Delhi Diary 8: The Days of The Trinity

Delhi Diary 8: The Days of The Trinity

This one is at the behest of my dear senior friend Bharat da who takes immense pleasure on hearing again and again the strangely comical plight that I bore and I made my own during my encounters with three of one kind and that was some deadly contest than spanned for five days! I hesitated because no matter how many apt modifications I make and how many sympathetic words I use, I would still have not succeeded in not characterizing myself as a fool. Only a month ago I had declared to the world with a status update that “I have mastered the art of nagging any indifferent clerk and haggling over any price!!!” But, it was my mistake of being so positively arrogant. I never considered the female kind!

            On the evening that the HOD of Surgery told me that I had been selected as a Senior Resident, I was greatly elated because finally the monotony of sitting idle was going to give way to a workaholic’s resurrection. I decided to join the very next morning.

            Day 1: At 10:00 A.M. I was in the Medical Branch office and greeted everybody with a smile. The three ladies seated there smiled back at me and that was all! For every other gesture that I made the result was a totally opposite one; for every question I put, there was a reluctantly spoken ‘no’ or an implied ‘no’ with nonchalant silence. The more I persisted, the more they receded into a shell and my acoustic waves only reflected back to me! The lesson of the day was that they had not typed the result sheet till then and an appointment letter could only follow later. I returned back being hurt at having failed to charm the ladies! But then, they were middle-aged!

            Once at home, I had to narrate and explain to Mohsinur, Gautam, Bharat da, Suman, my parents and many others the things that transpired and I felt a sense of self-pity which was however transient and died in seconds because after all a job was beckoning.

            Day 2: At 10:00 A.M. after shorter smiles were exchanged, and they were also lesser in number due to the fact that one of the ladies was missing, I learned that the same absent gentlewoman was the sultana of that office and there was no way around that distressing realization. My joining had to wait another day!

            Day 3: At 10:30 A.M. no smiles happened. I was told to make another demand draft by cancelling the previous one because the amount of security money had been more than doubled. On returning from the bank, the ladies played hide-and-seek and they were pretty good at it! I, being a laggard at the game, had no choice but to return home to contest another day.

            Day 4: The previous day being a Saturday, I could only cool my heels at home.

            Day 5: I was so well-prepared! All my forms were ready and I could see no missing link. The ladies however were all together a trinity with foxy intelligence and I saw Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple all at once when they showed me all kinds of deficiencies in my humble submission! They would not agree to the fact that I had forwarded a letter from the Deputy Medical Superintendent asking them to let me join as soon as possible irrespective of official hassles! I had thought that was my master stroke! They however showed me the letter was all my writing and the DMS had only written ‘forwarded’. I returned a few minutes later with an inscription ‘allowed to join’ and I won the contest at 3 P.M. too late to join the department.

            Once at home, I wondered who won it! Once a clerk, always a jerk!

            

Delhi Diary VII: The Rickshaw-puller’s Pregnancy Dilemma

Delhi Diary VII: The Rickshaw-puller’s Pregnancy Dilemma

At 4:30 P.M., a soothing cool breeze accosted me as I emerged from the air-conditioned chill of the OPD chamber, which had enclosed me for the past seven hours, in a gladdening contrast to the usual aversion of having to experience singeing due to the previously so-often-described calefaction. It had been raining heavily to flood the roads by a few centimeters depth! A faint drizzle still lingered on.

That affected my mind to decide on spending four times the fare to reach home by choosing the luxury of a solitary ride in a rickshaw instead of boarding a crowded mini-van which treats the passengers as poultry!

The rickshaw-puller, RP, enacted a cameo!

The guy was soaked in the rain and his guts were soaked in alcohol. The air he exhaled was pungently repulsive.

He asked me, “Sir! Are you part of the staff in the hospital?”

Me: I am a doctor.

RP: Then I have a problem to share!

Me: Yes, tell me.

RP: Do you have the pill to stop pregnancy?

Me: No! I don’t have it. How come you need it?

RP: What to say sir! My wife will have another child in her womb if you don’t help! We did it fifteen days ago and she did not take her pills! She told me only yesterday and I am very unhappy and thus I drank some more today! Please sir, only you can help! Give me the other pill.

Me: Why don’t you want a child? How many do you have?

RP: There are three!

Me: Then why don’t you undergo NSV?

RP: Why are you joking sir? My wife will be taking pills regularly from next time! NSV is impossible for me! I could be of use for somebody someday!

Now that was a weirdly immoral yet rib-tickling statement!

Me: How so?

That subsequent question sub-consciously followed while I tried to subdue laughter.

RP: I am thinking of helping those who can’t produce children!

Me: Ok.

This man believed in the modern concept of sperm donation.

RP: I have talked about it with my wife! She will give me only one chance and no more to impregnate her sister!

