asked how it feels to stand on my own two feet after a display of flagrant feet-fetish? Well, just getting my feet wet, shall we say!

Must rest my case as a pair of feet that belong to a thinking head before it gets to a position tantamount to putting my foot in my own mouth.

Sweep anyone off their feet? Good. I can really put my feet up now!

(The foregoing article, submitted for publication in a leading English daily, became an example of feet dragging by the Editor as he developed cold feet & resorted to complete reticence after first declaring it a good, print worthy piece. As you can see, the loss hasn’t been mine. If anything, it galvanized me into implementing my decision of starting my own blog to self publish my works. With this, I can now truly claim to be standing on my own feet with all the editorial freedom to boot! Hope to have a greater number of foot-falls here than if it had been showcased elsewhere! You can contribute to the cause of freedom of writing by making it happen through your ‘likes’ & ‘recommends’ to all your fun-loving friends who can think on their feet fast enough to transform it into a ‘viral hit from a fun-doctor’!)

He is so funny, even his feet reek of laughter!

On my best fun-feet !

My fun-tribute to the super funny description of  the hyper-needle-sensitive category of patients (that we doctors often encounter) from the zany-n-zingy pen of Jug Suraiya, the fun-Dhanwantari of Indian Humour literature whom I have admired for a long time. A prior reading of Jug’s super-cool offering “Don’t needle us” (as it appeared in Jugular Vein/Juggelbandhi on the Times Of India Blogs, May 10, 2012; available online at the click of your mouse here on the http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/jugglebandhi/entry/don-t-needle-us ) highly recommended in order to fully understand the following:

Hyper-funnies like us don’t need a jab!

Their only concern with jabs entails making provisions of them, with their penchant for penjabs, to all the fun-trypanophiles of the world at the expense of their trypanophobe compatriots. Jug Suraiyas of the world, have heart! Your annual ordeal needs not be the atrocity you so fun-dementally make it out to be.

Also, congratulations! You have had all the trypanosomes in existence, including the most famous one of them, Trypanosoma gambiense (the causative agent of ‘African sleeping sickness’ spread through the inject-bite of its insect vector tsetse fly to the mammalian hosts such as humans) wake up from deep slumber in their African abodes (at a time when New Delhi had woken up to a breakfast of your fun-jab shrieks) and take notice. And so awestruck were they with your fun tribute to the cause of things trypano (or ‘Trypanocausia’, the new syndrome I just nomenclatured), they decided to spend rest of the day rejoicing and spare humanity from their stinging jabs (they famously perform) for a full circle of the clock now that their biological clocks were upset because of their untimely arousal!

And science, we would like to proudly inform you dear fun-God Suraiya, hasn’t been quite as idle to the needs of trypanophobes as you believe. Unbeknown to many, it has already come up with options galore to spare humanity from the kind of annual ordeal you have so eloquently jabbed about. Why, there is a fun medical procedure such as biofeedback to obviate your requiring worrying about high cholesterol, triglycerides or blood sugar levels and, thus, even the need to endure jabs to provide blood samples!

Acupuncture, though it may have a sure cure for needle-phobia, would not be an acceptable option here for it will be a case of the ‘needle for needle’ double whammy. A Homoeopathic intervention, too, might help ameliorate the condition but would run the risk of needle(ss) prickly dermal side effects if its “similia similibus curantur” (or ‘likes are cured by likes’) approach went awry! Ayurvedic or Unani treatments for driving away the fear of the needle from the blood drawing sites (the veins on your arms) could instead cause your mouth cavity & tongue coming to dread the bitter, stinging medicinal taste!

Yet, get (needlessly) needled if you must, on the fun (to him) advice of your much needling doctor, then Dissociative Cognizance procedures such as those involving EFT or Self Hypnosis approaches could come to your rescue in order to jabtrain you for the fun of it. Or you could take recourse to reverting to one of your Multiple Personality S&M aspects that actually enjoys giving & receiving jabs of all persuasions!

And then there is Quantum Holonomic Psychodynamics which, in an out-of-this-world solution to your travails, enables you to be in touch with one of your not-so-trypanophobic spirit variant in an alternate physical universe who could gladly be persuaded to undertake a needle jab on your behalf so as to keep your combined spirits in the omniverse still resonably high. That should take the sting of the needle completely out of this world for you!

I could go on a bit longer with some more options made available by science, all of them more fun than calculating the value of pi to the 23^rd decimal or figuring out Lady Gaga’s real name, if I didn’t have to worry about the Indian Medical Association seriously beginning to wonder about disowning me. Or the Omniverse Quackal Association feeling ebullient about owning me up as their next presiding chief after this Punjabi jugalbandi note to your Haryanvi penjab! This jab job, therefore, has to come to an end.

If I didn’t know better, I would have failed to conclude that your Jugular Vein rants on a truly need(li)-of-the-hour issue for so many need(less)li  needle-scared nuts was a really superb jab of Neuro Linguistic (Re) Programming from the great fun-God that you are. But now that I do conclude & declare so, would you please be instrumental in letting your representative fun-Doctor’s Banal Vein views reach the TOI readership in tomorrow’s columns (of Laughter Medicine?)!

