Saturday, April 23, 2005

Promises and Lies

held lives in your hand
behind you, where ever you may go
if you lead, we'll follow
only if you lead

no more promises and lies
its time you stepped aside
no more hate across the lines
your sorry sight won't wipe
the tears from our eyes.

thought you stood apart
let us down
wonder where your road leads now
its too late
we're past your gate

Friday, April 22, 2005

The Short Pant Massacres

in your time you fought for our rights
now we're fighting amongst ourselves
life has taught our children well
love, brotherhood and gujarat's hell

hey mahatma, can you hear me
turning in your grave, a solumn sigh
men in short pants cleaned up your children
living in times of programmed minds

the light you shown on all has still not reached
the drill masters and their brain washed army
if, in time, they'll see our plight
ne'er represent my brother's rights

For a Bob and Two Mor(e)

morrison, you know the words finally did come out right
touched every woman deep inside
you put a trump card in my pocket
for a rainy night

hey bob, it don't matter if you couldn't sing right
all the stories 'bout you, truth or lie
you're the meanest bastard
i ever liked

lord i sing thru the night
with dreams of reaching far and wide
living in the shadows of the legends
legends of my time

morrison, your band didn't need a bass (base) cause you were there
but did you understand every word you read
when the doors opened
you weren't there

Plea for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and Vegetables

Imagine a mushroom in a pan as it is tossed about and left to simmer. It first gets coated with a thick layer of oil which then gets soaked in. With time it loses its vital juices, flavor, vitamins and minerals. What is left is a shriveled up, dehydrated mushroom in a gravy, that has drained it of its individuality, a scapegoat for the worst of human sins – Cooking with Indifference!
Every human being, animal and vegetable deserves the right to meet its end, with dignity. Day after day we commit atrocities at the altar of the cooking stove like overcooking, not marinating, not using fresh ingredients and underestimating the complexity of basic cooking techniques. There is still hope for even the most cruel among us, if we follow three simple rules.

The First rule: Respect every ingredient. Know their tolerance for marination and heat, both in terms of intensity and duration. The most important part of cooking takes place even before I have lit the stove. Marination is the process of soaking food in liquid and spices to flavor and to tenderize tougher cuts of meat or harder vegetables. Remember the best juicy tandoori chicken or paneer kebabs you ever had? The one where the juice dripped down the side of your arm. Those were marinaded by the acidic method by using yogurt or lime. The other more efficient method is enzymatic by using papaya or pineapple juice. In fact the best chefs in the world inject the food with the juice using a syringe. This causes the tissue to break down, allowing more moisture to be absorbed and giving a juicier end product. A good marinade will have a delicate balance of spices, acid and oil.

The Second rule: Keep it short and simple. This doesn't mean using short cuts but that the finer rules of cooking are the simplest. Like the polish proverb, ‘Fish, to taste right, must swim three times -in water, in butter, and in wine’ Or for example, ‘Hot pan, cold oil, no stick’. One of the most common mistakes in stir frying is not bringing the vessel to the correct temperature before adding oil. Since the oil isn't hot enough, it gets absorbed into the food, leaving us with a greasy dish and food that sticks to the pan. When a vessel is heated to the right intensity, adding oil creates a thin film that goes into the pores of the metal, creating a "non-stick" effect. The oil then dances easily on the surface of the wok, coats the ingredient and sears its surface as soon as it comes into contact. sealing in the juices and then I continue tossing over a high fire till the meat is cooked to the bone, not a second more. Once you get it right, you will always have tender meat that melts in your mouth and the vegetables crisp yet juicy. You also consume less oil in this method.

The Third: Justify the use of every ingredient and method of cooking. Be it boiling, baking, stewing, steaming, frying, tossing, toasting, roasting, bbqing and my favorite stir frying. Take for example the simple difference between boiling and steaming French beans. Both methods cook the beans with water. But with boiling, the beans loses its water content to the medium and the nutrients follow whereas nothing is lost if the same beans were steamed for the right amount of time. Rice on the other hand absorbs the water in which it is boiled. Therefore I can justify boiling rice, but never vegetables unless I utilize the water in which it is boiled. Good cooking is also a democratic process where every ingredient gets equal representation in terms of flavor without one overpowering the rest of the dish. In this way the chicken doesn't taste like mushroom, the mushroom doesn't taste like baby corn and the baby corn doesn't taste like the neighbour’s cat.

Three rules: Respect every ingredient, keep it short n simple and Justify the use of every ingredient and method. The way I appreciate food extrapolates to every aspect of my life. The rules are the same, respect others, be simple and justify every action. Ladies and gentlemen, the next time you sit to have a great meal, whether it is rich mughali gravy with cashew nuts, currants  saffron sprinkled on top with fluffy butter chulchas, Chinese stewed rice with stir fried broccoli  bamboo shoots and mushrooms in oyster sauce or as you lift your spoon with heavenly orange mousse, with walnuts cherries while the chocolate sauce drips into the whipped cream below remember that cooking is an art that is built on the foundation of pure science and who you choose to share your meal with is as important as the meal itself.

