The missing 'Humane' link

Many a times, I've wished if I was born 50 years back. Although back then, most of the people never knew what it was like to have a refrigerator, microwave oven or air conditioner yet they knew the exact amount of food to be made so that it doesn't need storage, the entire family ate together at one time so food didn't need re-heating.


Let me share an excerpt from a book that I recently bought called "Outliers"

"Roseto Valfortore lies 100 miles southeast of Rome. A physician named Stewart Wolf was invited to give a talk at the local medical society. Wolf said in an interview "After the talk was over, one of the local doctors said to me "I've been practicing for 17 years and I get patents from all over, and I rarely find anyone from Roseto under age 65 with heart disease". Wolf was taken aback. Heart attacks were an epidemic in US and the leading cause of death in men under age 65. So, Wolf decided to investigate. The results were astonishing. There was no suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction and very little crime in Roseta. They didn't have anyone on welfare. The people in Roseta were merely dying of old age. Wolf first thought that the Rosetans must have some peculiar dietary practices that left them healthier than the Americans. But he quickly realized that wasn't true. Rosetans were cooking their food with lard, they ate sweets all year round which were usually eaten only at Christmas and Easter in US.

When Wolf had dietitians analyze the typical Rosetan's eating habits, they found a whopping 41% calories came from fat!! Wolf later also analyzed the exercise, genetics and location differences among Roseta and Americans only to find no significant difference. As Wolf and his partner Bruhn walked around the town, they figured out the reason. They looked at how the Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the streets, or cooking for one another in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town's social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof and how much respect grand parents enjoyed. They saw people sitting on their porches talking to each other. They went to mass and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted 22 separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2000 people, they picked up on the peculiar ethos of the community which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.

Wolf and Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about heart attacks and health in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that they wouldn't be able to understand why someone was healthy if all they did was think about an individual's personal choices or actions in isolation. They had to look beyond the individual. They had to understand the culture he or she was a part of, who their friends and families were. They had to appreciate the idea that the values of the world that we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are."

Surprised, right? At least I was when I read this. I never knew about the scientifically proven research on how human interactions effect our bodies and so our lives, but the desire of going back in time is an indirect evidence that to some extent I realized how we as a generation are unfortunate enough to be deprived of the magic of extensive human interaction. Premature new born babies in incubators fighting for their lives heal remarkably quickly just because their mothers held them close to their bodies or held their hands for few hours daily. I've seen kids getting sick very frequently even though they get fully vaccinated and get to eat the best diet available, reasons being parents have unresolved issues which keep the two distant at hearts. We think that a few days' to few months' old child is too small to recognize the invisible differences between the parents, we think the baby is in the goo-goo-gaa-gaa land where all that he thinks about is suck, pee and poo.  The truth is that these differences among parents have significant impact of a kid's immunity and internal body environment to make him fall sick every now and then.

When a newly born baby takes such a huge impression of the lack of good quality human interaction then you can imagine the magnitude with which an adult would be affected.


Take a meticulous look through the lives that we are leading these days. How many of us make extra efforts to spend time with extended family members instead of roaming aimlessly in shopping malls or flipping through the channels of the television? How many of us prefer to wish someone a happy birthday or ask about their well being by texting them instead of calling or meeting in person? Don't you think we know a lot more about what's happening in Shahrukh Khan's life than that of our neighbors'? I've been following an Indian drama for about 6 months now and I understand the fake personality and wait impatiently to know more about the ups and downs of the life of the protagonist of the serial a lot more than the joys and problems of most of my extended family members. I spend more time in aimless facebooking than with my grand mother or even my mother. And if someone complains about our unavailability, we easily put forward the excuses like 'long working hours' and 'kids keep me busy' etc. How many times we go out of the way to help someone without first saving the best for ourselves?


The truth is that we underestimate the power of human expression. We as humans are like a box in which God has placed so many emotions and such strength that can only be seen and felt if and when a person wants to see/feel it. Every human has their equal share, but only some know it's importance and therefore make use of it.


So, the next time you decide to spend your Saturday evening at the new restaurant, take a U turn and instead go visit your khala/phuppo/chacha  whom you visit out of traditional obligation only on Eid days. When you've spend more than 10 minutes on FaceBook, close it and spend the next hour that you have with your parents/grand parents. Don't update statuses on FaceBook/Twitter first but let your mom know about the promotion that you just got because it's 'She' because of whom you are who you are. Smile at kids, laugh on jokes, hug your parents, give them presents for no reason and don't wait for a Mother's or Father's day to show them you care, ask them for their opinions while taking important decisions of life because even though they don't have the Masters degree from MIT like you do, yet they've been taught the lessons of life which only going through life can.   


Let's work towards good mental growth of our next generation, let's inculcate in them the seeds of respect for elders and significance of human relationships by not giving them lectures but by practically being such an example. Kids learn a lot more by absorbing what they see rather than following our serious lectures. Let's teach them not to use any human like a rung of ladder to ascend up in their lives but to learn from them and grow with them to become a part of the family tree. Let's emphasize more on sitting together for the meals rather than wasting tim deciding to cook fish or chicken. Let's spend time with each other not out of obligation but because of the fact that the best interaction that a human can have is that with another human being. Let's make an effort to not allow the mechanization of the so-called modern world take away the very ingredients that set apart a God made versatile human being from a Japanese robot.