(Needless to say that my good friend Jug Suraiya, Assoc. Editor of Times of India, did not find it possible to accommodate my foregoing fun-tribute on the pages of TOI.  Hence, its appearance here on my blog, instead!)

Something usually considered unpalatable comes to my fun-doctor mind when I come across fun-ideas such as declaring tea or alcohol our national drink (“Tea and whisky” ~Arif Zakaria 27 April 2012 & “Chai or beer, let’s raise a cheer” ~Jug Suraiya 28 April 2012 : in the TOI blogs).

Here is a thought for a universal drink most of us would readily swear to be an unpotable option but which, nevertheless, finds its way into our human system on a daily basis as much of humanity partakes of it unwittingly through contamination from a bad case of sanitation still present around most parts of the world. It’s a sort of ubiquitous karma cola flowing through every drain, nallah, lake, river, sea and ocean on the globe. And it carries the interesting epithet ‘Morarji Cola’ derived from the drinking habits of no less a personage than a past prime minister of the most populous democracy on earth.

It is the familiar waste product secreted by the kidneys that, in mammals, is a fluid which is yellow to amber in color, slightly acidic, and discharged from the body through the urethra. But this clinical definition apart, try telling anyone about the virtues of this ‘pee-wee‘ (in terms of quantity consumed by all the urophiles of the world combined, compared to all other popular drinks of the world) stuff and you are virtually assured of a gruff ‘piss-off‘ rebuff. But true urophiles – and there are many of the ilk to whom this deglutition is a milk ranging from Queen Cleopetras to Sarah Miles to Morarji Desais to Baba Ramdevs of the world – would have none of this deter them from being a consumer royale of this ambrosia regale doing service to an ailing humanity since antiquity.

In the article “Mutra-an Ayurvedic Medicine” in ‘davayurvedaezine’ written by Dr. P. K. Rai, Dr. Richa Rai & Dr. O. P. Singh, the urine of man, cow, goat, sheep, buffalo, elephant, horse and camel have been described (in Ayurveda) for their medicinal properties. The wikipedia page on Rasa Shastra informs us that in traditional medical lore of Ayurveda, there are methods corresponding to the alchemy familiar in the Mediterranean and Western European worlds which entail heating of thin sheets of metals & immersing them in cow-urine among other substances to bring out their medicinal properties.

Auto-urine therapy is an age-old practice of ancient India. Its practitioners talk of Shivambu, auspicious water of Lord Shiva, the Hindu god and promote it as an inexpensive way to gain health and vitality. In one commentary on the ‘Shivambu Kalpa Vidhi’ from the Damar Tantra, subsequently rumoured to have been imbibed by Jesus following his Tibetan trip, it is informed: “Many of you neophytes wonder what Tantra has to do with Urine Therapy. For millennia, this Tantra Vidya was very secret, but the Damar Tantra was open and literal enough to contain an entire chapter on Shivambu Chikista, also known as Maanav Mootra or UrineTherapy”. Jesus, too, warned us against secrecy: “Don’t hide your candle in a closet. Freely you have received: freely give to yourself.”

Cleopatra is perhaps the most famous beauty in history. Was her beauty just the luck of good genetics or was there something more that kept her looking her best? A common practice of the time in Egypt was to bathe in water with one’s own urine added. This was believed to be part of how Cleopatra maintained her youthful skin. Sarah Miles, the beautiful British actress, well known for her 1970 Academy Awards Best Actress nomination for David Lean’s ‘Ryan’s daughter’, has been a practitioner of auto urine therapy.  Citing Gandhi, who was an adherent of it, she has followed the tradition for thirty years, saying that it has kept her healthy and vigorous.

Former Prime Minister of India Morarji Desai, who lived up to the age of 99, has been the most well known proponent of this therapy. He claimed that India would have been better off if more people used this extremely inexpensive and effective way of treatment. He also attributed to Auto Urine Therapy the credit for his longevity. So fond & regular consumer of his own nephric filtrate was he that all the media attention on this (considered) quirky habit of his brought name & fame to his delicious, drink divine – and also the sobriquet Morarji Cola!

In recent times, the likes of Baba Ramdev have tried to re-introduce the therapeutic intervention of this delectable (to them) remedy as a cure for mouth ulcers, eye disease, acne, psoriasis, obesity among many other ailments. Has the clock come full circle since Morarji bhai’s time and is it time for another intersting label for this nectar around Baba Ramdev’s name? Or are we headed for the times when Baba Ramdevs of the world succeed in giving us the habit of a daily taste of our own medicine!

It’s a small mercy, yet, that with such a long history of human consumption of ‘Amaroli‘, the lovely Indian name for Urine Therapy, as attested by London based Yoga teacher Swami Pragyamurti Saraswati & the European researcher Coen van der Kroon (the celebrated author of ‘Golden Fountain: The Complete Guide to Urine Therapy’), they don’t seem too pee-tulant about enforcing its widespread use with their brand of moral policing!