A friend of mine read my blog a couple of days ago, and had a few things to say. Apparently I come off as unbearably gloomy, and also, I give the impression that I hate medical students, and doctors. I portray them, he said, as arrogant, self absorbed jerks. And also, I never write, he says, about what is happening in my life, but only about what I am thinking.

So this post is in the nature of a disclaimer. Which is actually pretty pointless, but I have some holidays and an exam free two weeks, which translates to an ocean of time I can waste.

Firstly, I would like to say, I do not dig up corpses and feast on their hearts.
[But I am not against a succulent liver or two :)]
I like puppies with stumpy tails, and ice cream, and sunshine.
I do not worship Satan.
I have a lot of things I should be thankful for: parents who love me; A wonderful sister; A grandma I adore; And the cutest, blackest, boisterous-est dog with the pinkest tongue.
So why, you ask, are my posts so very depressing?
The thing is I write only about things I know, or see, or feel. And the place I go to everyday happens to be involved with a lot of human misery. Perhaps this tends to color my writing a wee bit.
The person that writes these posts is only one side of me.
I could say other things. But I’m just going to repeat what someone said, much more eloquently than I ever could, some of my favorite lines from all of literature:

Preguntaréis por qué su poesía
No nos habla del sueño, de las hojas,
De los grandes volcanes de su país natal?

Venid a ver la sangre por las calles.
Venid a ver
la sangre por las calles,
Venid a ver la sangre
por las calles!
From ‘Explico algunas cosas’, from Tercera Residencia.

[I hope this satisfies you, A, old boy. And I hope you’ve read this, Sen. You too, Div. And I refuse to believe that I ever could make you feel under-read, or intellectually inferior.]

Regarding Medical students, and doctors, I do not intend to make them appear that way. Like all people, some of them are arrogant, and self absorbed, and some are not. Take for example, me, a reasonably typical specimen of the Medical Student. I’m about the most self deprecating person you could ever meet!

[A, I hope this assuages the dent in your ego my posts made!!!]

About the last point, one of the things I like most about blogging is the relative anonymity of the whole thing. Of the five people or so who’ve read my blog, I’m sure at least three do not know who I am. I revel in my own obscurity. Also, my life is not very interesting! So I post things that interest me, most of which, sadly, is in my head.

So there.

I like it when the monsoon comes.
Everything is so verdantly, unashamedly green.
Small weeds grow in the most untenable of places.
The sky is a perfect shade of cobalt-grey, and when the clouds leave, its like they strip the friendliness from the sun.
And the air smells different too. Not dustily hungry, anymore.
And rain.
Portly drops of rain, and the sound they make when they splatter on the ground.
And the cold pinpricks of the small drops.
And the sound of rain, like very large anklets heard from far away.
And the wind that heralds the coming of the rain.
And after the thunder stops, the silence, that sounds so alive.
I like it when the monsoon comes.

UNTITLED
I have built myself a cage of words.
Briar thorns are in the hearts of a thousand birds.
Shadows soak up the morning sunlight.
And nothing is ever good. Ever pure. Ever bright.
I am a coward, I know, and I quietly grieve,
And silence reigns for the space of a semibreve,
And a kindly goddess wills me to act,
While I flounder alone in tangled forests of tact.
And you appear, you are golden, I don’t know you well,
And I am lost, I know, this even I can tell.
To you I shall become a withered memory; something killed;
An afterthought in your dance of dreams fulfilled.

It was summer. The middle of the morning.

He sat at his desk and looked at the books piled high around. His desk faced a window and he could look up and out. He remembered that he would sit here, studying, for hours. No, not studying; the word was too passive to apply to what he did: he would pick a topic and strip it of its secrets, devour its strangeness until he could put his foot on its dismembered, distinctly labeled carcass, and scream that he was king.
But he didn’t do that any more. It wasn’t that he couldn’t, just that he didn’t. He didn’t know why. He was still the same, his mind the same instrument it had always been. And all he knew seemed to be receding into a fog, facts insidiously reclaiming their independence, while he floundered in a quagmire of lassitude.

