Gross Anatomy

Warning: People who are squeamish about body parts should avoid reading this. Even if you are not, do not read this while eating. Don't blame me if you barf your lunch on your favorite laptop!

Pep talk to self pre-course: "This isn't going to be too bad. After all you have done dissections in the past on rats and despite the initial disgust you felt for the whole process, it turned out pretty interesting, didn't it? You have also been to the 'Bodies' exhibition. I am sure it's not a big deal."

In the classroom: "I am the only girl in this class! I am sure none of these guys are vegetarians! I am doomed! I don't even have scrubs! Arrrrggghhh! Let me out of here..."

In the Lab: Dr. P: " ....most students do not have a problem with this lab. But occasionally there are cases..."
Cases of what? Students swooning, vomitting, having nightmares of cadavers running after them?
Dr. P: "Just make sure when you are not feeling ok, you raise your hand and I will have someone walk you out. Some students just walk out of the room without saying anything and it's only when I hear the crash in the hallway that I realize that they must have had a problem with what they saw."
'Gulp! I am next in line for that.' Dr. P noticed the horror writ all over my face and thought, 'Oh yes you are.'

Dr. P started making an incision from the nape of the neck and I could feel the hair on my neck stand. As he got down to the superficial fascia and layer of fat, I could feel my morning cuppa tea trying to make its way out the wrong way. The nauseating smell of fat subdued the odoriferous formaldehyde and began to overwhelm my olfactory nerve till my head starts to spin and I decided that I've had enough. Steve accompanied me out to the lounge outside.

Pep-talk to self post incision incident: "That lady was dead years ago. She cannot feel pain. Yes it takes just a scalpel to skin a person! She voluntereed to give her body for science so her soul won't wince at what we are doing to her. Go back in there, girl, and validate her sacrifice."

So back I was all pumped up to wrestle with the fat and the muscle and the blood and everything human that could possibly ruin my apetite for the rest of the day. 10 minutes into the dissection and I was right back in the lounge trying to get some air into my lungs.

Pep-talk to self post failed pep talk: "You are not a mouse! It is a human body just like your own. This is a one time opportunity to see how it all fits in together and works. C'mon clench your fist and say you can do it."

For the rest of the class I hovered around the table scalpel in hand just observing the dissections of the back muscles and even that made me rush back home after class and shower till my body became red. My olfactory senses became fully functional only after smelling and drinking coffee. Thankfully my apetite returned too.

Since then it's been less bumpy on the road to understanding human anatomy. I think I am getting the hang of telling the blood vessels and nerves apart and needless to say, it is immensely interesting. I believed it's the initial inhibition both physiological as well as psychological, one needs to overcome. If anything, being a vegetarian in an anatomy class makes it easier for me to handle what I am doing. The food I eat rarely looks like a body part. But every once in a while, there are cases : teammates who will insist on cutting open the gall bladder and insisting it looks like spinach, Dr. P cutting open the caecum with gloves covered in semi-formed faeces, dissection around the anus, turning the cadavers over and the arms almost detaching from the body, fat splaying on people's faces, dissection of the testis with fluid oozing out of it...it never ceases to get grosser and I spend a lot of time in the lounge!

'Altar'native Rock

They all waited with baited breath with eyes pealed on the giant altar. Some of them restless by the long wait and tedious distractions that made minutes seem like months. Some of them up on their feet ready to herald the arrival of their demigods. Some jostling among the early birds to get ahead of the crowd and get a priceless glimpse of the demigods. This could easily have been a scene at a popular Indian temple, except that instead of prasadam there was pizza, instead of agarbattis there were ciggies, instead of teertham there was beer and instead of the devotees rising to their feet chanting mantrams at the unveiling of the idol, the fans rose to their feet singing the leitmotif of 'Viva La Vida' at the arrival of Coldplay. Blasphemous? Maybe. The euphoria surrounds when you are standing in the middle of a rock concert, just as the beating of the drums and the cymbals do when you are in a temple during the Aarti. Of course, one cannot begin to equate the madness of rock music fans with the devotion of Hindu followers.

I have always been a great admirer of the Coldplay's compositions and lyrics and hoped to see them perform live some day. And Voila! They landed right here in Cincinnati. While it was anticipated that they would jump start their performance with the most popular Viva La Vida, they started with an instrumental 'Life in Technicolor' instead, which although not entirely disappointing didn't seem as quite appropriate for the start. While the crowd in the pit and the benches seemed to have a great direct view of the band and their shenanigans, back in the lawn, we were trying to use our psychic powers to request for our favorite numbers. Just as I was screaming 'Fix you' Chris Martin dedicated the number to all of us 'lesser' souls out on the lawn. Somehow the lyrics of that song strike a chord with a lot of what one goes through in life and the fact that the 'lights will guide you home', while being awfully cliched, is perhaps one of the most reassuring thoughts one could hope.

