Life lesson from my dad’s passing

Its been a month since my dad’s passing and as mom and I continue to reminisce about his life and reconcile with his loss, I am realizing that life has taught me an important lesson.

Both Dad and his younger brother were tall and heavy and both had acid reflux issues (thanks to their maternal genes). But how their health unraveled took two contrasting roads.

1. Extreme acid reflux can simulate cardiac issues and this happened for both. Cardiologists did angioplasty on uncle but treating arterial blocks do not stop acid reflux. Uncle lost faith in treatment. Bypass surgery was recommended for dad after 20 days so I figured if he can survive for 20 days, his health can be managed without surgery.

2. Both developed swelling on their hands and feet. Uncle’s condition was apparently not treated. Dad’s cardiologist kept asking about his bypass surgery and ignoring the swelling. So I googled to find out why the swelling was happening. Any issue that affects the working of the heart reduces blood flow to other parts of the body. When kidneys receive lesser amount of blood the body assumes there is not enough water so kidneys start accumulating water, first on the feet and then on the hands. The condition is called edema. Finally when water enters the lungs it becomes pulmonary edema. Then the only treatment left is bypass surgery. Dad’s cardiologist was trying to force bypass surgery on him by leaving the swelling untreated. I immediately changed the cardiologist and consulted a nephrologist who prescribed a diuretic which forces water in the swelled up areas to be released from the body through urination. Uncle refused bypass surgery, water had to be pulled out of his lungs, he developed paralytic stroke and eventually passed away.

3. Dad reduced salt intake drastically after misunderstanding cardiologist’s instruction. I was unfamiliar with the ensuing condition but realized something was wrong with him. Took him to hospital for checkup and found his sodium level freefalling. In another two days he would have had ended up in coma.

4. Dad’s new cardiologist advised me to treat acid reflux at home and not to take him to hospital as acid reflux bouts can seem like cardiac issue and he would end up in the hands of cardiologists.

For the past 10 years, I have been mostly at home and especially in the last 6 years, largely due to market conditions. This gave me the opportunity to try doing different things which led to starting a home based cloud kitchen and in a way fulfill dad’s lifelong ambition to start a restaurant. I forced dad to go to the gym which improved his health drastically. When he suffered stroke like symptoms I chose to take him to a physician nearby who checked him and told me his nerve functions were fine and he was suffering from weakness due to muscle loss caused by protein deficiency. Though he fell a couple of times nothing happened to him and mom and I ensured he never fell down again especially in the bathroom. Broken bones never heal completely in old age, restrict movements which reduces immunity and makes body vulnerable to other diseases. Dad had normal blood sugar and I ensured all his body organs were working well and his blood pressure, essential elements like sodium, potassium and magnesium and vitamin levels were normal. Circumstances prevented me from pursuing a career in medicine but my fundamentals in biology and human anatomy are strong and I read a lot on both.

I did not earn a lot of money in the past 10 years but I was able to save a lot of money on dad’s treatment. If I hadn’t been at home. he may have underwent bypass surgery which could have ruined his health. Most importantly, he was able to live a disease free life, eat and do everything he wanted to and go peacefully. I could not have bought him this with all the money in the world. Is it possible to become successful without having a lot of money and everything that comes with it? I guess it is.

Welcome to Googlopathy, the new millennium treatment method

More than a month back, as Dad was walking towards the gym for his cardiovascular workouts one morning, he suddenly became unsteady and ungainly. He had been complaining about general weakness and fatigue for some time. In a couple of days his left side became weak and was unable to move his left hand and walk properly. I took him to a physician nearby who is a M.D and is in his late 70s-early 80s. He did some basic checks on dad (he has all sensations intact on his arm and leg), checked his BP (perfectly fine at 110/80), Dad doesn’t have diabetes (his blood sugar is always less than normal though he can still eat voraciously and devour sweets), so the doctor told us to do some lab tests the report of which was all clear. Then the doctor, suspecting stroke because of possible blood clot in dad’s brain prescribed couple of tablets to make his blood thinner and dissolve the clots and another tablet to improve his nerve functions. Then he told me to improve dad’s diet and take him for physiotherapy sessions. A doctor I know who was the senior doctor at a government hospital and is pursuing P.G in general surgery now told me the weakness could be because of Vitamin D deficiency (Dad hates sun after he had a severe bout of migraine) and asked me to put dad immediately on high dose of Vitamin D tablets once a week and daily calcium tablet.

Dad slowly started feeling better but wasn’t confident about going for physiotherapy sessions so I looked up on YouTube and started basic exercises to strengthen his arm and leg. Then people who know us started getting to know about dad’s condition and were shocked that we did not consult a neurologist and did not do his brain scan. Couple of days back, he finally agreed to go for physiotherapy. The physiotherapist we went to was agitated and demanded us to meet a neurologist, do a scan and then meet him. So I went back to the first doctor and he laughed before prescribing for CT scan. Yesterday we did the scan and everything was fine in the report. The doctor told me dad may have had a Transient Ischemic Attack (TSA) which lasts for a very short period possibly because of minute old clots mentioned in the report. Dad is going to take a while to be back to normal but he has already started moving his hand and is walking better now. The weakness he was complaining about could have been because of Sarcopenia, a condition where people lose skeletal muscle mass and strength due to ageing.

