Since when did we become so afraid of our surroundings, so intolerant of the slightest inconvenience of temperature or dust or moisture, that we have started shutting ourselves away from the world? When did air-conditioning become so ubiquitous? If you have ever longed for some fresh air even if it does not smell very good rather than the artificial fragrance that the room freshener or car freshener spreads around you, if you have wanted to feel a breeze on your face rather than uniform coolness around you, you would have wondered about this with me.

You would have seen the advertisement where the old man is invited by a young girl to go for a walk and says he’ll walk in fresh air and then you see him on an exercise machine indoors. Oh, there is a scenic wall paper so that you can imagine you are outdoors! So much for the adults. What about our children? We wrap them about with so much protection that they do not know what it is to feel extreme heat or cold, a high wind, a sudden rain on their faces. It is as though they live in an enclosure, glassed in and secured. A temperature controlled environment where everything is seen at a remove. After all, what you see through the glass is not the same as what you see with untrammelled vision, is it? As for food, picking up a fallen mango, maybe cutting away the pecked portion or the part that was broken against the stone and rubbing it against your clothes for a tentative cleaning before you eat it, is unheard of now. We are so bothered about cleanliness and hygiene and the rest of it that the fruit has to be washed and perfect before any of us dare eat it. And then of course we eat all those chemically treated, biologically altered stuff with perfect confidence. So also with water. I remember a time when we would use tap water for everything other than drinking. Drinking water was always well water and water so pure that the film song about sweet water from the well in the compound seemed perfectly natural. We now try to drink bottled water, trusting the morality of the commercial provider rather than our own environment. Such an irony.

Colds, fevers, all those childhood ailments that are troublesome to the parents, do help build up immunity and strength in the body. Now we treat the symptoms with medicine, the infection with even stronger medicine, again trusting to the profit-driven morality of the pharmaceutical companies rather than the strength and resistance of the body. Haven’t you felt at least once in a while that we are weakening the body, making it helpless when it was meant to be strong, to survive adverse surroundings?

Yes, unthinking exposure could be risky in the present circumstances. One can no longer walk barefoot on the roads as the people of a couple of generations before us did. We can no longer drink well water in a city when there is so much dirt absorbed by the ground water. But need we go to the other extreme when we don’t trust anything natural, when everything has to have the respectability of packaging to become acceptable? Shouldn’t common sense tell us that we are better keepers of our health than some stranger who wants to make a profit out of us?

What kind of life are we making for ourselves and the generations after us, so wrapped around, so cut away from reality? What kind of life is it if you’ve never swum in open waters, never slept outdoors, never run, never been bitten by a black ant, never broken a bone, never sprained an ankle, never needed a cut dressed or stitched. Without being hurt how can we know how we get healed? If we’ve never known hunger so that even the poorest of meals seems heavenly, if we’ve never been exhausted and seen the bliss of the shelter just before us, how can we say we have lived? We lose all reference points of life outside our cocoons and don’t understand at all when told about it, when shown pictures of it.

Prema Jayakumar