Violet Hill soon became Cincinnati Hill and huge yellow balloons descended during their rendition of Yellow. The whole band then decided to tour the Riverbend Amphitheater and they even made a pit stop at the lawns, where they regaled us with a cover of Neil Diamond's 'I'm a believer'. We were just a few feet away from their stage and couldn't believe our eyes and actually couldn't stop screaming our lungs out. Chris Martin looked positively stoned and yet incredibly charismatic and attractive. N and I were pinching each other to make sure we were actually seeing Chris Martin from such proximity. N had a good mind to jump across the crowd and try to shake his hand but decided she didn't want to be arrested for hooliganism.

The band then pretended it was over and time to go home, when we were wondering why they didn't play the hugely popular 'Scientist' yet and screaming out the leitmotif of Viva La Vida. They returned on stage and obliged us with 'Scientist', an encore of 'Death and his Friends' and 'Escape'. The cherry on the top was the free CD of their most popular compositions that we received at the end of their concert.

I am certainly not one of those maniacal fans who follows the band, star-struck, around the world and worships even their sweat. I am not even one of those devoted fans who shells out 400 bucks for a front row seat at a concert, buys every CD that comes out into the market and remembers all the lyrics of all their songs like nursery rhymes. I am just a curious fan who paid 50 bucks for a good time in the lawn with friends and aquaintances, got my money's worth seeing them as close as the front benchers and came home with memories of having screamed like a teenager till I nearly lost my voice.

Shards of faith

She handed him an urn of innocent clay
Borne from the gentle, pristine earth
Unsullied by the squalor of the sly
Shaped by her open palms of faith.

It had no pomp of silver or gold
Nor embellishments of outer design.
A labour of love that would hold
The true reflection of their mind.

‘Twas to be burnt in the kiln of pain
And endure the merciless test of fire
But fortified by love it would remain
Indestructible by forces higher.

Alas, it fell from those callous hands
‘fore it could mould into permanence.
Smashing as it hit the veritable land
And she picked up the pieces in silence.

The crumbling pieces filled her hands
As she fervently fixed the urn again.
But now defiled by amorphous sand
The purity of ere it would never regain.

Her quivering heart upon him turned
Questioning those hands that wavered
Her reflection drained through the broken urn
Leaving her trust unanswered.

-Kirthi Radhakrishnan

I dream of a White Christmas

As the smoke smoulders over the Mumbai 26/11 attacks and the Indian media insisting on fanning the flames by reeling out images 24/7 and mindlessly interviewing every Tom, Dick and Harry who has an opinion about it, I believe its time people stopped the finger pointing and mourning and started thinking of affirmative action.

All the media can do is keep reminding us of how tragic the whole incident was and keep scratching the scab so that the wound never heals. It has only one purpose, like all cheap entertainment: to titillate; by either voyeurism, fear or sorrow. It seldom talks to the right persons who have concrete and useful solutions, because it truly seeks no answers and probably because the right people hopefully would be on top of the problem rather than speaking with a bunch of looney journalists who could kill each other for a sound byte from some 'important-sounding' person. Peace protests and boards filled with messages of solidarity only serve at best to unite people until the time they forget the tragedy and go back to their microcosms.

With every tragedy come the scapegoats and inevitably the first on the firing line are the politicians. The people are ostensibly tired of politicians and the media seems to fire it back to the people for not exercising their franchise: like it would make a difference! Its the same herd of jackasses up for elections each time and they just keep playing musical chairs: once in the opposition, the next time in the ruling. Our country is what it is, whether good, bad or ugly not because of our government but because of the people: right from the rickshaw driver to the corporate honcho. The politician serves only as comic relief.

The next heads to roll are obviously those of the Pakistani government and to date all the diplomatic and not so diplomatic ways of getting them to be declared a terrorist state have proven to be futile. Even if we have them declared a terrorist state, would that stop them from producing and harbouring jehadis? Would that give us a tangible excuse to go to war against Pakistan? War between two countries has never served any purpose more fruitful than a shouting match between two raucous juveniles: no matter who win., The former get battered economies and piling debt unpayable for any forseeable future and the latter get their larynxes battered and can't speak for a forseeable future. There are a lot of countries out there that could benefit from this war given the global economic situation, and one of them most certainly isn't India or Pakistan.

