DIGITALIZED MOVEMENTS AND RECENT TRENDS

[Dedicated to Dr Jnanananda Mukhopadhyay-my college-mate in CNMC]
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Hi,

The common Indian (or the Indian commoner -- if you prefer) is back again. My wife tells me I've started like The One too..
While I've been searching for a check-marked coat, I noticed that it has been a fascinating few fast dissipating weeks that all of confronted recently.

The archetypal couch-potato that I am, as I continue to watch on TV the massively spontaneous mass uprisings, I wonder in awe about the Collective Strength of us, Common Men(and Women), and it is a calming reassurance for the cynical minds that : Yes, It Can Be Done.

I'm sure that against the backdrop of the middle east 'renaissance', the eager anthropologist and the social observer didn't miss to neglect a definite pattern in human behaviour that had been theorized by scholars decades ago, but was not believed in entirety because an ever- accelerating process of technological evolution (and thus enabling technological advancement) in the late 20th century had ensured one definitive sociological phenomenon -- our society got segmented into smaller (in size, not necessarily so in relevance and importance) institutions -- small and essentially Isolated, that allowed the same basic diurnal activities of the human species to be carried out -- Families, which provide the stage for the same activities(and Acts) being carried out, to the day, at this very moment.(Well, the 'modes and modalities' in which the activities are carried out are quite different, but that, being a subtle variation, is not relevant to the present issue at hand that you have to bear with the products of the conditioned dyslexic I suspect myself to be..

This 'isolation', in the context of quality, quantity, subjectivity, objectivity, (...could you suggest more? My vain attempts to put on masks of expertise in philosophy, or sociology, or anthropology, shall never succeed, and I can only see doom..)shall always continue to vary, sometimes drastically. Though neosociological (a term borrowed without permission) trends seem to indicate that this concept of 'isolation' shall wipe itself out, I have a point here to argue and disbelieve for good reasons.

The 'neo--sociological isolation' shall perennially continue to exist over turning pages(or e-pages) of geography and across slides(or pps) on demography, (well at least till geography and demography shall cease to exist themselves). I fully agree that yes, technological evolution did lead to the present social structure where mass or collective actions of human behaviour are much less palpable or directly observable in any given situation, than individual behavioural patterns (and which thus dominate to affect our senses on any single day, anytime and anywhere on our family-stages).

Yet I find it a paradox: it is technological advancement -- that is throwing exploring lights on community behaviour at the moment. We just cannot ignore the role of the internet in all the recent changes the world has witnessed . There seems to be a new air of hope all around -- one barely expected to witness the way people changed systems in the Middle East recently, from Tunisia to Egypt, where freedom of expression had been usurped almost as a historical tradition. Man shall continue to dream and new ideas will always flow in, as they had done over the last 50 years. What clearly stands out is Absolute Intent and the way people used it, the practical execution to bring down everything that is stagnant and decadent.

One of the strongest factors behind this is the Internet -- the way people have used it for healthy communication, in e-forums and social networking sites as they fought to dream, to fight on...

Awareness has spread all over the world rapidly in its most unadulterated form, (we have witnessed sheer lack of speed and dilution of the original intent with time and peripheral distribution, in the networked fringes, breaking so many promising dreams before us, things just "fizzed" out)..I think India's fairytale is a very strong pointer about how we should proceed tomorrow, governance and administration at any level and in any office being amongst the foremost priorities of them all..

The Egyptian revolution and the 'mould' its socio-politics has chosen to be impressed by, are not Causes. They are Results (which I choose to qualify as unavoidable) of the Collective Consciousness of a group of people present in every cross-section of society, driven to secure unision by a variety of factors that they felt so as to prioritise in the same bracket. We all heard the barely audible pitch of voices accelerating to a crescendo, causing audible cracks in the glass that shattered away noisily in the palaces of the feudal elite. It was this Collective Emotion that spread digitally and was shared all over the world in the speed of light that hastened and strengthened the movement.

The prominent context which I'm trying to point out is the 'form' in which informations were despatched and received. Almost a century ago, a similar need to spread and share valuable information had become absolutely imperative in the European battle-fields where the First World War was being fought. Spread they did, in a hitherto relatively unknown technology which constituted of a manual exercise that printed a meaningful sequence of 'dots' and 'dashes' on a piece of paper, in a remarkably simple way that allowed transfer of information in incredible speed - the dots and dashes containing the essence of information zipped to and fro across continents and oceans, from one station to another in forms of electromagnetic quanta.

While the speed of 'actual' transfer (the physicality of the process) has remained almost the same, the time taken for the information to reach the recipient's brain, get registered and comprehended in its fullest form has come down drastically. More important is the format. Through the world-wide-web , ideas are shared in virtual audio-visual forms which incorporate the factor of 'Emotion' (which I believe you are fitter than yours truly to remotely attempt to conceptualise) to the data -- and that affects the result in an entirely different scale the parameters of which are neither digitally controlled nor contollable, in concrete digit units - a factor which man dreams to control with more authoritative volition some day,
(again - the concept of androids, humanoids, avatars is beyond the current issue. Though it would be interesting to observe when overzealous fertile brains (?geniusoids-- cerebroids) shall tinker about anti-corruptoids, fanaticoids, or nihilistoids, agnosticoids, even jihaditoids.. over superconductor receptacles containing hybrid consummables of siliconised caffeinoids)

And THAT is exactly why the process cannot be withdrawn or ever withdraw by itself (I'm putting in brackets against possible provocative protests, of course digitalised, coming from the [[ Academists, or Acosmists or Monists, even Nihilists or Primitivists -- .. They get me petrified to inaction! Do cover for me because I'm retreating, with just my Pen in hand)

Dreams and passions are shared now in the most elemental forms, no longer a question of when or where, and the echoes continue to reverberate to be manifested later, someday and somewhere else, so we have to Got to Continue: speak, listen, learn, share and adapt. All,.. to Live.

But again, That is what Life is all about, isn't it? I shall be keen to know what YOU say..

------------------------------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry®
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri, M.B.B.S
Consultant Physician [special interest
in Cardiology &Critical Care]
Mumbai, India
(+91)9870611252
http://jogyou963.blogspot.com
http://anirbanspeak.blogspot.com
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"There is a Purpose behind us all. The
Whole intends to do Something through
us." -- Swami Vivekananda

GOOD MORNING INDIA

"Good Morning India!"

"..Over the last 96 hours, we have witnessed one septuagenarian, armed with only Honour and Dignity, and the Will to preserve the two without an iota of compromise, take India's corrupt establishment by its roguish horns and making it relent to submission -- basically doing the dirty job for us, all of us. And of course for that generation too that follows us in toddling steps at the moment. It blindly trusts us to be responsible parents, keeping its own honour and dignity to be defended by the safety of its parents' hands.
A dawn has never ever been so beautiful as today's, breaking to soothen my tired eyes -- I'm really cherishing the first spoils of the victory that you all have won for me). And
while a new, rejuvenated India wakes up
to celebrate history, we shall not bother much about this non-bothering lot, because it takes all types of antithesis to keep a system running, perhaps as a reminder of the oft- digressed virtue of Responsibility and a lesson to be learnt from time to time that one cannot afford to drop guard.

It's an irony of truth too that he has gone ahead and about his mission for those who, over the last 96 hours, have barely bothered to care a hoot about what India is undergoing, and how, and arrogantly enough, even why. But of course they shall display their birth- rights to share all that shall be attained once the technicalities of India's new anti-corruption bill get sorted out to be formalised for practical execution..

I do not wish to spoil the First Indian Morning in any way. It's just that I felt a bit sad last night when I heard in a television debate,a couple of renowned "intellectuals" still sounding unconvinced, and more strikingly, absolutely dud and opaque to any sort of ideas, or reasons... Or for that matter even dry, dumb logic with which you poke(for pure and free entertainment's sake)these thick-skinned descendants of the primordial primates commoners like yours truly share common along ancestral lines. It's only that in these "cases", Darwinian evolution seems to have gone awfully awry..

"Elite pragmatism", for me,seems to wear a very different definition, essentially negative, at times when such acts of cerebration are on rampant display courtesy these bunches of luminous idiots who suffer from verbal diarrhoea trying to hog the limelight for no apparent rhyme and reason.

No more negatives now.
I wish to scream to all of you "Good Morning India",and of course to express my gratitude for the victory all of you have gloriously fought to win for me, my family, my neighbour, and the next neighbour....

