Thursday, August 30, 2012

THE CAT AND DOG STORY


THE CAT AND DOG STORY



I caught her paw and kicked some dust,
While our enemies eyed us with disgust!
They have dogged us since old times,
Coz I hogged the limelight with my crimes!
A notorious dog I have always been,
And in my company she is evermore seen;
Beginning from the day I heard her meow,
When we had a row but my heart I did endow;
Because love was a spark and made my tail wag,
Her smile was a mark that I earned the ‘lover’ tag.
Soon we were partners and made matters aggravate,
Because we were law-breakers, I and my doting cat;
Together we robbed many of the town,
Never spared a kitchen of any banker or clown!
Thus we made many foes, both canine and feline;
And they envied us for not falling in line!
Their jealousy grew over my fame and Katy’s charm,
So they all teamed up to cause us utmost harm;
Chased us in every nook and corner till today,
And we had walls on three sides to our dismay.
They all laughed wildly to find us thus confined,
Planning to hear Katy’s whimper while I whined,
Lying in my death bed when they fired every gun,
But I can never see Katy crying and thus I was not done!
I caught her paw and kicked some dust,
While our enemies eyed us with disgust!
And thus we escaped the trap because we are,
One romantic couple you can't put behind the bar!

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

THE FISHY STORY


THE FISHY STORY:

            I am working on an expert suggestion to empathize with a fish by looking into its eyes before it becomes the victim of my atrocious appetite. Once in the middle of the fish market, the task of hand-picking one out of the many varieties is confusing and thus difficult. I have very little knowledge about fish and none whatsoever about the local names of its types. I confess that I know only a few names in my mother tongue!
Today’s venture proved a little bit more exacting because the task was to find a big-eyed fish! After a cursory glance in every direction, I pointed my index finger at an array of sleek flattened fish flashing a silvery body, wet with thawed ice, and with a small head bearing a protruded lower jaw like a bull dog. The eyes seemed bigger than the other species. So I decided to buy that. But before I told the fish-monger to chop, weigh and pack 300 gms, I looked into the right eye of my dead prey! It was circular with an inner black dot and looked no different from the eye of a living fish because it was constantly staring at me! The fixed look not once appeared bereft of life!
I also bought prawns to add variety to my buy!
            Once at home, I became curious to know names of fish types found in India and after an hour with Google I believed I was fairly educated. Images of Mackerels, Carps, Catfish, Sardines, King Fish and Lady Fish appeared familiar. They escaped being my choice today. The protagonist of my story was probably a Herring! As I looked into the eye of its fellow in an enlarged JPEG image, it appeared like a target every time! Arjun too had famously hit a fish in the eye!



            I made the final nod of acceptance about the name of my buy and I recalled the term “herring-bone pattern”! It made me greedily imagine a pile of fish bones! I cooked the pieces of the Herring and also the less mentioned prawns and ate a sumptuous meal.



Dave Matthews' Big-eyed Fish:

            

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

THE ALTERNATIVE


THE ALTERNATIVE



            “What is the alternative?” The Boss thus thundered! He had his reason. And the stare allowed no room for anything other than an abject surrender by nay saying! When the question is differently put, the uniformity of ayes is equally striking. Seven brains seem wired to his and the conduction is uni-directional. He is the domineering kind. He sets the goals and browbeats his men to achieve it as well as he wishes. There is no gainsaying for anything less!
            Outside his domain, the alternatives are plentiful! He scoffs, but only before himself, at the chaos of too many ego-driven people trying to do one thing in many different ways. He watches several such examples every day and he grows more certain that there is no alternative. He also cannot see it another way!
Thus, he continues to call the shots with a scorn and a swagger!

