Vanakkam Doctor !

It is a full moon day again! The heavenly bliss, which God bestows upon us every month, must be, one hell of a sight, from anywhere on this planet!! From any site or location, any street or a house top terrace, it must and ought to be! However, to me, the moon (Nila) was or still possibly is at its best, especially, when it is swimming along the waves of Marina Beach, in Chennai , India , on a Full moon day (Pournami Nilavau). And what a sight it is!!! I still remember vividly, those Full moon or Pournami days, on my own or with my friends on Marina Beaches’ sands; waves after waves battling with the minutiae of glorious sand dunes, never ever getting tired of drenching them, however transient, it would be. Full moon is a sight to savour, absorb, and digest. It is simple, divine, and so pure and possibly indescribable. These are the times, when I constantly remind myself of how tiny I am in this huge ...

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...

மகேஷ் ஸ்டோர்ஸ் - 2 In Chennai, the odd sprinkler of kite will appear on the sky, late July or August and soon it will occupy the entire clear blue skyline of Chennai or the old Madras, especially around North Madras, where I grew up. My so called Maa Niram (euphemism for brown skin) would become an African by the time the season was finished, which was the month of October or November, depending on the day Deewali falls. The last day of the season would roughly fall on the weekend after Deewali , as a kid, I would be loaded with tonnes of thread and stacks of kites, caught in our catchment’s area. Kite flying was a sheer delightful past time or a hobby and for some or most in North Chennai, used to be a pride issue. Neighbours became enemies overnight, thick friends became thinner, girls were won or lost, you become nomadic or forgotten in your own household, become thick skinned and in the process become a Delhi erumai or a bullock ! Wars were fought ...