Service rendered without egoism, however small, can be highly beneficial. It must emanate from a tender heart which responds to every sob and groan, and is ready to renounce and suffer gladly. One must have the eagerness to get involved with others and feel their pain. One must cultivate forbearance and inner strength, in order to avoid resentment at criticism and ridicule, while one is engaged in joyful service. The wise use their money, strength, intelligence, skills, aptitudes and opportunities to help others and make their lives happier. Thus they win divine grace; for seva is the highest form of worship. There are millions who are hungry, desperate and miserable. I ask that you limit your intake of food to your actual need, so that you can share your resources with the needy. Never waste food. Do not fritter away money for harmful purposes; use it to help others. Do not waste time and energy; allow others to benefit from your skills!
Everyone craves for security, peace, joy and happiness. But most believe that these can be extracted from the world! The result is, people waste their years in eating and drinking, playing and resting, earning and spending. They rush from cradle to grave ad nauseam, drifting along, knowing neither the origin of their journey nor its destination, through the ages. Man has won unique qualities of head and heart through a series of effort-filled lives as members of inferior species; that victory is now reduced to ashes, by this supine sloth. You must have the skill to swim across the waves of joy and grief, of pain and profit. You must be a master of the art of being fully at ease, perfectly calm and unaffected, whatever may happen to your body, senses or mind! Learn the skill of achieving and maintaining inner peace, the art of being ever aware of your own inner Reality (Atma), then you can safely gyrate in the world!
The chief means to detach your mind from distractions and attach yourselves to the search of God are communion with God (Yoga) and sacrifice (Tyaga). Kama (desire) has to be got rid of by Tyaga, and Rama (God) has to be secured by Yoga. Desire discolours the intelligence, perverts judgement, sharpens the appetites of the senses, and leads to a false attraction of the objective world. When desire disappears or is concentrated on God, intelligence becomes self-luminous, and shines in its pristine splendour. That splendour reveals the God within and in the world outside. That is true realisation of the Self (Atma Sakshatkara). I bless you that you succeed in your sadhana (spiritual practices). If you are not practicing any now, I advise you to take up simple namasmarana (reciting the divine name), along with reverence towards parents, elders and teachers, and rendering service to the poor and the sick.
God is the source of all Love. Love cures pettiness, hate and grief. Love loosens bonds; it saves you from the torment of birth and death. Love binds all hearts in a soft silken symphony. Seen through the eyes of Love, all beings are beautiful, all deeds are dedicated, and all thoughts are innocent. Love God and Love the world as the vesture of God, no more, no less. The world is one vast kin. If you pay attention to the individual, differences thrust themselves on you. Fix your attention on the samasthi (the collective), then points of identity will be more apparent. If you concentrate on the outer labels – Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Parsi, Buddhist – then, you will develop pride or contempt or hatred! But if you focus on the struggle that man undergoes to raise himself from the flesh to reach the level of Divinity, you will find all labels insignificant. Then it is all love, co-operation, mutual encouragement and appreciation.
Stent, heart bypass surgery, heart attack…all of us have heard these painful terms amongst our loved ones at one time or another. But these were uncommon a generation ago.
So, what happened? How did we reach here?
In an attempt to understand the status of heart disease in India, Priyamvada Chugh reached out to India’s first and oldest cardiologist.
Meet Dr Sivaramakrishna Iyer Padmavati, who turns 101 this month, and still goes to the National Heart Institute in Delhi every day,which she founded in 1977.
Dr Padmavati is India’s first and oldest cardiologist. Photo
Born in 1917, Dr Padmavati fled with her family from Burma to Coimbatore in 1941 during World War II. With the passion to make a difference, she studied medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital and Harvard Medical College in the USA with cardiology pioneers Dr Helen Taussig and Dr Paul Dudley White, respectively.
While returning to India in 1952 was a personal decision, it was the turning point for cardiology in India.
She has been the face behind several firsts:
The establishment of the first cardiac clinic and cath lab at the Lady Hardinge Medical College, Delhi.
