Pre Exam Epiphanies.

Stop. I've decided I need to Stop, Look, and Listen.  It's like all the visual and auditory stimulus I receive is shelved by my mind, blissfully ignored, in much the same manner as the sound of clashing cymbals on a deaf persons ears. Except the deaf person doesn't have a choice and he doesn't consider it blissful. I have the choice; not just to see and forget, but to understand and process, you know? So I did. A little.

Inconsequential things, like why would people on a platform move closer to the train they're meant to catch ,when they know its going to come and stop right in front of them anyway. Why would you deny a beggar money, just because they're not blind or as conventionally unable , yet stuff a 10 rupee, 500 calorie pack of Lays down your throat, a momentary high for your taste buds, which is probably taking you and him closer to your deaths.

Pre-Exam Epiphanies. I'm quite sure there'll be more.

I Study in Med School

What I’m writing about is no different from what most of us have probably realized at some point or the other while having stayed here, in a Medical College. It is not a new, sudden or remarkable realization, different from anything that has ever been thought. Here, is a leaf out of an non-descript medical students life, 9 days after joining and almost 2 years after having joined. 

9^th August 2011: A Bone in the Common Room                         Written by, The NAÏVE First Year

My hostel room consists of a few oddities, a bag of bones, scalpels, forceps, and surgical gloves, all of which I am very proud. As of now the bag of bones is sitting next to me on my bed. I am alone in my room, my roommate is out for dinner, yet the bag of bones is now sitting next to me on my bed. The remains of another human being, are sitting next to me. A human, a person, maybe a father, mother, sister, friend, flesh and bone, ligament, tendon, fascia and periosteum, vascular supply and nerve fibres, once upon a time innervated and gave life to these set of bones. Yet here they are in the hands of a first year medical student, as tools of learning, all 17 of them; fibula, tibia, femur, vertebrae, radius, ulna, humerus etc. I got them on loan for Rs 700. The remaining legacy of a person(s) who once lived, who was conceived and born, who lived and grew, who spoke a language, who had beliefs, for Rs 700.

I received my ‘bones’ in the Dissection Hall today. It’s a long white tiled hall, with metal stretchers arranged across its length. The tube lights are a bit too bright, like you’ve walked into an incandescent, florescent world. There are skeletons hanging in each corner, like morbid watch guards. It’s funny, I thought it was morbid the first day, but that’s also the only thing that’ll be left of me once I’m dead and gone. Maybe I will end up being an unclaimed body which ends up hanging on one of those hinges. Life is so transient. Life, a word I have come to reconsider in the last 2 weeks. A cement washbasin lines the wall, the dull grayish hue of the mosaic pattern, giving it a primal bare aura. Add to the whiteness of the room, our newly bought, well ironed, and spotless lab coats and you realize with a jolt to the gut that you’re in Medical College. Mind you, it’s been way different from what I thought it would be, like discovering the little asterix saying ‘conditions apply’ on a clearance sale poster. And that brings me back to the very ‘odd topic of this discourse, the bone in the common room.

Yesterday I was making maggi with my friend in the common room. It’s this room with a hot plate and a wash basin. Oh, and it has a dustbin. Pretty much. While cooking the maggi I started shuffling the stuff on the counter around, uncooked dal, long expired black pepper powder, used greasy pans and dismal looking rags, I was thinking about how people could be that dirty when I saw it. The bone. The scapula. In the common room. On a basin. Probably long forgotten by a medical student very much like me. Maybe I shouldn’t think it unusual to find a scapula just lying around the place, but I did. And I’m writing this down because when I’m a year into this course and I forget the awe that overtook me every time I thought about where I am and what I’m responsible to accomplish, I would read this.

24^th February 2013: The Babaji                                      Written by, the still NAÏVE Third Year

Talk about getting demoralized. If ever someone needs a check on their bloated egos, they don’t need to go any further than, Clinics. And I mean this not only for the poor student, but also for that ‘patient’ patient (pun intended) whose dignity and pride is slowly bartered off to all of us aspiring ‘doctors’ willing to percuss and prod him. I wonder where all those lofty ideals of ‘treating the patient as though they were your loved ones’ went.

