Portmanteau film.

I am swimming fast.
The waters are murky. An intense green, barely showing the long, distorted shadows cast by the long palm tress that line the waterway on either side.
The fabric of water is crisscrossed by many tangled, tortuous water-plants.
I peel them apart; yet never forgetting to swim.
Swim fast.
An odd lotus, a lone lotus, a surprising white against a depressing green.
In bloom.
In full sway.
In total contrast. The lotus makes a fleeting appearance in the far corner of my busy left eye.
The emotion on my face is indiscernible.
I am sweating, perhaps.
I am out of breath, perhaps.
But,
i swim.

----------------------------

I walk in gliding movements. Like i am stuck to the wooden foot of a horse in a merry-go-round. Only, i am not going round. I glide.
The world around me is empty; and monochrome. With a tinge of the sun.
And dingy. (Unobtrusively so.)
I see no faces, i hear no sound.
I don't see myself, i don't hear myself.
I see what my feet see. Low and gliding.
Cobbled stone, well-worn pavement rocks, urban refuse.
Warm, water-soaked air in spurts; breaths of weary street dogs? I don't know.
But i know i am not stopping moving. And gliding.

Until,
a jerk.
A strong tug; at a sensitive solar plexus.

(And,
an unenthusiastically staid, weary, rhythmically squeaking fan.)

----------------------------

These are the only two recurrent dreams i get. I am sure they have definite psychoanalytical interpretations.
I don't know.
I wouldn't want to know.
I like the dreams too much.

'Scuse me, while i snuff a cry...

Dear all, do not blame me for coming up with another dreary post about academic pursuits. You must realize that when one is a medical student hoping to pass exams, precious else happens besides turning one dreary page after another, all filled with graphic pictures of grotesquely diseased breasts and penises, and then some. (So much for action.)
It is quite the paradox that the very organs that can turn one on could also,when slightly out of order, possess powers to let one lose appetite for days.

Be that as it may, the raison d'etre for my abusing bandwidth and your stopping by this time, is to let you in on an impending task which is so impossible i have chosen to call it The Impossible Task or TIT, for short.
(Yes, i agree i have a very corny sense of humour. And yes, i have read How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild And Got A Life).
The TIT i speak of here could also be referred to as The Impending Doom, or TID. So, in the likeness of Daag - The Fire, Baaz - A Bird In Danger, this disaster shall be called,
The Impossible Task - The Impending Doom,
or TIT - TID. Tittid for convenience.

Whatitees, this Tittid?
My internal - sigh - assessment - sigh - exam.
About the unfairness of medical exams, the evaluation, the unfairness, the ugly unfairness, and did i mention the godawful unfairness, i shall write about some other time.
But today, let us dissect my Tittid.

(As i write, it rains outside real horrorshow; like the clouds have determined to wipe out the human race. Loud and dramatic. Ah, how well they complement my mood)

I have five subjects this time. Let us now anatomize Tittid in heartbreaking, cerebrum-spinning
detail. (okay okay, it won't be too long, don't worry. Or, may be it will.)

*drum rolls, horns, confetti et cetera et cetera*
(You may choose to ignore the details, and jump directly to the synopsis of the story)

{1. General Medicine - Portions
Recommended reading - Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine - 1600 pages
Compulsory reading - Davidson's Principles and Practice of Internal Medicine - 739 pages.
Sidey-book-shunned-by-professors-WORSHIPPED-by-students - Medicine by George Matthew - 476 pages.

2. General Surgery - Portions
Recommended and Compulsory reading - Bailey and Love's Short Practice of Surgery, or The Book That Almost Gave My Mother A Slipped Disk.
(Apparently, it's a Big Deal. I realize most things in medicine work on face value. Ask me, it's a hardly Love-able book that hardly ever Bail-s you out of tough situations (such as Tittid). And Short Practice my arse. It runs 1522 pages, with an index that runs a book length itself,
at 70 pages.)
The portion is a cool Cover to Cover, id est, 1522 pages.
Sidey-book-HATED-by-professors - Manipal Manual of Surgery - 825 pages.

3. Paediatrics - Portions
Recommended reading - Nelson's Pediatrics - let us not even go there, but, for a ballpark figure, let's say 1200 pages?
Compulsory, sidey etc. - OP Ghai - 468 pages.

