Sometimes I feel like I’ve almost decided to become very rich and very famous.

Someone who reads papers, wears designer jackets, and attends polo games, and knows which vintage year the Chateau Haut-Bryon was particularly good.
One of the fashionable doctors, you know?
In fact, the embodiment of the wealthy elitist, the person everyone wants to be but loves to hate.
I would be good at that.

But most of the time I want to join an organization like “Doctors without Borders.”
Practise with the bare minimum, amongst people who lack even that.
I don’t really have a good reason for it.
It is not a question of dedicating my life to humanity.
I have no interest in feeling morally buoyed by my work.
I am not as weak as that.
It isn’t even that I am dispelling some of the misery that pervades our times.
My interest in mysticism is strictly academic.
And I have proved experimentally, to my own complete satisfaction, that Karma does not exist.
It is just that then my life would mean something.
To someone.
Anyone.
That is important to me.

At other times I want to drift.
Stop trying to be the best.
Stop needing to win the approval of my teachers.
Stop striving to be the person that everyone thinks of when they try to remember my group, my batch, my year.
Let go.

I don’t know.
What is better? Or worse?
Fame, but surrounded by vapid, contemptible people?
Or purpose, but with a profound lack of the comforts that make life worth living?
Or oblivion, but with oblivion?

Sometimes life is inconclusive.
Posts, too.

I learnt today that Tuberculosis is a disease of great antiquity. Many ancient Egyptian mummies, show evidences of spinal tuberculosis.
Is it not unfortunate that this malaise, which laid members of a race descended from gods low, revels in the ungainly (and rather undignified) name of "Pott's Disease"?

Anubis the deathless writhes in agony!!!

There was a storm last night. I love the smell of parched earth being quenched by rain.
I like the wind that comes before, bringing dust and that smell with it. I like to stand on the terrace and squint into the haze of dust. It is exhilarating, that sense of being eye to eye with the elements. Then the lightning is my servant and the rain is my cloak. I was there tonight on the terrace, with Thor beside me. He nuzzled the back of my knee, leaving occasionally to chase the dust-devils whirling in the corners, buoyed by sporadic gusts. Then the rain came, and he left, only pausing to ogle a passing cat.

Imaginary and not so imaginary friends, let me introduce you to Senora Sabasa de Garcia. She was eighteen when Goya first saw her. He was painting her uncle, Don Evaristo Perez de Castro, when he saw her. He had been painting all day, and yet he insisted on a sitting with her that very moment, and presented her with the composition when he was done. He then left, never to see her again.

Maybe I am a hopeless romantic, but that story touched me.Wouldn’t it be glorious to fall in deep, hopeless love? To have the love of one’s life forever unattainable? The image of a woman seared into your soul, untarnished by the passage of time, space, and emotion?

I once heard a song about a man who says to his wife, “You are not the person you were. You do not hum to yourself without reason all day, and your eyes do not light up at the sight of me.” It was in bengali and I do not translate very well. I don’t even remember the name of the person who wrote it right now. But what he is trying to say, is that this woman is not in love with him any more. They have changed, evolved, and drifted far, heartbreakingly far, apart. Perhaps a lost love is the purest of loves. Forever virgin.

It is rather liberating to think that no one reads my posts. (Yes, perhaps you do, Arunava, my dear fellow, but I have my doubts and for the life of me, I don't know why you would be interested.) So I can let my natural verbosity have full sway, and write something replete with verbiage. Yes, that felt good! Also, I can be self-righteous when I want, and frivolous at other times.

I have started translating Sholay into Latin. I submit an excerpt, for your reading pleasure:
Veeru: “Canis es. Nothus es. Sanguinem tuum potabo.”
In stalls soon, people. Await it with bated breath.

Another consequence of having posts no one reads. Here is something I wouldn’t really like people to know. I have enough people thinking of me as maudlin. A kitten almost ran under the wheels of our car as I was wending my weary way home today. I got out and put it back on the side of the road, but it just wouldn’t stay. It kept following me back onto the road. I finally picked it up and took it home in the face of almost tearful protests from the mater. Who finally relented. (It was very cute. Did you know, O imaginary people, that small mammals have evolved large eyes and button noses as a defense mechanism, so adults of most species would not kill them?) Anyway, I took it home, where La grandmeré threw a fit, threatened to leave home, and generally invoked the powers of darkness down on the kitten while I fed it milk with an ear-cleaning-bud-stick-thingy. I was finally forced to take it back and place it where I had found it. Perhaps it is self delusion secondary to guilt, but I have a mental picture of a worried looking cat hurrying towards it, so maybe all is well that ends well. I can’t really see Thor taking kindly to a cat.

And on another note, ACED my pharmacology exam.
Yes, I know, (imaginary) Gentlemen. I am Da Man.

I want to know if anyone has actually read Hermann Melville's "Moby Dick" through. I have started it 13 times. Or is it 11? I never get past where Queequeg shares a bed with Ishmael.
But isn't it a fantastic way to begin a book.. "Call me Ishmael."
If I ever write a book, I want to be able to start with something like that. Simple. It makes absolutely no promises about anything.
I want to be a writer someday. So many Doctors have become writers. Maugham never practised a single day in his life. He started writing as soon as he graduated med school. I would practise though. Preferably somewhere in Africa in a small white tent. With Medecins Sans frontieres or something. Under the desert sun.....
It took me about 7 minutes to type this. In this time 7 people somewhere in India have died of Tuberculosis, most of them with a coexistent AIDS infection. This year, more babies than ever before all over the world will be born with AIDS.

Imagine being born sullied.

No one could care less. And pharmaceutical companies save millions of dollars in tax by giving the starving millions of Africa obsolete or even expired drugs used to prevent fat absorption in morbidly obese people.

You're probably thinking I'm some sort of self righteous bleeding heart freak. Well, maybe I am.

Aquilus is latin for 'Eagle'. In Rome, it was the symbol of Jupiter, the king of the Gods, and the emblem of victory. The ancient Romans put it on their standard and as their armies slowly consumed what was left of the known world, it waved in its colours of purple and gold above the armor of the men who had left their homes to wage war at the behest of their empty rulers.

That is not why i call myself aquilus. I am not obsessed with victory. Sartre believed ( and I agree) that there is no purpose to life itself- It is a random series of occurrences and we are all colossal, cosmic flukes generated by an uncaring universe. We exist: and that is all.
The reason i call myself aquilus is that I like the idea of being suspended in space, far above... everything. I am like that most of the time. I am on autopilot, and I descend only when there is something that interests me.
Altus is defined in my dictionary as 'Grown, great. As seen from below, high. Hence of character, degree and rank, lofty or noble. As seen from above, deep. Of thoughts, deep seated, secret. Of time, ancient, or of great antiquity.'
Reading this over it sounds so very pretentious, which I really did not want it to. I want to explain my thoughts, send them out to whichever part of the unverse that cyberspace occupies. But I will not change it. Perhaps no one will read it. Or someone who reads it will understand.

LATER:
I have a dog. His name is Thor, after the Norse god of strength. I wonder what it would be like to be him. To be able to love unconditionally, without wondering how much the other person loves you back. Or how much he or she even likes you. Without any thought of return or whether you love more than you are loved. I wonder if that is bliss.