He was feeling faintly downcast, a frame of mind that was almost habitual to him now. He tried to imagine the worst that could happen to him- No post graduation, stuck in a soulless job, no career, stuck behind a pharmacy in a claustrophobic little room. It didn’t really affect him. It was like his life was coated with an anesthetic, and he never felt anything anymore. He couldn’t understand why he felt so numb, so deadened.
It was like, he thought, that he had no concept of his own academic mortality. He had always drifted. Always. But even drifting, he never failed to win. He didn’t understand that here at last was something that he couldn’t throw aside, muttering ‘I shall contrive’, and still succeed. He felt he had never known what it was like to feel that something was final, something really mattered.
He was always trying to fill a void inside.
He hadn’t been happy for a long time. He had no reason to be unhappy. His marks stayed high, he had many friends, many things to do, he loved what he did, and he had books and music and poetry. But he wasn’t happy.
He had so many personas to keep up to so many different groups of people, so many masks that he couldn’t recognize his own face anymore. Say-funny-things-to-make-you-laugh Guy, quirky Guy, bluff-good-fellow, quiet-confident-answer-any-question Guy, intelligent erudite Guy; he changed his masks to suit the company.

Maybe all he wanted to find was somewhere he didn’t have to pretend anymore.

I wonder what it will take for the government to acknowledge us.

In 96 hours, ninety four medical students have collapsed, as the hunger strike continues at Delhi. The reason that you have not been reading about it in the papers is that the media have been specifically forbidden from broadcasting this piece of news.

In Simla, another hunger strike continues, but the Himachal Pradesh government is also censoring the media.

At the North Bengal Medical College, the entire hospital has been brought to a standstill, and even the emergency labor room is closed. Parallel medical services are being provided on an out-patient basis. There are strikes at Burdwan, Patna, and Bhagalpore. Classes have been boycotted at the R.G.Kar, National, and Calcutta Medical Colleges.

There have been attacks against protesting medical students in Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi. They were peaceful protesters. The police tried to disperse us at the Esplanade at our rally, but they couldn't, perhaps because we would not allow it to degenerate into violence.

The protests are gaining in intensity.
There is only silence from the government.

Medical students in Calcutta have organized a relay hunger strike. It starts today, at the National Medical College. I am joining it tomorrow.

Vive l'egalité!

AT THE TEMPLE
As I walk in the gates of the temple, a priest newly ordained,
Everyday I see a woman with sores on her feet,
She sells cucumbers, and she is lame,
And she shuffles her feet on a dirty yellow sheet.
She spits into the drain, a little to her left,
And wards off flies with a piece of cloth.
To her right sits a beggar, dozing against the wall,
With matted hair, and a bundle he rests on a block.
It must be dear to him for I have never seen
Him sitting on the block instead; even when the ground is wet.
There is also a child- his bloated belly is obscene.
He chases the dogs away from the food he gets
By begging from the people who eat breakfast in a shop nearby.
His mother lies by the side of the gate
Where the high drain wall keeps off the rain,
Or the sun. And they all wish to be healed.
Even the sleep of the damned have dreams of redemption.

Ghulam Rasool is twelve years old, though if I were asked to hazard a guess, I’d say he was seven. He lies in Bed 51 in the medicine ward, which is one bed away from the window. He wears a blue shirt, which is actually part of his school uniform. It is the better of his two shirts.

He is so thin that his ribs are clearly seen, like twigs half buried in the dust.
He used to cry continuously when he came in, but he doesn’t any more. Now he only cries, a dull, tired, monotonous wail, if a clumsy medical student jogs his arm, and makes the ragged bruise at the place where a channel was put into his vein ache.
--
Medical students come in droves to his bedside because he has almost all the characteristic features of aortic regurgitation and aortic stenosis.
--
‘A seagull murmur, it is called, owing to its resemblance to the call of the bird,’ the professor says. ‘Who can tell me why this happens?’
We all look at one another mystified. We desperately try to think of anything that might conceivably produce a high pitched sound in the heart.
‘Ruptured chordae tendinae, sir?’ I ask, uncertainly.
‘That’s right. Good.’ he says, as he puts his stethoscope to Rasool’s chest.
And the lecture continues, and we are all so busy looking for his murmur, that we do not look at Rasool.
--
You see, we know Rasool’s place in this world: He is only the shell surrounding a defective heart.
--
And the professor turns to us, having concluded a conversation with an eager young doctor.
‘Do you hear it?’ he asks. ‘There is a high pitched sound right at the end of the murmur. A prime example.’
‘Yes, yes,’ we say, as we nod to one another. ‘Yes. Exactly so.’