Monday, August 27, 2012

THE COUNTER-STRIKE


THE COUNTER-STRIKE


           
It was not difficult for Leon to understand that his days at the top were over! He had the habit of assuming centre stage wherever he was! But, of late, Noel was proving to be more than just an irritation.
It all started months ago, with the former ridiculing the latter in front of a significant crowd. It was Leon’s nature to belittle other people who looked the type who could be overawed with high-decibel wordiness into figuratively kowtowing before him, which he preferred to occur in full public view so that as big an audience as could be managed celebrated his superiority while he basked in glory and the badgered unfortunate fellow was left nursing his mortal wound!
Once in a while however someone comes along who does not take loud words at face value!
Noel belonged to that breed and Leon failed to recognize and hazarded to play his usual game. After patiently suffering for quarter of an hour being at the receiving end of the tirade of vicious innuendos, cruel sarcasm, penetrating criticism, snide remarks and inexact and smoothly misleading comments and thus almost being demolished by that overwhelming armamentarium, Noel employed his counter!
Noel’s insouciant smile was the incongruously surprising opener of the riposte. He wore a carefree and even-tempered look and spoke in a soft but engaging tone and while he inwardly deliberated on every word that he chose to voice out, he enacted his performance with absolutely unhindered spontaneity! He dug out the half-truths in Leon’s much cheered speech and cleaned the grime! These were plentiful and slowly but eventually people gathered there could not deny the falsehood of many of Leon’s statements! Noel thus drilled a chink in Leon’s armour!
After three months, the buttress of Leon’s infallibility was no longer there. It was gradually dismantled and on every occasion, the mortar that shelled it came from within! It was merely deflected again and again to accomplish a successful counter-strike!


Sunday, August 26, 2012

What's with a misspelling?


When people ask me why I misspell my name “Gorov” I usually do nothing better than tackle it with a goofy smile so that the entire pleasure is of the questioner’s! The first impression continues to be a weak link. A few times in the past, however, I have shaken my disinclination in explaining that Gorov is like “Go” “Rov”! And since Rov is a very much usable syllable as with “Rover” or “Roving”, it suits my purpose! I would like to deny that it has anything to do with sounding like Russian even though tennis-playing lasses from that country are very much physically attractive and can easily be subject of male fantasy disputably making such a dismissal uncertain! 


THE LONELY BOY

THE LONELY BOY


            The lonely boy goes un-indentified and bears the name ‘X’. He is otherwise a luminary and is a cynosure of all eyes! Of course, these words may seem contradictory but this is only due to the lack of knowledge about X.
            While his unrevealed identity generates only temporary curiosity, that must be sustained for a little more time to know his story as well as one can.
            He never shuns any company and rather remains lost in the crowd but with a distinctive quietness that makes him the odd one out. He is the best listener and since everyone likes the guy who pays unwavering attention to constant blabbering, times have never been such when he garnered any dislike. His biggest asset is the social smile he learned at 2 months of age. He speaks so less that it appears as if he has been muted by the din of this world. It is almost unpredictable when he withdraws within himself trying to find solace in unrevealed thought processes because he could still be listening to you. Such instances are frequent and the predisposition is growing! The world with all the people in it is a big chaos and to retire into his mind where nobody else is admitted is his bliss. He is not lonely in the world but he is lonely in his mind and that loneliness is his heaven.
            

Saturday, August 25, 2012

THE DEATH OF A RUMOUR-MONGER!


THE DEATH OF A RUMOUR-MONGER!

            He had an endearing pet name when he was alive which I must not take for fear of waking the dead!
A rounded kind face was the perfect masquerade for his malevolent heart. He also had a roomy tummy and thus looked like a snowman from a distance but he never could remain silent. The buzz started no sooner anyone reached near him and his words seldom expired until they circulated through no less than hundred ears! He was very crafty in creating rumours!
He reacted to his crowd very well. Sometimes he was excited and racy with his words and at other times, he hobbled with simulated disinterest but he always was cent percent committed in fuelling his story for the longest relay of mouth-to-ear trotting! The evolution of a gleam in his eyes was in response to the gradual changeover of reactions in his audience. The usual sequence was of startled distrust with exclamations but with anticipation for more and then heightening interest, which became all-consuming, and soon the recitation banked on a flip-flop from the domain of skepticism to something from the gospels! The trick was that the sensational lie was always at last celebrated! The trickster’s slick tongue never failed while the reputation of many people nose-dived!
He was a compulsive rumour-monger till he died in his late twenties because his malevolent heart broke. A heart attack at his age is otherwise unheard of!   



This is Eric Cartman from South Park, who has nothing to do with this story except that our guy resembles him physically!

