FEATURE

Diets, diets and diets galore!

Prof. B. M. Hegde,

hegdebm@gmail.com

“The only way you get that fat off is to eat less and exercise more.”

Jack LaLanne

Our so called civilised society and our literate masses have an obsession about their body weight. Their role models in the film world show them the need for size zero to be acceptable! This combined with a sudden spurt in youth income, thanks to the IT Czars in India; we have an epidemic on hand. This seems to be one of the few diseases that does not bother the illiterate poor village masses! If on top of all these obesity in a girl gets further complicated by an English educated sophisticated doting mother result is chaos in the home. I call it as the new age malady. Other times obesity results from Mall nutrition, nutrition coming only from junk food and sugary drinks marketed by rich women in the shopping Malls, again a disease of affluence! Philosophically it is money, too much or too little, that causes malnutrition-protein calorie sub-nutrition in the poor and Mall nutrition in the rich.

Be that as it may, let us look at our response to obesity. Obsessed with the thin body mania we try to do everything to lose weight. A new disease was born thanks to this mania-bulimia. Weight loss industry is another growing money-spinner. Fitness centres, gyms of all hue and colour, and diet gurus of all shades rule the roost in this arena. My good neighbour called me the other day to tell me about her newfound diet that looks too good to be true. Two eggs in the morning, and oats. Salads, lean fish with buttermilk for lunch and green tea for evening and finally close the day with salads again with an occasional serving of white meat-no cereals, no sweets, no milk.

I saw a friend who was diagnosed with diabetes recently. His doctor was very strict about diet. He is told not even to look at rice by mistake! He could have as much of proteins by way of millets like ragi, eggs, chicken, fish and fats like butter and an occasional fruit. I have a good friend, Dr Khader Ali who treats diabetics on millets only. I have many sophisticated friends that want apples from Australia, olives from the Mediterranean, figs from Scotland, cooking apple from England, plums from California, dates from Arabia but do not like local mangoes and hates the best fruit available this season here, the jackfruit. Many of us have a misconception that rice is pure carbohydrate but wheat is all protein. Even some doctors ask their diabetic patients to switch from rice to wheat! The last advice is good for diabetic pill industry as wheat can maintain diabetes permanently by damaging the pancreatic beta cells with its gluten. While the protein content of wheat and rice is marginally different, rice, especially brown hand pound rice, contains too much dietetic fibre and also the bran contains a very powerful Vitamin D3 receptor stimulator called metadichol. The latter boosts the human immune system to prevent most illness very powerfully.

One other important point about diet is that man is meant to eat what grows in his vicinity and what grows at what season. Fruits plucked from the tree will lose the essence every day and fruits imported from far will have nothing left in them. Local fruits are the best and that too as fresh as is possible. A word about meat eating next. If one goes into human physiology man is not a meat eater. Our legs, our stomach, our small intestine length, our molar teeth, our jaw with its temparo-mandibuar joint not being in line with the lower jaw like meat eating animals, and our mouth and jaw not favouring eating into animal meat all tell us that we are built to be vegetarian. Meat eating animals eat raw meat while we eat cooked meat.

Animal milk is not a good food as it is foreign protein but if we can denature the protein by fermentation as obtains in curds we have an added benefit of millions of good gut germs in it giving us additionally vitamin B12 also. This vitamin is not available in animal meat but is generated by germs which are plenty in our environment. Curds, butter milk and above all ghee (clarified butter) are super foods. Vegetarians do not lack special strength. If one does not believe in this statement s/he has only got to fight to win with a pure vegetarian-our elephant.

All crash diets are not only not good and do not lower your weight consistently; they could be evendownright dangerous due to various reasons which I do not intendto go into in this short paper. Many such diets have come and gone and have also killed millions in the bargain. Ideally one is safer to eat what his/her ancestors have survived on but the essential part of good health is not the kind of food that one eats but the quantity. Unless one never over- eats and does not eat when not hungry, any food is as good. If one does not have any endocrine or other causes for obesity losing weight is simple in that one just has to eat half of what s/he has been eating when coupled with hard work and/or regular walking exercise. Running and jogging are also alien to human physiology as we have inherited the four legged animals knee and ankle joints without having any support for our centre of gravity when we run, we are not built to run.

In conclusion I must admit that nature provides some super foods which are otherwise called functional foods in every part. I know about this part of tropical south India. Our brown rice has been already shown to be functional (food that has additional functions other than giving calories like metadichol in rice husk) food. Our mango has some special medicine to control diabetes. If eaten in small quantities it is good for the treatment of diabetes! Our jackfruit is a super food. It has everything in it. The raw jackfruit is a very powerful anti-diabetic medicine. Ripe jack fruit is such a good food that it can be eaten even by diabetics as it has plenty of fibre which will help take away extra calories in other foods to the toilet the next morning. It has all the necessary vitamins excluding the fat soluble ones. The seed inside has almost a full meal in it. It is very rich in magnesium, a vital element for cell membrane health, including the heart muscle cells. This was the life saver for the poor during the II World War when rice, our staple diet, was very scarce. The poor lived on this King of fruits.