PS : We should start a new calender which starts with 9th April 2011... Just a fleeting thought from the opened floodgates I am feeling subjected to, in this glorious morning that greets me with Hope.

Be good, all of you.. ..."

-----------------------------------------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry®
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri, M.B.B.S
Consultant Physician [special interest
in Cardiology &Critical Care]
Mumbai, India
(+91)9870611252
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
"The most beautiful thing we can
experience is the Mysterious."
---- Albert Einstein

The world supports Anna

Here's a couple of excerpts from an e-correspondence I had last night with my good friend Arin Basu who is a resident of Wellington, New Zealand.

"-----Original Message-----
From: Arin Basu <arin.basu@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 8 Apr 2011 06:59:48

At least Anna Hazare is from our dad's generation, which is a reassuring thing that all did not go in vain. So, what are you planning to do about supporting Anna Hazare's fast and his movement?
/Arin
Sent from my iPad......"
---------------------------

Arin was keen to know about the sweeping change India is undergoing right now.

As I wrote back,
"... Sadly enough, I observe some pathetic intellectualisation of his movement by a section of the "cocktail elite" from the media, branding it as 'television tamasha' and anti-development. (3 hours back I heard Manu Joseph , editor of Open magazine, commenting in a TV newshour debate," There are two "Indias" - 'us' and those who vote.."!) I wonder how many Indias we have created to confront by now, with our progressive intellectual exercises in tennis club evenings and caffeine afternoons in art galleries, and which one to identify for my 2 year old daughter..

It is easy to loose direction when any movement gathers momentum ( sadly anti-physics!) and we should be watchful especially with our intellectual watchdogs barking in intellectual unision, yet I can only see Hope.."
---------------------------------
Arin's reply :
"-----Original Message-----
From: Arin Basu <arin.basu@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 8 Apr 2011 07:44:32
To: <drchodri@yahoo.co.in>
Subject: Re: A Letter to a friend
I share very similar sentiments as yours. My advantage is that, I do not live in India and therefore I do not have to live up
with the kind of crap that the magazine editor of Open for example was saying in TV as you wrote, "us" and "them" India. To me, India is one country, dammit, at least it was when I last checked. People may look
and talk a little different (I mean then again not that different),but we are all in it together.

I am excited to follow Anna Hazare's movement. It's exciting to think
we are finally going to get a strong ombudsman agency to take care of
corruption in public life, and that it's going to happen in front of
our eyes. It can't get better than that.
/Arin
Sent from my iPad...."
---------------------------

It was with great sadness that I bitched about India's respected and reasoned journalist Manu Joseph who seems to have lost all sanity and sensitivity (along with the money Hasan must have duped him off too, to stash away in his Scandinavian black pool).
And here is one of the exact foci where the vain irony of India's destiny finds secure shelter. Here is an Indian who pledges support and solidarity towards his compatriots in one of the most testing times Indian democracy has ever confronted. He provides us hope with a voice that represents what the world is feeling about the sweeping change India is undergoing,... and a pointer too to the degree of hurt exasperation and hatred we all have gradually developed over the years as a reaction to the utter decadence our political-bureaucratic 'mafia' has been cheating us to, with criminal apathy and complete lack of scrupules.
And it points to the intellectual corruption that has eaten away into segments of India's 'elite and the educated' -- the ever - conscientious fifth column who should be guiding us to freedom of propriety. It is our own people that has been letting us down, sitting smug in air-conditioned seminars over coffee and wine. Manu Joseph seems to be the personification of The Great Indian Cerebral Hypocrisy that finds Anna Hazare's fight a 'TV show', and brands India's new found voice as anti development.

This is one utter bovine faecal material that has been flourishing in our contemplative educated elite with heavily accented thoroughfare, that we should be guarding against...
Let's go for it.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry®
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri, M.B.B.S
Consultant Physician [special interest
in Cardiology &Critical Care]
Mumbai, India
(+91)9870611252
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
"The most beautiful thing we can
experience is the Mysterious."
---- Albert Einstein

MODERN TIMES - FARCE

Sometimes I get the feeling that I've forgotten Good Old Laughter.. And the 'existential' need to put everything in the back of the mind, just laugh the garbage off and over, to ''enjoy the inevitable'', specially with modern times with all its baggages weighing down so heavily..
In case you get the same feeling occasionally...


-----------------------------------------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry®
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri, M.B.B.S
Consultant Physician [special interest
in Cardiology &Critical Care]
Mumbai, India
(+91)9870611252
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
"The most beautiful thing we can
experience is the Mysterious."
---- Albert Einstein

THE BEST MEDICINE

I have been suffering from this neuropathy affecting my left hand over the last 6 months. Clinically one would brand the nerve disorder as Left Ulnar Mononeuropathy - the ulnar nerve is one of the 2 main nerves supplying the arm and hand - in my case it is the left one and it is my left hand that has been affected. I've been experiencing an ever-increasing pain, to the point of being excruciating,and an almost constant, weirdly tingling sensation in my left hand, particularly in the ring and little fingers, and the area of the palm below them which do not exactly move the way I wish them to.

The condition seems to have developed, according to my neurologist, due to extensive playing of guitar, an exercise I had indulged in with passion, in my late teens and early 20 s, when I used to play in the college rock-band which had a rather brief yet excitingly joyous professional stint later on. I had formally learnt classical and folk guitar(like flamenco, the Catalan folk)which is played finger-style,and that requires a 'classical' acoustic guitar which traditionally sports a much broader finger-board than usual. That necessitated my left fingers to stretch extensively,and all the more so when I used to hold the broken chords in the background when we played those Scorpions numbers(I still remember those initially painful hours during rehearsals as we played songs like "When The Smoke Is Going Down").

Over the last few months the left ring & little fingers had forced my hand into a clawed shape of submission, the fingers getting contracted and flexed at the little bone joints, a seemingly eternal state of Spasm that was not exactly painless. I find that rather ironic as the name of my rock-band(well it was 'mine' just as it was any other co-member's) was SPASM too, a name I'd kept myself along with Miku, the bass-guitarist who went on to become a hand-surgeon himself later on. Now that's one of 'those quirks' of destiny,isn't it?

Coming back to my neuropathy, the pain had,at one point of time,increased so much that even the strongest painkillers were not being effective, and I had become literally sick of pain-killing injections. Nothing seemed to work,and the fact that I could no more hold chords, or even use my left fingers while playing guitar (ultimately I had to quit my favourite pass-time activity) only added to my frustrated, depressing woes.

Three weeks back, as I was having my morning cold coffee, my 21 month-old daughter tiptoed her way into the hall, nimble-footed, and stood in front of me, looking at me with her sparkling, bright eyes. I knew that look. She wanted to climb up and sit on my stomach, straddling her legs on the sides facing her father - her favourite "seat" in the morning, as she would excitedly tell me how the pigeons had looked at her from outside the kitchen window or how busily the crows had pecked at the crumbs on the parapet. That day I found it difficult to give her a hand to take her morning seat. The pain was too much in my left hand which found itself too weak to carry her weight. I knew she would be disappointed.

As I looked back at her eyes with helpless apology written all over my face and with a tinge of guilt too, trying to shake my afflicted hand off the pain, I spoke to her in my Bengali mother-tongue, telling her,"Aaj baba'r haate khub byatha je.."(which vaguely translates into - "But there is too much pain in father's hands today...". She isn't too familiar with that language as her father has got only a handful of relatives and none in Mumbai to pay the occasional visit so that the language is spoken.
I really don't know what she understood, but she didn't show any disappointment. What she showed in her eyes was gentle and tender care. She took my hand in her soft, little fingers kissing it mildly, looked up at me and said in broken English,"Baba?pain no...Baba?pain no no.."..

Well, my left hand hasn't exactly stopped paining since, but that was the last time I felt the pain. I have not needed any pain-killers since then simply because I don't feel any pain anywhere, anymore. And as I watch my daughter growing up each day, every hour,every minute, I just wonder how beautiful life can be for anybody in the simplest of ways, in spite of all the pains & troubles, the aches and breaks it keeps on dishing out on a regular basis.
No matter how much one cries, life always gets back to you as a great leveller, giving you something to smile about, and perhaps with a little reward at the end. It is just only a matter of time.

Let it be.