Then the doctor told me something insane. People no longer believe in physicians and clinical diagnosis. They just run to specialists every time they assume something is wrong with them. On top of this they ask for scans and lab tests to be done. Headache for two days and people go on Google, start reading things with no understanding of human anatomy, diseases and their diagnosis and go to doctors suspecting brain tumor and asking for scans to be done. They no longer care or believe in physical examination and diagnostic abilities of doctors no matter how experienced they are. This is what is Googlopathy.

The other doctor whom I spoke to threw a different curve ball at me. A regular doctor or physician could go wrong with his/her diagnosis but it could quickly earn bad reputation for specialists that’s why they are left with no option but to recommend lab tests and scans for every medical issue. We are on herd mentality behavior now where we blindly believe we can be cured only by specialists who charge high fees, do frequent consultation and prescribe tons of tablets, scans and lab tests. Our mindset has changed into believing that when we spend more money on something we will be getting more in return. The specialists are essentially tricking us into exploiting this mindset we have.

Even the regular doctors and specialists are practising Googlopathy now. I had taken dad to a nephrologist in a private hospital a few years back for suspected kidney weakness because his feet were swelling intermittently. The nephrologist, probably in his late 30s-early 40s took his mobile tablet, searched on a website (probably webmd.com) and asked us to do 10 lab tests. I was horrified. With my extremely limited knowledge of medicine and treatment I could have done the same. He did not even bother to ask what dad was experiencing, if he had other health issues, etc. I did the tests and took dad to a nephrologist who was working in a government hospital and was much older (in his 60s). He glanced at the lab report, cast it aside and said older people will develop slight swelling on their feet because of ageing which can be safely ignored.

I told dad the doctor we consulted was experienced enough to send him to a neurologist if he suspected dad had suffered a stroke. The confidence with which he told dad to go home was extraordinary and it came from his wealth of experience which no technology can match. The so called alternate treatment methods such as ayurveda and homeopathy have treated people for hundreds and thousands of years only through diagnosis by understanding the symptoms. Sadly, even those doctors are gravitating towards scans and lab tests now because it makes diagnosis quicker and easier. Our abilities to create and use technological devices is killing our natural ability to do clinical diagnosis.

This degradation is not limited to the field of medicine. Technological devices are destroying all our natural instincts and abilities. Birders use binoculars to identify birds at long distances. Birds are found in specific habitat, the way they perch is different and the shape and size of their wings is different which we can see when they fly. Birders should train themselves to identify birds using these aspects. Doing something the easy way does not mean it is always the best way. Our preference is to eat tasty food but no food in nature is tasty and animals choose food for nutrients not for taste. Our craving for taste has allowed unhealthy food industries to thrive and destroy our health. If we are topping this up with Googlopathy and consuming medicines at will we wont be needing an asteroid strike or nuclear war for our extinction. A bed ridden relative who passed away last year was being fed 17 tablets in the morning (17 you read it right). The line between amusement and horror blurred momentarily for me when I saw it.

My dad’s journey from cardiac arrest to cloud kitchen and the importance of healthy lifestyle

This is about my dad’s journey from an active to sedentary lifestyle which almost took his life, 8 years of wobbling health and how he is transforming himself now. He is 6 feet tall and had developed a hefty physique with heavy eating and an extremely active lifestyle from his younger years. He always believed that eating heavy is the key to staying healthy and did not reduce his food intake with advancing age. To add to this, we moved from our ancestral house where he was very active to a sedentary lifestyle in our new house. He developed Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) induced heartburns which culminated in a cardiac arrest in 2013. Though he recovered, his health didn’t go back to how it was before. To top it off, he developed additional ailments.

He was advised to follow a salt restricted diet but he misconstrued it as a ban on salt and I started observing radical changes in his behavior. Turned out his sodium level was fast decreasing and in another couple of days, he may have ended up in coma. He had also developed swelling on the back side of his palms and feet. Cardiac conditions could result in decreased flow of blood to the kidneys and the brain would signal the kidneys to start retaining water. Because of the false alarm, water starts getting accumulated first on the hands and feet resulting in the medical condition called edema. It was then that I checked dad’s medicines thoroughly and found out that the medicine for edema, called diuretics which forces the excess water out of the body through urine was never prescribed to him. If left untreated, water will start getting accumulated in the lungs leading to the condition known as pulmonary edema which would have forced dad to undergo bypass surgery. The cardiologist never even referred dad to a nephrologist to get his kidneys checked. To top this off, dad had to visit him once every fortnight and he kept asking me when we are doing dad’s bypass surgery. I understood that his sole objective was to make money by forcing the surgery on dad. I immediately consulted another cardiologist, he referred dad to a nephrologist, was immediately put on a course of diuretics and the swelling went off. Now this cardiologist, whose father is well known in the city as the poor man’s doctor removed some of the tablets prescribed by the previous cardiologist and told dad only to visit him if he develops any further issues. Patients are one source of income for every doctor so how many doctors would tell his patients not to visit him unless it is necessary? Though we didn’t know at that time, dad’s younger brother had similar gastric issues and he underwent angioplasty after he developed cardiac issues but it did not solve his gastric issues. He lost trust in the doctors, stopped taking medicines, eventually water entered his lungs, he refused to do bypass surgery, suffered a stroke and passed away at the relatively young age of 66 years.