Let me reiterate that crash diets and crazy size zero diets are dangerous to say the least. Do not experiment on any new ideas about your health without knowing its history. It is not what you eat that kills you, it is what eats you ( your negative thoughts) that usually kills you! Moderation in food is the secret of good health. Periodic fasting is too good like exercise. Marginally overweight people live longer than the absolutely normal weight people. Reasons are far too many to go into here. Even obese people could remain healthy all their lives if they are really active.

“Want to learn to eat a lot? Here it is: Eat a little. That way, you will be around long enough to eat a lot.”

  Tony Robbins

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Decisive Leadership and Geopolitics at its Best: Two years of Modi’s Foreign Policy

Prof P M Kamath

The NDA government led by Narendra Modi has completed two years in office. We have invited some prominent thought leaders of the country to assess its performance in three areas – defence, diplomacy and economy. For the assessment of the foreign policy of the Modi government, we present two different perspectives by Prof P M Kamath and Amb Amit Dasgupta in this issue.

When you look at Modi’s achievements under the NDA II government during the last two years, what is strikingly evident is that Prime Minister, Narendra Modi has provided the nation decisive leadership and has demonstrated his astute abilities in the use of geopolitics and geoeconomics at their best, to sub-serve the Indian national interest. Nowhere else have these two admirable qualities — leadership and use of geopolitics and geoeconomics – have manifested so well than in India managing relations with China under him. These qualities shine extremely well when contrasted with handling of a similar situation by the former PM, Manmohan Singh during his lackluster handling of India’s relations with China.

Decisive Leadership

Discerning observers had a clue even before Narendra Modi became the nation’s PM. During campaigning in Arunachal Pradesh in February 2013, candidate Modi had clearly asked China to give up its “mind-set of expansion” and work with India to avail fruits of “development and prosperity” for both nations. As far as its claim on Arunachal Pradesh goes, Modi warned China that “No power on earth can snatch away Arunachal Pradesh from India.”

This was clearly demonstrated in Modi’s planned approach to China. In September 2014, soon after taking over as the prime minister of India, he had invited the Chinese President Xi Jinping. Jinping was given a rousing reception in Ahmedabad before he proceeded with Modi to an official engagement in New Delhi. While the two were having unofficial confabulations in Ahmedabad, PLA as in the past, intruded in Ladakh. But demonstrating clear leadership, Modi informed Jinping that economic relations cannot go on as usual if such incidents on the border continue to occur. Since the Ahmedabad warning was not fruitful, it was repeated in New Delhi once again. These signals were effective as China pulled back after eight days in Ladakh. Jinping, while departing, publicly expressed that he was sad about the tension between armies, which “cast a shadow” on his visit. But such incursions have not occurred again.

Earlier, Modi had shown similar decisive qualities of leadership against Pakistani tantrums. After initial bonhomie with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on the occasion of his swearing in as the PM in May 2014, his government cancelled a scheduled meeting of foreign secretaries of the two countries on August 25, 2014 on the grounds that government of India cannot accept the fact that while bilateral talks are to be held, Pakistan holds meeting with the separatists who are challenging Indian integrity.

Geopolitics & Geoeconomics

In Modi’s conduct of foreign policy, he has achieved an inseparable admixture of geopolitics and geoeconomics — one aiding the other. This became clearly evident in changing approaches. The Manmohan Singh led UPA government was undoubtedly aware of the geopolitical significance of bilateral relations with Vietnam. However, in awe of China on many issues, the Manmohan Singh government was unable to publicly express our concerns on Chinese policies Vietnam. We only claimed to have privately conveyed our concerns to the Chinese. It was a policy of extraordinary deference to China. In all fairness to the former PM, he only continued the policy of Congress governments since Rajiv Gandhi and PV Narasimha Rao’s time.

Thus, in November 2011, during the East Asia Summit, China publicly warned India to keep off South China Sea on the grounds that it was a disputed territory, where Vietnam had awarded a block on contract to ONGC (Videsh) to drill for oil. This was despite the fact that the day before this public warning, India had claimed to have privately explained to China that Indian interests in the South China Sea were purely commercial and China should settle all issues of sovereignty according to the principles of international law and practice. But then the UPA government never demonstrated firm leadership or had the nerve to ask Chinese leadership: How could it build roads or invest in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK), which too is a disputed territory?