Thursday, August 23, 2012

THE RYLE’S TUBE INCIDENT


THE RYLE’S TUBE INCIDENT:

I have seen a patient introduce a Ryle’s tube through her nose into the stomach by herself! Patients can indeed never cease to surprise you. While dirty green and sticky juice trickled from the end of that pipeline into the waste bin below, the sick old lady squirmed at the sight of that steady stream and so looked away. Thus she saw me approaching her and a weary and toothless smile survived and scraped through her parched lips. She put it in herself because she did not want to struggle with another person trying to force it in a third time! 


Wednesday, August 22, 2012

THE ART OF SAYING SORRY


THE ART OF SAYING SORRY

            I over-heard a girl saying, “I know you cannot be mad with me when you come to know what I think you will see as wrong when I tell you this. I remember though you probably don’t what you said a long time ago that you would not mind if I did this! Even though I was very much unsure at the time you said it that such would be the case as you see for yourself which it is now! I knew at that time that I would need to make you recall your words which you did so easily forget, probably not as much by convenience as by nature, because I know you that much!”
            Boy: Yes may be I do remember!
            Girl: Do you even then need me to say sorry which I will happily say because it is so easy to say it when you mean it!
Boy: Sorry! You don’t need to!


THE MASTER GREATER THAN THE STUDENT


THE MASTER GREATER THAN THE STUDENT

The Master is always brilliant with his statements. “When a girl breaks your heart into a hundred pieces, it is not a setback, but an opportunity to lend one piece each to hundred others who are in need of it!” Such declarations are his USPs. I remember saying, “awesome!” when I heard it.




The Student thus has exclusive access to unprinted lessons about ‘undying charisma’. But he has a stubbornly reasoning mind which has stagnated field work. Whereas theoretical classes span hours of scintillating brain-storming about the Master’s theories and the Student’s equally quick-witted corollaries, practical application haven’t yet been kick-started to the best of my knowledge! However, I have developed a lurking suspicion over some time that the Student may have gone ‘under-cover’ with his operations. Success will thus be incognito. Frequent and unpredictable smiles and dreamy eyes signal a favourable outcome. The Master is surprisingly non-committal.
This narrative is nevertheless not so much about the Student as it is about the Master! He can sweep any lady off her feet. Such power in his muscle bulk has been tested with a 100 kg dummy and he can do better. But, he prefers two of half that weight at any time. Besides, it is not with brawn that his conquests are won but with his brain and slick tongue!  I was privy to one such breath-taking conversation-starter and in no time I lamented about seeing him leave in a pair while I remained a gazer! His words were, “You can do better than give me the pride to walk alongside you into Dublin to the eye-popping and jaw-dropping strangers when later you allow me to surprise you with your favourite dish!” I wondered how he knew her favourites but I also inferred that it little mattered!



Tuesday, August 21, 2012

POST GRADUATION PERIOD: THE FANTASTIC BATTLES

THE FANTASTIC BATTLES

One truth about post-graduation period is a growing feeling of being important! The grinding in the first few months with unrelenting duty hours is relished with little joys like venous cut downs, chest tube insertions and circumcisions!
To cut and sew the abdominal wall is no less important a job than that of Heimdall of Asgard.



It is like a soldier whose sword refuses to go back into its sheath, the blade of the spirited new-comer ever willing to test its sharpness against an army of foot soldiers, herein represented by abscesses, sebaceous cysts, lipomas, corns and in-growing toe-nails! Soon he becomes boastful of his campaigns and ever so willingly announces his count! To insert a cannula into a hydrocele to see the clear water drain is like stabbing the heart of a monster filled with wicked blood!



The Jaboulays often make the stories for the day!
He soon becomes much skilled to fight emergency battles in polluted fields! He adapts in milliseconds to the obnoxious odour of the greenish gooey abdomen of old cases of hollow viscus perforation and his hands fondle the sloppy intestines as though it were dough!
Every spurting vessel is a game to catch like rabbits in the jungle! But, the Calot’s triangle is the lion’s den and his king, the master, always the sole lion-hunter!
He rather digs wells he calls colostomies to vent out flatus and feces! And he also digs into ladies’ breasts and retrieves pearly fibroadenomas. The digger also becomes a welder with anastomoses but he speaks of them less while he eyes the prize always!



