Love makes the world go 'round

'A General Theory of Love' is turning into a bit of comfort-reading these days. I tend to skim through chapters right before I go to sleep. For a neurobiology book, it's a fairly romantic read.

I was reading it right now and remembered how much I'd enjoyed this idea of limbic resonance the first time that I read it. Our limbic systems which are sort of the most primitive and emotional parts of our brain, are not exactly information-sponges. As the book puts it, they don't pick up facts as rapidly as the neocortex does.

The book postulates that the limbic system is capable of something rather profound, however. That it enables us to share deep emotional states and is responsible for our capacity to form non-verbal connections with other members of our species which are in large part responsible for our elaborate social behaviour. And this leads not just to creating the capacity for empathy but in some cases it lays the basis for the bonds of companionship since it allows 'our systems to synchronise with each other through limbic revision'.

All in all, apparently love rewires the brain by changing its chemistry. And to adopt the book's guileless and somewhat mushy tone, 'In any relationship, one mind revises the other; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our mammalian brains is limbic revision : the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love as our Attractors activate certain neural pathways and the brain's inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them.'

What all that means is that who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.

It rarely happens that a popular science book ends up saying the same thing as your favourite Jane Austen novel. But when it does, you can't help grinning like a fool as you jump out of bed to type it onto your blog.

Sing to me of the man, Muse

Dustin: So you're a painter?

George (nodding): Yeah. I mean I'd like to be. I just don't know what to paint.

Dustin: What do you mean?

George: It's just that every time I think of a subject, or even try to visualise an image of what I think I should paint, I just feel like I'm full of shit. Like I'm trying to be something I'm really not.

Dustin (staring at a painting on George's bedroom wall): Yeah, that's the hardest part, you know?

George: And what if it's not any good? What I can do -

Dustin (shrugging): Some say it's bullshit. Some say it's a masterpiece. You gotta be honest with yourself, man. Figure out what you're in it for. You might think it's art. You might think it's money on a wall. If you've got some talent, you gotta hone it. Read about it. Look at stuff in galleries. You can't live inside your own head all the time.

George: Does that make me not a painter?

Dustin: No, that's not what I meant. What you're doing is fantastic. This is what you should paint. Atleast until you evolve into something else. The fact that you struggle with it is a really good thing, you know what I mean?

George: I guess. But I keep thinking is it really meant to be this hard? If it's hard, then it's not natural. And you can't force something like that.

Dustin: Yeah, but you gotta exercise that muscle. It gets easier, I promise. Besides, how can you call yourself a painter if you don't paint?

- from The Art of Getting By.

This Land is your Land

I must admit my middle-class upbringing has been allowed to colour my view of the world around me much, much more than it ever should have been. Thus far, I have always considered slums to be a symptom of a societal ill; sad, dirty places overcrowded with the oppressed haves-not of a country divided along the fault-lines of class, caste and recently, religion. I haven't been impressed with the 'Slumdog Millionaire' spirit they were recently cast into- that technicolour, rags to riches, destiny-rules-all view of things was as many worlds apart from the truth, I thought, as is the first world from the third.

But I may have been very wrong, very middle-class in my thinking. After spending a month travelling the length and breadth of our confoundingly claustrophobic metropolis, visiting healthposts in 'slum' areas, setting up health camps inside houses, no, not houses, but huts, I have understood that these are real communities, teeming with aspirational, upwardly-mobile, intelligent, hardworking people, most of them immigrants from the far-off regions of distant states, others hailing from war-ravaged countries in our South Asian neighbourhood.

I always had this fantasy in my head, of people being seduced by the mirage of Bombay as a glittering city with the untold promise of wealth and luxury, luring them away from their clean, pastoral existence into the grimy muck of the ruthless, heartless city. Now, I realize that this was an oversimplification of the highest order.

People leave their homes, only and only when their existence becomes unbearable there, only when they realize that there is absolutely no way for their lives to improve, if they stay where they are. In other words, they immigrate from a place of no hope to a place where they think they can hope, hope for better lives, if not for themselves then at the very least, for their children.

