Rain

I wrote this nearly 2 years ago, one rainy March evening. I forced a lot of friends to read this *ahem* 'literary masterpiece', and most of them have refused to acknowledge my existence ever since. Now you know why I don’t write fiction.

I dream of rain.

The heavens opening and crying out its heart, carrying with it the grief of untold generations. The rain mingling with the tears on her face, flowing down her cheeks as one, to gaze apprehensively at the world below, only to get pushed down over the curve by their successors. The sweet liquid merging with the salt, to wash away the evidence of her broken heart.

The lightning, mirroring those moments when her wrath could destroy worlds. A blast of pure energy that reflects the heat in her eyes when the pain that threatened to overwhelm her transformed into rage. Lightning, blasting him into a million tiny pieces, each one glowing bright as the sun before fading to ash, to dust, fading to the black of oblivion.

And the thunder as loud as only thunder can be, yet, too soft to be heard over her screams. Thunder, shaking the earth, moving continents by its sheer intensity, while her anguish burnt a hole inside her, with no hope of escape.

She looked up at the sky. Black clouds had blotted out the sunshine from her life, hid from her the silvery moonbeams of hope, and shrouded the stars in her eyes. The very Universe was darkened by the shadows in her heart.

And it began to rain. Just a drizzle, and then harder, and harder, until each drop was a boulder. They pelted her face, washing away the signs of her emotion with a vengeance. She stood there, while the tears from heaven cleansed her soul of sorrow. She could feel it, each drop absorbing her grief, washing it away, leaving hopes of a better tomorrow in its place. Soon, joy began to make itself at home, for now her heart was healing, with scars that time would heal.

And a bolt of lightning came forth from the skies.

They found her the next day, a burn mark running down her body, and a smile on her face.

Moral of the story: Seek shelter during thunderstorms.

Purple Dreamer

A few million years ago, dinosaurs roamed the earth. After a while, birds and some pterodactyls flew about in the sky. Then somehow the dinosaurs and the pterodactyls died out, but the avians survived on fish. The fish became creatures who fed on milk, but couldn't fly. The birds wanted milk, and couldn't get any, so they took to swearing at the cows. Some of the abused took to the trees, in an attempt to intimidate the birds, but they (the birds, that is, and not the yay-I-can-climb-a-tree types) merely took to the skies and pooped on them. The tree-dwellers immediately (give or take a million years) evolved into the Wright brothers, and thumbed their noses at the foul-mouthed fowls. This just goes onto show you that in the vast and important scheme of things, time is irrelevant. Angel-Doc, remember tagging me? Although this post has nothing to do with it, let me emphasise that any resemblance to the meme is purely coincidental. As would have been obvious by now, it's all about how I'm slowly going off my rocker.

I baptise:
1. Tys on Ice
2. Spunky Monkey
3. Ziah
4. The Monk
5. Bullshee
6. Tangled :)
These worthy souls shall carry on the torch of enlightenment. Please don't set fire to the furniture, and keep an extinguisher handy.

People I'd like to execute:
1. My way or the highway:
Commands like 'You should do Gynaecology for your PG', or 'You should not wear high heels.'
The last I checked, this was a free country. I'll walk on stilts if I choose to. If my back hurts later, dammit, it's my back.

2. Insufferable know-it-alls:
I have an aversion to individuals who try to teach me hitherto unknown medical facts. I will not die if I eat curd and fish together. And hanging my cell phone round my neck will not give me a heart attack. There is a very good chance that I might die from a temporal glioma, but not a heart attack. Really. And the sex education perverts who get their kicks from expounding upon 'the union of the male and the female is achieved by the...'? Finish that sentence, and you'll be missing vital parts of your anatomy.

3. You're only a girl:
I understand that men have different qualities, and that women are far superior, so what hell do you mean when you say 'women' with as much venom as you can muster? If you are so contemptuous of what you perceive as feminine weakness, let's see you bleed for a week every month. And thanks to modern technology, now you can become pregnant too. Good luck with getting rid of the placenta.

4. Religious fanatics:
There are all kinds of people out there, and twice that many Gods. Those getting totally obsessed about God or religion have my contempt. I know this girl who is so orthodox she's never been inside any place of worship other than her own, because her Big Guy won't like it.
And the heathen. Don't get me started on that.

5. Bimbos:
Anyone whose head is more for ornament than for its circuitry. I'm not very tolerant of stupidity, even when the packaging is pretty.

