Mumbai, Aug. 2 -- The Wellness Co., located inconspicuously on the arterial Bandra Linking Road, Mumbai, is a miniature form of the global wellness-industrial complex visible in our timelines-the reels that capture potions inside sterile-looking tubes and gadgetry delivering potions into our pores inside plush treatment rooms.

They usually promote enterprises that promise to slay all things "toxin", "inflammation", or "free radicals".

Culturally extrapolated to India, they have turned into friends and emancipators of the dark-skinned-the skin colour we as a nation consider a curse.

A tour of the rooms of the wellness clinic had me gobsmacked-and even aspirational. It challenged my wellness intelligence a bit. Whole body cryotherapy, hy...