You must drink, I am told. We are told. Not just to quench your thirst, but to improve your metabolism (wow!), to stimulate your digestion (say what?), to satiate those hunger pangs (through water!). And so I drink. A lot. A lot of water. Hydrate yourself (I should have paid more attention to those science classes - Exactly, what is hydration? Explain in 50 words)
Some years earlier, we are content to drink water when we wanted, as much as we wanted. And if you were lucky to spend a good period of your life in a hostel, you drank the aqua straight from the tap. Another matter that it leads to a preference for the draught later on. Drink after a meal, drink after playing, offer water to guests and so on. Without counting our water intake, we drank. And I am quite sure we drank much more than the scheduled eight glasses of water, which was the golden recommendation.
Now, there are definite rules for drinking water. How much? When? With what? So, depending on what your best friend is reading and thus enriching your knowledge with, you would know that you should get up and drink four glasses of water every day first thing in the morning on an empty stomach. Yet another friend pipes up to say that we should drink just one glass with honey and lemon juice for weight loss. A well-meaning relative espouses the benefits of warm water. Not hold. Not cold. Warm. It is supposed to be the panacea for most everything. And the golden recommendation is three litres of water, depending on which report you are reading or which diet you are following. Suddenly, I am stretched to include this much liquid.
This hydrate-yourself affair is going a little off my hands. What should I drink? It seems I can include nariyal-ka-paani, which is aadsaraache udak or coconut water. Can I include my endless teas “ sweet, milky, strong, in this golden limit? No, I am told. Green tea is to be included, they recommend. Then, I might as well have plain simple water. Truly is it said that we learn something new every day, this hydrate-yourself affair is better known as ‘water therapy’. Almost sounds like going to a doctor. In today’s world, it seems that water is the key to our life. The new normal of drinking water does not stop only at drinking water. It includes well defined norms of what to drink before and what to drink after. Worse, it even has restrictions of what to eat. Before and after. You ever knew that water, chemically defined as H2O - with no odour, no colour, no taste - would one day rule our palate. Perhaps, there is truth in the saying ‘the meek shall inherit the world’.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously wrote, “Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.'” in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. A lesser poetess (me) puts it thus “
Water, Water everywhere
That is all that we should drink
Step away from the ship
And come back for yet one more sip.
Water, Water everywhere
Three Litres Full
One for when you get up
One for when throats go dry.
One , so that we complete the quota as we try.
No wonder Jack and Jill
Went up the Hill
To fetch a pail of water
I think I should do so too
To finish off with this matter
So folks, that’s what it is. Take our good, old, plain as gold water and reduce it to a medicine, with definite doses, rules and regulations. Now, if this hydration project would include all sorts of liquids, a lot of us would be sorted.
- Sonia Kuncalienker is an avid writer on matters that have no importance to anyone in the universe
