‘The Bad Girl’ at the interview

They were just about to let me go when, may be for lightening up the mood, the epidemiologist in the interview panel asked me “What are your hobbies?”. True to my soul, I replied “I read a lot and I love quizzing”’. 

Suddenly she asked, “Tell me the name of the last book you read”. 

 I wracked my brains for 5 seconds and stammered the only name which came to my mind at that point of time, “The Bad girl”, I told. 

“Who is the author?”, she persisted. 

I was in the dilemma of my life now. I told,  “Mario…(Vera? Varga? My brain hit the search mode with no luck)…...ehh, um,... I’m not getting the rest of his name”. 

Pause. 

Not one to give so easily, I blabbered, “He is Argentinian, He’s a Nobel laureate too. He’s actually a contemporary of Gabriel Garcia Marquez… I’m sorry, I don’t remember the rest of his name”. 

The bibliophile in me would never pardon me if I got his name wrong, so I could not and would not lie about it; that would be blasphemy. But I would not back down without a fight, so I thought it better to give pointers about who the author may be by mentioning his whereabouts. May be the interview board would have thought that I would go on with his biography if they din’t stop me right there and then. So they told me politely, “You can go now.”

I came out. I took two steps in a disoriented fashion. I had let myself down by not remembering the name of the author. I was a shame to the quizzer community of the world. Screw the rest of the interview.

Suddenly, in a flash, it came to me, “Llosa. Vargas Llosa. Mario Vargas Llosa ”. “Yippee…!!” my mind did a small somersault to itself. I turned back to go to the interview room. I had to redeem my pride, I had to tell them that I knew. 

Just then, one of the panel members emerged from the room. He din’t look like he cared. He hadn’t blinked when I mentioned the book’s name. There was no flicker of recognition when I mentioned Argentina or Nobel prize or even Marquez… For him and the others in the room, The Bad Girl could have been just another Mills & Boons book for all they knew, as the title seemed to suggest.

But for me, it mattered that I could remember, that I did not forget. I had redeemed myself in my eyes. I walked out feeling good, thinking of the actual Bad Girl that Llosa wrote about, about Marquez, One hundred years of Solitude and Love in the times of Cholera….




PS:It also didn't matter that later Llosa turned out to be a Peruvian and not from Argentina as I had claimed!




 

The Different colours of Spring

Spring has announced its arrival in Bangalore by breaking out into a melange of colours. The few trees that have managed to survive the onslaught of man;s greed as well as that of the metro rail construction have trumpeted the turn of time by bringing forth the colours they were harbouring in their bosoms around the year.

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The yellows and pinks of Spring

This is just outside my office. The trees are almost bare , no leaves, only flowers adorning their squiggly branches.

The entire ground has become carpeted with flowers...

Floral carpet

The Emergency Exit

I was waiting for my check in on the flight out of Bangalore. I couldn’t help but notice the middle aged lady checking in at the next counter. (She will probably thrash me for thinking about her as ‘middle aged’.) Well who wouldn’t notice a well dressed, well made-up lady? Then suddenly I heard her requesting the man at the counter, “Emergency exit please”. I got confused, ‘does she want an exit out of the airport pronto’?  Quickly I corrected myself, ‘ she might be requesting a seat near the emergency exit’. As much as I tried hard, I could not fathom what could be the motive behind this strange request. People request window seats, aisle seats, seats closer to the loo, the door etc etc, but an emergency exit? In what kind of an emergency could it possibly give you a head start ? Yeah, the plane is taxiing on the runway at the lowest speed possible and the tail catches fire. Or the plane has come to a standstill but the regular door fails to open?

 I am not sure how much help it will be in other major accidents like a mid-air crash or such needless-to mention tragedies. But then people are given in to their quirks, she might have had some kind of a situation in her mind where it helps to be near the emergency exit, or probably it just makes her feel secure. After all, security or the lack of it has nothing to do with the actual ground situation; it is all up there in your head.

Demystifying psychiatrists/ psychiatry

R has 'officially' been awarded degree as a qualified psychiatrist. 'Officially' because I believe he has been doing that since time began (in retrospect, yes, even while we were courting). Just that, now he is legally licensed to do it! Oh, I can't believe that I am married to a psychiatrist; me - who once hid behind a newspaper so that a psychiatrist in the room would not see my face and read my thoughts straightaway! Well, that was way before I got into medical school. Once in med school, I saw that our psych. profs were just normal looking people; they are not mind readers of any kind; they don't hypnotise people at will; they don't look or dress weird; these were just myths which society and media had perpetuated. Now I get irritated when people make supposedly witty comments about psychiatrist also having gone mad having treated so many mad patients. But then psychiatry is not about being 'mad' per se... Aren't we all mad at some time or the other - with anger,  grief, dejection, jealousy?

In the layman's perception,  psychiatry = treatment of madness. But in reality it is concerned with the treatment of many mental conditions like mood disorders, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, OCD etc... What we title as 'madness' may be schizophrenia or any other of those psychotic disorders. The patients who seek help from a psychiatrist aren't always 'mad'- they may be depressed or delusional or obsessive or anxious individuals who need medical help.