Now, my head was spinning at the grotesque statement but then, the words of the alcoholic sounded like truth.

By now, he was imploring me to fetch him the prized pill. It was my luck that I reached my destination and did it at half the usual fare for bearing with his story!

Delhi Diary VI: Return of Calefaction

Delhi Diary VI: The Return of Calefaction

Eighteen days ago the torridness that we were greeted with was very eloquently described by Mohsinur thus: it appears like I am sleeping on a frying pan! Mohsinur is a wily fellow and the stream of artful assembles of words that escape his mouth functions as an entertainment channel in itself. His facebook updates can only compete and lose because these are only shareware others make him choose! Original wit is his flamboyance which compares with the originality of the acting prowess of Will Smith whom he idolizes! The actor is my favourite as well and thus Mohsinur impresses me all the lot more. Thus, I have been reduced into a man who quotes him at all times. His intellectual influence keeps growing! He flashes a grin at me even as I type these words sitting in the couch opposite to him, where he is intently playing online cricket, and while he regards my thoughtful look in an offhand manner, I see rivulets of sweat dribbling from his forehead! This is one of the many indicators that the heat wave has returned with vengeance. After some insincere, shy and infrequent monsoon showers that somehow managed to keep the mercury readings below forty, the sun is again menacingly staring down upon Delhi during daytime. At night time, the calefaction continues with heat radiating from walls and floors and with long hours of power-cuts, tales of misery like the latter part of this one form update material from a fried brain!

Delhi Diary V: Cocktails

Delhi Diary V (17/07/12) : Cocktails

1798 London Morning Post and Gazetteer’s post:

Mr. Pitt,

two petit vers of “L’huile de Venus” 0 1 0

Ditto, one of “perfeit amour” 0 0 7

Ditto, “cock-tail”

A google search thus educates me regarding the origins of the word, “Cocktail”. Mr. Pitt, the then Premier of England’s pub debts included the above.

The four of us, Debashish, Gautam, Mohsinur and me, were huddled around a small table in a restaurant, on the occasion of my part of a debt, and plentiful delectable edibles filled up plates and bowls and cramped all space atop it. At one moment, we tinkled our glasses together, one filled with beer, two others with aqueous content and one with a cocktail! The meal was sumptuous and half past eleven P.M. was time to return home. However, the day was made awesome in the previous four hours! Attaboy! Our hero, and hope he doesn’t mind, Gautam, and henceforth to be called Gutlu, entertained us like a true artist! Every dialogue of the movie playing in the big screen was like a vicious delivery bowled at him by say, Wasim Akram! But by Jove! Gutlu batted well! With undying charisma which is so much talked about, and loquacious wit, he stole the limelight! The characters in the screen impaled in comparison and that included the pretty ladies, the one with a strange surname and the daughter of the Bangalore shuttler! All of us agreed where our own Gutlu belonged because Saif was over-age in that ‘awesome threesome’! Pardon me dear Gutlu but you rocked and this is only the aftermath! Alas! From tomorrow morning I will be shuttling between home and E.S.I. hospital. The free days are over.

Delhi Diary IV: Guwahati's News of Shame

Delhi Diary IV. 13/07/12

            The conference hall was the sanctum where our documents were being verified before the interview. It was Debashish’s turn. When the officer read aloud, “Gauhati Medical College”, a particularly restive fellow with domineering mannerisms, whose antics were hurtful to all senses, bawled an upsetting truth with lot of malice, “Guwahati! The same place where a girl was molested in the street by a mob!” That made all three of us very angry. Bharat da asserted, “That’s not the only place where this happens. It occurs a lot more frequently elsewhere!”

            The officer was a smart and amiable person who immediately sensed the simmering dissent in our hearts and made some general remarks to promote goodwill.

            However, the damage has been done! Those morons who wantonly perpetrated the crime have sullied the image of our city.

            On returning home, I see that all the national news channels are continuously flashing the incident every hour and I now harbor a feeling of unrest admixed with vexation and sadness that will die down only when I see the evil-doers speedily and harshly punished. I believe that this feeling is shared by everyone who lives or has lived in Guwahati.

Delhi Diary III : The Interview and The Swami's Quote

DELHI DIARY III: THE INTERVIEW AND THE SWAMI'S QUOTE:

Swami Vivekananda: They alone live who live for others, the rest are more dead than alive.

We and that included me, Mohsinur, Gautam and Debashish, read that aloud at 4 P.M. That was written in large letters in the big white-board in the corridor where we all sat, almost perpetually awaiting Gautam’s turn for the interview. Our party arrived there at 10 A.M.!

Debashish: How can anyone be ‘more’ dead? The statement is technically wrong!

Gautam: To be ‘less’ dead is to be in the vegetative state!

Mohsinur: Those alive are going to die some day but those who are dead are dead and so they are ‘more’ dead!

