Ill-feelings on ‘wellness’
Here’s a brief con-tour of the scams
‘Anti-ageing’, and ‘gut health’ are the new snake-oils. Being peddled by the slickest salesman of our times, the ‘wellness’ industry. Dangle either of these baits, and we fall for it, hook, line and sucker. It’s just old stuff but with a ‘wearable’. The search for the ‘elixir of youth’ once rivalled that for the ‘philosopher’s stone’. If that was the Vedic paras patthar, every ‘Ayush’ system linked all health to the poth-ar, stomach. The ancients bowed to the bowel. So did my father who pushed manners, grammar and milk of magnesia down our pre-pubescent throats.
So what’s new, bro, other than the Insta hash tag and hefty price tag? ‘Ageist’ has been added to the ban-wagon and even Sept-uagenarians can act like April-ugenarians, but it’s still never too early to collar the collagen. Never before has every he, she and them been so determined to become polyester, i.e. wrinkle-free.
At London’s Wellcome Collection’s ongoing ‘Coming of Age’ exhibition, the stickiest eyeballs were for US tech-billionaire Bryan Johnson’s time-consuming regimen to defy time. Waking before dawn to sit under engineered ‘sunlight’, he moves to intensive exercise, swallows over 100 daily nutrients, eats a calibrated, plant-based diet ‘within a four-hour window’, gets injected with his son’s plasma, etc; 30 scientists monitor his $2mn-a-year Blueprint Project. Why not simply lick a spoonful of Chyawanprash? Any Bharat First bhakt can tell you that ‘rejuvenation therapy’ is just Rasayana with branding, VC funding and ‘founder’s story’. The shrivelled-by-spiritual-pursuits sage Chyawan was restored to smooth-skinned, six-pack youth by divine-doctor duo, Ashwini Kumars. Really? No retinol?
‘Gut-health’ routine is so stressful, it’s constipating. It ranges from curated fasting, fibre, brewery-grade probiotic fermentation to $200 microbiome test kits and (pharma-not-farmer) ‘seed cycling’ ( for balancing hormones) and ‘colonic irrigation’ (merely enema with an MD degree). Reading my news site, I’m constantly assaulted by the ‘60-second pineapple trick guaranteed to clear bowels’; it’s driving me potty. Now, ignore primitive Ayurvedic agni which balances health-dictating doshas, bin humble curry-leaf-tempered chhaas/mor. It’s no longer possible to get up and go without gutting your credit card.
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Alec Smart said: “Will even such outrage lead to outage?”
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
