Ayurveda at your finger tips!

Disclaimer: I'm not a certified physician or doctor, just someone who prefers a natural and wholistic approach to small ailments. While I might drink honey and lemon with hot water every morning to detoxify, I would also check myself into a hospital ASAP if i'm suffering from acute stomach pain. Listed below are small remedies that my mother passed on to me, and ones I found to be very useful. On the plus side, there are no side-effects!

1. Drink two tall glasses of warm water first thing in the morning. It revs up your system and cleans out your bowels in less than half an hour. Adding a tbsp of lemon juice and honey is an excellent way to detoxify.
2. A spoonful of roasted ajjwain with a small glass of warm water is a quick cure for a bloated stomach, and or gas.
3. Tulsi tea helps ease a bad cough. Simply stew a handful of tulsi leaves in water, stir in some honey and sip.
4. Boiling cumin seeds and drinking the water helps speed up recovery from a cold.
5. A glass of milk with some pepper and honey in it helps chest congestion.
6. Boil a piece of ginger in water, strain, add lemon and honey to it to make a soothing tea for a bad throat.
7. This might sound really weird but it has worked for me every time! If suffering from constipation, in the morning on an empty stomach, swallow two tbsp of castor oil and follow it up with a little warm water. It works like magic.

... more to come later... so surf in again!

Classics Revisited!

Following is a list of some literature-shattering classics that every bookworm worth his or her salt must read! I've added an (x) next to the ones i've read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (x)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (x)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (X)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (X)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (X)
6 The Bible - (X)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (X)
8 1984 - George Orwell ()
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (X)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens(x)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (x)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (X)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare ()
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier(X)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (X)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot(X)
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (X)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (x)
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (x)
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (X)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (X)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Graham()
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (X)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (X)
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (X)
34 Emma - Jane Austen(X)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen(X)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (X)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (X)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (X)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (x)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (X)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (X)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins(x)
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery(X)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (X)
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (X)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (x)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen(X)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth (X)
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (X)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (x)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (x)
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (x)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (x)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold(X)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas(X)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (x)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (X)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (X)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker(X)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett(X)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce(X)
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray(X)
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens(X)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker(X)
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert(X)
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry (X)
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (x)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (X)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad(X)
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (X)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (X)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (X)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo ()