Yesterday

I went out and bought some drawing materials yesterday. I can't draw. My father could, and my sister can, but my lines look so hesitant and lame on paper that I gave up long ago. Then, at Christmas in Bangalore, I met a very pleasant woman who paints watercolours wherever she travels, and does oil portraits while at home: Nira Spitz. She was painting a brass pot with a plant in it, in the corner of a lounge. Later, as we began to talk to her and her husband, she came to our verandah, and began painting the cottage across from ours. Here's one of the pictures she showed us from her notebook, of the Lake Palace Hotel, in Udaipur:

from Nira's Watercolour Gallery

Seeing her looking so contented and absorbed in her work, I said something inane like, "Gee, I wish I could do that." She immediately pulled out a drawing pad and pencil, and a big eraser (most important), and said, "Draw something simple - like two leaves. Don't try to draw too many things at once." So I obediently drew two leaves, belonging to a palm tree just beyond the verandah.

And I liked them. I decided to give myself permission to make stupid-looking drawings.

My first creation, last night, was a papaya in pastels. It could have been done better by a small child. And she would have had to explain to her Mommy that it was a papaya. But never mind. I'm going to do it.

(Yes, and I was additionally inspired by a cheerful weblog called Everyday Matters, which I read about in Mint Tea and Sympathy.)

We also went to a Homeopathic pharmacy in Adyar yesterday. There are three main systems of medicine here: western medicine, which is called Allopathy; Homeopathy; and Ayurveda, the traditional herbal medicine of India. (There is Yunani medicine, of Arab origin, in the North; and Tibetan medicine; but these three are the main systems available here in Chennai.)

Ramesh knows a lot about all three. He feels that homeopathy is very good for certain things, like skin diseases, asthma, migraine, allergies. He wanted to buy a particular medicine, but he saw that a homeopath had a small office in the pharmacy, so we went in to see her. The room was the size of a closet, in which the homeopath, an earnest young girl with pretty, soft South Indian features, sat behind a tiny table covered with a printed plastic cloth. Beside her on the table were a blood-pressure apparatus, a flashlight, a ledger book, and a Materia Medica, which she thumbed through as she questioned Ramesh. We squeezed into two folding chairs. There was a sliding panel between her room and the small pharmacy, so that she could pass prescriptions to them.

The thing about homeopathy is that it doesn't recognise diseases, only symptoms. So you and the homeopath have to go through a very long list of questions before the right medicine can be determined. Do you have pain here? Does it increase at night? Do you get irritable? Do you feel uncomfortable when you eat certain foods? Are you subject to stress? And so on and on. And the claim is that there is only one medicine for each particular problem. So if you take the medicine and it doesn't help you - and it's very slow-acting, it takes months - it can always be said that some symptom was missed out, and so the exact medicine was not prescribed. (There are other odd things about homeopathy as well - the doses are minuscule; the strength of the medicine is in inverse proportion to the size of the dose; like cures like: so if you have respiratory problems, you take something that causes respiratory problems; the same medicine might be given both for diarrhoea and for constipation.... It seems completely counter-intuitive to me.)

Ramesh joked with this rather serious young girl, which confused her, but she did eventually begin to laugh; and she persisted until she found the medicine she wanted to prescribe. It was the same one he had come to buy in the first place.

The pharmacy sold a number of tonics and such, as well as the pure homeopathic formulations. As I browsed the shelves, I saw a bottle labelled with a very pink set of lungs, for coughs and congestion. It was called Wheezal Mixture.