6. Hypocrites:
I believe the followers of some faiths do not visit doctors when they are ill. There was one such person in my (please not the point) medical entrance coaching class. She had an acute asthmatic attack one night, and the warden of her hostel called an ambulance. She refused to get into the ambulance saying Satan gave her asthma and that it would go away if she prayed. Why on earth did she want to become a doctor? She didn't get through the entrance, if you were wondering.

7. Arrogant snobs:
'I can't sleep without an AC' types. I can arrange for it to be converted to DC, Your Lowness.

People I'd award the AP Nobel to:
1. Surgeons:
I have a rather complex relationship with surgery. I don't like the subject much, but I surgeons rarely fail to amaze me. All that confidence. 'Bleeder! Cautery.' Just how do they manage to stay on their feet for hours? How do they know one structure from another? How can they do it with such precision? How can they be unaffected by the things they see? How much control does that take? No wonder they think they are Gods. I do, too.

2. Param Vir Chakra:
Ordinary people with the courage to face the daily grind. Or if you prefer corny flakes, the unsung soldiers in the battle of life. I find it easier to deal with big emergencies than the little ups and downs. Q. E. D.

3. Well rounded brainiacs:
No, no. no. That's not what I mean.
I'm talking about people like my friend Scar. He is brilliant, well-read, athletic, and to top it all, he is a nice guy. And I've never found him with his nose buried in a textbook. The latest gossip, or the newest medical breakthrough, I hear it from him. I hope he gets the real Nobel someday. He sure deserves it.

4. Artists :
Whether it's a paintbrush or a scalpel, an artist is an artist.
Was it Mark Twain who said, "If it falls your lot to sweep streets, sweep them like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music." Somehow I can't imagine Mark Twain saying that.

5. B, 65:
I knew him only as B, 65 years. He was a patient in one of the Medicine wards. He had aplastic anaemia, and needed frequent blood transfusions, and that meant regular blood tests. He was the first person I ever drew blood from, and he liked us students. One of the first things we did in the morning was to go talk to him. He used to tell us to work hard, care for our patients, and would never crib about us pricking him for blood everyday. He never complained about his illness, no 'why me'. He always had a smile for me, even on a bad day. He never yelled at us, unlike many of the patients. He had the bed at the end of the ward for the 3 months I was posted in Medicine, and we used to go back and visit him even after our posting ended. One day, he wasn't there, and I heard he'd been shifted to the ICU. He died 2 days later.

6. Smilers:
People with a wonderful sense of humour. I can't find a better example for this than my mom. I was 11, and with the idiots on the Municipal Council blocking the major drains in our area, our house flooded with water during the rains. It was cold, we were knee deep in water, most of our things were on the road on ruin, and the stench was awful. We decided to go away for a couple of days, and were packing everything that could be salvaged. Suddenly, Amma laughed and showed me my foam slippers floating around in the water. It was funny seeing it getting stuck on bits of furniture. I've never met many women her age who is amused by the little absurdities in life. Most of them are very grim and prim.

Having successfully established myself as the epitome of frivolity, here's my Postal Joke. It's an old one, and one of my favourites.
Q: For every 90 sins you commit, you get caught 45 times. Wonder why?
.
.
.
.
.
A: Because sin 90⁰ = cot 45⁰.

P.S: As of today, I have an official fans association at college. What else can I ask for?

Monkey Brains

Guess what I saw here.

And this was very interesting. What do you say?

Real posts takes time, and I don't have any right now. The postman is on leave. A new post when he comes back on duty.

Of Blogs and Rats and Me

Why do I blog?
This is as good an answer as any.

At this point, I'd like to inform everyone that Stephan Pastis (may he live forever and continue to draw Pearls) owns Pearls Before Swine. I don't. Copyright and all that, everything, belongs to Pastis & Co.

Pearls is my favourite strip. Not that kind of strip, perv. Comic strips. The kind they put in newspapers. Like, say, Dilbert. Anyway, about Pearls. It's my favourite strip (I love repeating myself). Not Calvin & Hobbes (it's a close second), not Garfield (third, like Ender), not Dilbert (it's nowhere on the list), not {insert name of comic strip here}, it's Pearls Before Swine that's my favourite. The title is taken from a line in the Bible, that goes something like, thou shalt cast no pearls before swine. The strip is about a bunch of anthropomorphic animals that live in a city, alongside humans. Humans don't appear in the strip very often, and when they do, they don't find talking animals unusual at all.

