Mirror, mirror on the wall..

Spending two hours and a disproportionately large amount of money in a salon to make one look adequately put together for a cousin's wedding, one encounters a lot of strange people.

The girl who bites her nails on account of nervousness and then comes to get artificial nails made of protein gel no less so she can hide her habit.

The middle-aged lowest-rung-politician who dyes his hair black so he doesn't look absolutely ridiculous standing next to his twenty-nine year old wife.

The young woman with two children who decides to get her hair permed becoz her husband prefers curly hair and asks me for advice on how to get a liposuction done (also becoz husband prefers slim waists, it seems) when she learns I work in a hospital.

The grand-dad who accompanies his grandkid becoz the said seven year old demands a 'Taare-Zameen-Par' wala haircut on his birthday.

The teenage college boy who frets over his pimples and wonders if those 'fairness creams-only for men' will actually work if he bought and used them.

After these two hours spent in trying to reassure people, and quite frankly, after attempting to jolt them back to some semblance of reality, one does realize that vanity is, hands down, the most pointless of the seven deadly sins. And also, by far the saddest.

Dream On

This happy little two-day sabbatical has done me good. I'm rested, refreshed and rearing to go back to work. Also, it's given me a deeper appreciation of one of Richard Gere's decidedly more daring films. Having absolutely nothing to do at 1 AM prompted me to watch it on Zee Studio last night. Called "Mr. Jones" it is superficially a story of a man with bipolar disorder, prone to climbing the dizzying heights of euphoric contentment before plunging into the depths of depression that make him repeatedly suicidal. One such attempt lands him in a state-run psych ward where he meets a rather wistful and beautiful psychiatrist who grows attached to him and learns to appreciate his whimsical, if slightly delusional world view.

At its centre, it is quite a seductive study of a mental illness, making manic depression vaguely attractive, with its own skewed interior logic. It makes me understand what I'd always thought was a strange quality about crazy people. They're so convinced about their world view that some times we cant help but envy the strength of their conviction.

Anyway, moving on to what is the point of this post, there is a scene in the film that I really liked, in spite of the rough-handed way the rest of the movie played out the implications of the scene.

In it, Mr. Jones and his psychiatrist are talking on the rooftop of the hospital (most real-world psychiatrists will immediately tell you what a stupid and dangerous idea this is) and she's asking him about what sort of dreams he's been having lately, a valid question if she still believes in Freudian dream analysis. And now Mr. Jones does something really wild, he gets up from his chair and climbs to the ledge of the rooftop in one swift motion eliciting a squawk from his psychiatrist who finally sees the potential folly of this particular setting.

He spreads his arms out while she begs him to climb back down and he says, "I dream about flying!" She continues her entreaty while he surveys the view and he asks her, "What do you dream about?" She replies that she doesnt remember her dreams but she used to dream of flying when she was a child.

He smiles and utters the single best line of the movie, "Why do only children have flying dreams?" She stammers that she doesnt know and he asks her if she thinks he'll really fly off this rooftop if he tried. She screams that he will die and he asks her if there's really a difference before climbing down. She slaps him and the movie moves on to their love story but the memory of the goosebump-inducing scene is what lingers beyond the rest of their 'romance'. We wish they'd let us into her mind to see if she understands that she's falling in love with not just the man, but also this disease. That it is his mania that makes him so certain, so charming, so delightfully romantic. That she will never really know her loved one, and that she is ethically compromising herself by becoming so involved with a patient she's trying to help.

Regardless, the question Mr. Jones throws at us is important. Why do we dream of flying as children and stop when we grow up? Is it becoz we know that it is one of those things beyond the realm of possibility unless we have an airplane or a handglider? Or do we hang on to the dream by transmuting it into a realistic dream of becoming aeroplane pilots?

Does this also happen with other childhood dreams? Maybe we simply put them aside when we realize they wont really ever come true.

Is this why children aspire to become astronauts while adults put up with the drollest of jobs, becoz you have to, you know, 'grow up and get real'?

When we're young, we have the future, bright and whole, ahead of us. We believe we have endless potential to realize all the million possibilities we've told ourselves our lives will segue into.

We think we're brilliant and wonderful and that someday we'll definitely win an Oscar or a Nobel or something really, really important will happen for us.

But a lot of times, as we grow older, the realm of possibilities shrinks and aspirations shrivel up and die. And that is a real pity.