Flaws ensure a beauty that perfection can never hope to attain.

If I can ever con someone into falling in love with me, I want her to be afflicted by neuroses. Riddled with insecurities.

I will not be in love only with something about her, but the entirety of her.
That would be love untainted.
Profound, soulful, meaningless love.
Deep love.
Deeper than bones.

I am in awe of grace. The very fact of its existence fills me with wonder.

Perhaps this is because I have so little grace myself. My movements (when I pay attention) are economical, precise; perhaps even forceful. I was one of the very few people in our year who were allowed to dissect, and I am very good. Good when it comes to tasks. Coordinated motor activity comes to me only with great concentration. But grace... the physical quality of grace: fluidity and elegance combined with economy and unconsciousness of movement; that is beyond me.
But (or perhaps that is why) I admire it so. I admire grace in movement, in speech, in gesture and in writing. I fall in love with lilts of voice and subtle gestures, with long fingers, with sublime moments wrought in the substance of time.

Today, as I was leaving the Department of Forensic Medicine at our college, I saw a little girl. She couldn’t have been more than three or four. She was wearing a frock which I thought had been made for a doll, and her hair was the colour of malnutrition, a shade somewhere between red and brown. There is a large drain along the wall, and it has a narrow moulding around it. She was walking on tiptoe along that moulding, and the ball of her foot always came down in the exact same line. She had a tiny smile on her face as she walked. There was grace. In the midst of that squalor, there was a moment of beauty.

Death offends me.
I hate it.
And yet it surrounds me everyday.
I have seen more people die than anyone should have to.
I have seen countless dying people.
And even more people who die, a little, inside
As those they love die.

People who talk of the dignity of death infuriate me.
They have never seen death up close.
Up close is when you are not blinded by your own emotion.
Up close is not when you cry; and insulate yourself.
Up close is clinical, detached.
Up close is cold observation.
Up close is when ice sifts to the bottom of your gut.
This is when you form shells around you
To shield yourself from the physical awareness of death.
You joke
And you trivialize
And you hate those who die for dying.

Understand, there is no quiet death
No gentle smile of benediction
As someone dying looks upon his life.
No zephyr cools his wasted face
No shafts of sunlight sent by a petty god
Illumines his release from being.
Instead, there are rattles; and fear;
And convulsive movements; and starting sweat;
And staring eyes; and sphincters relaxing;
And hands that clutch at nothing in particular.
And superimposed on it all
Is the knowledge: that life
Is withering.
Fading.
Dying.
After that comes an unspeakable laxity
And after that
Putrefaction.
Corruption.

All of this is Death.

I am relegated to the realm of the imaginary. I suppose this is how it is. How are you, Old friends? As the great Gibran says,
“And alone and without his nest shall the eagle fly across the sun.”

Music is such a personal thing. One can really know a person by the song that is their particular favorite at the moment.
The reason I write about this is that I am astounded that there are people who actually hate alternative rock. I cannot believe it. The rock that came immediately before: GnR, Aerosmith, et al is so different, though of course superb, in its own way. This music is for everyone, jocks and stoners included.
Alternative rock, on the contrary, is for losers. It is the music of the misfit, the down-and-out, the hopeless romantic: all those who struggle against fate. Every song, even songs about drugs, has that sense of fragile bewilderment which is the hallmark of the loser, even in the midst of self aggrandizement. One knows the egotism is hollow. There are words like bacchanalia and sardonic, and they sing about insecurities and neuroses...
Even as I write this, I can see you, O (imaginary) Gentle Reader, curling your lip. This short piece is hopelessly inadequate to convey the sense of belonging that these songs give me. Every day I am grateful that this... this genre exists.
Articulate, self loathing music.
This is my music.
Music for the misfits.