Vanakkam Doctor !

Nissan Bluebird Nissan Bluebird was my first car and obviously, we were over the moon, I mean, I, and the car, when it was bought. The reg no was: F551 PVL. The white bluebird car was bought in September 1995, in Scunthorpe , which was my then abode in UK . I was then a Senior House Officer in the Scunthorpe hospital, my first proper job as a UK Doc. I had already passed my driving test by then and a matter of fact, possibly the only exam; I had passed in the first attempt in UK , apart from my Citizenship test, done very recently!! The car was bought for £2700, had already clocked 77,000 miles on it, which was Amazing! This was almost around 1, 30,000 km and I would be very desperate to know whether cars in India would be still alive and sold from a garage, with a three months warranty, after having clocked that many miles! The fateful event, catapulting me to buy a car, was an evening stroll along the Chennai marina beach ...

It was my first time and a new experience indeed!! Well, I was in Year II in Stanley Medical College and the year was 1987. It was the summer of 1987 and I was already gelling up with a friendly Shakeel from Pattukottai, amongst few others. Not sure, why, but this humblest of the guys from a distant Pattukottai, near temple town of Tanjavoor, schooled in Trichy or Tiruchirapally, became one of my closest mates that year and he still is!! I can certainly recall easily the closest mates of that time and they were not many; however Shakeel still remains one of those buddies, probably the only one with humility to the surplus, Intellectual ability to the core, lots of good superlatives and, full of contentment! Well, we were invited by Shakeel to his home in Pattukottai to spend the summer of 1987, and I was not surely the one to miss the opportunity to get away from Chennai! He in fact was the first one to invite me during those great medical school years and so we s...