4. Gynaecology - Portions.
Recommended, compulsory, essential all rolled into one - Shaw's - 508 pages.

5. Orthopaedics - Portions
Like most paradoxes turn out, the chaps that deal with the hardest of things (thoo, gutterbrains all) have the softest of hearts.
Recommended, compulsory etc - Maheshwari's Essential Ortho - 26 (yay!) pages.}

So there.
Quick recap.
Recommended reading - 4,956 pages. Oh-ho-kay
Compulsory reading - 3,263 pages. Hmmm, but oh-ho-kay.
Sidey book reading - 2,103 pages. DANG. Et tu, sidey?

This is purest rant, i agree.
Does not warrant your time.
Does nothing to uplift you creatively. Or otherwise.
But, people-in-cushy-software-jobs, spare a thought for poor me. Me, with the exponentially sinking cheeks and shrinking waistline. Spare a thought. Do. I am coming off all clingy and needy, you think i don't realise that? But, how in the name of Hippo-fucking-crates am i to read 2,103 pages of mindnumbingly complex name-dropping in, let's see, EIGHT days?

You ask me to listen to Himesh Reshammiya for 20 hours non-stop. I will. Most that will result in, is brain damage. No problems, decent bargain.
But this?

I need sympathy. Not one of you can empathize, i agree.

While you are at it, pat yourselves on thine collective backs, for having made the right choice when it mattered most. To stay away from anything remotely close to a medical college.

Sigh. Unedited, at-one-go rants are all i am capable of writing. Blogs that discuss writing and ideas and 55-word stories give me a complex SO massive, *insert biggest simile you can think of here, and funniest*. But writing about those blogs where genuinely good writing abounds is
for another day. Also, about those that are famous for no particular reason. And of course, where pseudo- is the dictum.
All, my friend, in good time.
Now i have to get back to knowing what exactly constitutes a 'pain in the ass'.

For an aside - my multilingual, multi-genre playlist currently plays,

'Duniya mein hum aaye hain toh jeena hee paDega,
jeevan hain agar zehar toh peena hee paDega'.
(Lata Mangeshkar & chorus, Mother India, 1957)

Ah, old hindi film songs! How well they compliment my mood.

So, some surgeons are lecherous

There are all kinds of surgeons. (You know, that bunch of slightly over-educated barbers.)
General surgeons, pediatric surgeons, plastic surgeons, neurosurgeons et cetera et cetera.
Most are good.
Some are just plain awesome.
Some are well, lecherous.

I know one such. Let's call him L; L for lecherous, L for lascivious, L for loser and L for first letter of his name. He happens to be a professor; or so he professes. His small stature is in absolute inverse relation to his Legendary Libido. I think he has a lardaceous, ladoo-munching low-life for a wife. But then, that's just my conjecture.

Now, our man Casanova was to take a tutorial class for us.
This is a class where we take a case which might come for the exam, present it to a consultant and strain cochleas to absorb every whisper that emanates from their halitotic oral cavities. You know, we are kinda desperate; and they kinda stink.
This week, like i mentioned already, L was to come and shower surgical nuggets all over us. His tutorials have characteristics completely their own. At least, unlike any i have encountered thus far.
He -
* makes the girls come closer, to each other, and to him.
* forgets the guys, for all practical purposes. (No, i ain't complaining.)
* insists that the girls tuck their identity cards to their white coat sleeves; and insists on peering down them, just to know their names.
* sometimes pulls them from their coats, and none too subtly while doing so.
* is a syphilitic bastard.

What was the case that we were presenting, one might ask.
You know hernia, dear readers?
You know hernia, you do. It is something that pops out of one's groin (generally).
You know hydrocele, dear readers?
You probably do not. It means fluid in one's testes.
Our patient this time, had both. Aww.

L walks in like a Little Mouse, all prepared to do L talk. ('reys the leyg, reys the heyd, do the teyst', 'Chaurasia is a flute singer' etc)
Patient strips waist down for thirteen pairs of eyes to fix on his things.
L starts.
Girls closer, boys forgotten..the routine.
We do not know what kind of sick behaviour it is, but he always asks the girls to examine the testes and the hernia. The test, by the way, involves some serious grabbing at things. He prods on extremely hesitant, rosary-counting types to make the 'swelling' more tense. This is not some ploy to teach the students better, but the man is so into cheap thrills you want to call him Rakhi Sawant.
Another test involves using one's index finger to do some poking around in certain delicate areas. And his idea of questioning us is to turn to a girl and ask, 'Why not the middle finger?'
There is another silly exercise where we need to localize the hernia using three fingers in a specific manner. In such a scenario, what is the need to take a girl's hand and hold individual fingers, all in the garb to teach us, while he could use his own fingers, that non-amputated bitch.
Cheap shot. (And the man is not getting enough action)

While all this lewd behaviour does slightly irritate me, what really takes my goat is this. During exams, the mere presence of slightly hypertrophied mammary tissue on a humanoid bearing XX ensures spectacular success (according to one running legend, he makes people bend to retrieve paper from the ground). While the unfortunate other half with the weak Y suffers untold indignation for not knowing enough Bailey, Love, Das.

