Quietly Amused

Google Minus

2011-10-24T20:28:00.002+05:30

So for some reason anything I post appears on Buzz. I already have Google=Skynet issues and this particular bit of nifty-we-own-it-all-anyway code that makes whatever I write appear in bold all over the internet frightens me. I admit that's great advertising but this also censors what I write.
Which is good too... sometimes...
Anyway we decided to go off Google plus since there's just too much social networking going on and I'm beginning to feel that my entire social life is currently sitting on a rather precarious fence between real and virtual.
Again, I have to pose a counter-argument to my own rants with the old - "some people are better off being virtually networked than in real life". And there are enough of them to make hiding behind millions of miles of fibre optic and copper cable and facebook a far better option than meeting over coffee.
But those concerns apart, this is largely a test post to make sure this blog is not broadcast across the fields of google and thus read advertently or otherwise.
More on the travails of the cooking bachelor and the undying nature of the world's most annoying coming up if this doesn't go viral.

Peace out

A Dramatic Turn of Events...

2011-10-14T13:51:00.000+05:30

So, it turns out that the jump from resident to consultant is interesting to say the least. Most often the moneys don't increase much (most often, remember), but the perks are to die for.

I've been a consultant for a couple of months now. A jump so to speak from mid level slave to mid level slave driver. The grass being greener, the hours being better and the power being colossal on the other side.

Bazinga!

Ok that was bad, he stopped writing even before I did.

Practical jokes and with great power comes great etc etc apart, it's a world of difference between me, the reluctant student, to me the over-enthusiastic-I'm-so-fresh-from-exams-I-know-everything assistant professor. Mostly now I shake my head sadly at the lack of intention to learn in my students, both in the past (my current problem) and in the present (soon to be current problem)

Thankfully I don't let them too near my patients. Or patience.

In other news, I've finally flown out of the nest and settled comfortably in a wilderness not so close yet not too far. That translates loosely to no nagging and the potential of a good meal once in a while. This living alone thing is nice too. My house, MY rules. My f***ing laundry and dust and damn it pave the parking area before it rains you wankers so I don't bring mud into my house. Like so. For you lazy I don't like clicking on links people, or oh no not again people, it points to this.

So it's a rather annoying thing to have always wanted to live like a slob without having the folks nagging about picking up behind oneself and making the bed and all that jazz and finding out, rather distressingly, that given a choice one would pick up behind oneself and make the bed and all that jazz.

The good part of course is the freedom to cook. Though we've been restricted, mostly self imposed, to processed meat, chicken and fish. Which have turned out satisfactory. I'm still alive, which is something.

In a summary of facebook statuses since I wrote last, I came back from Singapore. Spent a rather cold, very drunk december in Jaipur for a conference with a terrible scientific session but incredible entertainment. Absolut flowing like water and belly dancers from Ukraine or Belarus or some such.

Six months of the usual nonsense that happens in the loony bin. Moved out. Discovered Vietnamese Basa. Tossed an iphone for a good old nokia due to signal issues, stressed about iOS5 and found Infected Mushroom to be the ideal background for masochistic working out.

And finally after mourning the departure of Mike Portnoy from Dream Theater, I got to listen to their new album and I find, albeit grudgingly, that I respect the new drummer's skills. Feel free to decide for yourselves here.

Life following the return

2011-01-16T22:29:00.000+05:30

So day 2, which I promised to wax eloquent about a couple of months ago, was as good if not better than day 1 at Singapore. It culminated in the most exquisite black pepper crab. Facebook has some rather gruesome pictures of me battling the crab with utmost relish.
Anyway life's back to it's monotony of cracked heads and all that, barring of course the possession of Angry Birds for PC. (No I don't have an iphone or an android and the #$!@#$ Nokia 5800 doesn't have the game)
It saps productivity in the cackle of victorious birds and the occasional plaintive oink of the pigs that are decimated one by one.
Play it at your own risk. It's free on the android and obviously paid on the mac. But well worth it.
In other news I found a grill pan. Neat bit of kitchen appliance-ry that is. And on it's maiden voyage this is what it created.

That's chicken marinated in olive oil, lemon, paprika, mace and allspice with a tomato salsa and mashed potatoes.

Hungry kya?

Singapura day 1

2010-12-01T00:30:00.000+05:30

So I had to be fingerprinted at the Singapore Immigration just beyond Johor Bahru and as a result missed my bus from the border to Lavender Road.
The bridge across the Johor strait looks like so in the rain, though.

Pulled some Tamil out of the hat and convinced the next bus to take me to the aforementioned street.
Anyway having reached the city with dreaded thoughts of it being a lot like A Brave New World thanks to my cousin programming me so, I took a quick bus ride to China Town with MrD. I should have linked his blog in my sidebar but if not it's called the Other Side and pretty much a lot of fun to read. Had a quick bite at a local restaurant of sweet and sour pork and rice and proceeded to spend a little time exploring Chinatown.
Now one of the things I remember watching about Singapore on World Cafe Asia or some such was them interviewing this German sausage cart owner who had cheese stuffed sausages. In a cliched, yet very serendipitous moment while ambling through Chinatown, lamenting the fact that every toy store was closed, I find Erlich. Austrian, not German, he still sells those delectable wursts. And this is him.

And this is a temple of sorts.

Next was a trip to the highest point in Singapore with a 360 degree view of the city which is truly breathtaking. Again no camera but you could easily google 1 Altitute at the UOB building.
A nice walk along Clarke Quay next with the standard lineup of bars, very drunk expats and tourists and a really nice beer at Brewerkz. Both the India Pale Ale and the Oatmeal Stout are worth writing about and a trip to the joint. That was followed by a shot at Mulligan's the Irish bar and a good evening at Blue Jazz on Ophir Road. Which is opposite the interestingly titled Gotham Building.
Now we left Blue Jazz with it's very talented jazz band at 1AM and proceeded to China One (another bar on Clarke Quay). Nice little joint with some decent techno and electronica and the occasional hip hop track. However a Flaming Lamborghini later. It seemed they also had a nice alternative rock act doing a gig there. Amateur but very very tight. I have no idea what they're called though but they were great. And not just because of the alcohol.
And after that crazy night, punctuated with music alcohol and one very strange multiple martial art instructor from New York who insisted on teaching dance, martial art and finally walking till at 5 we ambled home to sleep.
Day two follows

The straits of Melaka

2010-11-26T16:24:00.003+05:30

So my little sojourn in Kuala Lumpur came to end in a hungover morning. Hoegaarden, Guinness and Laphroiag being blamed sorely I proceeded to a temporary make shift bus terminal called Bukit Jalil. Temporary and makeshift is the primary impression the place makes in one’s mind with large sheds and tarpaulins covering some twenty odd buses.

And therefore a two hour bus ride later I was at Melaka.

As the British would say, it’s a charming little town. Quiet, largely bored with everything.

Things to do in Melaka – go to Jonker’s street. Visit the only joint to have featured in the lonely planet – the Geographer Café. Drink down another Hoegaarden with batter fried calamari. Hop down the road to this roadside Chinese joint and have a Tiger beer with pork. Proceed up the road to a chicken with rice ball joint and proceed to consume them with relish.

Settle in to a nice boat to take the river cruise – a 45 minute up and down through the river which is pretty as can be. Better at night since the graffiti on the walls of the buildings on either side is lit up as is Kumpung Morten, a riverside village.

Try to ignore the rain pelting down on you. I missed Portuguese street because of that rain.

I will have to come back here over a weekend sometime, there was a pub with an open mike night that I couldn’t visit due to companion constraints. Companion restraints rather…

I’m off to Singapore. Pictures will follow.

Update - I'm in Singapore. Happy joy!

Chamarajpet to China...

2010-11-24T23:00:00.000+05:30

... or KLPD part 2

So the day began on a good note... bbq cheeseburger whist wistfully watching folks gorge on KFC at 8.30AM. Yeah the time when one hears the last fading notes of the suprabhatam and is hurrying to work. That time. Beef burgers and KFC. As the most important meal of the day. Need I really say any more. Things largely went downhill from thence, with mostly boring conference lectures barring one on stem cells (incidentally those little buggers are so big, folks have begun randomly injecting them around in the hope that they'll prove to be a Lazarus Pit). By evening once all was done I headed out the Central Market(Est circa 1888, much after Mangal Pandey refused beef and began it all) which is close to but not at KL Sentral. It's just off the Pasar Seni station and en route one finds this off the Pasar Seni station.

and for a better view...

Apparently Melaka, where I'm headed to next has bigger and better ones.

That apart, the central market is like Malaysia's partially regulated handicraft emporium, not unlike the Cauvery in home sweet home. So many, "I'm sorry I'm not looking for a batik sarong with a matching shirt", later I escaped and moved to Petaling Street. Where if you have a cycle you cannot be petaling because it's too crowded, la.
So this is Chinatown. What a trip that joint is. As usual fake china made goods at potentially rock-bottom prices if you have the time and energy to bargain. Street side restaurants with beer and pork. And the occasional accost from a commercial sex worker (I wanted to say whore but it's kinda politically incorrect).
Now if I'd only remembered to eat Haagen Dazs...
Anyway the day ended with Hoegaarden, Guinness, chicken and pork. And Laphroaig.
I could potentially die and go to heaven but I still have Melaka and Singapore to write about.

KL diary...

2010-11-23T21:38:00.000+05:30

... or KLPD part 1

Yeah ok sue me, my phone's camera sucks and I'm too cheap to buy a real camera. The 5800 is a waste of a phone if you're looking for any kind of picture quality. Actually it's a waste of a phone if you're looking for anything.
That apart I'm in KL, Kuala Lumpur for the uninitiated, the capital of Malaysia for the geographically challenged and for the few who've tried to call, I'm not at home and am a proud user of Maxis 3G.
I'm in KL on work (would you believe that) and today work is almost done so I shall begin to wax eloquent about the joint.
At first sight, it's deceptively like home. Hot and humid, a mess of an immigration counter, positively scary looking cab drivers, Indian restaurants and of course Tamil.
Then the drive from the airport changes everything. Gas stations with attached 7-11 type stores open all night, an awesome road system, well planned city and all that. It's been a good two days. For brevity and due to a fast failing memory (remember my bad phone camera? it's why I prefer to write) here are some of the salient points that I'd like to remember...
- 2.30 AM day 1. Drive with cab driver who says the following,
Teksi driver - you from India? Bengalore? where is that? north India?
Me - no south, near Chennai (much as it pains my heart)
Teksi driver - but you're not dark?
Me - I was but I haven't seen too much sunlight in the last 3 years...
Teksi driver - Aaaaah! ok. So you know Priyanka Chopra?
Me - we used to play hide and seek as kids but now that she's a big actress and all that we've lost touch...
Teksi driver - Really? I read in the news paper that she's looking for husband. Maybe you get lucky la... hahahahahaha
Me - facepalm.

Then did some cool d-i-y travel from Kl Sentral to KLCC, and gaped astonished at the subway entrance and exit gates that swallowed up my ticket and let me in and out and felt like it was the whole town mouse, country mouse deal all over again. Anyway KLCC is a beast of a convention center and beautifully done up.

The conference goes on for another day and honestly barring some strange names and stranger people who would effectively be in abundance at a November (as opposed to august) gathering of brain surgeons nothing spectacularly interesting's been happening except for meeting the who's who and all that.

But then again discovered that Starbucks in 10RM a cappuccino and Carlsberg's 7RM. Do the math.
8.30 AM Day 2 KLCC - saw people licking their fingers at KFC.

Agar firdous...

The food's of course fabulous.
The conference banquet featured octopi. Chicken kebab and the the most amazing red snapper, steamed Cantonese style. I'm threatening to like fish...

More in the next update - Melaka

C&H

2010-10-24T21:27:00.000+05:30

So, here goes today's funny of the day...

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

He has a point I think... though i'm not sure what to do with the layout.

In other things that move and shake and all that I'm back to my one flu over the cuckoo's nest state of mind. And the immortal words of Ace Ventura ring painfully in my head - It is the mucus that binds us.
But we'll have to do something about the frequent viral infections. Get out of the cesspit of infection you work in, you'd say. However that is not a consummation that will eventualize.
Yes that is MY word. Eventualize, verb, To become an eventuality.
Other options include cod liver oil (yuck), general green leafy vegetables (cysticercosis, here I come) and my top favorite immunity enhancing concoction - Waterbury's Compound. Which turns out has an I love Waterbury's compound page on Facebook.
I'm sure I've mentioned Waterbury's before, 40% alcohol and and eary morning buzz... It's there somewhere.
Anyway me off the get me some of that or brandy.
And for those of you who live in Bangalore, there's a nice little place tucked away behind Richmond Road called Under the Mango Tree. It's good. Go eat there.

and here's to 2010

2010-10-19T01:24:00.002+05:30

It's 1.30AM I'm having the first of possibly many insomniac spells and I'm writing my first post on a mac book air. It's a nice machine. They keys are responsive and make me honestly believe that I can type faster, longer and perhaps funnier than I could on my Dell Latitude. Which I must admit is the hardiest laptop I've ever seen. Barring the stuff that they sell to children nowadays.
This blog's been dormant for over a year. With possibly good reason. I recently became a licensed neurosurgeon and the better part of that year of ignoring this little space was dedicated almost solely to the pursuit of this lofty ideal.
Now that I realise that my current situation is not lofty and hardly ideal, I do suppose this is a good time to get back to writing.
What do we write about? My last wish list was a hopeless failure. I didn't get any of them. Thank you gentle readers.
There's the deteriorating traffic but that's now so much a part of our lives in Bengaluru (or I could just launch about how terrible a name that is) that the average 7 minute drive is 7 minutes because of a minimum of two snarls.
There's the metro, who offered a hundred thousand in cash for a cool 4 second jingle, in mp3 format preferably. mp3? Seriously?
There's the new ink pen from Flair. Called Inky. Which I quite like actually, not withstanding the fact that it's less than 1/20th the cost of the Sheaffer Valor which I so completely lust after it's borderline pathological.
There's the Hidden Orchestra, if you can find them, they're a very good listen.
And perhaps work and it's skullduggery it involves. In every way possible.
There's a conference in Malaysia, a host of new TV shows that I came across - old ones with new seasons and new ones.
There's Android phones and the N8 with Symbian 3 (Symbian 3? Why?) and the Chiphone, Chokia and Blackcherry that crack me up every time I see them. And the Micromax with a universal remote.
And perhaps the intense masochistic joy in soaking chili flakes in vodka for a month and then gingerly tasting one drop.
As Bill Waterson said, it's a magical world.
Time to go grab it.
Watch this space. I just might be back.

Been a while, alligator...

2009-07-05T13:04:00.002+05:30

So it turns out that planetary alignments being favourable and a syzygy in the offing led to my suddenly finding 36 hours of absolute absence form work. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a gift. Not one to be squandered on beer, beef and blogging, but one to relish those moments of peace, of solitude, of getting back in touch with the inner Mayan...

But since the only thing Mayan that I'll ever have anything to do with is a llama steak, medium-rare, I settled for beer, a nice ham quiche and kick starting this blog with a brand new edition of the usual nonsense.

Considering my contact with the outside world has been limited at best for the past few months we'll do a quick round up on the current state of entertainment before we launch into the topic of the day.

Dave Matthews new album is a treat. It's heavy, at least heavier than the earlier ones but just as enjoyable. Shake me like a monkey and the oft airplayed Funny the way it is would be the run of the mill picks. The others of course are the ones that really make you happy.

In other music, Dream theater has an album out of the usual insane riffs and time signatures that look like something Mandelbrot and Julia produced after a hot night in Peru. Nice if you're into some self-indulgent progressive thing. If not then there's always pop.

Wolverine was a disappointment. Vastly digressing from print for sake of popularity. Special effects were again not very impressive and the plot was at best, weak. Transformers 2 will need to be seen on a big screen and not some Russian camera print before anything can be said of it's affects, story and everything else that makes a movie. Megan Fox is reason enough to watch it in theater. So that comes later.

The highlight of today is a wish list.

Not a bucket list.

A wish list.

1. A Sailor pen.

2. A Back lit poster of the Matrix. This looks good but any of the others with the green letters would do.

3. This.

4. And this.

5. And any one of these.

I am as you can see a simple man.

And I'm sometimes glad I don't have the time to think.

Peace be on ye.

Baaack

2009-05-05T13:35:00.005+05:30

Oh my God! This is what this blog looks like. Derelict, dilapidated, abandoned and all that. Hell I'd like to say I was insanely busy doing this and that and hacking the occasional head and dealing with didactics but nay, those are just excuses for the lack of a muse. A-muse, get it? You do? Great! We're back in sync gentle readers and this ride's going to be a roller coaster.
So it turns out that we've decided to vote again and despite every reservation we had about democracy being a waste of good money and in this part of the world it being a way to waste bad money too, we filled the forms and dropped it off at the local poll office. We jaago-re-ed so to speak. Rose to the occasion. Woke up and smelt the sweaty armpits. Needless to say Murphy chuckled in his grave and we found that the good name was not on the good list. Or the bad. Or any list outside of the list of residents posted for emergency this month. And despite writing to the EC, Jaago Re and the local MP promising him my vote in an act of final desperation, we ended up inedible ink less. (Yes, I know it's spelt differently but it's supposed to be a pun. I couldn't have been gone so long, could I?)
But in funny news I know someone who wanted to vote but didn't want to be marked for a month so she painted on transparent nail polish and did a quick one with some acetone and now all she has to show for the whole franchise deal is... nothing. But a good idea it is.
In other interesting bits of information the sixth pay commission comes to the rescue of all previously underpaid doctors who worked for the central government (not the state government if you've been reading the papers). As a result of recession and fiscal policy Doctors apparently rule the roost at shaadi.com and bharatmatrimony. The hits have, if google analytics has to be believed, risen exponentially. Of course we are at our usual Murphy moment of being the dog in the manger sitting on the proverbial golden egg largely due to the lack of time to spend the new found booty. And I am talking of financial booty. Not the other one. The one that can be attracted with sufficient finances.
Add the arrears to that and we have a new Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and a black acoustic guitar. And the dream that little white boys and girls will one day play with little black boys and girls and realise that white men can't jump.
Flight of ideas apart, I can't for the life of me remember why I've stopped writing. It's fun and even the thought of repetitive stress crippling my wrist doesn't deter me. I've learnt that there's light at the end of the carpal tunnel.
Oh yes, there's a few months worth of bad puns coming your way.
In cooking this month, we speak of 2 interesting ways of eating bread. The first was featured on some travel and food show on one of the travel and food channels on Tata Sky (my life is jhingalala, yours?) . The first involves a whole loaf of unsliced bread which can be easily sourced, albeit with the risk of a suspicious stare from the local bakery. Speaking of which there's one in Pondicherry called "Bangalore's Famous Iyengar Bakery", run by a malayalee of course. So we have this loaf which we shall cut in half. The only way it should be cut in half, before an inane doubt creeps up in your mind. and we scoop out the inside to make a bread bowl. Fill it with some nice chicken masala or beef stew or even the bhaji of the pav fame and proceed to demolish it with the inner bits and thence to consume the bowl piecemeal. While not spectacularly different from the taste of sliced bread with any of the aforementioned accompaniments, it is novel in its presentation and therefore worth a try before the realisation sinks in that it really tastes the same.
The next bit of bakery wizardry comes from the National Law School where an enterprising cheta decided to slice a bun in half, keep a good sized bar of chocolate within and pop the result into a microwave for 30 seconds at full power. Here we shall stop and imagine the molten chocolate sandwiched in soft warm bun. Once done we shall mop up the drool from our keyboards before typos become the norm.
Speaking of drool on keyboards, there is a commercially available rubber key board that rolls up in to a crepe bandage sized cylinder and being rubber and all that is impervious to drool, coffee, coke and single malt scotch. Other hazardous substances may be tried on request and the promise of replacement if the rubber dissolves or something.
There's been little on the music scene. David Cook and American almost Idol or Idol or somesuch is out with an album that sounds identical to Daughtry so it is miss able barring maybe one or two songs. The Dave Matthews Band releases it's interestingly titled album next month, the single "Funny the way it is" from the same is brilliant. As is the Freddy Jones Band whom I just can't find enough of despite scouring the web.
The Big Bang Theory is the new addiction. Remarkably sharp comedy that is and it comes highly recommended.
So that's all there is considering I have about 4 hours to get back to work for the night and I've already pulled myself up off the computer for falling asleep on it. Hope there's more in the coming weeks.
Toodle-oo and pip-pip.

Long delayed...

2009-02-26T06:45:00.004+05:30

... has this post been on the state of affairs in the world. I'm largely bored which explains both the lack of something to write about and the lack of enthusiasm to write about something. But we're changing that. The cobwebs that have grown around the keys have been wiped clean and those little bits of dust stuck in between have been dealt with an ingenious device - the USB powered vacuum cleaner. How cool is that? USB powers the world at large if no one's noticed. After cell phones and Microsoft, USB is binding us and bringing us closer.
How? I don't care it just sounded cool to give the port importance.
Slumdog has swept the Oscars. Leaving a very disgruntled Sukhwinder Singh moping on the sidelines. Little unfair but c'est la vie, apparently. Resul Pookutty is da man. But seriously best film and best director? Think the Academy needs to take stalk of where they stand. It's a good movie, different from the rest of the stuff that comes out of Hollywood and apparently different enough to make Benjamin Button, Frost, Nixon and the rest of them seem - ordinary at best. In any case it won and a bunch of Indians are jumping around claiming that it's our movie. No it isn't. It got shot in Mumbai, that doesn't make it our movie. If it were our movie, it would have never reached the Kodiak Theater. It wouldn't even have run longer than Billoo Barber (which till I got to know better, I was hoping was a rip off of Sweeny Todd).
So stop calling Slumdog an Indian movie and feel happy for AR Rehaman. His work is finally being recognized.
And global and local warming has arrived making life a sticky sweaty mess most of the time. Polar bears are apparently turning bipolar with the glaciers melting, and Arctic Terns have decided to no longer migrate. I'm looking at a Honda Civic Hybrid and coming with a cruel reality that even the electricity that would charge the car is generated by the burning of fossil fuels.
It's all going downhill and the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep. Before we go back to the stone age. Though I still believe we were at the height of peaceful coexistence then. Largely because there were too few people to make a difference.
Morbidity apart, I've blissfully rediscovered the Star Wars, comics in .cbr/.cbz, pakistani music, lounging around in a lizard like fashion and other such hedonistic pleasures that would at best last the next 3 days till I find myself back in Emergency.
Oh well, that's fun too. May the force be with you.

