Pushpa M. Parmar

Gabor Maté spent 30 years asking one question medicine never asks. Not what is wrong with you. What happened to you. Across thousands of patients with cancer, autoimmune disease and chronic pain he found the same pattern every time. A lifetime of suppressing emotion. An inability to say no without guilt. A body absorbing everything the mind refused to feel. Your body is not betraying you. It is communicating what you were never allowed to say. The pain is not the problem. The pain is the message. Real healing begins the moment you stop treating your body as the enemy and start asking what it has been trying to tell you. Don’t lose this page Follow @soulmindhub

Yummy cabbage and potatoes-always goes well with basmati rice and kadhi 👍🏽😋

In the early hours of 23 October 1971, Security Branch police raided 12 Harold Street, Roodepoort and took Amina Desai to John Vorster Square, after Ahmed Timol and Salim Essop were stopped in her yellow Ford Anglia with banned ANC literature, traced back to her home.

Days later, Timol was dead — thrown from the 10th floor.

On the night he died, she heard furniture crashing and a man screaming from the floor above.

Married to Suleiman Desai, a founding member of the Transvaal Indian Congress, she was drawn into a struggle that ran through her own home.

At John Vorster Square, she was interrogated for 52 hours without sleep, forced to stand, before being sentenced in November 1972 to five years under the Terrorism Act.

She served time in Barberton and Kroonstad prisons, alongside Dorothy Nyembe and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.

Released in January 1978, she endured five more years of banning orders, and her home was later expropriated under the Group Areas Act.

She emerged with a distinction apartheid never intended to create: the Indian woman who spent the longest time in detention in South Africa’s history.

Amina Desai spent a lifetime in South Africa’s liberation struggle.

May her soul rest in peace.

We have allowed a 25-year stain of history to overshadow 12,000 years of global human engineering. The Sw****ka is not a symbol of hate; it is a mathematical representation of Su-asti-ka—the maker of well-being. From the Indus Valley to ancient Ukraine, this was humanity's first universal symbol for the four goals of life: Dharma, Artha, K**a, and Moksha. Hi**er didn't create it; he hijacked it, tilted it, and weaponized a distorted version of it. Reclaiming this symbol isn't just about tradition; it is about correcting a massive historical data error and refusing to let a single tyrant erase 120 centuries of light.

“Yashoda and Krishna” just broke global records for Indian art.

Indian artist Raja Ravi Varma painted the iconic piece in the 1890s which just sold at a Saffronart auction in Delhi. The sale beats “Untitled (Gram Yatra)” by M.F. Husain, which sold for $13.8 million at a Christie’s New York auction in 2025.

The buyer of “Yashoda and Krishna” is Cyrus Poonawalla, the billionaire founder of the Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine maker. Poonawalla said the painting is a “national treasure” and that he aimed to make it available for public viewing. “It will be my endeavour to facilitate this.”

“Yashoda and Krishna” depicts a pastoral scene of Krishna standing behind Yashoda, his adoptive mother, and hugging her as she milks a cow. He holds a small golden cup, while Yashoda wears a green sari and jhumkas, a delicate smile on her lips.

Raja Ravi Varma, born in 1848 in Kerala, is one of India’s modern art pioneers. He’s known for painting lifelike scenes from Hindu epics and depicting women with grace and dignity. Many photographers have since tried to recreate his aesthetics. During his life, his fame extended beyond India, with accolades at the 1873 Vienna exhibition and the World Expo in Chicago in 1893.

Varma is also one of nine artists who are “national art treasures” under the 1972 India Art and Antiquities Act, which means their art can’t be exported outside India nor sold to non-Indians. Other artists with this designation include Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Gaganendranath Tagore, Amrita Sher-Gil, Jamini Roy, Nandalal Bose, Nicholas Roerich, and Sailoz Mookherjea. That doesn’t mean their art can’t travel for public viewing.