The initiation of India’s first Doctorate of Medicine in Cardiology.
Setting up cardiology departments at the prestigious Maulana Azad Medical College, GB Pant Hospital, etc.
Founding the All India Heart Foundation, Delhi.
The list goes on. She accomplished all this in an era when cardiology was an unknown territory for most Indians, let alone for a woman.
To this Dr Padmavati says, “I pursued cardiology because there were very few courses available to women when I went to college, unlike today.” She was honoured with the Padma Bhushan in 1967 and the Padma Vibhushan in 1992 for her contributions to the field.
Having witnessed drastic changes in the incidence of heart disease in India over the last century, she says “Things were different earlier. Physical activity and a healthy diet were the norms. Now, times have changed.”
Burgers, fast food, and buttered paranthas, with eight hours of sitting in front of a computer, aren’t making things any better. As we move towards a machine-driven lifestyle characterised by increasing levels of stress, we invariably embrace unhealthy nutritional habits where heart diseases will only be on the rise.
Diseases of the heart have become the biggest killers of the modern times. According to reports from the World Health Organisation (WHO), heart diseases kill 17 million people around the world every year, and this figure is expected to rise to 23 million by 2030. The numbers are as horrific in India where 32% of all adult deaths are due to heart diseases.
Worryingly, heart disease in Indian youth is increasing rapidly, with 50% of all heart attacks occurring under 50 years of age and 25% occurring under 40 years of age.
So, what causes heart disease? Dr Padmavati answers, “The biggest reasons for heart disease are obesity, hypertension, diabetes and tobacco abuse.” High level of blood cholesterol is a common sign among obese people. Being a bad fat, cholesterol tends to get deposited in blood vessels, making them thinner and causing an increase in blood pressure, which weakens the heart.
Similarly, high salt intake also leads to increased blood pressure and eventually heart failure. Guidelines from the WHO recommend getting no more than 2.3 g of sodium a day, which is just one teaspoon of salt! As Indians, we are consuming almost twice that amount per day!
Another red flag for heart disease is high blood sugar, which gets converted to fat by the liver, raising the risk of heart disease. The American Heart Association suggests that we should consume less than 36 g of sugar per day, which is equivalent to just a single serving of a Rasgulla!
Can you imagine how many times the daily requirement of salt and sugar you have already consumed today? Studies show that exercising as little as 30 minutes every day decreases the risk of heart disease by up to 30%.
Limiting the intake of sugar and salt and increasing physical activity is the only way forward.
Another recommended strategy to strengthen our heart is by having at least 500 g of antioxidant-rich fresh fruits and vegetables such as tomatoes, pomegranates, spinach, grapes, etc. daily.
Several campaigns across the globe have been fighting these risk factors to reduce the incidence of heart disease. For instance, the Daily Mile Scheme, initiated in Scotland, is ensuring 15 minutes of morning run for school students across Europe. Norway has hiked the tax on sugar by 83% at the start of 2018, with products like candies and chocolates being taxed at almost $5 per kilo. In Finland, low-salt food options in the supermarket carry a “better choice” logo, and high salt foods have a mandatory warning sign.
In India, we neither have a sugar tax, nor a policy on salt consumption. So, for us Indians who worship food and love after-meal naps, it is time that we adopt something like Namak Cheeni Kam aur Exercize Zyada, karo apne Heart se ye Vaada (cut down your intake of sugar and salt and increase your exercise, make this promise for your heart).
Source….Health Heroes – This article is part of a series to celebrate some of India’s most amazing doctors and to understand the incredible work they are doing. http://www.the betterindia.com
Everyone is eager to be happy; everyone wants to work less and gain more, give little and get amply, but nobody experiments with wanting less and giving more! Every want is a shackle that hinders movement – it is a drag on your feet. A young college student roams free on his two legs; when he marries, he becomes four-footed! A child makes him six-footed; thus, further restricting the range of his movements. The more the feet, the less the speed, the tighter his grip on the ground – Remember, centipedes can only crawl! More objects means more hurdles and handicaps! Reduce wants, live simply – that is the way to happiness. Attachment brings sorrow in its wake; at last, when death demands that everything be left behind and everybody be deserted, you are overpowered with grief! Be like the lotus on water; on it, not in it. Water is necessary for the lotus to grow, but lotus will not allow even a drop to wet it.