The slogan I saw on a billboard near the bus stop recently was " Depression is treatable". It is a matter noteworthy because, what we were taught in med school was that "TB is treatable"; no one even bothered to mention about depression or  psychiatric disorders and the stigma associated with them. In that light, it is really commendable that the Ministry of Health & FW has woken up to this huge problem in India and started taking the baby steps towards sensitizing the public about the condition. The stigma associated with going to a psychiatrist's clinic is so huge that people will rather prefer to suffer in silence than taking their loved ones to one.

Bottom line: 
Psychiatry is not equivalent to being 'mad'.
Psychiatrists are normal people too... (oh yes, ask me).

Stir fried Potatoes

Yellow, green, brown...

I am posting this just for the sheer fun in enjoying the colours in this photo.
The bright yellow of the potatoes (turmeric is the secret),
The vivid green of the curry leaves,
The various shades of brown of the fenugreek seeds and fried onions, and the coconut coated with red chilly powder,
The occassional black dots of the mustard seeds...

I had added sambar powder to this potato stir fry and it gave a wonderful spicy taste. The onions and the fenugreek seeds were fried to a crisp which gave the occassional crunchy texture too. We loved it and gorged on it.

Three women at work

All in a day's work

I saw them on my way to the office; three women who also were on their way to work. They were selling these long brooms, as you can see, mounted on their petite shoulders. The lady in the sari (the middle one), also had a baby sleeping on her shoulder (not visible in the pic ) while she deftly balanced the brooms on her head.
These brooms are often around 6 feet long. If you are wondering what is the use of a broom 6 ft long, it has a unique purpose in India. It is used for removing cobwebs sitting pretty on unreacheably high corners of the roof in houses, offices etc. Trust me, they are more efficient and easy to use than you vacuum cleaner for roofs. I have tried using vacuum cleaners to gobble up the spider webs and suck the runaway spiders into the vacuum bag with a wicked glee. In the first place, the vacuum tube will not be long enough to reach high  roofs. Secondly I have to stare up with my head and hands pointing at the sky to aim the tube at the runaway spiders till my neck and arm muscles ache but to no avail.
With this broom, its so damn easy. First of all, they are so light weight and user friendly, esp. for lightly built people like me. Next, the bristles are arranged in a fan shape so that you can cover a lot of area in a single swipe unlike the vaccum tube opening of a few centimeters. The thickly arranged bristles also provide for more efficient squatting of the wannabe runaways.
Thus in ways more than one, these three women carry a very useful and totally indigenous device for keeping your homes clean.
Oh, and more pros are coming in now; this broom will cost you only a fraction of what a vaccum cleaner will cost (Rs 20 Vs Rs 2000); they are totally environment friendly; consumes no electricity/ fuel; they are totally plastic free; you can also use them to pluck mangoes (when its mango season) or guavas or some such fruits from trees. Thus its truly a multi-purpose , user friendly and environment friendly device.

PS: I almost sound like an online sales rep for these women, too bad they don't that I'm at it. :(

The shoe repair man

At the bus stop near home, there sits a man who repairs shoes. He has appeared there since the last 1 - 2 months or so. Initially when he started sitting there, I wondered whether he would ever find any customers. But I soon realized my folly and why he was in the right place at the right time. He had very prudently picked his place. It was bang next to a busy bus stop which saw heavy footfall at all times of the day. It was close to a couple of schools and colleges. With that many feet in the vicinity, surely somebody is bound to walk around with footwear which needs mending, broken straps which need a stitch or two, worn out soles which need replacement. Proving his business acumen true, he is quite a busy man these days. Whenever I pass by, I see him stitching or sewing or applying glue, with a customer or two waiting patiently nearby. Even one of my shoes came undone at the sole one of these days and I found myself limping past him in my half-split-open-at-the-toe shoe trying not to catch his eye. Nowadays, it would seem like what our area was doing without a shoe repairer all these days.He has merged unobtrusively into the landscape.

He is a dark and wiry man,always wearing a white shirt darkened with time and dirt. He has a small cloth bundle next to him, which I always imagine contains his life's possessions. I have even contemplated where he was before he came to our area, whether he is remaining thin because of retro infection (stereotyping on my part; it could be a plain and simple case of  no-money-to buy-anything-to-eat), how much he earns per day and so on.

Today as I passed by him, I found my self remembering what someone told me some time back. When asked why we Indians cannot manufacture good quality shoes which wont get damaged within a month or 2 of use, one Indian retorted, "Then what would all the poor cobblers who make a living out of repairing our damaged shoes do for their livelihood?" So true, I found myself thinking today.

PS: I wanted to take a pic of him and all his tools which he spreads out on a cloth in front of him. But I was not very confident of my clandestine photo snapping skills and abandoned the idea. On an ideological level, is it proper to make 'poverty porn' out of someone's struggle to eke out a decent living?

This is how we help our poor countrymen to earn a living!

In this Pic, I'm trying to show my only 6 month-old shoe which came off at the sole. [I'm also trying to show off my mint green nail polish ;) ]