Plan your Flu

So now it is obvious to all of us that flu, common cold, cough, throat infection are the things which are inter-related and anyone of them if neglected will bring the others along with it and you can't prevent them but yes you can avoid them.

I have had flu twice in this last 6 weeks and both of the times it started off with a throat infection. I have seen that throat infection initiates cold>running>nose>blocked nose>fever+cough. Since there is no immediate cure for these I will be ready the next time it comes and I want you to know successful plan to combat it and damn I am gonna defeat it from now on.
It is better to take medicine as your food than take medicine after you get sick. So, take honey everyday. Ancient well to do Hindus used honey as a sweetener in their food and jaggery was used by those who couldnt afford to use honey everyday in everything. Honey in ayurveda playes a very important role in medicine where almost medicine is suggested to be taken with (wild honey if possible) honey to increase the effectiveness of the medicine. Among many uses of honey the main and most useful are its potential to hep in the following
increase the immunity,
sore throats & coughs,
increase metabolism & cause weight loss,
wounds, burns and cuts,
help with hay fever,
digestion,
hangover,
healthy skin,
athletic performance and many more...
If you are a tea or a coffee drinker then everyday use honey instead of sugar if you do not like the taste of it or do not know how to use it daily. It is a win win situation. About that tea again I will touch that subject again in a while.

You might have heard the famous saying 'an apple a day keeps the doctor away', well I cant verify that but a Vitamin C tablet a day keeps the cold away for sure. Vitamin C helps us in
fights cold,
immunity,
antibiotic, antioxident,
cholesterol,
maintain blood sugar level,

Warm cloth isnt warm enough. Most of the people wear clothes to keep them warm when they have flu but that isnt enough. The whole idea of curing fever/flu as per the british/english medicine is to make you sweat. So you must wear (so many or so warm) clothes which will make you sweat and you must feel hot instead of feeling cold. A banyan, t shirt and a shirt were enough to keep me warm during an attack of flu but i went ahead and added a jacket and a hoodie pull over. Now I was feeling hot instead of cold.

Let us also look at my grandma's, her grandma's traditional way of doing some things.

• If at night for some reason if you have a heavy cough and cant get to a doctor or the cough syrup isnt helping then the best instant kicker is a glass of water with 15%-25% turmeric powder.
• Garlics+jaggery in equal quantity will also help you to stop it
• During sleeping at night, sleep to the side where your heart is (usually left side but some people have their heart right side too)
• Gargle with salt water twice or thrice a day.
• Keep a wet sponge or cloth on your forehead if you are hit with a heavy flu at night with no access to doc. It will sure control it and you might have to wet the sponge again and again since it dries up quickly based on your temperature and this was usually done by mom or grand ma when I was a kid and dammit it works.
• Eat something spicy but easy to digest (no fast/junk food please) to kick off your blocked nose for many hours.
• Drink tea made out only from dry ginger powder. I strongly advice you to get some dry ginger (It will be white and powdery) and make some powder out of it and use it to make tea (just think of it as a tea powder but made out of ginger) instead of getting the powdered ginger since they will be low quality and low potency. If I could I would rather drink dry ginger tea every day since it just tastes so good and opens you up to a whole new stimuli.
• Drink lemon tea if you can't have the ginger tea.

Use turmeric in your daily food as a spice because it just enhances the taste and moreover in ayurveda there are many benefits of turmeric mentioned that you might want to take it everyday. One of the most recent finding is it will help you avoid Alzheimer's disease.
So in short to avoid flu & related side effects

• 1 Vitamin C tablet a day whether you have cold or not.
•  Honey everyday
• turmeric in your food
• replace your morning or evening tea with med teas like dry ginger tea or lemon tea

If you already have flu then along with the above please try

• gargling with salt water
• sleep towards the side of your heart to reduce heavy cough at night
• turmeric+water to instantly reduce cough
• garlic+Jaggery to instantly reduce cough

and of course you will go see a doctor. If I have missed something please do not hesitate to give your input via comments below. share if you care  because these are all tested by me and followed by mine and other families of our relatives from ages.

