Bliss Between East and West

There is a peculiar Indian instinct to treat wellness as indulgence rather than investment, as though the body were a car you serviced only after the engine seized. I have never subscribed to this. Three decades of travel, television, and the particular exhaustion of always having an opinion have taught me that the spa is not a luxury. It is maintenance. And like all good maintenance, it rewards discipline far more than it rewards decadence.

My education in this began, as it does for many, at Clinique La Prairie in Montreux. I remember arriving sceptical—Switzerland has always struck me as a country that takes its own perfection a little too seriously—and leaving converted. There is something almost monastic about the place: the lake outside your window, utterly indifferent to your jet lag; the clinicians treating your bloodwork with the gravity most people reserve for a will.

Clinique La Prairie does not sell you relaxation. It sells you data, discipline, and a faint, unshakeable sense that you have been recalibrated rather than pampered. I have returned more times than I care to admit, and each time I leave lighter—not merely in kilos, but in the accumulated static of a year spent saying yes to too many things.

But if Clinique La Prairie taught me the Western vocabulary of wellness—cellular therapy, precision diagnostics, the whole clinical choreography of European longevity—it is Goa (Ayurclinic), and Dr Rohit Borkar, who taught me its older, more patient grammar.

My annual Panchakarma with him has become, over the years, less an appointment and more a ritual, the sort one guards jealously against the encroachments of work and social obligation. Ayurveda does not flatter you the way a five-star spa menu does. It interrogates you.

Borkar has an unnerving habit of diagnosing a decade of poor sleep from the state of your tongue, and a disposition that treats vata, pitta, and kapha not as marketing terms but as genuine forensic categories of the self.

The Panchakarma itself is not comfortable, and I say this with affection. The Abhyanga oil massages, administered with a rhythm that feels almost percussive; the Shirodhara, that slow, hypnotic stream of warm oil across the forehead that somehow disassembles anxiety you didn’t know you were carrying; the disciplined, faintly punishing diet—this is not a holiday. It is a dismantling, followed, if you surrender to it properly, by a rather extraordinary reassembly. I have gone in irritable, over-caffeinated, and convinced I hadn’t the time for any of it, and emerged inevitably apologising to Borkar for having doubted the process at all.

What strikes me, comparing the two, is how differently the East and West have arrived at the same essential truth: that the body keeps a ledger, and eventually presents the bill. Clinique La Prairie approaches this ledger with Swiss precision—biomarkers, cellular therapies, a faith in measurable improvement. Goa approaches it with older wisdom—balance, elimination, the conviction that healing is not addition, but subtraction.

I have come to believe you need both. The clinical rigour of the one keeps you honest about the science; the ancient patience of the other keeps you honest about the soul.

I am often asked, usually by friends mid-collapse from overwork, whether these rituals are worth the time they demand. My answer has not changed in years: you do not find time for wellness; you make it, the same way you make time for the people and the pursuits that actually matter. A body that is looked after tells the truth in a boardroom, a television studio, or a dinner conversation far more reliably than one running on fumes and ambition.

So, yes—Montreux whenever one can, and Goa in autumn every year. Between the two, I have built something resembling equilibrium in a life that otherwise offers precious little of it. It is, I suspect, the only luxury I have never once regretted.