What is this undue advantage to the fairer sex eh? To say, no girl in my batch is even fair.
Totally unfair.

As for Mr.L, balls to him.
(Or, maybe not)

Sap

There is a gnawing desire to tell you all that goes on in the many folds of my small brain,

of the grey and black static that is interrupted by images of color, woven with words and memories,
of the impulses that present as alpha and beta to the more mundane,
of ideas that remain muted, but never erased,
of the visuals i paint in a myriad of colors, but could never put in words,
of the void and brimfulness that my thoughts seem to be constantly vacillating between,
of the voices that doubt and whispers that encourage,
of why the first falling flower of autumn has me all depressed and happy,
of chaos and no-chaos, determined simply by the presence and absence of people,
of my anger and frustration, and inability to counter either,
of words that lend themselves into sentences, but never make it to the tongue, held and strangulated in shy vocal cords,

of...


(now, if only your phone was not always engaged)

First Night Of Rain

The touch-me-nots played
shy all night, lest rogue raindrops
made them blush again.

Lucid Interval

Oh fuck this blogging shite. The social networking. The pseudo-writing.
Screw the story of the metamorphosis of the Malabar MoL.
Fuck everything that has kept me distracted like a child in a classroom full of pixies.
T.E.L.E.V.I.S.I.O.N
Films.
Books.
Bought by the roadside; at seconds sale shops.
Read off the computer.
Film Society.
T.E.L.E.V.I.S.I.O.N.
Computer.
Inter-fucking-net; data-fucking-one.
Fests. Innumerable fests.
Caution be thrown to the wind, language be best rotten.
Fuck everything.
(T.E.L.E.V.I.S.I.O.N.)


My results are out. I got fucked. Like, literally.
69 and all. Only a lot less enjoyable. (Apparently)
They do not portray me in the best light.
They have brought a sob track along.
So, it is an unqualified AVM tragedy.
The rains lash like they were the product of the combined angers of Tlaloc-Chaac-Kon and other such funny sounding gods. The government quarters' windows respect the anger and loosen their hinges to perform symphony for perfect Bollywood setting of a thunder-and-lightning-very-very-frightening situation.
(Who said life was never without background music?)
(Wait, that was me)


But,
like it always happens,
tragedy in succession.

FM Radio. And an interview with Whizkid Senior. Distributing munificently to all those who cared to buy, The Virtues of Hard Work and The Joy Of Winning University Gold Medals. (And also, a practical lesson in How Not To Talk.)
So,
As It Happens (TM), my mother was one of the listeners. As was *sheepish* I. The W.S. reeled out his academic achievements (he had precious else) about the ranks, and the medals, and all those.
And the rest as i now know, is the stuff 60's Kannada cinema would be proud of.

Now, you see i cannot, cannot mug. Not even if i were on a sinking ship, and you know, the availability of a safety jacket or a lifeboat depended upon rattling off stuff.
Medicine, my chosen profession(!), is all about it. Well, mostly about it.
And my chosen explanation for calamitous results is the one cited above, in italics and bold italics, merely to reinforce the grade of incapability. And for effect. Sue me.
But,
It's one thing to say you are not interested in certain things you forced yourself into because 'the Devil pulled it' and that it was a moment of glorious loss of insight.
It's another to acknowledge to yourself and people who care for you that you are completely, pathologically incapable of it. Especially when they think otherwise.
Despite your lack of interest, when you begin to detect the faintest whiff of incapability is when the truth actually sinks in.
It's when you see the world around you falling apart, looking none too good.
It's when you know, all your best was in the past.
It's when you know, it's an Eternal Sunshine moment.
It *might* not come back to you.

To tell you the truth, i am actually a little bummed out.
Morbid i sound. Morbid i have gotten.
You know, they say there is a period in the mind state of psychiatric patients when they are actually normal and think clear. These states are called Lucid Intervals. May be, just may be, i am in one such. I have been mad enough all this while. May be this is my lucid interval. And i am thinking clear and prioritizing well.
May be all i want to be is a nerd.
Yes.
I want to be a nerd.



P.S.: I know i will regret writing this. I just know it.
P.P.S.: I might not write for long. Here's one more thing i suck at.