At the heart of the triangle made by the three Canadian cities of Quebec, Montreal, and Sherbrooke, lies a town with the worst name imaginable—Asbestos. So ugly is the word, that local businesses with “Asbestos” painted on their vehicles are denied entry into the United States. Custom agents recoil with horror when they see “Asbestos” stamped on packages of meat.
Asbestos, a fibrous, silicate-based natural mineral has been mined around the world since ancient times. The mineral has several desirable properties, such as the ability to absorb sound, and resist heat, fire and electricity. It is tough and cheap. Large scale production of asbestos began in the mid-19th century and use of the material continued to grow through most of the 20th century until growing evidence of the lethality of asbestos and its association with a particularly painful form of lung cancer forced most countries to ban the product. Today, the word “asbestos” is synonymous with poison and death, but for the 7,000 people in southern Quebec, it is the name of their home.
Asbestos was first discovered in Quebec in the 1870s. The first industrial scale mining began at what is now Thetford hills, and the city became a hub for one of the world’s largest asbestos-producing regions. A couple of years later, the Jeffrey mine opened less than 50 miles south of Thetford hills. The town that developed around Jeffrey mine named itself after the “miracle fiber”. Soon Jeffrey mine became the largest asbestos mine in the world providing half of the world’s supply of asbestos. As the 19th century slid into the 20th century, an increasing number of asbestos mines opened in Quebec, Newfoundland, British Columbia and the Yukon, helping Canada become the world’s largest asbestos exporter by the 1970s.
Canada’s biggest power shovel loading an ore train with asbestos at the Jeffrey Mine in Asbestos, Quebec, June 1944.
While the asbestos industry boomed, workers began to get mysteriously sick, coughing up blood, suffering from breathing difficulties and dying. Asbestos resident and long-time head of the Asbestos Historical Society, Pierrette Théroux recalls as a girl how she would wake up to the screens of her home covered in snow-like asbestos dust. Walking on the porch would leave footprints.
The first connection between the disease and the deadly mineral was made in the early 1900s when a coroner at London’s Charing Cross Hospital conducted postmortem investigation of a young man who had died from pulmonary fibrosis after having worked for 14 years in an asbestos textile factory. Traces of asbestos was found in the victim’s lungs. Twenty years later, after another confirmed death by asbestos, a British pathologist William Edmund Cooke testified before a court and forced the government to act. The first Asbestos Industry Regulations came into effect in 1932, and a string of regulation followed. But it took another half a century before the use of asbestos was phased out. Asbestos’ Jeffrey mine continued production until the late 2011.
Today, there is a huge gaping hole in the ground at Asbestos, more than 2 km across, and almost as big as the surrounding town. With Asbestos’ biggest employer shuttering its business, the town is searching for a new identity and new means to support its population. Some debated whether they should change the name of the town, but the residents voted against it.
There is a microbrewery now in Asbestos called Moulin 7, and some of the names of the beers they serve borrow from the town’s history—such as L’Or Blanc (meaning White Gold), Spello (a mining term for a short break), and Mineur (Miner), which picked up a gold medal in 2016 World Beer Awards. Another pale ale called La Ciel Ouvert (The Open Sky) is prepared using water taken from a lake that has accumulated at the bottom of the disused mine. The water was tested to be pure.
Since the closure of the mine, other businesses have found home in the former mining town. A gourmet food products company opened a duck meat processing center providing jobs for over a hundred workers. A ski resort a few minutes north of the town absorbed another couple of hundred employees. The town is slowly stumbling back to life.