Path, Pasta, Pod

2009-01-10T12:56:00.007+05:30

So, some many unfinished prematurely done posts are beginning to clog up my thought process. The saved drafts section is slowly growing to near epic proportions. There are posts about music, movies, new year rants, resolution promises and even that magnum opus on the evolution of pornography that I've been planning for many a year now.
The last one of course is never ever going to get published. For many reasons. One my research (purely academic) is never going to get done. Every day I think I have enough material to go forth and wax eloquently but a cursory check reveals some new and often unimproved piece of absolute kink that warrants more investigation. Now if we'll avoid the innuendo and the puns and the general nonsense in the comments for that I'll be glad but then again one can never be sure. Anyway thankfully all is streaming and none is stored. So they can't find me.
Got me a bigger and better iPod recently and have spent the better part of one early morning filling it up and drooling over coverflow. It's not rocket science and seeing the album covers whizz by is never ever going to change music quality but I still choose to drool.
And speaking of drool since when we have very little to actually talk about outside of an absolutely terrible start to the year with respect to work , I decided that my month in Pathology (this one) is going to be spent in the pursuit of updating this place a tad more regularly. Maybe even the porn post.
Pathology is a strange subject. It deals with the dead. In a convoluted not-so-comforting way so does neurosurgery but that'll change in the next many years. I hope. The joy in having the absolute last word is omnipresent in jars of formalin and bits of paraffin. People stare rapturously into bifocal and confocal and fluorescence microscopes deriving pleasure from little bits and blue and pink and ultimately pronouncing life and death judgments. And as I found out today, destressing with Shakespeare. They didn't take too kindly when I picked a skull up and proclaimed in a baritone, "Alas, Yoric! He was a good friend." Or when some technician was heating a beaker full of some noxious looking fluid elicited a"fire burn and cauldron boil."
Tomorrow there promises to be a session on gross anatomy (yeah that's what it's called. with good reason.) of the brain. Where we slice and dice a real thinker to learn how the hippocampus curls in around the dentate gyrus and how the choroid fissure runs in the inside of the brain and how if time and circumstance permit, the perfumes of Arabia will never wash the smell of blood off my hands.
No such humor is not appreciated. Though strangely referring to a malignant brain tumor which would translate from slide to reality as a life expectancy of 6 months, as beautiful is considered standard behaviour.
And of course the jabs at neurosurgeons who never remove the right part, neurologists who never send enough tissue for diagnosis and radiologists who never supply enough clinical data are a part of the daily schedule.
But enough about pathos.
Dinner sometime ago was a tomato and pepperoni pasta.

Straight forward stuff really. Blanch tomatoes, peel and cut roughly. Saute some finely sliced onions in olive oil, toss a crushed clove or two of garlic. Once they're soft, in go the tomatoes and some tomato puree. Add salt and paprika and oregano/basil/mixed herbs. Let it all simmer away merrily till it looks, tastes and smells cooked. Feel free to throw in some pepperoni slices/cut up sausage along the way. Al dante some pasta in the mean time and drain out the water. Mix it all up. Top with grated parmesan.

Bon appetit.

Legal Eagle

2008-12-25T09:45:00.001+05:30

So, a while ago, I solemnly swore that I would tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth on the matter in question yesterday. Was called in to give evidence for a sod who came in from the cold a tad too late for anybody to do anything about. It all began with a cop who walked up to me one morning and presented me with an arrest warrant in my name. Bailable with payment of Rs 500/-. Why? In order that yours truly doth show his countenance at the 2nd MM traffic court on such and such a date and time... "Where was the summons", I enquired. Oh we stopped issuing those. We find that a warrant makes responses quicker and you fellows also turn up only when threatened with arrest.Point.

So I landed up at this crowded courthouse and ambled around trying to locate my liason in the servers and protectors of society. Got accosted by three lawyers who wanted to represent me in whatever matter I was apparently caught up in before I made my way to the aforementioned 2nd MM Traffic Court and met the cop in question. About half an hour of roll call later I was asked to step up in the witness box. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, an actual witness box with a judge and a court reporter and evil eyed defence lawyers hanging on to my every word. So I told my story and was politely asked to exit stage right soon after.

While I was pleasantly surprised about the speed of it all I was a tad disappointed that I wasn't cross examined and all that.

Anyway a good double lamb burger from ice and spice and all was laid to rest.

Brilliant how Ice and Spice has turned out be some really nice deli type place. Cheery interiors and a lamb patty and mayo to die for.

I remember it being some bathroom tiled joint some many thousand of years ago with the same to die for lamb patty.

Times and people have apparently changed so the place has a new look enveloping the old burger.

Go try it. St Mark's Road, opposite the State Bank of India. Sandwiched between a wine shop and Noon Wines.

Speaking of Noon Wines when one is feeling substantially brave and all that feel free to drop in and have that battery acid that he serves in the guise of "house wine". It's potent and honestly the fact that it doesn't taste like any wine you've ever had gets significantly blurred after 3 glasses.

And then last week I decided that Ice and Spice is too far to get to for a burger and one happy day decided to try my hand at making them.

Lamb mince, chopped onions, seasoning (whatever you want, I used salt and red chilli powder(yeah I toyed with saying paprika)), and egg and bread crumbs went in to a bowl and got shaped into patties and cooked on a skillet with just a little oil till both sides were wonderfully done. Buns sliced in half, lettuce, slices of tomato and onion, mustard and mayo and voila...

Bon appetite.

Virtual Reality

2008-12-20T13:03:00.004+05:30

So after many profound brain things inside my head I'm back on Facebook. While my angst against social networking is not entirely gone and now that there are a million others claiming their individual superiority and new nifty applications that get sued by toy manufacturing giants, I've decided that a known evil is better than an unknown possibility of a good time. Yes, I humbly accept that that makes no sense. It wasn't meant to.
And thus I'm back on the wild world web having decided to let nifty little applications determine my social life. Of course there's also the fact that compared to the real world, the illusion of the matrix is pretty good.
Anyway profile updated and random socially acceptable likes and dislikes are in situ and I can go back to ignoring the site.
In interesting news Madagascar 2 has finally arrived in our fair part of the world and much as i would like to see it... again... for the fourth time I think I shall pass. I can now recite King Julian's new and improved insanity when woken up from a dead slumber. I feel, deep inside, that it will not be appreciated by the hoi polloi around me. So I shall continue to watch it in the privacy of my laptop. Streaming is so cool. As are cheap dvds of the streamed videos. Except of some time lag in the audio which was, after much wrestling, fixed.
But as I wanted to say but as usual got sidetracked, Madagascar 2, some say is not as funny as the first installment. Nay. I refute thy claims, critic. King Julian of course has been put on steroids for his mental condition and it's worsened. The penguins are a trip.
Alex, Marty and this time even Gloria and Melman go into the usual sentiment trip and considering this time it's in Africa, some much self-discovery and emancipation and yada yada happens that serves only to distract us from the real hero.
Bernie Mac will be sorely missed.
Go watch. Watch it. Maurice, you naughty little monkey, shake my arm.
In other such things the Mekaal Hassan Band (which I remember mentioning) and Shafqat Amanat Ali's solo album (Tabeer) and to say the least very good. I'm not going to go into the cool production, the mature fusion of hindustani and rock and the very excellent voices in detail but you get the gist. Some disappointments though especially with Tabeer. Dum Ali Dum and Naina in particular lack any kind of substance. But like always it's worth a listen and some songs will stick on.
So there it is life in a nutshell. More whenever.

PS I'm back on facebook because some mental plans for ganging up and consuming insane amounts of alcohol are made and propagated therein. It's just easier to plan the hangover thus.

Legal Eagle

2008-12-12T08:49:00.004+05:30

While I was pleasantly surprised about the speed of it all I was a tad disappointed that I wasn't cross examined and all that.

Anyway a good double lamb burger from ice and spice and all was laid to rest.

Brilliant how Ice and Spice has turned out be some really nice deli type place. Cheery interiors and a lamb patty and mayo to die for.

I remember it being some bathroom tiled joint some many thousand of years ago with the same to die for lamb patty.

Times and people have apparently changed so the place has a new look enveloping the old burger.

Go try it. St Mark's Road, opposite the State Bank of India. Sandwiched between a wine shop and Noon Wines.

And then last week I decided that Ice and Spice is too far to get to for a burger and one happy day decided to try my hand at making them.

Bon appetite.

Inspired.

2008-12-02T00:12:00.004+05:30

Here's a new cartoon inspired by an old joke which was popped back into the head by an old friend.

___________________________________________________

Just like that....

2008-11-05T15:20:00.003+05:30

So as time and space and planetary alignments would have it I find myself way north of the usual latitude in the NCR recovering from the acute removal of a parotid. Long story but the bottom line is I have a funny haircut, a lopsided smile, an aching face and am grossing out the north with a suction drain sticking out of my neck. Which one hopes will come out today.
I also haven't been writing for many reasons. Primarily since I've had nothing to write about, or if I have it's just way too technical, neurosurgery-wise, since that's all I've been up to.
The entertainment industry is in shambles. With the possible exception of House being available as a streaming video nothing spectacular has happened. We've finally as an industry broken into the hallowed grounds of animation with Roadside Romeo which as a movie sucks. I've been listening to the absolute worst music courtesy the radio.
Let's play a game. Think of the worst song you've heard in modern times. The chances that I'd have operated listening to it and worse yet would know the lyrics and in moments of stress have even hummed it are close to 95%. The latest in the long list is the not so new Sajanani Vaari Vaari from Honeymoon Travels Pvt Ltd. What a song it is! But that is just one... there's come songs from Cash and Race and other such monosyllabic movie titles whose soundtracks inundate my consciousness from time to time and in true altruistic fashion I ensure that the consciousness of all around me are also inundated by the same bad music.
So there's the rub on work and entertainment.
What else is happening? The usual wikipedia trolling is getting me nowhere.
And yes a new day has dawned. America Voted for Obama, despite all the jokes and misgivings this is a momentous occasion. The world will not be the same and history has been rewritten.
Watched his acceptance speech through the haze of post operative delirium and I found myself thinking, "Yes, we can." Brilliant speech. Now all we can do is to hope and pray he doesn't go mental. Which is the word of the day by the way.
That's all from here and now, from the other side of the knife and the back of beyond. As usual we end with promises to write more and draw more, to fill lives other than mine with joy and humor but we know deep down that the only thing that will actually happen is I'll hack more heads and drill more holes and occasionally get mails chastising my choice of profession and the resultant step motherly treatment that this blog gets. Oh well, such is life (since I forgot where the apostrophe's come in c'est la vie...)

Anesthesia

2008-08-12T22:02:00.002+05:30

So it turns out that for the past few OTs I've noticed a definite giddiness and somnolence that sets in while assisting a case at around 3pm. Initially I attributed it to sheer hypoglycemia from attempting to stand for about 9 hours on a cup of coffee. That got dumped after I almost fell asleep despite hearty breakfast and half a liter of milk. Then was the thought that the job of an assistant is to say the least, boring. One dribbles saline into the surgical field and occasionally clears everything up with a well directed suction tip and on rare occasions points out that the boss is actually wrong/right/or has no clue.
The answer to the sleeping beauty riddle is apparently the lack of a scavenger in the anesthesia machine. The scavenger is what keeps the sleepy gas that comes out the patient away from the atmosphere of the theater itself.
Isoflurane, I can say with great experience works like a charm...

Fwd:

2008-07-26T20:13:00.002+05:30

So with all the criticism I'm trying to come up with something that's not minimalist, involves that neurosurgeron face, unispired in a good way, has blood gore and a drill. Reminds me of that Dilbert and Dogbert conversation regarding stringing together the top ten words that make funny jokes. Don't remember most of them but weasel was somewhere there. In the top 5.
Anyway since I've always believed in buying time here's a forward I got that I think is funny. According to which I'm sane, hard-working and mean. So you might want a pinch of salt.

Toon #2

2008-07-24T07:41:00.004+05:30

One of the constant grouses that we let simmer in our hearts is that almost everyone we know gets to eat the 3 square meals provided by the directive principles of state policy. While this is often accepted as a part of life, it gets a tad irritating sometimes.

Cartoon Cartoon

2008-07-22T22:41:00.003+05:30

So I landed up at Staples and despite every fibre screaming at the thought of patronizing an MNC and all that jazz I went berserk on a stationery procurement spree.
One of the few things I picked up apart from another wi fi router to replace my old Linksys (we mourn it's sad demise and rue the day it's circuitry was cruelly snatched from our midst by the ravages of an electric storm) was a Pilot Sign Pen. Works like a sketch pen from the local store but is about ten times as expensive and absolutely useless for anything but maybe doodling. I can't fathom of signing off discharges with it and since no one's pestering me for an autograph at every street corner I decided to go with the doodle.
Here's the first of a another bold venture - Neurosurgery 'toons. Let's hope it lasts longer than the blog.

Bring it on.

On the days gone by

2008-07-14T23:57:00.002+05:30

Ok then. Been a while and all that jazz. Many things have changed since the last post and that annoying blog-in-Hindi option seems to have suddenly appeared, as has a new grammar Nazi, albeit anonymous, who's made mincemeat of my syntax, spelling and inappropriate punctuation. While I shall try to toe the queen's line and be as proper as I possibly can, I've never had the patience to edit more than once so any of the inconsistencies that crop up geographically, grammatically or ecumenically should be forgiven and forgotten.
Life's been revolving around work and a new found passport into the operation theater and the past few weeks have had me going medieval on many a random skull. Yeah so we're in the 21st century and survived the Y2K crisis (which some people made out to be potentially worse than the nuclear holocaust that Nostradamus had predicted) and technology rules our lives but still medieval is what we are while getting to the brain.Yeah that's what we use... it's hard initially as is the skull but does wonders to shoulders and forearms.
The average neurosurgeon therefore is lean, emaciated, unshaven, but has arms to die for... or at least a right arm to die for.
We also apparently believe in the 24 hour validity of both a bath and brush.
Work apart what else is news?
Kabhi Kabhi Aditi is a trippy song. Trippy enough to have on constant repeat and begin a groove to it when it plays in the middle of surgery.
What you say?
Some of us like music when we work. And considering we're all low tech (see above) we use FM. And till a little while ago that was good. Then every station barring two decided to go local. Now while I have no grouse with local music and to be honest while the melodies are catchy and some even excellent musically the lyrics I'm afraid drive me up the wall and get me to the state of wanting to grind my teeth to a fine white powder and replace whatever the man was snorting when he wrote this. So with much cunning I position the dials to Radio One 94.3 since 91.9 will be vetoed by all except the anesthetized patient and begin to scrub for the case. Only to find that some more cunning and devious lie in wait in the shadows to switch to the hottest local station - Mirchi - less than a minute after I gown up for the surgery. It's an unerring regularity with an unerring tendency to piss me off (since this plays at hourly intervals). Anyway 94.3 plays contemporary hindi film and pop music which is how I got to hear the Aditi song in the first place and has the funniest fillers in Prof Ulfat Sultan, Chamarajpet Charles and Rajani Saar. Since it's all accent dependent a transcription will not be attempted and neither in the near or distant future a recording and streaming of the same. Best that you should hear them for yourself.
So that's what's been happening. Bad humor, worse work shifts but a good dreamless sleep after it all.
A parting shot at new music, I shall consider reviewing Sampooran by the Mekaal Hasan Band. Think it's got the potential to be the next good thing that'll never make it big.

Nickel back?

2008-04-29T15:56:00.006+05:30

It recently came to my attention that Nickel Creek, a band I've loved for a few years now has decided to indefinitely split up and its 3 members want to pursue their own individual solo careers. While this is yet another instance of something giving me great joy disappearing in a puff of reality, this post is hopefully not yet an obituary.

I remember reading an edition of Rave, a magazine that I will still say has some moments of good music journalism, which was about Live 8 and also had an article on Robert Corwin. Who? Photographer who specializes in music/musician photography. As they say in the IRC way JFGI for more information.
Anyway the article on Corwin (who incidentally is related to that Animal Planet fellow Jeff) obviously had examples of his work and one picture caught my eye.
That's Nickel Creek.
Three musicians, in the air. The next couple of days were spent prowling the net for information and a few torrents later (yeah yeah sue me) I discovered joy.
It's not often that the sheer passion and happiness of music is almost exactly reflected in a picture but this is one instance.
Their music is traditional, folksy, bluegrass injected, acoustic, passionate and just happy.
And after some many years of touring and making music they apparently find it's no longer as easy and natural as it used to be...
So they're off on some soul searching expedition and all I can do is hope and pray that they get back sometime.
Their last farewell (for now) tour did feature one hilarious track.
Google "nickel creek" and "toxic" download the mp3 and listen to it.
Then listen to Smoothie song, House of Tom Bombadil, Beauty and the Mess and the host of others and you'll see what I mean.

To Sean, Sara and Chris, hope you guys get back.

Back.

2008-04-20T08:06:00.002+05:30

Didn't think it would come to a time when sitemeter and google analytics would start telling me that the number of people visiting our little patch in the woods would reduce to levels that it no longer made sense for either site to devote a bit of memory to keep count of the few who swing by. And many thousands of people egged (notice it's egged not egg,are egging or will egg) me to continue writing despite all and reminded me of promises I had made and am not keeping.
So here goes nothing.
After the last run in with suicidal/homicidal/genocidal gas repairmen, we've settled in quite well thank you. No more telltale aromas of LPG wafting through the house. The occasional new house glitches of flushes going off on their own still exist. And only because it's a new house can one be sure it's the plumbing and not some poltergeist.
This time's funny story comes courtesy the paterfamilias. Not something he did or thought but just the usual anecdote. He's gotten himself a Swift and yours truly managed to wrangle a spin. Nice car that. Spacious, responsive but a little tight on the gearstick. That should resolve in a while I guess. And with some cool new car stereo that reads a flash drive via USB and plays it all with scrolling text. Makes my Xplod look like some Jurassic Park hand me down (which it is, the only thing the tape slot is used for is the tape adapter for the Pod). All the cribs aside there is one more to add and that's the fact that there's a nasty blind spot at about 30 degrees that the designers didn't quite take care of. So while driving and narrowly missing many a wayward motorist due to the aforementioned blind spot and cribbing about it, Dad launches into a story.
Long, long ago when the man was globetrotting and found himself in Europe and the conversation turned to cars in India, Dad mentioned his car that was an otherwise nice drive and all that but had this blind spot problem that forced him to look out of the window every time he wanted to turn to the right. When further interrogated he mentioned that the car was a Premier Padmini (yeah that long ago) made by Fiat. Perplexed at the loud laughter that ensued my rather distraught father probed into the possible cause of such joy. Turns out the explanation was thus, "It's obvious, isn't it. It's an italian car. Italians always drive with their heads sticking out of the window."
That episode apart, we've come a long way from the time that changing gears meant trying to haul the steering wheel off the assembly.
Also been discovering more and more of Rashid Khan. And loving it...
And since my well of ideas is running dry we'll leave you with a few snippets.
The first is courtesy Jay Leno who pointed out that a recent German study has shown that many adult Germans are depressed and most of them think that the best way to deal with that is a long walk. And the Poles are now worried because last time the Germans were depressed and decided to walk, they walked all the way across Poland.
Maggi Cuppa Mania - the Chilli Chow Yo flavour is good.
When not paying attention to what one is walking on, one must at least have that much awareness of the ground to avoid stepping on BOTH gum and cow dung. Each is bad enough, together they're impossible to deal with.
And finally, heard on radio - Save the earth, stop eating meat since cows produce methane by the gallon and methane after carbon dioxide is the greenhouse gas of the millennium. I'm thinking why won't they stop drinking milk. A steak doesn't produce half as much methane as a healthy, grass-munching heifer.
Peace be on thee.

Scary

2008-02-18T23:35:00.003+05:30

Ok I've had it with abortive ideas, exhaustion, writer's block, the lack of internet and perhaps sheer laziness. I type with renewed vigour and zest and will to complete this post and then retire in to my shell of the above mentioned for another 20 odd days before my conscience and other influences prod me on to a new post.
So we shifted to an apartment. Whee. Apart from my dad waking up screaming in cold claustrophobic sweats once or twice a week due to a previously mentioned issue, the transition from house to flat has been smooth with less hitches than Will Smith. It's nice, 12th floor, one less than the expensive drinking joint, overlooking a concrete jungle and a hyacinthed lake, with faint strains of bhangra and biriyani, not always mutually exclusive, occasionally wafting through the windows. But I love apartments. Life is so easy. Within minutes of shifting we had milk, water and newspaper delivered by some enterprising little man who for a tad extra offered to bring by flowers too. Valentine's notwithstanding I had to pass that offer.
So one day in this new abode, sleepy and disoriented due to some paradigm shift in my internal clock I was rudely woken up by a man claiming to have put in the internal gas line in the kitchen. He of course wanted to check and see if all was well and we weren't living in some gas chamber, so to speak. Here's my problem, the standard way to check for a leak is either by dabbing soapy water on the joints to look for bubbling, or in the absolute worst case scenario to do it inspired by a truffle hunting pig - smell. They do dope the cylinders with some sulphurous compound for that simple reason. Our intrepid little Darwin award contender proceeded to pull a matchbox out and light up under the pipe. 30 of the longest seconds in my life later he turns with a grin and proclaims all is well. I haven't slept since then...

Back.

2008-01-21T15:14:00.000+05:30

Ok I've had enough of aborted posts. Some five lie incomplete in the drafts folder and it's beginning to look like the death of a blog and one that I swore never to let die.

So here goes. After some many half-hearted lines on small towns, John Butler and his two friends and a bit on Rashid Khan taking Malkauns to a new level, I've decided to start small and wax eloquent about what I know best. And no it's not that you sick mind, I was talking about medicine.So I had some impacted, infected molar with the roots growing all awry so it needed to be yanked out and I had to, after much procrastination, visit the local dentist. Sweet man with all the regular jazz of assistants, unprotected-thyroid-cancer-inducing X-rays and a lifetime supply of 'Outlook' in the waiting room. So last Saturday evening was spent in his company with him going at the old biter with an assortment of scary implements (and bending two in the process). Saturday night was spent in hungry agony. Saturday afternoon though, was spent in prayer to the Gods of blasphemy at Koshy's consuming some incredible beef fry that they serve with beer. But that lasted only little longer than the anesthesia which explains the rest of the night. The next day happened to be apartment checking out day considering the folks have finally gotten tired of living with the fungus. No that's not their idea of me. The old house is falling apart and the only saving grace is that it isn't ours. So the usual house hunting saga happened with us finally settling on an apartment. Now those of you who've been avid readers of this space and hang on and memorize every word would remember that dad had an apartment complex... well it seems while you can't make horses drink water, most would once led to a stream or some similar water body.
So we found an apartment and once the interior designer has decided that the upholstery is the right shade of blood red and is finally satisfied with the cool inlaid saree on the cupboards we shall shift. Will have to remember to take the Balinese menstrual cloth that she's put in one of the rooms as a curtain and sentence it to purgatory.
managed to rip the sound track of Unreal tournament and put it on the pod, if I have already mentioned some technological achievement of this sort, I beg for forgiveness.
But getting back to our medical story - what connects a tooth extraction, burning feet and high fever the next day? House would go infection. It's not auto immune and certainly not Lupus and god forbid a tumor. But yeah the feet have been doing the hot coal routine for the past day or so and it's driving me up the wall. Much rumination went into it's etiology and after denying access the the zebra diagnosis of Gopalan's Burning Foot Syndrome (yeah I know it is cool too) I've settled for post infectious radiculoneuropathy.
All that's left to do is to load up with some legal trippy meds and kick my feet up. Suggest you do the same.

On the afterthought, to do justice to the many posts that didn't see the light of day Rahid Khan does make Malkauns a tad more magical than it already is, John Butler Trio is trippy music, if at Madikeri or Mangalore eat at Eastend (Biryani) and Costa's (Neer dosa and any curry you want) respectively.
And check out the Hero 849. Cool?

