Its been a long hiatus. Hope it has done me some good and I am able to write better (read readable) blogs. While I had been away, I was pushed hard by my friends (and push came to shove and shove to pester – never heard of it?). One of them even had the gumption of comparing a writer to a cricketer and insinuating that as cricketers practice daily so should I begin to write daily too. My good friend does not realize that we writers may suffer from a tennis elbow too and need to recuperate.

I regularly go out on a pilgrimage to Vaishno Devi – once a year at least and at the most. It absolves me of my sins and my conscience of the ever nagging thought that I don’t remember Him too often. I always try to choose the time of the year very carefully so as to avoid any mad rush on the way.

Being adventurous is at most times a virtue but sometimes it can lead you to trouble. The adventurous are sucked in by the charm of the unknowing, succumbing to that wanton lust of exploring beneath the surface and beyond the obvious. The problem is that you fail to realize when you have scratched more than needed and discover places that need not be discovered in the first place.

Over the period of its existence India has not started any war. We have been invaded, time and again, by the Mongols, the Mughals, the British and in recent past by Pakistan and China. This statement of fact tells a lot about us as a nation. We have been taught to be subservient, respectful, non-violent and not aggressive. This has now become a part of our personality, well entrenched in our mindset and something very difficult to shrug off. What this has led to is that we have learnt to adjust to almost everything even when we don’t have to. We subconsciously do it almost everyday, everywhere.

The Wikipedia describes the Jeans as trousers made from denim mainly for work and which became popular in the 1950s among teenagers though a certain Mr. Levi Strauss used to sell blue Jeans to the mining communities of California even in the 1850s.

Over the entire last week I and my brethren experienced rain and reacted differently to it depending upon where we were. While in office we cursed because the journey back home will be long and tedious and if at home, the feeling was romantic bordering on aphrodisiacal. One of my lady friends who is currently studying in Houston will not forget those rains, the winds and the collateral devastation in a hurry. She was only slightly away from the epicenter from what we have come to know as Hurricane IKE. So let us read it as a first person account.

The economy opened up in the early nineties. It gave people more avenues to make money and slowly but surely brought upgrades to the class they belonged to, horizontally as well as vertically: horizontally because the numbers began to swell from mutation from within the class and vertically because more people began to leap from the class just below (read upper, middle and lower class). This in turn redefined the social fabric. Let us see how:

The cliche “Man is a social animal” manifests itself in many ways. Growing beyond the belief of individual identity, man had always wanted to be uniquely identified and assert himself socially. He learnt to mutate, multiply and form various complex structures. His need to be recognized at different levels  – as one family and one clan, as one culture and one society, as one state and one country or united as poor or rich was insatiable. The most powerful form of belonging came from religion and its various forms. Religion easily transgressed physical barriers and began to be practiced worldwide. Even for the intelligent its a tough call to choose between his faith and his country.

People throng to religion because it gives them a reason to live life beyond the materialistic. For some, it gives release to their spiritual energy and helps them come to peace with themselves. For others, it allows them to commit more sins outside as they had already asked for forgiveness for all the bad things that they had done. To the weak it gives the high of being accepted socially and to the powerful, the ever growing flock  ready to die at his command.

Religion is big business these days. Politicians use it as a tool to garner votes and come to power. There is no easier way to divide people and generate euphoria than through religious outcries. Countries were formed on the pretext of people practicing same religion. Religion brings in a lot of money too from the religious tourists who come for their periodic pilgrimages. So the locals tolerate them because they feed on them. Religion has the power to unite and divide – unite the people who practice it and divide them from the people who don’t.

Religion still leaves me with more questions than answers. If man was born Adam and Eve and then grew (many may dispute this theory but at some point in time in the past we must have been very few and a single clan or if we evoluted then too it could not have been the work of different Gods) how could he have different Gods. God is one unless he is human too and felt the need to assert himself through his various identities. And Mankind, if only it stuck to a faith and not try to give a form and shape to it the world could still have survived as one country, one religion and one clan and not lost itself to the Chinese whispers that passed on through generations starting with “We are one and the children of one God” but now interpreted as “We are children, all very different, each with his own personal God”.

PS: I’d request all my readers to leave a comment on the post - good or bad, so that I know you exist and get to know you better through your comments. I can see on the stats page through the number of page views that many of you are visiting my blog but too few comments to show that you actually came.

God made man with the intent of creating it equivalent to all the other animals. But unsatisfied as he is, man decided to straighten up first not liking to be considered equivalent to apes and then worked continuously towards discovering new depths in his brains and innovating to constantly redefine the saturation limits of improvement. That is what made us distinctly different – our brains; what we could not do with our hands we did it with our brains making machines that could do things hundred times better than hands. So if God created mountains, man discovered dynamite to blow them up and make roads, if God created oceans, man discovered ships to traverse the waters and if God created disease man made the Doctor.

With the power to heal, the Doctor became a small God unto itself. The ability to produce children every time he copulated made mankind grow exponentially. Compound that with the profound desire to prolong his life, newer diseases on the horizon and a very complex human body, it was but natural that the Doctor would always be a rare and highly revered species.

The Doctor to his credit really tried to stay human but with all his patients regularly expressing gratitude, most of them overtly and some covertly, he was reminded that he was the next best thing to God, and he ultimately succumbed to the lure and began to suffer from the megalomania. In his hundreds of interactions with his patients daily he started treating them differently. A lot of how he treated them depended on the time of the day, the color of his mood and the availability of time. Slowly, as he began to become more successful and powerful (as a consequence) he forgot that he needed to maintain a checklist for everything he did so that two people suffering from the same problem did not end up being treated differently, that he needed to give them the same level of attention and that he needed to constantly upgrade his knowledge which is what elevated him to that platform of God.

Much of it happened because the Doctor wanted to fulfill the social need to maintain a minimum standard (threshold of minimum standard being much higher than ordinary humans) and still live the life of an ordinary human (getting married and having children and taking care of their future) and complacency. Without realizing he was, but naturally, out of control of his time and life.

The human God has disintegrated. Today he is hardly accountable, he does not like to be questioned on his decisions, does not even like to explain his actions and his brand equity is low.

Oh Doctor! How I want you, at least, to be more human and compassionate because not only medicine, love heals too.

PS: This comment is on the state of the profession in general and should not be taken as a comment on the whole community. I know of a few Doctors who try really hard for the well being of their patients.

A friend will keep on changing but the friend will remain with you for life

A friend may disappear when you fall into a problem whereas the friend gets transformed into the friend at the time of the first problem

You will have many a friends but sadly or fortunately very few the friends

You will confuse between a friend and an acquaintance many times but the friend will be just that the friend

A friend will typically be the result of your social circumstances whereas the friend will typically be there inspite of your circumstances

A friend indulges in politics and the friend will shield you from it

The friend will always live without a storage device whereas a friend would not let you forget the need for one (where he stores and constantly fetches what all he has done for you)

Your family may not know a friend but the friend will be a part of that family

And finally you should allow access to all to be a friend but be diligent with who you tag as the friend