Blame yourself not your Boss

I more often see hear people blaming their bosses for their low pay, current position, present grade and the hike that they got. Some are even mature to blame the system or the company for this. I on the other hand blame none but instead praise the bosses for it whole heartedly and I even defend them.
Let us look at Ganesh Garage Inc., and the owner has two mechanics. One of them repairs the cars properly and keep them nice and clean so that the customer and the owner are happy. The 2nd one also does the same but he also makes sure that he tunes the cars to get the maximum mileage out of them. It is clear that the owner and the customers will love the mechanic who makes their car give more mileage that the 1st mechanic who just does his job. The 2nd mechanic increase the efficiency by increasing the mileage. Now, re-imagine the same with your bosses as the mechanics, cars as the employees and the owner as the investors and shareholders. If you were an investor/shareholder then don't you love the guy who gives you more income and profit from your investment ? Don't you love that CEO who promises more profit in the quarterly results. If you would love and prefer a guy
who will make more profit for you,
who is more efficient and if you love a car which gives more mileage to you and still costs the same or less than the other car then you have no right to blame your boss and if you do then you are hypocrite.
A manager has to compete with his colleague and prove that he is much efficient that the other, if he wants to grow and prosper in his career. If you manager gives you lesser pay, lesser hike but still manages to take proper output and work from you with his nice manners, sweet talks and other tactics then obviously you manager is better than the other manager who pays his employees as per the industry standard and gets a similar output. Your manager's manager will obviously promote your manager than the other manager since your manager saved him a lot of money. Your manager's manager can then show to his manager that how efficient he was and how efficient and productive he was compared to the other competitors in the same organization. It is a chain of competition. It is the corporate world reality. If being efficient is unethical then go ahead and call yourself unethical for wanting a car with more mileage, wanting a nutritious food which can keep your energetic for the entire day, wanting a clothes or gadgets, phones etc., which cost less and perform more.
If you were so good then you should have not hesitated to fight for yours and get it. If you were so good at what you do then you would have explored your opportunities outside the organization too and people outside would be waiting to hire you. If you were so better than the rest of the lot then you wouldnt be there wherever you are. It is the bitter truth and the more time you spend in being denial the more years of your life will go wasted. If you go to a shop and ask for a pack of bread and if there are 2 such packs with the same quality then it is obvious that you will buy the one which is cheaper. If you go to a showroom and want to buy a car then you will obviously buy a car which fits your budget and gives a good mileage too. The same way a manager would do everything to increase the efficiency of his team by getting more work done with the least possible pay that he can spare for an employee. The lesser you get paid and the more you work, the better it is for your manager since his team's efficiency has increased in comparison to his colleague's team's efficiency. If you are smart, If you want to paid properly for what you do and if you know that you do things properly and you are better than many others then you should not hesitate to find a place where your efforts are valued as per your expectations; this place can be inside or outside the company or the organization. Nobody loves a coward who is afraid of change, nobody loves a faint-hearted who is afraid of new challenges. Please do remember, still water becomes the source of filth or drainage where as the flowing water always remains fresh and healthy. Go check out all the profiles of all the top bosses that you can find within or outside your organization and all have changed companies, all have switched careers and jobs. If tomorrow I want to hire a manager for my team I will definitely prefer someone who has been in at-least 3 to 4 companies because he has faced at-least 3 to 4 different work cultures, 3 to 4 different types of challenges that come with 3 to 4 different companies and that adds to the variety of expertise and skillset one has compared to someone who stayed like a steady water in one place and never moved from there. This person who thinks stability is valued, he forgets to realize that one's stability can also be counted as that person's inability to get a job outside, his cowardliness to go outside, his fear towards change. It also makes his management takes him for granted since nobody wants to waste their resources on someone who will not leave the company anyway but instead they can spend the same resources on others who have the skillset, ability and courage to go outside and earn what they want.
If you have 2 babies and one is crying for food and the other one happily playing and doing its work then whom will you feed ? of course crying baby gets the milk. If you have 2 daughters and if one of them starts taking money from guys outside your house if you don't give her pocket money then won't you pay her to retain her?. It is only you who is the reason for your failure, not them, not me and definitely not your boss or the organization.

Disclaimer : -These are my personal views based on some online articles, HR forums, experiences of others from other organizations across the globe whom i may not know personally. These views or thoughts are not connected with the people I know or the places I have worked or currently working.