A quiet restaurant. The subdued murmur of conversation, and the clinking sounds of cutlery handled by hungry hands.
Suddenly there is a commotion. A rather fat gentleman at one end of the dining area, stands up and staggers back, and his chair falls. He clutches at his throat, and tears stream from his bulging eyes. It is obvious to everyone that he’s choking.
His daughter screams, and his wife pats him on the back. Nothing makes it better.
At this moment, someone screams, “Is anyone here a doctor?”
I rise from my table, and walk over to the diners in distress, elbowing a gawping tall gent out of the way.
Tossing my spectacles carelessly to one side, I say, calmly, “I am a doctor. Please move away.”
At my announcement people scatter, leaving a clear space for me to work with.
I go behind the fat gentleman, put my arms around his midriff, and attempt to perform the Heimlich Maneuver.
It doesn’t seem to work. The fat gentleman goes limp, and a glazed film appears over his eyes.
His daughter clasps her hands, and says, theatrically, to me, “Oh, please, please save him.”
I realize that there is only one thing to be done. I shall have to perform a tracheostomy.
“Hand me that,” I say, pointing to a table knife.
“No, the knife,” I say, as someone hands me a dinner fork.
Armed with the knife, I sterilize it in a cigarette lighter flame that someone holds for me.
I take a moment to visualize the thyroid gland, and the laryngeal nerves and vessels, and the thyroid vessels, and I make an incision into his neck.
***
The paramedics have come, and are taking the fat gentleman away, as he signs his broken thanks to me. (he can’t talk, obviously, he just had a tracheostomy.) I nonchalantly wave aside his daughter’s thanks, and walk away as she mouths “My Hero” to my retreating back.
As I leave the building I am cornered by a horde of waiting newsmen.
“It was nothing,” I say, modestly, “all in a days work.”
“No comment” I say, when someone asks me something (because that’s what all famous people say), and fade into the night.

***

Dammit. Why can’t this happen for real?

If anyone of you is thinking ‘Walter Mitty’ I’m coming after you with a table knife and a dinner fork.

I am no quantum physicist, and even less of a philosopher. But I have a question.

Is it impossible to define reality in terms other than relative, that is, without relating to perception?
What is reality?
Are pictures real? Sculptures? What about stuff on TV screens?

Physics calls reality a state in which events occur, an event being something that has a position in the universe defined by four co-ordinates: three for space, and one for time.

Pictures exist. But their subjects are in two dimensions, and so are not real.
Sculptures have three dimensions. So they exist, and they are real. But what they represent is not.
They are not real because they do not have a temporal association with the universe. A sculpture of a man does not move, or age, or change with time. A sculpture may age, but not its subject.
Depictions of real things are reality immured in a facsimile, which in turn, is real.

Things on TV screens are two dimensional, they’re disqualified.
What about a sort of ‘three dimensional’ image? If I could project a holographic image, with sources of subliminal light placed all around, seen only when they intersect, and thus produce, say, a disc, which would technically be three dimensional, would it be real?
Ok, temporal association. Let me extend this, and postulate a sort of holographic TV. Would that be real? They would have three dimensions, and temporal association, of a kind.
(Incidentally, plays are real.)
No, they wouldn’t, because a projection of a tree is not like other trees.

So, real things are those that must not only have an independent three dimensional existence and have a progressive association with time, but must also conform to all the characteristics of others of their kind.

You see? You can’t tell if something is real, unless there is an original thing of its own kind for it to be compared with.
Reality is just an accident of perception.
If that is so, reality can only be a statistical concept.
‘This’ is reality because the frequency of people who call ‘this’ real is maximal.

I once read this case study of a man with schizophrenia who said that that he could hear the voices of ghosts. He had dialogues with his great-grandfather (who was dead, and whom in fact he had never seen), with Napoleon, and with his dead son.
He is what is called an ‘incorrigible’. He has been in a psychiatric ward for years, because he has remained obdurate in adhering to his own version of reality.

