The song remains the same

These days I feel a little lost in the haze of routine. Every day resembles the previous one so exactly that the passage of time doesn't feel like something that needs to be made note of at all, really. I've realised I've spent almost my whole life doing things at odd times of day - so now, waking at the crack of dawn and actually watching sunrises feels like something out of someone else's life.

I'm surrounded by people all the time and yet, I wish the world could be a little more intrusive. Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm holding something back. I've been awfully good at withdrawing from people but now I'm required to do the opposite. To reach into them. And sometimes, quite literally, too. Other people's lives, their existences start to take on the quality of the hyper-real. I used to have a professor who claimed that Indians aren't, what she called 'self-actualised'. 

It isn't true. Most people have such a clear sense of self - they think about their own self all the time and they think about making their lives better. I mean, why wouldn't you? You literally are at the centre of your universe. It's from behind your own eyes that you perceive the world. And everyone else in it. It makes sense that you would think of your place in the world as something important and something unchanging. It is this sense that colours all of one's reactions to the world. This idea of being at the centre of it all. 

Of course, there is a part of me that enjoys being a creature of habit. It's a good thing to have all your days mapped out. It is weirdly freeing. Time passes more slowly and the precious few hours I keep for myself every day feel refreshing. I've started to read more and study more and enjoy it. 

I've never been what you'd call a workaholic. But now the idea of taking a break feels much less appealing, much more unnecessary. I guess you'd say one gets used to anything. And I am grateful for that. I never thought I'd be this content right now. I'm really, really glad that I am.  

Will night never come?

"They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more."

- Pozzo to Didi & Gogo on the lot of humankind, in 'Waiting for Godot' by Samuel Beckett.

Speed of Light

Sometimes, I wonder if all our best relationships happen in transit, often with people we may never ever meet or meet again. All that is beautiful is ephemeral and most of what is ephemeral acquires a beauty of near-preternatural intensity.

To Denmark and back again

For the past few days, my mind has been a jumble of half-formed thoughts. It is only today that I begin to see the rather startling and somewhat oddly elegant symmetry of the past week. It began with reading about renegade political scientist Francis Fukuyama and his phrase 'getting to Denmark' from his book The End of History, a phrase that suggests that a liberal democracy like Denmark represents the end-point of the world's socioeconomic development. It ended with Michael Frayn's maddeningly complex meditation on the physical, the political and the personal, the incredible play, 'Copenhagen' a play drawing its name from that great Danish capital city, I previously associated with Hans Christian Andersen alone.

The play suggests that if events on a fateful evening in Copenhagen in 1941 had played out differently, Denmark wud have been not the end-point of the world's development but the starting-point of the end of the world as we know it.

The nearly three-hour long play is peopled not by characters, but by ghosts. Ghosts with a haunting, restless, questive quality. Ghosts that refuse to let us rest in peace. They make us, the unseen audience, the judge and jury to a decades-long argument - an argument that has followed them from life into its after.

What made it impossible for me to write about the play, is that all things that are discussed and described herein happen in a place located in memory or in limbo, not in any place inside of the space-time continuum.

The ghosts of Niels Bohr, his wife Margrethe, and Werner Heisenberg push past the pages of the history books, striding onto the creaking floorboards - questioning, always questioning the past, the present and the future.

When the play starts on a September evening in 1941 in the middle of the Second World War, on the eve of the atomic age, in German-occupied Copenhagen, the Bohrs, the rather apprehensive Danish couple are expecting a visit from their former protege and friend, German physicist, Werner Heisenberg. They try to guess at the purpose for his visit, both implicitly agreeing that it is not simply to revisit the past. "He wants to show off to us that he's a famous German professor of physics now." says Margrethe. "He wants to talk about fission. And he's not that famous!" grumbles Niels.

"Talk about physics, and not politics." Margrethe warns her husband. "The two can be difficult to keep apart." replies her husband coolly. By the end of the evening, they are about to realize exactly how difficult.

Heisenberg walks in, as on an ambush, we want to warn him. He is treated equally as old friend and new enemy. The conversation is a minefield. Old memories of colleagues, and skiing and three glasses of wine are brought forth, but are not enough to smoothen the rough edges of the conversation that alternates between assertions of patriotism, the detailing of how friendships go sour, the possibilities of escape and immigration, and of course, the war that is on about them. The war that has recast an old friend, teacher, employer as a possible source of information about the enemy's war effort.

There is also the painful awareness that the house is bugged and wired and Hitler's silent sniffer-dogs, the Gestapo are waiting in the shadows. The awareness brings with it long silences, and painful pauses.

