BY TARA NARAYAN

COMING BACK to Mumbai-which-was-Bombay is always an education. Also an exercise in how not to go the Mumbai way! Amongst other things, I’ve been hanging around at hospitals and Mumbai has the best of the them of course - seeing how much ill health there is in this over-grown vertical megapolis i.e. city within cities. There’s a mega conference going on currently on vertical cities with the leading experts of the world in attendance but I don’t think I’ll be able to attend any of the sessions. But the flip side is that there’s so much consciousness about what it takes to be healthy in Mumbai and the newspapers are full of all kinds of up-to-date information on various illnesses and ailments which plague Indians, the latest in healthcare and the various alternate systems of medicine. Especially Ayurveda, which has hit big time now. People are actually taking it seriously, at least to detox or clean up their clogged body beautiful through panchkarma and various treatments. The classified columns are packed with offers of health-conscious meals using organic ingredients…all for a price of course.

The hubby has got another scare vis-à-vis his health problems and mercifully at the Tata Memorial Cancer Hospital (which is the place to go if you seek bona fide and economical treatment) the big C was ruled out. But it looked like all of the country’s cancer patients were gathered at here and it was a veritable kumbh mela…one could get a form, fill it in, register it, make the payments and then wait for a week to meet the doctor of choice! Tata’s are the best of course but Mumbai is currently smitten by the mega Kokilaben Ambani Hospital, which opened at Andheri a year ago, and the hubby was referred to meet an endocrinologist there for his problems. So there I was at this centrally air-conditioned five-star deluxe state-of-the-art hospital with everything laid on, what’s there not to like about the Kokilaben Ambani Hospital which is dedicated to the people of India and a social initiative of the Anil Ambani side of the pretty split Dhirubhai Ambani family now, with perhaps only mama Kokilaben still nursing hopes of a reconciliation.

FRUIT BREAK

BUT the first floor is where all the diagnostic hardware is and there’re huge posters up at the various reception centres depicting beauteous flowers and fruit - appealing that you take a fruit break or a spiritual break I suppose. The various benefits of eating apples, grapes, pineapples are listed…in a surreal moment I found myself staring at a picture of William Wordsworth’s golden daffodils for hours on end (while the hubby was doing his sonography). The hospital follows a colour code and the blue ribbon against the floor leads you to the well-appointed toilets, just follow the creamy white, red, orange, green, blue ribbons painted against the floor walls and get to your destination…the various speciality sections. On a blue day one could easily step through the security system of the hospital and while away time at the “fine dining” cafeteria, buying medicines Indian or imported at the chemist’s or soft toys at the souvenir shop…I’m told the doctors here are not just consultants but employees with a stake in the profits and earn something like a take home salary of Rs.5 lakh! So who doesn’t want to be employed by Kokilaben Ambani…wish I were a doctor instead of a permanently impoverished scribe! By the way, the 8th floor maternity floor of the hospital is booming with babies, looks like all the loaded young Guju women of Mumbai head here for delivering their babies…

(Sigh) Going in and out of hospitals is being a way of life! Life is like that only, as they say in Mumbai. It always occurs to me that we take such good care of our things - our homes and cars and clothes and footwear and jewellery and bank accounts but when it comes to our health, we treat our body like a garbage dump and have no respect for it all. I’m not saying we should be narcissistic and be obsessed by our body beautiful, that’s one extreme; but why do we have to go to the other extreme and behave like we hate our body and must punish it from the inside out and outside in??? Tell me it’s all in the mind and it’s the mind which needs to be treated if the body is to be set right!

By the way, the Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital & Medical Research Institute is a social initiative by the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group and for its motto they have “Every life matters”! The more cynical than me hubby of course says it’s more like “Every paisa matters”. That’s a matter of opinion, one hears good things and a few bad things about Mumbai’s newest state-of-the-art hospital, some say it’s all so remotely controlled and automated that the human touch is missing, but some say that’s the way they like it as long as the doctors are top-notch and make a correct diagnosis! Make what you like of that. What I do like is the informative leaflets at every medical station and I’ve been reading about “Alcohol vs Liver”, “Vascular Surgical Services”, “Endrocrinology & Diabetes”, “Colorectal Services” and so on, a host of very informative leaflets about how we abuse the body and then what happens to it…hey, this is probably the first “Tobacco Free Hospital” in the country and yes, there’s a notice up somewhere saying, “Sex selection and detection is not done in this hospital and is punishable under the PCPNDT Act.” Good for them. The hospital can afford to be more eco-friendly…plastic cups for drinking water are everywhere.

EATING OUT

LIKE any other megapolis eating out is big time in Mumbai! For old nostalgic times sake some friends took us out to eat at Khyber’s down town and this upstairs and downstairs maze of a restaurant is still the trustworthy place (opposite the Jehangir Art Gallery). But what I’d like to note here is that there seems to be a bumper crop of strawberries this year at Maharashtra’s hill stations and one can see strawberries everywhere and even at the traffic lights - it’s one of the Mumbai scenes, hard-working children and adults selling boxes of strawberries…Rs.30 per box or Rs.160 per half-kg. I ignored the big glossy ones for the smaller strawberries and bought some. I’ve always loved Mumbai’s suburban outside the railway station veggie and fruit markets, my favourite being the bhaji galli outside Grant Road station and the one outside the Vile Parle (East) and Matunga markets. Mumbai has the best of everything naturally…folk these days are indulging in makki di roti, palak paneer (laced with fresh cream Punjabi style) and gajar ka halva! Haven’t gone walking down Juhu Beach yet, one of these days…artistic yoga for losing weight is in vogue, as is kick boxing and Muay Thai whatever that be! Like I said, Mumbai is full of enterprise and imagination on the fitness scene and the bold and beautiful amongst Mumbai’s society folk are taking to reading a fairly comely lately glossy lifestyle mag called “Jade”, which is in competition with “Verve” which I used to write for at one time… lifestyle mags are now priced at Rs.100 and over. My friend Carol Andrade is now editing The Afternoon Despatch & Courier (which had run down for a while) but ownership has changed and Carol is trying hard to offer an alternative non-celebrity centred tabloid for readers who’re quite sick and tired about being kept informed about what underwear Aishwarya Rai Bachchan wears and how many botox treatments Bollywood’s aging stars have paid a fortune for! Mumbai’s newspaper lifestyle sections are terribly celebrity and foodie centred now and the presentations in colour are fabulous.

Wish someone would give me a challenging job at 60 years! In comparison to Carol’s life in Mumbai, mine in laid-back Goa is as boring as death! I notice that the hot spot of the country is now Hyderabad and this Jade mag is dedicated to making the South Indian states take their rightful place under the Indian sun! From the sound of it, some real exciting life is happening in Hyderabad, Chennai and Bengaluru and not Delhi and Mumbai! They have as many malls as Mumbai…I haven’t gone mall hopping though, nor spa hopping…even a seven-day Ayurveda treatment at one of the five-stars can add up to Rs.10,000 and that’s supposed to be cheap! Like I said, Ayurveda is making a comeback with the urban rich taking to it in a big way and I’m trying to coax the hubby to go on a detox Ayurveda treatment to clean up his lymphatic system - the lymphatic system is what removes the garbage from the body in case you don’t know and if there’s no exercise in your life, you can be sure that your lymphatic system is in poor shape! Most gyms, health systems, spas now sport trampolines on which you’re supposed to do some gentle bouncing daily to get a sedentary lymphatic system to move and go on a jog to clean up body beautifuls!