He throttles and beheads many appendices and hernial sacs while he regards the lion’s den from the distance! But one fine day, he finally tastes the lion’s blood and holds high a stone-filled sac! The tales of blood and gore keep on growing as does his pride in being an executioner of gall-bladders!



It is three years of battles he has come fighting but he longs for more because he cannot let his sword rust!



Sunday, August 19, 2012

True Love and a Story


            THE IDEA:  TRUE LOVE AND A STORY

The meter read 25,000 kms and it was thus a milestone! Simone and I were 5000 metres above the sea level when the last rays of the setting sun still reached us.  She was sitting on the bonnet of Rover holding my arm as we gazed at the far-away horizon. One year seemed so long!
          Then I told her the story of the love marriage of my parents in the back-drop of the 1983 Assam Agitation riots and captured her interest for twenty minutes with a racy narration. At the end of it, we exchanged knowing smiles!
            True love indeed makes great stories a little more often than a great story makes true love!






Friday, August 10, 2012

ABOUT A SEMINAR ROOM AND AN EVENING CLASS


ABOUT A SEMINAR ROOM AND AN EVENING CLASS





When Suman asked me this morning, “Why don’t you write about it?” I sounded “hmm…”
In London, the Svetlanas are jumping the height of close to 2 metres. Two years ago, I witnessed a similar event but a bigger spectacle! It evokes a smile every time I remember it. The venue wasn’t an open-air stadium but a cramped ‘Seminar Room’. Since that does not sound like an amphitheatre, I will furnish a little description.
The Seminar Room was a sanctum by virtue of being a reading room for us, with ‘us’ meaning the surgery post-graduates. It was a place for our seminars and hence the name. Therein, we took ‘evening classes’! It was also the place where surgery practical examinations were held. Thus, it was where many were christened with ‘passed’ tag and some unfortunate souls were sacrificed being differently labeled as ‘failed’. The rigmarole was periodic.
Its dimensions qualified the Seminar Room as ‘big’, with the wall in the west bearing a series of tall windows letting in as much light to make a photo shoot possible! So, the two huge tables that lay next to them were illuminated in the best manner during the day time. It very much suited the highly learned and presbyopic professors who used to sit around it to moderate our seminars. In front of them, there were rows of metallic chairs that were colored black in contrast to the whiteness of the photon surge, both natural, by which I mean the almost obtrusive sunlight, and artificial, represented by the three couples of tube lights under which our brains sought knowledge! A glowing display of ignorance was routine as the old men used to hem and haw about historical and linguistic details with surgical precision. One hour was too less for anything else except for tea and samosas!
To the right was the huge cup-board, the shelves of which contained formalin-filled bottles with decaying human organs of various pathologies. Hundreds of brown copy books were stacked above it. Wooden chairs and desks, one black-board, one bed, one fridge and one basin were other items that ate up space. Two air-conditioners processed the breathable air.
I will now move on to the other term in vogue, which was ‘Evening Class’! That was when we assumed the role of tutors for the undergraduates, henceforth to be called the juniors, and supposedly coached them to hone their clinical skills for all forms of practical examinations and taught them to adapt to and defeat all threats that could come from the ‘Internal’ and ‘External’ examiners! The juniors were game to the idea that we were the all-knowing breed who could conjure up success formulae in only an ‘Evening Class’! I was myself a part of the sect of believers a few years earlier when I was a junior and ardently took part in many evening classes to acquire the same mantra from my seniors.
I say ‘thumbs up’ to all easily correct guesses that the evening in question was one of ‘Evening Class’! The tube-light illuminated air-conditioned Seminar Room was the amphitheatre!
A bed-side demonstration of methods of examination of hernia preceded the lecture I was giving to my juniors as they huddled around the twin tables craning their necks towards me to listen to what I had to say in my characteristic low tone and stare at the numerous diagrams I drew in my effort to be ‘awesome’! They seemed much fatigued at the end of two hours of constant listening and thus I decided on a break. I left them to discuss possible doubts and inconsistencies! At that moment, they all looked seriously over-fed and weighed down in their seats!
Five minutes later, I was back! I opened the door slowly and thoughtfully! And then, I was startled to see many of the girls synchronously jumping from several feet high desks and landing with a single thud to the floor. Each one had a brown copy in her hand. Their eyes sparkled with triumphant joy! If I had to score it as a team event, I would give a 10.000! I remember Niki spreading her arms like a bird to decelerate the fall while fanning the brown copy to navigate those long air-borne seconds. The moment she touched the ground, she bent the elbows and the knees at complementary angles! 