Almost Unreal

2007-12-09T21:27:00.000+05:30

Damn I realised that I'd forgotten I'd had an online presence. The last post was a half-eaten apple. For more reasons than one. So I'm done with my month in emergency and this time around no insensitivity towards boys with toilet brushes or auto drivers with plastic bottles or the usual assortment of patients who come my way. I've realised that it's not a statistically skewed position I hold and my life is not all that left-shifted. Why? Because the net and even my textbooks have a plethora of nethers with an equally varied selection of objects within them.
But that isn't the point is it... Casualty is such a blissful posting. Yeah so your hypothalamus is mijooked and you can barely focus for 15 minutes when the shift is all over, there's this wonderful instant gratification, don't-have-to-care-about-tomorrow emotion that keeps the adrenaline going for a month. Well at least 3 weeks after which it's no longer as cool as it's cracked up to be.
Instant gratification reminds me of Unreal Tournament. Which is not what you miserable little worms are thinking about. Though it can be the name of some sleazy time bound competition that could theoretically happen in the bowels of men's hostels but that isn't the story either.
Unreal tournament is the ultimate instant gratification tool after internet porn. May be in moments of extreme geekdom, it occupies the same pedestal.
An environment (sometimes just a room), a bunch of other characters, an assortment of weaponry, a set number of frags. You die, you respawn, they die they respawn, whoever gets the magic number of kills wins. And if you want you try another room.
No story. No complex map to navigate, no secrets to unravel, no dark, long, anxiety inducing corridors a la Half-life or Doom. I remember when I got some shareware version of Doom and took three nights to finish it and had nightmares for three weeks and walked very slowly and carefully around corners for three months.
But Unreal is the future of gaming for those who don't want to use anything beyond maybe the midbrain. We come home, leave our frontal lobes behind and fire away at bots till the frustration of the day disappears and settle for a good night's sleep. And the good news is that such activity improves hand eye co-ordination.
The bad news is that I need a graphics accelerator.
Worse is that I'm constantly told by residents of The Age of Empires that I'm a Wendol equivalent or by those Baldur's gatekeepers that I'm of the mental capacity of a halfling.
The plan is to get me either a Redeemer or a Flak Cannon and make the best of the five minutes.

Staying Up...

2007-11-11T09:16:00.000+05:30

...or how to trick the hypothalamus and make a mockery of your internal clock. After some many consecutive nights of staying up and trying to keep the drunk denizens of this fair city from eradicating themselves I've shifted to the day shift and all I seem to want to be doing is sleeping. As a result of such clock malfunctions I'm up at some insane hour, bathed and dressed and considering I've woken, washed and wasting time, I should be blogging. So here I am.

While I shan't tolerate any jokes about those who can't blog, photoblog, I really like this picture. I call it Sin.

That apart I'm finally listening to music again and sailing the high seas as a pirate of reknown. Though considering I only get to hear the first five or six songs before I drift off and somehow I never remember to start the next listen from track 6 or seven, my reviews of the music that's caught my eye are going to be limited to the first half, Side A, you get the drift...

The Eagles are back. I remember writing a review of their music once and at that point of time we were only stuck with Hole in the World as a taste of things to come and about six new greatest hits compilations that had the same tracks in various permutations and combinations. I remember arguing with Hypolink who used to make an occasional appearance in the comments section about how the song was still Eagles' with it's harmonies and I got thupped at for liking a song that his favourite band had written like it was some boy-band. So we waited and amidst rumors of another break up thanks to Don Felder playing spoilsport we silently wept at the prospect of their demise. But all is good and Long Road Out of Eden did see the light of day. I just realised the connection with the picture above but hey it wasn't intentional. The double album takes time to grow on you and considering it's only the first few songs that I ever hear what little I've heard has grown and taken root.
How Long is the catchiest tune of the album, reminiscent of Take It Easy and Already Gone with the trademark guitar work and almost impossible harmonies. Drive to it if you will and you'll see what I mean. I don't remember the names of any of the other tracks due to many days of missing my multivitamins. But I did feel that some of the songs seemed like solo album material with Don Henley and Glenn Frey hogging the limelight for almost the entire track, but Timothy Schmidt has his moments and Joe Walsh while subdued on the first CD does pull off some neat work in the second album.
Bottom line? It was worth the 13 years for a studio album.

Matchbox 20 I remember from early college when they burst in with Bent, that featured on a Compilation of alternative rock of the same name. Then a friend bought The Mad Season Album and I managed to buy a cheap(very, very cheap) CD of Yourself or Someone like You from Nepal. More Than You Think You Are came in a Torrent as did an assortment of live and acoustic tracks. Rob Thomas' distinctive voice and the magic that he created with Santana in Smooth and a couple of tracks (Streetcorner Symphony, being one of them) in his solo album, Something To Be, albeit guilty of being tainted with pop, had all set the scene for Exile On Mainstream. The Band finally released a Greatest Hits of sorts with 6 new tracks followed by the old hits. Which suits me, as outlined above, perfectly. The new songs, in simple terms, rock! How far we've come is catchy and begs to be covered sometime in life. The video's out on VH1 apparently and all over the web so go forth and enjoy. The assortment of older tracks that form the latter half of this album are, thankfully, a good selection from 3 AM, Push, Bent to Disease, Bright Lights and Unwell. Overall, whether or not you've heard Matchbox Twenty, it's a good album.

I shall confess to have started writing this post a couple of days back and now not knowing how to finish it and running late

Just...

2007-10-31T05:39:00.000+05:30

Tragic it is when a comment on the frequency of posts hits you deep inside. True it's turning out to be some monthly affair. And considering I'm on call tonight and in emergency all of next month I'm guessing it's a good thing to try write a post.
My drafts folder has some bastard child paragraph of stuff on the virtues of Centrum, a firang brand of multivitamin that has turned out to be the best in some double blind study (15331331). Incidentally common everyday instances of a double blind study are two orthopedicians reading an ECG or two neurologists reading an MRI. My stand on research unfortunately still stands despite colossal wastes of time and energy such as this and that Ignoble prize winning theory on nose picking.
The other half of the abortus has a glossary of sorts on commonly used terms in the loony bin and what they really mean. I guess after that wonderful reception to mijook, how can one stop?
Neurotic - Loose
Psychotic - orre loose
CT/MRI - Ways of avoiding letting the world know that one doesn't have a clue as to what one is dealing with. Eg : "Sir, what is God's name is that?" "I'm not sure, let's get a CT and then an MRI"
Biopsy - When CT/MRI shed little light and there this gnawing compulsion to KNOW. Eg : "Sir, what in God's name does that MRI show?" "I'm not sure, let's go in and take a small biopsy." Mijook it is.
Then there's the assortment of vegetables, goners and the likes that makes the classification of patients in The World According to Garp seem the most realistic thing in that book. But those of you who haven't read it... do. It's a good book.
My last outpatient for a month today, which means it's my last day to interact with the assortment of patients we get from all over the country. What about next month you say? Next month is Trauma (reminds me that there was someone who thought that a patient with trauma needed to be seen by psychiatrists, till I pointed out that trauma just meant hurt from anything, a blunt object for instance). Which means my patients to a good extent would not talk much and logic states that they'd only be from the immediate vicinity (a 100 km radius is the immediate vicinity).
We seem to get patients from everywhere. While AIIMS seemed inundated with folks from Bihar hopping on the the Garib Rath and dropping by the hospital on their way to the Qutub Minar or the Red Fort, this place seems to attract people from every state. Most commonly West Bengal. We have the dubious distinction of having the second highest patient density from there after CMC, Vellore. And there are plans to add a coach more to every train that's heading this way from Kolkota (kolkata? Calcutta damn it) so the sick can be exported out.
When asked the average bengali answered, "Our government doesn't feed us well so we're all sick." And I couldn't resist the Ayn Rand-esque reply to communism and had to tell him that's the result of expecting a government to feed you as opposed to going forth and getting some food like the rest of us do. And that they were the ones electing the same government for half a century. Another more worldly-wise said, "There is no guarantee in the hospitals there." Again, the question of poor government health care arises and the irony of a communist state having poor state-run health establishments. (Kerala of course is the exception where the government hospitals run almost at par with the private sector). Then there is also the seminal question of what guarantee are we giving. But the point was lost on the man. Anyway these patients are the hardest to deal with. A lot of them do not have valid income certificates and can't afford treatment, we of course are made privy to this fact only at the time of discharge and then a day is spent trying to waive of charges. And they are not satisfied with anything. It's a little unfair because when we try explaining the possible deficits they would have, the language barrier might just interfere with that. But I'm guessing if you want to be treated outside you jolly well understand something outside of what you grew up speaking.
The Tamil patients also come in droves and can be incredibly annoying while giving a history of their ailment. They will invariably dwell on the various doctors they visited and what was done at each hospital and how they now have a lump in their brain and thus have arrived here for the needful. So the question "why are you here" is a bad one. The question "what is your problem" elicits a range of daily troubles like the lack of water in the village to how the crops have failed or the fish aren't biting. They respond to direct leading questions well though and some history can be gleaned.
North Karnataka breaks one's heart. After driving one up the wall. It is possibly the poorest place I've encountered. They would sell all they have and come down here and camp till admission, they're illiterate, ill-informed, have little ability therefore to make an informed decision and constantly reiterate that they are so.
The gults as always will either hunt you down in the canteen to ask you when they're going to be operated and when told firmly not to bother an eating neurosurgeon will pounce on you just outside the canteen or will wail at a moment's notice.
Who's left? The biharis who decide not to go to Delhi will drop in, the mal's are educated but some know way too much. The locals would fit into any category above.
And I'm late so toodle-oo and pip-pip.

Mijook...

2007-10-09T21:20:00.000+05:30

... is the buzz word of the day. What is Mijook? you ask...
Turns out that many years ago when the world was young and crack was just a defect on a surface, the unopposed badshah of Bollywood music Bappida in an interview said that his "mijook" was inspired by many different things. As it would happen, in the unlikely-est of ways, a young not yet neurosurgeon (not me, thank you) happened to hear that and figured that this was the jargon discovery of the millennium. He christened the next post operative complication he got as a mijook case. Simply because it was messed up. Then the word, very literally, spread and even preoperative muck ups became mijooks.
A typical conversation would go thus - Chief what's the scene? Orre Mijook man, 2 cases in hypotension post op and one's refusing to respond to even deep pain. - And the initiator of the conversation would then sacrifice his night to the Gods of Complication and hope and pray that his pager died in the middle of the night or something.
So, one drunk night, one realised that there are more uses of mijook than just in the hospital. More alcohol later it started... the Mijook Series. They begin like most grammatically challenged jokes, with Confucius Say - and take full poetic license and humoral immunity. Examples follow...
If you leap and don't look.... your life will be mijook
While drinking and driving if the police doesn't let you off the hook... your life will be mijook
If you are not knowing every cranny and nook... your life will be mijook
If you answer a question correctly in rounds by fluke... your life will be mijook
If at chess you try to castle without a rook (for the more intellectual)... your life will be mijook
If after you pee you don't shook (well there is license isn't there).. your life will be mijook
If you are putting line and she doesn't give second look... your life will be mijook

And so on and so forth. Try it, it can be fun. I know you're thinking we don't have lives and our senses of humor suck.. I agree.

But that apart, life and work go on at their respective paces. More work than life.
Snatches of news that we get to hear, I heard we got trounced at cricket but the firecracker that exploded in close vicinity to the petrol tank of my car sometime ago makes me believe we won one too. Hooray. Now can we tax all those jokers please?

And turns out the rat pack that runs the state decided to pull a fast one on the other rat pack which was beginning to drool at the thought of being at the reins of the golden egg laying goose called Karnataka. While we are all going, "Great, President's rule. Pratibha Patil's in charge now." No seriously what was the BJP thinking? That that many months later the current rats would graciously step down and say, "Go forth my brothers! We have stood on your shoulders for so long, they must be sore. And all you have gotten are tit-bits of our corruption. Now it is your turn. Don't bother throwing us any tit-bits. We've made enough to live through 3 recessions and an Ice Age. Go on. We are sated with our plunder and aren't the kind to deny others a chance. Gentleman's agreement it was, wasn't it?" No it wasn't you lying, two-faced money guzzling bandicoots.
But all said and done we are glad that it's Mrs Patil right now and not either of the two factions.

I'm hoping the Left will get left behind and Mayawati becomes Prime Minister.

But then I also hope to eat three full meals and get eight hours of sleep a day. That ain't working.

Go listen to Alanis' cover of Crazy. Many thanks to the wonderful person who introduced that song to me.

2007-09-25T20:19:00.000+05:30

I like.

You?

As usual I promise to write but as of now I can't think of much else to write about.

Finally...

2007-09-02T20:28:00.000+05:30

... I'm at the computer again, Desktop as it maybe despite my Dell (yeah I'm cheap so sue me) laptop lying drained of battery from two hours of loading software lying on the side. It's been a wild month. Not like AXN's shows but some rather insane working hours that unfortunately leave little time for pursuits such as blogging. I shall, as promised in some drunk state, attempt to keep this alive if not well.

Work is interesting. It's new and challenging and a constant reminder that I'm not as cool as I thought. There is as it would seem much room for improvement. And that's good. Life had just been too comfortable. It's rare to see an institution that lives and breathes a work ethic that we only read about. That people speak of in hushed tones with wistful expressions while reminiscing a time long gone. While I've always maintained that no one today practices medicine with an altruistic intention and that if we work insane hours and lose sleep and food and gain tuberculosis and a host of infections (and sometimes pass them on) we're doing if because we're nuts. We're nuts enough to be masochistic enough to live that life and block everything and everyone else out. I still think so. It's just rare to see so many people living that life because at least in the majority they want to live it.
This of course means that one can't ask for a lunch break considering everybody over and above you (which is everybody) isn't eating and doesn't even look hungry. Which also means I've finally begun to lose those pounds that I put on eating potato chips and drinking coke whilst preparing for the exam(s). But at the end of the day I sleep easy. Mostly because I'm dead tired but a small part lives happily in the thought or delusion that good work has been done. My salary that due to some insane red tape courtesy the State Bank of Mysore arrived at the appointed date in cash felt earned.
All that apart I'm loving it.
The only regret maybe is the disuse atrophy that my ipod is going through.
And my ink pens that occasionally land up at work unfilled and of little use.
Funny stories do happen... as do the sad ones that medical fiction writes make royalties out of. Which brings me to this really nice book I read on surgery. No it's not Complications, which is a nice book. This one's called When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales of Neurosurgery by Frank Vertosick (Ordered from Transatlantica by Gangarams). The take home message are a bunch of rules which are holier-than-thou, practical and funny and not all at the same time.
Here are his rules :
1. "You ain't never the same when the air hits your brain."
2. "The only minor operation is one that someone else is doing."
3. "If the patient isn't dead, you can always make him worse if you try hard enough."
4. "One look at the patient is better than a thousand phone calls from the nurse."
5. "Operating on the wrong patient or doing the wrong side of the body makes for a very bad day--always ask the patient what side their pain is on, which leg hurts, which hand is numb."

And the last one is, "Never stand when you can sit, never sit when you can lie down. Never be awake when you can be sleeping. Never take the stairs if there's an elevator. And eat and shit at every first available opportunity."
This apparently is a modification of Suldog's Philosophy of Life.

I also have a pager. Yes that relic of the 1990s that now cannot be repaired since no one knows how and cannot be replaced since it's more expensive than a Nokia 1100 and no one makes those anymore. It's numeric but occasionally due to possession by out worldly beings spews out Chinese. This means that some patient who's anything between coughing in the special wards to dying anywhere is completely dependent on some defunct technology that runs on an AAA battery with a mind of it's own for my or any other resident's attention.
And I looked the net they really aren't making the model we have anymore.

Well going by Suldog and his philosophy it is time to me to shut-eye. I'll leave you with my current desktop backdrop. It's an advertisement I realise but a good one I think...

Obit.

2007-08-07T05:10:00.000+05:30

So I started work a week ago... And much as I might have wanted things otherwise this blog is being neglected. Like, perhaps, some many other aspects of my life such as personal hygiene and nutrition. But today, having woken up when most BPO people are winding up for the day and birds and small rodents are poking their sleepy snouts and beaks out to gingerly sniff at the morning air I decided to post for what it was worth.
Funny story of the month began with a friend pointing out that an obituary in the papers may have been of a common acquaintance and a request to dig up more facts. The paper stated that so and so had died in an accident and his last rites would be at Bangalore. A few shocked moments and a few phone calls later we find the story unfolding thus. So and so, as we shall call him for the sake of anonymity, was apparently planning to tie the knot and do the do with the future (now current) Mrs So and so. Which is all fine in the grand scheme of things till the Paterfamilias put his foot down in the manner of the typical patriarch for reasons best known to him and apparently stated in the vernacular, "yeh shaadi nahi hogi!" or over my dead body as the case may as well be. Kids nowadays aren't as efficient at bumping off their folks as Aurangzeb was or as whacked in the head as Romeo and Juliet, so the So and Sos decided to go ahead and take the leap. Or is it Plunge? So it came to pass that the aggrieved father in a fit of rage decided to announce to all and sundry that the So and so was no longer a beating heart. Hence the item in the papers.
What is wrong with the world?
My time to ablute draws nigh.
Toodle-oo and pip-pip.

PilGrim

2007-07-27T08:49:00.000+05:30

In a moment of... well I wouldn't call it weakness but let's just say rationally challenged thought, I promised my granddad that I would trudge up the famed seven hills to pay obeisance to the family deity. Actually if I remember correctly he said he'd do the trudging if I made it to the hallowed halls of Neurosurgery and I offered to accompany him. So we left about 36 hours ago on this shady Mysore-Thirupati-Chennai Passenger that stopped on almost every two-bit platform and picked up more despicable people. Why despicable? Let me elucidate. So this large extended family gets on and occupies most of my lower berth, preventing my reclining and drifting off. Then proceeds to consume portions of pomegranate and then tossing the bits unceremoniously, not out the window but on the freaking floor of the compartment. Cursed socialism for a while then just decided to pick the piece up and toss it out hoping that setting an example would help. But nay, the man continues to thup seeds hither and thither. Now the seeds of a pomegranate are meant to be eaten.
On an aside, thup, which is tamil for spit, is the first evidence of vernacular onomatopoeia that I've ever encountered. And how good an example. ThupI, so simple, yet so clear. Any more examples would be received with much gratitude and appreciation.
Anyway in some form cruel justice, one of the extended family who was on the wait-list ended up sleeping on the thupped upon floor.
So we arrived at Thirupati on the Pilgrim express and a short ride later entered the vast halls of "srinivasam" the pilgrim services centre setup by the TTD at around 5 AM. No rooms allotments till six screamed a board and while perusing the sign a man walks up and offers to get a room. For a little more than what is the regular price. Went ahead and gave him the go to do the needful, slowly coming to terms with the fact that this was to be a regular feature.
Wash and breakfast later, we began the trudge up 3,665 steps over 9km. Finished it in about 3 hours and my granddad's my current hero. Unfortunately between getting up and getting to the correct queue we'd gotten too late to make any of the special offering deals that they have up there. So we hobbled along to the above 75 queue and holding up my hobbling granddad got in for the usual 5 second look at the deity before being shoved away by the crowd controlling scouts who are unfortunately ever prepared.
Took a bus back and planned to visit the temple dedicated to the Goddess Padmavati (consort to the God on the hills). There too we found the queues all closed for the next hour and refused to bribe some local tout and entered the temple hoping to get a glimpse. And how we did. The deity was being taken around the temple on a palanquin and a good look ensured that we didn't have to spend the next couple of hours in some queue, which seems to be the way of life in Thirupati.
The town itself is hell. Built around the ten odd temples with nothing outside of a train station, a bus terminus and about a million lodges. And advertisements for Bio beer and Bio whiskey which I did not have the guts to try.
No pictures due to an embargo on cellphones and cameras in the temple complexes.
But it's strange when a temple becomes a business or sorts where one can get ahead in the queue depending on the amount one spends and having spent that much time, energy and money all one gets is a 5 second glimpse. Not that I believe too strongly, but still. Actually it's worse if one doesn't really have the faith. But it's done. I'm aching all over and have a couple of days before I start off my residency so rest it is...

2007-07-18T08:19:00.000+05:30

I've discovered a lost passion. The sheer joy of writing. Not on a keyboard as most writing is done nowadays but by hand. And not with a gel, a ball-point or even a Parker roller ball, but with ink. As I write this at close to midnight the only sounds I hear are the gentle scratches of a Lamy on paper and it's slowly becoming a very comforting sound.
The nib glides over the paper leaving behind a trail of waterproof black ink and thoughts are given form and substance. The romance of a pen writing about the emotions it evokes is hard to ignore.
Ink pens, I rediscovered thanks to two people. One, who gave me one before I left Bangalore for my short stint at Delhi and another who shared his passion with me and showed me what joy writing could bring. My collection has grown since then. Foraging through old cupboards to find relics of a lost time and cringing while buying an expensive Sheaffer. And not regretting it one bit after the first stroke it makes.
It's the nibs that fascinate me. How with time the abrasions on paper, which are ironically there to hold and bind ink, burnish the tips to an angle specific to the writer's style. To an extent that the only mark of respect one can give another's ink pen is to allow the pen to write as it it has a will of it's own. To an extent that after a few years the pen itself has a character. To an extent that it belongs, like no other possession, almost exclusively to you.It's a lost passion they say. Who has the time or energy to fill ink nowadays, when at, often, less than a hundredth of the price of a good fountain pen, one can get a gel.
Who has the time to clean nibs and buy good ink, to mourn a bent nib or a cracked body.
But the joy of feeling a pen slide across paper, giving ideas form, leaving a trail of black across white, is one that must be experienced to understand.
I have a new passion. I love it.

How to save a life.

2007-07-10T00:13:00.000+05:30

This has been on repeat. This makes sense and is a brilliant song.

How to save a life - The Fray

Step one you say we need to talk
He walks you say sit down it's just a talk
He smiles politely back at you
You stare politely right on through
Some sort of window to your right
As he goes left and you stay right
Between the lines of fear and blame
You begin to wonder why you came

Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life

Let him know that you know best
Cause after all you do know best
Try to slip past his defense
Without granting innocence
Lay down a list of what is wrong
The things you've told him all along
And pray to God he hears you
And pray to God he hears you

Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life

[How To Save A Life Lyrics on http://www.lyricsmania.com]
As he begins to raise his voice
You lower yours and grant him one last choice
Drive until you lose the road
Or break with the ones you've followed
He will do one of two things
He will admit to everything
Or he'll say he's just not the same
And you'll begin to wonder why you came

Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life

Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life
How to save a life
How to save a life

Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life

Listen, learn, enjoy.

Vista.

2007-07-06T06:25:00.000+05:30

So it comes to pass that my dad got himself a suitcase disguised as a laptop. Or a laptop disguised as a suitcase as the case may be. It said 15 (inches) but looks 17 (like most of the women I meet nowadays, I mean what is it with precociousness(?)) and runs on Vista. While I agree that Vista is pleasing to the eye and when given enough time, space and energy, performs like none other, but who has 40GB of harddisk space and 2GB of RAM to spare. And spare is the key word. If you have 2GB and you have Vista, then even Solitaire, which I strangely cannot find, doesn't move the cards like it should. But it looks good. That I have to give the boys at MS. Clean lines, transparent windows and good hardware intensive animation effects on opening, closing and copying and deleting. But the hyperactive security that apparently makes Vista so much more safer to buy things off of Ebay and the like is the one thing that bugs the life out of me. Any new software, anything deleted, any internet activity is questioned close to 3 times. And I don't yet know how to turn that off. I'm sure some smart ass somewhere is smirking and saying, "Dude, if you turn that off it becomes XP with cool graphics?" And considering I don't really give two hoots for cool graphics I think I'm going to stick to XP for a while. Call me old-fashioned but I think Vista in my life shall wait a while.

In other things, watched Die Hard 4. Full paisa vasool only. Bruce Willis quips and shoots his way through a million bad guys and one bad girl (maggie Q, I like.) and does stuff that would make the Boss (you know which one) look with a raised eyebrow and say, "I want an F35 to jump off a 20 wheeler truck onto whist some freeway all around me in collapsing. And I want it to look good."

Overall I'd give it about 3/5 for decent effects, good screenplay (what soopar whistle evoking dialogues) and bruce willis. Some sentiment gets dished out at random points through the movie which wasn't quite there in the first 3 movies but hell everyody gets old...

Also watched Dogma and came up with the conclusion (again) that Bennifer and Matt are brilliant and that movie in the midst of all the jokes hits a hard lesson home. Watch it if you haven't yet.