Margrethe is a commentator in the silence. We learn that it was all different in the 20's. Between the wars, Bohr and the upstart young German he'd befriended were as close as father and son, Margrethe informs us with a strange but characteristic mixture of warmth and bile. She tells us about Christian, a son they lost in a sailing accident, how he had been all but replaced by the charming, brilliant Heisenberg in Bohr's heart, long before Heisenberg was lost, too, this time to the war and we can see how things would never be the same between them again, no matter which side won the war.

As the silence ends, the reminiscing over, a walk is suggested. For old times' sake. A walk that Margrethe says lasted barely for ten minutes, ending as abruptly as it began.

This walk is also the reason the play was written. Heisenberg said the sole reason he had come to meet Bohr in Copenhagen was to discuss a terrifying possibility that had occurred to him - the possibility of using radioactive uranium to build atomic bombs and the moral repercussions of scientists becoming involved in such a project, a project whose disturbing outcome Bohr preempted. Bohr balked at the idea, refusing to discuss it, or even consider the calculations involved, ending the conversation before it had begun. What was said that autumn evening, or rather what wasnt said, would change the course of human history.

In assuming that Heisenberg would build the bomb and help Hitler win the war, Bohr had jumped to a conclusion that Heisenberg would defend to his dying breath. It would also ensure that a fatal error in Heisenberg's calculations would not be corrected in time. The bomb would be built in America, not Germany. Bohr himself would later be part of the legendary team that successfully built the world's first atomic bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Heisenberg would fade from glory, ostracised by the international community for running Germany's ultimately unsuccessful nuclear programme, punished severely for his idealised patriotism. As a consequence he would never have the blood of innocent millions on his hands. By misunderstanding his friend's intentions, Bohr had unconsciously done him a great favour, it would seem. But, of course, this is only one version of events that occurred that night and throughout the play, these events will be subjected to various revisions and additions and editions. No one can know for certain what really happened in Copenhagen. Skepticism and Uncertainty dominate all to the very end.

(From left to right, Veera Abadan as Margrethe Bohr, Vivek Tandon as Werner Heisenberg and Tom Alter as Niels Bohr in "Copenhagen" at the NCPA.)

Another recurring theme throughout the play is the connection between the material world, governed by the laws of physics and our inner worlds, governed by rules of the heart alone.

"A particle, when observed, changes its behaviour." Margrethe intones as she shrewdly but silently observes Bohr and Heisenberg as they awkwardly attempt small-talk.

"Doubt always cast a shadow on your thinking. That is why you discovered the uncertainty principle." Bohr reproaches the impetuous Heisenberg as he boasts about his impulsive strategies - strategies that helped him win not only skiing contests but also the woman who wud be his wife.

"You always assume the worst about people, and then you decide to forgive them for it. Complementarity is in your very nature." a crestfallen Heisenberg bristles at Bohr as he brings up a discredited former student.

It is as if we were nothing but extrapolations of the billions of subatomic particles that constitute the behemoths that are our bodies - our actions as random and chaotic as anything else in the quantum world. This is at one point rather vividly illustrated as Heisenberg and Bohr pretend to be electron and photon - colliding in the darkness, spiralling away, forever changed by their singular interaction.

As for the characters, it is, of course, incredible to view famous scientists whose names have become by-words for theories and principles in physics textbooks come so forcefully to life as people in whose hands and in whose minds lay the key to saving or dooming the lives of millions of people, the key to changing the face of the twentieth century, and the outcome of the Second World War.

"Theoretical physicists are of no use in wartime. They are yet to find a way to kill people using theoretical physics." jokes Bohr at the beginning of the play. And an hour later, we learn that this very man, a half-Jewish proponent of quantum mechanics, which Hitler called "Jewish science", forced to flee his country in the face of the Holocaust would have a hand in building the two atom bombs that wrought such death and destruction as the world has scarcely seen.

The characters are brilliant men but they are played by actors who seem to follow not from the at-times assiduously scientific language of the play but from the deeper feelings behind it. Tom Alter plays Niels Bohr with a defeated air, a man who sees no hope in the world and who assumes only the very worst of his former friend.

Heisenberg is played by an actor who, unfortunately for the character, goes for breadth over depth. As a result, this Heisenberg is hapless, but not haunted. He is bright but not clever. He is confounding but never enigmatic. He is at his best in the scene where he recalls his childhood in a defeated, war-ravaged Germany, a memory that strengthens his resolve to do everything in his power to prevent Germany's defeat in yet another war.

Margrethe seemed most perfectly formed to me. A woman who stays mostly in the background of the play but sees with most clarity what happens in the foreground of her life and the lives of those around her.