Dad’s dream of setting up a restaurant never materialized but the emergence of online food delivery partners helped him set up a home based cloud kitchen in late 2019. Another cardiac arrest, though at a much smaller scale hit him again in 2020. Doctors kept advising him to walk on flat surfaces but where would he find flat surfaces other than at home? He couldn’t go out of the house anymore. I finally realized that medication and care alone was not going to help him. He had to become physically stronger again to handle the heartburns which in turn will make him mentally stronger. So I told him that if he wanted to be ambitious at this stage of life and run a business, he will have to put priority on his health first and persuaded him to join a gym for cardiovascular exercises. But making him invest himself in it was important so I made him buy walking shoes. He couldn’t even walk for a minute when he started on the treadmill but he slowly started picking up and started working out on the air glider.

When I dragged him and embarked on this journey 7 months back, little did I know it was going to become probably the most important project of my life. Dad didn’t have any hope of regaining his health so I gave him a milestone, kicking out the tablets he has been on for the past 8 years. He was taking 4 tablets, 2 for blood pressure, a blood thinner & one for cholesterol. I didn’t know how much time it could take, but I woke up at 4 in the morning 5 days a week, pushed him out of bed and into the gym. I also had to figure out the most effective workout schedule for him. Last week he started complaining of headache after taking tablets for blood pressure. I immediately got him checked without taking tablet and it was 110/80, the same as mine. Checked again the next day morning without tablet and it was 130/80. Then I took him to his cardiologist and it was 135/80. Blood pressure rises as the day goes on and falls as dusk approaches. One glance at his ECG report and a cursory check of his heart using the stethoscope was enough for the cardiologist to stop one tablet for blood pressure. The headache has vanished. One tablet down and it is a momentous achievement in such a short span of time. Another 6 months and all other tablets could be gone too. Doctor also said he need not worry about his kidneys as he is active now. He used to feel a bit shaky when walking and that has reduced after he stopped the tablet. He used to get heartburns while cooking when we open our cloud kitchen but not anymore. He was always fearful that reducing food will make him weak. I have put him on a diet of banana and papaya in the evening which has improved his digestion and decreased heartburns considerably. Now he knows that he has to eat healthy and keep working out to get rid of the tablets to become fit.

He is navigating through the treadmill and air glider easily now and I have put him on the machine fly to make his chest and back muscles stronger.

Now I am contemplating upgrading him to weight training exercises slowly. So how about a new milestone? Participating in a body building competition for 70+ guys? He is aghast at the thought. I asked him how many people can do what he is doing so why not be ambitious about it? Looks like my project may have just started after all.

I am writing this to let the world know about the importance of staying fit throughout our lives. My mom started going for morning walks after dad started going to the gym. She has lost weight, started feeling better and her thyroid condition has improved. It is also important to understand that the medical system we follow only treats us when we are sick. Hospitals are not wellness centers and very few doctors advise us to live healthy lives and prevent diseases. Ironically, cardiologists check the condition of the heart by making patients undergo treadmill test (TMT) but they do not advise patients to work out on treadmill every day. We have been living our lives as we used to, none of us have got infected with COVID or any other disease and we are yet to take our vaccine shots. Goes to show how important daily routine, exercises, healthy food and mental health are to maintaining a robust immune system which in turn will protect us from diseases.

We have all been conditioned to believe that our value is in the money we have, our jobs, size of our house, size and number of cars, quantity of gold we possess, etc. and our social status is measured by these parameters which forces us to chase them our entire lives. What we conveniently forget or ignore is, we are social animals and what is truly important for us are health and relationships. Only when we have these will all our accomplishments truly make sense in our lives. We don’t really have to take any extra effort to improve our lives, we just need to understand this one simple fact.