And finally the techies at my source of great internet connectivity this north of the Vindhyas set up a hardware firewall to prevent others such as myself from downloading copious quantities of someone else's intellectual property. And like the builders of that labyrinth, they can't bypass it. So many megabits of bandwidth lie unused and underutilized and I bleed...

Picturesque Speechless...

2007-07-01T07:44:00.001+05:30

I miss those little comics in readers digest.
So, it's my last week or so in the NCR and what better way to let it all go than with a few pictures. Yeah I'm too lazy to write.
We had a lightning storm a few days ago and here's what a microsecond looked like.

And a few hours previously...Blow it up and desktop it if you will, it really ain't so bad...
And then one night while trolling through the streets of the capital after 4 bottles of Kalyani Black Label, which incidentally I haven't had in six odd years and it's back and just as good as it used to be, in a friend's Alto, I commented that the lack of a car stereo was maybe reducing the quantum of enjoyment a tad. He then proceeded to provide the required music in the following manner. The red rectangle has kind of, sort of been blown up below.
And finally though I think it's a crappy airline, like most of the low budget players this was funny...

Enjoy, ladies and gentlemen. Till I get home, adieu.

National...

2007-06-19T10:04:00.000+05:30

... Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences offers 3 seats every year for Super specialization in Neurosurgery.
I join on the 1st of August.
This blog and maybe many patients might die over 3 years. Not because I want them to but because I may not be able to do too much.
But yes I will be a neurosurgeon.

Forked Up

2007-06-18T00:03:00.001+05:30

Home. There's no place like it. It maybe Geneva, Mogadishu or even just Bangalore. It's still home. It's where the roots are and somehow comforting. Most things are easier to deal with at home. Being de-homed, so to speak, causes enough stress to make even the slightest disappointment seem like the sky's been doing the whole falling act. And I've had my share. Not to be cribbing the the past month has been a bitch. And while I do not want to crib about my life considering it is primarily due to my own choices that I find myself at these crossroads there are still things that get my goat. Like this.

The take is simple don't fork my dosa. And this isn't a naan-issue.This incidentally is at the Madras Cafe at Green Park where, along with Adyar Ananda Bhavan (A2B, yeah), one can get dosas for Rs 50/- and about 50 ml of Pongal for Rs 40. I'm thinking, "Keep it."

So here springs my alternate profession plan #56. This comes after ambulance driver (hell an MBBS degree and a driving license), quack, and best-selling author of how not to do things right. Open South Indian restaurant in Delhi.And unlike the competition import both cooks and raw material from, say, Chennai. And con Mohayana to DJ the place with gaana-patu. And we're in business. Get the boys to run around in mundus and speak like Mehmood in Padosan and the choms will flock like flies on fresh you-know-what. It beats idea #43 which involves recycling used underwear with sources tell me is a very lucrative business given cheap labour and Surf Excel.

And who is Pratibha Patil? And since when did loyalty to the Gandhi family start being the prime criteria for Presidency? And why do we laugh at Bush when there's enough nonsense in our own backyard.

Too much...

2007-06-04T22:30:00.000+05:30

... love can kill you, yeah we know. But this time around it's how too much of anything is bad. No this isn't advice medical or otherwise it's just a bunch of observations.
But before the jist of it all the usual digression commences now spurred by the current misery. The heat. May was a confused month of alternate day rainfall and everyone accusing greenhouse gases and global warming for a midsummer chill in Delhi, but that's gone. Almost as if the weather follows a calender, the past three days of June have been miserable. And yours truly had to go to Mayawati's own Lucknow for an exam. And I've already cracked the let's see how's my luck now joke. So, we got on to the Shatabdi at 6 AM and got a cup of tea and I decided to sleep when I heard that Ghaziabad was going to be next stop for the scheduled 2 minutes with intentions of waking for breakfast. An hour later I woke to find myself still in Ghaziabad because the Gujjars of recent newsmaking had pulled off about half a kilometer of track and were making merry on the train that had left ahead of ours. Four hours later we were given the option of getting our tickets refunded and heading back to Delhi. By which time I'd more or less had enough of Jalebis and bread pakoda and a couple of calls later was on my way back to Delhi to fly out to Lucknow later that evening.
Now which idiot holds an exam in lucknow, in summer, at 11 AM, in a fanless room. And a bad paper at that.
Apparently there are such idiots. And people flock from near and far to go through that torture.
I'm incidentally blogging off a mac. I like. Jokes apart, I like.
Ok then back to basics. Been listening to In Dino from the Life in a Metro soundtrack and loving the song. Except that it would have been so much better without all that extra music. It's got a good tune, decent lyrics and a bad voice but that's ok. Why in god's name is there a distorted guitar blaring away every 3 seconds? And why is it so layered? I can just see Pritham (the music director) with Vegas or Audition, layering track over track to bugger up the song.
Same with Joss Stone (my new love) and her first album. She has such an incredible voice that there is no need to add instruments and a cool rhythm section and a blistering lead to her songs. Thankfully Soul Sessions her second album is produced based on her voice and very little else. Listen to Fell in Love with a Boy, a cover of White Stripes' Fell in Love with a Girl. Actually listen to both. Hilarious it is.
Also been listening to Porcupine Tree and Blackfield. Progressive, but not quite. Interesting.
Three more exams including the ultimate test of tolerance - PGI, Chandigarh.
Adios.

PS haven't bothered with either Pirates or Shrek III. Spidey was bad enough and there are very few things in life that work the third time around.

Just like that...

2007-05-26T22:12:00.000+05:30

Oh Joy to the world. Blogger now saves drafts automatically. But that apart this bit of blogger has been neglected by author and audience alike as the weekly updates from sitemeter inform me and the occasional sojourn into Google Analytics reaffirms. Now Google Analytics has a new and hitherto undiscovered version that I need to analyze once I have the time and bandwidth but as of now I know someone in East Anglia read my blog. I thank you, friend.

I wasn't going to post, the way things are going, but when I came to know that people's early morning bowel movements were loosely connected to what I wrote or rather whether I wrote, things change from hobby to moral and intestinal responsibility. At this point I'm tempted to say that those who can blog and those who can't photo blog, but I won't be mean and instead hopefully just generate drool and other such Pavlovian reflexes.
Will probably write when I have something funny to say, till then here's a taste of last week's bruschetta and a little more.

Drool.
Provoloni and Pepperoni on fresh Ciabatta Bread

The aforementioned bread with olives, fresh tomatoes and basil. And a hint of the 70% chocolate.

"All the better to eat them with..."

Adios amigos, till next time where hopefully I'll have a happy review of Pirates III and some news about where I'll be doing my Neurosurgery.

Green?

2007-05-09T06:35:00.000+05:30

This was supposed to be a post filled with pictures of great food and a detailed description of each ingredient and the process that ultimately leads to fried mozzarella with salsa, fresh ciabatta bread with olive tapenade, fresh basil, provolone cheese and tomato and pepperoni slices. With the not very dry but still good Jacob's Creek Chardonnay. And the 70% cocoa chocolate.
Needless to say the food and drink got over before I realised that my initial intentions, albeit good were forgotten in the hedonism of atherogenic food.
Then I slept.
Now awake, all I can do is gloat with my cup of coffee and offer little tips.
Buy bread crumbs and frequently practice crumb-frying. It's a skill that can and will come of assistance when all else fails.
The keys to good salsa are coriander (or cilantro if you prefer) and believe it or not Cumin (jeera, you katpadi). But tomatoes being anemic at this time of the year throwing in some prepackaged puree is a good idea if one is mildly anal about the redness of it all.
Olives. Anytime, any place, anywhere. Beware the pre-pressed variety that has the oil and the life has been squeezed out of it. Those aren't worth the brine they're soaked in.
What else? Bread should be fresh and if consumption is contemplated with all the above flavours, stick to a single grain bread. Weird grains, as Calvin has said, sometimes adds a conflicting taste to the food.
I want to leave it all get paid by travel and living (which apparently has a show called Wife-Swap, and which unfortunately is not what I think it is) and do an Oliver's Twist like show for them.
Well, not really but it would be close behind NeuroSurgery in the Grand Scheme of things.

And then some...

2007-05-02T12:48:00.000+05:30

It's the end of the world when I've had nearly unlimited access to a keyboard, a monitor and broadband for a few days and I haven't found anything to post about. Or just not posted. Laziness isn't something I want the blog to be a victim of. So here I am wonderfully happy at home albeit my last day. I was here for a short holiday on account of Mr D's taking the big plunge. We wish him and his pretty bride a long fruitful happy married life.
And on that note we also realize that we have little else to say and shall take up valuable screen space with pictures and cartoons as follows.

When wet cement signs should bark...

Birds on wires...

On a movie I wanted to but never could see...

The cartoon is from a vicious online comic site - xkcd. google it. and while at it also take a peek at sinfest and cyanide and happiness.

Peace and back to the grind.

Foodie

2007-04-27T10:55:00.000+05:30

I used to be a foodie. Reveling at the thought of a square meal, wondering what dinner would be during lunch and planning lunch during breakfast.
Then hostel happened. In the midst of unidentifiable fried objects and the occasional worm wriggling it's way out of the aforementioned UFOs I lost my appetite, love for sambar, and a distaste for garlic rasam. As I slowly regain my taste buds, oodles of weight and that happy contended look that only comes from eating food that can, in twenty years, give you a heart attack. So chronicled below are some of the gastronomic excesses that I've indulged in over the past couple of months.
The usual disclaimers apply as does a profound regret that I don't take pictures of my food.
In no temporal profile or order, first up - Punjabi by Nature. Gol guppas with Absolut peppar aside this place I think has the best local fare for the worst possible price. While as expensive, if not more than the urban dhabas at Pandara Road, PbN scores over them as it serves alcohol. The Galouti Kabab, which as rumour would have it was created for a Lucknowi Nawab who was either edentulous or had a full set of snappers that he was just to lazy to use, is understandably a dish of the rich and famous of an era gone by. Lamb meat that's been tenderized and then pounded to oblivion to create a kabab that melts in one's mouth. Like swiss chocolate, only richer. The kabab itself is delicately spiced with saffron. Explains the price but also the total satisfaction that follows it's consumption. The Dal Makhani is by far the best I've had. It's a tough call between Bukhara and here but since Bukhara was too long ago and the people who fed me then are too far away I think we'll give PbN an edge. And it's not just the fat that makes it taste good. The butter chicken should be had for the gravy and not the chicken, again wondering if the folks at the Habitat Centre's Dilli-o-Dilli do a better job. Overall, recommended if rich, if not then still recommended once in a lifetime. a
Karim's. If one has to take the metro across Delhi to get paperwork done at the University and the train passes below old Delhi, an urge almost magnetic causes one to hop off on the way back at Chawri Bazaar and follow the mass of humanity to Jama Masjid and thence to Karim's. For those of you who've read Wells' Time Machine, Chawri Bazaar is like the future only flipped. The wendols live above and occasionally saunter down 30 feet or more to the metro station and thankfully haven't yet started kidnapping young nubile things. But that apart a quick rickshaw ride from the station to Karim's and Mutton Biryani and Mutton Korma is the way to go. The prices are reasonable while the quantity appears lacking. But nay, never let the initial sight disappoint you since the end result is the usual sated expression. Any food there floats in a lake of fat. And makes life worth living. The rice itself is heavenly. No added colour, just plain rice and a chunk of meat. Unlike the biryanis down south (Hyderabad included) the major flavour is of the meat itself and something else they add that I haven't been able to identify. Again, worth your while and now that the metro goes close enough it shouldn't be too much of a problem to actually get there.
Finally there's this hole in the wall in RK Puram called Nazeer's delicacies. I haven't been there and till now all transactions have been over the telephone. But that is sufficient for him to send over tangri kababs and sheeks in half an hour. The tangri needs a special mention. A large leg of a bird, or the leg of a large bird miraculously stuffed with kheema and raisins and cashew nuts. And the meat is moist and tender and that special centre just makes the 25 bucks I spend on it worth while. The sheeks too are suspiciously beefy, which so far north is a surprise. Beef or not that too should be tried.
On a quick last one, the Habitat Centre had a bengali food festival the last time I went there and they gave me this steamed fish wrapped in a banana leaf. Don't know what it's called but sure liked it enough to believe that fish can be eaten.
So what's left? I still need to try the Chicken Lababdar at Moti Mahal in the M Block market, I need to try fish at Ploof, non Mughlai UP cuisine at Nand Lal Dhaba and maybe a couple more that I can't quite remember. Till then, bon appetit.

MMM

2007-04-20T19:19:00.000+05:30

As life dawdles along at a pace mostly set by forces out of one's control, we attempt to blog again. We'll kick things off with the usual quote from the QDB.
In our anal retentive manner here goes :
So this doctor goes to the bank and when asked to sign a cheque reaches into his pocket and pulls out a rectal thermometer. He begins to attempt a signature when he realises his error and mutters, "Damn! Some asshole's got my pen."

That one done with, a random saunter through the campus in the intolerable heat of this afternoon found yours truly in front of a Littmann stall. The makers of probably the world's best stethoscopes are offering a small discount to buy more such acoustically enhanced devices. Turns out that there's a new one in the market. An electronic one. With noise cancelling. Like the Bose headphones I've spent half my adolescent life drooling over. Noise cancelling stethoscopes had to be the last straw till further perusal of the brochure revealed that one can record up to 6 tracks of heart sounds. Then they can be beamed across using IR or some such sperm immolating radiation to a computer. Then the sounds are converted into a phonocardiogram and played back at half speed or double or just analysed by the software. Of course volume controls are present as are soft ear pieces and the trademark Littmann diaphragm. Just when I was thinking that they couldn't do much more...
Read it all.

That's just about all we have time for but before we go here's the parting quote.
Since the invention of the Internet, the rotation of the earth has been primarily fueled by the spinning of English teachers in their graves.

Adios and kudos to technology.

Darwin Revisited...

2007-04-10T21:54:00.000+05:30

I remember many moons ago having dealt extensively on the laws of Darwin and how simple observation of turtles, mutant or otherwise and the fact that de-tailed rats did not beget rats in detail it was decided aboard the Beagle off the coast of the Galapagos that stupid people ensured our survival by killing themselves in the absurdest of manners. The Darwin Awards.
And many moons ago I also remember waxing eloquent on the sorry state of an auto driver who had a bottle stuffed where the sun apparently didn't shine.
In a strange amalgamation of these two we present two absolute cretins who graced the Emergency last night.
Names have been kept confidential since I don't remember them but with all due respect for privacy you pervs don't get to see any pics.
Ladies and Gentlemen, if you've all digested your meals I'd like to present exhibit A.
Moron child of the decade. Was playing at a car repair shop with other moron children of the decade. So these representatives of the not-so-full-decks decided to fool around (like they were capable of anything else) with the high pressure air hose. Threatened, hopefully in jest, the initial moron child, with introduction of the hose where, you got it, the sun don't shine. Now I think it was survival instinct that made the protagonist of this story get into some kind of scuffle, which ended with him developing a rent in his scrotum. Just the skin. Now this bit of the skin is continuous with that of the anterior abdominal wall the deeper layers are not and are attached in and around the groin. So if this layer is inflated at 60 psi, in a matter of a few seconds moron child develops subcutaneous emphysema that freaks everyone in Casualty out before someone decides to take a good history.
So ends story one... nothing exceedingly untoward, the boy recovered and is under observation. but like dealing with the mafia, a slip could have landed the hose in deep shit. And the boy.
Exhibit B is a tad more stupid.
But before we launch into the gory details of this expendable specimen of the race one has to ponder why is it that we as surgeons, and on a broader scale as doctors subjected to events and people who force us to keep a straight face when all we want to be doing is rotfl. Much as I detest that word, it does manage to describe what we'd like to be doing, in the most insensitive manner and thus bringing the hounds of hell on ourselves.
Exhibit B was wheeled in to Casualty and placed in a discreet corner, not 20 minutes after exhibit A's spectacular entry. This one at a glance appeared to be your average peri-pubescent imbecile with two legs, a penis and what appeared to be a toilet brush sticking out of his nether. On closer examination we found he had 2 legs, a penis and a toilet brush (with the handle in the inside) sticking out of his nether. Turns out that his friends told him that it was a fun thing to do. Loosely translated, of course, from "mazaa aaega".
A great mind once said that stupidity is a problem that'll solve itself if we took the safety labels off of everything.
A greater mind said that every new and improved idiot proof product will give rise to an new and improved idiot.
On a complete aside a small voice says that the chom problem is just about beginning to take care of itself.

Dry Spells

2007-04-07T11:06:00.000+05:30

No jokes.
Flashes of inspiration apparently come at all times, rather at any time. When least expected. And when there is no paper or pen to jot down the thought in an anal retentive way and speaking into a phone to record the elusive idea is a consummation I haven't devoutly wish'd for yet.
So as I was waiting for an Oncologist friend with a ward full of high profile cancers and thus a rather unpredictable schedule, I found myself seated on a pavement, helmet in hand. Having carefully juxtaposed myself between two dessicated betel stains on the sidewalk, I figured this could be a long and boring wait before we actually got off to watch 300.
Again.
No more movie raving and glorifying what I now call aesthetically appealing violence and bloodshed. I am a surgeon. Gore doesn't disgust me, at least not as much as Bush does. Make what you want of that cruel pun with substantial innuendo (it's bringing up rather disgusting interpretations every time I read it.)
There are things about Delhi I like. The Metro, the food (except when someone tried passing off some buffalo meat as tenderloin), the fact that if one has enough money to run the air-conditioner and refrigerator for 6 months and a heater and electric blanket for another 6, how women are out with summer clothing, the fact that I can get a vascular instrument set at 2AM and an extra ventilator or a contrast CT.
And there are others I dislike. A large percentage of the people, referring patients to SJH due to a lack of beds, fat men in tight flashy clothes, signs that one should not spit here - in English (why?) and hindi (what's the point?) surrounded by the aforementioned dessicated paan stains.
And there's stuff that I'm not sure about such as Dry days. Very ambivalent am I.
Alcohol in any form is only sold via government stores in Delhi. So every gazetted holiday (72 this year I think) there is no booze sold. The Government also randomly assigns dry days where one can't get a beer even at restaurants. Pre-elections is a good example. Delhi was dry from 5PM on the 3rd to 5PM on the 5th. And on Good Friday and today. Today to apparently allow people to count votes in sobriety. So that left 5 hours between 5 and 10 on the 5th where everybody decided to get drunk, fall off an assortment of vehicles, assault each other with a battery of weapons and land up at casualty making my night miserable.
The downside of course is that I can't obviously drink on such days unless I drive to Faridabad, Gurgaon or Noida. The good bit is that there's a statistically significant reduction in the influx of cases on such days.
Have been listening to Shine by Take That. Don't judge me. Listen to the song. Mike (I think) Owen's fronting them this time around. Welcome change.
For a parting bit of entertainment read this. And then this.

Law of the Land

2007-03-30T09:08:00.000+05:30

The Blue Billion is thankfully back to square one with it's prodigal eleven sequestered in undisclosed safe houses with black cats and other creatures of voodoo significance prowling the nights around them.
Bob Woolmer was killed by either the mafia, the bookies or a particularly irate fan. Or so the speculations go. Greg Chappell is still alive so it rules out the irate fan. And we have enough of them. The demand for donkeys has sky rocketed in Bihar and it's hard to imagine that they'll ever run out of donkeys. And the coach's existence also brings about the lack of bookie or mafia involvement. Which means what we all have suspected for quite a while is true - that sachin, sehwag and the rest of the nitwits no longer have it in them to play cricket.
Now that we've established that why are their ads still running on TV and in print. Especially that disgusting one where Sachin lends his voice to Reliance to read out the score. Now of all the things about the man, the last thing I want to be exposed to is his voice. And if I were him I wouldn't want my voice to be heard reading out Bangladeshi scores as they plant their flag deep in the arena of international cricket.
Cricket fever is finally gone and the Supreme Court has squashed Arjun Singh's grand plans. Amidst riotous revelry is an irate idiot of a HRD minister and the Left front claiming the SC's questioning of the 1938 demographic statistics was irrelevant.
Our dear Health Minister has been shown a moonie by the courts too. And if there's one thing the Times of India has done right it's that the only thing missing from their file photo of Anbu to complete the picture are a couple of horns and a forked tail. About time. Not that AIIMS is running wonderfully well but the last thing it needs some some cretin like Anbu rushing in with a spanner to throw into the works.
Forseen circumstances are forcing me to stop now and give up control of the laptop. Adios.

Summer is here by the way.

Break....

2007-03-26T12:19:00.000+05:30

I detest these long breaks from being able to write. I can often blame them on either the lack of a computer to write on, or wrist pain from trying to sms a post or the unreliable sify connection. Mostly it's because I haven't a thing to write about. Strange, ye all say. Not at all. Considering I'm all through with complaining about both Delhi, AIIMS and the Chom assortment that plagues my life as of now. Now I go back to being amused often loudly and in-their-face.

Night duties have been filled with either Sardars affronted when someone innocently asks if it's finally past 12 o clock in order that a break may be taken, 30 odd students of the KSO (read some newspaper for more information) ordered by court to be treated at AIIMS since they were apparently not given the required attention at RML (another local hospital). And considering they were under police custody after trying to enter the parliament protesting the arrest of their brethren back in Manipur. It was all good till we needed to admit a couple of them (which we actually may not have if there was no court order). Now we needed to keep them nil orally and they wanted to eat pork. From Koopchand at CP which is apparently certified free from tapeworms. Mental note to check the place out. In the end of course the KSO stalwart had to settle for a glucose drip and six policemen to ensure that he didn't take the next bus to pork land.
Speaking of tapeworms I've decided to make it known that I shall avoid Pepsi since the blue billion debacle. In any case, the pesticides in Coke are far superior in ridding the gut of the occasional infestations.
Fort Minor plays in the background and despite many accusations of not growing up and listening to angsty nu metal I still like that music. I can list cutting edge production, incredible recording, nice use of mixers and turntables as reasons but I'm going to stick to simply the fact that the man/men have a neat sense of putting words in rhyme and rhythm and generally getting me in a good mood.
Continuing in my flight of ideas and musical genre, the grandparents left happy due to a cartload of cds that we bought a few days ago and the play list now has Rashid Khan - Brindavani Sarang, Kishore Amonkar - Todi and Ahir Bhairav, Hariprasad Chaurasia - Pilu and Lalit and Brindavani Sarang and finally Gangubai Hanagal - Behag. And the winner is Gangubai. I've never heard her before, live or recordings, and she is simply divine.
As usual posts on classical music come with the disclaimer that prevents (theoretically) commenters from taking my trip about what I think.
Finally in a show of either surprising secularism or insight we find this on a bottle of Jim Beam, Kentucky Bourbon. Now either we acknowledge that Urdu is a secular language and one of the greatest tragedies is associating it with any religion or we acknowledge that alcoholism is a problem that all irrespective of caste, creed, religion and tribe face.

300.

