The Pendulum

The mind oscillates like a pendulum but in varying amplitude. One one side is 'Happiness' extreme of which is called the ' Mania'..on the other side is 'Sadness' extreme of which is the 'Depression'. At any point of time our mind fluctuates between the extremes of mania and depression....the less the fluctuation the better controlled personalities we become.
It is a Herculean task to acheive 'Level-Headedness', ' Mental Balance' and ' Equanimity of Thought' and ' Meditation' is the road to this goal.
Meditation delinks us from the physical world around us and takes us to a whole new world of absolute peace where the pressures of life cease to give us pain. A few minutes of meditation in a day can be so rejuvenating that one can come up with new confidence and energy.
While happiness is a positive feeling it is important that we learn to control ourselves from its extremes. It is said," Never be too happy when you are happy or too sad when you are sad".
The turbulences that we are exposed to in our day-to-day life make us extremely vulnerable to a nervous breakdown and a severe depression and thats the time we need to give ourselves the wake up call and say," Cheer up....Life is like that..enjoy".

Expectations Hurt

Every relationship comes with a package of expectations and when it is not fulfilled, the relationship gets strained. In extreme cases, even parents begin to detest their offsprings when they do not fulfil none of their parental expectations..when they do not complement their parents love in anyway.
So, are relationships too, a form of transaction?
Even the best of friendship is a ' Give and Take' affair. The concept of ' Unconditional Love' largely remains a myth. The word 'I' is the epicentre of all our activities and we live in the pursuit of fulfilling its wishes. Then, are'nt we all 'self-centred' or 'I-centric' people?
Can expectations be seperated from our love, admiration, enamour and adoration for another person?
Is it possible for one to shower all the love to his near ones without expecting a bit in return?
My answer is,'Its difficult but not impossible.....possible at the greatest depth of your feeling and emotion' and the more we are able to do that the less we will hurt ourselves.

A little love and lots of respect

The couple was very close to me , they were the greatest lovers that I had ever known, their love would easily place Romeo and Juliet in the second rung. She was a mesmerizing beauty and he was the brightest brain of our times.....a case of talent attracted by charm and vice-versa.
But then, there was something that was lethal in their love. They always had an overdose of each other....would indulge until they fight...would indulge again after the fight is over, the cycle would go on. When asked ,'Why do you fight so much?', their reply would be,' Fighting makes us love each other even more'........somewhere I felt that in their quest for the pinnacle of love they were accumulating disgust.
I met this friend of mine recently, asked about his old beloved, his answer was 'That bitch'.....we did'nt need to talk any further on that. I was amazed that a relationship that was once the cynosure of all eyes would dwindle down to the level of calling 'A bitch'. Why do we love each other so much if we have to ultimately become sworn enemies? With love, comes possessiveness and with possessiveness comes jealousy....a good and healthy feeling leading to a poisonous one.
The problem that I saw in this relationship was that the love was not complemented by respect for each other.The positive qualities that once draw us to someone, fades as we go closer to that person and his negative qualities become more prominent. It is aptly said ,' Never go too close to the one you don't want to lose'.
It is not obsessive love but deep admiration that binds people together. Isn't it a little love and lots of respect thats required to keep all forms of relationship blooming?

Cricket and the rest

I was a very staunch cricket fan in my school and college days...would miss classes to watch a test match,even one between India and Zimbabwe,would watch from the 1st ball to the last without missing a delivery in between.The knowledge of cricket statistics that I had could have been easily converted to an encyclopedia.I could tell you how many runs David Gower scored in the 2nd innings of his 16th test match,could tell you the directions in which Ravi Shastri hit Tilak Raj for six sixers in an over,predicted of a man called Rahul Dravid much before he came on the international arena and till today talk of a batsman called Dhruv Pandav who would have outshadowed Sachin Tendulkar,only if he lived.

I would think of cricket all the time,would dream of it,had sleepless night if I had a cricket match the next day and would cry if it rains.I would consider cricketing statistics as precious knowledge when I was not sure who won the Nobel Peace Prize that year.

However,I was not alone in this country; there were tens of thousands of people like me ready to waste lakhs of man-hours on any day India played cricket.Such has been the craze of our people for this game,which for all practical purpose is the National game of India( not hockey).

But, what is disturbing is that our extreme enthusiasm for this game has taken its toll on other sports.Cricketers have become millionaires...nay, billionaires but another sportsman who excels in another game is reduced to penury because his game does not have the viewership.