I think my version of today is so very vastly different from what it’s supposed to be. Today I met a babaji, Ajaib Singh in Ward 2. He was a man slight in demeanor, with jolly twinkly eyes and laugh wrinkles on the edges of his eyes, like crinkled up butter paper. He had on an orange turban, a clean crisp off-white kurta and sheet pulled up to his waist. As I approached him I noticed under his bed a series of urine sample bottles and by his side was sitting his wife, knitting and chatting away with great agility at express speed. As I proceeded to get a ‘good’ history and find some of the ‘findings’ which always seem to elude me, he told me about how he’d been a shopkeeper till ‘peshap mein problem ho gaya’… his wife gave me an incessant backup of the details about how life changed after ‘peshap mein problem ho gaya’. I think I spent close to 40 minutes chatting with them completely forgetting to go and present my case, and therein lay the problem. Needless to say, I stuttered and stammered through the whole ordeal once I did get back to class, and received mirth-filled looks from the rest of my class mates, for the show had begun.

Now if I’d done things the way I was supposed to have, my day would’ve consisted of having worked up a patient, Ajaib Singh, male, 60 years old from Ludhiana who was apparently well till 5 days ago when he came to OPD with complaints of frequent and painful urination. End of story- teacher happy, student happy and patient? Well, who really cares right?

Note: Although the incidents may seem unrelated, and well, not that big a deal, slowly, ever so slowly, our consciences are getting blunted out and shaped. At the end of the day, it’s still in each of our hands to decide what shape that’s going to be.

Living with Thatha: The Moments in Between

My grandfather called out to me ‘Chinchu, I can’t hear too well, so please make sure you listen for the score okay? How much India made in the match, against Sri Lanka…’ I look up from my chemistry textbook. My grandfather is listening to the evening news, sitting in his ‘easy’ chair. That’s what he calls it. And it really is the ‘easy’ chair. You can ease yourself down into it, it has wooden frame with a piece of happily stripped cloth that hangs low across the length of the chair. Much like a cloth lounge chair, but with so much character, so much history. If ever, a chair could speak, it’s this one. The ‘easy chair’ is some 80 years old; it used to belong to another old lady from Dohnavur Fellowship where my grandparents grew up. All the furniture I’ve seen in my life has disintegrated at some point, but this chair and my attachment to it, fosters feelings in me akin to those one would relate to seeing an old friend again, a solid reliable, unchangeable one compared to me. I have grown, and times with the chair have gone from my little 5 year old feet dangling over the edges, to adolescent seventeen year old limbs planted firmly on the ground.  Everyone from my family; cousins, uncles, aunts and me, we draw strength from it, comfort, Thatha’s comfort. It as though some of the wisdom left over from the hours that he sits in that chair is palpable, like a tangible frequency we could absorb into our young, proud, inexperienced minds. We fight to sit in it, even if it’s for a minute, but as soon as my Thatha needs it, it is given up with all due respect. And much awe.

‘Has the part about the match started yet?’ he asks me again. ‘No, not yet Thatha… do you want me to turn the volume up?’ I asked him. Rather loudly, as the voice of the radio newsreader reaches daunting decibels in her recitation of President Pratibha Patil’s speech. ‘Yes, please’ he answered, and I got up wondering why he hadn’t told me to do that before, so he could hear for himself. The radio was turned already turned up to full volume, it was loud enough for the entire closely packed street full of matchbox houses to hear the national news, but not for my Grandfather. He couldn’t hear it. ‘I’ll tell you the score when they read it out, okay?’ I shout across the room. He nods in response, rests his head on the back of the easy chair and closes his eyes, his fingers tapping the worn teak of the arm rest in time to the rhythm of the changing news headline background music. My thatha always likes to close his eyes when he eats or drinks, he also likes to sip his tea with a spoon sometimes; he says he appreciates the taste better and for longer that way. As he munches on some freshly fried onion pakodas he tired to brush away a crumb from his big characteristic nose with his strong, fingers. They are slightly curled. The tendons and veins are clearly visible as they are stretched taut under his wrinkled, aged skin, and I expect his hand to waver as he raises it uncertainly to his face, some 5 inches from the target, but he gets the crumb of anyway. It’s funny how this simple action can seem so endearing… ‘Sri Lanka won the toss and the score stands 125 at the loss of 1 wicket…’ explains the earnest newsreader, going further to say that ‘… India does not have good prospect at clinching the series at this rate…’ How astute. I relay the news to my grandfather, who is now suddenly alert, telling me how ‘India gets too overconfident, they need to be humble, and they really have to bat well this time.’ With this he leans back, and I hear his breath even out as falls into easy slumber. As I turn back to my chemistry textbook, continuing to read the passage on Electron Affinity, I realize that if anything could make my life worthwhile, it’s this time, this time in between.

Some perspective.

Morning has broken, like the first morning

Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird

Praise for the singing, praise for the morning

Praise for them springing fresh from the word

Sweet the rain's new fall, sunlit from heaven

Like the first dewfall, on the first grass

Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden

Sprung in completeness where his feet pass

Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning

Born of the one light, Eden saw play

Praise with elation, praise every morning

God's recreation of the new day.

