Vyaar eye vaas till now...

A long time ago, kbpm had suggested that I should post on my blog any JIPMER-ian anecdotes I might have to narrate. Life in JIPMER was chock full of amusing incidents. I’d like to share them, but first, let me tell you why I was there in Pondicherry in the first place.

It’s common knowledge that today, there aren’t enough audiologists and speech language pathologists (ASLPs) to provide screening, diagnostic and therapeutic services to all those who need it. We need people to screen newborns, help identify communication disorders as early as possible, counsel, suggest methods of intervention, and such like, but there just aren’t enough people to do it. Also, it takes time (and money) to produce ASLPs. So, as a way to create greater manpower, 1-year diploma programs and short term courses were introduced. Those who completed these courses would aid ASLPs in their job, carry out the work that required only a basic knowledge in the field, and spread themselves out all over the country, thereby ‘reaching out to the nation’ (heh. That’s our Institute’s new motto).

It was with this very intention that the Diploma in Hearing, Language and Speech (DHLS) was started. The program is amazing in that all the classes are conducted through video conferencing. The parent institute, in Mysore, conducts classes that are relayed to DHLS classrooms in Imphal, Mumbai, Delhi and Pondicherry simultaneously. Students in all centres can see and hear each other, interact with each other as well as the lecturer, take down notes while the lecturer scribbles on an electronic whiteboard… The whole thing is quite well thought out and cool.

But something tells me the DHLS program isn’t going to be a big success. I was there in Pondicherry to help out with program coordination and practical classes for the DHLS students. I also got to set tests, correct papers, give assignments, so on and so forth. It was while correcting the answer scripts of the first test that I realized that in spite of all that cool technology and the good lecturers and clear, easily understandable text books, DHLS wasn’t working. S and I corrected the papers together, and we laughed so hard, we nearly fell off our chairs. Here are some of the most ridiculous answers we came across:

Q: Name the three bones in the middle ear.

A: Reflection, refraction, fraction

(Bones in the middle ear? Really? We’d told them if they can’t remember the words malleus, incus and stapes, they should go for hammer, anvil and stirrup. One girl had answered ‘hammer, nail and striup’. We gave her half the marks. But fraction?)

Q: How would you check for the presence of nasal air escape?

A: Put your finger inside the patient’s pharynx and say ‘mmmmm’

(Why do you have to put your finger inside the pharynx to check for nasal air escape? Just hold it in front of the nose! The patient might really not be comfortable if someone sticks a finger in their throat. And it’s even weirder if the someone goes ‘mmmmm’!)

Q: What complications, during the delivery of a child, could cause the child to develop language disorders later in life?

A: Parents marrying related people

(What kind of parents are these, I wonder, who run around ‘marrying related people’ during the delivery of their kid? The student meant consanguineous marriage, by the way. Ok, it might cause a language problem, but it doesn’t take place at the time of delivery, does it?)

Q: Write an essay on why hearing is important in daily life.

A: Hearing is important because it is an interpret. If hearing we can music TV, Sun TV, Jaya TV, Vijay TV, Sun Music, Poghigai and movie musics also, and many radios like Surya and Big.

(You can also hear Star Plus and HBO and Pogo and DD Bangla, but it so happens they don’t watch these in Pondicherry. Sigh.)

Q: The 12 pairs of nerves that originate within the skull are called _________.

A: Brainial nerves

(Impressive, really. The cranial nerves, after all, do originate somewhere in the brain. Why shouldn’t they be called the brainial nerves? This answer got half a mark too. We’re extremely generous)

There were two other coordinators… Mr. T, a very annoying, very stupid, very exasperating kaamchor, and Ms. T (they’re not related), whose life’s mission was to feed us as much kizhangu (tapioca) as she could, and who abhorred Mr. T. She was quite sweet, really. She, unlike Mr. T, was open to new ideas, was willing to accommodate any changes or corrections we made in the way therapy sessions were conducted, and never claimed to know everything. Which Mr. T did. Which irritated us no end.

But to his credit, Mr. T was funny. Of course, he didn’t intend to, but he was ridiculously funny. He always spoke English, albeit badly. One afternoon, G and I were sitting at a table in one corner of the DHLS classroom and reading. Suddenly, Mr. T burst into the room and, gesticulating energetically, spoke to G.

