So, I catch up with a friend on a whim, and lo, the girl who rarely has time being busy taking care of everyone else, picks the call and we talk for straight two hours. For the two hours , the smile that stayed on my face made me at once sad and happy, sad for how we have missed talking for long and happy for how we enjoyed this catching up.

My sweet friend was always enterprising and energetic. Her cheerful giggles and laughter was her hallmark then, when we were in college and now two decades later, I am happy to hear the same chirpiness in her voice.

Being self driven, effusive and full of life, she always longed to do more. She tried her hand at running a boutique which was quite popular given her sense of fashion, outgoing nature and enterprise. Yet, the past few years, she has been a student of alternative medicines.

Her shift to alternative medicines started with her mom’s untimely death, being the youngest to two brothers, she was her mom’s pet and this incident shook her badly.

What started as a cursory superficial interest in acupuncture, yoga, Dorn therapy and so on got her in touch with some of the brightest and best minds in the field.

She also became quite popular in her area, where people the locals turned to her for solace and some advice.

When some of her friends, her family turned to her for suggestions on’ ‘how do we do this’, ‘what is happening to me’, my diligent sweet friend tended to them with care.

‘Perhaps this was my call’, she said smilingly, ‘I never wanted to learn anything about English, really!’, she chuckled.

When her loving husband built her the clinic she so wanted in front of her home and also joined the same course out of his love for her, she says, ‘life has indeed come to a full circle.’

Recently, she did fall sick and badly too, when I called her, she smiled,’yeah, I am alive, good you called me!’.

She talks earnestly of how alternative therapies are looked down as some ‘mumbo jumbo’ and how allopathy or the so called, ‘English ‘ medicine always gets an upper hand.

In fact, it is patients who give up hope on ‘allopathy’ , who go scrambling for acupuncture, Dorn therapy and more.

‘Someday you should talk to more people, maybe even teach, and come online and share your wisdom with world’, I insisted. ‘If he is ok, I will,’ she said and went quiet.

Stay cheerful, dear Sophy Syed, there’s many who will thank you for bringing joy to their lives.

I have personally experienced the benefits of a bit of care and love, and some so-called, ‘slow therapies’ in my life but Rujuta Diwekar, the now very famous dietician made a scathing remark on our blind trust of experts and equally blind distrust of traditional foods. ‘If the doctor prescribes a medicine, you will take it without question, but when your mom or grand mom tries to convince you of the benefit of turmeric milk at night, yoga or say, the ubiquitous ‘kaada’, that miraculous cure for sore throat, you resist, but why?’, she asks. Well, she is right. Our fear of being not so progressive and cultured, perhaps of being called jingoistic, stops us from appreciating the ‘mumbo jumbo’ of alternative therapies, which have been around for centuries!

Ps: Grass is grass, till you learn to name it, or realize what value it has!