Humanity’s fantasy world has been shattered by a virus

I had a very interesting conversation with a friend (who is going to read this) about whether COVID-19 virus is a zoonotic virus or a man made virus. There are many articles and videos that have been circulating on social media proposing to provide evidence that the virus was created in the virology lab at Wuhan, China. What my friend is worried about is, if these allegations turn out to be true, it means we have interfered in nature and tampered with the natural evolution of a microorganism. He wants strict regulations on biological testing similar to the ones imposed on nuclear and chemicals testing so that we do not end up engaging in a biological war with one another like the atom bombs in Japan and chemical warfare in Vietnam. My answer to him was in 2 parts. 1) Human interference in nature We started interfering in nature when we started cutting down trees to build our houses. We did not pause to wonder why animals are not doing the same. Rather, in our arrogance of having superior intelligence we looked down upon the supposed lower intelligence of animals. We never wondered from where did we get this ability which no other living being on the planet has. Nature will never give the intelligence and ability to any living being to destroy nature’s ecosystem. Nature is a closed ecosystem which means everything that is born or created within it will or has to return to it. Animals build nests using items available in nature which gets recycled by nature after use. When we die our bodies are recycled by nature. Fully knowing this, we created tar, concrete, plastic and a zillion other things nature cannot recycle and knowing that nature cannot recycle our waste, we keep forcing it on nature which nature has duly started returning to us during natural calamities. So we have come a long way to worry about human interference in nature now. 2) Tampering with the natural evolution of a microorganism My friend believes biological testing in labs is essential to understand about microorganisms so that we can build medicines and vaccines to protect us from them. First of all, every organism in nature is in continuous evolution. So there is no end to biological testing. Why are animals not doing the same? This is not about higher or lower levels of intelligence. Nature has a sophisticated and effective way of handling this situation. Immune system. Diseases are simply conflicts between organisms of higher and lower orders. All living beings when exposed to nature will constantly be under the attack of microorganisms. Immune system keeps learning about more microorganisms and becomes more robust in protecting us. So we do not need to test microorganisms in labs for our protection from them. The bigger problem with this is, not everyone will have good intentions. These genetically modified microorganisms could be stolen and released into nature. We will have no control over them once they are in nature and consequences could be catastrophic. We have found ways to splice genes in lab and now we are working towards repairing genes in human genetic structure that cause diseases. I am all for it because it can cure genetic diseases like diabetes permanently. But any lab experiments that can potentially involve nature has to be strictly forbidden. Even if COVID-19 is a man made virus and we let it out into nature, did it affect nature? No animal died because of it. 3 million humans and counting have died. Every time we go against nature, the consequences will come back to bite only us. Most importantly, it is inconsequential whether the virus is natural or man made because in either case it has broken the glass houses we have been living in for so long. This goes back to the conversation I had with another friend (who is also going to read this). Every aspect of human life has become untenable in nature. Our food habits have become extremely inorganic and unhealthy, our sleep cycle has vanished and our entire lifestyle is in disarray. We are no longer in communication with nature because of which our immune system gets to learn nothing and has literally become idle. One virus of moderate virulence has raised a question mark over the survival of our species itself. Diseases are one of the ways in which nature controls population of every living being. So death is inevitable. Greater the size of population higher the mortality rate and more number of reasons to die. If diseases don’t kills us, accidents, murders and so many other reasons are lurking. We do not even know if we will wake up from our sleep the next day. Common reasons for death during sleep – silent cardiac arrest, brain hemorrhage. But we are “existing” in a blissful fantasy world. We take housing loans and agree to pay EMIs every month for the next 20-30 years. In interviews, candidates are asked ” where do you find yourself in the next 5 years or what are your professional goals for the next 5 years”. Education is linked to profession which is linked to money which is linked to social status. Health has become irrelevant. We take insurance policies and swagger around in arrogance that when we fall sick, the policies will take care of us. Health is wealth has become wealth is health. We rush to hospitals where we get treated when we fall sick. Note : Hospitals are not places that ensure we do not fall sick. Doctors do not take us off tablets and tell us how to become healthy naturally. We no longer seem to remember that prevention is better than cure. Moreover what diseases are doctors and hospitals curing us from anyways? We are given medication that suppress diseases. There is still no cure available for even common cold. Google and see the classifications of headache. There is a type of headache called stress headache the cause of which medical community has no clue about. This is how little the medical community and doctors who treat us know about human anatomy. Medication for pain simply interrupt the signal to the brain that indicates pain so we stop feeling pain. This is called workaround in other professional jobs and cannot even be considered as treatment. Suppressing a disease and keeping it inside the body long enough can result in the genetic information of the disease getting encoded into our genetic structure. This is how genetic diseases are created and passed on to future generations, thereby making the entire species unhealthy. This is what has happened to us which animals with their lower intelligence avoids by identifying and abandoning/killing unhealthy offspring. Even more ironical are the facts about medication and vaccination. Diabetes is a genetic disease and medicines only help to keep it under control. Can pharmaceutical companies manufacture medicines and vaccines to repair our genetic structure? Human body is tuned to absorb vitamins from nature and food on its own. I have read about people in western countries who live on diet of vitamin tablets completely ignorant of the fact that human body is incapable of absorbing vitamins from tablets properly. I have heard of people suffering from Vitamin D deficiency in India which is literally unbelievable. I can understand this in the colder western countries where there is less sunlight but in a tropical country all it takes is soaking our body in sunlight for a while. We are all made to believe that medication will cure us and vaccines will protect us from diseases. In reality, medication and vaccines are top ups for our immune system, a miniscule external intervention which provides more information for the immune system to fight diseases and protect us. If our immune system is already weak, medicines and vaccines can never protect us on their own. These are the reasons why keeping ourselves healthy is so important for the survival of our species. We have no control over diseases and death. The healthcare system we have does nothing to protect us from diseases. All we can do is to stay healthy, maintain a good immune system and hope that it will protect us from diseases. We cannot run away from nature, live inside concrete buildings and hope to have a good immune system. People are being kept under lockdown now and are being told that staying at home will keep them safe from COVID-19 virus when the reality is governments are completely unprepared to handle a health crisis. Staying at home without enough physical activity and away from nature can drastically affect our immune system and make us vulnerable to other diseases. It is mind boggling that almost the entire human race has become so ignorant about themselves, about nature and have become so gullible to live in such an artificial world. There is a business evaluation model called PESTEL which evaluates uncertainties in the business environment such as political situations, economic conditions, etc to find the associated risks that can impact business prospects. The 2nd E in the model is for evaluating environmental factors which includes natural disasters and diseases. Very less importance is given to this as I came to understand from the experience of a local businessman. Even though some corporate companies do give importance to natural disasters, diseases are largely ignored. We saw how much companies have struggled after the COVID-19 pandemic broke out and it has taken a year for employees to get used to working from home. Just like fever is our immune system’s indicator that a foreign organism has entered our body, nature sends out signals when there are changes in its environment. Animals understand signs of natural disasters in advance and are able to protect themselves. We have lost that ability somewhere along our evolution. I do not know how useful is our higher intelligence if it does not even help us to survive in nature. I do not know if we are too late to break out of the glass houses we are living in and return to nature, but it is never too late to try.