In this whole post-mortem of the terrorist attacks a few things were blurred out of the context. One cannot keep one's safe unlocked and expect no one to steal. The whole process of tackling the terrorists left a lot to be desired: for one we were caught napping, next our forces did not have the right ammunition, the commandos reach the hotel and then rummage for maps and layouts and further the terrorists used GPS when our average joe NSG commando would never have laid eyes on one! It beats me how a country with top IT giants can fail at the most rudimentary tranferrence of information.

Now that the war is no longer fought in battlefields of Panipat or for that matter Kargil, one would expect the security forces to be armed for such civilian warfare and on their Christmas wish-list would be getting the right arms and ammunitions and fast enough, getting briefed about the layout and locations well in advance and to top it all getting the media out of their hair when they are on an operation. With an apathetic government, a Prime Minister and a President who are a travesty to the posts they hold, one can only expect inaction from them on this wishlist. Its time corporate India which has so far been a silent spectator, largely viewed by the public as an emblem of capitalistic greed and an equally visible finger pointer in this whole circus begins to take affirmative action and becomes the 'secret Santa' of our security forces. Corporations like Tatas, Wipro and Infosys have been pioneering in trying to effect social and infrastructural changes in cities like Jamshedpur and Bangalore. I am sure the security forces would be happy to use CCTV cameras installed in public areas, lobbies and hallways of commercial buildings, databases containing layouts of buildings and for God's sake a good PR who would get those rapacious media hyenas out of the way and cordone off the area before they start a tea party amidst gunfire.

Ideas of having paid public toilets, of installing pollution meters, of manning traffic during rush hours, of building a city around steel plants took birth within corporations that looked beyond merely profit margins and annual turnovers. They sought to change the situation around them not just point fingers and blame lazy governments. Lazy governments came and went and yet the cities that survived were those with responsible corporates. It is time that those within corporate India cogitate and percolate such ideas with the powers that be to reclaim our belief that we the people truly run our country.

Deja vu

Upon this familiar path I set afoot
The caressing grass I have trodden before
Its sinuous windings as I saw them last
Beckon my footsteps to explore

I know the little leaves that wave me by
The pebbles that crumble under my feet
The breeze that whispers into my ear
Foreboding the destiny that I am to meet

Anticipation throbs through my being
My footsteps hastens every moment
Alas! Visions of the past cloud my thoughts
And rain emotions without relent

Why did the leaves smile as they do?
Does the harbinger wind prevaricate?
Are the celestial beings conspiring too,
To make this path my only fate?

Wisps of forgotten smoke filled the air
An odour of irreversible abhorrence
The burnt bridge now a lonely decrepit
Recites its story in a chilling silence

Of a path once green with ebullient spring
Wafting with love and tenderness
Lives floating through the dreamy clouds
Treading towards a bridge of promise

Alas! A bridge of deception t’was
Feeding on my guileless faith
But a mirage lasts not the storm of reality
Crushing every memory in its wake.

But this path that now enchants my mind
Promises bridges that need to be built
Will the ominous clouds of the past disperse
Before the flower of hope begins to wilt?

Kirthi Radhakrishnan

'Hulla'baloo

Its been a while since I have visited this long derelict and probably decripit website. But I am indeed, very grateful to all of you for egging me on to keep writing. So I guess although my fingers are rusty and my creative right side of my brain is hibernating, I will try to grease the phalanges of my fingers and awaken the moribund neurons in my right brain with something I do with relative ease: a movie review.

I did not pick up a Bollywood blockbuster or gigantic budget potboiler to shoot down: KJo what's with you? You haven't made your annoying genre of movies in a while: so much less fodder for some pseudo-intellectual like me to chew and churn to dust! I did not pick a Hollywood flick to gloss over and by the way, I found The Dark Knight a little overrated.

I actually enjoyed a simple, seemingly nondescript movie like 'Hulla'. It does not have a fantastic concept or big stars. It is about a simple situation in a typical building complex in Mumbai. The protagonist (if we can Sushant Singh one) enters a new apartment with his wife and finds himself being disturbed every night by the night watchman's 'rounds'. His insomnia reflects on his quality of work and his irritable disposition throughout the day. He tries to deal with the problem in every perceivable way: pacifying the watchman, talking to the secretary of the housing society, using sleeping pills, earplugs, bribing the watchman with new job prospects and even lodging a police complaint.

What is interesting is how a small problem like the watchman's rounds snowballs into bigger issues and becomes a social commentary on people's self-centered and self-absorbing ways. It is used as a background to portray contemporary socio-economic wars that happen everyday in a highly stratified urban India. For instance, when the secretary of the society (played by Rajat Kapoor) finds his wife comparing his economic status to that of the protagonist's, he tries to bolster his self esteem by claiming that the security arrangements he made for the society serve as an exemplar for other neighbourhoods to follow, that being the greatest achievement of his lifetime of failing attempts at doing business.