Who knows? Maybe he had it right all along, and we just couldn’t tell.

Every one has a breaking point.
I don’t mean the conventional ‘stress’ breaking point. Something quite different, actually.
It is the one thing that is central to that person’s sense of self esteem. And it is quite easy to find, if you think about it.
I can find it fairly readily, in most people.
Everyone has one.
I do too.

I know yours. And yours. And yours. And yours sticks out a mile.

You, for instance, like to think you’re so cultured.
But I used to know you before you went to college and acquired that thin veneer of sophistication. Back when your idea of good literature was Robin Cook, and Erich Segal. Back when you couldn’t tell a Gauguin from a Goya.
I think you still can’t, unless it’s pointed out to you.

Or you. You like to think that you were loved once. That you were part of something timeless. Or so you were told.
But then, you have always been very gullible.

Or you. You think you’re so cool. You have long hair with those ridiculous streaks of color, you play in a band, and you’re a hit with the ladies. I’ve seen you practicing playing the guitar with your teeth.
Good for you. Enjoy it while you can. This is the summit of your life. Ten years from now, you’ll be teaching the piano to little girls.

And you. You’re smarter than everybody else. Intelligent.
Who told you that? Your high school teacher? Your friends? The adoring bimbo you have on your arm?
Please. You are the most contemptible of them all. They delude themselves, but you are desperate for every person to share in the general consensus of opinion about you. And you’re always afraid that someone is going to see through it, and expose you for the picayune you are.

So go away before I say something I will regret. All of you. You see, I’m not a nice person.

Tomorrow I’ll be the big man again. I’ll look past your stupidity, and tiptoe around your insecurities. And you can mistake my forbearance for acquiescence once again. That’ll make it better.

Leave me alone. I need some time to lick my wounds, and feel them harden into scabs, and burn into scars.
Go away.

I am reconciled to the fact that I can never do as well in exams as it is possible, in absolute terms, for me to do.
It is just that I can never actually study before exams. And though I have already read most things I need, I do not remember every single thing that I have studied throughout the term.
For some reason I am unable to sit still; to read something consistently.

I wander from room to room, my brain pickled in ennui, lost in a fog of repetitious meaninglessness.

I hate examinations.

(This is part of a phone conversation, and yes, I have a photographic audio memory, except for lectures at college)

‘So how is college?’
‘You know. The usual. How are things in the medical line?’
‘I’ll tell you how things are after I find out if I’ve passed.’
‘Sudhra nahin. Why must you always be so irritatingly modest?’
‘Hey! I’m not modest. I get antsy around exams.’
‘Thought of a career yet? What, Gynaecology? Paediatrics?’
‘Oh, no. No, no. Not gyno.’
‘Why?’
‘Because people who work in coffee shops hate coffee.’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘Think about it.’
‘And why not paediatrics? I thought you liked kids.’
‘I do. And that is why I won’t do paediatrics. Apart from the fact you have to be clairvoyant to be either a paediatrician or a vet.’
‘So, what?’
‘I don’t know. I won’t be an ophthalmologist. Or do ENT. Or biochemistry, or pathology. I have figured out what I do not want, but not what I actually do want. Story of my life. Maybe medicine, or surgery. Most probably omphalology.’
‘What on earth is that?’
‘“Omphalos” is Greek for “the umbilicus”. An omphalologist is a specialist in diseases of the navel.’
‘I didn’t know you had diseases of the navel.’
‘You don’t. That’s the point.’
‘Ha! Do surgery. There’s a lot of money in it.’
‘Mon cher!’ (In heavy fake French accent) ‘I find you fort amusant. Ze money, she does not mean anyzing to me!’
‘Oh, Please. You’d be selling your soul to rake in the moolah, once your trophy wife starts asking you to buy her stuff!’
‘Good God! You think a trophy wife would divert me from my lifelong dream of being absolutely idle? Almost you persuade me not to seek a trophy wife!’
‘Yeah. Right.’
‘Well, I did say almost!’