My favourite part of the play was a monologue in the second act, where Bohr explains to us that in the early 20th-century was born an idea that humanized physics like never before. Einstein's relativity theories that restored man's place at the center of the universe. "That measurement is not an impersonal event that occurs with universal impartiality", but "a human act that had meaning only when carried out from a specific point of view in time and space."

Thus, man can stand at the center of the universe and while he can see all the world, he cannot see what lies behind his eyes. This fundamental unknowability of people, even and especially to themselves, is an important idea the story plays with. If man is indeed the measure of the universe, then nothing is really quantifiable. This is a surprising idea, my favourite from the several brilliant ideas the play threw up.

And as the evening comes to an end, we realize the three characters have brushed against each other in such different combinations that this friction has caused them to each emerge more clearly. At the end, we have come to know them all, from the inside out - rather than the reverse.

There is so much thought here, even when we choose to look past the layers of the science and the politics, we find the fervid, ambivalent father-son relationship between the two men. The sharp marital protectiveness and the simultaneous subtle resentment that Margrethe possesses, the pain of the loss of a child, the personal tragedy of war and how it scars forever even those that survive it bodily unharmed.

By the end, what they transmit to us most, is their spirit of ravenous curiosity. We may yet learn the secret ways of strings and quarks but we cant ever know exactly who we are, or why we do what we do. Our motives and intentions are often shrouded in ambiguity, moreso than the fate of Schrodinger's famous cat. Our memories are as unreliable and dynamic as an electron on its unpredictable trajectory.

As we witness the different permutations and versions of what may have happened on that September evening in Copenhagen in 1941, we learn that definite knowledge is probably unattainable in "Copenhagen". But how much more interesting life is, as a result. You know, that familiar letdown as you reach the end of the story in a mystery novel? Well, you wont find that here. In the world of "Copenhagen", no such anticlimaxes exist. The thrill of the chase is infinite.

P.S. Heisenberg, ever ebullient father of the Uncertainty Principle, has an epitaph over his grave that reads 'He lies somewhere here.' Uncertain in death as in life.

P.P.S. A friend who watched the play the same evening as me and who sat beside me in the latter half of the play, whose post pushed me to finish my own has perhaps a clearer, more elegant set of thoughts. Here.

There is a Light that never goes out

In our hospital, the fact of life and death going hand in hand is somewhat ironically underlined by the placement of the Labour Ward from the OBGY department along a corridor right opposite the Male Medicine Ward for Seriously Ill Patients where I am posted right now.

While this leaves much room to philosophize, ground reality presents a rather different set of observations to be made.

Four nights ago, on the night of my second consecutive emergency inside of a week, at around 3:30 A.M. approximately, while our houseman and I were trying our level best to maintain some semblance of conscious brain function while struggling to stay awake, two of the 'seriously ill' patients in our ward simultaneously took a turn for the worse.

That I wud have to watch my houseman, in his sluggish although frightened mental state, perform a quick but random triage in his head, did not occur to me while he rushed to the side of the patient on bed number 1, ordering for the intubation tray and the emergency cart. He began what he knew was about to be a failed attempt to resuscitate the dying man, when he gave me a sudden deer-caught-in-the-headlights look and as if just then remembering we had yet another dying man to deal with ordered me to bed number 27, and as I began to do what I hoped wud bring about a miracle, he yelled at me to call for help. From the MICU or the EMS, anywhere.

And unless somebody came, he seemed to imply, we wud likely lose both patients simultaneously. Asking the student nurse to hold my mobile to my ear while I was doing chest compressions, I managed to get two very sleepy medicine residents on the other end of the line, both of whom declined to come, citing reasons slightly churlish but wholly practical.

And as soon as I heard the call disconnect, all my slowed-down mind could grasp was, this was it. This was the first patient I wud watch as he died with my hands compressing his silent chest. I wud have stopped when I knew he was not coming back but the look on my houseman's face meant I wud have to keep going. I did it for ten whole minutes before he stopped and it meant it was okay for me to stop as well.

I must have looked really sad or distraught becoz he talked with both sets of relatives himself, I was relieved he'd spared me from having to deliver the news of the death. I walked slowly back to the side-room and lay down on the bed before he entered around an hour later and kindly asked if I was okay.

He said to me, in what he hoped was a comforting voice, "You'll get used to it. It happens all the time, every day. People die and you deal with it. It's strange, isn't it? Their bodies, out there, have everything the same as before, nothing's changed in them. Yet, the force that animates us all, is gone. Just like that."