The greatest leveler

Of all the numerous consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is one that is the most significant yet the least discussed. Fear of death. Media has played a central role in unleashing it upon the masses. We simply have to look into our history to see the havoc epidemics like malaria, chicken pox, small pox, etc. had created on our population. 90% of the South American population was wiped out by the Spanish Inquisition and the diseases the Spaniards brought with them. I am yet to come across a case where a normal healthy person with no underlying medical conditions has died only because of COVID-19 infection. Anyways, this is not about what is happening around COVID-19. Why do we fear death? It is our companion from the time we became zygotes in our mothers’ womb. The womb has a sophisticated self check mechanism to see if the genetic combination of the zygote will affect the mother or any future offspring. From the time of the fusion of sperm and egg, every life that grows on to become an adult is a miracle. Case in point is the cat that delivered 3 kittens on the top of our house. While 2 are healthy and have grown quickly, 1 was genetically weak and ill. 4 days of trying to save it with medicines and feeding proved futile as it passed away eventually. This is how fragile life is. So the fact that our population is 7 billion and counting is undefinable. So what exactly is death? We know it is an inevitable door through which each one of us has to journey without exception. But we don’t know where it opens to and what lies on the other side. What makes it more complicated is, we cannot go through the door, see what’s on the other side and return. Its a one way trip. Its not like going to sleep, being in a dream and waking up back to our world. Its like leaving home and going to another place knowing that we cannot go back home, ever. So we ended up creating many “systems” on the other side, the most common one being the Gods and the heaven-hell system which has helped to reign in and control people’s lives. When we ponder over the intricacies of death, we are blissfully ignorant of the extraordinary complications of life. Most of us are living blissfully in the belief that there are no connections between what we do and what we experience and no two events in our lives are connected. Either we can choose to live in the assumption that the place we were born, the family and circumstances we were born into, the friends we make, are all coincidental and beyond our control or we can choose to believe that they are all connected and makes sense somewhere. Astrology says planets and stars exert their influence on our lives which has a direct bearing on the place and time we were born. Do their influences extend to animals as well? I believe it does because animals are more attuned to nature than we are. So why is death still a mystery? Super rich people are already trying to cheat death by doing whatever they can to increase their lifespan. The patriarch of the Rothschild family reportedly did 19 heart transplants before he eventually succumbed. If we knew what is the on the other side of the door, we will most probably stop caring on what is on our side. We would only want to escape death by any means. We have been searching for the fountain of youth and elixir of everlasting life for thousands of years. One aspect of Alchemy was to create this elixir. A larger and cosmic reason exists. Anything that starts has to come to a stop. This is not just a universal law but it is also the law that governs the universe itself. The Universe has a lifespan beyond which it will cease to exist. If the Universe has to die everything inside it will also have to die. The world of astronomy is hard at work trying to determine if a Universe existed before the one we are part of. A positive result could mean rebirth exists for all of us. Is there something called destiny in life? Was I destined to become an engineer? Taking up engineering was more of a circumstantial than a preferred choice at that time. I love mathematics but I am passionate about biology. Nevertheless, the choice was mine irrespective of the reasons. Our lives are littered with choices and the choices we make defines our way in life ahead. If we harm someone, it will come back to bite us. When we belittle and look down on people during their times of distress, we forget that tough times will catch up with each one of us. If destiny does exist, how I see it is if we are destined to go through bad times, then someone could end up harming us and then that person’s karma would decide his/her destiny in another life. This would keep the wheel of life and death rolling if the cycles of rebirth does exist. But the question here is, how relevant understanding death is. Once the outpouring of grief over the death of a loved one is over, our mind starts drifting back into the reality we exist in. The personal belongings of the deceased are all supposed to be destroyed or thrown away so that his/her intimate memories no longer remain part of our lives. We are rooted to the world we are part of and the world keeps moving ahead regardless of births and deaths. Death is not supposed to distract us from living out our lives. Knowing about death will fundamentally alter this state of our living. Death is the greatest leveler in the cosmos. No matter how rich we become, no matter how high we fly, after we die, all of us will be addressed as “body”. Death erases the name that was given to us at our birth. I realized death even makes it irrelevant that the deceased was related to the living when I heard a son addressing his father’s mortal remains as “body”. The one person I look up to here is former Indian President Dr. Abdul Kalam. A marquee rocket scientist, he served the country at the highest possible levels and passed away with a smile on his face. He wasn’t married and turned out that the only earthly possession he had was some pair of clothes and a box full of books. While billionaires take so much effort in the name of philanthropy, he did not even bother to earn and hold on to money in the first place. I may not see a wealthier person than him in my life. The man may have never thought about or feared death. He lived his life to the fullest and went when his time was up. Its a life worth aspiring for to emulate.