The humour is dark, it often comes across as insensitive, there are plenty of people lobbying for the un-syndication of Pearls, it pokes fun at many serious issues, but, bottom line is, I find it funny. Funny as in 'hahahaha if I laugh any more I'll die' funny.
Pearls, for the lack of better words, is me. I can identify with all of the main characters in the strip, except one. God, not that one, please.

The hero, Rat, is the personification of our greatest vices. And I don't count greatness as a vice. I think, when things get really really sticky, we think about our own skins alone. I don't mean that we are all always uncaring monsters, we do give lots of damns about our loved ones, it's just that we love our own selves a little more. Take unrequited love, for instance. X (yeah, took me an hour think up the name) loves Y (it was easier this time, only 45 minutes). But Y does not love X (big surprise, huh?). X is sad (understatement of the year) because (duh!) Y does not love X. What I'm trying to say is, although X loves Y, all X is wants is another person to love X. There is no such thing as an unselfish act. No, that's too general. I have never come across a completely unselfish act. Think about it.
Rat is the personification, or more accurately, the rodentification, of the worst of many of my faults, magnified into something enormous that fits into the body of a rat. He is a self-centred, cynical, cruel, sarcastic, insensitive, totally hateful megalomaniac. I know myself well enough to realise that I have a nasty streak in me. I don't kick small children, but I'm tempted to, if they bug me. I need to use a lot of restraint when it comes to not pulling their hair out by the roots when they do that to me, the force of temptation being directly proportional to the age of the child. Rat is multi-talented, he writes children's books and romance novels, owns a tabloid (The National Enquirat), and is also a highly successful (what else?) lawyer.

Pig, Rat's roomie, is, well, a little dumb. He says and does a lot of things that are misunderstood, because he did not know they could be taken the wrong way. He is innocent, not very worldly-wise, shy, insecure, a little slow, a misfit among his peers (he likes bacon). I wish I could say I'm nothing like him, but the truth is that I'm too much like him for comfort. But he's also very sweet, a description that, sadly, does not apply to me.
Rat: If you could have a conversation with one person, living or dead, who would it be?
Pig: The living one.
[pause]
Pig: You must really think I'm stupid.

Goat is quite intelligent, a loner, prefers books to people, is always the butt of Rat's ridicule, and easily exasperated by stupidity and apathy. He can't stand Rat, either, but it's always Rat who gets the last word. Goat keeps a blog that no one reads. Yes, I know, the resemblance is uncanny.

Zebra is a very ordinary sort of guy, but unfortunately, prey. There are all kinds of predators waiting to eat him, or one of his herd members back home in Africa. He's an idealist, trying to make the predators more understanding about the plight of becoming eaten. Not a particularly easy task, when staying alive is hard enough. He also has a lot of principles that he lives by, and he finds it frustrating when they are paid no heed. I could write entire books on the subject.

Most people have guard dogs, but Pig has a Guard Duck. His solution to every problem, small or big, is his rocket launcher. Not a bad idea, that. Nothing like a rocket launcher to stop others from being annoying.

Da Brudderhood of Zeeba Zeeba Eata. The dumbest Crocs on earth live next door to Zebra, and are such incompetent predators that they have to subsist on take out from KFC. Da only seemilareety between da Crocs and me ees dat me sometimes talk like dem. But that could be because I'm addicted to Pearls.


The jokes in the strip are my favourite kind- horrible puns that would leave my victims writhing in agony.
Rat: I saw my cousin Gene today.
Pig: Is he the guy that runs marathons?
Rat: Yeah, but he's a real jerk ... nobody in my family likes him.
Pig: It must be tough to have a bad Gene that runs in the family.

I hope everyone liked the new display picture. And do check out Pearls here. You can read the Wikipedia entry on Pearls here. Enjoy.

There are dozens of recurring characters, like Danny Donkey, Farina, Stromoski, and Angry Bob, who is the hero of the romance novels Rat writes, but none of them are, well, me. The day I become Angry Bob is the day I die (pun intended). Plus the strip is really complex, with cross overs, pop culture references, running gags, and all. In short, just like life. But taken in in its entirety, the strip is totally me.

I'd like to remind everyone that all of the pictures I have used here, and the characters, are the property of Stephan Pastis, the creator of Pearls, and that the copyright and things belong to him.

