Stress Changes You; Will You?

When was the last time you put Stress at the focal point of your attention? If not in a while, perhaps a few moments to ponder over it may save a life in more ways than one. Here is why:

Stress morphs you into another person, a person you are a stranger to in your calmer moments. But over time, persistent stress also brings in irreversible and undesirable changes within. While stress has been the subject of study since decades, an overall view of it is perhaps not very commonly put across. This write up proposes to do that for you.

A Wake up Call on a Holiday !

Diwali brings in the Hindu New Year and also ushers in holidays for a large portion of people living in India. Like countless others, we also decided to holiday away from home with the family. This time it was Saputara, a hill station in the south of Gujarat, in the Dangs district.

Thanks to a contact in the Tourism Corporation of Gujarat Limited, we could book enough rooms for all of us at a distance of three weeks prior to our scheduled departure, in the Toran Hill Resort at Saputara. It is located at the entrance as it were, into Saputara. The town or whatever little of it is there, unfolds from the traffic circle at the entrance of the winding road as it reaches the plateau atop the hills.

Partly out of human tendency to do so and partly out of the staggering contrast, I could not but help compare my experience of this place 14 years back and now.

The Old Photograph

Cleaning my drawer sometime back I chanced upon a colored photograph of my departmental colleagues from the time I had just cleared my post-graduation in orthopedics.  Below the photograph was a type written note gummed to the cardboard mount of the photograph, bearing the names of the people in the photograph in all the rows, left to right, sitting and standing. What a neat method, I had thought to myself, for making sure whoever sees the photograph knows who is who.

That was face tagging as we know it now, and it was before digital photography came to help us mark people for posterity. Well I was happy for this photograph and the memories of the experiences it conjured for me.

By coincidence, the next day, a cousin sent me by email a scanned copy of an old group photograph, a black and white, with the identifying note below the photograph missing.