It was a Saturday, almost a year ago.
It was our first class in the ‘hot wards’, the emergency, as compared to our usual travails amongst the chronics at the ‘cold wards’.
We were all a little awed, I think. The cold wards were almost a relaxing place to be compared to the frenetic activity that was taking place around us. Here was imminent death, a fog of palpably immediate pain.
Our class was taken by a post graduate trainee.
Ruzy, we called her, a diminutive of her unpronounceably long name. She is from somewhere in the North-east; young, very pretty in a Michelle Branch sort of way. The thing about her is that she has the tiniest hands, red and white, with which she gestures as she speaks. Captivating hands. Quite a few of us fancied her at the time.
At the end of the class she said that we were going to learn how to examine the lympho-reticular system.
She brought us out into the corridor.
The corridor is where the overflow is housed, on trolleys. Many people never make it to beds.
This one hadn’t. An old man, with some kind of lymphoma, I don’t remember exactly. But he was quite dead.
Ruzy knew, of course. She told us that he had died that morning, but his lymph nodes were very enlarged, and it was a good specimen.
And so we had the rest of our class. We learned to palpate the horizontal chain of cervical lymph nodes. And it was extremely instructive, I have never seen pre-auricular lymph nodes that big.

It was the first time I had touched something freshly dead. He was not cold; he felt clammy.

K said that his head was very heavy, and that it would have been easier if he'd been alive.
Ruzy agreed.
I remember thinking that that was not a very good eulogy. I almost laughed. I wanted to leave, to go wash my hands, to be anywhere else.

I know you’re probably thinking that this is a violation of a man’s dignity in death.
But you don’t understand.

You see, there is no such thing.

I can’t do the melon thing.
You know, pick up a melon and shake it, and percuss it to see if it is good. I don’t know how. And I can’t tell if fruits are going to be sweet, or if the cauliflowers have insects in them.
I’m more of the ‘go to the supermarket and ask the guy who’s got a “May I Assist You” badge on him in which aisle I can find produce’ kind.
I prefer buying cartons of juice to actual fruit, and those readymade soups to actual vegetables. In fact, for a period of about a month when I lived absolutely by myself, I ate maggi every night, out of the saucepan in which I cooked it.

I hate maggi now.

In fact, unlike most young men my age I have never actually gone to the market to buy stuff. I hate haggling.
But there is one area in which I have the theoretical knowledge necessary to buy things: Fish.

First you look at the gills to see if it is well vascularised, and if it is wet. Then you look at the eyes, because apparently, hypoxia makes the nictitating membrane go opaque. And there are a thousand other things that tell you if the fish is fresh.

Now you must bear in mind that I have actually never gone to a fish market, and quite frankly never intend to. This is just stuff I have imbibed over the years.

Maybe this is some sort of mystical knowledge that is passed down through the generations from Bengali father to son: the genetic ability to tell if fish is fresh; a sort of bio-cultural adaptation, necessary to the people of a riverine civilisation.

I am sure if I ever have a son, and if there is a nuclear explosion that selectively destroys supermarkets, then, in this post-apocalyptic, supermarket-less world, my son would be able to tell if the fish is really fresh.

Ok.
So I am a science fiction and fantasy buff.
Yes, I actually know what wormholes are.
And yes, I can name a fantasy author other than Tolkien who writes for readers older than 15.
I know what a Hugo is.
And incidentally, I have watched all the Star Wars movies, and every episode of Star Trek: the next generation.
In spite of this last, I am a science fiction fan.
I think it is exasperating, the way people bring up the star wars franchise or the star trek show in any discussion of science fiction.
I mean, I enjoyed them very much. I remember what Jabba the Hutt looks like. And I can also name every member of every crew of the Starship Enterprise.
But that is not all of science fiction. Or even very good examples of it.
And most importantly, that is science fiction without soul.
Give me a Frederic Pohl, or an Alastair Reynolds, or a William Gibson or a Robert Silverberg or a hundred others, who actually write science fiction.
Good science fiction sticks with you. You carry it around, and it influences the way you think, a little. For one thing, I still remember the day I first read ‘Ubermensch’ by Kim Newman. It blew my mind. And I still fantasize about having my own dragon, like in the Anne McAffrey books.
Science fiction is so much more than spaceships and lasers and aliens. Science fiction is a fiction of ideas, of ‘what-if’ scenarios explored to their logical conclusion. Science fiction as it is intended to be makes you look up from the book you are reading with a beatific smile and shining eyes.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a good read.