I think Mr. Jones senses that better than a lot of people becoz he is cursed with the ability and the sense to feel both the expansive high of optimistic hope and the suffocating cynical vise of desperation. That is why he alternates between living life as if he will die any minute before proceeding to attempt to die the next minute. We are fortunate that we do not share his fate, but atleast we can learn a lesson from it.

Octopus Garden

My mother tells me that one of my worst habits is the way I treat books. I buy a whole pile of them and arrange them carefully on my bookshelves and start reading a myriad books around the same time, then leave them off to begin new ones and the cycle continues endlessly. She says that this is becoz of my essentially easily distracted attention and fickle nature.

I must confess that while this treatment of books is shabby indeed and I do regret not finishing a lot of the books I start, I have truly honorable intentions and I do intend to finish reading all those books I turned away from in favour of new ones.

But then I love books, I have never let a single page tear or the spine fray and what few stains there are on their pages have been thoroughly regretted.

Then I read these two truly marvellous quotes by fellow booklovers from a bygone era and realized that well, atleast I'm not the only grave offender here.

The first one is the by the famous O. Henry who raised short stories to a sublime art form and in whose stories every character, however ordinary, is treated delicately with great care and tenderness.

"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention."

The second one which I adore beyond measure is by the inimitable wordsmith Winston Churchill, one of the singularly most brilliant orators that ever lived.

"If you cannot read all your books...then fondle them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances."

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.

Hold on Hope

It is cruel and unfair how we're fooled into believing in the absolute invulnerability of our parents. It is when they actually need our help that we realise that now we've grown up and they've grown old.

I wish I had learned to be more independent earlier on in life. This wud not have been so painful. Perhaps, it is a lesson that is best learned this way, heart-wrenching though it may be.

One cannot exercise control on fate. No matter how strongly you will your love to protect those you love, it cannot.

It is the most humbling thing to feel so completely helpless. Like S. told me, "Every little girl has to grow up one day." I just wish it wudnt have been this tough on me. Or perhaps, I am too weak to bear this cross without crumbling like this.

I am grateful tonight that this blog is actually this therapeutic for me. I'm a lot calmer now that I've typed this out.

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

Paranoid Android

People around me seem to become increasingly mistrustful and deceiving of each other as apparent vicious competition tightens its noose around the neck of fragile friendships. There's a reason they call it 'cut-throat'. I always thought that was an extremely bloody metaphor. Will some people really stop at nothing to get ahead?

Reading this bit of poignant paranoia someplace as innocuous as someone's facebook profile bio, I barely suppressed an involuntary shudder.

"Walls have ears.

Doors have eyes.

Trees have voices.

Beasts tell lies.

Beware the rain,

beware the snow.

Beware the man

you think you know."

from 'Songs of Sapphique', Incarceron

by Catherine Fisher.

Wud you like to turn the page now?

Watching The Jane Austen Book Club, a movie that came thoroughly recommended by members of my own book club, I cudnt help wondering if life really is like a book, specifically one of Jane Austen's books. I mean, if you think about it, maybe it's like this. The non-readers think what happens is fate. But the readers, they know, all along, that it's all just part of the narrative, life is like a story-line.

Besides, as my friend M. points out, present-day India isn't all that different from eighteenth century Victorian England that Austen wrote about.

Everyone thinks about marriage and people pair up, sometimes even with the right person and there are these big fat families with these stereotypical characters and their money issues, and the need to do what is proper against the desire to try the most inappropriate thing we possibly can.

Perhaps, it's all becoz people havent really changed all that much over the last two centuries. Circumstances might have altered, societies have supposedly evolved but our emotions are just as confused and confounding at times.

Well, about the movie, it's pretty interesting, especially if you've read all the Austen books. Each character is sort of based on an Austen character type. The marry-everybody-off-and-gossip-about-it lady, the never-say-die romantic, the beautiful-but-bashful woman, the passionate-but-picks-the-wrong-partner girl, the sensible Plain Jane who finally finds true love and of course, the quiet, handsome, misunderstood Mr. Nice Guy. Six books and six people in the book club. And the events of the book subtly parallel the events of their lives, and the decisions they make are mirrored with those Jane Austen wrote for her characters.

Like my friends said, it's not necessary to have read the books, but already having read them will provide an added dimension.

In fact the movie is exactly like a Jane Austen book, too. You can see the happy ending coming from a mile off but we learn a lot about these people as we go along, we care about them and we cheer when they do get their happy endings.