The sense of defeat that the middle aged secretary feels as he watches the newly wed couple enjoy a car and a two bedroom apartment while he grapples with his ramshackle Kinetic Honda and a family of three living in a one bedroom apartment is a picture straight out of middle aged middle class urban India fighting to keep its head above the water in the onslaught of the DINK (double income no kids) couples and newbies earning twice the former's current salary.
The servile attitude of the watchman who grew up in colonial British ruled India and listens not to reason but only the orders from a man of heirarchy and the transformation of a normal sophisticated and successful stock broker into a raving self-absorbed vengeful maniac are also very real scenarios.

What I really liked about the movie was that it ended with a karmic message without being too preachy. As a result of the stock broker's insomnia and his irritable nature, he ends up pulling down the stock price of a company that his client has invested in and is forced to quit his apartment which was being financed out of the client's pocket and to add to the repercussion, the secretary who also has a stake in the company is forced to sell off his apartment to cover for the loss. So with both ending up as losers in a battle of egos they have to let go of their vainglorious attitudes and eat a humble pie in front of the whole society.

For those who watch movies with an intent to escape into a world of fantasy and unrealism, this movie will seem as bland as boiled vegetable: avoid it. To me movies do not serve as entertainment, they are a reflection of today's society: in terms of attitude, aspiration and values. 'Hulla' made a passive commentary on it in a realistic and in a sense, sattirical way. The very fact that there is money invested in such a movie shows that the concept of realism is not dead in Indian cinema which sadly for a good part of the time invests in mindless megalomania.

Mars and Venus

Disclaimer: This story is purely fictional and has only fictitious characters who bear no resemblence to anyone dead alive or yet to be born. Please refrain from speculation.

‘This one is the worst I’ve ever seen.’

“…and then she came into my kitchen and yelled ‘Hi’. I was so taken aback that I screamed and threw the salad bowl into the air. I so hate it when people creep up from behind and say something. It was so hilarious all the cabbage was on my hair. I could have passed off for Bozo!…” she giggled to herself.

He stared at her for a moment and realizing he was supposed to react, he smiled.

‘It just gets worse every time doesn’t it?’

“ So what’s up with you? Do you have such crazy embarrassing things happening in your life?”
She dug into her sub as the mayo dripped from the sides.

‘I am getting a bad feeling about how this has been going…’ he stared at his mobile and sighed.

“Well, my friend once took off the signs on the restroom and I walked into the ladies room and literally got beaten by a crummy old hag with a stick. It wasn’t funny then, but I guess it is funny now.” he shrugged.

She laughed with her mouthful almost choking on the banana peppers while he pecked at his pasta. He had almost lost his appetite. She noticed.

“Is something wrong with your ravioli or with you?”

‘How am I going to get myself bailed out this time?’

“Err nothing. I am just not too hungry right now. The ravioli is wonderful.” He dug up a forkful and stuffed it in his mouth to prove the point.

“ Oh ok. I remember once at a restaurant we were served some really rotten cheese and my friend told the maître d' that he should inform the chef that even her dog would not eat that. And he told her….”

‘Should I call Shailesh? Maybe he’ll help me out of this one. He’s such an expert in such situations.’

“…then we planned to walk out of the restaurant after meeting the manager and telling him what a rotten restaurant he has. But he didn’t want us to give his place bad publicity so….”

‘I’ll text message him first.’ He started punching the buttons.

“…and every time we go there we get a little dessert or a discount.”

By now he was totally distracted and did not make any effort to hide it from her.

“Is something bothering you or is it just me?”

His mobile beeped. “I’ll be right back with you in a few minutes.” He rushed clutching his phone to the restroom.

“Would you like to order a dessert tonight Ma’am ?”

“No I’d just like to wait for a while before I decide.” She glanced at her watch once more. He had been in there for over half an hour. She considered requesting the manager to check on him but didn’t want a manager peering at her date in the restroom during their very first meeting.

‘Maybe he had a bad stomach. That explains why he was not eating.’

A few minutes later. ‘What if he stood me up? He could have climbed out of the vent in the restroom and run away. I could tell he was not even interested in me from the beginning. Hah! He didn’t even have the guts or the decency to tell me on my face. Men!’

She signalled the waiter that she wished to pay the bill.

At long last he emerged from the restroom with a sullen face. Seeing the empty table he threw his hands up, “Story of my life. I just lost all my money to the stock exchange and now I lost her too. They somehow sense a pauper. Women!”