(author's note : this was written in early February)
-----------------------------------------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry®
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri, M.B.B.S
Consultant Physician [special interest
in Cardiology &Critical Care]
Mumbai, India
(+91)9870611252
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
"The most beautiful thing we can
experience is the Mysterious."
---- Albert Einstein

A Letter to a friend

To one of my many friends who are urging on and raring to go,

To Dr. Aparna Agnihotri Tripathi,

Thank you so much for the effort. We really need to assemble and channelize our efforts in the most constructive of ways.

Personally speaking, I would hate to be in a possible future position where my daughter, utterly frustrated and disillusioned, would ask me what did I do in my own capacity to prevent the rot -- the way I ask now : what did my father do except leading a secure life with his wife and son, without any effort to de-stagnate the 'system',and letting this political system settle in with every election,
guided by nothing else but cowardice and lack of intent. I'm sure many more have the same question,in essence that is..

And what have we got to lose? Things can't get worse than they are... A scam a day being just the tip of a malignant malady that has eaten into us, making us dumb mannequins, consumed by the most selfish consumerism with no goal or vision, so much so that we didn't have a Leader to guide us because nobody took the First Step.

And can we deny our own corruption, before pointing fingers towards the corrupt?

There is a leader now (it's a shameful but not a paradox that he is a septuagenarian who is trying on my behalf and my family's and my daughter's), and I see a chance to redeem and undo everything that needs to be undone, and start all over, afresh..
No way I'm going to let this go..

Let's wish each other luck and urging all to join and lend voices,
HE is doing the dirty job for us..
Regards,
Anirban.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry®
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri, M.B.B.S
Consultant Physician [special interest
in Cardiology &Critical Care]
Mumbai, India
(+91)9870611252
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
"The most beautiful thing we can
experience is the Mysterious."
---- Albert Einstein

SUPPORT ANNA HAZARE

Support Anna Hazare. This phenomenon is not just another flash in the pan. The spontaneous support firing up in every part of India really shows the utter frustration in and disgust towards the political system we have developed over the years.

The period since early 2010 has been a watershed -- Scam after scam being dug out by the responsible segment of the media, and the abhorant shamelessness with which the politicos tried to deal with that initially, then the Supreme Court literally having to harshly rebuke the vigilance agencies into actions of intent -- a pointer towards the stagnation and the rot that has eaten into the political class and into our own morality that we have literally sit back letting it all happen just because we are just 'secure' in our own families..

All revolutions start like this.. Are we afraid to deal with the responsibilities that a sweeping revolution might bestow upon us?
Are we silent because we don't have the dynanism to carry forward the changes a revolution shall bring upon? Listen to the wind - "the times they are a'changing"..

Join the movement.. Otherwise we won't be able to look in the eyes of our children when they'll grow up to find a rotten system and ask us what did we do..

Have we become cowards that we shall continue to 'observe' times sitting smugly in front of TV sets, and just bitch about it?

I know I'm probably sounding melodramatic, reeking of cheap hypocrisy -- a voice like mine does not have any worth.
Listen to those who have. Or you are no better than me..
-----------------------------------------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry®
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri, M.B.B.S
Consultant Physician [special interest
in Cardiology &Critical Care]
Mumbai, India
(+91)9870611252
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
"The most beautiful thing we can
experience is the Mysterious."
---- Albert Einstein

On Books...

It was yesterday evening when I found myself smiling with dry amusement over a mail an lady-friend of mine (a college-mate) had sent, apparently with what can be qualified as benign disgust..
Not that I was bothered much because the disgust had not been primarily vented upon me in the first place, but I came to know about the feeling of exasperation she apparently goes through on a regular basis when she reads the literature' I seem to have started creating and sharing with some of you over the last couple of years, with brazen audacity.

While I would strongly suggest to my little 'e-fan club' to dismiss my literary garbage as a vain pathological process sickening an infertile mind that is probably going ballistics due to premature senility crossed with insane narcissism, the thing that bothers me is the state of contemporary affairs around me that triggers the pathological process from time to time. And that brings me to the exasperated question my friend has asked in her mail : why waste time reading and writing where I should be busy securing my socio-economic status to confront the demands of a rapidly mutating reality that modern times present before us all ... why waste time where nothing will change to respond to the voices of honest,asking minds, or to the acts of lunacy I indulge in.

Now let's get serious.. As far as Reading is concerned, there is a reason,a natural one, why I, all of us here, keep ourselves attached to books.. to what successful extent is subject to certain external factors behind our control, but perhaps we 'feel the urge' to do so no matter what, and that's the reassuring thing. Absence of that is an indirect yet one of the first pointers to Stagnation -- something which is against the nature of Nature..

The need to keep one's self connected to literature -- I feel that it is both inherent and the response of a mind that gets created, in optimal amounts to its surrounding stimuli. I must state that it doesn't, in any way, comment upon the intellect of a human mind or qualify human minds to segregate them into intelligent and dumb categories, or for that matter into superior and inferior groups where the parameters are cultural and intellectual attributes -- a perception which some 'intellectuals' have always seemed to exhibit in the most dismissive of ways, with upturned noses (a trait that should be simply shouted down by all, and in the most risqué and commonly vulgar of ways -- exactly what these high noses turn their faces from with sarcastic smiles.)

It is more so if I try to restrict myself to the medical profession (though whatever I express holds true for every profession which is pursued with sincerity and honest passion), as most of us rarely find the time and the chance to try extra-professional activities. It IS essential for medical professionals to remain actively associated with stimulating forms of art, literature being one such...

It has been advocated and suggested consistently over the centuries as a necessity or need for the human mind, and correctly so. Consciously keeping myself away from the luminous, immortal names of the greats,the giants and the geniuses (at times things become too bright and dazzling for the common eye which misses to see and percieve,at times even the possible attribute of mortality of the immortal), I mention here a favourite quote of mine, attributed to Yoshida Kenko,a Japanese philosopher in the 12-13th century : "To sit alone in the lamp-light with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is a pleasure beyond compare...".
Plainly speaking books influences the human mind with the balanced rationale with which one looks at life and chooses the way to interact with it. And with that comes the secure attribute of stability with which man participates in every process of perception of what lies immediately outside his own entity, which is so necessary for all of us to interact and understand.

For two minds to understand and pay honest attention each other, standing in the common field of life, it is imperative to understand and conceptualize life itself as correctly as possible. Drifting away from this optimal correctness creates a whole spectrum of perceptions all right (thus providing the eager student of life a broader area to choose from) but with increase in choices, the possibility of incorrect choices,the 'mishits' increase too. Though the skeptic and the cynic can put in an argument statement here that nobody reaches his goal bypassing his fair share of trials and errors, the answer lies in the statement itself -- it is desirable that the share remains fair 'only', the possibility of which decreases with the increase in the choices of life. And one of the most secure ways to approach life is to have a stability in perception which is exactly what books offer to provide us with. And understanding the needs and expectations of life better needs enables us to understand each other better -- the safeway to a good life, with peace and the least possibility of confrontations in any sphere,in every stage of our existence.

That accounts for the Reading. Regarding the writing, the less said the better.
I do not claim that my outputs will decrease with time, and if that sounds a threatening possibility, so be it. What can one do about a lunatic, other than keeping him in straight-jackets? And a circus needs its jokers too to keep the entertainment going.. (Smiles)
-----------------------------------------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry®
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri, M.B.B.S
Consultant Physician [special interest
in Cardiology &Critical Care]
Mumbai, India
(+91)9870611252
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
"The most beautiful thing we can
experience is the Mysterious."
---- Albert Einstein

GOOD LUCK INDIA

We have waited for a long,long time..we were 13 -- 14 year olds when India won the world cup out of nowhere.. India weren't the best team in the 1983 Prudential Cup, not even anywhere remote to that.. It was Self -- belief that kept on adding silently to the team's arsenal with every match, perhaps taking a realistic shape after Kapil Dev's 175 not out as he single-handedly won that match against Zimbabwe..

We had nothing to lose, and had that team-spirit buoyed by the increasing self-belief as Kapil's team decided not to let go of a modest 183 runs against the Caribbean giants without a fight, and that audacious self-confidence written all over the team's profile on that day shocked and knocked the wind out of the Caribbean sail..

Indian Cricket has come a long way since then..we know we are good and on our day we are invincible..Today we have to carry that Self- belief around, the belief today, in the Big Match we won't choke, won't throw away wickets, won't let our shoulders drop no matter what. Champions always deliver in the big matches, and we now know for sure that our team is going to perform the way it has the calibre to.. Today 3-4 of our champions are going to make it big, to put India's name in the pages of history.

The entire country is behind our champions and Believes in them.

