Ninad, Mana, Rohin. Santanu's debts

Ninad arrived yesterday evening. He is 16 years old. Although he has travelled several times by air, this is the first time that he has travelled alone. No big deal. All he had to do was get in the flight at one airport and get off it at another. I have travelled second class by Indian Railways, alone, when I was just a couple of years older than him.

But you know how it is with mothers. If you have kids, and you are a mother, I know you will understand this. You worry. But he reached me very well, thank you very much. My parents had gone to receive him at the airport and there was a flurry around this activity because the roaming facility was not activated in his mobile and he was uncontactable until he came out of the airport.

I was seeing him after three and a half months. But it seemed like yesterday. He was the same height as three months back, his face was pimply and his facial hair had been trimmed with scissors. He had a fresh haircut, done early morning on the day of his departure from Guwahati.

Ninad had given his 10th standard CBSE exams without the physical presence of his mother. I remember my mother fussing over me with food, checking the exit points of the house for bad omens before departing for the board exams and making it a point to drop me and pick me up from my examination centre which was really far away from my school.

I could do none of this for Ninad. Of course technology kept us together. Skype and the mobile phone made sure that he could see me and hear me whenever he needed me. I would stay up at night till he slept in the early hours of the morning. He was a night bird. He would sleep in the daytime and study at night. He would study, secure in the knowledge that his mother was staying up with him. The only thing he missed was not being able to hug me, or have me massage his head and run my fingers through his hair when he was really stressed out.

It is difficult to believe how soon this little child who was in Class one the other day, is now in the final year of school. In my head, I am still stuck in class 10. I havent grown a year older, mentally.

We have a cuddle relationship. I had read somewhere, when Ninad was a child, that hugging, cuddling and physical shows of affection makes children emotionally secure in adulthood. From what I observed around me, it did seem like it is true. In Ninad's case also, he gave an important examination in his life inspite of his circumstances, without losing his emotional balance.

It is my strongest desire to make Ninad emotionally secure, as people denied of love in the childhood, often have a very turbulent adult period inspite of being succesful in their careers, and having all the trappings that our society measures happiness with. The best cars, the best spouses, the best houses, and the biggest bank balances still keep these people seeking for something more, something that they never find.

I have expressed gratitude in an earlier post. I express it again. How can I not? There is so much to be grateful about. I will have to carry all the debt of gratitude over to my reincarnated lives in the future, because I know I will not be able to pay them back in this life.

I had got engaged to be married in the fourth semester of my MBBS exams and was married off in the sixth semester. I was cut off from all my medical college friends ever since as I was married to a non medico, and we didn't have friends in common. But there is something about medical schooling that makes bonds stronger with ones batchmates than in any other kind of educational program. There were hundred odd students in our batch. There were several with whom we barely made eye contact with because the classes only got together during the theory lectures. At all other times we were made into small batches according to our roll numbers to attend clinics, wards, tutorials, dissection tables and visits to the forensic morgue.

When a get together is organised by Santanu Deb, paediatrician of Nazareth hospital Shillong, and obviously my batchmate, as I am mentioning him in this blog, an overwhelming number of us want to be present. He did it once in Shillong and last December in Kaziranga. The others who helped him will be angry with me for not mentioning their names. But, and this is a well experienced but, there is one effective leader who gets work done in any given situation and even though Santanu could not have done this without help from others, he moved the show.

I couldn't attend this meet. It was the 25th anniversary of our joining medical college. I hadn't properly met even one tenth of my class mates in 20 years. Yet they all supported me as if I was still in the classroom with them. They all prayed for me. They made me feel secure that I could turn to them should I need anything. That is a very big mental support for anyone, believe me. It keeps your mind free from troubling thoughts and makes you want to do useful things like writing blogs on gratitude.

Shamima, is my friend from the first year of medical college. I had met Shabeeba Hannan during the med school admission interview, and I was very amused to have a Shamima Khanam standing in front of me in a queue we had made for registering our names for biochemistry practicals or some such thing soon after admission. The rhymes stuck to my head and both Hannan and Khanam are very good friends of mine today. Shamima is now head of Pathology in Fortis hospital in New Delhi, and Shabeeba is an Othalmology consultant in Kent in England.