It is insensible and needless to live in fear, even if it is of a disease

“Two fall outs of COVID-19 pandemic have become clear:
1) Creating medicines and vaccines for every known disease and consuming Vitamin tablets to boost immunity has rendered our immune system idle and useless. In antivirus systems, definitions of new viruses have to be constantly updated for the antivirus to keep our computers safe. Our immune system has to dissect new microorganisms, understand their genetic structure & then create antibodies to fight them. We cannot stay two steps ahead & have medicines & vaccines for every disease going to affect us in the future. Only a robust immune system can save us.
2) The fear of death among people is mind boggling. So much fear has been created over the virus that people are not even stepping out on to their house’s porch. Death is our constant companion from the time we were zygotes in our mother’s womb. Diseases are one way nature controls the population of all living beings in it’s ecosystem. Death is inevitable yet people fear it so much with the false pride of not admitting it. Incomprehensible.”

This innocuous post I put on my social media timeline drew the ire of a friend who messaged me saying “we have intelligence so it’s stupid not to use it and depend only on immune system”. Nothing wrong with what she said.  Why can’t we protect ourselves with medicines and vaccines?

COVID-19 is a mild virus with 99% survival chances as per reports. Then why the fear? Because it’s a new variant of Coronavirus. There are no medicines or vaccines for it yet. So we have no option but to fall back on our immune system. But it also doesn’t know this new microorganism. So it gets confused and puts its entire focus on eliminating the virus. This becomes problematic and even fatal for people already suffering from other life threatening diseases as the immune system gets overwhelmed.

My friend missed a very important point though. Survival is instinctive and has got nothing to do with intelligence. Every animal from the time it is born tries to survive as long as it can. What my friend cannot seem to accept is the fact that death is inevitable. Someone who could live for another 10 years may succumb now because of COVID-19. That’s how it has always been in nature. The weaker ones have to die. Nature needs only the strong ones to survive. Why such a rule?

Scientists and researchers believe life on Earth formed by a process called panspermia wherein asteroids carrying microorganisms from space travel, collide with planets and fall on them. If and when conditions become favorable for life to thrive, the microorganisms from the asteroid rocks will start replicating. Let’s take this situation and assume that no microorganisms die. They keep evolving into more complex organisms through billions of years but none of them die. What would have had happened to Earth? Overpopulated, overheated, resources exhausted & nature’s ecosystem could have had collapsed. This is exactly the situation now. We started making medicines to protect and cure us from diseases so our mortality rate dropped. Earth’s resources are rapidly receding and nature’s ecosystem is heading towards collapse.

This is why death is so important. In the Earth’s timeline, 99.99% of the living beings that existed have supposedly become extinct. Why is nature killing living beings in its ecosystem? Death is essentially the backbone of evolution.  Death is never the end of life. Best example of it is wildfire. When fire has done enough destruction then comes torrents of rain and kick starts life again. Nature is learning and evolving from the cycles of birth and death of living beings in it’s ecosystem. Universe in itself is supposed to have a lifespan at the end of which it self destructs and a new Universe is born and takes the older one’s place.

Take a look at the complexity and diversity of nature and then look up into the cosmos. How many planets have we discovered like ours till now? There could be planets harboring life elsewhere in the Universe but none in the near vicinity of ours. This is what makes our planet special. Nature has survived for billions of years because of its ability of self conservation by following the rule of ‘the sum is always greater than the individual parts’. This is why no animal has the ability to destroy nature for its own survival. This is the best proof of advanced human intelligence not being a product of natural evolution.

No matter how intelligent we become we cannot cheat death or prolong our life on Earth.  But there is something we can do. There is a process called terraforming (reference: Movie – The Man of Steel) by which we can create an environment that suits us and can possibly control. Mars seems to have all the qualities to harbor life so there is supposedly a plan underway to terraform Mars. It is somewhat like creating a planned city. This could be the way forward for our existence. What we are engaged in now is a fight to the death with nature for which there can be only one outcome. Our annihilation. Something that has been in existence for a few thousand years can never defeat something that has been here for billions of years. There is no version of the story in which we will ever come out on top of nature.