T: Vyaar are you!

G: (blink blink)

T: Vyaar? Vyaar are you?

G: Uhm… I’m here!

T: Yes, but vyaar are you? (poor guy sounds really distraught)

G: T? I’m right here!

T: Yes. No. In the ago.

G: Huh?

T: (flapping his arms) Ago! Ago!

The conversation went on in this vein for a few minutes before he asked, “Morning… in the ago… vyaar are you?” Then we got it. We could barely keep our faces straight as G answered, “Oh. We were in the OT in the morning. Fridays… Surgery…” and we quickly made our way out of the room, where we collapsed in a fit of laughter.

There’s more, but I’ll put them up sometime later. This should hold for now...

I'm back... post-internship!

Before the commencement of our internship year, we’d been told that each of us would be posted in three cities, for a total duration of five months. Alone. Of course, that didn’t go down too well with us. We were sure we’d end up like those despos who punch out a random mobile number and call or send annoying text messages like, “Hai. I don’t kno f ur guy or gal, but I m alone. Will u b ma fren?” So we decided to have a meeting with our Director and voice our protests.

Have a meeting, we did. We asked her to increase our monthly stipend. She agreed. We asked her to cancel postings in Sonitpur and Nalbari, Assam (because we were afraid our classmates posted there would be gunned down by the ULFA). She, being the very soul of generosity, said she couldn’t just cancel postings like that, but if we got shot, she’d let us come back without completing that term. How sweet.

Don’t make us go alone, we said. At least send the girls in pairs, the guys said. She just laughed. We said we’d have to spend so many hours sobbing on the phone (STD calls, mind you), that our monthly stipend wouldn’t cover even a part of our phone bills. We told her we’d end up having everything from depression to multiple personality disorder. We shouted. We pleaded. She just smiled and said that all that time alone would lead to self discovery and deep introspection, that it was all for our good. Discussion closed, have a good day. With that, she regally swept out of the room, leaving us either gaping like fish or sighing resignedly (some even wore sardonic I-told-you-so looks).

It was decided that for the first term (five months), half the batch would work here in the Institute, while the other half went on their ‘outside postings’. At the end of those five months (and a 15-day break), the two halves of the batch would switch places. I won’t even try to explain how they worked out the whole who-goes-where-when… It’s immensely complex.

It was only when the first batch went out on their ‘outside postings’ that things began to change. Nalbari got flooded, so postings there were cancelled. Sonitpur was going through a mildly violent phase of random stabbing and minor bomb blasts, so that was cancelled too. They couldn’t find the students any accommodation in Mehboobnagar or Narindernagar, so those were taken off the list. Postings in Gujarat were cancelled for no apparent reason, and those posted there were transferred to Vellore. In some place near Barabunki, the students were told to get out of there unless they wanted to be sent home in body bags. Apparently, it’s the kind of places where people carry revolvers in their hip pockets and use them when they can’t find the right words to make their point. So, surprise surprise, postings there were cancelled too!

With fewer places to cover, we could now be posted in twos and threes. Excellent! I was still going to be with my buddies, but in Vellore. It must’ve been a real headache for the internship coordinator, what with everyone giving him a list of their preferences, then changing their minds, then changing their minds again… Poor guy! But almost everyone got what they wanted (or so I think).

I thoroughly enjoyed my first few months of my internship. I learned to make paper rockets (that’s right… I hadn’t known how till recently!), I read novels between therapy sessions, I often sat and sang songs in the clinic with a bunch of friends, I downed two cups of disgusting coffee at the canteen everyday, I went around screening newborn babies for hearing loss, I made an ear mould (and a shiny transparent heart, using the same acrylic material) for myself… Then came Annual Day. I had a lot of fun then, too. I was in four of the cultural programs and had to spend so much time rehearsing that one lecturer asked me if I actually intended to kill myself. But I had a great time, and the dances came out beautifully too. And yeah, I survived. It was just brilliant!