The others did it as well as their team leader.

Madonna’s song:

“There is so much you can learn in one place
The more that I wait, the more time that I waste…
Are you ready to jump?
Get ready to jump!”




It was picture perfect for one moment!
Of course, there was commotion soon after because they rushed back to their seats…


Monday, August 6, 2012

ONE MISTY MORNING TO A TWISTY SUNSET DRIVE!


ONE MISTY MORNING TO A TWISTY SUNSET DRIVE!




The speedometer of the red car I was driving oscillated between 20 and 60 kmph as it paced up the road winding helically around the body of the hills to ascend 5000 feet in 3 hours. Simone sat next to me and this narrative is a triple attempt in registering no less number of aces in a queer game!
The feebly contrite look on her face that she put on after realizing that the lens of the still camera was wetted by the ultra-fine rain drops of the faint drizzle, whereas being unable all throughout that time to click even a single un-blurred photograph out of the many dozen that she tried, evoked an understanding smile in me which had no rebuke in it!  This encouraged her to remain ever so playful, unhindered by possible reproach, and she carelessly fiddled with the device dangling it out of the window and testing its endurance in the rainfall. The puerile preoccupation died down in a quarter of an hour and she spent the next quarter viewing time and again the results of her exercise and selectively showing me the supposedly better ones. I must say that she did wonderfully well because the shaky snap shots captured the incessant motion and I conveyed my enacted awe at each one of them by generous smiles and an occasional wink! Her trustful cheerfulness bubbled and the ebullience grew till her giggles turned into cinematic laughter and to match the moods, Colbie’s ‘Bubbly’ was playing in the stereo. That was by a little design!
At certain times, physics helped to bring us closer! The speed and the centrifugal force generated on turning left in an arc connived to do so, and she realized it only on the third occasion that she was falling sideways towards me by anything but chance. It became a jolly game for a few more occasions and the cherubic cheeks gained more colour from a more vigorously pumping heart! The thrill of looking out of the window into the deadly depths that were partly covered with clouds was more exciting. The hills and the valleys looked more beautiful than ever!
I knew what beckoned her all along and not surprisingly before shopping became the order of the day. The compulsive filling of all space within the car with things ‘to wear and tear’ continued for hours. The act was as laborious as that of an ant but it kindled unbound and unmatched joy as always!  



Saturday, August 4, 2012

Delhi Diary 9: The Total Recall Party


Delhi Diary 9: Total Recall Party



Douglas Quaid recalled only in fragments all throughout the movie but what fascinated me in ‘Total Recall’ was ‘The Fall’ and the weightlessness at the centre of the Earth. Thus, I am reading physics after so many years. Newton’s Shell Theorem and Gauss’s Flux Theorem for gravity engage me for some length of time and all the equations, the integrals and the differentials generate a total recall of the two years in higher secondary college. I once loved physics and mathematics! Many of my medico friends have told me the same. But then, years ago, we took our seats in The Fall and the transportation was permanently one-way.
Two hours later, I am writing another part of my Delhi Diary. It is about the previous night. I remember Mohsin telling me that his name means ‘charitable’ or ‘beneficent’. Thus, it was only be-fitting that he threw us a generous party for getting a job! But he is more generous than Hatem al-Tai! So, he bought us tickets for the movie too. He watched with intent and looked askew at me from time to time to assess if I understood the content. The other two fellows, Gautam and Debashish were busy re-directing the movie according to their own scripts.
The post-movie discussion was the time for total recall! All of us re-visited our interest in physics and pondered on the problems of zero gravity. Mohsinur was frantically creating problems and solving them himself while we listened with awe at the newly-discovered stalwart of physics! His rocket science theory was the most brilliant one. He declared, “Farting in zero-G would propel one in the opposite direction and could be useful navigation means!”
I was reminded of Sheldon Cooper’s asparagus woes.