Shamima comes from a rich well to do family from Barpeta in Assam and has a lineage which traces to the royal family of Goalpara. She is the most magnanimous person I have come across. She has a lovely daughter Mana, with whom I shared a mutual love relationship when she was around one year old. We didn't meet much after that and she has forgotten me now, but I know her through the pictures Shamima posts on facebook. Shamima reminded in a recent phone call that I was the only person Mana would come to as a child. What a refreshing boost it was to my ego!

I met Shabeeba when I had been to England recently. She was visibly pregnant and yet she made me feel very guilty by inviting me over to her house for a grand lunch. I am now known to be a good speaker, anchor and presenter, and I owe all this to her mentoring. She feels embarassed when I tell her this, but it is the truth. I fell in love with Rohin, her son, when I first saw his picture on facebook. The love story persisted when I saw him physically in Kent. I was squeezing him and hugging him and he never complained, so I think the love is mutual.

Shabeeba Hannan and Shamima Khanam's children have a love-love relation with me. And both, it is important not to miss out here, are very fine cooks.


 

Shifting paradigms: the good and the bad

There is a paradigm shift in the perspective of life seen by a person cut off from the external world. Like, for example, an ascetic who chooses to go to the Himalayas and spend his days in expressing love to his God. And in the case of us lesser mortals, an experience of this perspective of life can be sensed when they are forcefully cut of from the external world for reasons like isolation due to health reasons or may be an astronaut isolated in space, or a researcher slogging away alone in a laboratory.

After the devil has done all that he possibly could in the workshop of the idle minds of these people, the divine sets in. In Deepak Chopra's words, I don't know if they are his original, we realise, with a pleasant surprise, that we are divine beings having the occasional human experiences and not suffering human beings without a purpose.

This is the shift in paradigm. Suddenly the world is a better place than what one has seen on television or discussed with family, friends and colleagues, or read in newspapers. One gets to see the goodness in people that had always been there, but never percieved before, all because of this paradigm shift.

Especially when there is a problem. The neighbour who affected your mental faculties adversely because of the way he talked or behaved, comes forward to donate platelets and spreads the word around for more donors. The colleagues of your husband, who you never met before, do the same. The office staff of your sister's friend and your brother-in-law, do the same. The neighbour in the apartment complex of your temporary apartment, drops you to the hospital minutes after the phone request. There is a notice on the apartment notice board from the Secretary, for urgent requirement of A group donors.

All for some one they don't even know. It is humbling and shaming. You try to rack your brains to remember if you have refused help to any one, any time, ever, hoping you haven't. Old groucho parents, cook and clean for you with smiles. Friends you havent met for 27 years send you CDs and books through Flipkart from Bangalore. An emotional support system develops, where you thought you didn't have any. Friends and aquaintances in all parts of the world pray for you, in their own special ways, and plan ways to help you. These are people you haven't met or talked to for maybe decades. People you never would otherwise contact, go out of the way to help at a phone call's notice.

The doctor villains of Amir Khan's show, who wouldn't care to look you in the eye if you otherwise pass them, become the pillars of your support: emotional and physical. The empathy can only be believed by those who experience it. Doctors, who do not realise how awestruck we get when we know that the average sleep they get per day every day including Sundays and State holidays and festivals, and family events is 2 hours. Who eat canteen food day after day, night after night, morning after morning, food of a quality that the average person would refuse to consume as 2 consecutive meals.

Doctors who think it is normal to stay by their patients' side 24 hours a day when complications occur without eating or sleeping because the HOD will not allow food inside the unit as it could cause infection to the patient. Doctors, who make phone calls to their patients at their homes, if they feel there is a reason to know the patients status, physical or emotional, so that they can ensure that there is nothing impeding the patients recovery.

What I'm trying to say is, you realise there is so much to be grateful about.  Life shattering events can now be understood with clarity. They are divine triggers to make you choose a path with a better outcome. You become grateful for events that preoccupied your mind with resentment, making it oblivious to all the goodness around. You become grateful to people who have shattered your lives thanks to this clarity and begin to see the good things that they have done to you, things that you were blinded to by the resentment.

The world is full of good people. Some how we prefer to see the bad part and highlight it. A paradigm shift for everyone would be wonderful. All of us then would shift from seeing and highlighting the bad to seeing and highlighting the good.

There is much to be grateful about. As my astrologer tells me, there are a lot of good people in the world, which is why it is livable despite all the despicable events doing the rounds.