- Eleanor Farjeon

For when we lose sight of the greater picture, for when the fog of daily hussle closes in and makes you lose hope. There is a greater purpose, and their is happiness, we get to see a new day, while many others slept last night and didn't wake to see another day. Let's not take that for granted.

Morning has broken.

Wishing for Pangaea: An Ode to Long Distance (Friend)ships

According to Wikipedia, ‘Pangaea’ is the supercontinent that existed before the earth split into its current continent configuration some 250 million years ago. It also goes onto say that the earth is in the habit of doing this random drifting apart and shifting around every 300-400 million years.

And at each point we have managed to come up with names to describe it, Gondwanaland, Pannotia, Rodinia… the list goes on. How anyone comes up with these numbers and postulates is anyone’s guess and I’m pretty sure I sound daft and nerdy as I go on about something very irrelevant to anything today. Do bear with me, I have a point. You see, when there was a combined landmass everyone lived together, continents which are now separate, then overlapped to form common ground. Everyone lived on the same piece of land. There was no divergent evolution or natural selection, no survival of the fittest or random elimination. Therefore, my best friend and I have come to the conclusion that the origins of our friendship were somewhat like that, until that fateful day when the continental drift decided to come along, aka graduation. Yes, the continental drift did also cause an intermingling of populations and a division of pre-existing populations due to tectonic plate shifts resulting in many of the hypothesis that Charles Darwin and Mr Lamarck liked to throw around. However, for friends such as mine, it rendered our life a bit chaotic and more than a little lonely. On opposite corners of the world in completely different external environments, we now had to adapt to circumstances previous unforeseen and to a good extent, unwanted. Our routines diverged and so did our communication. Add to that a long list of limiting factors such as time difference, internet inconsistencies, the issue of paying to talk on the phone, living you current life as well as holding onto the good old Pangaean times, new people, new food, the obligatory growing up etc, and you get the perfect recipe for being friend-sick. That’s right. Here’s a sickness that’s not given as much care and attention as compared to “love-sickness”. We speak on end about long distance relationships, of the separation of love which is meant to be together. But what of two friends sitting miles, oceans and continents away from each other, staring at a computer screen waiting for a word, a phrase or chat conversation with their significant other. What of the heart break you feel when the video freezes, or the voice get cut, when the bars on the internet signal plunge down, when the computer decides to be dodgy, when the phone line goes dead because you’ve run out of money, when you’re greeted with missed calls instead of a familiar face, when sending the package costs more than what’s in it, when in a country like India it just ends up getting lost anyway…. What of those chuddy-buddies, those brother’s-in-arms, those homie-G’s, those machas, those roommates and dorm mates and classmates, those people that made up your day, and marked your calenders. What happens when they end up like those continents separated by seas of… everything!? It takes time and effort to keep it up, to keep it going, to keep in touch. It’s harder to be there for someone, and it’s also harder not to think about how it ‘used to be’ and what ‘could’ve been’ instead of focusing on what is and has to be done. As my friend and I do absurd things to overcome the time difference, from downing tons of coffee and green tea to having showers to stay awake, one this is for sure, we will come together. Maybe physically, like the earth does every so often (note: 300-400 million years) or maybe and most probably, mentally, in that way we look to the future, for better things are definitely to come. It something like the commonality between the Tasmanian Wolf (a marsupial found off the coast of Australia) and the Placental wolf (found on the mainland)… although they were victims in separation of the continental drift, and were subjected to various different environments that they were required to adapt to in order to survive, the end product, i.e., the current species of the same, are not very different. Yes, they appear different and function differently but their purpose is still the same; to hunt and survive. Forgive the crude simile, for we all seek to do more than hunt and survive in life, but in essence the mechanism is parallel. Because when my friend and I saw each other a couple of days ago after almost 8 months not having been around each other, we picked up as though we were in the middle of a conversation we hadn’t finished. Although we’re separated by different cultures and lifestyles and oceans and what not else, we still are and always will be, Pangaeans.

The 21st Century Assembly Line

I always wonder at the way a place that seemed big when you first got there just gets smaller as you got to know your way around it. It’s quite like the plastic Christmas tree that you decorated since kindergarten just got smaller as you got bigger. Less intimating, easier to decorate, easier to reach the stars on the top… maybe also, less awe inspiring, giving us the power to jump up and hang the decorations, without using the stool, without holding your mother’s hand and then suddenly, a gentle Thud! You fall. You cry. Someone picks you up. Asks you, concerned, “Are you alright?” plain, simple concern. No condescension, no accusation but still. Ever answered with an angry retort? I have. So sometimes I wonder, is this what I have grown up to become? I feel like I have lost the sense of wonder and awe, which would fill me as I looked up at a big building, or gazed to the top of the Christmas tree, at the twinkling lights and the crowning angel right on the top… things which seemed so far away. Yet there had always been the anticipation, maybe if I live long enough, I could be tall enough to get to the top. But there would also be the seeping disappointment, if I grow a little every year, wouldn’t the tree grow as well? So maybe I’ll never get to it! But wonder of wonders, the fairy dust worked! The tooth fairy did exist because hey! One Christmas I could touch the top of the tree on my tippy toes.