A couple of months before my ‘inside postings’ would end, the internship coordinator said Pondicherry had been added to the list of postings, and he needed two volunteers to go there. He then gave us an outline of the kind of work we’d be doing. A teaching job at JIPMER for two months! Of course I’d go! I volunteered, as did my friend S, and we got to spend October and November in Pondicherry. I already told you all about the places we saw there…

After a vacation that lasted 15 days, I went back to Pondicherry, but this time, with D and G. A, R and S, all of whom I love very much, were in Vellore, so I didn’t miss them very much. In the last week of January, my postings in Pondicherry ended, and G and I came to Adukkamparai, Vellore. Tiny village, really. There’s the hospital where we worked, a bakery (that sells, in addition to what bakeries usually sell, everything from paper to shampoo to mosquito repellant. One can even send couriers from there), a ‘gents parlar’, a few gaadis vending fruit and a seedy looking wine shop a little way off. There must be houses somewhere, but I didn’t see them.

Now, after spending three months in Adukkam-boring-parai, I’m home. I look deep-fried and my rear end has gone numb after 9315km of bus-journeying (over the past 7 months). Sure, internship was great fun, but am I sorry it’s all over? Not at all! After all, east or west, home’s best!

More of Pondicherry... Now, the Botanical Garden!

I first came to know of the Pondicherry Botanical Garden while reading Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. But a visit to this ‘heritage site’ of Pondicherry turned out to be a huge disappointment. Apart from the graceful entrance and a few boards that spoke of the garden’s history and ‘Importance of the Botanical Garden!’ (every sentence on the board ended with a !), and a sculpture of two bulls, there isn’t really anything worth seeing here.

The Pondicherry Botanical Garden is 181 years old, and the only one on the East Coast. According to one of the boards, it houses several tree species… Evergreen, semi-evergreen, tropical dry evergreen, deciduous, ornamental trees, fruit-bearing trees, and trees of medicinal and economic value. The board also claims that the rare and endangered Cynometra ramiflora is found exclusively here, and nowhere else. Apparently, one can also see specimen of Khaya senegalensis (native to Africa) and massive forms of Pittosporum floribundum, Spondias pinnala, Enterolobium cyclocarpum, Pterocarpus marsupium and Alstonia scholaris. We saw tamarind, teak, mahogany, palm and cannon-ball trees. We looked for Cynometra, pretty much scoured the botanical garden for it, but couldn’t find it.

In Life of Pi, there is a mention of a toy train that stops at two stations, Roseville and Zootown, whose name I have forgotten. There really is a toy train that runs through the botanical garden, but it has more than two stations, one of them being Fernhill. And I were somewhat surprised to see the train full of college students, roughly our age, hooting and whistling whenever the train passed through a tunnel, making an unbearable din even otherwise.

But oblivious to all that noise, under almost every tree, there slept a person (sometimes even a small family). Wherever we looked, we saw homeless people dozing in the afternoon heat, the trees providing some respite from the relentless sun. It’s really not the sight one expects to see at a botanical garden. There was an information centre, filled with sleeping people. Some families have set up home and are living in the botanical garden… we saw mini-kitchens and clotheslines where we should have seen exotic trees.

There’s a greenhouse (it was locked), a rose garden (we didn’t see any roses) and a ‘musical dancing fountain’ (which hadn’t played for years, by the look of it). As we walked past each ‘attraction’, not the least bit interested but still clicking away on the camera, a small gang of guys followed us around, muttering in Tamil and wolf-whistling. “Zoology students, da… Can’t you see how interested they are in plants?”, one Whatte asked another (what is a Whatte, did you ask? I shall explain in the end). I was tempted to turn around and tell him that a botany student would very probably be more interested in plants than a zoology student, but I wasn’t about to start an argument with a bunch of Whattes when we were outnumbered 3 to 1.We scooted out of there as fast as we could, and found better sights to see.

By the way, I went through the history of the Botanical Garden. There’s no mention of a zoo anywhere there :P

Soon after our rather sad tour of the Pondicherry Botanical Garden, that too on an unbearably hot day, we found a nice ice cream parlour on Nehru Street and gorged on delicious Choco-mint Sundaes. That, I believe, was the best part of the day!