Let's bring it on. Let's do it.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry®
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri, M.B.B.S
Consultant Physician [special interest
in Cardiology &Critical Care]
Mumbai, India
(+91)9870611252
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
"The most beautiful thing we can
experience is the Mysterious."
---- Albert Einstein

ON MUSIC

** Though this is actually intended for one of our friends whose child is getting trained in western classical music (it's a been a pleasure to have come to know about it, which enhanced many folds to discover how gifted the child is), I am putting this little write -- up (if one should call it so -- after completing it yesterday night, I have a strong notion that it is actually a confused ensemble of more confused perceptions :-) ) to this main forum, to all of you to read, so that if any confusion persists in your mind - those who are getting their children trained in music, in any of its superlative forms, -- you might just be wanting to know a bit more yourself.. **

Our friend is understably having a hard time(it was her kind request too that I put it up in here), yet I would advise her to be patient, and give the child a little more freedom to contemplate on its own -- you shall be overawed soon to discover how many new, fresh perceptions the child would develop to reveal spontaneously.
**My motto : when one is dabbling with the 'music of the spheres', he always gets spontaneous insights, like sudden visions, 'from the spheres' -- a phenomenon which keeps mesmerized and hooked to Music -- a lifelong infatuation which makes a better human being..**
[I have generously borrowed from the internet groups too]..

The standard music notation used in western music shows measures and beats as subdivided by integers, but every musician knows that, believe you me -- they should not be played as written ("-'like many things "as written" that are not to be played that way).
**Nor is there a universal way to transform the notation into "music in the air" -- the sooner this belief grows,the better..

There are one collection of conventions and style for 17th century French keyboard music, and another for that written by Beethoven and further along, Duke Ellington,and his school that followed.

Most non-trained people can hear that there is a difference between a drum machine or simple MIDI rendition and how human musicians would play the same score. Some score programs have a feature for playing back the notations, and there are parameters that can be adjusted to give hints to how the playback program should both phrase and pulse the music. This sometimes works pretty well, and other times produces incoherence.

And when one learns music from a musician- teacher, he first learns the phasing and pulsing via singing (as "oral culture body rhythms" -- advocated by Francois Couperin I guess in the 1720s & 30s), and are later shown what the notation actually looks like. This dispenses with the considerable pain of trying to divide the measures and beats evenly which,to me, has essentially no musical significance(though I do not claim to be an authority on Music).

One of the reasons for the success of the oral learning first is that our brains (partly via language use) are really great at hearing and remembering and imitating rhythms (even though we have a very difficult time reading them).
For example, in "Green Fields" when one is to play on piano, he plays 3 notes in one hand against 4 in the other in the same time interval. But the oral rhythm is:
" Snowfall -- || -- snowfall -- || falling - | - along..", where both hands start on the first "jump" and then alternate. When I tried it on a table with both hands slowly and then speed up, I noticed myself winding up with a particular kind of "texture" -- THIS is and what the composer wanted.

What is used in music instead of integer multiples is more subtle and starts with the idea of "pulse". This is actually not perfectly metronomic but one feels it is a sense of "connected emphases" that move through the temporal axis.

Compared to the metronome and looking at both "beat" and "measure" boundaries it ebbs and flows ( I had a sudden feeling of being alive and breathing and heart beating (which are somewhat regular but not clocklike).
This can sometimes be very pronounced -- for example, in the Bach Violin and Cello Sonatas (even more so in mazurkas) where the first "beat" is stretched quite a bit and the others are compressed, and the most regular thing one looks at would be where in time each measure commences (and even here there is ebb and flow).
Organists will often play Bach passagework "violinstyle" to help provide accents that the organ cannot put forth in any other way.
Jazz musicians call good uses of pulse "grooving" and "laying down a groove". (I strongly believe that when one plays music -- need not be perfect, but yes with Passion,he is creating a kind of life)
Similarly, a bunch of quarter notes in a row (even on the same note) are not played the same, and are not heard as quite the same.

A teenaged Mozart once wrote to his father : 6 year.old son letters to his father :
"Notes are silver, but rests are gold". And he means putting gaps judiciously between notes where there are no rests written. (And in rubato playing to decouple the hands from the same pulse: more regular in the left hand and more "ragged" in the right)

Initially I used to think of the written notation as a kind of shorthand in which a lot of context is supplied by the player via both conventions and personal style. This is not unlike theatrical conventions ( where only the dialogue is given for the play, and the players and director have to figure out what it is about and how to say this dialogue and to whom and why. --classic example most plays of Ibsen)

In Shakespearean blank verse iambic couplets, one uses exactly the same approach as with music to avoid metronomic sing songing, but to let the meanings take front and center and the iambic pulse be a subtle background coloration (not unlike lighting and set).

Ending with a personal observation for which I risk being lynched : As years pass by, I feel that, in the larger scheme of things, it is kind of a human myth that any adult knows enough to teach a young child. What often happens is the adults start to teach their own misconceptions.
-----------------------------------------------------------
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-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri, M.B.B.S
Consultant Physician [special interest
in Cardiology &Critical Care]
Mumbai, India
(+91)9870611252
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
"The most beautiful thing we can
experience is the Mysterious."
---- Albert Einstein

SHELLED and SHOCKED

Just before the ICC 2011 World Cup started, M S Dhoni had announced with a cutely 'high' smile --- "let's win the Cup for Sachin,since it is most probably his last....".

I guess it is "duty as usual" for Sachin to take a bow and modestly declare (with a dry and wry smile) --- "oh don't take the trouble, let ME win the cup for you guys.. for a change?!!"

Amongst all the clatter and clamour which can be habitually expected not to last long at all, I guess it would be prudent, Not(please) to make M S Dhoni the fall guy. There are a couple of over-fed blokes in the Indian Team who are already 'fallen' real big-time.

And when it comes to the 'last over' decision of his, seemingly being made into an act of blasphemy and sadly so --- whom does he turn to or afford to take a fancy chance on ? If a lead bowler of a national team cannot hold forte to defend the vanity, honour and modesty of Thirteen Holy Runs from being outraged in the final over, in a big match, in an event which is held every four,rather longish years and comprises of a rather finitely small number of matches, I guess he( and his 'fallen' likes )should be pulled back and down, without any fancy floral courtesy, to ground zero reality with deftly unflattering ruthlessness..

But then, aren't we supposed to be 'Soft'?

Quiet boys and girls.. Matches ahead, work to do..
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Sent from my BlackBerry®Smartphone
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri,M.B.B.S.
Consultant Physician (special interest in
Cardiology & Critical Care)
Mumbai,India.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

To Shaheed Afridi with Love

Shaheed Afridi
I used to hate you once,
Every time you went Boom Boom at India,
Today I Bow to Thee..

Being the archetypal Indian cricket-enthusiast -- one who is all the more an enthused lover of the game when it is played with real passion --- I can't help but express(even at the cost of being lynched) :

If Destiny were to hand over the ICC World Cup 2011 to a Champion - the most befitting of them all,I'm sure Destiny,having ensured that Poetic Justice be delivered,would have chosen Shahid Afridi.

If India were to miss the cup, I would still be happy if it went to Shahid Afridi.

Go India..

A cricket lover,
Mumbai,India.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
• Sent from my BlackBerry®Smartphone
-------------------------------------------------------------------
• with regards from:
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri,
Consultant Physician (with special interest
in Cardiology & Critical care)
Mumbai,India.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"Let us live to work for Peace towards a
Green,United World.For that is the
Tomorrow we shall leave for our Children,our own Tomorrow,to live in."

GRAHAM STUART STAINES

On 22nd.January this year the Supreme Court has delivered its verdict over the killing of Graham Stuart Staines which had taken place in the very heart of India exactly 12 years ago. The death sentence of the monster who had killed the Australian social worker so mercilessly has been converted into life imprisonment. Nobody should have a problem with that,especially who knew Graham as a person,who would have pardoned his killer anyway. What is shocking,to say the least,is the rejoinder that has come with the verdict.

A Supreme Court verdict isn't just a legally binding decision. It represents the set of values that guides the code of living of an Indian in front of the entire world. It sums up the sense of the good and the bad,of what is proper and what isn't for the average Indian. It represents the set of values that guides India to live and let live the way it wants,peacefully co-existing with all other nations. If burning a man and his two sons alive inside a station-wagon in full consciousness and in cold blood isn't a rarest of rare cases in the eyes of an Indian,I wonder what is. The entire world is watching us.

