If you are fit, you can enjoy your family life, work, and social life. But, if you are unfit mentally or physically, everything will suck. You will feel like a liability to yourself. An unfit person feels sick, drained, lazy, lacking motivation, lack of drive, lack of enthusiasm. It is very easy for an unfit person to slip into negativity, experience bouts of anger more often and have a very low level of control over their emotions. 

We have made our mind and body so fragile these days. I didn’t know until I discovered this through my own experiences. Once upon a time , I had come home. My home is located in a village. Here in the village, people are employed in farming and agriculture. Despite the rhetoric of mechanisation of agriculture, my village is far from being mechanised. Here the people do all sorts of work with their hands. 

So, these farming people keep cattles at home. And these cattles are the source of milk and ghee. So, even my parents had kept these two buffaloes at home. And they enjoyed its milk every day. A buffalo’s milk is thicker and tastier than a cows even though the cow’s milk is more nutritious. Btw they feed their cows and buffaloes the virgin green grass of these farms that are filled with fertile soil. They will cut the grass with their own hands using an instrument called khurpi/ khurpa. 

And they would bring these grass bunches home and clean them and wash them and then cut them nicely and chop them. For chopping they have this mechanical instrument which is called hand operated grass chaffer. So, my daddy asked me to operate it. 

I tried to do that but I found it to be a tough task. But when my daddy took over realising he had to intervene to get the grass cut, I was surprised to see him doing the same task with so much ease and comfort. It really puzzled me. 

This really came as a shocker to me. After withdrawing myself from the machine, I took out my hands and drew them close in front of my eyes to stare at them as if to understand the status of my own body strength.  It was a fragile body! It looked so fragile that I could see the clear distinct marks of the pressure on my hands. And paining as well. 

Our body needs constant physical challenges to keep it rough and tough. Physical luxuries and comforts somehow have made our body gives up it’s strength as it does not face the demand of it.  I saw the people in my village were pretty hard and tough when it came to walking, lifting, twisting and turning their bodies. This small incident did create a spark in my mind but I was light years away from the train of thoughts that would one day lead me to rebuilding my self after I would completely break down and become inoperable mentally and physically both. 

People with manual work have the privilege to be happy and healthy. They are tougher mentally and physically. They don’t suffer from the pangs of anxiety as we white collared workers do.  They take deep sleeps, wake up early and toil all day long without getting tired or drained out. 

I saw my grandpa, my daddy and a lot of other people in my village who enjoyed the hard labour in their farms. I was so wrong. These people though they complain about being poor and underprivileged don’t seem to trade for a better life leaving their farms behind. They live on their farms like their mother.  They treat their mother with lots of love and respect offering their prayers once in every three months calling it pujai. 

The first food made out of the newly harvested crop is given to the mother earth before they could take the bite themselves. They live their farms and the hard labour that they do there. And they have given me the education that I would never find in the books and the ivy colleges of the world for ever because these are plain common sense quite uncommon these days.