Marriage

On my trip to Mumbai I made a trip to visit a friend of mine who got married recently. For certain specific reasons, I will withhold her name. It was good to see her after almost 1.5 years. She was also very happy that I took the time to come visit her as I was not able to attend her wedding. As we sat there talking, I noticed a strange sense of satisfaction in her. We were looking at her wedding album and as she launched herself into explaining who was who and what was happening, I could not help but notice that she had so much to say about so many things. We spoke about the events that lead upto her wedding, the wedding itself and her last six months of married life. She spoke about so many things that day, about her husband, his career, what she wants to do with hers(she is a teacher), about the flat they are living in, how they went about furnishing it, about what she expects from her marriage, about the pleasures she has experienced, about the disappointments she faced and about her fears regarding the future.

As I took the train back home from Vashi that day after meeting her, don't know why but I felt terrified.

Reading and traveling

Just finished reading

Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince by J.K. Rowling

and

A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul

The former was in some ways a disappointment of sorts what with the way its been written and yet could not help but feel a little anxious for Harry at the end of the book. I will wait for the last book just to see how many other people will have to be sacrificed before the pot of evil boils over and "You-know-who" meets the fate Rowling has destined for him. As of now she just wants to spend some time with her baby(courtesy the Economic Times)

The latter was a well written book more so because of the fact that the book seemed to start slowly, picked up pace in between and again slowed down towards the end. It talks about the life of one Mr. Biswas living in Port of Spain(you will know where that is if you know your cricket well!) , the number of places he had to call home, his travails in bringing up a family and in the end buying a house. It sure made for some good reading.

I am off to Bangalore tomorrow night as we are performing a show at Rangashankara on sunday. I will be back on monday morning and resume with some regular blogging.

A beautiful vignette

As we sat at the Prithvi cafe, we heard a lilting music emanating from a distance. Did not give it too much attention, however after a little while when the melody persisted, I got up and followed the source. The man had a long white flowing beard that reached down to his stomach, a bald head and a smile that completely animated his face. He was dressed in black pajama-kurta and held in his hand a hindustani flute. It was the first time I had seen such a big flute. As the man continued playing, it was a very quaint setting, with the man playing jana gana mana and instructing his student about some of the intricacies of playing a particular note, somebody walking with incense to keep away mosquitoes. Yet what was most striking was the fact that as some of us sat and listened to it and basked in the beauty of what he was creating, there were a couple of teenagers on the next table talking loudly about something as inconsequential as watching "Dus" and how hot Abhishek Bachan looked.

Don't know why but it irritated the hell out of me.

Government Hospital, Mumbai

My cousin is currently interning at a government hospital in Mumbai. While talking to him about his experiences as a part of the medical community, he gave me an insight into the happenings in those corridors. Some extracts from our conversation

Ajay was a 25 year old man who was admitted for stomach pain at 6am. When he was brought into the hospital, the CMO(Chief Medical Officer) took a cursory glance at him and decided to send him up to be admitted inspite of it being standard procedure for a patient to be sent to the ER to get his x-ray and other required reports to diagnose his ailment. At 12 pm, Ajay was still in the ward waiting to be taken for the x-rays. Once his x-ray reports came in by 5pm, the hospital authorities realised that their consultants had left for the day and so he was made to wait through the night. Ajay was operated on the next morning at 11pm and he died at 12noon.

Some of the worst wounds are burns where the injury can vary from some simple burns to third degree burns. All wound burns have to be cleaned thoroughly inorder to avoid pus and infection.
Neha was brought in with severe burns and her wounds were cleaned regularly. However it becomes imperative on the part of the patients to participate in maintaining the hygiene regime prescribed to them. However, Neha continued to procrastinate and her dressings could be found in different places of the ward thereby throwing all matters of cleanliness out of the window. In a matter of 2 weeks, five patients of the ward died because of infection.

What do to-be-doctors learn from such experiences, I am not sure? As a rookie when one sees a CMO dismissing a case that later turns out to be fatal and the CMO gets away with it, what could he possibly make out of such a situation?

Mumbai meri jaan!!!

Well I am off for a sabattical to Mumbai(strange place for a sabattical I must say!) tomorrow morning.Its going to be a 9 day trip in which I also plan to make a fly-by visit to Pune. I am hoping to catch up with a lot of people(mostly family) and some very good friends and in the meanwhile we are performing evam Indrajit at Prithvi. Also the weatherman has forecasted a rainy week ahead for Mumbai.

Aaahh!!I love it when everything falls in place.Bliss.

Update: I love political satire and could not help linking to this , that I found on Amit's blog.Nice.

Recap

A friend of mine(Dilip D'souza) is currently at Akkrapettai, Nagapatinam, the place that was ravaged by the Tsunami on December 26th, 2004. It was exactly six months and six days back that the three of us(Dilip, Amit and me) trudged through an incredible stretch of slime, slush, shit and carcasses to meet Dr....aah got it from Dilip's blog, Dr. Lakshmi Narasimhan We had decided that we would make the same journey six months later to see what had changed. For reasons that are not important, Dilip is doing that journey alone. He just called me a few minutes back and said simply."Saraansh I am here at Akkrapettai", and I knew that for an instant that we were both thinking of what we witnessed six months back. Its been six months but its amazing that I remember every detail of that day.

We looked and looked and then realised that the only way to reach the Doctor would be walk through almost 2 kilometers of the mix that I described above. So we ultimately decided to ignore the slush slowly oozing into our shoes, and finding a way through the pores of our socks and after a while all I could feel was a squish-squish with every step I took. It was strange that inspite of walking through this we found small things to joke about to lift each other's spirits. We were about 100 metres from the doctor when we noticed a yellow carton and five small toes of a six-year old poking out. That was how we welcomed The New Year 2005.

Read a full account of that day here and here.

Dilip wrote this on his trip to Akkrapettai.