The problem with our sporting scenario is the inequality of sports.Sportsmen's career are not protected satisfactorily....they should be made financially secure or else sportsman will no longer be talent driven but will become reward-focussed.I have seen players leaving certain form of sports because that game does not pay you even when you are at the top-level....and why not...your bread is more important than the laurels your talent may bring to the nation one day,which will be forgotten in no time.
India has to seriously think on this concept of 'Equality of sports',otherwise the country of one billion people will at best, continue to aim at only one gold medal in the next Olympics,too.

Of Relationships and Control

Out of the myriad reasons,that causes breakdown of relationships, one commonest that I have observed is our undue exercise of 'Ownership Right' on people who are close to us. We often try to control the people who are near and dear to us.... be it our spouse, children or even friends.....decide on what they do, what they wear, with whom they make friends etc. without realising that such acts of control comes much at our beloved's chagrin.
We are born alone and will die alone.All these relationships are farce. Nobody actually belongs to no one. Even the phrase that we often say'My Body' reflects that we are not our body..we are an entity seperate from our body...an entity more intrinsic than the body...an entity which we call the 'Soul'.
However, to pass this 80 years of being part of a body,we need a lot of things-health, wealth, good parents, good children, good friends....the list is endless and when we go,we take none of these.
' Man is born free but always remain in chains'.Often these chains have come up from people who are our own but who try to dictate us terms,who try to impose us 'Do's and Dont's'....and these very acts of control have often proved to be the apple of discord between two close people.

The Animal In Me

Making me a vegetarian,would be tantamount to converting a leopard to a herbivore....such is my taste for non-vegetarian food but something within me says its wrong to kill, just for the sake of eating. We love our pet and on his trivial suffering our heart aches, we run frantically for the vet. but for another animal we would issue the execution order to the butcher,not at all bothered what pain the animal must be going through.
I really feel bad when I write this article because this one proves that I am not someone who practices what I preach. Have I become such a compulsive non-vegetarian that I can't change inspite of believing that its wrong to kill?
We kill hundreds of lives to celebrate a marriage and we call it auspicious......our mind justifying all the wrong things we do. We, human beings are the most intelligent lot but are not the best or the kindest. We are as brutal as any other animal. How are we different from the other wild animals like the lions and the tigers?
The only answer is we cook.......they don't.

The Insane Woman

I used to often see a woman at the road-side in rags, teased by everyone around...she was a schizophrenic abandoned by her family. One day she was brought to the hospital by a symphathizer and was in acute labour pain. Not long after, she gave birth to a baby boy but once she recovered from the episode, she left the hospital least bothered to even take a glimpse of her baby.
The job of bringing up the one day old infant without the mother was left to us. With no decent orphanages around, we had no choice but to find foster parents for this new-born and today the child is happy, being the only son of a couple who were not blessed with their own. The mother is no more to be seen ....wonder what must have happened to her. This had forced me to contemplate about the way we treat insane people. Where did all the human right activists go? Where were all those who were fighting for women's rights?....Wasn't this woman raped?
The insane never get the justice they deserve, the irony is that to get justice you have to be able to fight for it and they are just not able to do that. Has anyone seriously done a head-count of the number of mentally-compromised people? Has the government or the Medical Council of India ever bothered how many mental beds we have in our hospitals? There is a serious shortage in the number of asylums, rehabilitation centres and hospitals for the insane people. The corporate hospitals are not going to think about it and even if they do, they will cater only to insane of the elite and well-to-do families.
It's time we properly rehabilitate the lunatic to fulfil both their rights and also to reduce the danger and the unpredictability of having them around. One might recall  an incident when a girl was slit by the throat by an insane at the Gateway of India, unprovoked some years back.
We too are all insane in our own way. Insanity is a continuous spectrum of a disease where all of us fall somewhere along its continuum and we can easily become one of those whom we tease and to whom we throw stones. They are very much much part of us and we have to accept them in our fold and rehabilitate them on the right hands.
The insane need your love and support; I reverberate their unheard voice.