As for me, I simply began to wonder if I were more dead than alive at that point!

Here we were, three surgeons and an orthopaedician, tagged ‘degree-holders’, utterly jobless, trying to squeeze out humour by talking foolishly about a perfectly correct sentence and a deeply meaningful array of words supposedly so intelligently arranged by the master philosopher rocking his own times and standing the test of the times that followed! However, the statement was apparently like a spent unripe lemon rather than a mango!  And no, this simile was not suggested to me by Mohsinur!

The above resulted because we had exhausted every topic of discussion, talking from the time we got there to that wicked hour when our stomachs ached in hunger and our brains were affected by consequent shortage of its fuel, glucose. While three of them went into power-saver mode, the remainder suffered acute dysfunction and went into over-drive! The last one was encased in the sturdy skull of Mr. Singh, that is, Gautam! And thus he mesmerized the interviewer!

E.S.I. Hospital, why the hell call us all at 10 A.M. when you conduct the interview at 3?

I now stumble upon the complete quote of the Swami. “This life is short, the vanities of the world are transient, but they alone live who live for others, the rest are more dead than alive.”

Yes! Our life is short! We don’t even realize what transient vanities are escaping every moment from our lives! Yes! We are living our lives for others! Yes! We are more dead than alive…

Delhi Diary II: Metro Man

DELHI DIARY II: METRO MAN

I, Mohsin and Gautam are now a pack of three and we are kind of combing the city for senior residency vacancies. We make an awesome team, thanks to the phlegmatic and eagle-eyed Mohsin and the charismatic and the apple of God’s eye Gautam, apart from me, who can also make use of a few similar generous adjectives. I will however skip that part. The point is that the aforementioned awesomeness is diluted within the teeming numbers of the legion of eligible candidates vying for the same prized job. The face value is over sixty thousand bucks! Today the odds were 19:1!

That same awesomeness was again infinitely diluted within the intimidating swarm of busy bees in the Metro train we took to get back. As we headed for the stairs after de-boarding the train, we heard a distinct voice yelling at someone over and above the general cacophony. The words were clear, “Gentleman! You dropped your phone!” and when we all turned our heads in unison to look at the vociferous man, at the same time that we nervously checked for our own cell phones in our pockets, we saw the man, who, even though was partly bald and had grey hair, still qualified under ‘hale and hearty’ and was sprinting forwards till he reached and swung around a diminutive person by his shoulders and thrust into the hands of the latter the cell phone. Then he hurried back to board the next train in the same direction.

I looked with awe at the man! He was like Metro Man of the Megamind movie! He was the hero of the day!

Delhi Diary. 03/07/12

DELHI DIARY I: DELHI METRO

At 11 AM, I and Mohsinur scampered down the flight of stairs to board the Metro train. I, being nimble-footed, outpaced him by several seconds and would have dashed into a group of damsels with a particularly eye-catching beauty in the middle, all of whom were struggling to stand upright being shoved from all sides by people who were getting in and out of that bogey, but fortunately I did not have to do that because I applied the brakes and was thus spared the consequences of such a fateful clash! Rather I chose to board the next compartment and witnessed the wrath of titans! There were two prominent uncouth males with a few side-kicks on either side who were engaging in an epic battle of words. They were howling at the top of their voices, with neither showing any signs of getting subdued by the intimidating decibels of the other, using the choicest, and otherwise widely circulating, slang words and profanities. Scowls like theirs will seldom be seen in the face of any of the top brass of Hollywood villains, because they seemed to have perfected that expression by some regularity, which though cannot be known, can be easily surmised! As I looked at the rest of the crowd, I noticed that it included some who were least bothered, displaying either bored faces or nodding their heads in tune with music playing in their head phones. Another fraction, and mostly a middle-aged and elderly class, all white-headed, tried desperately to infuse reason into the fighting duo, with little success. Their own voices had the strength to otherwise subdue tamed animals and also bore evidence of what terror they were capable of invoking when they used to be younger by decades! The heat generated in the clash rose exponentially and competed to match the sweltering heat that existed outside that air-conditioned train and soon it gave rise to splinters in many others. A few by-standers among the ones whom I had mentally labeled as the petrified class, suddenly barked in unison, to douse that fire only to understand that their voices didn’t match the roaring tenor of the ones in the lead role of that skirmish. They thus retreated unsuccessfully into their own corners!  The two would have been scuffling by now but the compartment was so jam-packed that there was no room for even that! Besides, the other reason was that some restraint was being delivered by the arms of a few bold ones! Thus being denied space for physical conflict, each one of them bellowed to the other the challenge to de-board at places where they thought their powers were sufficient for winning the duel. Their eyes were red with raging murderous intent. Mohsinur and I safely got out of that train in the next station. We were relieved to notice that the two of them did not!

            Similar incidents were witnessed by the two of us two more times during the day at separate places under various setting.