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...

None takes it, when it is there to be taken. But, then it is too late and we are left shaken. Self-centered and selfish Eaten by vanity and pride  and inflated egos to guide. We may never know When it’s going to end, hence Deep in our heart There lies our fear and sorrow. Our elders Who may have been  silly We being hypocrites Never empathize Snub them on saying it’s their folly. Elders try to be complex Whilst their soul is so simple   Like a stream of water Running quietly underneath a rocky cave  Words to share Words to give so simple indeed it’s all what they need. But, then it is too late and we are left shaken. None learns it, when it's there to be taken!

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...

It is PLUS two (+ 2) results , this time 23 years ago!!!! However, first I would like to apologise for the boring length of this blog. Life is a mere chain of incidents and possibly co- incidents, I suppose. I still, vividly remember a mallu friend of mine called Suresh, arriving breathless on the doors of my brother’s video shop to drop a bombshell on a May hot week day afternoon of 1986! Yes, I was blown off completely by the news. I had just become the top achiever in our school. The exams were State run Plus two exams, which provide the gateway for higher studies, on merit basis. Well, I scored a meagre 1086! It shows indirectly, the standard of my other classmates in St Gabriel’s School, Broadway, in 1986. The state record was around 1180 out of 1200 marks, awarded that year. The top notches from State toppers went to students with primary aim of scoring high marks and with ease, by taking up FRENCH, instead of Tamil. However, we in our school studied Tamil ...

What swayed me over to the kites? We lived in North Chennai, that millennium and that was the entire pre requisite for flying kites. There were no barriers to kite flying in terms of caste, religion, class or anything for that matter. You just have to have kite and thread kandai or a lottai, sooner or later you will be surrounded by anyone from the list above! I have seen upper middle class mingling with ordinary class people very easily when it came to flying kites and I still feel that it was the common bonding factor that was widely prevailing in 70's and 80's North Chennai, a sense of camaraderie, which may possibly still exists in that part of Chennai.........I love and admire! Yes, My father did it, his brothers and uncles did it and I am sure, their fathers did it and we all did it! I was possibly four or five, when one fine day; my appa came home with bundle of black maanja nool, a meesaii baana kite and a cooler on his eyes. Here we go! That was the...