Death is the natural end of a life cycle so it is nothing to be feared. We all know death is inevitable but we still fear and fight it because we have found our purpose of existence in houses, cars and in the social life of status, wealth and fame. There is also the needless fear of the unknown of what lies on the other side of death. There are more laws of nature and forces of the Universe acting upon us than we know. I believe celebrating life and death equally is the best way to live a balanced life.

Economics in the time of pandemic

 

The world is going to take stock of it’s economic situation soon. The economic system we have created requires us to work to keep it moving. Only when people work will goods and services get created and the movement of which will allow money to flow and propel the economy forward. What will happen when a vehicle that was travelling at it’s full speed is brought down to complete halt in a couple of seconds? That was how lock down was implemented. But this time away from the life we have been living is very crucial for us. COVID-19 has opened many doors and windows for us to introspect on our lives and the world we have created.

First of all, this entire saga of the pandemic is totally our creation. No, this is not about the conspiracy theory of the virus getting leaked out of the virology lab at Wuhan. Its not about our health and immune system either. The fault lies with the medical insurance ecosystem we have created. The busy urban life and the taxing corporate world yanks away all our time and what we are given in return is money. When we started exchanging money for our time, we unknowingly gave away our health as well. On one side is the pressure to work more for more money which gives better social status. On the other side is the medical field taking rapid strides ahead with technology and telling us that healthcare has become so advanced and better. Health is wealth has subtly become wealth is health. The plethora of insurance companies and their policies have ensured that we do not have to bother about prevention being better than cure. So falling sick has been normalized for the working class, even cool to say “I worked so hard that I fell sick” and it is expected that older people in the family will fall sick. What has become alarming is how parents and grandparents falling and breaking their bones in their old age has also become normal. The amount of money getting spent and the effort on the family to take care of them is minuscule compared to their slow recovery and the physical pain and mental anguish they have to undergo at their age.

We are living in an alternate reality based on the concept of wealth in which insurance policies make us believe that when there is money all health issues can be treated, thereby implicitly and subtly pushing us towards diseases and getting us used to being sick. This is regardless of the facts that insurance cards are valid only in select hospitals and medical care centers, getting cashless insurance benefit during treatment is even tougher, only a certain list of diseases are covered by insurance policies, insurance companies either do not have policies for the older people or their insurance premiums cost much higher and most importantly, in spite of all the insurance cover, plenty of money is still required in hand because other expenses far exceed medical bills and getting insurance companies to pay out the insurance amounts is a lengthy and painful process. Only if everyone started to calculate the time and effort required for the entire insurance drama in terms of money.

There is a certain aura of invincibility we have created around ourselves in the belief that if we have wealth we will get access to advance healthcare and so we can fall sick and recover time and again. Diseases do not happen by accident or coincidence. Every being in nature is in the process of continuous evolution and at the heart of it is cell mutation. Microorganisms too evolve through cell mutation. The beauty of nature lies in the subtle fact that evolution is not synchronized among all the living beings. When they come in contact with one another in such an environment, biological conflicts arise. These conflicts are what we call as diseases. This is how a virus with a new mutation has caused a pandemic in our population. We will eventually evolve and adapt to the virus but not all of us will. This is where the rule of survival of the fittest becomes relevant and is one of the ways in which nature controls the population of each living being in it.

Now, two incidents to ponder over.

Even the faintest of thoughts about this would have had been ridiculed away as insanity at any other point in time. Oil prices plummeted to below zero for the first time in it’s history. That the cost of a barrel of crude oil finally settled at $-37 is incomprehensible. Twitter was so overwhelmed with tweets about it and it took me a while to figure out what had happened. Something that had become the most precious item for the entire world has become the butt of jokes in a day, the best being we are going to get paid now for using oil. To think that the entire Middle East region became what it is now because of the same oil. The higher we go before jumping into water the deeper we go inside water. Law of averages catches up with everyone and everything.

A few days back, this report from the Indian city of Agra about a truck ferrying milk falling over and a man collecting spilled milk on the road while some stray dogs were drinking milk some distance away created a lot of buzz on social media. Milk, a type of food being the common factor here, what separated the man and the stray dogs was money. When he could get the milk without having to pay money, he did what the dogs were doing. Simply put, we have reduced ourselves to the point where the only factor that separates us from animals now is money. With our higher intelligence, communication skills and ability to do critical thinking all we could achieve was to create our world based on money and wealth.

I hope COVID-19 will drive some sense back into people’s minds. The same disease that afflicts us can affect healthcare professionals too. Doctors and nurses can die, hospitals can get overwhelmed and all the insurance policies become useless when a pandemic hits us. Nothing much has changed from the medieval times of small pox and bubonic plague. Religious places of worship have been shut. The Gods seem to be helpless to protect us and we are not even able to pray to them at their places of worship. The foundation of society that has been built over thousands of years is being shaken. Why should people go to religious places anymore when we know that we can pray from our homes? When the Gods people went to pray to in religious places couldn’t stop them from dying, what’s the point in going there again?