"How come no one came to help?" I asked him. He sighed and said, "It's late at night, they've got their own work to do. Don't blame anyone. It was my job, anyway." He turned away from me and fell asleep for what little remained of the night.

Outside, in the lightening sky, I heard birds chirping, signalling dawn and a new day. In the corridor outside, a woman was sobbing, loudly at first, and after some time, she stopped, only whimpering now and again. In the next wing, newborns cried as they took their first breath of life.

As I rose to start the morning blood collections, I realized I had learned a new and important lesson. That it takes more than adequate knowledge and good intentions to save a life. It takes luck and random chance. And acceptance of the fact that saving one man does not mean you'll save another the next day.

But life goes on. Atleast, until death intervenes.

Say

What Iris Murdoch once said, or rather what Kate Winslet as Iris Murdoch said in the movie Iris gets one thinking about the exact significance of language.

It may be the one of the best reasons human beings have been as successful as they are as a species so far, but one wonders if its cardinal purpose of communication is served exactly.

Often, people dont say what they really want to say either becoz they think it's not the right thing to say or becoz they dont think they are equipped with the necessary vocabulary to express in words exactly what thoughts form near wordlessly in their minds.

Sometimes people talk in abstractions becoz details cannot, must not be given away. Other times people talk to distract from the truth, or to dilute it, or to embellish it.

To capture a feeling in a few words or a thousand is challenging even for those who love words and self-expression as much as Iris does, or as much as I think I do.

And since words are never enuff, language becomes something lesser then originally intended. Especially becoz people dont use it only for conveying meanings and points. It is a medium of communication, yes, but more often it ends up being about avoidance, misdirection, self-protection and mostly plain confusion.

And the truth probably is that people often talk simply becoz they have nothing to say.

But then, as Iris points out, what else do we have? Unless evolution turns us all into telepaths, and that wud be way more curse than blessing.

"There's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. But they're important to us, nonetheless, because they are what connects us to thoughts other than those belonging to us."- Iris Murdoch

How to Save a Life

When push comes to shove and when you're up against the wall with just a chance and little else, that is when you come face to face with who and what you really and truly are.

That is when you know, for certain, whether all that humanism and kindness is just a facade necessitated by society or if that philanthropism is literal.

And those who really manage to hang on to that professed love of all humanity, within that precious last inch of life, only they understand that sometimes all one has left is their dignity. And when that is lost, life is just so many breaths and heartbeats.

Should one be allowed full control of their life, including even the way it ends? Is it valid to even consider that one can be 'offered' such a choice?

All I know is that, a lot of the time, saving someone is not as simple a matter as preserving their life.

Blood, Sweat and Tears

Working in the bowels of a hospital, working on the bowels of human beings, there is a startling sensation of clarity. All of us are the same animal. This doesnt strike us so often what with our awesomely different skin colours, hairstyles and nose sizes. But we're the same. Really.

That may be a little difficult to believe when everybody looks so obviously different and strikingly unique. Well, not so much when you push past that tough, tough skin which stuns me everytime I try to put a needle in, it's so much tougher than you'd expect it to be, you know.

The truth is our innards do really look almost exactly the same as that of say, President Obama or for that matter, Baba Ramdev's. Some have a few veins extra, others have a couple of arteries clogged. Certain really special people may have their hearts on the right hand side.

But otherwise pretty much the same.

Which makes me understand the true significance of our frontal cortices. The emotions we invest in people is what raises them over and beyond the milling millions of humanity.

We prescribe identities on flimsy bases of language, region, class, dress and perhaps most artificially, of religion.

But under a surgeon's scalpel or a butcher's knife, we're all exactly the same. Meat. We're so fragile; we bleed when we're cut, we seize up when injected with nerve poison, and we're shockingly, shockingly simple to kill.

Ik Baar to yun hoga, ki Thoda sa Sukoon hoga.

We never consider some little things when we attempt to think of the big picture at times.

And that doesn't so much lead to mistakes as it does to a lot of surprises. I've been told often that you mustn't, when pursuing your passions, give in to them entirely, not so much so that they possess your mind even while you dream. Becoz it makes it that much more difficult to tell the waking world apart from those increasingly vivid dreams.

I have always wondered if I was a particularly ambitious person. And what it really meant to be a particularly ambitious person. I wondered if it made me better at this line of work, or worse.

Did it dilute that other side of me, that empathetic side, the side that really wants to believe in the motto of our hospital? That yes, all this really is, non sibi sed omnibus. Not for self, but for all.

A blogger friend repeatedly tells me about the gravely fallacious notion of being wholly philanthropic (in the literal meaning of the word). But it is not in me to be misanthropic, either.