Now, what a whatte is:

The word is derived from “What a (guy)!!!”, pronounced rather badly. A Whatte is essentially a wannabe dude… The look-at-me-I’m-so-cool type. The kind of guy who swings his arms with excessive energy as he walks (or struts) and holds them at a rather odd angle, away from his body. The kind with chunky steel accessories and overgelled hair of an unbecoming colour. The kind that ogles. Get it?

Go with the flow...

That's what X always told me to do... Go with the flow. I took her advice. I'm now caught in a current, unable to get out of it, and being swept towards that big waterfall right there...

It all began with one harmless fancy. I wondered what it'd be like to take the GRE. So, the last time i was home, I went out and bought PrincetonReview's 'Cracking the GRE'. I had no intentions of actually taking the exam... I just wanted to see what the big deal was about GRE.

I was wrong. One thing led to another- since I can actually prepare for the GRE, why not take it? Since I'm taking the GRE, why not apply to a couple of Univs abroad? Ah. You want to apply? Sure, go ahead. Get your transcripts ready. Get your essay written. Find professors who'd willingly write recommendation letters for you. NACES. Financial documents. Bank statements. TOEFL. So on and so forth. All because of one harmless book.

Sorry, this isn't really a post. Just a very lengthy and vague excuse for not putting up anything new on my blog for a while. I WON'T be blogging for several weeks more, there's that too.

In essence, I'm busy, and shall be unable to update my blog. That's all!

A Cockroach Ride

In a previous post, I narrated a rather memorable bus journey. It appears that buses aren’t the only providers of action… Last Sunday, D, G and I were on our way back to JIPMER from the beach, in one of those shared autos (a k a Cockroaches). The Cockroach was packed to the fullest extent possible, and I was crammed between G and a woman with four young kids. Right behind me, his back against mine, sat the driver of the Cockroach. We’d just started off when a fight broke out between the woman with the four kids and the driver. She refused to purchase tickets for her kids, saying they were all too young to count. The driver pointed out that no matter what their age, they took up space, because only kid sat on her lap while the other three sat on the seats, so she would do well to pay up. She refused.

The argument, inevitable as it was, began. The driver pulled over, turned around to face the woman, and began yelling. She yelled back. There was quite a shouting match going on. “Shut up! Shut UP! SHUT UP!!!”, he hollered. “YOU shut up!”, she hollered back. Another woman, ostensibly a friend of the one with four kids, hollered “SHUT UP!” at nobody in particular. Since I was caught right in the middle of the fight, literally, squashed between the warring parties, I was deafened by the “SHUT UP”s and also generously sprayed with spit. Ew ew ew. After shouting for several more minutes, everyone DID shut up, though both the driver and the women continued to mutter rather unintelligibly.

And then, quite suddenly, an oldish woman right at the back of the Cockroach said something about mothers not ‘keeping their kids to themselves’ (rough translation, that one). The mother of four sprang up from her seat (quite a feat, considering the Cockroach was CRAMMED with people (and four kids, of course) and slapped the oldish woman- SMACK!!! Soon there was a string of Tamil profanities that I can’t translate to English, and even if I could, I wouldn’t have been able to put those words in a post on my blog.

Soon, they came to blows. First they beat each other, trying to do their best, what with the limited space and lack of light. I received a few blows on my back. We decided it was high time we got off the Cockroach. The last I saw, each woman was trying to pull the other’s hair out. I thought of all those seemingly pointless questionnaires I’ve answered… You know, the ones that carry questions like

If you came across two people fighting, you would

1. Stop and watch
2. Try to pull them apart
3. Try to make them see reason and stop fighting
4. Just let them be and get out of there as soon as possible

I’d always answered either B or C (though option C doesn’t make any sense, really). But I now realize that it’s a LOT more important that I save my own back. I DID try option B, albeit half-heartedly, but I got kinda hurt in the process. From now on, it shall be D. Always.

Well, thanks to that catfight, we had to get down MILES from JIPMER and then walk most of the way. As a result, we were late for dinner, and missed the Gulab Jamun that had been prepared as the Weekend Special…. Sigh.