Subjectively speaking it delivers two essentially different statements.
1 ) The court has observed,as if in a mode which justifies the change in the nature of punishment,that the killing doesn't fall in the category of "the rarest of rare cases" that actually demands capital punishment. An obnoxious thought itself that outrages the moral values of the common Indian,the entire avoidable rejoinder couldn't have been more improper,shaming the nation's pride.

2 ) The Chief Justice of India has come down heavily on forced religious conversions. Was it necessary for the Supreme Court to make this observation while passing the verdict in Staines' case? Graham Stuart Staines was not a missionary zealot who made religious conversions. It seems that the highest chair of Justice in India has made a correct decision for all the wrong reasons.

January 23rd. 1999 was just another chaotic day in Kolkata.There was nothing irregular about it.When I reached The Oxford Book Company in Park Street,it was past midday. I remember waiting for 3 long weeks before I decided to pick up a copy of the unabridged King James' version of The Bible.( The Old Testament used to be - it still is - one of my most favourite books,being one of the most brilliant books of history,and a wonderful mixture of sociology & anthropology too.)
As I waited for the busy traffic to slow down a bit so that I could cross over from Flury's to the opposite footpath that bordered Park Hotel,I frowned to look up at the sky. It was a dull grey, so typical of the outgoing winter that used to keep Kolkata enwrapped in a thick,depressive smog in the month of January. Trying to read into the January sky,I couldn't understand what was disturbing me on that day. What I didn't know was that it was going to be day which would witness religious extremists brutally murdering Graham Stuart Staines and his two sons, burning them alive inside a station wagon - one of the most brutal,heinous killings Independent India had ever witnessed.

Nothing could have been so ironic. There I was,a Hindu Indian,holding the Old Testament in my hand because I loved to read it. And a few hundred miles away an Australian Christian was being burnt alive,right in the heartland of tribal Orissa. His "sin" - he loved tribal lepers and wanted to make their lives beautiful. Soon after that,the brutal killing had snowballed into a political warfare,with political parties taking sides and the newspapers screamed hoarse everyday as they covered the high-pitched political rhetoric that the two sides slung at each other. So politically Indian.

I remember standing a few paces behind  Gladys Staines as she stood in front of the entire world to softly declare that she had forgiven the brutes who had killed her husband and her two sons so mercilessly. Graham Stuart Staines was a father-figure to me. Though I have no intention of going into the details of the seemingly "blasphemous relationship" of which I had been accused of once upon a time (- how did an Australian Christian Missionary who ran a leprosy rehabilitation camp in Orissa  ever bond with a 29 year old Indian doctor that was me, born unto a Bengali middle-class Hindu family),because such an act today will degrade the memory of Graham, I remember weeping bitterly as I read the headlines of The Telegraph,trying to withstand the onslaught of the morbid helplessness that took me in,reading about the gory details of how Graham had been grilled alive a day before on the day that marked 102nd.birth anniversary of Subhas Chandra Bose.
It was going to be the first of the  serial personal losses that struck me so suddenly and quickly,as life unfolded itself over the months of '99. Though I was devastated,the memory of Graham and everything he stood for helped me and guided me away from the borders of reckless self-annihilation that had threatened my sanity over the year that saw me across to the new millenium,and a new life too.

The murders had shamed the entire nation. Graham had been accused of forced religious conversion by those who mocked to justify the gruesome act. Yet when I made that trip to Manoharpur,Orissa 12 years back to stand by whatever was left of the Staines family-my last, I didn't find a single religious convert in the entire missionary camp that Graham ran like an angel,with Gladys by his side. And I hung my head in shame as I watched her reading out to reach out to the entire world that she knew Graham would forgive his killers as she did too. She prayed for her two sons too,and silently returned to her life without any cheap fanfare, back to the camp that loved and helped Oriya tribal lepers who had been ostracized by their own society,and by those who were "supposed" to show them the "Path to Salvation".

Since that day,life has moved on. India has moved on too to a possible redemption,that part of her that loved and understood Graham Stuart Staines has learnt to live out of the shame that had once belittled its own self. But the pathetic malady that is eating away into India's humane face every day,hurling her into a hellfire of corruption,money laundering,sex-scandals and brutal rapes of minors,just doesn't seem to  go away. And on the eve of Graham's 12th.death anniversary,as I watched the newscaster reading out the Supreme Court verdict on primetime television news,I hung my head in shame once again.

I knew Graham personally. I have been fortunate enough to have felt his love - the love that he had for one and all,cutting across countries,beliefs and religions. He took his inspiration from a man called Jesus Christ,but was gentle enough to have never forced his faith upon anybody. Yet the blind fanaticism that cuts the world into bleeding pieces today in the name of a highly dispensable folly called Religion took this man away.

Maybe it's time for some real introspection for those of us who think that they care and understand. To stop lying to our own selves once and for all,and to listen to what our hearts tell us silently every single day that witnesses the rape and murder of a brother or a sister somewhere out there. And we just keep on looking the other way.
-- anirban
-------------------------------------------------------
• Sent from my BlackBerry®Smartphone
-------------------------------------------------------
• with sincere regards from :
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri,(MBBS)
Consultant Physician (special interest in
Cardiology & Critical Care Medicine)
Mumbai,India.
---------------------------------------------------------
"Let us all live to work for Peace towards a
United,Green World.For that is the
Tomorrow we leave for our Children,our
own Tomorrow,to live for."

THE BEST MEDICINE

I have been suffering from this neuropathy affecting my left hand over the last 6 months. Clinically one would brand the nerve disorder as Left Ulnar Mononeuropathy - the ulnar nerve is one of the 2 main nerves supplying the arm and hand - in my case it is the left one and it is my left hand that has been affected. I've been experiencing an ever-increasing pain,to the point of being excruciating,and an almost constant,weirdly tingling sensation in my left hand,particularly in the ring & little fingers & the area of the palm below them which do not exactly move the way I wish them to.

The condition seems to have developed, according to my neurologist,due to extensive playing of guitar,an exercise I had indulged in with passion,in my late teens and early-20s, when I used to play in the college rock-band which had a rather brief yet excitingly joyous professional stint later on. I had formally learnt classical &folk guitar(like flamenco,the Catalan folk)which is played finger-style,and that requires a 'classical' acoustic guitar which traditionally sports a much broader finger-board than usual. That necessitated my left fingers to stretch extensively,and all the more so when I used to hold the broken chords in the background when we played those Scorpions numbers(I still remember those initially painful hours during rehearsals as we played songs like "When The Smoke Is Going Down").

Over the last few months the left ring & little fingers had forced my hand into a clawed shape of submission,the fingers getting contracted & flexed at the little bone joints,a seemingly eternal state of Spasm that was not exactly painless. I find that rather ironic as the name of my rock-band(well it was 'mine' just as it was any other co-member's) was SPASM too, a name I'd kept myself along with Miku,the bass-guitarist who went on to become a hand-surgeon himself later on. Now that's one of 'those quirks' of destiny,isn't it?

Coming back to my neuropathy,the pain had,at one point of time,increased so much that even the strongest painkillers were not being effective,and I had become literally sick of pain-killing injections. Nothing seemed to work,and the fact that I could no more hold chords,or even use my left fingers while playing guitar(ultimately I had to quit my favourite pass-time activity)only added to my frustrated,depressing woes.

Three weeks back,as I was having my morning cold coffee,my 21 month-old daughter tiptoed her way into the hall,nimble-footed,and stood in front of me,looking at me with her sparkling, bright eyes. I knew that look. She wanted to climb up and sit on my stomach,straddling her legs on the sides facing her father - her favourite "seat" in the morning,as she would excitedly tell me how the pigeons had looked at her from outside the kitchen window or how busily the crows had pecked at the crumbs on the parapet. That day I found it difficult to give her a hand to take her morning seat. The pain was too much in my left hand which found itself too weak to carry her weight. I knew she would be disappointed.

As I looked back at her eyes with helpless apology written all over my face and with a tinge of guilt too,trying to shake my afflicted hand off the pain,I spoke to her in my Bengali mother-tongue,telling her,"Aaj baba'r haate khub byatha je.."(which vaguely translates into - "But there is too much pain in father's hands today...". She isn't too familiar with that language as her father has got only a handful of relatives and none in Mumbai to pay the occasional visit so that the language is spoken. I really don't know what she understood,but she didn't show any disappointment. What she showed in her eyes was gentle and tender care. She took my hand in her soft,little fingers kissing it mildly, looked up at me and said in broken English,"Baba?pain no...Baba?pain no no.."..

