Every time I come back to India, there's a readjustment of sorts. I notice, better, the parts of me that are very Indian.

As I sat myself down at the local, legendary Irani cafe (Koolar & Co., one of the inspirations for Botiwalla for my Asheville friends) at King's Circle to a breakfast of chai and anda burjee, a gaggle of school kids passed by led by a handful of teachers, ostensibly on a local tour of sorts. The teachers stopped in front of Koolar briefly to say – "What is this? Koolar. Repeat after me. Koolar". The children repeated the name a few times. I smiled thinking of how common the notion of "rote memorization" is in Indian education that even on a tour, the kids are memorizing the name of a place. I'm planning to start Indian cultural tours soon in Asheville that cover all the Indian restaurants and all I'll do at every restaurant is make people repeat the name 100 times, followed by a quiz at the end of the tour where if you score less than 92%, I'll publicly shame you by comparing you to a tourist who came a year ago and scored 98%. I can't think of a better Indian cultural experience than that.

On this journey, in particular, I notice–and I feel vulnerable writing this out publicly–my attention drawn to the chubbiness of the average Indian man's face and the weakness of our chins. At least amongst those Indians that are wealthy enough to afford a flight from Amsterdam to Mumbai, it was impossible to find the absence of face fat or any kind of visible muscle definition. I saw a woman at the Mumbai airport who had visible biceps and talked to her to find out that she was an IFBB professional body builder! Being overweight in India is a bit different from being so in the US. In the US, you have extremes–extremely jacked, cut, lean beings and extremely obese beings. In India, it seems like we have on average overweight humans–doing their morning walks to keep the hope of losing weight just slightly alive, enough to justify a ladle full of sugar in their pre-breakfast and post-breakfast cups of chai. As I write this out, I'm a bit afraid of being attacked for "fat-shaming" and notice myself attempting to check my language again and again to make sure that I'm noting down my authentic, objective observations. The intent of this is to not shame because shame is just self-destructive. I strongly believe that spiritual fitness reveals itself in physical fitness and that physical fitness is easier to achieve in the absence of shame. A current hypothesis I carry is that the more fat a human body carries, the easier it is for spirit beings to infest it. Over the past few months, weight training has been an important part of my inner work and I've been noticing how connected all the upper body weight training exercises are to the lower belly. Something I never noticed before because of how much numbness I carried in my system. Now, with every bicep curl, I can feel the energy for the curl being sourced from my lower abdomen. The lower abdomen being where most of my sexual trauma is stored. I was so shocked when I first felt the activation of my lower abs in a bicep curl. I've done the exercise many times before but never felt that deep chain of muscle connection. These same past few months has also been an opening of my perception to the spirit realms.

As for the weak jaws, my sense is that it is related to the absence or destruction of martial culture in India. So the jaws get stronger where men are more martial–evident in North v/s West India. In my own inner work, I've noticed how the more martial arts I've indulged in, the easier it is for the fiery energies of anger to not get locked up in my body system but to flow freely. The muscles & ligaments that connect the jaw to the skull are tasked with "managing" anger–as represented colloquially in the phrase "clenched jaws". So the more anger is trapped in a human body, the more clenched the jaws get and over time, the chin sinks and fat accumulates–that's my hypothesis anyways. Knowing how related my own accumulation of fat was to my obsessive eating as a means of attempting to quieten the stirring of repressed sexual trauma in my lower belly, I look around and wonder–how many of these people that I see around me also carry repressed sexual trauma.