The City of Dawn

‘There should be somewhere on earth, a place which no nation could claim as its own, where all human beings of good will who have a sincere aspiration, could live freely as citizens of the world and obey one single authority, that of the Supreme Truth; a place of peace, concord and harmony…’

Reading that was enough to make me fall in love with Auroville, a utopian settlement a little to the north of Pondicherry. This alluring universal town was founded in 1968 by Mother Mirra Alfassa, the chief disciple of Sri Aurobindo Ghosh, as a ‘laboratory of evolution’. Here, a city has been created where all persons can live in freedom and peace, rising above all petty politics, caste, creed, and nationality, in unity and international understanding.

On February 28th of 1968, Auroville, or the City of Dawn, was inaugurated, when youth from 128 nations placed a fistful of their native soil in a white, lotus-shaped urn near the Matrimandir, representing the creation of a city dedicated to unity and harmony. Today, the city sprawls over 25 square kilometers, comprising of 80 settlements, separated by local villages. The city is planned in the shape of a spiral galaxy, with four zones radiating out from the Matrimandir, which the Mother called the Soul of Auroville.



The site of Auroville was originally a backward and impoverished rural area. Under the French architect Roger Anger, the Aurovillians toiled for twenty years and have succeeded in transforming it into a lush and beautiful settlement, with dense jungles and breathtaking greenery all around. The Aurovillians used only biological farming methods, planted over two million trees and paved all paths with plants. Even now, their primary activities include afforestation, organic agriculture, village development and environmental conservation.

I visited Auroville on a rainy Sunday with a few friends and students. We went straight to the Visitor’s Centre, built of mud blocks and Ferro cement. We spent considerable time looking around, gazing at the pictures in the gallery and reading all about the principles of Auroville, its history, conception, values and activities. After a cup of steaming coffee and a few brownies at the café, we went on to collect the free passes that would allow us to walk to Matrimandir, which our students called the Golden Globe.

Before actually going to Matrimandir, we visited a small information centre, where we learnt that the Matrimandir is erected on four pillars, each one representing an aspect of the Mother. They’re called Mahalakshmi, Mahakali, Mahasaraswathi and Mahaparvathi. The structure of the globe itself is quite interesting. At the heart of Matrimandir is a circular meditation room, with white walls, and white carpeting on the floor. At the centre stands a crystal orb, the largest in the world (about 70 cm in diameter). Around the room are 12 pillars. Through an operculum above, sunlight falls directly on the orb, lighting it up. There is nothing else… No idols, no religion or religious symbols, no writing, no ornate carvings. As the Aurovillians put it, there is nothing except absolute silence, meditation, and Truth. They claim that once inside, nothing matters, except the Supreme Truth. All that one must concentrate on is the play of sunlight on the polished surface of the sphere. Nothing else matters, nothing else is real.

The construction of Matrimandir began in 1971, and is still going on. The inner chamber is now complete, but work is still going on outside. We couldn’t go inside Matrimandir because of the ongoing construction work, and even if that weren’t the case, we would’ve been asked to come back some other time because Matrimandir is open only in the afternoons, and only on weekdays.

After watching a documentary on Auroville and Matrimandir, we collected our passes and walked one kilometer through the Matrimandir gardens (Battery-powered coaches are available for those who can’t walk that far) to the globe. It’s really quite awe-inspiring… like a gigantic blob of gold, surrounded by greenery. Right in front of Matrimandir lies an amphitheatre. And that’s where the urn containing the soil of 128 countries is. Nearby, there’s a huge banyan tree, the geographical centre of Auroville, revered nearly as much as Matrimandir itself.

I was delighted to learn that Auroville has only mud paths, paved with plants. Nearly all the construction here is eco-friendly. All the houses in Auroville are dependent on solar energy. In the kitchen of Auroville, there’s a solar cooker that’s 15 meters in diameter… probably the largest in India. Biogas tanks and solar heaters are commonly used for domestic purposes. There are 30 windmills, 2 wind turbines which pump water, and 100 photovoltaic pumps and a 36 kW photovoltaic power plant. What with all the greenery, energy conservation plans and near-zero pollution, this community must be every environmentalist’s dream come true.

The inhabitants of Auroville are actively involved in educational research, health care, cultural activities, community service, small and medium scale businesses. They have set up workshops and schools, and provide education to a large number of the rural populace. They also have several education centres for the local farmers. Research is on in several fields… organic farming, alternative energy sources, water management, and so on. Meanwhile, they also experiment with issues relating to organization- the process of entry, the economy, decision taking, and other aspects of administration.