There are very few things for which I have strong feelings, humour is one of them. My tastes are another. There are a few more, but Medicine tops the list. I also love stating the obvious. I don't know how boring this has been, I talk seriously only about issues that are very close to my heart.

From now on, I'll be ending all my posts on this blog with a joke that I find funny. I'm going to call it *drumroll* Postal Joke.
Pig: What are you reading?
Goat (holding book): It's a mystery.
Pig: Have you checked the title page?

18 and Above

No explicit content, peepals, it's the 18 things you've all been dying to know about me. Oh, someone already died? Thou hast not died in vain, O William of Avon, thy sacrifice has been rewarded. You can read this if you can access the net from your grave. You can all thank Sreejith for this literary masterpiece.

1. Pick out a scar you have, and explain how you got it.
Healed scar, 0.5 * 0.1 cm, on the dorsum of the right hand, 1 cm below and lateral to the 2nd metacarpophalangeal (MCP) joint. I had my viva exam in Forensic Medicine yesterday, so please forgive me for not speaking English. Translated, it's a small scar on the back of my right hand, below my index finger. Don't be misled by the size, I bled like a stuck pig. As is true of all of women's problems, this too was due to an MCP. Looks can be deceiving. That's him on the right.

2. What does your phone look like?
You don't know what an iPhone looks like? Tsk-tsk.* I was just dying to say that. My phone is a combination of dirty silver and a particularly ugly shade of blue, thanks to some idiot at Sony Ericsson who thought he was a designer.

3. What is on the walls of your bedroom?
Blood, and other less colourful things that splatter when people die under torture. Makes for a very unique design. I could tell you why they were tortured, but then I'd have to kill you.

4. What is your current desktop picture?
This one, from my favourite comic strip, Pearls Before Swine, by Stephan Pastis. Zeeba Zeeba Eata!

5. Do you believe in gay marriage?
Weddings are serious affairs, sometimes a little too serious, so I think a little more liveliness would do no harm. And if the bride(groom) and (bride)groom add to the gaiety, I have no objections.

6. What do you want more than anything right now?
I want mosquitoes to practice birth control.

7 . What time were you born?
My mom went to work as usual, thinking about her maternity leave which began the next day, and how her little Arjun would be born after a month. She was wrong on all counts. I came along a few hours later, and turned out to be this 2.4 kg Amazon any football team would be proud of! Everyone was expecting a boy, because of how I used to kick. Amma's sari would be lifted into the air and slowly come to rest against her tummy, waiting for me to start again. And I was a month early, the doctor said I was as developed as a baby at full term, so I didn't have to be incubated.

8. Are your parents still together?
My dad is watching TV, and my mom is in the kitchen. So technically, they're not. No mean feat, considering the Bush-heart-Osama moments, (flashback to the time Sun Tzu visited them to get tips on waging wars), but it's been 32 years. Are you listening, Nobel Peace Prize guys? I need one!

9. Last person who made you cry?
It wasn't a person, it was a weighing machine. *sob*

10. What is your favorite perfume / cologne?
I never go out and buy perfume because all my relatives in the Gelf insist on gifting perfumes, and I don't get a choice in the matter. My favourite so far was Red Door.

11. What kind of hair/eye color do you like in the opposite sex?
I can't stand guys with straightened long hair and tinted contacts, a fad that is hugely popular here. Somebody shoot me!

12. What are you listening to?
Moody Blues- Nights in White Satin.

13. Do you get scared of the dark?
I go to sleep clutching a torch and another one under my pillow so that if there's a power failure in the middle of the night and my night lamp goes off, I can scare Count Dracula away. He attacks only in total darkness. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and shine my torch around the room, to ensure that he isn't hiding behind the bookshelf. No exaggeration, this.

14. Do you like painkillers?
They go well with my migraine.

15. Are you too shy to ask someone out?
I think I would be. Anyone who could make me want to ask him out would be capable of making me tongue-tied.

16. If you could eat anything right now, what would it be?
Grapes. I'm crazy about grapes. I can eat grapes morning, noon and night, and even while I sleep.

17. Who was the last person you made you mad?
An ad for spectacle lenses with brand mark. Brand nahi to style nahi. What the bloody effing nonsense? I'd like to throw my Lacoste shoes at them.

18. Who was the last person who made you smile?
My cousin, when he rang up and asked for Dr. AP. :)

Anyone who has cats can take up this tag.

PS: Bill from Avon, stop turning over in your grave.
PPS: The guy who gave me the scar is actually a girl. He's pregnant now.