Happiness, simple and unadulterated. What happened to it? It. Just. Died. With the "maturation" into adulthood and the coming of the 21^st century marvel, which is globalization. And I’m sure you’ve read lots of articles on this one so let’s just be “cool” (more like clichéd) and call this, just another brick in the wall.

Have you noticed how when little children laugh their eyes smile?

It puzzles me but, all I see in the eyes of the people around me as I jostle through the 8 am Morning Rush is a vary alertness, an unequivocal aim of getting to work on time, and in many cases a slight hint of desperation. This world is surging forward like high tide crashing at the rocks, except it never ebbs away. It keeps coming, and it batters the common man, the "mature" adult against the solid silica over and over and over again. I am dashed out of my reverie when I bumped into a poised and calm 45 year old woman, in her crisp starched cotton sari on her way to work. When I turn to apologize, I am pinned with a REALLY angry look. So much for smiling with your eyes. And so much, for poise. If this where development and growth brings us, I’d rather not have a bunch of cars, some property or a nice phone. I’d rather just sit on top of a mountain and look at the view. Oh! For the fulfillment of such fanciful ideals.

When I was little I would look at a skyscraper and count the number of floors in it, although I would go cross eyed somewhere along the way and have to start all the way from the beginning again, finally giving in to the utter impossibility of task. Down the years I’ve still tried to do it, and my dream came true when I counted ALL FIFTEEN FLOORS of the LIC building on Mount Road in Chennai. Anywho, essentially my point is that a sense of awe and humility at the sheer size and scale of the world around us is now considered as being the curse of the complacent inexperienced minds which are just ‘easily amused’. An expression of pleasant contentment at a cup of coffee well-served at a Bistro was reciprocated by my friend, with a careless shrug and a overtly humble, “Oh that’s what they’re paid for, Big deal!” A person has to think a million times just before asking a question that’s on their minds just in case what comes out sounds ‘uncool’ or ‘ill informed’. The fear of not seeming up to date with going on-s of the world around us in terms of the latest music, or the newest brands, or the most recent unnecessary overpriced piece of technology is the paramount concern in the minds of many. Attribute it to low self esteem of the individual or the psychological dictatorship of the society we live in, an innocently spoken phrase or a defuse of silly excitement at something trivial can be so ‘pregnant’ with connotations (yes, pun intended) that a sufficiently self conscious person would best leave it unsaid. So much, for the freedom of speech and expression. We protest against physical coercion for human rights, but what about the compartmentalization of our minds, this complete and absolute take over by no one in particular, of everyone in general. It reaches us all, this shutter on our soul, this filter installed at the frontal lobe of our cerebrum: stop, listen, repeat. Reuse, Recycle. The same junk that everyone throws out linguistically is picked up by our radar and regurgitated for fear of risking a place, a seat, a number in this assembly line we call the Beat Generation.

An Educated Guess

When do words go from being conversational, to contemplative to philosophical? When do diary entries become capricious, frivolous, exaggerated or carefully organized ramblings instead of thoughts, feelings, events, activities, just life? When does pretending become being, when does trying to be, become pretending? When the genuinity dissolves, can you really tell? Or does it not matter. I say this because I know; my words are not genuine, that they are imagined masterpieces thought out over and over not because I am thinking, but because I am awaiting an exposure, a display of this ‘secret’ life, these ‘hidden’ writings to the world someday. So what do we really do, because it makes us happy, because it makes us content, when are our words, or our thoughts, yes even those, completely our own? When is it that we present our souls, our very core, in simple plain words, unadulterated and honest, even to ourselves? Because even in the most private moments, one shares with his own thoughts, we are governed by the wish, the will, to be seen. To be heard. To be admired. To be loved and appreciated. To accepted and to be coveted. Yes, coveted.

To be honest, is really much harder than I thought. The words above are mine. And still, I have lied. For I have shown them to you. And this is my excuse. I’m human.

Hi. Clichés and human shortcomings apart here are the beginnings of a linguistic algorithm with no particular rhyme or rhythm, just a few educated guesses I’ve picked up along the way.