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French chef Bernard Pacaud: "To me, the only real adventure is in the ingredient, in its identity; the china plate must not be more attractive than the dish prepared. Everything goes through the senses: you have to touch, listen to an ingredient in order to understand it."

Sunday, April 10, 2005

Catch a falling star and put it back up !


One can never tell just exactly how one has had an impact on someone or inspired another to develop the best within themselves. We never ever had a dearth of people to look up to at John's and I'm sure all of us still have a soft corner for specific people who have made a difference in our lives.

Just as much as this is true there are also people who look up to you! Yes you! You who topped class or showed resilience and strength when you slogged in the odd batch. You who sat in the first bench in class or slept in the last bench. You who struggled through the straight path or made your own. You who believed had nine lives or at some point thought of taking your own. No matter what weakness you feel you have, there is always someone who looks up to you!

The sad part is, you may never know it because the main drawback of this entire process is that it is a passive transfer.

My friend told me that he heard about one of his juniors who was very 'low' after having received an above average score in the USMLE exam. It was a decent score (about 86) which would have placed him in a residency, but with all the 99 percentiles flying around in John's there was a lot of expectations and a lot to live up to. On hearing this news he immediately called up his junior (who he hardly knew well) and told him about all the good qualities he had noticed in him, his people skills, ability to organize among other things, building up his confidence gradually.

The junior soon developed a healthy outlook and is now infused with the same zeal he had when he was head boy in school and in the student committee at John's where he had been noticed because of his leadership qualities. He now knows that even though he won't get into the top programs, he will get a residency and be able to prove himself from there because of his determination, the 'soft skills' he had developed and consciously work towards a good fellowship program.

My friend tells me that they now have developed a close relationship where they call each other from time to time, the junior updates him on his situation and he guides him. They even talk about mentoring other students at John's who have forgotten their true worth because of a low score at some point in their life. (For example, a small mess up on OBG doesn't mean one can't become India's most successful physiologist! Yes, Anura! You Rock!.. :)

My friend says that he has learnt more about himself after the day he called his junior. He has become even more responsible since he has an image to live up to and says that whenever he feels low he cheers himself up with the thought that 'no matter how low he feels or how high he has yet to climb, there is always someone who, looks up to him!'

I realized that the difference is, while getting inspired by someone is a passive process, mentoring is an active one which has benefits for BOTH the people involved!

You don't have to be the best in your field or have extra ordinary abilities to mentor someone. The guy who mentored his junior, had repeated fifth standard, required two attempts to get into John's and two to get out but that didn't stop him from reaching out.

An old zen saying:

'When the student is ready, the master appears...'

and '...vice versa.'

(OK ! I admit I added the last part but only, because it is true!... :)

Monday, April 04, 2005

Linguistically Challenged Doctors


This post was meant to be a comment to my friend Lalit's post called 'Can I heal you in English?'. I wrote so much that I finally decided to start and post it on my own blog. Check out his blog entry first then read on.

http://lalitnarayan.blogspot.com/2005/03/can-i-heal-you-in-english.html

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Hey Lalit !

I'm one of those linguistically challenged doctors you talk about, who also incidenally believes in one world one language. 'How atrocious, what about all the loss of cultural diversity' you might say. I have seen some of my classmates pick up languages relatively fast and put them to use in the hospital. One of them from Andhra, speaks to a Keralite patient in Malayalam, but put a Telugu patient in front of him and see the room light up for both of them, you know what I mean. The situation is not about picking up a language. How many languages would a Bangalorean doc need to know to take care of about 90% of his patients ? Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, Telugu and English.

Wow!

The situation is neither about picking up a language or 5-7 languages if we insist we do linguistic justice to every patient who walks in, nor is it about communication which consists of the triad of listening, speaking and understanding. Both these though extremely tough are child’s play when it comes to the Big Mama of all healing... 'Establishing a Rapport'. It is one of the most gratifying aspects for a doctor and the main contributor to his job satisfaction. As far as the patient goes, a lot of whether you are a 'good' doctor or a 'bad' doctor depends on whether you were able to build a good rapport, no body checks your mortality rate or the number of publications you have! It boils down to ... ‘Can you light up the room’ which you might extrapolate to 'In just how many languages can you light up the room!'

We can exalt and promote regional languages and put the responsibility of good communication in multiple languages on the doctor. But one of the main reasons we got this far is because we started off in an English medium school. There is no way I could have got through the St. John’s interview in Kannada. I wouldn’t even get past the application form! This is why keeping English out of government schools is equivalent to breaking a kid’s leg before she’s learnt to walk! The vernacular boys with their vested interests continue to blow their vernacular horn, but we don’t see them providing a solution for the high rate of unemployment among the non English speaking youth. Promote regional languages by all means but they shouldn't block English from being taught in the schools. Which brings me back to ‘one world one language’. Communicating in one language, as it is, is hard enough. Getting medical students to pick up languages in a systematic method in college is important, but wouldn't it be so simple if we all just spoke 'binary'.