Having no vaccine or medicines for COVID-19 is the primary reason why panic has spread among us and complete lock downs in countries had to be implemented as knee jerk reaction. Animals get attacked by scores of microorganisms every day. They don’t lock down their entire communities because they have discipline, something we have lost because of our arrogance of having superior intelligence. Animals know instinctively to self isolate themselves to prevent the disease from spreading. This makes food unavailable to them which is necessary because the entire resources of the body can be used for fighting the disease and does not have to be used to digest food. Crocodiles and turtles have survived an extinction event and many ice ages through millions of years of their existence. How many viral and bacterial invasions would they have survived?

The answers to diseases do not lie in vaccines, medicines, money, insurance policies and places of worship. Only the one that nurtures and sustains the planet can help us survive. Only in nature can our immune system evolve continuously to fight diseases. To understand this we have to first stop attacking and destroying nature and that will happen only when we stop looking at the economic value of nature’s resources. Till then more pandemics, lock downs and economic disasters like the present one will follow and if we still don’t learn, there is a mass extinction event waiting at the end of the road.

10 reasons why humans are the aliens on earth

1. Everything in nature is beautiful in it’s own ways with vibrant colors, sounds and movements. Only we are monotonous and boring in the way we look, sound and move. Male animals and birds are the ones who have been created as beautiful to woo females. Only in humans are females expected to look pretty for men to woo them.

2. All animals in nature have developed camouflages, either for protection or for hunting their prey. Only humans build camouflages to hide from other humans. A Zebra’s stripes are for camouflaging it from lions and other predators, not from other Zebras. Only we do not have any natural camouflages. But the camouflages we create are not tuned to nature that’s why we can never use them to hide from animals.

3. All animals are part of the food chain in the ecosystem, only we are not. We are neither a predator nor a prey (or we are both when we decide to go hunting in the forest and gets mauled by a lion or tiger) and we are the only species in such a unique category on the planet.

4. All animals stop eating food when they are sick. They use all their body resources to fight off the disease so it does not make any sense to burden the body further with digestion of food. Only we need external nourishment from food when we are sick. When an animal falls sick, it isolates itself from it’s group so that the disease does not spread to it’s brethren. We, on the other hand seek caring and attention when we are sick which in turn spreads the disease to the people around us.

5. No wild animal gets afflicted with the diseases that we do. Back pain, cancer and all of those are extremely weird diseases. The moment we stand up on our two feet, we start going against gravity and become candidates for spinal diseases. All animals have their body fine tuned to gravity. Cancer has been found to be caused by the deficiency of Vitamin B12. Most urban people are suffering from diseases due to Vitamin D deficiency. No animal suffers from any Vitamin deficiency based diseases.

6. There is nothing unique about us that anything in nature can learn and use it for their own benefits. Rather, we have constantly observed and learned from animals and nature for our growth and evolution. Even martial art forms such as Kung Fu have been developed by observing the movements of Cranes, Snakes and Tigers among other animals.

7. Animals have evolved according to their habitat to protect themselves from the forces of nature. Polar bears have developed a black hide beneath their thick white hair. The hide conserves the heat produced from body fat and prevents it from radiating outward. Similarly all animals have developed their own means of self protection. Only we did not evolve similarly or we were not created in this way. Only we need clothes and other external methods to protect ourselves.

8. All animals consistently follow the principle of Survival of the Fittest. They have the inherent ability to understand which among their children are healthy and can procreate successfully when they grow up. The rest have to die. That’s why birds push their chicks out the nests after they grow up to a certain point. The ones that cannot fly should fall down and die. In this way, all animals ensure that defective genes and diseases are not passed on to future generations. Only we defy this rule and protect our children because of which we have all become unhealthy due to defective genes.

9. In Indian folklore, the legendary poet Kalidasa was an illiterate woodcutter in his younger days and he was once found cutting the same branch of a tree on which he was sitting. This is exactly what we are doing with nature. We are destroying nature to build our homes, the same nature that sustains and nourishes us. No other animal displays this behaviour. Animals use what is available in nature and adapt to changes in nature for their survival and existence. No being in nature has been given the ability to destroy the very environment it is part of.

10. Finally, animal senses are all attuned to nature and our planet. Animals sense geological changes such as natural disasters in advance and move to safer places. Apes and Chimpanzees also have this ability, so if we evolved from them naturally, why did we lose it? If we were created from apes or from early hominids, was this ability removed from us? If yes, why?

To add to this,

Every animal in the ecosystem have a particular season or time when they procreate and that is the only time they become sexually active and mate. The female ovaries of all animals are able to hold the male sperms for a long time after mating. Only humans do not have any mating seasons. Human ovaries do not have the capability to store male sperms. There is no sex in the animal world, that term is applicable only for humans. Ovulation and menstruation cycles with such complexity exists only in humans in the mammal world and does not even exist for other animals. How did it evolve to such an advanced level only in humans? If the reasons were because of changes in nature, why did the same adaptation not happen in other mammals?