It's hard to leave....

Scooters, Vacation, Fall

Crowded streets, crazy traffic.
Bustling station with porters everywhere.
Noisy cafe where workmen hammer and saw a rustic rhythm.

Strangers dine together, suspicions galore.

The bags are loaded, the seats are taken.

The coach lurches forwards- the journey begins.

Dry grass, dust, burning asphalt. The afternoon gives way to dusk.

One night at a four star- hardly a word exchanged.

Start the day at a Mughal garden.

Pictures are taken, names are asked.

The coach moves on: brown gives way to green, and silence to a friendly murmur.

Shrubs turn into fir trees, rocks into mountains.

A Victorian city shimmers from its height.

The church's spire presides over the delightful scene

Of shoppers, vendors and colourful wares.

Then a meadow of cedars and spruce.

Little ponies to take you up there.

Silvan hillsides above the clouds,

Surely heaven was near.

Next on to where our Noah docked his ark,

The journey by a little stream.

The little stream that feeds the world

That knows it as a massive river.

First the rain, then the snow.

Silver lashes from the sky,

The dainty flakes bejewel the firs

And strike my skin like burning ice.

A hundred ancient temples stand,

As pure in beauty as in faith,

A hundred miles into the sky

On cliffs of snow and windy prayers.

Snow fights, snow rides, snowmen, snow angels.

The ice was melting amid all these.

While nature froze in breath taking splendour

Hearts warmed up to one another.

And then we rowed our rubber rafts,

Not gently down the stream

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,

Though most of us did scream.

Over dinner, dance and song

And thirteen hundred miles,

Our world of fun and fantasy

Finally said goodbye.

TIME

I happened to read this article on Medscape- My Battle With Time by Jeff Wonoprabowo a med student who seems to share my problem: time management, or rather the lack of it. It contains a good number of suggestions on how to deal with it, so I'm pasting the link here http://medscape.typepad.com/thedifferential/2008/11/my-battle-with.html for the benefit of my fellow sufferers.

I have really battled to manage my studies and though it's off season now, it's not too late to ask you people for some help. Is there anyone out there who feels an irresistible urge to sleep as soon as he opens a text book? Or does anybody itch to pick up a racket and knock some balls when you have a hundred pages to read? Or are there any hopeless day dreamers like me who can while away precious hours by simply staring into space over an open book? If you have any tips on how to break these ugly habits and get focused, please share them with me. I'll be indebted.

How not to make strawberry slush

A simple step by step guide to how not to make strawberry slush for anyone who is bored out of his/her brains.

- Discover a bowl of strawberries in the refridgerator

- Discover half a cup of curd which Mum had instructed you to gobble down with lunch.

- Idle mind, devil's work shop: get to work.

-Put about 8 to 10 strawberries into the blender jar.

-Add in half a cup of curd.

-Make up for the remaining half cup with butter milk.

-*You can make the drink with only curd or only butter milk. Use one cup of either in that case.

- Throw in about a tablespoon of honey. I like it sweet so I put in a little more

- Blend until smooth.

-Allow a few chunks of strawberry to remain. It won't taste bad.

-Add in crushed ice.

-Pour into two serving glasses and garnish with a strawberry.

-Surprise Mum when she gets home.

Thank you!

One is six feet tall and the other is two inches taller than that. It's a wonder I didn't sprain my neck and they didn't break their backs as we stretched and hunched respectively to blitzkrieg our way through much of an epoch called internship. It started thirteen long months ago, when Lata Ma'am dumped the three of us together in the same unit in surgery. I was low on confidence and very nervous at that time, but it didn't take a day to discover that these two gentle giants were the best people I could have ever been lucky enough to work with.

Amit is a warm, talkative, happy-go-lucky fellow who can brighten up the rainiest of days- days when it rains thirty-five patients, testy JR's, marauding bed bugs and a squall. He will regale you with stories of drunk medical students just as you're inserting a Foley's into a foul mouthed, not so sober street fighter, give you an elaborate recipe for the world's best chicken biryani while you dash down to the microbiologist's with a sample for a hanging drop preparation on curt instructions from MG and colourfully describe his Basic Mountaineering Camp with its Survival Night as you trudge up the stairs for the sixth time in two hours armed with lab reports from the CCL. He's the kind of guy who will wrestle down a violent patient at midnight, debride his infected wounds while he's showered with expletives and then greet the fellow with a wide smile in the morning. An artist par excellence, he fills up the lives of those he meets with the brightest colours from the palette of his good nature.