My own great-grandfather left his ancestral home in another state, persecuted for his religious beliefs and linguistic allegiances, to come to this benevolent leveller of a city where three generations later, his great-grandchildren no longer speak his dear mother tongue with any felicity, nor do they hold that sacred religion close to their heart. But they survive. They thrive. I wonder if he would have believed, as I do, that tradition was a good thing to barter with, in exchange for prosperity.

I admire each day these people I meet. They are smiling, hard-working people, not as disillusioned with the state of affairs as me and my friends are. They want the very best that their money can provide for their children, education and healthcare that wud have been impossible to achieve in their native villages.

Everywhere we went, we were spoken to politely, greeted smilingly, invited into humble but tidy homes for tea and biscuits. There were old women who asked after my family, young men who shyly asked me my name, children who asked me how they cud become doctors, too. These were not the tragic half-starved working-classes of my overheated imagination, these were robust people, confident in the future they cud build in this incredible 'maximum city' as a writer called it. They did not despair, they just got on with their lives.

I wondered if Gregory David Roberts did not grossly exaggerate the life of slum-dwellers in Shantaram; I was always doubtful if his foreigner's eye and subsequent rise in life did not colour his 'somewhat true' story. But I was perhaps more foreign to these places than he was. He'd lived here, right beside the people he wrote about. And I understood now what fascinated him.

As for Danny Boyle, I admit I was wrong about his film. I can see now, just as he saw, the traces of great beauty in the harshest of faces, in the darkest of places.

My parents have always tried to educate me about the importance of keeping an open mind when visiting foreign lands. I begin to understand they did not mean only other countries. I can also see that it's hard to leave the comfortable world one belongs to, to dip into unknown worlds with unknown dangers, but these journeys are definitely worth it.

Subah ho gayi, mamu!

In the big run-up to my Final Final Final exams, we've been visiting our wards for what must be the absolute last time before we finish our degrees. Needless to say my entire batch has turned into Supreme Worrywarts and have been thronging the wards, taking cases feverishly, eliciting signs, jotting down findings.

All this has rather irritated the patients, who provide the aforementioned cases to the point of great anger. And one patient, such as the one I was examining today afternoon, to the verge of hypochondria. This poor man, fancy case of Peripheral Vascular Disease, had been examined by atleast 50 people since morning. He asked me if something was seriously wrong with him, was that why he was receiving so much attention.

I told him that all the people examining him were merely students getting some practice before the big exam day and that what he had was the condition we were likely to be asked in our examination. He looked a little flattered when I said this and a little put out by the fact that my batchmates were doctors-in-training and not doctors.

In the very first year of our clinical rotations, an exceptionally brilliant professor had clearly instructed us to let the patients continue to labour under the illusion of being treated by doctors. Or else they won't "co-operate with you guys if you tell them you're just students".

And while this may be true with some, I've found the advice of a more senior and more considerate doctor more useful. "Try to be as honest but as reassuring as you possibly can. Do not forget that that is live human flesh underneath your fingers." and "Every individual has the first right of control to his body, you as his physician only come a distant second."

I've always told the patients I deal with that I am a student and that I require their help for my study. And not one single person has ever refused. Except for I think a woman suffering from a bout of fever. But that's a lot more kindness than I wud show if I were ill.

Today, watching my batchmates auscultating chests while excitedly discussing murmurs made me wonder how we'll ever learn how to balance the affect of our excitement against the solemn bedside manner that we are expected to adopt.

I dont think I wud be right to be flippant, but I also dont think I'll ever manage to look cheerless. I wonder if people really prefer poker-faced, stoic doctors over smiling, cheerful ones becoz they believe their special conditions deserve more serious consideration.