Despite these different sides of the same coin, our heart is in the right place.... :)
Nice to see that you're keeping the white mice running along in your head, active!

Blog on brother!!

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Max Planck: 'A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

In Defense of Past Tense

Project 1: The Ice Breaker

What’s in a name? Apparently a lot, if one has been called ‘magic fingers’, ‘eagle eye’, ‘silent buddha’, ‘accident prone’, ‘twice lucky’ and the ‘sarcastic nerd from hell’!

I was born in a village called Puttur an hours drive from Mangalore, where I failed miserably at my first attempt at a normal delivery. Hours later I surfaced following a caesarean operation. My mother told me that I cried shamefully that day. I don’t have many childhood memories except for a vivid one of being expelled from the local village school when I was in upper kindergarten. That can be a tough episode for a 4 year old. I spend most of my childhood in Muscat where my father worked for the airlines. One of the fringe benefits was free air tickets which we used to the max. We would be off to Macau over the weekend and be back in time for class. From 5-8th standard I studied in St. Germain High School. This was my initiation to a reckless rowdy lifestyle and the best learning experience of my life. Bunking class, hockey match fights, gang wars.

In fact once during art and craft class, the teacher had left a bucket and stepped out for 5 minutes. My best friend peeped into the bucket, looked up and with his eyes sparkling said ‘ Macha! P.O.P daaaa!’. It was a bucket full of plaster of Paris and within seconds there was a full scale snowball fight. We were suspended soon after. Incidents like this occurred on a daily basis.

Each of us had super nicknames. Mine was a long list of notable ones like ‘magic fingers’ since I spent most of my free time dismantling our TV, video player, assembling computers for friends and fixing things, mostly because I had broken it in the first place. There were also labels like ‘accident prone’ and ‘wounded soldier’ which came by because till 6th standard I could never be found without a big wound dressing. Whether it was tumbling down from the top of a two storied metal spiral staircase, being bitten by a monkey, innumerable bike accidents, crashing into horses, dogs, cats and the most memorable one, crashing into a cow. Not a normal ordinary cow but a coward, a coward cow, that refused to meet me face to face, eye to eye. I’ll try to retain a small amount of self respect by not revealing which part of the cow I was forced to deal with.

In 6th standard I was labeled a ‘nerd’ because I started wearing glasses. It worked perfect for me because now at least people would think that I was smart. The ophthalmologist himself was surprised that I had survived so long, because he discovered that I had a very high power of minus 4. It was now clear that all those years, I was not ‘accident prone’, I was in fact, blind.

I studied in a co-education school and as with everything else in my life, it took twice as long for puberty to set in. So while the cute girls were doing weird yucky things like making eye contact and placing love letters in strategic locations in my notebooks, I was appropriately and eagerly responding, by smacking them with water balloons, bursting stink bombs and placing my pet frog, Alice, in strategic locations in their school bags. By the time puberty dawned, they were looking after their figure and so was I. The good ones were all seeing smarter boys who had grown up faster and I, well I was seeing, Alice. Don’t let the fairy tales fool you, a frog can’t turn into a princess and they definitely don’t like to be kissed. It took a long time to let go but from the day I threw Alice back in the well my social life picked up rapidly and now I know that girls kiss slightly better, even though I still can’t figure out why fully grown women still like to play ‘doctor doctor’.

The next phase was Ist and IInd PUC at St. Aloysius College in Cox Town. 140 students in each class, 4 classrooms, 2 for science, 2 for commerce, open air toilets on the terrace and Extra-Curricular Activities were banned ! In short, hell on earth!

From there I moved on to St. John’s Medical College, where I spent the best years of my life. It encouraged me to discover myself. In fact a few of us spent more time all over India representing college at various cultural events and conferences.

A few years ago I met activists from the NBA, heard the horror stories and saw the scars left from police torture. This and working in the camps in Gujarat following the communal riots shattered every thing I believed in. Suddenly the whole world seemed like the figment of someone’s imagination. That someone I realized was commercial media. News is no longer about presenting facts and events but a cold, calculated, prepackaged yet highly hyped and exciting positioning of the commercial media’s agenda.

This lead to starting a youth organization called ‘The Forum 19.1.a.’. 19.1.a stands for the article of the Indian constitution for freedom of speech and expression. We dealt with a lot of fun stuff like theatre, documentary films, music, arts but with an agenda to spread information that was under-represented. Soon we made friends with like minded groups that we used to look up to.

This was also possible because of teamwork and a lot of support from my family. Both my parents are real estate brokers and my sister is a graphic designer. We all share a passion for music, design, food and ice cream. I love ice cream, any ice cream as long as it is chocolate! After dinner we usually relax in the living room discussing a book we read or interesting stuff that happened during the day. I play the guitar before I sleep and awake up at 4 for a 8 km jog around Ulsoor lake before I start studying for the USMLE exams.

Yah I know, that was too much info, to fast. From now on it will be bite size and regularly irregular.

Zai jian (picked that up from Geeta, my almost chinese buddy!)

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Nikola Tesla: "I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success... Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything."