YES...YOU CAN!

My wife wanted me to help her write an editorial for her school magazine.I came up with this.I don't think she found it good enough for her magazine, but I guess its good enough to have a space in sweetsaltandbitter room.So, here goes..

Yes..you can!

What you think today can be a reality tomorrow and the power to make it happen lies within you. Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try. No matter how high the building, the construction always begins with a single brick.

There was once a boy who loved football. He was never too good at it. But every match that his school played, he would reach the ground and watch his team play.His father knew of his liking  for the game and always encouraged him and joined him everytime he went to watch. The coach took notice of it and when there was a need for an extra player, he took him in. The boy was on cloud nine and called his father immediately to tell him the good news.Tears of joy ran down the cheeks of the proud father. Thereafter, whenever the team and his son played, father would be there in the audience encouraging his son to play better. Unfortunately, the boy was not the best of the players in spite of the sincere efforts he put in the game.Most of the times he would be sitting in the dug-out while his father sat in the audience encouraging him not to lose heart.

While his team was practicing for one of the important match of the season, his father suddenly passed away. Tears rolled down his cheeks and with a heavy heart, the boy asked his coach if he could take the day off practice. The coach told him to take his time and be with his family. The do or die match was the next day. The boy went home crying and thinking about his father who never stopped encouraging him in the game he loved.

The next day, the team was losing badly in the match while the boy watched it. He went to his coach and begged to allow him to join the team. The coach was reluctant as the boy was not a good player but since nothing was working for the team, he gave in. Before long, the coach, the players and everyone in the stands could not believe their eyes. This little unknown, who had never played before, was doing everything right. And the boy won the match from the clutches of defeat for his team.

Finally, after the stands had emptied and the team had left the locker room, the coach noticed that the young man was sitting quietly in the corner all alone. The coach came to him and said, "Young man, I can't believe it. You were fantastic! Tell me what got into you? How did you do it?"The young boy looked at the coach, with tears in his eyes, and said, "Well, you knew my dad died, but did you know that my dad was blind?" The young man swallowed hard and forced a smile, "Dad came to all my games, but today was the first time he could see me play, and I wanted to show him I could do it!"

Most of the important things in the world are accomplished by people who keep trying when there seems to be no hope at all. So,friends never lose heart. If you fail in achieving something a 100 times, you have not lost anything because you have discovered 100 ways of how not to do something and that only reduces the chance of error the next time you do it.Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes,courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, "I will try again tomorrow”.

ABOUT 3 MORE IDIOTS...

First of all, a very happy new year to all..Don't know if happiness is so easy to usher in by just changing the year but then it is a thought and practice carried out for so long and carries a positive vibe, worthy of being spread and passed on.
I had my family with me for the holidays and it surely brought a lot of joy and happiness meeting each other after a gap of 4 long months......especially for my little darling daughter,who I feel ,is unknowingly sacrificing the most in this decision of mine to take up the job at Port Blair.The worst thing about the holidays is that they end and make life more tough because you have just started romancing and getting to love it more and more when it suddenly moves away.So, my wife and kid moved back to their routine last Sunday and I returned to mine.......and just to keep that smile on my face stuck for some time more, I got a pirated dvd of "3 idiots" to watch; instead of cursing the time for passing by so early.
The movie is no doubt good and very enjoyable which every person who has led a life in hostel would surely associate with.I could draw a lot of parallels with my life in the medical college hostel where I spent almost 8 years of my life.I just got transported to the year 1993 when four words on a piece of telegram changed my life forever.It said : Selected for MBBS course.......
After the initial joy and partying,I remember moving out on 27th July,1993 from Pune with my father to join the course.We reached the college after a long and tiring journey and though I was nervous and scared like a wet cat to enter into the new world of being alone and catering for myself,I was nevertheless determined to go through it.After getting over with some paperwork, I was asked to undergo the medical examination which was being conducted in the physiology lab.And there, I saw a glimpse of my batchmates who would get embedded in my memory later as the guys who came as boys and girls and walked off the same college with a prefix to their name : DOCTOR- one word which carries a lot of trust and hope for every human on this earth.

My first medical check was quite a disaster.Don't know why, but my blood was under too much pressure and shooting and the doc who examined me checked twice and then asked me to rest and not to get tensed as this was a routine affair.Fortunately, the blood stopped being a cooker and the pressure came under control in some time.The next check really caught me off pants.........the surgeon wanted me to bare my nuts, a routine test done to check for conditions like hydrocoele and hernias which I learned later...but at that point of time, it was something shameful for me.......I was caught unawares but I had no option but to let my genitals get molested by the surgeon :(
And there as I was zipping myself feeling like a rape victim,I met the first idiot of my story.....Pravin Salunke,Salu for short......... jeans,shirt,finger combing his hair and acting more like a bollywood wannabe than a wannabe doctor......I moved on...The torture soon ended and the check ups were over and I was finally admitted as a first year doc to be....a dream come true..
We entered the hostel after 15 days of "Orientation" (a silly idea of the college authorities to make the new kids on the block stay in an ashram and get to know the Gandhian way of living.....surely  an extended party for all the fuchchas) We never learned anything Gandhian but had loads of fun in his name and got to know each other a bit better.
As we got our bags ready, we all felt like a chick coming out of the egg shell with no idea of what lay ahead .It was more scary than I had imagined and as the bus dropped us at the entrance of the hostel,I had  a feeling of getting caught by the enemies as prisoner of war. And the same was the feeling felt by all the guys with me........some more and some less but nevertheless all shaking in their pants.Myself and the Shahrukh look alike Pravin turned out to be neighbours and all we could do was sit in the room and wait for the clock to tick till it was finally time for dinner.Like slaves in a prison,we formed a queue and started with our first ragging act of banging our plates with the spoon all the way to the mess.We had also shaved our mouchtaches and the third button on our shirt was red, as instructed by the ragging inc.

We were then in for a long haul of ragging, some pleasant and some  not "decent" enough to be mentioned here, but enjoyable nonetheless.As the time passed, the ragging became fun and we started gelling with the seniors and batchmates alike.We jumped like frogs all over the hostel rooftops,had midnight campfires on the rooftops to celebrate birthdays and gave birthday bumps throughout the night while the intricate biochemistry charts and scary anatomy books waited for us to come and give them their due respect.It was a party never willing to end.
And the anatomy class brought in the forefront another idiot of my story...Vikrant Pulliwar,Pulli for short......a lean,fairly tall, spectacled dude who no matter what the time of the day had to keep his hairstyle intact and would spare no effort to do so. Anatomy was like taught to him in the womb....he could tell all the attachments of the muscles and the course of the arteries as if he were inside the body and tracing their path! And there was one more thing which he was known for ..........his STINKING SOCKS! In dearth of any anasthetic agent,they were surely "ram baan" to make a person faint! No exageration there....
Study wasn't easy.....seeing the body with which we were born, in a totally different perspective and learning the art of being a healer from a sufferer took around 5 years of our life.But what kept the wit,smiles and joys alive all this time was the friendship and pranks we 3 idiots had together.We hailed from Nagpur, Bombay and Delhi and once,for the holidays, we just planned to visit each other's house together and see the places too.We shopped at fashion street in Bombay and managed to convince the hunk among the 3 of us....Salu... to buy a short tight T shirt and make him get into that in the sulabh shauchalaya  to flaunt his muscles on the street.When we reached home and his sister saw him in the attire,she burst into splits of laughter and then she educated us that we had landed up buying an undersized female top for our muscle man which he flaunted all over Mumbai........We even have a picture of him in that........

Time has passed and we are now in different streams - Pravin is a Neurosurgeon, Pulli is an Orthopaedic Surgeon and well I became and Otolaryngologist (ENT Surgeon).But the smiles and fun have never failed to cross our faces when we reflect on the past...........thanks to the 3 IDIOTS ........3 more idiots have managed to relive their past!