Of Storywriters and Storymakers

So Vonnegut died.
The man who gave this blog its name without so much as batting an eyelid, stitched his shut for good. But then, like he told us, all things living and otherwise, are only coincidental.

I, and here i speak for all the Tralfamadorians (I push for this to be the name of Our Clan, in all solemn spirit), only hope he is in a better place. And exchanging notes with Mark Twain.

On a completely radically different note, i wanted to tell you all (look how insanely optimistic i have gotten) about this classmate of mine that has a royal crush.
Which keeps dying. (So it goes)
And keeps springing back to life,
thus influencing her moods rather visibly.

The story of The Malabar (almost) Princess and her (coco)nutso-ness about The Man Who Would Be King, follows in a few days.
So, wait.
With breath that is bated.
(Oh come on, cut me some slack)


But, not to digress from the reason for abusing bandwidth.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr., R.I.P.

The dark holds no terror

Sudden dimming of lights.
And then, darkness.

The initial catcalls, and the amma's.
Then, the shush-es. The din of shush-es.
And then, the silence.

Light flickering.
In hesitant spurts.
On a white screen; with a traversing black line.
Light flickering.
Exposing the diaphanous wings of the triwinged contraptions.

Islands of light.
Lighting up eerie faces.
White. Blue. Yellow. faint.
Showing curls, and bitten lips, and furrowed foreheads.
And chunky jewellery.

The high pitched crackle; like mustard in hot oil.
Arthritic, oil-denied furniture.
The creaks, the squeaks. Oh, the creaks and the squeaks.
And a lizard calling for a mate; or looking to join the party.

The rancid odour. Typical.
The stubbed cigarette butts.
The smell of grime, of the wanting to relax.

Loud, introductory sound.
Collective breath-holding.
Collective excitement.
Beginning of,
an adventure in,
suspension of disbelief.


Ah,
how i love the cinemas.

Parks and LSD

Now people, do not blame me for using footage yet again. This one, I had to use. You'll know why.

One of the tests of endurance that unfortunate medical students (the implication here being that ALL medical students are unfortunate; and not a mere percentage of the medical students being unfortunate) have to undergo is a subject called,

*eggs, the rotten kind, tomatoes, the mold infested kind, farts, the post-Sankranti scybalous kind, bottled scent, the Vrishabhaavati canal kind and curses, ranging in variety from the incestuous to the paraphiliac to the kind favored by irate truckdrivers*

PREVENTIVE AND SOCIAL MEDICINE.

This festering piece of godawful nonsense, also called Community Medicine, comes in an unattractive, garish-blue, unimaginably boring tome-that-leads-to-your-tomb called,

*(all those said above) and a deep, well gathered kwak-thoo*

PARK'S TEXTBOOK OF P.S.M a.k.a. THE HOLY (whatever book suits your religious inclination) OF COMM. MED.

Now this book is no walk in the, er, Park. It is studded, you know, like studddedd with lines that can make the hair at the back of your neck spring up in gravity-defying trich-s and get your ribs all worked up.
But, those are for another post. If at all.

For now, let us concentrate on how Park and Park, in a fit of affection towards the much harassed med studs (oooh, coolness) decided to pass on some nefarious information.

On LSD -
"LSD, Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, was synthesised in 1938 by Hoffmann in the Sandoz Labs in Switzerland. Its psychic properties were noticed much later in 1943, when he accidentally sniffed a few micrograms of it(poor thing, thought it was whitener perhaps).

* LSD is a potent psychotogenic agent.
* LSD alters the normal structuring of perception. The individual perceives the world in a different manner.
* There is intensification of colour perception and auditory acuity; body image distortions, visual illusions, fantasies, pseudohallucinations are common.
* Colours are heard and music becomes palpable.
* Subjective time is deranged so that seconds seem to be minutes and minutes pass as slowly as hours.
* Physical dependence does not develop with LSD; hence there is no addiction liability.
* No characteristic abstinence syndrome is manifest upon abrupt discontinuation of chronic use of the drug."

So.
Go ahead; tell me you are not tempted.

All this in a textbook. Seems nothing short of an advertisement brochure. These Park guys lived in Jabalpur. Something tells me, students there have more fun than we do here.

Cary Clack who?

Exactly.
He is pretty much nobody. But he grabs attention. (and No, i am Not talking about the Mr. World extravaganza and all that. Shutaap)

Apparently, the chap is with the San Antonio Express-News.
So?
Nothing.
Then what?

He said the following -
"Having to explain it means you probably shouldn't have said it"

Enough for me to stand up and clap hard.