Ulhas, on the other hand, is the quiet gentleman, towering over everybody but intimidating none. A man of few words but still very amiable, he was the hard working, punctual, sincere and efficient worker we relied on to help us sail through the grimmest of ED's. Just when you're staring down at a seemingly endless list of tasks, Ulhas will appear out of nowhere and silently set about getting things done. He will cover for you at your every slip, step up to the job just as you show the first sign of weariness and stand up to anyone who tries to bother you. When you're running up flights of stairs to do odd jobs, a bunch of bored guys may feast on a Temptation that you bought for someone who is just right for Amul Chocolate, but Ulhas will be right there to help you finish your work, and share the chocolate later.

Thirteen months of sweat and grime, and I wouldn't have gotten through without the two gentle giants. It sometimes fills me with wonder when I look at the way we bonded, the way we became a team, the way each of us had made a silent promise to ourselves that we would never let the other person down for the sake of our own individual interests. They have given me something to miss when I leave this place, something to keep my heart here, something to make a goodbye just as hard as it should be so that it doesn't feel empty.

Guys, thanks for everything! May life bring you the very best, because you truly deserve it.

I'll agree with Mr. Bachchan, partly

We Indians are a proud lot. We should be too, because we're privileged enough to be born in that part of the planet whose evolution to it's present form is not just remarkable but also riveting. It is the land where saints have trod, where the bravest have been born and the wisest interred. The key word though, is privileged.
We middle class, educated, English-speaking, Oscar-loving Indians have grown such a habit of being proud of all things even remotely Indian, that we have all but numbed our brains with it. In fact we Indianise things so that we can be proud of them. Take the example of Sunita Williams: a brilliant lady she is, and I my respect for her remains immense and unmitigated, but really, can we as a nation stake any claim to her success? She is 'of Indian origin', a term that describes most of our present day national heroes, and that means born to an Indian father and Slovenian mother in her home country of the United States, bred there. She set out on her space expedition in an American made craft, with an American team, from American soil. Yes, I'll admit there may have been many more hands of Indian origin involved in the success of that mission, but did that justify the nationalistic euphoria that broke out here, one that would be befitting an entirely Indian mission? And back home, our own home grown Sania Mirza, sweating it out on Indian courts, under the guidance of Indian coaches, in a not so sports-other-than-cricket friendly Indian environment, gets a fatwa for wearing what all women players wear and has her national commitment questioned time and again.
The latest case in point is the movie Slumdog Millionaire. As The Times of India put it, the original novel is written by an Indian, the movie has Indian actors and was shot in India, so that makes it an Indian movie. Alright, that's not hard to buy. It is an Indian movie with the story set in Dharavi, but that's exactly what we should not be proud of. It's a movie of horrors, that follows the lives of two little boys from the slums of Dharavi, orphaned by riots. Some may whine that the movie portrays India in a negative light, but they've missed the point entirely. They worry about what image of India it portrays to the world, which is always limited to the white world.(Agreed, many scenes in the movie, especially the depiction of the police, are distinctly discomforting, but they subscribe to the image that most Indians have of their own country.) Much as we would like to portray India as an emerging superpower to use that over over-used phrase, the fact remains that that kind of poverty and misery very much exist in the shadow of our sky scrapers and lake cities and you can't just wish it away. I certainly wouldn't call it the 'real India', another oft used phrase, but it is definitely a very real part of the real India.
Yet, the movie has won critical acclaim and it definitely is a fine example of film making, and above all, it is a front runner for the Oscars , so we must be proud of it and wear that on the sleeve. So we must ask Dev Patel ridiculous questions such as whether shooting in the in the muck lanes of Dharavi "helped him connect with his roots", to which if he answered in the negative, we all know, he would immediately be labelled racist, conceited, arrogant, traitor and generally an enemy of the state. It must ruffle our feathers that such a film was made by a foreigner, and a gora at that, so we must file cases in court accusing the film makers of insulting all Indians by calling them slumdogs, there by proving at once that we have plenty of time and money at hand. And we must cow down anyone in the industry and who was not a part of the film for expressing views contrary to the prevailing exhilaration.
However, I'd like to believe, and I think it is right, that these varied reactions to the movie are rooted in the common sympathy that we all feel for the under privileged. It is more of a case of people living in denial, rather than a case of being so accustomed to it that we don't care anymore. It's more of being so horrified by it that we want to turn away and run, rather than a case of selfishly deserting a sinking ship. Whatever it is, there are many Indians who valiantly wage a battle to better as many lives as they can. God bless them

It seems like they all decided to swoop down on me today. They hardly know each other, one of them definitely doesn’t know that I even exist and I’m sure they never conspired to set my brain in a fine muddle of self directed questions. In only living their lives the best that they can (and by best, I’m talking superlative) these fine people have got me thinking- yes thinking- and for once, not in terms of beguiling mark numbers and misleading grades: what on earth am I really up to?