2007-03-19T14:28:00.000+05:30

I remember the day Mr D posted, drooling over the fact that they were to make another Frank Miller graphic novel into a movie. And after what they did with/to Sin City it was a just a matter of watchful waiting or waitful watching as the case may have been. Decided at the spur of the moment to make my otherwise pointless life a tad interesting by taking off to the local PVR after a good session at TGIF.
300 is stunning. It's a treat visually. Apparently filmed almost entirely on blue screen with the backdrops being added from the book itself, it also has a sort of sepia filter on all the colours. Blood (oodles of it) is dark red to black and unlike Apocalypto doesn't trigger the wave of nausea that often accompanies such hemorrhage on screen. The fights are beautifully choreographed and the soundtrack kicks in perfectly.
The film has been dogged with controversy with the Iranians screaming murder at the depiction of their erstwhile civilization as barbaric. There is also an undertone of the Greeks fighting for democracy and logic against a vastly barbaric Asian invasion. And then there are others who aren't quite sure whether Xerxes represents George Bush or Terrorism.
The day people stop drawing oblique analogies to real life while trying not to enjoy an otherwise landmark in film making will be a day of joy and feasting for us all. Of course one did have to deal with a hundred odd choms whistling every time a decapitation occurred or a bare breast appeared and some even when the obviously androgynous Xerxes came along.
The only disappointment was that Lena Heady who plays the Queen of Sparta was seen with a spear and shield and copious blood in some picture I got of the net, but didn't actually do any fighting. Like I often say, there is something about women with weapons as long as a) they're on screen b) they aren't Jennifer Garner or Halle Berry and c) they aren't after me. Before some smart alec decides to brandish ol' Mrs Bobbit to my... face.
In other interesting bits and pieces, Bacardi has this dark dark rum called Bacardi Black and the TGIF here in Delhi kindly stocks it. A large of that drink on the rocks is heaven. Makes one wonder why the old casks, monks, smugglers etc even exist.

Rant.

2007-03-14T07:04:00.000+05:30

Aborted a post. Then wrote one. On paper with a pen. Tossed around with the idea of transcribing it and ditched that too. Read about Stephen Fry on wikipedia off my phone. Which I must say continues to surprise me. Mostly by vibrating in my pocket when I least expect it but occasionally by allowing me to check where some errant courier is (en route apparently) and also reading bash.org every morning on the pot. Though I know and feel deep down that there are many whose lives would go on just as before and maybe even a tad better if they didn't know that detail it is still cool. I recently found that this blog had replaced a newspaper as someone's crap-read so to speak. Now again I know and feel that there maybe some who think a crap read is one that would have been better if not read at all and that I too should feel chagrin that my opus-es are relegated to lavatories. But nay, I think I shall stay happy that what I write eases someone's morning. Again I was going to say passage but then that's way to graphic for even me.

Maybe I'll GPRS his blog in the midst of my sojourns.

Applications for the next set of exams are out. The good part is that seems to be my only ticket out of this place. The bad part is that this time around there are only 5 seats on the bus. And one's in CMC which may just decide to go ahead and give it to a believer. No qualms about that considering they mention it very boldly in their bulletin. They also allow one to apply online, which due to some inadvertent press of an enter key I've botched up so now I eagerly wait their reply to tell me how I may redeem myself from eternal purgatory. Nimhans is up as is PGI within a couple of days of each other hinting at travel at the speed of anxiety. AIIMS has no seats which makes me occasionaly feel like a jackass but then my paycheck comes and I shut up and sink into my prostitution without complaint.

This post has gotten too ranty for my liking but nothing funny's been happening. My apologies.

Swank.

2007-03-09T13:54:00.000+05:30

Not Hillary of the Boys don't Cry but I can make 'em by knocking their teeth out in the second round 'cos I'm worth a Million Dollars Baby, fame. Just the root of the word 'swanky'. It's 2 pm and I'm reeling from the effects of a reasonably bad night at work and way too much caffeine but this is the one chance I have to get at the laptop, so here I am.
Why the one chance? The owner's not back yet but others more needy than I need the keys to surf the waves of information albeit in bits and pieces. But I'm ranting. The flight of ideas is primarily due to the fact that I'm incapable at the moment of sticking to an idea for longer than 30 seconds. That apart I'm ok.
The powers that be took pity on me and some thirty others and offered us rooms at the new Trauma Centre, about a mile away from AIIMS. The mile is a small issue when compared to the flashy, swanky as of now pleasantly cool rooms that exist there. It's a nice large single room with an attached bath and a little balcony. Furnished with a computer table, a revolving chair (to make my attempts at pursuing academic excellence a little roundabout, so to speak), a book shelf, a bed (with a mattress, this is a new one) and Godrej look alike. Just what do you call those things? Steel cupboards? Almairahs? So I'm finally bereft of the pigeon brood, which incidentally is now a brood and not just potential omelets. And in good time too for as of now the little things are quiet but they are rumored to have the highest decibel to size ratio at the age of ten days. I'm also potentially looking at a death-trap in summer due to a rather poor ventilation and little provision for installing electricity consuming, ozone depleting rented air conditioners. But that might be offset by some eco-friendly architecture.
So this is the time for all good men to come to the aid of getting through to something substantial in the coming months and not getting comfortable in the luxury of a room, butter chicken and a substantial paycheck.
Next up if nonsense doesn't come my way, Kareem's in Old Delhi and a meat extravaganza like no other.

Holi ko unholi kar de...

2007-03-04T14:20:00.000+05:30

Yeah I know I'm losing it. When the title's in hindi, the cry goes around, as Psmith would say, that Quietly Amused's finally been found cackling in a strait-jacket in a Padded cell. Again something Wonko would wax eloquently about for hours on end. But yeah somehow the spirit of the festival that permeated this part of the world has stayed off me as have the riot of colours.
It started at one am last night and thankfully there's only so much the average human body can endure before lapsing into a tired sleep. So more than 24 hours hence the campus is finally quiet. And no body's trying to waylay me and paint me in that particularly stubborn gold spray that they seem to have invented this time around. The heavy metal content of the various shades that are used is disturbing to an extent but unfortunately a single exposure once a year is not sufficient to cause any lasting damage. In any case I think the jokers here are so used to pollution that their bodies would take more abuse without batting the proverbial eyelid.
The current obsession though is Superstition by Stevie Wonder who in my mind is finally out of the I just called to say I love you mould. Amazing how the worst songs become the most popular. And the Nokia Nseries theme. Not the Moby one, the one with all the drums. Does anyone know what track that is? Can you mail it to me? I will be eternally grateful.
In other news my hostel allotment is held up due to the unfortunate emptying of the printer cartridge. Which means depending on the speed of a Government Procurement Agency, I'm either going to be in a swanky room with an attached bath and rumored central air conditioning, or have screeching hatchlings courtesy the pigeons.
I'm also officially a whore now. I'm doing a job that I don't quite like, with no apparent future, with the risk of HIV with every client, for a pay that's reasonably good. The accounts department here works the best apparently.
So last night, the period between the first half of this post and a couple of sentences ago was a nightmare. People drunk on alcohol, bhaang, both or assorted psychedelic substances came to the Emergency in droves along with the people that they'd beaten up and run over and it was only the collective state of inebriation that stopped them from continuing whatever fights they had outside, in the hospital. There's something seriously flawed in a society that wants to douse the average passerby in colour and when met with opposition proceeds to douse him anyway and then beat his head in with a brick. It's times like this I wish I could buy a month's supply of water, store it and then drown a few monkeys in the water supply. Or wish that small amounts of exposure to the colours used here had lasting damaging effects. The ward was a sea of trolleys with patients of every hue, thus also making it impossible at times to identify who was who and occasionally what was what. This hopefully is only an annual occurrence but one can never really be sure.
The highlight of the day though was lunch at the AP Bhavan, which is like the Andhra Pradesh Embassy in Delhi. Full meals. With Gongura. Heaven.
I need sleep now and maybe a hot bath in any order so Ta.

Fry and I

2007-03-02T11:33:00.000+05:30

More benevolence and a slack schedule finds me here yet again. The friend in question's gotten himself a 12" Toshiba. Not a Vaio... Well that means I get to use this for a few days more and post away. Wonko, or Wanker depending on time and inclination has more posts in the last couple of weeks than I do. And this is not a consummation to be wish'd as Hamlet muttered after that eternal quandary about things being and not being.
I've been reading Paperweight by Stephen Fry and it's been a joyride to date. Does come with a Statutory warning that reading more than two essays at a stretch is inadvisable but those two essays usually leave me rolling on the floor laughing. ROTFL, get it? Anyway he says that Shakespeare never said anything. It was all his characters and while quoting one should ideally reference the character and give due credit to Lady Macbeth for example when washing hands. He also mentions sentences that end with 7 prepositions and palindromes with oscillate and generally has a ball... or two.
There is also a transcript of a Sherlock Holmes story hitherto unpublished and also not quite proven to be the result of Watson's hand (notice the credit giving habit extends beyond William). An interesting tale with a rather fun twist at the end. Lay your hands on it people. It is worth it.
In another reference to Wonko, you'll notice that his new posts are all about photoblogging from his fancy new phone that's effectively a camera that you can make calls and send sms's from. It is then that I realized that I hadn't gloated about my phone in a while. Not that anything new has been discovered on it but what I did do was ride in the metro with the earphones in listening Bela Fleck and Dave Matthews Band, making like the advertisement - I (sony) my long commute. The sad part is the Metro will take another few years to link South Delhi by which time I will either be out of here or dead due to over exposure to bhangra.
In other great ironies that plague my life, Petrol is apparently cheaper now and my car is too below the tropic of cancer for it to make any difference to my life.

Trauma and the like

2007-03-01T12:18:00.000+05:30

Damn it's good to be on a keyboard again. And a nice Toshiba laptop at that. Now I'll let you all imagine that I struck gold for a bit. ... . I didn't it's a friend's who's kindly left for a two week trip to to Seattle to settle scores with certain gates that didn't let him through to whatever he wanted to do. And he plans to buy himself some slim, trim Vaio or some such. So here I am Toshiba-ing away. I can feel the beginnings of a bad Toshiba joke bubbling away but I'll spare my small but significant sane side the agony.
It's almost a month since I landed up in Chomland and my take on it sadly is unchanged. My Jane Goodall feeling persists as does my intense displeasure at the vagaries of the weather and the people. Had someone asking me a week ago if I'd learnt hindi from watching movies considering "in the south" they don't take too kindly to hindi. If only they knew what chom meant... So I had to politely in my stingiest voice point out that much as we might not like it we are taught the national language in school. I then proceeded to daydream about punching their shocked faces in.
C'est, they say, la vie.
But on the upside, summer's starting soon.
That's not the real upside, my pigeons, which according to Wikipedia incubate their eggs for 18 days are coming to the end of that period.
Which again reminds me of this nondescript shop at Kadrenhalli Cross in good old Bengalooru that had some emaciated, marinated birds boldly advertised as teetar tandoori. Now I'm not quite sure if that's a parrot or a pigeon and almost anyone I ask has a tendency to avoid answering the question by breaking in to song. You must have heard it, "teetar ke aage do teetar..." It's only the thought of June back home that's keeping my from going on to some homicidal rampage. For those of you who play chess and unreal tournament, the next time you play the board game, capture 6 or seven of your opponents pieces continuously and then in the deepest voice you have say, "killing spree". Thank you bash.org for that.
Ok to point of it all is that I've suddenly realised a few things. One, that trauma is a good place to be as long as you're on the other side if you get what I'm saying. Oh on a small aside, when I told someone that I was going to be working in trauma they asked me why I would encroach on a psychologist's territory. It took me a while to figure that a traumatized person needn't have been in an accident.
Back to the points in question. Trauma/ER shifts are excellent for many reasons. The whole I'm a surgeon, I save lives line that I borrowed from Grey's Anatomy and use to evoke alternating awe and disgust from the world at large, is largely true in the ER. The golden hour, though a fine theory, is rarely followed in the real world. Patients land up usually at 55+ minutes which as one can imagine gives us five or so minutes to do what we can. Which at least here is quite a bit.
The adrenaline rush apart, once the shift is done, there's absolutely no concept of a follow up. Which I love. Every shift has new patients, no wards where there's a chance of seeing patients for days or weeks on end, no discharges or case notes to constantly update and thus no boredom.
Yeah I'm insensitive.... Sue me.

Pigeon holed.

2007-02-17T12:11:00.000+05:30

It seems I'll post whenever I can find a computer, ten minutes and an idea. Irrespective of how bad the post will be. Why? Simply because much as I think my phone and it's ability to interact with the Internet at any level from simple mail checks to telling me route information of the Delhi Metro to even USC 2257 approved material, I get tired of typing mails on a little keypad. And watching the Internet in little 2x3 inch bits. (bits, Internet ha ha). So here I am on this really cool laptop that has a screen that's bigger than the desktop back home and apparently is one of those wide screen things so when you watch Lord of The Rings on DVD you actually get to see the lone orc wanking off the normal screen. And some people will make quiz questions on that. Like what's his name? Was he of the White Hand of Saruman or the Eye of Sauron or just some freelance bystander turned on by all the carnage?
The rambling is due to many reasons. One, just outside my window two pigeons have decided to roost. Thus for the past few days I've seen them bring twig after twig akin to the little drops of water making oceans, and put together a nest and then in one flash of movement do the needful. There are now 3 eggs in that nest. I had initially planned pigeon omelets but they're just too damn small to make anything substantial. And too common to be touted as a delicacy a la caviar. Now I dread the time in the next few weeks when they'll hatch and all day and most of the night some fledgling squealing is going to drive me up the wall. Watch this space then. Or maybe not.
Second I haven't slept after last night's tryst in the emergency. Not that it was life-savingly busy but yeah got a few brownie points. The most frustrating is having to bump patients across (vide previous posts) after some aggressive resuscitation.
Third is Delhi and it's intense insanity. Like some moron who ran into a glass door. Like the Saint Gobain advertisements we all laughed at. He did. And despite every instinct to whack him across the head and ask him what he thought he was looking at I had to scan his head and surprisingly enough he seemed to have an intact brain.
And then at three I heard a sound that television and occasionally real life have taught me signifies a potential sight for sore eyes. High heels clicking on mosaic tiles.
Sound followed. Ugly unpolished pointy leather shoes found attached to chom man. Thus the angst.
Have this cool plan to get Bangalore's fashion gurus and force them to watch the common man here. Hopefully they'll die of apoplexy. Or something.

And then some...

2007-02-13T22:06:00.000+05:30

Somehow my life revolves around monkeys. I'm tempted to say evolves too but that is apparently is hotly disputed in circles of intelligentsia in the city and out. Delhi's been a difficult place to adjust to. The weather, the people, even the language to an extent. But the one thing I've never had trouble with is food. Between my tapeworms and commensal bacteria it's almost always been good with the pipes. But the past week has been one of cramps and the unmentionables and yesterday I was informed that they found a dead monkey in the water supply.
Cringe people who read this. I did too.
Then I figured it was too late to purge, one way or the other and there was nothing to do but hope that chlorine is as good as they say it is.
Then I wondered for a moment if this was a good way to rid the world of them that live in and around "medical". Then I had to rush to the facilities.
It's been cold and raining for the past few days here and like Russia, the met department's been blaming some western cause for the muck that I have to wade through to get to work. There are moments of wonderful bright sunshine that drive the pigeons that are trying to build a nest in my window out into the open. I'm tossing the idea of pigeon egg omelets in my head but will just board up the window I guess.
All the preamble about my otherwise miserable life done with, the highlight of the past two days has been the serendipitous discovery that Thermal was playing less that ten minutes from Medical. And since I went there, the discovery that they can cover any band. Over twenty minutes they went seamlessly from Rush, U2, RHCP, Aerosmith, Stevie Wonder (Superstitious, can you believe it!), Dire Straits and maybe another couple which I can't remember and finally finished up with Stairway to Heaven. And they ended the show with Sunset Man. Joy to the world.
And the central government employees though are not paid well subsist on the many allowances that are permissible. For example, the hostel I live in is about five minutes away from the gate of Medical and thus "outside" the campus. Which means them that live there are eligible for conveyance allowance. Which is good. What is better is that I'm given 4.30 meters of white cloth and Rs 130/- to get myself two white coats to induce hypertension. I'm good with that. Aren't you?

Monkey Business

2007-02-08T07:46:00.000+05:30

So I spend most of my days surrounded by monkeys. Real monkey monkeys and chom monkeys. To the extent that I now feel a bit like Jane. Goodall not Tarzan. "Choms like chimps have personalities too. They may all look the same the first time but soon one realizes that each has it's own identity. See this one's called Raj..."
No it's not so bad. But a little exaggeration hurt only the boy who cried wolf. But I am surrounded by specimens. Close encounters happen every other day. Some heart warming some decidedly scary. Like take for example this little runt who works across in the pediatric casualty. Five foot nothing, juvenile and his hair is in the same state of disarray every day. And by the same state, every single strand is out of place in the same angle, so to speak, every single day. And he's mad. Been around for a couple of years in pediatric casualty. QED perhaps.
Or another guy in medicine who saw me condemning a patient to acrossness (more about that) with flourish using a parker ink pen decided that I deserve better and should be gifting me a sheaffer sometime today.
Or people who randomly accost you while roaming lost in the bowels of aiims to show you the way, or those who'll bump into you while you have an 18G needle because they couldn't care less.
The past few days at the job have raised many a lofty thought on health care that in retrospect I think are meaningless. It's bad enough that I now realize that a single health care policy wouldn't work in this country, I now think that it won't even work in a single hospital.
AIIMS is the premier medical institute in the country. At the apex of it all. Does it make sense for it to have a casualty and accident and emergency services? Shouldn't it be a tertiary referral institute. And only do stuff that "lesser" institutes can't. Chitra in Trivandrum and SGPGI at Lucknow already function that way. But we have a casualty. Then shouldn't we be doing it justice. Or be doing the patients justice considering we don't have a choice regarding the presence or absence of emergency services. On an aside their presence is what brought me here so I shouldn't be cribbing.
As one enters the casualty one sees in big bold letters a board that states that it is a policy in this hospital to not admit patients once all the beds are full. Which they almost always are. So no matter who it is, and delhi is filled with politicians of all shapes and sizes, if there are no beds then there is no admission. So a substantial number of patients are "acrossed" to Safdarjung Hospital. It's pretty hilarious once you get used to it but till then you, like me can feel bad about the 2 patients an hour that Safdarjung has agreed to admit if sent from the institute.
But we have a 24 hour coffee shop and a General store that will procure anything (from mats to sleep on to USB LAN cards). We have half a dozen CTs that run almost 24/7, central lines for free in casualty, ventilators if required, good patient load and frequent resuscitations. Some of whom survive to be acrossed or icued.
It's a good hospital. And I'm learning to like it.

And to make the title valid this here are the lyrics to Bebot by the Black Eyed Peas. (Goofy, if you're reading this, enjoy!)

TEST BLOG

2007-02-04T09:36:00.001+05:30

So this is how one Blogs with predictive text and the risk of sms
thumb. there seems to be an option to photo Blog will explore it.
cheers to technology.

Work in Progress.

2007-02-04T07:08:00.000+05:30

Those of you who came by yesterday and saw the title mobile blog and nothing else, my apologies. But I do hope to get that up and running in a couple of days. Work has begun in earnest and I'm back to being bored as hell. The hours are good. The work mind numbing but this as they say is the small step in the right direction. Nothing funny's happened out side of an MP who wanted to get someone he knew admitted. When we pointed out that the hospital policy was to only admit if beds are available he went on a ranting spree till we pointed out that he was of the policy making ilk...

Somehow think that the double standards that politicians lay down for themselves are an unfortunate fallout of a pseudo communist regime. Not that it doesn't happen in capitalist/democratic states, but just feels so commie when that happens.
My phone continues to amaze and impress me. In fact the more I'm disillusioned with the apex of health care in this country, the more I love my phone. There is of course one small problem. No network has a signal strong enough in the hospital. Except for MTNL which has a tower bang in the middle of the campus and in exchange gave the hospital mobile phones instead of pagers. As a friend says, how cool is that?
This evil conspiracy ensures that when at work the mobile isn't a distraction anymore.
Thus if called and found unreachable I'm at work. Mail me instead.
Between gmail's mobile friendly version and opera mini I think I should be able to blog from the phone. that would revolutionise things.
Nothing else blogworthy. Adios.

Ready? AIIMS... DAAG - The Fire

2007-02-02T06:27:00.000+05:30

Dear God,
I do know that I don't believe in you and often our interactions are by proxy to say the least. All I want to know is if the last two days of running from pillar to post at the apex of the Indian Health care system is any indication of things to come in both life and afterlife.
Eagerly anticipating your reply.
Sincerely yours.

Crazy kiya re only. So the academic section will not let me join till I'm declared medically fit before 12.30 PM. The medical officer will not see me till I get my urine tested (before 10 AM) and xRay done. And ENT and Eye are cursory but essential. And after all the running around over the past 48 hours, today, apparently might just be the big day.
Notwithstanding the fact that there is no accommodation. There hasn't been for six months. Married residents have a year's waiting list, which is reason enough to not indulge in handkerchief-pandkerchief. And it looks like it's sardines for a few days.
Then again there's the bright side. here's a shot albeit fuzzy, of the many fuzzy companions in Aiims.

All along...

2007-01-25T07:17:00.000+05:30

... the watchtower, Princes kept their view...

This is the only Bob Dylan song that I really trip to. Somehow along with the Beatles, the Who, Rolling Stones, Dylan is also around in the list of music that I haven't heard and more importantly don't listen to. With Bob, if he'd pardon the familiarity, it's his voice that drives me up the wall. He is a brilliant poet and a musician, granted. I've even liked Axl's screeching on Knocking on Heaven's door, surprised folks by knowing the lyrics of Times they are a'changing (Simon and Garfunkel version) and of course sworn by the Dave Matthews Band cover of All along the Watchtower (which with the violin and sax solos beats even Hendrix's, then again my take).

That version is what we successfully assasinated. Note to self: check new guitar strings for tuning after every song. And some men can growl, some can't. I lean to the right of that sentence. Don't feel like going on about how I'll miss bangalore (as opposed to how I want to do miss bangalore) and how I hate Delhi (though I'm guessing I'll want to do miss delhi too) so I'll leave you with this video. Be patient and wait till it gets to the chorus.

The bell...

2007-01-18T21:10:00.000+05:30

... tolls for me. It turns out that whatever administrative issue AIIMS was having with it's Senior Resident posts has been sorted out and Dispatch has finally gotten around to matching the numbers with the faces and addresses. And if I take what certain well placed sources have had to say seriously, I came close to being a victim of Arjun Singh's vote bank politics. But since most stories have to be taken with appropriate condiments we'll leave it at that.
The downside of it all is that I have about 10 days left in Bangalore. Bengalooru. Whatever. That's not half as bad as I have 10 days before I reach Delhi. Which is scary. The goodbyes, the I'll miss you, this place and the beer and the music are again bad but what is wrenching the gut is the thought of dealing with a swarms of humanity that I've dissed as long as I remember. The good part however is that Neurosurgical Trauma involves people who to a large extent are incapable of speaking coherently. Either due to alcohol or due to the head injury due to the alcohol. Now if I were a less conscientious doctor I'd have figured it would be a good thing to leave them in a state where they can't talk and ruin my life. Instead I'm going to have to scan their brains and set them right. But this is something I've always wanted to do so I'll just not crib about the where.
Polyglyph had their first show, well attended by friends and family as most first shows are. We were as Mr. D has said thus. Here is a short preview. So if you like us and we have another show and you either get a mail or read about it here feel free to drop by. Of course considering I'm heading to higher latitudes that may not happen. Unless you like this so much that you want to sponsor another gig. Or get us to cut an album. I could give up cutting people for that. Or at least think about it. Anyway, enjoy.

Poly..who?

2007-01-13T07:34:00.000+05:30

...glyph but that comes later.

