I’m a connoisseur of massages. I greatly savour full body massages, head, neck and shoulder massages, foot massages. Those Kerala-style ayurvedic massages are excellent. I’d had a series of them, not only in Kerala, but also as part of a detox programme at the outstanding Jindal Naturecure Institute in Bengaluru. It included shirodhara (with warm herbal oil streaming onto your forehead) and pizichili (with warm herbal oil poured over your body, as two women synchronously massage your left and right sides).

I’ve been working with the blind since decades. I had arranged to have adult visually challenged people trained to give massages at the Victoria Memorial School for the Blind in Tardeo, as part of a self-reliance programme. And this fuelled my interest in massages further: massages given by the visually challenged are superb if they are well-trained, as their fingers are far more sensitive than a sighted person’s.