 

Gargi. Sridhar.

I just came to know that at least one person is reading my blogs. It is an understatement to say that I am thrilled!

Gargi is among my best friends, with whom I had lost contact for nearly 20 years. Now that we have resumed contacts for the reason that most 40 year olds resume contacts, we have resumed the bonds we shared in the medical college hostel in the 5 years that we spent together.

If you didn't know, 40 year olds resume long lost contacts because by then they are professionally and family wise settled, and suddenly realise that something is missing in their lives and that something is their youth. They get nostalgic and want to connect with old friendsand then the intense desire for a reunion starts. They start hunting for old pals and sweethearts on facebook, linkedin and other internet sites.

Our class, the Gauhati Medical College batch of 1987, similarly wanted to celebrate their 25 years of knowing each other. Even counting the 20 years in between when most were so busy with career and family, (which includes getting divorced for some) that they did not care to be in touch with classmates living within few kilometers of each other.

Gargi and I suddenly came back into each other's lives on Skype one fine evening. I was trying to Skype my sister who had just moved to the US through my facebook login id. I used to think Skype was something exotic and and had never cared to use it earlier. It was only because I needed to contact my sister, who had a phone connection to which we could not call from India, and I desperately needed to contact her for some reason, that I decided to try out Skype. She had a laptop and wifi connection, but could not be contacted over phone. That is the USA. In India at least all phone connections can recieve calls.

I saw Gargi online on Skype when trying to contact my sister and that resumed my long lost sisterhood with Gargi. She was due to come to India for our class reunion and we were very excited about meeting up.

Gargi is among the most wonderful human beings that I have known. She unfortunately went through some deep personal tragedies just after passing MBBS, during which time I had no means of being in contact with her. The internet was non existent for people like us, as were mobile phones. I heard about her losses and mourned for her on my own.

In the medical college hostel, her room used to be the adda room. Everyone loved her. I often regretfully wish I had her personality so that everyone would love me too. I invited unpopularity, I think because of my lack of tact. There must be other reasons too, but someone else will have to tell me about them. I do not know what they are.

She is among the most enjoyable company I have known. We would laugh a great deal when with her and enjoyed all her addas. She hardly ever was mean or nasty about anyone. I think it is her innate nature to be non judgemental which makes her an effortlessly good person.

Recently, Hariharan uncle, my fathers colleague from NDA, and a retired Professor of Physics got in touch with me through email. Which was a very pleasant surprise. My father had retired 18 years back and getting a mail like this unexpectedly in your inbox is quite thrilling. Uncle had found this email id on google in a press release of my father's fictionalised history 'A Mole in the Breast' based on the Indo Bangladesh war which had been released way back in 2008.

Uncle thought the email id was my father's so had addressed the mail to him. My father is very intelligent but still hasn't figured how to read a message on a mobile phone. So maintaining an email account, even though I have opened him one, is expecting the impossible. I wrote back to Uncle, my excitement obvious in the language, and told him it was me. I asked about Aunty, his genius IIT alumnus son Sridhar, his daughter Radha who was senior to us. Sridhar and I were batchmates, though we studied in different schools as the mission schools we studied in were not co-ed.

We exchanged phone numbers, talked on the phone and all were excited about this electronic reunion after such a long time. A month later I was sick and in hospital. Uncle and Sridhar would call us or email us to enquire about my health and treatment status. One day, Sridhar asked me on gmail chat if I wanted anything to keep me busy like books or CDs. He probably sensed that my mental status was less than optimum and suggested I read the Shri Sai Satcharita, one chapter every day.

I said I would. Next he emailed that he had ordered the book and sent it to me.  After 2 days Flipkart delivered the book to where I was living in Mumbai. It is a voluminous book, hard bound and 883 pages long. Holding the book made me emotional. I actually had tears in my eyes. I have not met the Hariharans since my father retired 18 years back, and not met Sridhar since we left school 27 years back as he had joined the IIT and then moved to the US.

My sister and I discussed this and realised that when one grows up away from relatives in a campus, the people you grow up with become like your siblings. God shows you how much one has to be thankful and grateful about in unexpected ways. It is truly wrong to complain and be judgemental about most things in life.

This blog has turned out really long. I hope the reader reaches this sentence. If you do, thank you very much!