The rustling of coconut leaves

I love coconut trees, and having born and brought up in Kerala, there was no dearth of coconut trees around. The word ‘Kerala’ combines the sound and meaning of two words, kera (coconut palm tree) and alam(land/ location/ abode) to form the word Keralam, which means ‘Coconut land’. During vacations spent in grand parents' place, all of us cousins would roam around in the compound with many types of trees. It was fun making chains with tapioca leaves, flutes with papaya stalks and to watch with great fascination how coconut leaves were converted to sheets for thatching roofs.

I loved to observe ropes being made with the fibers from coconut husks. The smell of fresh coconut oil, oh God, I used to go crazy applying it on my hand and keeping on smelling it. Since our coconut oil supply was from grand parents, we never stopped its use. During those years, (paid) doctors were publishing volumes of research that painted coconut oil as causing health problems and prompted people to buy vanaspathi (Dalda).

Coconut leaves in the moonlight

When we shifted to the house that my parents built, my room was on the first floor and in those days I could sleep with the windows open. What a blissful sight it was to look at the coconut leaves in the moon light, outside the window! They had a special effect on me as I was dreaming of the person I was going to marry. During the eight months between our engagement and marriage, I was preparing my mind to live without coconut trees in future. He was from the north where coconut trees were absent and we planned to set up our dental practice in his home town.

Destiny had other plans

As it so happened, we went with the flow of destiny and instead of setting up practice, got into teaching and finally settled in a place where we could plant coconut trees in our compound. As I lie down on my bed and listen to the rustling of coconut leaves, my heart gets filled with gratitude to that Universal force that made this possible. The sound of rustling coconut leaves is so conducive for sleep!

It doesn’t end here. My husband got interested in plants and he gets cold pressed coconut oil for our use. After my mother’s demise, I thought that then on I will have to buy coconut oil from the market as she used to supply my stock. The whole world is now acknowledging the miraculous health benefits of coconut oil, and oil pulling with virgin coconut oil is so popular!

Ref:

1.      ‘40 years ago...And now: How Dalda built, and lost, its monopoly’

http://www.business-standard.com/article/management/40-years-ago-and-now-

how-dalda-built-and-lost-its-monopoly-115030501153_1.html

      2.  http://draxe.com/oil-pulling-coconut-oil/

Tooth bleaching to increase beauty

For a large number of people today, beauty is in teeth color. Many commercials show film stars advertising for whitening teeth.

Tooth bleaching before marriage

When I did dentistry, I learnt to bleach patients’ teeth that had become dark yellow or black when the pulps were dead or after the root canal treatment. But now I hear that in big cities there is a dental package for those who are getting married, which includes bleaching for all the front teeth. The newly weds can then flash their dazzling white teeth on their D-day.

He wanted the lightest shade

During a tooth bleaching course in USA, one of the persons from the company declared, ‘I have got the bleaching done six times to bring my teeth to this shade’ and beamed. To me, his teeth looked lifeless. By nature, fair complexioned people have light yellow colored teeth and dark skinned people have whitish teeth. I believe that when Nature designed it so, there must be some reason for it, which we are not able to comprehend.

Increased staining frequency

Our teeth become slightly darker as we age. One of my friends in her fifties approached me for home bleaching kit as she wanted whiter teeth before her son’s marriage. I tried to discourage her, in vain. So she went off with the bleaching kit. She was very happy with the result. But now, every four or five months she comes for stain removal.

Last time when she came, I started thinking. The staining problem was not there earlier. Then it struck me. The bleaching procedure has made her teeth surfaces more permeable and they get stained fast. I thought of the  plight of all those newly weds who got their teeth bleached, and thanked God that for the monetary benefit I had never advised any of my patients to undergo ‘beauty bleaching’.

Other associated problems

Transient tooth sensitivity and soft tissue irritation occurs during bleaching. Some times it can damage the roots of teeth. Enamel treated with the bleaching gels also exhibits a small but significant decrease in abrasion resistance. This behavior is most likely due to an alteration of the organic matrix of enamel under the chemical action of hydrogen peroxide.

It may be worth spending some time developing the inner beauty instead of altering the natural color of teeth and suffer the consequences for the rest of one’s life.

Ref:

https://www.cda-adc.ca/en/oral_health/talk/procedures/teeth_whitening/

https://www.deltadentalins.com/oral_health/bleaching_risks.html

http://jdr.sagepub.com/content/71/6/1340

http://engineering.jhu.edu/materials/research-projects/the-mechanical-properties-of-human-enamel-and-dentin/#.VtfghX194rg

For authentic Kerala food, go to Dubai

We reached Dubai by lunch time. While settling in the room, found that the water was leaving the wash basin very slowly. Called up the house keeping and a person came to set it right. My husband started talking to him and asked where we could get some simple food for lunch. I was glad that he was a Malayali and asked for any Kerala restaurant nearby. He said there were two good places at walking distance. One was Sara restaurant and the other was Oottupura.

We went to Sara for lunch and I had egg roast and barotta. Wow, what a lunch it was! We saw the menu and I made a mental note of what all I had to try.  Next day morning we had breakfast there and the appam  and vegetable curry were delicious. I saw some adas (grated coconut and jaggery filled inside rice flour dough spread on a plantain leaf, folded and steamed) at the counter and asked my husband to get them packed for our lunch as we had to go for a meeting. They were so good that on the subsequent two days also we did the same thing.

This time during my Kerala trip I had missed pazhampori (deep fried banana with maida covering), so I availed the opportunity to compensate that here. On the next day we went to the Oottupura restaurant and I got kappa biriyani (though they call it biriyani, it was just the tapioca cooked with some masala and then seasoned) and fish curry. I felt I was in Kerala having that heavenly food! Another day we ordered the vegetarian thali and got to enjoy a typical Kerala lunch. The puttu was made of parboiled rice flour and served with green gram dry sabzi. They had even kanji (rice porridge) and coconut chammanthi (dry chutney), which are my favourite, but we had only four days and the items that could be sampled were limited.

Somehow, whatever dishes I had, I felt they had more authentic Kerala taste than what we get in Kerala hotels. My husband had an explanation: In Kerala they are trying to get other tastes, but here, the people miss their home towns and by cooking food the original way, they maintain their closeness to their native places!