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10/30/2017

War of the zits (End)

india,zit,spot,skin,acne,pollution,weather,hone remedies,turmeric,lemon,ayurvedaRegarding food, if my nanny thinks it’s butter and chocolate that are responsible for my acne (1), Dr. Google has a different opinion and suggests to stop white rice and milk (both sacrosanct elements of my nanny’s diet; you should have seen her face when I told her they were the culprits (she just thought I was making fun of her)) and pasta and bread (ayurveda adds sugar and coffee). I was just left with salad. And it was fortunate, since it was the leafy vegetable season!

I refused my mom’s offer to use the radical treatment I took in my young years (Roacutane); I checked my thyroid (normal); I applied a mask (lemon juice and honey after washing the face with a hot towel) after scrubbing (with the above mentioned recipe) twice a week; I threw away the face solution of L’Occitane (I anyway never really understood how this foam could do anything against Indian dust) and ordered Marseille soap to my mother; I reduced the quantities of rice, stopped Nutella and coffee (replaced for a time by decaf) and started eating granola almost every morning; the weather changed with the summer taking over from the winter; I took a holiday in Europe. And after three months, I was (almost) saying goodbye – until next time at least! – to my (not so) juvenile acne and I still have no idea about what worked!

Except that obviously, a little while later, everybody had gotten back to their old habits, including my pimples.

Out of sheer despair, I decided to try ayurveda again. I had to drink a horrendous potion twice a day, and it didn’t even work the magic way it had the first time I had tried it, a few months after we moved to Gurgaon. It was a bit better but nothing to be happy about. Every other day I had to apply a smelly paste on my face why terrorized my son – he was yelling to everybody that I had become a gorilla! The treatment got ended by a formidable liver attack which required another ayurvedic medicine, much more drinkable this time. At that point of time, I couldn’t even be bothered about my face anymore…

For mother’s day, my husband got me… ayurvedic soap and oil… for acne. No useless gifts in our family!!

And then, slowly slowly, things started getting better, after seven months of ordeal. They definitely got better when I stayed a couple of weeks in France. I am not far from declaring that my skin is allergic to Gurgaon! Well, life goes on…

 

(1) In the same vein, I began to ‘check’ the popular theories of my nanny. And she has a lot of them!

Do not mix milk and fish. Beyond the fact that this association seems strange to me, I had never heard of this interdiction. Thinking of it, I actually have never heard about any food you could not combine with one another (except Baileys and Coke). Is this to say that this ‘science’ got lost somewhere (at least as far as I am concerned)? Or is it different in France? I found a recipe for cod with milk. And then I also found that Jewish ‘science’ says no to fish and milk. And finally that there is no risk of allergy or toxic reaction but rather digestive.

Do not mix meat and fish. “Because one lives in water and the other on the ground” according to my nanny. But she allows to mix fish and chicken because “chicken fly, it doesn’t really lives on the ground”. She had to justify fried rice with chicken and prawns! But then what about paella? Here again I find Jewish references on the issue, funny isn’t it?

Sources : http://www.masantenaturelle.com/chroniques/chroniques2/acne.php ; http://www.elephantjournal.com/2015/02/the-complete-anti-acne-diet/  ; http://easyayurveda.com/2014/08/04/ayurvedic-treatment-for-pimple-cause-herbs-home-remedies/ ; http://noskinproblems.com/lemon-juice-for-acne-and-acne-scars/  ; http://www.acne.org/lemon-juice-applied-topically-reviews-73/?&filters%5Breviews_per_page%5D=10&filters%5Bsort_by%5D=date+DESC&filters%5Brating%5D=1  ; http://www.torah-box.com/question/melange-viande-poisson-et-lait-poisson_357.html ; http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/ask-the-expert-meat-and-fish/   

10/23/2017

War of the zits (Beginning)

India,zit,spot,skin,acne,pollution,weather,hone remedies,turmeric,lemonMid-January, I started getting pimples on the face. I chose not to panic: one or two spots when you get your period is quite normal. Except that the bastards multiplied really fast and soon it (I) became quite ugly. Not knowing what to do, I continued washing my skin thoroughly and applying a bit of Kailash Jeevan (a magic Ayurvedic cream one can found in Mumbai and which heals any kind of injury; you can even eat it to cure indigestion!). But it just got worse. So when my nanny told me about her magical cure for the third time, I finally paid attention. According to her, I just need to use a home-made scrub: coarse sugar, salt and lemon juice. Not convinced and anyway enjoying a respite of the blooming, I let go, until new pustules appeared and she puts the ingredients in my hands, hereby stopping any kind of discussion. After all, I thought, maybe I should listen to the good old ‘folk wisdom’ (or knowledge? belief? common sense?) that has (almost) been lost in Western societies? So, I applied the scrub two to three days in a row, feeling my skin getting clearer. But a trip to Mumbai forced me to interrupt my ‘treatment’ for 3 days.

I enjoyed this short stay to go and say hello to my old nanny I had not seen for a year. She greeted me without any preamble:

- But Madam, what is this on your face? But it’s ugly, you must do something!

- Hello to you too! Yes, I know, I'm trying a scrub with sugar, salt, lemon.

