Vanakkam Doctor !

Mahesh stores - 5 As I had mentioned before, we sold everything in “Mahesh stores”. It was seasonal brilliance and opportunistic business ideas, based on timeless and seamless observations. Those ideas were most likely to have come from my brother, who is currently a big shot Regional Sales Manager in Ranbaxy. He used to sell things and stuck his finger in most of the pies known to human fellow beings, before he landed for good in Ranbaxy in 1987. He had sold TV antennae, furniture, cotton wools for the factories, insurances, Video cassettes, and possibly few others. In fact he owned few other shops those days; definitely a video shop and possibly a furniture shop in Choolai medu area, whose existence was and still a mystery to all in our family, except him! The seasonal opportunism was very eagerly taken on by my Appa, possibly took it very seriously to his heart, when one fine day evening, in January, just before Pongal, he landed at our gate, in a cycle rickshaw, ...

That’s how we arrived in London from Madras, via Delhi! Aeroflot airlines, the official airlines of the then USSR, or whatever was left after Gorbachev and his Glasnost and or Perestroika, carried us from Delhi, via Moscow to the busiest airport in the world. Needless to say that those words of Gorbachev got into Oxford English Dictionary of the 80’s, similar to WMD, i.e. Weapons of Mass Destruction in the new millennium courtesy George Bush. Perhaps the words are as obsolete as they were, when came in vogue. I, Hari and Ganesh Moorthy! We roughly paid around Rs 20,000 each for the return journey to London from Delhi. It was March 1994 and the aim was to attend PLAB exam in London, pass it and find a job in United Kingdom as a Trainee Doctor and earn the whopping Rs one lac monthly! Perhaps, this is what I had told my poor mother and managed to convince, before she pledged her Jewellery for the same journey and the examination fees. The journey from Chennai, to L...