All education in Auroville is based on what Sri Aurobindo once said… ‘The first principle of teaching is that nothing can be taught’. Auroville claims that here, children would receive education not so that they can pass exams, obtain certificates or jobs, but so that they can ‘enrich existing faculties and bring forth new ones’. Opportunities to serve the community are considered more important than ranks and titles. Work here is not a way to earn one’s livelihood, but a means to express oneself and develop one’s capacities, while serving the community to the fullest extent possible.

Later, we checked out the Auroville boutique, which sells fine leather, marbled silks, batik textiles, essential oils, aromatherapy bath salts, fragrant candles, pottery, pewter, cards and handmade paper. We then stood watching as a few artists in the Artist’s Camp sketched and painted. Soon, it was time to go. We took one last look around and then headed back to the real world, which, even with all its corruption, communalism, hatred, bigotry and discrimination, isn’t such a bad place after all. But if every place could be like Auroville…


‘…It would be a place where human relationships, which are normally based almost exclusively on competition and strife, would be replaced by relationships of emulation in doing well, of collaboration and real brotherhood…’

Buses, brakes and bald heads

Once again, it's time to leave home. I've spent the last two days pressing, folding and packing. Really, I envy those Bollywood heroines who screech hysterically, "Mein yeh ghar chod ke jaa rahi hoon!" and then just toss a few designer sarees into a designer suitcase rather unceremoniously and strut out of the ghar. Ohhh boy. Not so easy. I know my kind of 'leaving' is slightly different, but still.

Anyway, this time tomorrow, I'll be on a bus to Pondicherry. I generally like journeying by bus. More often than not, a bus ride is anything but uneventful. This leads me to narrate something that happened the last time I was traveling to Pondicherry (Yeah, kinda like Tinkle's 'It Happened To Me', I know)...

I was traveling alone, and I had a window seat in the very nice, very comfortable bus. Sitting right in front of me was a bald, middle-aged man (henceforth referred to as BMM, for convenience's sake), who, soon after the bus started moving, reclined his seat and promptly fell asleep. Every few minutes, he'd wake up and move the back of his seat a little further back. By the time we entered Tamil Nadu, the back of his seat (and his head) was resting against my knee. Bugged, I moved to the next seat which, thankfully, was empty. BMM started to snore, loudly at that. I got bugged-er. I looked around. Everyone else seemed to be asleep too, with the exception of a heavily pregnant lady who was retching into a plastic cover (her second. The first plastic bag was still hanging from the hook on the back of the seat in front of hers) with abandon.

I looked away, and focused all my attention on the snoring BMM. How could I wake him up? Which would be the best, most irritating way of doing so? Okay, I was being unnecessarily mean, but an idle mind is the devil's workshop, remember? I played a game on my cellphone, careful to shine the light on BMM's face. I was contemplating playing a loud and unpleasant ringtone (Mars, or Coconut would've been my choice), when the bus, which had been whizzing along at a remarkable speed, lurched to a sudden halt.

Inertia. I fell forward. Since I'd stowed the arm rest, I quite involuntarily grabbed that which had now taken it's place- BMM's bald head!!! To make matters worse, I'd had my mobile in my hand, and there was a dull THWACK when it made contact with BMM's skull. I withdrew my hand at once and squeaked, "Sorry, sir!", but the damage had been done. I wish I could describe the look (The Look) BMM gave me, but I can't. I won't even try... I'll leave it to your imagination.

Anyway, after that, BMM pulled his seat back into the normal position, I moved back to my own seat, and the pregnant lady stopped puking and threw both plastic bags out. Nothing untoward happened during the rest of the journey.

But the best part was yet to come. I got off the bus right in front of JIPMER, instead of going all the way to the Pondicherry Bus Stand. And guess what? BMM got off too! As we walked through the gates of JIPMER together, another man, a doctor, came striding up to BMM and spoke to him for a while. He called BMM 'Doctor'. So he works there in JIPMER. He's very probably a staff member. Maybe even a big shot... the kind that can pull some major strings.

Dr BMM gave me The Look again, and walked off.