The first of these three did intend to make me think. Not me, really, but all those who have an elegant habit of reading good books, or those like me who have friends with this elegant habit, and the even more elegant habit of gifting good books. I wonder if Richard Bach is really aware of how a simple stroke of his pen can send my neurons into a tizzy, on a wild chase to dig out that effulgent being he claims is hidden somewhere inside of me. I could, he professes, achieve everything that I want, if I only believe. But the trick is to believe. (There’s another trick, a much more basic one too, that is I have to know what I want, but we’ll deal with that later.) Jonathan Livingstone Seagull knew what he wanted. Nobody understood it, and they certainly didn’t understand why he went after what he did, and Jonathan never cared to explain. He didn’t know why he wanted it either, but that didn’t matter: he wanted it bad enough to achieve it. As I curled up in my bed with the book, soaring with Jon’s every effort to reach break neck speed, crashing into a heap of feathers and water with his every failure, I found woven into the words before me, a poignant depiction of the pain I have become so familiar with of late. I identified with Jonathan as he lay broken on the water, staring at another unsuccessful effort, thinking of his limitations, while his heart burst with the agony of not being able to give up and accept the mundane. Of course, Jon took wing again, soared to reach his dreams and much more, to finish the author’s work of sending out a message of self belief and perseverance and raising my spirits with him. Oh, and of course, making me think. But the part of the book that really brought a tear to my eye, was when Jon leaves Fletch to move on to another world. You don’t need me to teach you anymore, he tells Fletch, may be you have to find your teacher in yourself. There are few people who understand those lines the way I do.

My teary reverie was broken by my buddy, who called to tell me that he’d sent me a draft of his curriculum vitae, and that he wanted my suggestions to polish it to perfection. Getting online, I found this twenty three year old had a four page cv! Four pages! Geesh! I wondered what my cv would look like. It would barely fill four lines, I guess. Name: Ashkelonian Relic. Qualifications: Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery. Other activities…. No; it’s too painful. No writing cv’s for now. I opened other mail, and found one from G.

G, of course, is the one who started it all. She introduced me to Richard Bach years ago, with my now favourite “Illusions”. She was now e mailing to tell me that she was in this exotic country, teaching computer science to college students older than her, because she wanted the experience. G has way of doing things in a grand, though understated, way. She’s a researcher, and researchers always fascinate me as being those blessed people who are so enchanted by the beauty of the universe that they yearn for more than it offers the untrained eye. They’re the ones who want to change the earth every second, and to keep up with the changes that happen by a power beyond us, the wide eyed curiosity that we’re all born with being their faithful companion their entire lives. It was with G that I honestly spoke about my dreams for the first time in many years. We talked about chasing it, and how the path seemed strewn with minor obstacles I had seen few people overcome. We talked about what it would mean to realise it, and what it would mean to give it up. Though I was listening to everything G had to say, I was really thinking about the difference between myself and what I wanted to be. The reason why G is this fascinating person, why my buddy has this four page cv, why Bach’s Seagull shines immaculate is that they all found the courage to break the bonds of common conventions and wisdom that teach us to be ‘one of the flock’. While most of us find an illusion of security in the mundane, and balk away in fear from the unexplored, these guys eschew that which reduces life to a programmed cycle of night and day. They are the ones who keep alive inside of them, the zest for living each day to the fullest. And they have the audacity to live life the way they like it. Without giving in to ostents and laws and norms handed down for generations. I thought about it: None of us is going to live forever. For the Universe, we’re hardly a speck. It really matters to nobody whether you live life on the edge or just roll along a physical existence, living by rules you accepted without ever questioning their authenticity. Nobody other than yourself. So I think it’s up to each one of us to make the call- grovel with the unimaginative, or soar with the courageous.

Republic Day- Salaam!!

A question to my brethren: Are you what your country makes you, or is your country what you make it?