God’s grace is just like the shower of rain and the sunlight. You must do some sadhana (spiritual practice) to acquire it; like keeping a pot upright to receive the rain, or the sadhana of opening the door of your heart, so that Sun may illumine it. Pray for grace and do little sadhana. Grace will set everything right. Its main consequence is Self-realisation (Atma sakshatkara); but there are other incidental benefits too like a happy contented life, and a cool courageous temper, established in unruffled peace (shanti). The main benefit from a jewel is personal joy but when one has come to the last coin in the purse, one can sell it and start life again! That is an incidental advantage. The plantain tree has bunch of fruits as its main gift! But its leaves, soft core of its trunk, flower bud, etc. are subsidiary items with profitable use. This is the nature of grace. It fulfils a variety of wants.
The universe, including the house within which you dwell, namely the body, is composed of the five elements: earth, water, fire, wind and ether – elements that act upon the senses as smell, taste, colour, touch and sound. Since elements are ‘divine emanations’, each of them has to be treated with reverence and circumspection. For example: take the earth. If you scatter seeds on the soil, or plant them too deep in the soil, they may not throw up their shoots! Pouring water down your throat can very well become torture, if the limit is crossed. You cannot breathe comfortably in a typhoon, nor can your eardrums stand the pressure of an explosion within earshot! Any use of the elements, over and above legitimate bounds, is a sacrilege. So too, each element must be used under some limitations, not as and how you like. Treat the elements as a vesture of the Almighty.
The Peekskill meteorite car sitting at a collector’s garage in Peekskill. Photo credit: Ryan Thompson/Flickr
On October 9, 1992, a brilliant fireball flashed across the evening sky over eastern United States startling thousands of spectators attending the weekly high school football matches being played across the East Coast. The fireball, that witnesses described as being brighter than the full moon, was travelling almost horizontally and heading northeast. In just forty seconds, the meteorite had crossed four states travelling 700 kilometers through the atmosphere. The intense heat and friction broke the space rock into more than 70 pieces, several of which were large and fast enough to produce their own glowing trails. A considerably weighty chunk of the meteorite, about the size of a bowling ball, eventually touched ground at Peekskill, New York, with a loud boom.
17-year-old high-school student Michelle Knapp was watching television in her parents’ living room when she heard a thunderous crash outside. Knapp ran outside to investigate the noise. There she found, standing on the driveway, her 1980 Chevy Malibu. The Malibu’s trunk was twisted and battered with a hole through it. A sizeable rock over 12 kilograms in weight lay under the car, embedded in the asphalt. It was still smoking and smelled of rotten eggs. The rock had narrowly missed the fuel tank.
Understandably, Michelle was not happy; she had recently bought the car for $400 and now it was totaled. Michelle did what anybody else would have done—she called the cops and reported an act of vandalism. It was a neighbor who reasoned that vandals can’t throw rocks through cars and surmised that the rock was from outer space. The suspicion proved correct when the very next day, a curator from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City confirmed that the object was indeed a meteorite, the same one that streaked across the northeastern sky distracting coaches and parents from their kid,s football games.
Michelle Knapp in the driveway with her Malibu taken only days after the historic impact. Photo credit: John Bortle
It was this impeccable timing of the Peekskill meteorite that made it one of the most witnessed and most recorded meteorite events in history. Dozens of spectators to the high school football games had brought camcorders with them, and when the meteorite flashed over their heads many of these cameras turned skywards, towards the brief but more exciting event. As many as 16 different observers from various locations recorded the event on tape—a record that was not broken until 2013 when a meteor exploded over Russia. The sixteen videos of the fireball taken from multiple perspectives made it possible for scientists to determine the exact trajectory of the meteorite. Indeed, Peekskill is one of the few meteorites whose orbit is precisely known.
As for the car, Michelle spent no time securing a deal with a renowned meteorite collector for an amount that was nearly two orders of magnitude more than what Michelle had paid. Since then, the car has been on display in numerous cities throughout the world, including Paris, Tokyo, Munich and more.