So this morning when I finally woke from some nightmarish sleep largely due to the fact that I'd left my lights on and dozed off while in the pursuit of academic excellence, I found a huge milkberg floating in the milk that was to contribute significantly to my coffee. It's still trying to melt and boil so large parts of this post are pre-caffeinated. And thus may be excused.
So a few weeks of constant practice has finally resulted in Polyglyph. For those less inclined to use dictionaries or the Internet it means 'many symbols', I'm sure Sapru would have a lot to say about that but that again is what comments are for. Polyglyph is not a feeling, an emotion or a movement. It's a band. Plain and simple. Four of us got together reaffirming that the world and Bangalore are small places and decided to make music. And since my remaining in this wonderful city has recently come under the shadow of the future we're moving hell and high water to get a gig. And so we have and more about that later.
Currently the Four of us are
Srijayanth - The only one who really knows music. Like KNOWS. Like he'll listen to a chord and pronounce judgment on it's minority and ninth-ness, map a killer solo to the frets and strings or the keys without having touched them. And get bored if we stay on a 4/4 beat for too long. Listens to Jazz (not even mainstream), Blues (black, not white) and the Beatles. Plays lead guitar on a LesPaul custom and keys on a Yamaha PSR. And knows truckloads of carnatic and bollywood.
Anant - Techie, mensan, drummer and occasional rhythm guitar. Shouldn't sing to save any lives but will hit the wrong note unerringly if allowed. Listens to Progressive anything from early Genesis (I know that sounds weird but it's true) and Tull to some many bands that gave me nightmares when I left them playing and dozed off. And also the Beatles. He's the man with the rhythm as long as it's complex. The 'riddim' on the other hand is what he seeks.
Umesh - Quiet as all bassists usually are, Umesh has had years of association with TAAQ so he's going to play well. He was supposed to sing a song before he swallowed a frog so as of now he's playing away on the strings of a low frequency. He listens to the Beatles too.
Yours truly - Rhythm and vocals. Which is good sometimes, bad sometimes and has banshee times. I don't listen to the beatles... or pink floyd. I've been caught listening to hiphop and glam rock and nu-metal and almost every genre of music that most 'rockers' consider to low on an evolutionary scale.
So this is it. Polyglyph.
And we have a show of mostly covers and a couple of originals tomorrow (14th). Evening (around 7pm). At YACS. You can find directions here.
So come along, we're planning to have fun and we hope you will too or at least enjoy the coffee.
Hope to see you there.
Cheers.

Eventuality.

2007-01-08T21:48:00.000+05:30

Ok here's a warning. This isn't a funny post. And today I'm not amused. Just Quiet.
Lost a grandparent this morning.
And it's been a grandparent losing week from what I hear.
Well to be fair, she wasn't someone I was close to, considering I used to meet her about once a year and in the recent past with even rarer frequency so I'm not devastated or anything. At the same time the morning was spent getting my dad a ticket to head to Vizag (as I'll always call it, along with Bombay, Madras, Calcutta and Bangalore) and then driving him through mind-numbing traffic trying to make the GoAir departure. And apparently that airline does exist and fly since he's reached.
Mind numbing traffic does do wonders. Completely blocks any semblance of thought and strangely can also be a time for quiet introspection and rationalization if looked at another way. Like sandpaper... can smoothen a rough surface and roughen a smooth. No, I just wanted to use that somewhere. But that isn't the point. The point is though I've learnt to deal with death in a clinically detached way at some point of time what it has taught me is to treat life with a reasonable amount of respect. The fact that life is ephemeral. That no amount of medical knowledge and surgical technique and bio-medical engineering can change that. That life will slip from one's grasp at a moment's notice.
And no one can do a thing about that.
All we can do is try with what we learn over the 12 odd years of structured medical education and that random classroom called medical practice.
But medicine and dealing with life and death is just one aspect of what's been running through my head. As I said this was a part of my family (reasonably close genetically at least) that I've lost and though this doesn't affect me as much as it would perhaps the people closer to her, what it does do is sharply pull the rug of comfort from under my feet.
The immortality complex that we develop along the course of our rather long education is something that cocoons all that are near and dear. We ostrich when we hear of their problems and refuse to acknowledge the fact that they grow old and a step closer to the end. Events like today's are sharp reminders of the inevitable and also augmenters of a helplessness that should be fought. For one's own sanity if not anything else.
So how does one wish that nothing goes wrong with the people one cares for knowing fully well that something will...
I need a stiff drink and some sleep. Night all.

2007

2007-01-02T07:05:00.000+05:30

Now before I launch into some drama about my resolutions and how they've never made too much sense to anybody outside of my conscience here's an interesting story.
The Airbus A320 has enough fuel loaded onto it to do close to 3500km. And maybe more. So when my materfamilias got onto the plane that was to fly her from Bangalore to Delhi in these turbulent times, little did she realise what she was in for. It turns out that the plane took off more or less on time, flew the perquisite distance and then hit a solid wall of fog that had successfully blanketed the entire NCR and made even CAT III systems ineffective. So the A320 with all the luggage and passengers did a 180 and flew, not to Jaipur, Ahmedabad or Lucknow or even Bombay but all the way back to Bangalore. It is therefore a well laden flight that the Wright Brothers would be proud of. No wonder the damn thing gets hijacked and flown to Azerbaijan every once in a while.
Saddam was assassinated by the US. The TOI for the first time in many years had a really nice write up on that. Tragic the world is becoming.
To matters on a lighter vein, it's a new year. Like the many that happened in the past and like all those years it's a time for joyous revelry and looking back and looking forward and looking back again and crossing the road sideways.
And once the hangover abates it's time to take stock of all the goof ups and decide which ones were simply too embarrassing to repeat and which are funny enough to do maybe once more before they get boring. Hence the resolutions. Had a couple of people call me up and swear to go off alcohol, but that's a recurrent theme in their lives and more so at this time of the year. Partysmart apparently doesn't work as well as it claims. Then again the makers of that 'erb didn't think of times when the 1st of January would be a holiday.
So I resolve not to grin in an evil fashion every time an ambulance howls past. The truth is, sorry as I feel for whoever is in the van, I'm laughing at the plight of the poor sod who's going to be woken up at 2 AM. I've been there. It's not a good time. And in the event that I get where I want to I'm going to have to do a lot of that and considering what goes around comes around I'm guessing this would be a good time to stop that practice.
I also resolve to build up the courage to eat teetar tandoori that I found at a shop near home. It doesn't look like much meat but it's a scary meat. Which brings me to how any meat is ok as long as it's advertised as an acceptable animal. Meat of Obscure/Unknown Origin that masquerades as beef/mince under the flyover on KR Market is a classical example and incredibly tasty.
I'm going to try and be nice to people in order to buy myself a ticket to heaven considering my job saving lives isn't enough.
Will try to be tolerant towards the north.
Will also try to keep this blog going.
The other resolutions either don't deserve mention, can't be followed or are simply too bizarre to be broadcast on a public forum.
Yawl have a good year ahead.

What Ails Ye

2006-12-30T19:48:00.000+05:30

www.indiangyan.com is a site that I came across about ten minutes ago while exploring a concept that I'd heard about. Onion (Allium cepa) it turns out is an aphrodisiac. Not just a regular one, the second best. Second to what you'll discover shortly. It's also been stuffed into mummies (the Tutankhamen kind, you perv), been the longest running tear-jerker for most housewives, though Ektaa thinks she can beat that record; sliced, diced, saute-ed, fried but never ever consumed before hitting the sack for some handkerchief-pandkerchief with the significant other when chocolate has failed.
The last thing I can imagine that's a turn on is sulphur breath. Horny, sulphur breath at that too. Anyway for those of you who're interested here's the excerpt from the aforementioned gyan site.

Onion is one of the most important aphrodisiac foods. As an aphrodisiac, onion stands second only to garlic. It increases libido and strengthens the reproductory organs. The white variety of onion should be peeled off, crushed and fried in pure butter. This mixture acts as an excellent aphrodisiac tonic if taken regularly with a spoon of honey on an empty stomach. The powder of black gram when dipped in the juice of onion for seven days and then dried, produces a mixture called kanji. This also acts an aphrodisiac.

More here.

Now if that bad enough the more perceptive of you would have realised is that at the zenith of all randy devices, more potent than rhino horn and tiger claw and the extract of a bull-elephant's prostate is Garlic. Allium sativum. The reek that chinese food gives you is apparently due to indigestible allyl methyl sulphide that seeps into the blood and then has to be gotten rid off by the lungs and skin. Leaving you smelling simply peachy for the better part of a day. The vampire myth is thence by simple extrapolation explained. That isn't the point.

This is. And if you don't feel like scrolling here goes.

Garlic is a natural and harmless aphrodisiac. Even Dr. Robinson, an eminent sexologist of America considered it so. It is a tonic for loss of sexual power from any cause, Sexual debility, impotency from over indulgence in sex and nervous exhaustion from dissipating habit. It is said to be especially useful to old men of high nervous tension and diminishing sexual power.

So Dr. Robinson lived a happy garlicked life, no longer bothered by the impotence of over-indulgence and the nervous exhaustion from dissipating habit. What in God's name is a dissipating habit? It had better not be what I think it is.

So all this came about when I realised that I didn't have any friends from school. Not from high school where I think I have the socially acceptable number of friends and acquaintances and voodoo doll needle stickers, but from kindergarten. Where apparently lifelong friendships take root, etc.
It turns out that my caretakers at the time (I'm not mentioning names here) used to fry a few cloves of garlic in good sesame oil and rub me down with the oil prior to a hot bath and feed me the fried cloves.
Every single day.
So I was the reeking randy four year old. No wonder no one stayed in touch.
More general garlic blade here.
Enjoy.

Season's greetings

2006-12-28T08:56:00.000+05:30

So some many things have happened.
Discovered the marinara and how to make it. Belted Mojitos at TGIF. Got held up for 2 hours on the runway in Delhi. And 2 and a half hours off it. Managed to drive my mom who was traveling with me, up the fuselage. And got all privileges revoked by telling her, at 37,000 ft, that if she didn't like my company she could go outside.
Discovered also this really irritating-incomplete-sentence style of blogging.
Jesus was born some 21 odd centuries ago. Merry Christmas. And no, I didn't get any Ginger Wine this year. I did get sozzled on that noxious potion they serve at Noon Wines, which incidentally should either be declared illicit or come under some serious scrutiny. It's the only red wine I can drink without getting the mother of all headaches and the only wine that gets me drunk with half a glass. These two premises make me wonder if it's actually the Claret that it claims to be.
Internet is now unlimited which means some insane amount of quasi-legal activity will happen from my IP.
In the usual ironic vein that I seem to flow in, I have probably less than 2 weeks to make full use of this gift. It would seem that the world has conspired and almost successfully gotten me to head from my cosy world down south to the dreaded Capital. For what might be eternity.
Now Delhi I've decided is not a city. Not even a state. It's the Mothership.
It landed some millenia ago and since then has been in the continuing mission to assimilate and be assimilated. In the hope, as usual, of taking over the world.
"Abey!! Resistance is futile!"
That apart I think I've been spending sleepless nights in the worry that I have to pack, leave, leave my amp (Akai) and speakers (Bose) (yeah I had to put that into my blog. Shantanu, stuff it!) behind and actually live in the new Trauma Centre that AIIMS is running.
I guess it should be fun.
Hell it's a new year after all.

Branding

2006-12-25T21:17:00.000+05:30

Because it fits well?

What will they think of next

Saving Grace.

2006-12-22T07:47:00.000+05:30

And my sojourn to this higher latitude and lower almost everything else place comes to an end. And shocking as it may seem to the many hardliners (viz authors of vitriolic comments on previous posts) who believe that I do not approve or even tolerate this part of the world, I have found many a saving grace.
The Delhi Metro.
Incredible.
Traveled the Blue line as they call one of the lines, the other is called the Yellow line (which reminds me of an old, gross joke). This particular one (blue) is elevated. And the stations are just 100m long extensions of the platform accessed by stairs, escalator or lift. The trains run in a 5 min frequency, are air conditioned and as of now relatively empty when compared to Bombay. I still didn't get a place to sit at 11 am but at least I wasn't held aloft by people and completely dependent on the movement of those around me to get out of the train. There is of course an annoying announcement that keeps repeating itself telling one to stay away from the doors and what the next station is and which side (of the coach) do the doors open. Which if not for the rather generic voice and intonation is much better than trying to guess if the next platform is on the left or right.
Connaught Place (CP, yeah.) is called Rajiv Chowk and is a two level station. The blue descends to about 15ft below ground level and if you want to take the yellow line - as always it's down under. Add another 15 to get close to 30ft below Delhi and find the Yellow Line to North Campus etc. Sources tell me that the Kashmiri Gate Station is a three level station, will visit it the next time.
The metro as of now is cheap (what would have cost me around Rs. 5/- by bus and close to 50 by Auto was Rs. 9/-) and quick (what would have taken me between half an hour and forty minutes, took between 1o and fifteen). It's frequent as I saw 3 trains whizz by while walking to the station (100 m away and I walk at 4.8 km/hr. Go Figure). The only issue with it is they haven't quite covered south Delhi and they aren't making too much money. Which makes me wonder if they two are related or if the government if going to hike the prices. The Commonwealth games are going to be held here and apparently a criminal amount of money has been sanctioned to making Delhi a city of international amenities. It's getting there.
The other thing that makes Delhi worth my while (ok Ego, down boy) is Butter Chicken. Often called the official bird of the NCR and a close contender with Tandoori Chicken for the title of national bird of Khalistan, this dish is the best thing I've had in years. It is with great shame that I realize that I spent many years of my life in darkness eating many variants of chicken in tomato sauce under the impression that it was butter chicken. All that's changed now. The rich tomato gravy, the succulent meat and the atherogenic butter...
Gar Firdaus bar roo-e-zaminast, Haminasto haminasto haminast
Shantanu and other specimens from here who object to my transliteration of Firdaus, stuff it.

Visions...

2006-12-19T07:11:00.000+05:30

This is what happens if the flight gets delayed and one has no entertainment
What better advertisement can one ask for...

I think H2Go is a funny name. And it's a bitch to take pictures in moving objects
For those of you who can read this. there is nothing funnier.

Will have to dig some more up if I can find them.

Enjai

Just Jobless...

2006-12-18T07:10:00.000+05:30

Ok so I was in Chandigarh for a few days for reasons I’ll elaborate on shortly. I’m still up north by the way, and all ye who believe that I’ve served my sentence; this would be a good time to actually get that petition up and signed. And may be even delivered.

Now Chandigarh is a joint that essentially survives because of the cumulative governance of the Punjab and Haryana State machinery. To that add the chaos of a Union Territory. And the extreme planning of Le Crow. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again that place is the epitome of how one can make a city so monotonously well planned it creates a serious antithesis in the head whether one wants to live there or not.

Rediscovered a Single Malt(Whiskey, you Philistines) there called Ardbeg. In a failing attempt to not sound the male equivalent of la-di-da, it’s a pale whiskey with an incredible peaty flavour, best probably diluted with an equal amount of water. For a bit, sitting on a friend’s terrace in a Chandigarh winter watching the stars and sipping on a glass of Ardbeg felt like some Persian poet thinking Agar firdaus bar rooye zaminast to haminast, to haminast, to haminast. Though with a few modifications in time place and person it could be another Persian poet content with a book of verse and a jug of wine but there was no one singing in the wilderness.

The Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh is one of those institutions set up like maybe the Missionaries of Charity and Tihar, by an act of Parliament. Thus it enjoys certain privileges, one of which is conducting it’s own entrance. A sop that thankfully Tihar doesn’t have. It would be the end of world when a jail started choosing it’s inmates. With guys getting rejected if they “passed their morality paper” or “turned out just too smart for here”.

The PGI (as it is fondly referred to by friend, foe, employee, auto-driver and patient) entrance is not just a test of knowledge. It’s one of endurance, patience and sheer nerve. The application process is by far the most complex. And one is never sure till the last moment that one is eligible. Then every once in a while you can pick up the hall ticket at the exam hall ten minutes before commencement. The exam itself is at 8 AM on a winter morning. In a freezing classroom on desks and chairs made for ten year olds. It thankfully lasts for only an hour and a half. After that all there is to do is wait in the midst of all that winter for the results. And for those of you who understand it, full AJM happened. For those of you who don’t it stands for akkan just miss and no I’m not explaining that further. So I wrote AIIMS over the weekend and I don’t know yet but it doesn't look too good.

Had a discussion with an uncle of mine over a bowl of mishtidoi and screw you if you don’t like my transliteration; about life, the universe, medicine, music and food. This is the food bit. So chaats, it turns out have been destroyed by the Punjabis and us Southies by the simple act of adding onions to them. So the Original Hing (Asafoetida) based Chaats got overshadowed by the Onion based Chaat like items (paav bhajji, for example) which apparently are favoured by teenage females of the human ilk. It might even be that the predilection that the aforementioned teenage females have for such items is related to hormones and their swinging. Teenage males may also be found flocking to the centres that sell such onion based chaat like items resulting in the illusion that such tastes are not gender specific. However, one must realize that such selective migration of males could primarily be due to the presence of teenage females in those areas in the first place.

And we win a hundred points for sheer joblessness.

AIIMS results tomorrow.

For more interesting images of up north wait a bit… on a dial up and can’t upload.

More north than I'd like to be

2006-12-11T16:36:00.000+05:30

Funny stuff that one can see do on trips to airports and distant lands.

Indigo, the airline, not the radio station. I can fill jars with bile vented as a result of the radio station that would make Ali Baba, the black sheep, bleat a hasty retreat. Their music is ok, it's western and occasionally that Putomayo world music hour gives me joy, but if they don't do something about the RJs then we might just go back to listening to Uppi approved Big FM.
Anyway IndiGo as they put it has nasty blue crowd control things. The 3' high metal cylinders connected with 2" strips of nylon? Yeah that's the one. IndiGo's is bright blue with "IndiGo No Red Tape" written all over it. Wanted to take a quick picture with the cool phone but I was already getting evil-eye from the security guard for laughing too loud.
Stare at the guy staring into the laptop. Not his laptop, the guy sitting next to him's laptop. And sue me for my grammar. When the guy looks up give him a raised eye brow.
Generally get shocked at the NCR and how things work there. Sometimes it's a rude shock that they do. But apparently they do. Been here at annual intervals and the infrastructure that gets built is simply amazing. They have a Metro now. The next cretin who goes weren't they always one, is going to get poked in the eye. And with some Commonwealth Games happening in a few years that's all the excuse they need to make the entire NCR look like the future. Except that every once in a while it feels like the planet of the apes. Like one woke up in some otherwise nice future except that there were monkeys all around.
Not being overtly nasty and communal but things do irritate me sometimes. The butter chicken makes up for it but not always.
All the Delhi rants apart been listening to this band called Advaita which apart from the usual bunch of bassists and guitars and the usual has a sarangi and a trained vocalist in hindustani... Like Scott Matthews who sounds like... like I need to listen to his stuff some more.
Leave for chandigarh tomorrow. More on that when I return over the weekend.
Peace out. Like they say sometimes.

NCR again

2006-12-10T09:59:00.000+05:30

Science fiction and Fantasy novels stopped being original after perhaps LOTR and Dune. Nowadays they try to be funny (like Terry Prachett) or extensive (like Robert Jordan). Robert Jordan. What can we say? Twelve books the size of the original facsimile edition of Grey’s Anatomy, another 3 planned, more characters and complexity than Ektaaaaa could ever conceive. But having read books one to nine, forgotten the story, reread 6,7,8,9 and read ten and found myself in more or less square one. I realize that I’m just another victim of some cruel publicity. And Robert Jordan has enough money to get his amyloidosis treated at the Mayo Clinic.

That apart he does say more often than not that the wheel of time spins the fabric of reality with men and women woven in to this continuum yada yada, now the only unfortunate offshoot of this is that a wheel does the spinning and so history can repeat itself. And so it does, every once in a while.

Like now I find myself in Delhi to write an entrance all over again. For Neurosurgery. Which should be interesting if and when I get through but ever so often I want to scream, “when will this all end.” And then I just go back to sipping my beer.

So here is the latest bunch of useless thoughts. Planes are cool. And old as I am I still want a window seat even though I ask for an aisle. And like to look at the flaps and slats and imagine falling out of the sky if the wings break off. And marvel and how humanity has progressed from watching birds, eating them mostly out of jealousy and then taming the skies and still eating birds. And one will never get a cute woman in the next seat. I even got an empty seat but no woman.

And need to get me a laptop.

The next thought I having to deal with the NCR for a couple of weeks. Not just the temperature, which for someone like from closer to the equator is pretty cold. Even though the locals are going, “Lovely warm winter - 12 degrees today.” I’m thinking, “@!%$!@#$ You’re kidding me…” But one can always find sheepskin or wolfskin jackets, baby seal gloves, mink lined shoes to keep one warm, it’s the natives I have an issue dealing with. Discovered a way to get that out of the picture too. Use Sony’s in-ear jams with the iPod. They’re those cylindrical, sit-in-your-external auditory meatus, deafen you, but cancel ambient noise and one-tenth the price of the Bose. So you can’t hear them and thus live in the denial that they don’t exist.

Went for a nice 40 minute walk in the cold this morning, listening to Jamiroquai on the aforementioned iPod-Sony combination. The one thought I had was to kill the guy who when Godzilla came out and I mentioned that Jamiroquai was interesting launched into some passionate Cesaresque speech on how the weird hat wasn’t quite where things were at that point of time. So I didn’t listen to more of that band till recently. And how I’m tripping on that stuff. Brilliant. As Mohayana would have said, “Full groovy da! Trippy only it is.” I agree. Despite reservations against the word ‘trippy’, Jamiroquai is a “Somewhere it is” band. And the natives of the NCR were treated to splendid display of me grooving to Dynamite. Whatever shocks them.

Wisdom yet again...

2006-12-02T09:30:00.000+05:30

Sources of Wisdom in the world are often not evident to the untrained eye. One must be a seeker of wisdom to find it. Unlike opportunity, this particular entity may not even knock. Take this for instance.

Picture taken with the w810i, somewhere in Bangalore.

Addendum : Too many people seem to be asking me this so go here if you don't know what the thirukural is or want to know more.

Addendum

2006-11-30T21:41:00.000+05:30

So to further strengthen my position on where I go when me and my professional bretheren go when we die and why it's not heaven here's another tale.
Cardiology and it's hallowed halls have oft been the chosen destination for practitioners of internal medicine who aren't happy dealing with the entire body and would rather make more money than they already are whist prescribing cold medicine and the occasional sleeping pill. So a friend decided that these economically and perhaps intellectually more appealing halls were for him to saunter through and is currently doing DM Cardio somewhere.
This is about him, unlike my usual initial digression. Those of you who've seen the Axe/Lynx Click deoderant advertisement with Bennifer (yep whether is Lopez or Garner he's still the same) and the clicker read on, those who haven't look here or here. The song by the way is "Gansta' of Love" by Johnny "Guitar" Watson.
So this cardio friend of mine plans to get himself one of the clickers and everytime he sees anyone obese, smoking, eating red meat or even clutching his chest in anginal agony he plans to walk up, grin and go "Click!"
I, as always, rest my case.

PS Have a theory that weird names are due to mothers in that peri-delivery (peri-partum is the technical term, I know) are still not quite used to the joy of motherhood and are still frustrated with all the labour and the pain. This situation leads to an occasional, hasty, borderline vengeful decision of naming their kids thus.

The Grim Irony...

2006-11-28T09:15:00.000+05:30

... or how I may never see the light of heaven.