- Lemon? Are you mad? No No, you must make a paste with turmeric and Chickpea flour and it will dry the infected parts very fast. Saffran is known for its antiseptic properties: when we get an injury we immediately put saffron, even you know it. But do it, huh, because this is really awful.

All that in front of her new employer, a girl I was meeting for the first time. Fortunately I’ve not been ashamed of anything in a very long time! Which comes handy when you are in your thirties and have the face of an adolescent with unleashed raging hormones.

I used my time in the taxi driving me to the airport to ‘check’ on the Internet what ‘science’ has to say about mIndia,zit,spot,skin,acne,pollution,weather,hone remedies,turmeric,lemony nanny’s popular wisdom. Nothing about her scrub in particular but a clear message: ‘avoid scrubs’ because they attack the skin which is already traumatized enough (more precisely, when the skin is attacked it produces sebum as protection, and sebum is already produced in excess which is what clogs the pores, leading to infections). I could have checked earlier... What my nanny had also conveniently avoided to tell me it is that when this happened to her, the calci face, she scrubbed it with so much energy – what am I saying? With so much violence – that she is ripped half of her skin off. So of course the pimples left as well. Sometimes, I think she gets me concerned.

And then, at the airport, the army lady who checked me spurted a “but what do have you on the face? Is it chicken pox?? ”. But what is wrong with Indians that they always comment on your physical looks like that?

On that note, I tested the second recipe. ‘Improving it’ by adding lemon juice to bind the turmeric and the flour – upon the insistence of my nanny who really wants me to put lemon on my face (about this I read an interesting article with varied opinions on the use of lemon on the skin, which apparently, science rejects). What I can say for sure is that it had a great impact. On the bedsheets at least. When Baby Samourai grabbed the cup and spilled the powder all over: saffron is magic, you can hardly remove it. Other than that, I continued to apply the paste every night, for three days, until I forgot.

I had already tried an Ayurvedic medicine which had had terrific results, working as a blood purifier or something like that. But this doctor, just like all the dermatologists I’ve met before, treated the symptoms without trying to understand where the problem comes from. Food and digestion? Lack of sleep with baby Samurai waking up two or three times every night? Hormonal imbalance? Pollution? Weather? Dust? Stress? Anything else?

(To be continued)

 

10/16/2017

When Indians re-invent creativity...

I am often asked to describe Indians. Which is absolutely an impossible task. But there is a trait that I often forget and yet explains so much: that’s jugaad. Of course it is so unique that there is no English translation. But I would translate it by “the art of thinking out of the box and find solutions nobody would have thought of”. Indians are masters of this. Beside them, MacGyver is a debilitating Penguin.

Here are some examples to illustrate.

India,jugaad,creativity,demonetisation,black money,corruption,alcohol,drinking and driving,ruleWhen Modi, the Prime Minister, launched his ‘demonetization’ at the end of 2016, he thought that at least 70% of people would not dare put their black money back in the bank and would rather destroy it, for fear of facing fines, public shaming etc.. He was wrong and had underestimated his compatriots who have found ways to deposit more than 99% of all the notes (source https://www.ft.com/content/7dbe0e14-8d8a-11e7-a352-e46f43c5825d). Including by distributing to the poor around them with incentives (deposit 250,000 rupees (the limit to not attract attention) for me and I will give you 10,000 kind of thing).

India,jugaad,creativity,demonetisation,black money,corruption,alcohol,drinking and driving,ruleAnother example: in December 2016, the Supreme Court delivered a judgment: they banned (Indian authorities have a knack for banning things) alcohol sales within a radius of 500 meters from a main road (national or local highway). This was the result of a 4 year campaign on road safety – ironically enough, the man who led it had been left crippled by a road accident, because his car had gone off-road in the hope of spotting a leopard and he tackled the problem of alcoholism on the road. There is definitely a problem in India, but alcohol remains the 3rd cause of accident after excess of speed and mobile phone.

india,jugaad,creativity,demonetisation,black money,corruption,alcohol,drinking and driving,rule

But let’s move on. The goal of the Supreme Court was to reduce drinking and driving. As a result: 80% of the restaurants in our area have put down the shutter, from one day to the other. But some ‘smart ones’ managed to divert the entrance to the restaurant; something like you have to drive twice around the block to be able to enter, thus covering the legal 500 metres! A weird rule though: 500 meters is not enough to sober up, as far as I know. Anyway on August 23rd, 2017, the Supreme Court relaxed their decision and lifred the ban within the cities, probably in the spirit of focusing on drunk truck drivers, who, surprisingly (or not), are not likely going to get drunk in “pubs” but rather from local dives serving plastic alchohol. Whether the judges were hit by logic or pressure related to the losses of the restaurants who have to shut down and the reduction of collected taxes on alcohol no one knows.

India,jugaad,creativity,demonetisation,black money,corruption,alcohol,drinking and driving,ruleI sometimes face the challenge of explaining Jugaad to the Swiss... For whom the rule is the rule, even if the rule is stupid...

India,jugaad,creativity,demonetisation,black money,corruption,alcohol,drinking and driving,rule

Source : http://www.indiatimes.com/news/meet-wheelchair-bound-harm... ; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/25/alcohol-rul... ; http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nat... ; http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/measuring-impact-of-demonetisation-in-india/article9459507.ece

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