Opinion | Columnists
West is not always best
Jal neti is so effective that it's criminal you don't immediately know what it is. It should be a household term around the world.
- By Gautam Raja, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 23:33 December 29, 2008
Jal neti is so effective that it's criminal you don't immediately know what it is. It should be a household term around the world - a world in which all the decongestants, inhalers and antihistamines have been flung unceremoniously from windows, and have been replaced by a little plastic, ceramic or metal pot that looks like an Aladdin's lamp, or sometimes, a little teapot. It is little more involved than swallowing a pill, but only for the first couple of times. After you experience the magical banishment of congestion, post-nasal drip (and accompanying cough), fuzziness, sneezing and nasal itchiness - pouring water up your nose becomes just another 'person's got to do what a person's got to do' task like brushing your teeth or shaving.
Jal neti is a yoga practice using a "neti pot" and warm, slightly salted water. The simplest procedure is to tip the head to one side, pour water into one nostril and have it come out of the other. Yes, it sounds potentially gruesome, but it's not bad at all. The horrid water-up-the-nose feeling you know from the swimming pool is eliminated by matching body temperature and salinity: the water should feel blood-warm and have about a quarter teaspoon of salt per potful.
The swirling flow is relaxing, and even noses you were contemplating taking Drainex to are totally freed for several hours, if not for most of the day. It makes even the most powerful decongestant syrup look like a bottle of snake oil.
But yoga practices have this sort of effect. I have been doing what is supposedly a yoga no-no, and learning it from a book: yoga practitioners I've talked to are vehement about going to a teacher first. But yoga is so effective, if I stop for more than two weeks, I notice a regression in energy, powers of concentration, immunity and mood stability; even if I'm doing regular conventional exercise.
Flexibility
The resultant increase in flexibility has made everything from getting out of a car to sitting 18 hours in economy class easier. The benefits are so tangible that I'm baffled that I've grown up in India, and had to discover it so late.
The closest I came to the neti pot, for example, was a faint memory from a yoga show on a local television channel. I rediscovered it only recently on an online swimming forum, when I asked about recurring upper-respiratory infections, and was told that many swimmers used neti pots to avoid them.
So I learned to use one from an international swimming forum, the shame! Instead of worrying about changing the names of road and cities, surely the Indian government could have made yoga a part of our physical-education curriculum in school?
It pains me that much of wealthy urban India has a colonial suspicion of "native" practices such as yoga and ayurveda, and adopts them only after they've been belatedly certified by the West. Thanks to celebrities, yoga classes are now all the rage in yuppie India.
Perhaps I should find out which celebrities in Los Angeles have winter colds and send them a neti pot.
After sleeping like babies through sinus attacks, they'll be driven to go on Oprah to demonstrate the process, and then we'll all be using them after the sniffles strike. It doesn't matter what it takes: we mustn't let something so amazingly effective become merely water under the bridge.
Gautam Raja is a journalist based in the US.
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