My India 9 - 1950-55

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Before looking at the various Alternate Systems of Medicine to which we were subjected, let me talk about the general health condition of our Village 60 years ago.

We were somewhat special in that ours was a sea-side village in South India.

This at once meant that it was sandy and sun-drenched. These two features led to the blessed state of no water-logging at all. Every drop of water that was spilled either by clouds or ourselves was at once soaked by the sand and vanished as groundwater. So, we never had swamps or stagnant pools that breed the mosquito menace. We used to sleep in the open blissfully without any nets or mosquito coils or ointments (this was not at all so in all the subsequent half a dozen pleces I lived in later on).

We didn't have Malaria or Filaria (Vizianagaram, a town in AP, had such large polluted water bodies, that it used to be called the 'Mother of Malaria and Father of Filaria', deservedly).

We never saw an obese person. Due to the incessant outdoor play by kids and heavy physical labor for all males and females, and lack of Radio, TV and such sedentary idle pursuits, obesity and its related diseases were unseen and unheard of. No one died of heart problems unless they were congenital, in which event they died before schooling. I never lost any one of my schoolmates while in school. We somehow survived.

There was one obese couple though: The 'Pappu Chetti & his wife' (Village Provision Shopkeeper couple). Their entire time was spent behind the counter with a beam balance (no doubt loaded) in their wizard hands. So, there was a toy too named for them. It was a spherical plastic thing heavily weighted at the inside bottom by an unseen iron semicircular block. Tilt it any which way, it will set itself right-side up after a few oscillations. It didn't look like one, but it was a pendulum; instead of suspended, it was sort of 'pivoted' by a flat bottom. Several of such weird-looking toys based on the pendulum principle appeared in the Toy Market later on; but the most beautiful one was the Chinese Albatross with low-swung protruding wings that was pivoted on a sharp point tip by its nose, which appeared in the KGP shops round 1998. The original Chinese thing was just fantastic. I bought one and used to show it off to my Physics Students visiting our Qrs. It also had another beautiful feature: Swing it about its two natural axes (Principal Axes), and the time periods wee roughly 1:2. Just lovely. If I were a II Year Lab-in-Charge then (which I was fortunately not) I would have picked it up, suspended it and asked the students to plot its Momental Ellipse, a nice UG Lab Experiment playing with Tensors.

So much for Physics buffs like Vineet who are unhappy with this Series.

So, we had no Hypertension, Sugar, Thromboses of various kinds of fat-folks-diseases in our Village. W were all having some kind of malnutrition, but that just meant that we were lean and mean and fighting fit. When I passed out from my High School, I was 4' 6" short, and weighed 34 Kg. But I could outrun any bully in the town. And when our Drill Teacher had to take his Annual Data for Sports and Athletics for us in our SSLC Register, he would put me up on the very high (for me) horizontal bar and leave me for push-ups. He would lose count after fifty and brusquely ask me to drop down on the sand cushion.

None of us had the unheard-of Triple Antigen Vaccine. But none suffered from Tetanus or Diphtheria. But all of us without exception had a bout of whooping cough (Pertussis) each for a week or two, but none was the worse for it (forced holiday); we got lifetime immunity from it. But while it lasted, it was hellish: we coughed and coughed our hearts and souls out. But we were young and it didn't matter much, since we all had it. There was only one remedy; there was a tree (which I never saw among the thousand varieties at KGP). It had elliptical coin-shaped green unripe fruit. They used to make a garland of them and hang it round our necks for the nonce. But I guess these things go away by themselves if you are sturdy enough, which we all were due to our non-stop play round the year.

I and my siblings did have small-pox vaccination in our first year or so, and we have ugly scars on our upper-arms to prove it. And once in a couple of years, a Govt Uncle used to visit our home with his kit, take out his oil lamp, ask for a matchbox (they never supplied it) and light up the thing while we waited in a row. He would sort of ticklingly drill his hot needle with its medicine on our forearms and go away. It swells for a couple of days and vanishes. I later learned that these were 'booster' doses for small-pox.

But I guess this immunization for small-pox wasn't Universal then in our Village. As soon as word spread that small-pox has hit the neighboring village and is heading towards ours, the school would be shut and all folks who can would run away to a far-enough town, wait a fortnight, and slowly limp back peeping in ones and twos till the All-Clear is blown . There would be stories of many who couldn't and were lost. Sad! But, we fled, and when we returned, none of our schoolmates vanished. The only 'remedy-cum-precaution' was several branches of neem leaves that were hung all over homes and places and bedsides. I guess, it took away almost half of the population who couldn't flee. But it left the survivors who were struck by it with life-long scars all over the body and face and sometimes left them blinded and deaf ( ?).

Terrible Plague!

Stomach problems like mild and severe indigestion, and typhoid and at at times cholera were very much there. But Terra- and other -mycins were yet to arrive on the scene. For typhoid (and for much else) the only 'remedy' was strict 'starvation' for 21 days.

Half of the deaths were due to typhoid and the other half due to starvation.

For cholera, just trust God since even 'saline drip' was unknown in our Health Center.

Once again, we never lost any of our schoolmates, luckily. We did have typhoid cases in our school, sometimes, para- as well as double-, but I guess once aagin our outdoors-sturdiness helped us build our general resistance and fighting spirit (there were many scores to settle in the Play-Ground).


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