Read our story on Amrita Sher-Gil and modern Indian art at the link in bio, then click this image 🔗

Things I’m learning to accept about my Desi mom. • I used to think healing meant holding my mom accountable. Now as I get older, as a mom myself - I’m learning it also means understanding the world that shaped her. • My mother came to NYC as an immigrant with two little kids—5 and 7—trying to survive a life she didn’t necessarily choose. She was one of 6 sisters and the only one who was given permission by her father to study away from home for college, then to postpone marriage to pursue her masters degree in political science and then go onto begin a career. She agreed to an arranged marriage and then continued her career while raising children. I often wonder what my mom would have done if she had grown up in a different time period or had the opportunities or freedom of choice. Would she have gotten married? Chosen to be a mother? Would she have liked to travel the world? Pursue more education? Pursue her interests of writing and poetry? She was thrust into marriage and motherhood without any healthy examples of parenting or love, no real understanding of who she was or what she wanted in life other than what was already planned for her, in a world that never made space for her feelings or asked her what she wanted out of life. • So she did what she knew. She loved through sacrifice. Through control. Through fear. Through survival. And I grew up feeling it all—without always understanding it. This is me breaking cycles and holding compassion at the same time. This is me breaking cycles but also understanding that my mother broke cycles too. Because two things can be true: She might have made decisions that hurt me. And she was hurting too. • If you’re navigating that complicated love with your Desi mom… I see you. 🤎 The more I heal, the more I seek to understand her rather than to blame— the goal is to continue to heal, to name what wasn’t okay, and to choose something different moving forward. • Drop a 🤎 if this resonated. Share with someone who needs this reminder today. • #BrownMamaTrauma #CycleBreaker #desimom #ImmigrantStories #motherwound

Some silences are chosen. Some are built — brick by brick, year by year — because telling the truth feels more dangerous than carrying it alone.
Roxane Gay was twelve years old when something happened that divided her life into before and after. She went home that day and made a decision: she would tell no one. Not her parents, who loved her deeply. Not a single person who might have helped.
Instead, she turned inward — and she began to build.
She built, as she would later write, a fortress. A physical, deliberate wall between herself and a world that had proven it could not always be trusted. She understood exactly what she was doing and why. It was not self-destruction. It was survival — the only kind available to a twelve-year-old girl who had no other armor.
For twenty years, she carried it.
She went to Yale. She fell apart in ways that made no visible sense to the people around her. She started over — earning a master's degree, then a PhD, becoming a professor, writing constantly in every form she could: fiction, essays, criticism, anything that let her process at a distance what she could not yet say directly.
Words were always the place she was safest. Even when she couldn't use them honestly about herself, she kept writing.
Then, in 2012, she wrote it down.
The essay she published traced not just what had happened, but what the aftermath looked like — two decades of living inside a body she had reshaped as protection, carrying weight both literal and metaphorical, navigating a world that preferred its survivors quiet and its trauma tidy.
Women responded immediately. In enormous numbers. Not because her story was unique — but because so many of them recognized the silence, the strategies that looked like damage but were really the only way to keep breathing, the long work of building a life around something no one wanted to acknowledge.
In 2014, Bad Feminist arrived and Roxane Gay became impossible to ignore.
The title was a deliberate refusal of perfection. She loved things she wasn't supposed to love. She held contradictions without resolving them. She argued — compellingly, wittily, precisely — that feminism had to make room for flawed, complicated, fully human women or it wasn't worth much at all.
The labels came quickly. Difficult. Divisive. Angry. Too much.
She recognized those words for what they were — not criticism of her work, but pressure on her volume. She had spent twenty years understanding exactly what her silence protected, and it was never herself.
So she kept writing.
An Untamed State explored trauma through fiction. Hunger traced the full arc of her body's story — the fortress, the years inside it, the world that punished her for surviving in the only way she knew how. Not That Bad gathered the voices of survivors who had been told, over and over, that what happened to them didn't quite count.
Each book pulled language from places where language had been forbidden.
She never claimed to be healed. She never offered the clean redemption narrative that makes trauma comfortable for audiences. She offered something rarer and more honest: the truth that survival doesn't always look like recovery — and that a life built in the aftermath can still be a powerful one.
The girl who built a fortress out of silence became the woman who built a movement out of words.
And every time someone called her difficult, she knew she was saying something someone had counted on staying buried.
She just kept saying it anyway.

Can’t remember last time I made shrimp/prawn curry with a side of basmati rice and spinach and peas 😋😋