I dont really believe I'll ever be able to pull the poker-face off. So I've given up trying. I think I'll likely end up being a doctor of the Munnabhai persuasion. :D

The Tyranny of Beauty

I had a very interesting, if a little one-sided, conversation with an old friend from Ruia's theatre group who I ran into, not too inexplicably, at the Prithvi theatre fest way back in July. We were sitting in Prithvi cafe, that most favoured of suburban smoky pseudo-intellectual open-air hangouts. We were reminiscing about old times when we'd set out to stage the play, Hamlet, except we'd reversed the genders of all the characters. So now, there was a King with a manipulative second wife, who'd plotted to get rid of the Queen, and Hamlet was now a princess, called Hamda. Now, all this, of course, was in Hindi and ultimately, in my opinion, came off as more than a little soap-operatic on the stage (maybe that cant be helped becoz of the way Shakespeare actually wrote his plays). But we won the "Adapt a Shakespeare" inter-collegiate at Malhaar, and my friend, who played Hamda, was praised and uniformly feted by our college folks till pretty much the end of that year. My part in all this had been simply to read the original play and help the 'playwright' Tauseef translate it into suitably clear and correct Hindi.

She was telling me about how she'd found work in this experimental theatre group and I was very happy for her. She was surprised that I'd chosen to study medicine, thinking I wud have chosen to pursue more "literary inclinations" as she'd called them.

I told her that I quite frankly admired her gumption about having chosen to follow her passion for acting while pursuing a Batchelor of Arts degree. She told me that she occasionally modelled to earn some extra money, becoz "As everyone knows there's not much money in theatre unless you're Naseeruddin Shah, and even then it's a struggle."

She seemed to be in this strange confessional introspective mood, she kept telling me about how everyone, even in theatre, was more than a little obsessed with good looks. "It's not enuff that you're talented. You have to appear striking."

I pointed out that on the stage, you can be almost anyone almost, irrespective of what you look like. And it didn't really matter anyway becoz she was quite lovely looking herself.

"Thats just the problem, Karishma! I dont know if the people that say they like me, like me becoz of the way I look or becoz of who I am!"

I thought that all this was coming from someone in particular and I asked her that. She nodded, frowning a little. "Yeah. I dont know if thats why he liked me."

I didnt know how to respond to this, except to assure her that that cudnt be the case, at which point she said something that surprised me completely, though I cant say I was shocked.

"Its so different for you, Kari! People like you always get other people to like you for your mind. You're cute but you know what I'm saying. I mean, its just different for me."

What she left unsaid was plain to me. I wasnt pretty like her. She thought that for some reason that that worked to my advantage, becoz I knew people genuinely liked me for my, ahem, my thoughts and "my nature", apparently.

I wud be lying if I said the thought stated in words was a little hurtful to me. But it is the truth after a fashion.

Besides, being a friend, I had to offer comfort. So I said to her what I firmly believe, "It doesnt matter what you look like, atleast not after the first few days. The people we love become beautiful for us. Honestly, if you met someone you liked right now, you'd smile and feel this warm rush of emotion for them. You wudnt really take time to notice if their hair was messed up or if their shirt was crumpled. That's secondary. What's beautiful is the person."

I dont think I managed to convince her. "Yeah, but what about that very first time? Most people have already judged you by then. Love enters from the eyes and leaves through the eyes, like de Bernieres said."

"I dont believe that." I told her. "People who judge you the first time arent really worth all the trouble."

She looked directly at me, and I cud see contempt on her expressive face, "Yeah, well, atleast that's true. Anyway, Kari, you're too idealistic!"

The conversation came to a rather premature stop while we sipped masala chai and then, she met a friend of hers who called her away. I sat under the tree for a while wondering about how other female mammals had it so much easier than us. In the animal kingdom, only the males worried about vanity. How had humans got it all reversed, then?

The answer must lie in the exaggeration of the ideas of beauty that humans indulge in. So much so that even the very beautiful are bothered by these ideas. And if that is true, thenI do really wonder if beauty cud be more than a little over-rated. Guess I'm not that idealistic after all.

Pokerface

Every time I'm tempted to make a mental filing cabinet to fit in all the people I know, so I can slot them into neat, organised little categories to make things simpler for me, every time I'm almost convinced that I've finally got a 'handle' on my piece of humanity's pie, people surprise me. And in a most fascinating, anthropologically stimulating way.

Either I'm extremely poor at judging people or extremely good at looking past surfaces. Or maybe its just that these people I know are absolutely resistant to banal slotting. :)