Well,my left hand hasn't exactly stopped paining since,but that was the last time I felt the pain. I have not needed any pain-killers since then simply because I don't feel any pain anywhere,anymore. And as I watch my daughter growing up each day,every hour,every minute,I just wonder how beautiful life can be for anybody in the simplest of ways,in spite of all the pains & troubles,the aches & breaks it keeps on dishing out on a regular basis. No matter how much one cries,life always gets back to you as a great leveler,giving you something to smile about,and perhaps with a little reward at the end. It is just only a matter of time.

Let it be.
-- anirban
-------------------------------------------------------
• Sent from my BlackBerry®Smartphone
-------------------------------------------------------
• with sincere regards from :
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri,(MBBS)
Consultant Physician (special interest in
Cardiology & Critical Care Medicine)
Mumbai,India.
---------------------------------------------------------
"Let us all live to work for Peace towards a
United,Green World.For that is the
Tomorrow we leave for our Children,our
own Tomorrow,to live for."

THANK YOU

Thanks to all of you who have lent your strong voices through your personal mails to me here and in Facebook as I remembered Graham Stuart Staines the other day-voices so eagerly needed to keep alive the Hope of the Good Cause that Graham personified - one desperately seeks voices like yours that actually become kindly leading lights when social stigmata come across your way, revealed so shockingly that normal cerebration get numbed - not only for the uncivilized perceptions to the point of barbarism that they represent, but the "educated and liberated" quarters of our society that they originate from - even from acquaintances,my own blood relatives near and distant - that commanded my respect and who once used to be valued to be high.

Personally speaking,in my relationship with Graham,I 've come across innumerable taboos that I wouldn't have known otherwise,existed for real,haunting to plague our educated society. In difficult and changing times like now it is all the more important not to be silenced..

My association with the Staines goes a long way in moulding the aggressive ignorance that plagued my entity once,into the relatively civilized ( and far-from near perfect) tolerance that guides me as a husband,a father and a professional.

Graham's memories show me still that It is so important not to lose one's self to the coward compromise that trying times like today coldly demand round the sudden bends in one's walk of life. Certain compromises are just unacceptable because if you do so,you just stop being the very person you are,you lose that minuscule island of Truth that you still rule in the midst of the chaotic oceans that you have tamely forfeited and surrendered over the years.
This is what Graham taught persistently, even in the face of death threats - one of them came back and took him away. Yet he lives on - In my memories and in your voices. One can only see Hope from here.

Thank you so very much.
-- anirban
-------------------------------------------------------
• Sent from my BlackBerry®Smartphone
-------------------------------------------------------
• with sincere regards from :
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri,(MBBS)
Consultant Physician (special interest in
Cardiology & Critical Care Medicine)
Mumbai,India.
---------------------------------------------------------
"Let us all live to work for Peace towards a
United,Green World.For that is the
Tomorrow we leave for our Children,our
own Tomorrow,to live for."

THE BEST MEDICINE

I have been suffering from this neuropathy affecting my left hand over the last 6 months. Clinically one would brand the nerve disorder as Left Ulnar Mononeuropathy - the ulnar nerve is one of the 2 main nerves supplying the arm and hand - in my case it is the left one and it is my left hand that has been affected. I've been experiencing an ever-increasing pain,to the point of being excruciating,and an almost constant,weirdly tingling sensation in my left hand,particularly in the ring & little fingers & the area of the palm below them which do not exactly move the way I wish them to.

The condition seems to have developed, according to my neurologist,due to extensive playing of guitar,an exercise I had indulged in with passion,in my late teens and early-20s, when I used to play in the college rock-band which had a rather brief yet excitingly joyous professional stint later on. I had formally learnt classical &folk guitar(like flamenco,the Catalan folk)which is played finger-style,and that requires a 'classical' acoustic guitar which traditionally sports a much broader finger-board than usual. That necessitated my left fingers to stretch extensively,and all the more so when I used to hold the broken chords in the background when we played those Scorpions numbers(I still remember those initially painful hours during rehearsals as we played songs like "When The Smoke Is Going Down").

Over the last few months the left ring & little fingers had forced my hand into a clawed shape of submission,the fingers getting contracted & flexed at the little bone joints,a seemingly eternal state of Spasm that was not exactly painless. I find that rather ironic as the name of my rock-band(well it was 'mine' just as it was any other co-member's) was SPASM too, a name I'd kept myself along with Miku,the bass-guitarist who went on to become a hand-surgeon himself later on. Now that's one of 'those quirks' of destiny,isn't it?

Coming back to my neuropathy,the pain had,at one point of time,increased so much that even the strongest painkillers were not being effective,and I had become literally sick of pain-killing injections. Nothing seemed to work,and the fact that I could no more hold chords,or even use my left fingers while playing guitar(ultimately I had to quit my favourite pass-time activity)only added to my frustrated,depressing woes.

Three weeks back,as I was having my morning cold coffee,my 21 month-old daughter tiptoed her way into the hall,nimble-footed,and stood in front of me,looking at me with her sparkling, bright eyes. I knew that look. She wanted to climb up and sit on my stomach,straddling her legs on the sides facing her father - her favourite "seat" in the morning,as she would excitedly tell me how the pigeons had looked at her from outside the kitchen window or how busily the crows had pecked at the crumbs on the parapet. That day I found it difficult to give her a hand to take her morning seat. The pain was too much in my left hand which found itself too weak to carry her weight. I knew she would be disappointed.

As I looked back at her eyes with helpless apology written all over my face and with a tinge of guilt too,trying to shake my afflicted hand off the pain,I spoke to her in my Bengali mother-tongue,telling her,"Aaj baba'r haate khub byatha je.."(which vaguely translates into - "But there is too much pain in father's hands today...". She isn't too familiar with that language as her father has got only a handful of relatives and none in Mumbai to pay the occasional visit so that the language is spoken. I really don't know what she understood,but she didn't show any disappointment. What she showed in her eyes was gentle and tender care. She took my hand in her soft,little fingers kissing it mildly, looked up at me and said in broken English,"Baba?pain no...Baba?pain no no.."..

Well,my left hand hasn't exactly stopped paining since,but that was the last time I felt the pain. I have not needed any pain-killers since then simply because I don't feel any pain anywhere,anymore. And as I watch my daughter growing up each day,every hour,every minute,I just wonder how beautiful life can be for anybody in the simplest of ways,in spite of all the pains & troubles,the aches & breaks it keeps on dishing out on a regular basis. No matter how much one cries,life always gets back to you as a great leveler,giving you something to smile about,and perhaps with a little reward at the end. It is just only a matter of time.

Let it be.
___________________________________________
• Sent from my BlackBerry®Smartphone
----------------------------------------------------------------

• with sincere regards from :
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri,(MBBS)
Consultant Physician (special interest in Cardiology & Critical Care Medicine)
Mumbai,India.
____________________________
"Let us all live to work for Peace towards a United,Green World.For that is the Tomorrow we leave for our Children,our own Tomorrow,to live for."
-----------------------------------------

ON REPUBLIC DAY

I remember being a three year old boy, colouring up pieces of thick,white paper with orange & green pastels(which changed to little tubes of watercolour and oil a couple of years later)and stick them up with gum to secretly acquired(or stolen) broomsticks to make 'flags' the night before 26th.of January. Next morning after a hurried breakfast temporally shortened to dimensions lesser than usual by an excitement sweeping my mind, I would ask my mother for permission to step out and join the other kids in the neighbourhood with flags in hand. We competed on how many flags each one of us made.

Nobody watched as the children gathered and we didn't know what exactly to do with the flags except for counting them,then holding them up and waving them with a pride whose essence I am no more able to analyze exactly.( Well I guess that's a high price you pay for growing up.)

There were elders dressed up in smartly ironed kurtas,the "uncles" of the neighbourhood, who would hoist the tricolour high accompanied by inspired clapping in the local "Square". A modest shamianah of tarpaulin - everybody called it "Pandal" - used to be put up at the Square providing a nice shade over a dozen of rows of wooden,folder chairs adjacent to an elevated 'stage' made up of wooden-planks,by an enterprising uncle whom everybody called the 'decorator' (I remember the word painted in a seemingly ancient billboard above the door to his one-room office which his father used to frequent years before I was born).The "aunts", dressed up with fragrant coils of jasmine neatly tucked in their hair,wrapped in sarees immaculately worn in crispy folds and of the same colour(white with red border in the neighbourhood where I grew up)with fragrant Jasmine neatly sang 'Jana-Gana-Mana' (the inevitable first song) with a harmonium and a pair of tabla keeping the tune and the beat. There used to be little speeches interspersed with ladies singing songs,and tensed recitation of poems of an inspirational nature by the older boys and girls.