My First Autopsy

Jan'1997, I was on the Rajdhani Express on my way to Delhi. Delhi was one of my favourite holiday destination, not only b'coz I had relatives and a resultant free stay but also for the several other things that attracted me.....The Rodeo at the C.P. , The Priya Cinema, The Delhi Haat, and the Daiichi at South-Ex. just to name a few were my favourites.
Travelling alone, I ensured for enough newspapers and magazines to give me company, lest I don't find a congenial co-traveller. As the journey started I opened the newspaper and found a startling headlines..it said my best friend, my hostel room-mate whom I bid good-bye after my final examinations was missing for the last 4 days. I, however did'nt take it very seriously. Though he had managed to hit the headlines, somewhere in the back of my mind, I firmly believed that he must be somewhere or the other.
My next 1 month in Delhi was all fun and frolic, met old friends, literally did'nt have time for newspaper and T.V. After a month, the day I landed at Imphal airport curfew was on...my dad had arranged for a police-officer to bring me back home so that I don't remain stuck in the airport till the curfew relaxes. The state was boiling in agitation,' A FINAL YEAR MEDICAL STUDENT MISSING FOR ONE MONTH WITH FIVE OTHER PEOPLE......GOVERNMENT CLUELESS'. Demonstrations, hungerstrikes etc. had become a daily affair & I,too joined in protest.
Meanwhile, our examination results got declared; both of us passed in subsequent ranks. Internship also started shortly and my first posting was in Forensic Medicine. It was a Sunday that I received a phone call from the mortuary that 6 dead bodies had been brought and that I needed to report by 9 A.M. to conduct post-mortem.
As I entered the morgue, I found my friend's dead body lying on the table, putrified & pungent in odour. His red jacket was intact, I could identify his shoes & his torn jeans. Face was puffed up beyond recognition. The bodies were brought after exhumation, buried after the murder probably a month back. His hands were tied behind & had a bullet entry wound in the occipital area & an exit wound between the nose and the right eye which meant he was shot from the back, hands tied. All the other bodies too were shot in similar manner. The professor told me 'Girish, this is your friend, you have to do the P.M. on him'. Heavy in the heart, but bound to oblige, I put on my protective clothing, ran the scalpel on my friend's body, emptied his putrified abdomen, removed his lungs, his heart, slit his skull open but the brain had undergone liquifactive necrosis and ran off as putrid fluid.
Never in my wildest imagination, had I thought my first post-mortem would be on my friend who was always with me. This episode hit me hard and I took lot of time to recover from it. My friend was a very kind-hearted person. He belonged to a humble family where all eyes were set on him that he becomes a doctor and looks after the rest. He was a classic example that proved the old saying,' Whom the Gods love,die young '.
It has been more than 12 years since this happened. Today, I am just remembering you ,my friend. Can you read it in heaven?

Euthanasia,when death is the cure.

The debate seems endless where many view 'Mercy Killing' as a merciless act. Others opine that there is an intrinsic value of life and it cannot be terminated on grounds of mercy. Yet others believe that the rapidly developing health science gives a room for Hope till the last. Lastly, when Hope ends, it leaves Miracle to do the rest.
Let me try to put forward a more pragmatic approach to this issue. We all agree that the fundamental aim of Medical Science is the well-being of the patient. All efforts are directed towards curing the ailment or at least to alleviate the pain and suffering. It is also undeniable that inspite of all the advancement that has been acheived in this field, there still remains a fraction, however miniscule, of highly incurable illness with zero prognosis.
It is a painful sight to see the suffering of a terminally ill patient and as doctors we get suffocated in helplessness. Can't I do something for him? These are the times when palliative treatment even loses its sensible meaning. The survival of a person in such a condition may be of no benefit to himself or his family and in such circumstance, the only cure is death itself.
I stand in support of Euthanasia. However,it should be an exceptional decision,rather an exceptional choice of treatment, decided upon by a panel of highly responsible doctors, in an authorised centre with the consent of the family of the patient, in the presence legal authorities.
If the aim of the medical professionals, is to minimise suffering, Euthanasia is definitely a therapy.

Not Enough Education

Working with the tea plantation workers, one of the most illiterate lot, a thing that I discovered was that though economically compromised, a vast majority of them are quite truthful and honest people. On the contrary, the so called educated people in white-collared jobs.......doctors, engineers, bureaucrats, police officers etc. can be quite dishonest and greedy.
This has led to the conclusion that honesty, sincerity and truthfulness are not qualities that are related to the level of education. Our education system might have taught us a lot of languages, history, geography, science and mathematics but there is an inherent lack in the moral lesson that it imparts.
Can you consider a man learned if he has no moral values? A lot of schools have cropped up charging exorbitant fees, only to release smarter products who are more materialistic.
Educationist should be aware that the biggest social threat today, in a developing country like ours, is the economy divide....the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
The onus to bridge this gap and bring the two classes closer, is on the rich. This however cannot be acheived by a person who is rich only in wealth; he has to be rich in his heart as well and to create such human being should be the biggest challenge of today's educationist.