ANALYSIS OF A DEVELOPING NATION

Its another weekend in the room alone and away from my family (Its been almost two months since I moved into Andamans living the forced bachelor's life) and idle mind does come up with some sensible thoughts occassionally. I was just thinking that India is referred to by derogatory words like "third world" and "developing nation" but  there are certain aspects where this country and its people have made really fast advances. For one, the communication sector. Its been around 20 years since the communication wave started to build and we almost have every part of the country connected with the cell phones now. I am in fact, right now far away from the heart of the country in a teeny weeny island in the Indian Ocean and writing this blog with a small modem to keep me wired to the cyberspace.So, how come on one hand we have a farmer who is commiting suicide not having enough money to cater to the basic needs of his family while at the same time ,we also have a rickshaw wallah pulling out a mobile and listening to FM and talking to his near and dear ones while he goes around with the daily chore.
I guess the answer lies in the effort of the government and also the mindset of the people. Competition creates the best oppurtunities for the needy and that sure has helped in bringing the call rates from astronomically high costs in the past to less than a rupee for long distance telephony in the present. The entrance of the private sector surely makes the competition tough as the rates have to be kept low to make the service attractive and simultaneously one has to maintain high quality of service so that the faith in the company and the product stays on.
Now for the mindset of the people.I don't know if its a world phenomenon or a man thing- but gadgets have a thing to impress. You want to use and fiddle with every new mobile handset that you see. A man may not have learnt the numerics in school but he would make no mistake in quoting the right number of the nokia model in the market. I guess gadgets have some x factor like the females. You may not own it but you will not forget to notice it- I guess that's a universal truth for females and gadgets.I guess because of this fetish for gadgets, every man (who in most of the households decides where the money is spent) builds up enough to invest in the purchase of a mobile phone irrespective of his need or earnings.
Another thing which has an omnipresence is the video and cd industry.The technology in the tv and video industry has changed manifolds- with first the vcps,vcrs, video cds and now dvds. But be it village or a city,all have kept up to the times. You will get the pirated movies in all the latest formats in every nook and corner of India with the availability of the latest player for putting it to use. Its all because of the common man's deep rooted interest in getting the latest with the times in entertainment which makes this possible.
So, my idle mind thinks that two key things to make progress happen are : desire and interest.The mobile and dvd industry are sureshot proof that if we put our desire and interest together, we can achieve a lot.But unfortuntely, the two feelings are restricted to very few aspects of life and that leaves us tagged as "developing" nations. Till we develop the desire and interest in every field of life,we can only be considered as "developing" nation and that is one tag we shall find very difficult to get rid off.

Budget : Lalu style!

Ten Things Indians Can Do Without!

I was just sitting idle the other day and one thought that suddenly came to me was what is it about us Indians that puts us apart.Well, the mind kept ticking and I then realised there were quite a few things which makes us what we are.
1. Our obsession with the colour white. I don't know what it is with us but the moment we see anyone with fair skin we start oggling and salivating like a hungry dog does on seeing a bone.I think most species have only hatred associated with colour of the skin of people, but for us it is different and that sure puts us apart.
2. Our second obsession is with covering everything .Where in the world would you find so many varieties of sofa covers,dining table covers, car seat covers,remote covers, washing machine covers,TV covers, covers for cell phones..... you name it and we have a cover ready for it.No matter whether we use it or not, WE HAVE TO COVER IT (except for one thing which if covered while at work would do something really good to control the population... sorry for being a bit cheeky ;)) In fact, I think we have more varieties of the covers rather than the product itself.
3. We love BURPING! And the louder it is, the more satisfying it is. I don't know why the person next to you has to suffer because of your passion for food.
4. And this one is thanks to the men alone........ the habit of grabbing their twin jewels in public!The beard and the face isn't enough to let the people know your sex, the signature act is.... the "ball-grabbing" act!
5. And all know kiss and piss story..... no to kissing but yes to pissing in public..... in fact the Indian male bladder is almost passionate about emptying itself in public!
6. Who can forget our obsession with loudspeakers anytime we think of God. I guess, we leave no stones unturned to make God HEAR us. Its almost like making God listen to you at gun point. The less the melody in the voice of the "devotee", the louder the music has to be.
7.This one sure is a thumbs up for the Indians.Our celebration of marriages in the grandest possible way like no one else.Thanks to the likes of Suraj Barjatya and Yash Chopra the big loud and pompous Indian wedding is known all over now and may be that plays a part in making the marriages last longer than most places in the world.
8.We have an uncanny knack at picking habits and accents. It would take a decade for an American to get the Indian accent, but it just requires a few hours of interaction with an American for us to catch the American accent and to love their pastas and pizzas.... :)
9. We know how to litter well. Be it India or America, we always mark our zone with loads of litter and filth. I guess that's what has played a major part in developing immunity to diseases in India.
10. Well lastly, I guess its the habit of making a mockery of anything Indian that contributes ironically to us being Indians.That's true for me and I proved it by writing this write up....:)
Whatever be it..... the bottom line is .. MERE BHARAT MEIN HAIN SAB PARESHAAN PAR PHIR BHI HUM KAHEIN : MERA BHARAT MAHAAN!

Happy New Year!

Its that time of the year when all the channels on TV are busy getting all their old clippings in line and setting up a list to show over and over again calling it the best and the worst of 2008. Actually, I guess this is the time when the news channels have to do least research and lie back and enjoy the new year as there is hardly much to think and show for at least a couple of days till something new and big comes along.

On a more serious note, I think a few names which were never heard of till last year, but now would ring a bell anytime they are mentioned would be :

Abhinav Bindra who got India the sole Olympic medal, for which India should thank the richness of Abhinav's father to have been able to afford the world class training which could channelise the talent of this shooter

Vijender Singh :who has been showing his teeth and face more than his boxing arms since Beijing Olympics.

Saina Nehwal for making it into the top 10 of World Badminton Female Rankings

The now very famous phrase in the north " SINGH IS KING"

A new Khan  and a new Kapoor in Indian movies : Imran Khan & Ranbir Kapoor

Aamir Khan gave barbers a reason to cheer : the new ghajini cut set their cash registers ringing though it is still to become clear whether the movie does the same for the producer.

An infamous Ajmal Kasab : whom the Pakistanis won't own and the Indians can't pardon

I guess its been a mixture of good and bad just like all the other years in the past but as usual we will talk and make a big hu-ha about it. The new year is not going to change the universe, but just brings in the hope that it would make the world a slightly more tolerable place to live in.

Happy New Year To All!

The Positives of 26/11

The whole world has been talking about the attack on Mumbai and the negative sentiments it conveyed.With due respect to all those who succumbed to the terrorist bullets on that day, I still see quite a few positive points coming out of that fateful day.
1. The Page 3 of India moved to page 1 for a sad reason and got a first hand feel of terror and its repurcussions on one's life, which probably has helped to make this incident appear as INDIA"S NINE ELEVEN as the journalists put it.
2.It was the final nail in the coffin to prove internationally that Pakistan is surely nurturing the terror organisations against India.
3. At last the politicians came up with what India needed for a long long time - a federal agency against terror and more teeth for the laws against terror.
4. Three most useless people in the Indian political scenario were finally shown the door - Shivraj Patil, Vilasrao Deshmukh and R.R.Patil
5. The "lal batti car" status provided to the overprotected netas was reevaluated and the police were relieved of the shame of protecting 50 useless politicians and were back to doing what they were trained to do- fight for the citizens of India.
6.Actors like Rahul Bose who have little to do as far as their career as an actor is concerned got a chance to talk about something in the media besides their embarrassing box office records.
Well, I guess there would be more to add to that list but at least not everything is grey and sad about the happenings of that horrifying day.Every cloud does have a silver lining after all!

NON VIOLENCE IS NOT NO VIOLENCE!

क्षमा शोभती उस भुजंग को जिसके पास गरल हो
उसको क्या जो दंतहीन, विषरहित , विनीत, सरल हो!
सहनशीलता, क्षमा, दया को तभी पूजता जग है,
बल के दर्प चमकता उसके पीछे जब जगमग है!

These are a couple of lines from a poem by a well known hindi poet, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar. I am no poet for one,neither anyone with a great literary sense nor do I have much space at the top to understand as to what most people narrate in the form of prose. But when my colleague, Dr.Rajeshwary, narrated these lines during one of our "discussions", it just made so much sense in my life as well as that of India.
Lets start about India.I think in the name of resilience, we have been just trying to avoid facing these terrorist outfits which has made us look weak and meek in the international arena. All it takes to avoid any noise from our quarter is to send an emissary from the powerhouse of the world (and that's USA as we all know) and we sit tight in the corner thinking we have done enough and then its time for us to keep silent and lie still waiting to be shaken up from the slumber by another attack on not just the citizens but our pride as a nation.And that's how we have come to be taken as a QUIET nation still dwelling on the pride of being non-violent. I think its time to redefine this term NON-VIOLENCE. We have to vehemently make the world aware that NON VIOLENCE does not mean NO VIOLENCE . We need to instill the fear of our toughness too and not just get into a jumble of words when attacked.
I guess its the same in our lives to as individuals.Sometimes we just find people taking advantage of us and our manners making it our weakness rather than a virtue. We all need to realise that its not an ideal world and so there are times we need to assert our rights and say it loud when its wrong because its not just doing the wrong which is not right but not doing the right is also wrong.
When the two great mythologies,the Mahabharata and Ramayana, preach about good prevailing over evil even if it requires a war to get that result, isn't it time for us to once again to prove that its time for the good to prevail over the evil by taking the right measures??