Everybody smiled on that day, including the grumpy uncle who threatened us on other days with seemingly dire consequences when the occasional,and sometimes too frequent to be occasional, cricket-ball banged against his door as we played in the pavement juxtaposed against his ground-floor flat.
I used to enjoy the merriment in the air all around to the full,consciously hoarding them up in cozy packets of silent joy tucked in a special corner of my heart(the corner has survived the onslaught of Time) which I would "use up" in calculated installments for those days of the future which were forlorn of all happiness just by the sheer depressive regularity with which everybody and everything went about as normal business -days when my mother sported a poker-face all day long after a disagreeable confrontation with a neighbour,or when my father seemed to be in a perpetual frown under the heavy weight of financially tough months. Even the grumpy uncle abused palpably harder and longer when his door was,according to him,under attack by a possible conspiracy.

But I knew that those days wouldn't last forever. There would be respite from the regularity of school which used to cast a dark,almost black shadow in my mind when I had exams,ending in a month- long holiday of lazy afternoons,accompanied by the lulling sound of incessant rain and the smell of moist earth,or a richly coloured month of festivities that saw Durga Puja being celebrated in new clothes and shoes amongst other earthly things. There would be smiles about the house too,when I would be the prince of cozy wintry nights warmed up under my quilt that just couldn't wait for the gaiety of Christmas and a new year to come and greet life.

Age saw me understand and feel the folly of the thing called politics which always brought a feeling of a low negativity,where people would swear and shout in packed buses and trams,and in the neighbourhood too. People around me,who were not in the business of formal politics,seemed to wear disturbed,angry masks, without being under any apparent compulsion - the sort of compulsion that sent my father to regular work and to vegetable & fish markets,or that drove my mother to go about her household chores with dry regularity,and engage herself in serious calculations over how much money remained for the month and how much didn't.

Age also saw me learning to feel,like and enjoy Patriotism. It came from what teachers said in the classrooms and from the stories my grand-parents(specifically my mother's mother and my father's mother) told me at bedtime and during the family afternoon siesta,when I used to come out of the confines(so they seemed, contextually)of my three-member nuclear family and go to stay with them for more than one day with my mother, and later even alone.

My paternal grand-mother had seen it all. Getting married by her mid-teens in a family which ruled over one of the biggest royal estates in undivided Bengal,she had been in the luxury that came from the vulgar richness of gold coins,money and property. And she had seen the deathly reality of a famine too, that hit parts of Bengal during WW- I I .Settling in Calcutta,she had to sustain a family under acute financial strains after the Partition of India,almost single-handedly because her husband was too worthless to earn by himself,unable to free himself from the hypocrisy of an irrelevant,meaningless feeling of aristocracy that had left him a waste of a man since his early teens,for life.

My maternal grandmother had been left with the despondency of an early widowhood that pressed upon her the sheer compulsion to raise seven children in a practical and effective way. Both my grandmothers taught me the value of modesty and the value of hardship in which one could really take pride in. They told me wondrous stories of undivided India and the valiant people who had fought for Independence.

But their present lay in a country,politically free alright but getting increasingly enchained by the shackles of corruption,poverty and the loss of self-pride by an ever-thriving politicking community who operated under the hypocrisy of meaningless tokenism and vain jingoism,and nothing more. I could feel the sadness that beseeched the two ladies when they consciously looked at their past,and then at their present. They were sad because they loved India. That made me think and discover what and how it felt to love my country,to take pride in her,and dream about good times which she and me would be happily sharing together one day.
I know that you,through your own childhood,along your own journey till now, have felt and feel the same too.

Today we see a day which sees Corruption usurping the money,India's money which would have bought food for farmers who have taken their own lives out of hunger and heartbreak. Seperatists tear India into hapless pieces so much so that we have lost the right to hoist and wave the Indian tricolour anywhere in the Indian Republic without controversy and without fear.

I'm not sure whether this sort of a write-up should be put up for public reading on a 26th. of January. Because on this day it is so necessary for all of us Indians to unite under the banner of Patriotism,to speak,write,promise,express for others to see,know,learn(& relearn) that we love our country and that we are what we are as Indians,we are proud of her,just as India is proud of her children - us,and India is a united republic.
It's unfortunate that today Patriotism has to be expressed as being a 'common banner' for us to show our belief. Yet it has to be declared expressedly, because it is a hard core reality that all sorts of "Isms" seem to be running India over - the politics in and of regionalism,communalism(even Nationalism because the possessing rights of the word have long been usurped by rotten politics to serve its own mean purpose) to ruin and viciate the wonderful feeling of Pride that this day evokes in the mind of an Indian.

Are we going the right way?And are we,in our own capacity,doing what is actually required? A false security hypnotizes us into frustrated inaction. We don't act and we don't react and we won't react unless and until the Reality of our present enters our home to affect our own families. And we pretend that IT PERHAPS won't happen. What have I done so that my daughter won't grow up,look around her and think what did her father do to stop this mess.
Nothing. And I continue to pretend that PERHAPS she won't. So far so good..

I congratulate you for and wish all of you a Happy Republic Day.
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Sent from my BlackBerry®Smartphone
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with regards from :
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri,
Mumbai,India.
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GRAHAM STUART STAINES

On 22nd.January this year the Supreme Court has delivered its verdict over the killing of Graham Stuart Staines which had taken place in the very heart of India exactly 12 years ago. The death sentence of the monster who had killed the Australian social worker so mercilessly has been converted into life imprisonment. Nobody should have a problem with that,especially who knew Graham as a person,who would have pardoned his killer anyway.
What is shocking,to say the least,is the rejoinder that has come with the verdict. Subjectively speaking it delivers two essentially different statements.
1)The court has observed,as if in a mode which justifies the change in the nature of punishment,that the killing doesn't fall in the category of "the rarest of rare cases" that actually demands capital punishment.
An obnoxious thought itself that outrages the moral values of the common Indian,the entire avoidable rejoinder couldn't have been more improper,shaming the nation's pride and modesty.
A Supreme Court verdict isn't just a legally binding decision. It represents the set of values that guides the code of living of an Indian in front of the entire world. It sums up the sense of the good and the bad,of what is proper and what isn't for the average Indian. It represents the set of values that guides India to live and let live the way it wants,peacefully co-existing with all other nations.
If burning a man and his two sons alive inside a station-wagon in full consciousness and in cold blood isn't a rarest of rare cases in the eyes of an Indian,I wonder what is. The entire world is watching us.
2)The Chief Justice of India has come down heavily on forced religious conversions. Was it necessary for the Supreme Court to make this observation while passing the verdict in Staines' case? Graham Stuart Staines was not a missionary zealot who made religious conversions. It seems that the highest chair of Justice in India has made a correct decision for all the wrong reasons.
January 23rd. 1999 was just another chaotic day in Kolkata.There was nothing irregular about it.When I reached The Oxford Book Company in Park Street,it was past midday. I remember waiting for 3 long weeks before I decided to pick up a copy of the unabridged King James' version of The Bible.
The Old Testament used to be(it still is) one of my most favourite books,being one of the most brilliant books of history,and a wonderful mixture of sociology & anthropology too. As I waited for the busy traffic to slow down a bit so that I could cross over from Flury's to the opposite footpath that bordered Park Hotel,I frowned up to look at the sky. It was a dull grey,so typical of the outgoing winter that used to keep Kolkata enwrapped in a thick,depressive smog in the month of January.
Trying to read into the January sky,I couldn't understand what was disturbing me on that day. What I didn't know was that it was a day which witnessed religious extremists brutally murdering Graham Stuart Staines and his two sons, burning them alive inside a station wagon - one of the most brutal,heinous killings Independent India had ever witnessed. Nothing could have been so ironic. There I was,a Hindu Indian,holding the Old Testament in my hand because I loved to read it.And a few hundred miles away an Australian Christian was being burnt alive,right in the heartland of tribal Orissa. His "sin" - he loved tribal lepers and wanted to make their lives beautiful.
Soon after that,the brutal killing had snowballed into a political warfare,with political parties taking sides and the newspapers screamed hoarse everyday as they covered the high-pitched political rhetoric that the two sides slung at each other. So politically Indian.
I remember standing a few paces behind Gladys Staines as she stood in front of the entire world to softly declare that she had forgiven the brutes who had killed her husband and her two sons so mercilessly.
Graham Stuart Staines was a father-figure to me. Though I have no intention of going into the details of the seemingly "blasphemous relationship" of which I had been accused of once upon a time - how did an Australian Christian Missionary who ran a leprosy rehabilitation camp in Orissa ever bond with a 29 year old Indian doctor that was me, born unto a Bengali middle-class Hindu family(because such an act today will degrade the memory of Graham),I remember
weeping bitterly as I read the headlines of The Telegraph,trying to withstand the onslaught of the morbid helplessness that took me in,going into the gory details of how Graham had been burnt alive a day before on the day that marked 102nd.birth anniversary of Subhas Chandra Bose.
It was going to be the first of the serial personal losses that struck me so suddenly and quickly,as life unfolded itself over the months of '99. Though I was devastated,the memory of Graham and everything he stood for helped and guided me away from the borders of reckless self-annihilation that had threatened my sanity over the year that saw me across to the new millenium,and a new life too.
The murders had shamed the entire nation. Graham had been accused of forced religious conversion by those who mocked to justify the gruesome act. Yet when I made that trip to Manoharpur,Orissa 12 years back to stand by whatever was left of the Gladys family-my last, I didn't find a single religious convert in the entire missionary camp that Graham ran like an angel,with Gladys by his side. And I hung my head in shame as I watched her reading out to reach out to the entire world that she knew Graham would forgive his killers as she did too.She prayed for her two sons too,and silently returned to her life without any cheap fanfare,back to the camp that loved and helped Oriya tribal lepers who had been ostracized by their own society,and by those who were "supposed" to show them the "Path to Salvation".
Life has moved on since then. India has moved on too to a possible redemption,that part of her that loved and understood Graham Stuart Staines has learnt to live out of the shame that had once belittled its own self.
But the pathetic malady that is eating away into India's humane face every day,hurling her into a hellfire of corruption,money laundering,sex-scandals and brutal rapes of minors,just doesn't seem to go away. And on the eve of Graham's 12th.death anniversary,as I watched the newscaster reading out the Supreme Court verdict on primetime news on television,I hung my head in shame once again.
I knew Graham personally. I have been fortunate enough to have felt his love - the love that he had for one and all,cutting across countries,beliefs and religions. He took his inspiration from a man called Christ,but was gentle enough to have never forced his faith upon anybody. Yet the blind fanaticism that cuts the world into bleeding pieces today in the name of a highly dispensable folly called Religion took this man away. Maybe it's time for some real introspection for those of us who think that they care and understand. To stop lying to our own selves once and for all,and to listen to what our hearts tell us silently every single day that witnesses the rape and murder of a brother or a sister somewhere out there.And we just look the other way.
Sent from my BlackBerry®Smartphone
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With Regards from :
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri,
• • • • • • • • • • • • •