Despite all arguments that there may not be a heaven (though there may be a hell) or there may not be both and we all die only to be reborn as boll weevils or salamanders, or we just die and like Mozart, decompose or like Newton, disintegrate, let's assume for sake of argument itself and for sake of this post there exists a heaven and a hell, ruled by God and the Devil... respectively.
And that each of us has a personal heaven and hell, not the generic boiling oil-pearly gates pictures that some of us have been led to believe. For instance my heaven would involve wine, women and song and hell would be a joint filled with goody-two-shoes dressed in white with harps playing Coldplay or some such. I'm assuming the drift is being got. So this post deals with how contrary to everything I try I'm just not getting to my heaven.
Those of you who've seen the movie Constantine, where Keanu Reeves tries to play a exorcist who's sentenced to hell because he attempted suicide but was revived and the Good Book says that all suicides attempted or successful are condemned to eternal damnation without relief, would have realised that the movie was a waste of time. I didn't and am probably one of the ten people who actually dug (digged?) the movie. Anyway so he decides to become an exorcist to do God's work on earth and send every wayward demon back into hell so that he maybe allowed entry to heaven. Of course he also realises that if he fails, he's going to go to 'a prison where half the inmates were put in by him.' Life's a bitch, init?
In a very similar vein doctors I do believe have been sentenced to purgatory the minute they enter the hallowed halls of medschool. No amount of reviving dying people, wading through body fluids, staying up days on end, for pittance of a remuneration is going to change that.
Why? Simply because no amount of slavery can condone our inherent or developed insensitivity to the world at large. Our patients are the single largest source of humor in our lives. Well most of our lives, I have the Provider to give close competition. The jokes that get cracked when a patient is anaesthetised, being operated, in the midst of the OPD, being given CPR (yeah even then), while being discussed; are sinful in the average person's mind. That collective idea of sin overshadows the collective goodwill that we may ever get. The average person is often referred to in my book of life as the muggle or mudblood. Which in itself ensures a year or two of the rack. Let me show you how it works.
Take for instance the auto driver who was assaulted by 3 people for asking for '1 1/2 meter' post 11pm. He had a bottle of brake fluid (empty) stuffed into his nether. When he came to the hospital the first reaction was that he'd have put it in himself. The next reaction was that every nurse, ward boy, anesthetist who was involved in this man's surgery was laughing their heads off. Now if that wasn't bad enough his case with photographs and the bottle itself was presented at conferences and generated equivalent amounts of laughter there too. I could see the Devil ticking off names.
Or how one gentleman sauntered in to my out patient one morning and began to wax eloquent about how he was an Ayurveda specialist attached to ESI or something and he had this one wonder drug that would cure all kinds of colds, allergies, skin conditions, etc on daily consumption for 45 days. So after patiently listening for close to ten minutes at the advertisement I ventured to ask him what his problem was and he replies in the most sheepish voice I've heard, "Hernia." And I almost fell off my chair laughing. Not openly and though my initial response wanted to be, "Why don't you take your pill and see if it resolves after 45 days..." I ended up keeping a straight face and advising surgery.
Or the 23 year old with erectile dysfunction who was advised to watch porn and wank, or the 30 year old complaining of sterility when he hadn't been staying with his wife. Or the... these just go on.
So i wonder in the face of such terrible odds how can we ever be forgiven...

Obituary and obsession.

2006-11-24T20:53:00.000+05:30

A 2L bottle of Sauza tequila in Houston can be procured for somewhere in the vicinity of $10 on good day in a good shop. That translates to roughly Rs. 500. Then why in God's name does every place in this city charge Rs. 200 for a 30 mL shot? Outside of Pondicherry where a bottle of some noxious drink that's labelled tequila except that it's distilled in an equally obscure chemical waste treatment plant can be got for the same price. The world isn't working quite the way I'd like it. There also exists in the good shop in interior Texas powdered Margarita mix. Just add water and tequila and aye caramba! One drunk night.
All that apart, it is with a heavy heart that I bid farewell to a friend of a few years. A comfort in loneliness, an entertainer when bored, a protector when vulnerable, this was one companion who almost never let me down. Outside of the time in hostel when a depression in the Bay of Bengal had knocked power out for 3 days but that was an act of God. But all things have a lifespan. And often not as long as Darwin's tortoises. Some they say are born to lead short lives, other's achieve it and some still have an early demise thrust upon them by technological advancement. My Nokia 3315 belongs to Category III. The world spun on it's axis and I find myself on the other side of the MS fence and in a position to claim the bonus of a new phone. So here I am the proud, new, obsessed owner of a w810i. And having spent two sleepless nights downloading themes and games and notorious Russian software to read the medical tomes in pdb and other unsupported formats I'm finally in a position to play Prince of Persia the Warrior Within and Sudoku. Joy to the world.
There is often a twist in the tale and occasionally a funny one at that. The Provider of food, shelter and technology also decided to get himself a phone considering the 3310 that he had and had just about come to terms with decided to start breathing it's last. And since presbyopia can be a bitch the obvious choice was a Samsung, wherein the text size makes children's books look like fine print. So the X 700 has an FM Radio, mp3 player, 1.3 megapixel camera and bluetooth to name a few. I still haven't managed to load sudoku onto it and have been promised much rewards when I do but that isn't the story. After the water filter incident the man's decided that maybe reading user manuals might just be a good way to start things (flight of ideas, start things - let's start the very beginning... - do re me fa so latte do, with credit to barista for coming up with that on their t-shirts). So after a day or so ardent perusal we find that he's caught someone to take a picture of him at work in the executive chair in all his resplendent glory and set it as his wallpaper. Also he's realised that the little silver disc above the camera is for taking self portraits and works reasonably well.
Apparently both a fondness for red meat and self-obsession are transmitted paternally so, in all likelihood are linked to the Y chromosome.

Um... Yes!

2006-11-22T19:15:00.000+05:30

So I came to pass.

And whatever calamity that forced me to land in the Capital is done and I'm back to home sweet home, which is the best place to be despite the rodents running the government and the assorted insects that populate the city council. It is depressing to see the state of the state and the rather dismal progress in the establishment of infrastructure here when in sharp, stark contrast the NCR has a metro up and running and plans to get an elevated monorail up and running (in more ways than one I guess) in the next 2 years. A giant flyover connecting the airport to Gurgaon should be ready in a month which would shorted transit time between the two points to less than twenty minutes. Depressing but this is home.
After the usual digression we get to the point. Watched an open air concert - Indian Ocean. At the Garden of Five Senses. Yeah I couldn't believe they had a wiki on that but it's not a great one and the external link doesn't work anymore. I'm guessing Delhi Tourism doesn't think too much of it anymore.
It's a lovely place. A huge sprawling botanical park with curvy lanes that essentially go round in circles, effectively making one lose one's way ever so often. I found the amphitheater after about half an hour of searching. It looks a lot like Trans Indus if some of you've been there and know what I mean. A pit of sorts with benches and occasional rocks as seating. Anyway, Indian Ocean started at 7.30pm. The crowd was a spectacular one with almost every year from 17 to 70 well represented and applauding like it was going out of style. Yours truly perched on a rock in the midst of a crowd that started smoking tobacco, went on to weed and somewhere in the middle I could distinctly smell eucalyptus too. In the immortal words of Obelix, these Delhi people are crazy.
Indian Ocean is an amazing band. Rahul Ram on Bass, Sushmit Sen on Guitars (more about that later), Asheem Chakravarthy on tabla and Amit Kilam on Drums. Seamlessly integrating Indian classical with jazz and vocals that include everything from their own rather good lyrics to Kabir and Sanskrit shlokas. Though I've been listening to their music for a while now, their live concerts are always a treat. Vasanthahabba a couple of years ago had them on as the last act at close to 5am. On a post-rain Bangalore morning with the weather taking on just a nibble of cold, clear skies, an amphitheater, an appreciative audience. Perfect. Their show at IIM a year ago wasn't too bad either except that Strings was also playing and within a few minutes it was pretty apparent that Synth Strings are no real match to this band.
The Garden of Five Senses hosted them this time around. November in Delhi feels like Bangalore now. Replete with hordes of them from higher latitudes. And a cool stage setting with boom cameras swaying by every once in a while, since the plan for a concert DVD is on. The three hours were filled with the usual Indian Ocean repertoire of Jhini and Bhor, Bandeh, Hille Re, Ma Rewa (with the gab gubli, which is the strangest sounding instrument I've heard after the didgeridoo) and Kandisa to name a few. Interspersed with the songs are Rahul Ram's incessant chatter and the occasional listing of cars that were parked awry and in danger of being towed away. And the frequent video tape changes. Altogether a good trip.
Indian Ocean though one of the most original and refreshing bands to have come out of Delhi and perhaps India itself does leave one persistent thought. They sound the same everytime one listens to them. It is a good sound, there are no second thoughts about it but somewhere it gets a tad repetitive.
This incidentally was Sushmit's guitar. If you can read Japanese there's more here.

And Thermal should be playing in the same venue next weekend.
And Lounge Piranha plays tomorrow in Bangalore.
And a couple of posts in the pipeline.

Delhi Diary

2006-11-18T07:34:00.000+05:30

Things as usual spiraled out of control and I found myself actually swiping plastic over the net and saying things like "don't worry I'm on the next flight out". Jet Airways, though the best private carrier yada yada, has a couple of glitches. The Boeing 737s that they use have smaller food trays than the A320s. Not a big issue unless you're trying to read a textbook on the tray. Why, you ask? Because here I am and this is me and that's what I do. And since when did they start having more men in the Mile high club than women. And yes I know what that sentence means. Too many stewards, so thankfully I disappeared into the recesses of my book for most of the journey.
The NCR is at it's pleasantest best in terms of weather. And only weather. I've hunted high and low for pleasantness everywhere else in vain. The usual culture shock of an airport the size of an airport as opposed to the corn field we have in our wonderful city, people completely unconcerned about your safety, nice roads, a Metro, a Monorail proposition to be done by 2009, construction of flyovers late into the night, the closing of every shop on MG Road. Now I used to think, after close scrutiny of Pondicherry and Bangalore that almost every town or city had an MG Road named after the father. Turns out that the NCR's MG is Mehrauli Gurgaon road dotted with factory outlets, furniture stores and Rohit Bal exclusives. All of which, thankfully have been shut.
Anyway whatever uncontrollable bit of fate got me here is now all back in place and an Indian Ocean concert happens at the garden of five senses this evening. That promises to be fun. Back to the hometown tomorrow for my results (of some examination that I'm close to forgetting I ever wrote).
On an aside studying medicine and it's allied branches for close to ten years does unforgivable damage to many parts of one's brain. The most significant is to the language centres. On one hand it's 'cool' to use words like palpable in daily language in the form of the phrase 'no palpable benefit'. On the other this is what I had to deal with. And I quote -
Calcium should be infused with caution in patients with hyperphosphatemia - it may precipitate.
And spent the next fifteen minutes wondering, "..precipitate what? A fatal reaction? Anaphylaxis? What?"
No idiot. Calcium, in the presence of Phosphate will simply precipitate...

Precipitate what?

Home and other stories

2006-11-10T08:10:00.000+05:30

The second degree family's heard of the blog and is threatening to let the world at large know of it's existence and worse - of it's contents. Now the world learning of quietlyamused is a good thing, even though I don't have adsense, but if a part of the world is extensions of the second degree family and it comes back to the first degree then hell could break loose. Now if this sounds like an Ektaaaaa Kaaaapoooor, it is so no surprises there. So we need to find a way to stop the kid from babbling. Bribery is the only thing left. We shall see.

So the Provider had to go out for dinner the other day so I was left eating instant noodles or some such. He returned the next day and recounted the events and this was how it all went. He was invited to a Muslim house and he claims the most prominent feature in that house is an impressive, well-stocked bar. If there's an overall transgression quotient that needs to be calculated for this incident, it just climbed a notch. So after drinks and small eats dinner was served which was prawn curry and beef biryani. Which the man ate like there's no tomorrow (TQ climbs again). Since the story of my love for most things non vegetarian has spread reasonably far and wide, the host was kind enough to pack me a large serving or two of the biryani and some eggplant (it's sophistry to say things like eggplant and aubergine but at least they don't induce as much nausea as 'brinjal' does) and raitha. Half of this was consumed with great relish the following day since biryani always tastes better then (The TQ monitor usually goes kaput when applied to me). The other half our loving father took for lunch. With huge chunks of meat, etc.

The plan is simple when I die and reach the fork in the road where sinners are sorted out I'm going to smile and blame it all on upbringing.

Like one day, at the risk of severe repercussions, I pointed out to the mater and the pater that if the traits of any person depends on genetics and upbringing (what the neo Freudians like to call nature and nurture) I've absolutely no hope.

And I've been accused of being sexist.

Wtf?

Fear Of The Dark

2006-11-07T09:02:00.000+05:30

It's been around for a while but I recently discovered a software that can replace Apple's Operating System on the iPod. Why? To make it more functional. Not that it'll cook breakfast or be a more active replacement for a spouse... Or even send emails or access the GPS to tell you where in the world in Carmen Sandiego. But what it can do is make file and music transfer a lot easier since it makes the 'Pod behave more like a hard drive than Apple's positively insane file system. And it can make the screen look like this.

This is the Vista Theme for those who haven't seen anything like it before, and there are more which look even better.
Add the options of using the device as a PDA (though typing involves scrolling through character by character), playing Games (maybe Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego, tetris for sure), easy file organisation a la the Creative Zen (as drive:\Artist\Album as opposed to F004 or whatever inane naming system the 'Pod already uses).
The only problem is I'm dead scared of hacking the iPod. Fooling around with Windows is not an issue. You can tweak, pull, rip to shreds anything at all and still get back to some bare bones version with only a bad memory of the incident. With the 'Pod I'm just not sure if I'll lose the 20GB of music, which is backed up somewhere but it's a Himalayan task to get all of it back and together with the proper tagging and album art and whatnot.
So here's the dilemma. To Rockbox or not to Rockbox.

Kids These Days

2006-11-06T09:04:00.001+05:30

The weekend past was spent conducting a couple of lit events at St John's Medical College and attending a full paisa vasool concert. I did get in for free so theoretically it would have been paisa vasool if anyone but Himmesh was there but this was also a band that I have and would have paid to watch, time and again. The grammar in the previous sentence is of a dubious nature but there are reasons for that too. And the organisers at John's are a kindly bunch and thus the free entry.
Many thoughts have risen in the old cranium the past few days so this just might be a long ranty post so there's the headlines so you can scroll down to the relevant parts or just leave if you find them uninteresting
1. Lack of substantial participation in lit events
2. Rather depressing state of knowledge of the current TV generation
3. A somewhere it is Thermal and a Quarter Concert
4. The deplorable state of affairs regarding music taste or the difference between good music and popular music
5. Adobe Audition as the best audio editing software no matter how amateur you are or How what you hear is never what you get
6. What is this Gazzag anyway

Part I& II
So I was asked to conduct Word Games and 20 Questions at Autumn Muse 2006. It used to be a good fest in the years gone by attracting excellent talent in literary and debating events. Culturals will always be big anywhere. Vellore Engineering college gets some 15 western music bands so we shan't go there. Now there are hardly 5 teams in registering who know what the event is. And they don't know grammar. Or slang. Or difficult words. And in twentyQ somewhere along the way you realise that they aren't reading classics anymore. They aren't reading medicine either so what are they doing? TV? Awesome!!

Part III - Bring your Daughter to Thermal and a Quarter
Taaq turned 10. Have seen them and heard them for 9 of the 10 so I shall speak and not take flak. Like they say in Cheers, I'm rubber and you're glue, anything you say bounces of me and sticks to you. The concert started at seven and within twenty minutes of it's starting the heavens opened like they did an hour before the concert and the previous day. Incredible really. Autumn Muse does that to the weather. Clear skies for a week before and after the fest and torrential, end-of-the-world, let's all pair up and get on to the ark rains bang in the middle of the Rock Show. Squelchy but it's fun if you're at the sound console.
This was the song list
Galacktiqua, Look @ Me, Paper Puli, Sunset Man (Hallelujah!), Brigade Street, Wonderwall (yeah Oasis but I actually like the song now), Holy Jose (new), Sanity, Bend The World, How Can I Get Your Groove(clean, simple, awesome), Shine On You Crazy Diamond (another trip), Chameleon and Hoedown. How do I know? I've spent the last 36 hours trying to clean up the audio recording but more on that later. The one thing new that I saw this time was 23 year old Nate from the Chicago area who's here with his tenor saxophone which he cleans with used currency notes when it gets damp, by the way. Now Nate changes the way the band sounds to a level that I haven't seen in this many years. Be it blistering solos in Shine or Hoedown or fill-ins in Sanity there's something to it. Treading the fine line between staying in tune and straying off it, as he would say, it was trippy da.
Thank you lord that Bruce is back to singing and Pascal isn't. And like I said it was good fun and so was the 10 year anniversary bash after that.

Part IV - The serious bit
As the rains poured down the sound console had the usual influx of the audience who didn't think getting wet was a good idea but didn't mind the risk of electrocution with all the cables around. Now in the midst of the hoi polloi was one heckling gentleman screaming for rock. I do understand the individual preferences of the world at large and that would explain how Himmesh and the Backstreet Boys are oh so up in the ratings or why the only thing we get to hear in rock competitions is heavy metal. Or why Strings, Fuzon and Call are raking in millions by selling albums in India. It doesn't quite gel well. Shah Rukh Khan is a superstar while Nasserudin Shah is best known for his role in Tridev. Why no one's heard of Dave Matthews Band but would swear by 'Nsync. Why music with the shelf life of spoilt meat is so popular while enough good bands haven't gotten very far.
Time will change things they say. But a paradigm shift (how I love that phrase) in people's tastes is unlikely to happen and till then Himmesh is going to rule the roost.

Part V
Adobe Audition is so cool. That's all there is to it. Simple any moron (including yours truly) can work it with ease and actually get something that sounds almost, but not quite like perfect.

Gazzag. What kind of meaningless palindrome is that? The worst kind.

More editing remains me off.

And I made no spelling mistakes apparently.

A pass at glass

2006-11-03T08:12:00.000+05:30

A refractory error is something that just happens. Either because you're genetically prone to it or your eyes and face are mismatched. Size-wise. The end result of such anatomical aberration is glasses about 3 times larger than your face by the age of 10 and a whole day of walking into school after the holidays and being treated like the new boy by classmates of 5 years. And being labelled 'soda' for a while. I'm guess the pride, privilege and pleasure of being the only kid with spectacles in class for four years made me decide that glasses were the mark of a man. And occasionally women.
Then school got changed to another more intensely academic and that was when I found many people with either similar genetic propensity or mismatched anatomy who had glasses of such thick glass that would bounce if they fell. Which they often did due to gravity. Thence I decided that glasses were the mark of men (and women) who spent most of their childhood like Boo Radley, locked up away from the sun devouring all manner of literature.
This is of course a unidirectional relationship since Boo himself didn't wear glasses. Statistics are so cool to play around with. That man wrote a best selling freaky book just by playing around with them. He did have a point to make about Ted Kaczynski though.
That's not the point I'm trying to make. Then came days of basketball and trying to decide between shards of broken glass in and round one's eyes, or lenses so scratched that it was easier with them off and with them off and missing the subtle eyebrow movement that indicated that I was supposed to pass but not the person who's face I couldn't discern.
Contact lenses are so cool. Nearly invisible. Reasonably comfortable and for the first time in 10 years the world looks equally clear in all angles of vision. It's not bounded by a metal frame, it doesn't get blurry on the edges and when topped up with ray bans, the world is a dull shade of brown but sharp and well defined. The basketball is big orange and has Spalding written on it, the jersey's have veritas curat in fine print and passes are to the right person with never-before accuracy. In such happy times Azozel and and Lucifer confer, angered by the joy in the world. And one drunk night you fall asleep with them on. And wake up with them stuck to your eyes and it takes a bottle of contact lens solution to get them off. Or alternatively you get sprayed in the face by some artery that an inept surgeon nicked. No it doesn't have to be a life threatening nick of a major vessel, even the small bugger bleed like crazy. A 120mm of mercury can push a spray from a 2mm arteriole up to 2 feet. A lower limb amputation would involve working around the femoral which is close to a centimeter in diameter. A 1mm nick can send blood up to the operating lights. Just so you know.
So we're back to glasses now. Plain and simple that don't turn brown at 8pm in the inside of a well lit banquet hall, that don't bounce and can break but don't get scratched and when at the receiving end of a camera glare like there's no tomorrow.
So we went with our occasional benefactor and source of all joy and money, viz., the materfamilias to procure ourselves another pair to see Red Riding Hood better with... which reminds me I need to see a dentist soon. And she needed a pair too. But considering she's on the wrong side of fifty and presbyopia can be a pain she needs bifocals. Now bifocals on the elders (note not elderly) are a treat when you're a kid looking at their eyes as they're looking at you. A few degrees of movement on your part, which is a small sacrifice, changes their eyes from small and beady to Poe's Vulture-eye. Which is worth it.
So the lady in the shop does the usual read the fine print thing and gives us the prescription and the man points out the various frames and pitches the latest technology in bifocals to the mater. She falls for it hook, line and sinker. The man then produces the bill. Mom's lenses, not the frame, the lenses cost half my erstwhile stipend because they're progressive and will be ready in a day. My lenses which are, as mentioned earlier; clear, plain glass will take four days. Apparently like vegetarian food at Empire or Fanoos the chef/optician's forgotten how they're made and needs to look up some encyclopedia for that.
So here I am with the Model T of visual aids the world looking just as it did with the old pair.

If you have issues with what's written read the label for this post.

Stumped... and trippy

2006-10-30T08:19:00.000+05:30

And the blue eleven make fools of themselves yet again. Whoever went around saying things like we do well on our own doctored pitches and Sachin is back with a bang. Well maybe he was back with a bang, now he's out with it too. And there seems to be some 1 second delay between my typing something and it appearing on the screen. Need more coffee, I think.

So back to the rather dismal post-diwali damp squibness of the team despite some royal advertising by Pepsi and Nike. Which brings us to Sourav I-like-taking-my-shirt-off Ganguly in some pathetic Pepsi ad. What were they thinking?

Ranting and raving about how badly the team performs makes as much sense as banging the proverbial head against the proverbial wall. Just stopped the virus scan. Delay now reduced to negligible amounts. So instead we take a nice trip (more later on the "trip") into the history of sport with special reference to our motherland - England. Well the British Isles, broadly speaking, from whence the weirdest yet surprisingly popular sports have emerged - Golf, cricket and perhaps fox-hunting and hare-coursing.

What kind of jobless civilization decides to let all active sports go and invent games that could be "played" outdoors but with just about as much energy expenditure as say scrabble or Scotland Yard. Incidentally play Scotland Yard with new and improved rules, almost like Calvinball, it's a treat.

Golf - according to Robin Williams was invented by a drunk Scotsman who after a few shots of the ol' malt decided the following -

Mad Drunk Scotsman : I got an idea, I'm going to take a ball and knock it into a gopher hole with a stick.

Innocent Bystander : Like Pool?

MDS : @$#! Pool not like pool. I'm not going to use a straight stick, I'm going to use a little f@#$%d up stick.

IB : So like Croquet?

MDS : @#$! Croquet. Not like croquet. I'm going to put the gopher hole like yards and yards away. and put shit in the middle like trees and sand and a lake. So you'll keep hitting the ball with a tyre iron and every time you miss you'll feel like you're having a stroke... @#$! that's what we'll call it - we'll call it a stroke, 'cos every time you miss the ball you're going to die! And then... this is brilliant, I'll put some level and and a little flag near the hole, to give you hope. But I'll put a pool on one side and some sand on the other to @#$! with your ball. And you'll be stroking away thinking you're going to die...

IB : So you do this just once, right?

MDS : No, eighteen times...

And now that you've read all of this you can go here and take a look at the video.

My apologies.

Cricket is a very similar story. It's bad enough to have enough time and energy to want to hit a ball with a weapon of some kind, but these guys go all the way... the whole nine yards to come up with the weirdest set of rules.

The ball must be thrown with the arm above the level of the shoulder and the elbow extended at the point of release. Whatever happens before is fine. Paul Adams, way to go and that new Sri Lankan fellow, who's name escapes me.

Then you need to knock one of six sticks down. Or catch the ball or some such. Why is it so damn complex? Take this set of simple rules - Here's a ball, you can't touch it with your hands, or go out side the big white rectangle that we've drawn. Kick, head or chest it into that net on the far side and try not to kill anyone along the way. And you can only head the ball not your opponents.