I am reading “Les Fleurs du Mal”.
Beautiful poetry. I am surprised to find that Baudelaire and I have a lot in common.
Case in point:
He writes, in a ‘Sad Madrigal’,
‘What do I care if you are wise?
Be beautiful, and sad.’

Wow.

I have a theory.
As a people, we enjoy destruction. We like to watch it. To share vicariously in the grandeur of decay, and of loss.
The destruction of something beautiful is inherently beautiful.
That is why so many people visit waterfalls.

A waterfall is just that. Water falling.
But its allure is not in that.
It is that something is falling. We are mesmerized by the simple fact that the water is symbolically dying, flying off a cliff and crashing to the ground below.
That is it.
It dies, but what a magnificent death it is, with what magnificent disregard for life, for prudence. Clad in its funereal splendor of trapped rainbows, it goes blithely to its dissolution.
That is what we enjoy.
It brings home to us the wildness that we will never give in to, the urge we sometimes have to leap into an abyss, for no reason at all.

There is great self love in that, of a different kind.

The reason I am writing all this is a phone conversation with a smitten friend. He tells me that he has found the girl of his dreams.
He has always been inclined to melodrama.
He tells me all about her, all of her (many) virtues. She seems very nice.
She seems perfect, actually.

Now this may sound masochistic, but I would hate that.
Because I would like to love someone just a little bit self destructive
Because I would rather love a waterfall than own a stream.

Did you know, there were eagles at St. Lawrence when I was young.
Or hawks, or whatever. Ornithology is not my forté.
But they always fascinated me.

Eagles, who fell from their nests in those high trees into the sky. And they were always silent. I never heard them make a sound. Maybe I was too far away.
Silent silent grace. It was like they never moved. Like they were carved in place.
I think about them often. They are a part of my childhood I will always carry around with me.
I remember lying on the grass one day watching them fly, silhouetted against an impossibly blue sky, the kind of sky you get just before the end of summer, with cirrus clouds that look like feathers.
I could smell dry dusty soil, and dying grass.
If I squinted just a little, I could block out the buildings and the lamp-posts, and the water tank just outside school on the other side of the road, and even the trees. And then I could pretend that I was an eagle too.
And that I could fly.
And that I would live forever.
And that I would never fall from grace.

My semester exams start the Monday after next, and therefore, I am procrastinating.
I have made the rounds of every community that I am a member of at orkut. I have checked every blog that I can think of, and have tried, and failed, to think of a song to download. I have studied the chapter on penicillin. And there is absolutely nothing on TV.
I was going to go curl up in a ball on my bed and listen to All American Rejects, but I think I’d rather type this post, instead.

I’m listening to “white trash beautiful” by Everlast. Next up is “strange condition” by Pete Yorn. And then I will play ‘stupify’ by Disturbed, at full volume.

I’m bored, and I feel scruffy inside my head.

Maybe I should have gone to college instead of deciding to stay home and study.

I hate exams. Not oral exams, but long theory exams where you have to write and write and write. And you know its no use because if you were the examiner, you wouldn’t read your handwriting anyway.

Even the dog is asleep.


Fat, lazy dog.

I met M and S yesterday. I hadn’t seen S since high school. He hasn’t changed at all. M has hair in a ponytail now.
We walked around for ages. I got home at 11.

The dog is still asleep.

I’m going to find my scalpel and cut things into little slivers.