I AM SORRY SANDEEP SHETTY

I just marvel at the way Life unfolds to  bare its Beauty as one moves ahead in Its Path,ambling at times and trudging along at other times. But whatever is the way one rolls along,Life never loses its charm,always seducing one to live it to the brim. And it's wonderful to observe and feel the changes that one undergoes in his journey.And thus as my life goes on, 18 years after my graduating out of medical college, It feels so good to hear every now and then, about what my college-mates are doing at the moment and where and how.The more I get to know about each of them,shining more & more in their respective places scattered all over the world as professionals in various disciplines of Medicine, the more "fulfilled" I feel.

There's a reason why I am writing this little note.If I run back in Time,scurrying through those invaluably special memoirs of my life which specially stand out as fluorescent  milestones, memoirs of a highway along which I'd once trotted on in a journey six years long as an undergraduate in my medical college.

A few days back I came across a news which a former class-mate of mine had shared with the website that acts as an internet forum for us all - batch-mates of the class of 1987.And that was about Dr.Sandeep Shetty,another batch-mate, who now works as a top state-level administrator in Government Health Services.The news was about the luminous height of the level Sandeep Shetty has worked his way up to,in the administrative/bureaucratic heirerchy. All of us were pleased to know that.

Now that I find myself pondering over Life and its endless surprises,I won't hesitate to share a trivial memory,20 years old,with you since I am specially remembering Sandeep Shetty here.There was a time when Sandeep Shetty and I were in eagerly regular exchanges of thoughts & opinions about movies like DEAD POETS' SOCiETY or GOOD MORNING VIETNAM or BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY or MISSISSIPPI BURNING etc. This was this time when I,in my early 20s, used to revel over the Martin Scorsese's and the Brian D'Palma's or the Oliver Stone's for that matter,and I remember devouring the artistic & intellectual brilliance which were abundant in movies of classic genres, procuring those now-extinct videos cassettes on rent to enjoy them at home playing them in the little VCP that we had at (it couldn't record).I guess you can roughly recall the period .. 

Coming back to Sandeep Shetty, I must say that our exchanges during that period of time were more regular & frequent than they actually were throughout the rest of our college-life. Though there was a transient phase of growing fondness for Shetty for his thoughtful comments over a  poignantly good movie,I discovered (or should I say re-confirmed )the presence of a nasty trait inside the 20 year.old me.I was good in Pharmacology because I was fond of it(my father was a medical representative for a long time).Though I flunked horribly in Pathology (in the written - the tormenting first ever academic failure in my life),I got rather good marks in Pharmacology. Sandeep Shetty seemed to be good in Pharmacology too,and he was most generous in his appreciation of my retentive memory of kinetics & dynamics of most drugs when we got into discussion mode weeks before our 2nd.Professional Exams.I remember feeling sunk to devastating depths as I searched for my name in the list I wanted to be in...

I don't remember Sandeep Shetty's performance in that exam when it came to success or  failure,but my agony increased to near-villainish levels when I found that his marks in Pharmacology were better than mine..I remember resenting that undesirable "phenomenon" and pangs of Jealousy pursued me to borders of frenzied brooding and sulking.Worse- I started to misbehave with Shetty,petrifying whenever he appeared in my field of vision. My spontaneous smile vanished and my vocabulary reduced to one -liners that kept on being less frequent and more sarcastic.Poor Sandeep Shetty couldn't fathom what was wrong,and slowly he apologized himself off our 3 month-old companionship.I was sadistically happy to see the back of his disappearing figure.

 Pathetic stuff.

I discovered that I could potentially be that pathetic. 

Though our relations became perfectly normal when we started frequenting the hospital wards a few weeks later(and he was most gracious when I stepped up to talk to him,much to my relief),I never apologized to him or brought up the Curious Case of Nasty Anirban,for discussion ever.We have met later many times after leaving college and his omnipresent grin never disappeared.

Life is Beautiful.Today I find myself truely happy. Over-happy? .No. Just happy & sincerely so.And I Feel Wonderful Tonight  - that's the reason behind my sudden urge to pen down and share an archetypal inglorious episode of my life,one that I ought to have brushed under the carpet. Why does an unselfish Happiness,  a blissful serenity of Peace overwhelm me - that any one of us might possibly feel here,as we share with and talk to,laugh and cry with everyone else,days in days out ?  Well, I wouldn't want to explore the reason for this one at least.But I have come to identify one of Life's polyrrhythmic facets. Life is a Wave. A consistent Sine Curve progressing ahead forever with unflinching perfection in its ' wave-length' and 'amplitude' .The crests and troughs - high or low,happy or sad,sunshine or rain,smiles or tears,war or peace,victory or defeat,light or darkness - are the best lessons for the traveller who embarks upon his journey. Life itself is the best guide for the lost, the best oasis for the weary and the thirsty, the best shade to rest under off rain or snow. Yet it is never the hiding place for the fugutive.

Life is a Grand ,Grand Celebration of the indomitable spirit of man who guides one another  unto greener pastures in eternal springtime from season to season,while attending to a bird with broken wings or giving shelter  to a shivering pup which has lost its way.If I were a minstrel of  the 60s,I might have crooned -  "And Here's to you Sandeep Shetty ,Your friends Love you more than you could know...!".But that is Not To Be. So as you stand high today,making our own heads high too,I have to repay a debt I have owed you for 20 long years. What could be more appropriate an occasion than in here and now, as we celebrate the Spirit of friendship and bonding that touches our hearts in all odours and hues  every day. And I must say now without a twitch - I AM SORRY SANDEEP SHETTY