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 ...

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...