I cud argue that life doesn't provide happy endings to everyone, and working in a hospital puts that in even sharper perspective. But perhaps that's becoz life is like an Austen book without the direct payoffs, if she'd written them to be longer and more complicated. Even in her books, not everyone has a happy ending, and often, choices are shown to have wildly unpredictable consequences. In her books, those that are too charming are never to be trusted and almost every character has hidden depths.

I like how the movie talks about the minor characters in the books having a secret life that even Austen wasn't aware off. Like speculating if Charlotte Lucas from Pride & Prejudice could be a lesbian, for example. But hasty interpretations aside, I think I'll quote my brother, who prefers sci-fi over other kinds of books, like Grigg in the movie. But on my insistence, he read Sense & Sensibility and then Persuasion and he said, "Austen's books are more than how-to-get-married manuals, they're about determinedly doing what brings you happiness, at great initial risk. They're highly individualistic."

I agree. Which is probably why they're such best-sellers more than two hundred years after they were written. And they keep making these fabulous movies with these great actors that win Oscars. There are Jane Austen scholars who dissect and describe every single character, line of dialogue, description and turn of events to find a rich collection of underlying themes.

And without pontificating, they still talk about things everybody cares about. Not the existential dilemmas of one hallowed soul, but the everyday decisions and compromises that regular yet unique people must make.

Which is why I wonder if I really am living out a Jane Austen novel. And this way, we all get to be Elizabeth or Anne or Marianne or Elinor or Emma, leading ladies of our lives, striding into a glorious future of our own making.

P. S. If anyone knows a guy like Grigg, the sweet sci-fi geek who cares about the environment and doesn't care about upholstery, please contact me pronto! :D

Be nice! I cud be your doctor some day! :D

So, instead of making this a 'A journey ends; a journey begins' sort of a melodramatic post, just let me say, that five years, fifteen journals, hundreds of practicals and endless vivas later, I have passed my Final MBBS examination with gliding, if not flying, colours (alright, that was trying too hard, but today I'm allowed) and have earned the much-feted, much-coveted prefix of Doctor to go with my name.

My obsessive-about-etymology friend reminds me that the origin of the word doctor lies in the Latin 'Doktore' which is a rather generic term for a teacher. Our foremost purpose is to teach patients about their health and so on.

It does feel rather fantastic to earn the epithet, it actually wud've felt just as fantastic to earn any other graduate degree. However, this does feel like a milestone along a longer journey and as our professor cheerily reminded me on facebook today, "In medicine, what we learn the very first year is that the first degree isn't the last, and that there never comes a day when you shut all your books and put them away. We must remain eternal students."

Which is all very true in more than a Gandhian sense. We learn as if we live forever and live as if we have a whole storehouse of tomorrows.

Which brings me to the next bit. My seniors remind me of the dangers of postponing 'life' in order to make studying a priority. It is important to give time to one's own self and stop and do all those things that make one happy if one is to avoid a total burn-out.

How anyone ever manages to make the time is a mystery to me. But I suppose somebody will end up teaching me time management one of these days.

Now, it is post-graduation that everyone will obsess about and work themselves to exhaustion for. That's as good a goal as any, I guess. Let's see how well this year treats me.

Right now, I'm just soaking in the reflected glory of this unnaturally revered degree. And the fact that my school friends got me a T-shirt emblazoned with the words, "What's up, doc?" Atleast they were confident about my result, which is more than what I cud say about my state of nerves.

All's well that ends well, tho. And never have I been more grateful for the faith that these others have chosen to invest in me. I shall never forget it. And I shall require more along this rather long journey. Well, whaddya know? It is a 'A journey ends; a journey begins' kinda post after all. :D Wud never have guessed it starting off! But today I'm allowed. ;)

Stay

I am struck today by the full force of the realisation of how important communication really is. How vital it is to reach out to another human being across the ether, to open one's mind unto another's, to share a memory, a feeling, and to receive, in return, an equally heartfelt emotion, an equally poignant memory.

It is so easy to feel lost and lonely in the world. Sometimes, the urge to reach out and touch someone becomes almost irresistible. The comfort to be derived from contact is great.

I cannot have imagined a greater gift than that of language, be it one of words or gestures or smiles or caresses.

The incredible power of sharing an experience will never be underestimated by me again.

Reassurance, when given, if sought, is like an unshakable and adamant support. And tonight, for that much I am grateful.