Does ambition sit pretty alongside a clarion call to selflessness? Not selflessness in the Randian sense. In the general sense.

Does ambition not indicate a desire for improvement? An aspiration for the better?

Is that even a bad thing? Is that ever a bad thing?

Perhaps, too much of it is. But how do you know that you're crossing the line?

A month ago I remember wondering why some feel that the ugly necessity of meaningless competition is indispensable to personal success. But does competing with yourself count?

The past few weeks have been important for me. I've understood the full import of how doctors can, almost ingeniously, effect a cure. And when it happens with someone you love so dearly, that the very thought of losing them causes intense agony of body and spirit, you really appreciate, really, really appreciate what it means to be doing this.

Not studying, not watching, not observing. But Doing.

And fortunately for me, I helped. I really helped those who needed me to help them.

It is a rare and remarkable feeling. To know. To really Know. That finally, after all these years of questioning and doubting, you Know that you did not make a wrong choice. It was one of the many right ones, atleast.

Yes, this is what I want to do. I am passionate about it. It means so much. So much.

This feeling, this moment is precious to me. I want to preserve it forever. And so I keep it here. In what has turned into a slightly public trove of keepsakes.

This feeling is beautiful becoz it comes so rarely. It's called Certainty.

I'm done capitalizing initial letters of abstract nouns and throwaway verbs for effect. I have said what I needed said to me.

And this is what I was searching for, for five years. Some sign, some indication that I havent mucked up my life. I am capable of doing this, and willing to give away all that it will ask of me, and take out of me and snatch from me. I am willing to let it prey on my mind, now and forever.

Becoz that is what passion does to you. And the pleasure to be derived from surrendering to it completely, of letting it take control of me, even if it is only for as long as this feeling lasts, is indeed incredibly immense.

At least it was here

Watching Community on Star World has become something of a guilty pleasure when I'm supposed to be cramming irrelevant details of textbooks into my wannabe-harddrive of a brain. The more I watch it, the more I realise how difficult it is to make new friends when you're set in your ways and when your personality is as immutable as a grown-up's. And how when you do make friends with someone at 'this age', it's actually special.

Makes me kinda wonder how it was even possible that once upon a time sharing egg-sandwiches with a guy wud be enuff to create a bond of friendship and the girl who sat next to you on the schoolbus wud be your brand new BFF.

But the harder it gets to find probable bosom-buddies, the more delighted I am to actually meet someone I can definitely be great friends with or atleast have great conversations with.

Friendship is born at the moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one.' - C. S. Lewis

What dreams may come

I just read a description of an interesting, if aprocryphal, conversation a six year old boy and his father have on, of all places, facebook.

When the boy asks his father how one can know one's waking life isn't really a dream, the father replies, if everyone were really inside a dream, no one wud go around asking if it's a dream.

And I suppose it is true! All my own dreams are exceedingly vivid and I most certainly believe they're really happening while I'm still in them, to the extent that I sometimes forget what happened in my dream and what happened when I was awake yesterday. I remember asking Shaivi why she kicked my foot under the table yesterday, only to horribly realise a split-second later that that was probably a dream I had. I think it's incidents like this one that contribute significantly to why a lot of people in my college think I've got a "couple of loose screws" somewhere in my head.

I wish there were a profound exploration of the mind's dreamscape that I cud refer to and take comfort in. But The Interpretation of Dreams did not hold my concentration for long, and Inception, which I kept hoping wud grab my attention and jolt my mind, leaving me gobsmacked, was unintentionally funny in a lot of places.

The idea behind it, I must admit, was unique, getting lost in a dream and forgetting that you're dreaming. Or rather, never realising that you left reality, raises interesting questions about the nature of reality and how our minds work to tell the difference in real time.

Another interesting thought was held up by the writers of a segment of The Animatrix. They claimed, "To an artificial mind, the real world and the virtual worlds are impossibly difficult to tell apart." This was shouted out, of course, while plugging a struggling robot into the matrix, so the profound overtones were somewhat lost in the heat of the moment.

I find it fascinating, that so many people in the world, independently, arrive at the same question. How to tell if one is not dreaming up one's whole life? But I think I have another answer to this question.

Have you ever noticed that in dream time, a lot of things tend to happen at rather breakneck speeds, if my afternoon one-hour-long siestas are anything to go by. Life, on the other hand, tends to move reaaaaalllllly slowly at times, especially in the forbiddingly long minutes one spends waiting when one wud rather not.

I think the best way to know that life isn't a dream is simply to come to terms with how boring some parts of it are. Dreams, at least my dreams, are never, never dull. :D