Aadhar (support).......for the needy!

Hi all! This time I am not writing my thoughts but just wanting to spread a nice cause that my "FPG" (friend, philosopher and guide) has been doing for the last 10 years. She is Dr.Rajeshwary Kulkarni - an eye surgeon and a victim of a cruel disease called cancer which in medical terms was Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Its normal for a human to fall prey to the problem and get dejected but what is commendable is that Dr.Rajeshwary not only had the will to come out of it unscathed but also drew inspiration from the experience to start a charitable trust called - AADHAR (meaning support in hindi). The trust, for the last 10 years, has been helping small children suffering from cancer with funds to bear the exhorbitant cost of the cancer treatment and with the help of its volunteers lending a helping hand in the form of counseling to cancer patients of all ages. Its a totally non profit organisation and the donations to this fund are tax free in India.
Well, readers, the least that we can do is visit her blog (www.aadharforcancer.blogspot.com) and help pass on the message that this wonderful lady started 10 years ago and continues doing the same untiringly.God bless Aadhar!

Harry Potter's INDIAN connection..????

Its been raining cats and dogs in Delhi for the last two days and well the drop in the temperature has not just brought some relief to the weather but has also brought some smile on my face. I really don't know what is it that I am upbeat about but I guess its just one of those days when you feel positive and glad to be where you are and what you are doing.
I am not a really a bookworm but somehow I managed to gather courage to read the first book of the Harry Potter series (the truth is that I really never understood the movie and was feeling sort of ashamed that I wasn't able to follow something which kids one fourth my age really are going ga-ga about! And so it was high time I matched up to them!! ). I have just gone through the first few chapters of it and I must say that the author has some really wild and interesting imagination.... but I don't know how many have found some similarity between the events in the life of Harry Potter and our own Lord Krishna.
The fact that,this boy was hated by a powerful and evil guy and inspite of his attempts to kill baby Harry, the baby survives and is left at the doorstep where he can be taken care of, is very close to what the mythologies describe about the life of Krishna. I don't know if that was in anyway an inspiration for J.K.Rowling but definitely the popularity of the book and the movie shows that possibly Krishna lives in the imagination of not just Indians but also the other races and it is a character which all love to believe and identify with!

Hi I am back!

Hello! I am back after a long break and its been a tremendous change not just in terms of the place but also the lifestyle, work and rather every aspect of my life. I guess thats the way life is in a big city.... specially when you are in the capital of the country. Gone are the days when I used to wake up and lazily carry the paper in my lap and go through the headlines bothering least about what my next activity should be. Now the alarm is almost like a war cry for me to get ready for the fight called LIFE . And after seeing the regularity with which the terror has creeped into our lives, I guess no one is really very confident of what he or she is going to encounter on leaving the doorstep. And after the blasts that rocked this city once again, despite all the odds that we may come across in our lives at various points in time, we all need to just thank that WE ARE ALIVE and well at the end of the day ..............and maybe thats the only sign that we have probably done some good act during that day for which we have been saved and survived another day in this BIG BAD WORLD!

Mysore: glad it happened!

Its been 10 months since I have been waiting for this moment............. leaving Mysore and going back to Delhi. To be honest, I disliked this place from the very moment I stepped here. I was coming from Chandigarh,one of the best cities in this country, and it was my first stint of stay ever in south India. Only after arrival here, did I realise that there is a strong and invisible divide between the north and south.In fact, here in the south, people almost tend to treat you like foreigners once they come to know that you don't share either their looks or have any little knowledge of the language they speak.For the first time I realised that its really amazing that we call ourself one country and are bound by one law because the under that one roof,the rooms are so strongly built that there is really not much that one can hear of what goes on in the other.
However, the last few months have softened my outlook about Mysore.... thanks to some of the nice people that I have come of befriend.In fact,I surely would remember this place for its weather and beauty and at the end of the day, I am really happy that Mysore happened to me.
However, the bottomline is that I am going back to where I belong and that thought leaves a big smile on my face.So, I shall be back in the same avatar talking sweet salt and bitter once I settle down.Till then, ciao!