Depressing Suggestions

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It is well-known that well-meaning people en masse can often be irritating. This is especially true when friends and relatives visit patients and liberally give free uncalled for suggestions as to why, how, when, what to do, what not to eat and so on and so forth.

There should be a Law against it.

Birbal once tells Akbar that the trouble with the health of his kingdom is that everybody in it is a Doctor. Akbar*** asks him to prove it. Next day Birbal lies down in front of Akbar’s watchful Palace on a charpai groaning and yelling. Every passerby solicitously asks Birbal what is wrong with him; and invariably gives free advice to drink Tulsi water or chew betel leaves or eat goat’s testicles etc.

One can put up with these materia pseudo medica for corporeal afflictions. But when it comes to maladies of that inscrutable elusive thing called ‘mind’, all limits are crossed; because few understand these things but don’t admit their ignorance, nor keep shut, nor mind their business, all in the spirit of helpfulness.

I write from my experience. Soon after my retirement I was laid down by a severe bout of Clinical Depression. Fortunately, I knew something about it, having seen close friends sink into that valley and getting out of it by proper medication. I wouldn’t recommend you browse them, but if you wish to be perverse, here are the links:

http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2009/10/world-mental-health-day.html

http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2009/10/gpss-depression-one-liners-for-wise-and.html


I now come to the various fruitless, bootless, and bootable unsolicited suggestions I received from my near and dear:

1. Play Caroms
2. Listen to Classical Music
3. Go to Ravidra Bharati Auditorium
4. Visit Libraries
5. Go for long walks along the (stinking) Tank Bund
6. Try Yoga
7. Try Art of Living
8. Visit Temples, in particular, Sai Baba and Balajee
9. Do Puja if you can, or let others do it on your behalf
10. Consider people who are worse off
11. Consider your parents’ agony (‘here’ or ‘elsewhere’)
12. Consider your wife’s agony (she was watching Zee Soaps)
13. Just CONSIDER!
14. Avoid sleep during daytime
15. Avoid morbid thoughts
16. Read Chandamama
17. Read Readers Digest (of all things)
18. Try change of place, like visiting Goa
19. Visit astrologers, palmists, bhooth, praet & kapalik cranks
20. Read Gita (not Gita Govinda!)

I was too preoccupied with my own struggles to say anything to them openly but said only one thing to each of them sotto voce: “Go to Hell!”

I got cured overnight miraculously by an emergency change of drug (Olanzipine), thanks to Dr. G. Prasad Rao!
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*** Birbal once tells Akbar that sometimes apology could be worse than the affront. Akbar, the Goat, promptly asks him to prove it. That evening when Akbar was smelling a rose in his Mughal Gardens, Birbal quietly pinches his bum from behind. Akbar turns around and gets wild; whereupon Birbal apologizes saying: “I thought it was the Queen!”

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