Isn't that so much simpler. Or take this one. See that guy walking into our court muttering something? we have to grab him and hold him down or make sure he stops muttering. And if he grabs you, you're back on the bench.

Even chess and dungeons and dragons have a simpler rule book than cricket. Yet there are millions (thankfully restricted to the commonwealth and South Africa) who know all the rules and will come up with newer ideas to make things miserable for all concerned... and me.

Why me? Because you can't go around saying things like I'm not watching the match or I honestly don't care or Let them all go to hell without a significant proportion of the blue billion wanting to lynch you.

All that apart, here's on the word "trip"

A: Listened to that band da, the something quartet - ok it is.

B: Did you hear that one song, trippy it is.

A: It's ok nothing to go all crazy about. Supreme Beings is Trippy though.

C: Have you heard Hey by the Pixies? Trippy da, full addicting only that song is.

A: Yeah I downloaded it but I don't think it's all there.

D: I'm damn scared of this trippy word when you @#$!ers are around and drop it all the time...

That's all folks...

Nee Sandman?

2006-10-26T21:03:00.000+05:30

All we read or get to nowadays is stories of how the kids just ain't right. And that some one's getting a face transplant. The last one got rejected on account of ugliness I think. It's interesting how medical research is funded. The first knee prosthesis released over a decade ago were simple hinge joints. In other words, they moved only in one plane and around a single axis. And cost the usual GDP of a tin pot little African country. The rich old men who could afford to both play golf and get their knees replaced realised that post getting enough metal in them to set of detectors in all airports except the ones in Bangalore, Delhi and Hyderabad, they couldn't play golf anymore. Not that golf is a game that requires one to be in the pink of health and prime of one's fitness but the issue here is simple - the swing, in golf, to be completed perfectly, requires a small amount of rotation in the joint. Now, the knee is easily one of the most complex joints in the body and though primarily a hinge, it does allow enough rotation to make Woods a Tiger on the fairway. It is also historically an extremely important joint and has been immortalised in the Tamil greeting "nee eppudi irruke". Digression apart, rich old men fuelled their rich old money into material research to give rise to this.

Miracle of modern engineering. And that's why as Chris Rock says we'll never find a cure for AIDS. Because then drug companies will go out of business. Then maybe they'll bring small pox back.
That apart been reading two incredibly creative and entertaining comic series - Fables and Sandman. More on them later. But this is a legend I read - every night as we tuck ourselves into bed, the Lord of Dreams comes along and sprinkles sand in our eyes. This makes us sleep (duh!) and the sand is what makes us dream. This also is why we wake up with a gritty, sandy feeling in our eyes.
So I did wake up with something that felt like sand all over my face for a long time. Maybe I need to start earlier. Circa 1980 when teak was actually available. So then the Provider decided to get himself some teak furniture that would look good and outlast us all. And in the midst of all the wood work were two beds. With proportions that required a custom built mattress (80"x30" - we were a tall thin race apparently). The headboards were out of a single piece of teak some three feet across, worth the GDP of a TPLAC (tin pot little...) in present day. And the years rolled on with little or no change outside of us becoming a tall not so thin race and the Provider's taste in wood changing. Albeit slowly but surely.
Then one fine shopping expedition a gargantuan bed with an intricately carved head board but with more acceptable proportions was procured and yours truly inherited the teak. The new bed though wonderfully carved is a dust magnet and if one is allergic the night is spent with the Sandman battling the Dust bunny. But that's not the story, is it? So the teak device was my place of somnolence for many a moon till I realised that I was waking up with the mother of all back aches every morning. And not because I was sleeping funny. Or anything. Investigation revealed that though the cool headboard was teak, the bed itself was plywood (incidentally invented by Alfred Nobel's dad). And teak lasts twenty years. Plywood on the other hand twists and turns with time and warps like the gravitational field of a small star.
The result is a morning-after back ache. The cure is to take the mattress and use it to soften the floor and enjoy a restful night or two. That's when the sandman came along with me waking to a faceful of dust. The legend we began to believe and dreams were in technicolour.
Till it all fell apart. The dreams, the legend and my mattress which was bought circa 1980. Made to order to fit the bed. It says Dunlop on top, like the tyre and over twenty years the rubbers becomes mud. Like the book says, "... and dust ye shall be." Looks like the folks got conned and got an adult rated mattress.
So it's now the not so soft floor. But I'll live. Looking for someone interested in buying the carved monster so that's one less piece of junk I have to deal with.

But on an aside on tyres, what do you do with 365 used condoms? Melt them down and make a tyre. Call it Goodyear.

Lead me not into...

2006-10-23T09:36:00.000+05:30

...Temptation Wines.

Church Street is probably the most hedonistic place in bangalore. Unapt (it can't be inapt, can it?) nomenclature aside, greed and gluttony are worshipped and I'm sure in the recesses of the dark night you could add maybe lust and a couple more. And they call it Church street.

There was a plan, maybe a year ago to make it the upmarket "food street" like Ibrahim Sahib or that unnamed road of joy in the middle of VV Puram. And perhaps it can still be that. Some twenty odd restaurants dotting the 20 foot-wide asphalt serving everything from insipid samosas to appam and pandi curry, throw in some good biryani and a smattering of sushi and there you have it.

So a bunch of us where there last night under the awning of the very aptly named Temptation Wines. Sitting on the steps 6 feet from the road belting Bacardi and beer and making the worst jokes possible. For the record the link to silly puns was a hit with at least one person. I'm happy. As a certain commenter so succinctly put it, the rest of you can sod off if you don't like it. After much consumption of legal alcohol and discussions on the more illicit paakits which depending on the ISI (indian standards institute) mark on them may or may not turn you blind, we proceeded to the high temple of non -vegetarianism, videlicet, Empire. Now the normal grilled chicken/chicken kabab, ghee rice is an all time favourite but the management at Empire (who apparently have up to 60 Lakhs worth of outstanding Chicken credit with various sources of poultry in and around Bangalore) have opened an Arabian joint on the roof top. And to save time the menu (sans the prices) is printed on the door of the lift so one can decide what one's poison is on the way up. There are of course signs imploring one to use the stairs since it is perhaps a healthier way to ascend.

Standard issue pita breads and humus and sheekhs exist but the thing to consume is the Kabsa mutton. Which is a huge chunk of meat served on a bed of rice. We've done meat before but this chunk was simply incredible. Tender to a fault and when held up, meat slides off the bone under the influence of gravity. Gravity! No fork, hand, pulling, biting. Just slides off. Incredible. The chicken version isn't such a big deal, in fact it pales in comparison to the red meat.

Satisfaction guaranteed.

Orkut has decided to become user friendly and there's a new thing on the line which is innovatively titled "Gazzag". Cool palindromes apart will review it when I can.

Tell me about it

2006-10-19T11:32:00.000+05:30

So things aren't as peachy or creamy as I thought they could be once I had the license. To take a knife to people with curative intent. Which would explain the lack of anything concrete to write about. Spent a few days in good old Pondicherry, essentially taking full advantage of the fact that the State has negligible taxes. At one point of time I wanted to fill a Jerry can with petrol and whisk it across the border. Which reminds me the car's off for the usual overhaul. Will be broke (me, not the car) for the next month so those of you who're planning on asking me to fund food, alcohol and other illicit habits, talk to the hand.
Discovered that Jamaican Passion Bacardi Breezer if spiked with anything above 60mL of Bacardi White Rum is an awesome drink. And also that the Lime Breezer is nothing but Limca. Yuck.
And the Beef Biryani joint in the vicinity of Muruga Theater is still active as ever and they remember old customers. As does the tea shop opposite the main gate of JIPMER.
Learnt a few filthy jokes in Telugu which due to a self-imposed prohibition on sleaze on the blog I can only relate in person. In any case there isn't anything worse than transliterated vernacular humor.
Discovered this.
And this story related by a friend on the etymology of a commonly used phrase.
Long years ago, during the Crusades, knights who due to insanity, peer pressure or sheer boredom decided to head to the holy land would usually lock their houses and their women. The famed chastity belt which now mostly features in strange BDSM pornography and perhaps museums of natural and unnatural history played a rather important social role in the locking up of the aforementioned ladies. These errant knights would leave the key with a trusted friend for safe keeping. And if and when they returned would be welcomed by a presumably fidel (what's the word derived from fidelity that should come here?) close friend and wife. So one such knight in armour decided to save Jerusalem and as custom determined, did the whole locking and stocking and maybe some barrelling before the locking and stocking and gave the key to his friend and rode off. He hadn't gone ten miles when a breathless friend on a breathless horse galloped up and informed him that the key was the wrong one. The knight replied, "Yeah? Tell me about it..."
Cheers.

3 weddings and my funeral

2006-10-12T08:18:00.000+05:30

Got happily drunk on beer yesterday and in the midst of many irrelevant statements on life, the universe and everything realised a few things. One, Beer is God's way of telling us that we still hold a special place in his heart. Two, it's always a good thing to drink without having anything to do the next day. No work, nothing to read, no deadlines breathing down your neck - good thing. And three, beer is God's way of telling us...
Had an enlightening chat about a north Indian wedding with a friend. Which brings us in record time and space to the subject matter in dispute here. After Vadakancheri and this really cool Arya Samaj wedding I attended the discussion brought back memories of a Punjabi wedding that I was subjected to a while back. So here we are with a standard-issue compare and contrast.
Vadakancheri was you typical Palaghat Iyer affair, replete with the Kashi Yatra (where the groom, disgusted with the whole concept of marriage pulls this mock show of taking off to Kashi or some such place of spiritual interest to renounce this world of materialism. Methinks it's performance anxiety that made the first groom think of such a thing but can't say that out loud. The in laws-to-be then coax the poor sod back into the fold and proceed to get him married before he can think of escaping again.), the old women in heavily gold-embroidered silk sarees discussing everything from family gossip to potential suitors of every unmarried girl in a ten km vicinity, kids vying for a place next to the couple to inhale the fumes of the pyre. No, fumes of the fire. And the usual old men talking about how good the Railways was in 1932 and how the pension check isn't coming in on time, and how today's generation is simply too disgusting to be left alive and in charge.
The Arya Samaj wedding is a simple, highly interesting affair. Lasts for about an hour, maybe ninety minutes if the man in charge is a little on the slow side. Only the incantations specific to two people being united in holy matrimony and a quick spin around the pyre. Damn, fire. Classmates of the groom resorting the the usual hooliganism in the back chairs. The priest, usually one who's not playing with a full deck - I think he's got just the jokers - translates every line in Sanskrit to Hindi, Kannada and English (I'm sure the languages change with place but one never knows). And before you're done laughing at groom turning red at mention of his (potential) children or his rather frequent bored expression, it's over. May we all adjourn for lunch, never to return.
In stark contrast to all this is the shindig that happens to the north of the Vindhyas and, nowadays due to the exodus, all over the world. So much so that movies and even discovery travel and living, which the world seems to think the world of, does a documentary on the more expensive of these. After HAHK (which sounds like a cat with a fur ball problem) it seemed rather surreal that the many events depicted in that torturous film would actually happen in real life. And then I ended up at this wedding. Landed close to dinner time to a quiet open area with little activity outside of waiters and the buffet. The barat apparently was having trouble with traffic. This I decided needed investigation. So off we went following some distant cacophony to locate the problem.
A mass of humanity herded along on either side with similar humanity carrying tube lights was the first thing that was observed. Then the sound of a portable generator (to power the tube lights) and the sound of an live orchestra. Incidentally on the same truck as the generator vying to out sound the diesel motor with minimal success. Then the horse. With the groom on top and horse-byproducts behind. A million drunk revellers (which I can empathize with) and a brass band. A full brass band. Playing souped up jazzy renditions from the aforementioned HAHK and the more nauseating DDLJ. So this bunch after being temporarily hindered by an ambulance, a cow and the police, proceeded to arrive at the open buffet space.
Then someone wanted to steal shoes. That's when I realised that there sometimes is little difference between reality and celluloid. Stealing shoes apparently is a huge money making racket that persists despite all logic. And more money can be made with the aid of neem leaves and black mail.
And at around 3 am when the vampires have decided that it's time to head coffin-wards, the bride and groom decide to do the old fire spin egged on by close relatives, considering the rest of the invitees have either passed out or decided to go spend that dubiously earned shoe money.

In the midst of all this is me going why can't we just sign the papers and get on with it. But ours is rarely to reason why. And why should we? It's not my funeral. Yet.

Addendum : Condom sales from vending machines in Gujrat during navratri where the whole dancing thing happens for many a night in a row show an astronomical increase from the average for the rest of the year.

Reality Bites

2006-10-09T01:03:00.000+05:30

It's one AM. And sleep eludes me in a manner that would make Carlos, the Jackal not Santana, raise an impressed eyebrow and smirk a "You're good kid, real good. But as long as I'm around you'll still be second best." This takes me back to a 36 stanza trip I wrote once one the Mask that has disappeared along with many cherished and not so cherished things in the midst of the four or five changes of residence that used to happen in my life.
It is done, by the way. A day long assessment of three years of learning that didn't go quite as well as one may have liked. Those who've trod (treaded?) that path have attempted to console me by saying that the point of post graduate exams is to squelch all resistance that one's ego might put up while being... squelched. The end result is a blubbering, hypoglycemic idiot who ends up watching Munna Bhai Part Deux.
It's not so bad a movie. But remove Arshad Warsi and it is. Not in quite a state to give movie reviews though Sin City is relatively fresh in the mind and a take on the Movie and comic might come around some time. File that with the waiters from idiotville who despite incessantly managing to make life for all and sundry a living hell have not made it to this blog.
Back to the blubbering blathering bashibazouk... (couldn't resist that. Just discovered all of Tintin on my computer in .cbz) Strangely an unfortunate fallout of the ego bashing, rather humiliating experience is a sudden fear that treating patients may not be such a good idea. That I'm hoping should pass. On an aside I've decided that unsolicited medical advice over the phone or via the internet will not be given any more. It may be given over coffee and beer but not over the phone. The next person who calls in sick will have to first rattle off their credit card number, it's expiry date and that cool 3 digit number at the back of the card. No more Mr. Nice Guy. With the possible exceptions of Kiera Knightley, Koena Mitra and the Ku Klux Klan (the last bunch will get a prescription for Diazepam and Lasix, just to see what happens) and any thinly veiled dancing girls who decide to call.
Results of the afore-oft-mentioned exam will be declared on the blog when they're declared to me.
If random TV trolling gave rise to a distaste for Power Rangers in any avtaar, it's also gotten me thinking about reality shows. What is it about us as humans that we want to see other's misery. And other's lives. In technicolour.
I will admit that a few of those shows are good- The Amazing Race and Pimp My Ride, off the top of my head. But the rest? Disaster Videos, Best Police Chases of All Time, Ripley's (for crying out loud some moron has a tissue expander in his forehead and is obsessed with body modification), How to get a date?, The Apprentice, that stupid designer show... the Cut (I think), Survivor, Indian Idol and finally the killer - Fear Factor.
What kind of weird prostitution is Fear Factor all about? I might give you money if you eat these worms faster than her. And your mom's watching. And some statutory warning to not attempt the stunts at home. Hey, lets all get some tarantulas and jump into the tub. After that we can get the eggs of some endangered species and eat them. Ostriches. The only upside to the whole thing is this woman called Summer Papania. Don't bother googling - there are no pictures of her. If you missed the ostrich egg episode and the favourite winner episode, you aren't ever going to see her again till the reruns. Reruns of Fear Factor is the end of creative television.
But why are we so fascinated with misery being inflicted on our brethren (and sistren)? I don't have the guts or the inclination to eat a worm, as early as I may be up, and I sure as hell don't want to see someone else eating them. But the rest of the planet seems to want that kind of entertainment. It's the modern day Colosseum. An arena of pitched battle and fatal fighting with a significant section of society watching and enjoying what deep down inside they know is disgusting.

Et tu?

Couple of quips on the net that made me believe in the existence of sentient sapient beings on this planet.

A: Dude would anybody be upset if I confessed to being turned on by her drinking an ostrich egg (w.r.t. the Summer episode)
B: Nobody but the Ostrich...

Still no Sleep.

Power Up!

2006-10-07T08:03:00.000+05:30

A tryst with destiny is something that happens once every 50 odd years, they say. Like Haley's comet and perhaps a good hindi film song. That doesn't involve jhankar beats, Bappi Lahari or Babul Supriyo or some other skanky characters of dubious genetic make up. But I sway from my purpose, after all digression is my middle name. Actually it's my first name. Always works are my middle and last names respectively. For those not working with a full deck of cards that would mean my name is Digression Always Works.

If there's one thing worse than a bad joke, it's the explanation.

My tryst with destiny after that little scenic detour is tomorrow. It represents the culmination of years of training, the efficiency of which will be judged in a matter of may be an hour and a half. All ye who feel that's unfair and extend sympathy in my direction I'm deeply touched and a few prayers would touch me more.

That isn't the point either. During my rather long study leave I have managed to actually get some studying done between two hourly mail checks, three hourly catnaps (that would mean I'm dozing on the keyboard every six hours) and frequent trips to the refrigerator and the idiot box. The idiot box of course follows the universal law that the more number of channels the less the likely hood of finding something remotely interesting to watch. In one of these random surfs I discovered that I get Jetix - Disney's animation/unmentionables channel. Since I like animation (yeah I think the Swat Kats are cool, so bugger off), I thought this might just be the panacea for all ennui. But, alas, at various randomly picked times of day the only thing on Jetix was Power Rangers.

Which now brings us to the point. Which crazy, demented, high on LSD or some such synthetic psychedelic specimen thought up that show? Even worse which crazy, demented, high on LSD or some such synthetic psychedelic specimen decided to adapt the show from Japanese TV to international broadcast. With Disney at that. It all went downhill after Walt died. Japanese entertainment is tailor-made for a very specific audience - Japanese. Nobody outside of them and perhaps 6 year-old precocious boys can understand it. Pokemon, Beyblade have taken over the minds of these kids. So much so that they can't operate the VCR anymore which used to be exclusively a 6 year old's domain. I will at this point confess that Takeshi's Castle is entertaining. Very funnily so. It reminds me of the Darwin Awards and of lemmings.

But the Power Rangers... If one season of Morphin' idiots in opaque helmets in all colours of the rainbow was not enough, they now have some ten variations of it. All of which come at different, randomly chosen times of the day on Jetix. Now I agree I'm not meant to watch stuff of that intellectual calibre but I don't think anyone is. Especially 6 year olds. The last thing you need is some pesky brat in an opaque helmet running into everything thinking he's going to save the world. Then they have this talking dog ranger. Whose muzzle vanishes in the helmet. And throw in some corny humor. And some potential racism with an African American playing the Black Ranger, and an Asian playing the Yellow Ranger. Which brings us to a disturbing thought, did Quentin get his idea of naming everybody by colour from the Rangers?

The end is nigh. Of the world and maybe this post.

And the show was banned in Malaysia due to the fact that these goofs in spandex kept shouting "It's Morphin' Time!" And Malaysians don't take kindly to references, as oblique as they may be, to Morphine.

OK it's back to the perusal of the famed textbook so toodle-oo and pip-pip.

Microwaved rays

2006-09-27T21:57:00.000+05:30

Ok this is, as embarrassing as it may be to admit, the third time I'm sitting down to write a post in 2 days. It's not just your average writer's block, apparently, which usually resolves in the second attempt to write a post, unless one is James Joyce. Or some pathologically deranged creature with suicidal intent every time a blog goes unwritten.
The problem is that this is to some extent therapeutic. If we could get the average agoraphobic sociopath to blog and of course throw in some fake comments to con them into believing someone was listening we'd manage to get old Sigmund into the Internet age. Of course these need to be access controlled since we don't want other agoraphobic, sociopathic, Internet junkies getting ideas to destroy civilian life and property from them.

So here goes attempt three.

The stingray menace is being actively tackled down under, apparently by dragging them onto land. What is wrong with people? Steve Irwin died. We're sorry about that but lopping tails off stingrays doesn't solve anything. I'm not even sure they taste good. But this might just explain things.

In other things that managed to mess my life up, albeit not significantly enough is the microwave. This device powered by electricity but more importantly radiation at 2450 MHz (that's a wavelength of 12 cm approx, which I thought was pretty large) was the brainchild of one Percy Spencer whose candy bar melted in front of a Radar. Stopping short of running down the streets naked and proving the Archimedes principle yet again, he patented it and for many generations ensured that his descendants could live off the interest from the royalties.
That's not the story. Of late the microwave oven has become an indispensable kitchen accessory. Of course it can't grill or roast but who wants the carcinogens anyway. We like boiled food nowadays - it's apparently healthier. And even more salubrious if we do away with salt and pepper. Garlic is still fine. But if you want to breakfast on it just make sure you stay out of the halitotic radius.
In a woman-less household the microwave is of prime importance. In many a bachelor pad, the day starts with paying obeisance to this mighty machine of easy cookery. And consuming it's offerings with relish. Mine is one such abode that resisted the temptation to get one for many a year till our fridge (which contains mostly cold stored pickle, beer and orange juice) died a sad demise. Some wheeling-dealing later we now have a new fridge and a microwave. Joy was that day. Food could be warmed in 2 minutes, pop corn was now do-it-yourself and aerosol cans were no longer kept in stock.
Things went along well. The bell was a joyous sound that meant food was ready and hot. The hazards of trying to heat plastic boxes of frozen food - most involving molten/melted plastic and a tendency for it to coat the digestive passage - were no longer present. The metal rimmed mugs were strategically broken beyond Araldite's reach and all was good. Till Dad decided to put a bowl (microwave safe) of rajma in without a cover despite there being a full roll of cling wrap in the immediate vicinity.
The third item to be tested in a microwave ever, was an egg. Apocryphal perhaps, but here it went in before the chicken and needless to say it burst. As do tomatoes. Boiling rajma also as a similar tendency. Dinner therefore, involved spooning it out from all 6 walls of the oven and spending the rest of my life dreading the bell.

Tomorrow, they say, is another day.

Lusht For Life

2006-09-25T07:21:00.000+05:30

After being inspired by Mohayana's bright gifting ideas I landed up at the Lush store at the mall with the plan of picking a gift for a friend who was getting married. Marriages in the friend circle are often trying times. Mom goes into some why aren't you getting married obsession and secretly harbors thoughts regarding exactly which way I swing. Once I'm done with fielding all her questions and convincing her that despite being straight as can be I still don't want to tie the knot so her grand children plans will have to be put on hold. On an aside I once pointed out that in the 21st century it isn't exactly necessary to be married to have children and got two weeks of nag-free time.
But a close friend's marriage can often be a trying time. Apart from the sudden change of heart they get towards sexist jokes, leching on the streets, random women, alcohol etc there's the huge immediate issue of gifts. Which is what this is all about.
Lush seems to be an ideal place to pick up stuff for friends who are close enough to accept a rather cheeky gift without either blushing to the point of bursting or wanting to kill you instead. So I have in my possession assorted items with chocolate including a massage bar, shower gel, soap, lip balm and just plain cocoa butter. We know what chocolate can do. They made an entire movie out of it. Other options included underwear dusting powders but I actually like the guy getting married.
The only problem with the store is the smell. Some would say aroma, I'm sticking to smell. It's appalling. Even cookie man is better. The other problem is the way the stuff looks. Charcoal bricks, alien slime, stuff out of horror movies and stuff that despite the vegan tagging looks like it's about to eat you. Of course if you're really unlucky one of the saleswomen will grab your hand and demonstrate how their glitter bar works and leave you disfigured for life.
Expensive as it is, Lush is a good gift buying joint. That's the bottom line.
The other bottom line is the joy of seeing a man-behind-the-counter's face when you ask for 5 packs for condoms of various types and then ask him to gift wrap it...
Need to ask the man to open his gifts in private. Wish him luck.