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 5-8^th 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 6^th 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 6^th 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."