Pandemic Story
THE PANDEMIC… THE STRESS… AND MORE… Dr. Shruthi Sreedharan (M.D. Scholar)
Department of Panchakarma, Amrita School of Ayurveda, Kerala THE TANGY STARTER… Let’s take a quick flashback. Imagine yourself as a teenager say around 13 years old, and its a calm December evening and you are at your friend's place, discussing some Christmas holiday homework. Obviously no discussions among friends are over without some chit chat. So you guys keep on talking and by chance when you look out of the window, you realize that it's getting dark. Now that annoyed face of your Mom, flashes before your eyes and you just want to get back home, so that you are not scolded. You jump out of your friend’s couch and rush out of her house right into the street. You are now pacing back home that is just 2-3 houses apart in the same lane. You take few more steps ahead and suddenly you realize that… it is too dark and there is no one walking or talking or cycling anywhere around you. The entire street is empty and the doors of the houses on the either sides of the road are closed. May be, to avoid the evening attack of the mosquitoes. Anyways, in short there is no one in the vicinity. Suddenly, there is a shift in your feelings. You get those butterflies, deep down your gut and you realize that you are breathing faster, your heart is pounding right in your throat and your mouth is dry, there is a kind of insecurity that’s burping from somewhere within and you hesitate to look around, especially to look back. There is some kind of a fear in the air,
a fear of the unknown. So you walk faster and faster, and there you are, right in front of your house. You open the gate and you don't even bother to close the gate behind you, then you literally run to the veranda and even before you press that calling bell, your Mom stands right in front of you with opened doors and seeing her face, you feel at the height of security and hence, you breathe in life. THE MAGNIFICIENT HUMAN! I guess it won’t be wrong, if I say that it’s quite likely that we do encounter incidents like the one mentioned above at some or other point of time in our lives. Putting it a bit scientifically, what just happened to that girl is nothing but the ‘Primitive Human Response to Stress’. I address it as primitive because this is the mechanism which has helped the human race to survive through all the ages of early man era, when he was a hunter and gatherer in the deep dense forests on this planet, millions of years ago. Where he had to hunt to feed his family, and meanwhile an encounter with the wildest of the animals was literally inevitable. There exists a much discussed example of, the man hunting a rabbit for his family and a tiger trying to follow him either for the rabbit or for his life, and in both the cases, what he could do is to just run and escape, as fighting back with the beast is never a smarter option, and his children back at home sit hungry waiting desperately for the feed he brings and above all he must run for his survival. The Ancient Ayurveda | May-Jun 2021 | Issue 7 | 31
