Addendum

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...

... 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.

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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.