Look at the manner in which India under Modi has deftly handled the issues in relation to Vietnam and Iran. When PM Modi was holding his high level meetings with Jinping in New Delhi in September 2014, Indian President Pranab Mukherjee was in Vietnam as a part of regular exchange of visits. Later, on October 28 2014, Modi held high level talks with the Vietnamese prime minister, Nguyen Tan Dang, on strengthening strategic partnership and as a part of growing understanding of importance of bilateral relationship, India agreed to sell military hardware including BRAHMOS missiles, naval vessels. And Vietnam offered two more blocks to India for energy exploration within its exclusive economic zone in the South China Sea!

China is a dictatorship that understands only the language of power; when it uses its power, India too needs to demonstrate its willpower to counter it powerfully. That is the only way to get substantial results from Chinese leaders. We need not and cannot think of matching China in every respect, as Indian economy is only one third of China’s. But Indian power deficit can be balanced by cultivating likeminded friends on the basis of shared interests without compromising national interest. Nations make friendship not only on the basis of their perceived congruence in their national interests but also based on their geographical location, perceived specific economic interests in conjunction with geopolitical interests.

Geopolitics and geoeconomics at its best was demonstrated by India as a gift to people to celebrate completion of two years of its superb conduct of Indian foreign policy. Demonstrating a clear vision of future of Indian foreign policy compulsions, PM Modi signed two agreements in Teheran on May 23; it was a commercial contract with Iran for development the of Chabahar port and a trilateral agreement between India, Iran and Afghanistan on trade and transit. This effectively links India through Iran to Afghanistan from where it is connected to major cities of Afghanistan like Herat, Kandahar, Kabul and Mazar e Sharif through Garland Road.

Chabahar port development agreement is a smart geopolitical and geoeconomic answer to Chinese controlled Gwadar port in Pakistan at a distance of one hundred km west of Chabahar. When fully developed, the Chabahar port will provide easy access to India to Afghanistan bypassing Pakistan. And through Afghanistan to energy rich Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and other Central Asian nations. Though Iran had offered the development of Chabahar to India in 2003, Modi government signed a MoU in May 2015 and agreement in May 2016. It should adhere to complete operationalisation of the port facilities by December 2016 to free Afghanistan from over-dependence on Pakistan for access to the Indian Ocean. This move on the part of India will also enable it to play a stabilising role in the Gulf region as well as in West Asia.

Conclusion

Indian pursuit of geopolitical strategic partnership with Iran and Vietnam is likely to be extended with moving times as there are clear signs of it. Japan, which shares India’s concerns about China’s growing assertiveness, has indicated to India its willingness to financially participate in the development of Chabahar port. The United States, another strategic partner, has also extended its support to the Indian project to develop modern port facilities at Chabahar. Similarly, the US’ lifting of economic sanctions against Iran, after the nuclear agreement, is also likely to share Indian concerns behind its efforts to develop the Port of Chabahar in Iran. India could play a role in bringing Iran and the US closer to promote a win-win situation amongst the partners.

Another recent development is President Obama’s visit to Vietnam and worth a mention as part of a larger geopolitical operation. Was it by design or coincidence that Modi was in Tehran and Obama in Vietnam on the same day — May 23? We may get clear answers after the Modi-Obama meeting which is scheduled to be held on June 7 in Washington, DC. But as much as India shares US’ concerns against the growing Chinese security threat in Southeast Asia, it also shares deep concerns with Vietnam and other members of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) over the Chinese claim of sovereignty over the entire South China Sea which also washes the borders of ASEAN countries. It is this concern, which led the US to speak of ‘Asian Pivot’. It is this concern that led Obama to lift the arms sale embargo on Vietnam after his recent visit.

There is thus a message to the Congress Party in India: Do not criticise geopolitical cooperation between India and the US on the ground that “PM Modi and his government” are pushing “India into a closer, deeper military alliance and become the part of the larger operational designs and requirements of the US in Asia, in Pacific and South China Sea” in response to the government’s in principle, agreeing on military logistics support agreement. It is not intrusive and doesn’t affect India’s nonaligned status. Anyway, non-alignment in its Cold War sense is dead when Manmohan Singh asked the US to stay put in Afghanistan even after December 2014. What now prevails as PM Modi has said is: Congruence of national interest of US and India. I may add that Non-Alignment (NA) has become National Interest Alignment (NIA)!

Author is formerly Professor of Politics, University of Bombay and currently Hon. Director and Chairman, VPM’s Centre for International Studies (Regd.), Mumbai and Adjunct Professor, Department of Geopolitics and International Relations, Manipal University, Manipal.

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