Some serious advice

This is an ‘advice’ piece I wrote for the students of Jubilee Mission Medical College, for their magazine: When your Editor and my good friend Harsha Annie Mathew asked me to write something inspirational for young doctors and medical students I was flabbergasted. That is because I consider myself a young doctor. So the suggestion […]

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Whirlpools and languages:

In 1938, Richard Archibald, an explorer, penetrated the interior of New Guinea and was surprised. Who wouldn’t be? Everyone sort of knew that the area was uninhabited. But it turned out that nestled in the valleys between two rows of mountains, were 50000 aboriginal people, speaking approximately thousand different languages. An area one tenth the […]

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The Fatal Gap

‘Wow!’ I exclaimed, looking at my friend’s flat. “What did you do with the bottles and the cigarette cases?” His uncle and aunt were visiting. They will report back to his parents. My friend had cleaned up his living room. Years of accumulated muck had vanished. I congratulated him. How did he manage it? It […]

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When a Calling dies.

I just read Paul Kalanithi’s ‘when breath becomes air’.  Some had told me that it was inherently depressing. What is joyous about death? Especially when it is about death that is imminent, untimely and destroys a life full of promise? Yet we are all potential Kalanithis. May be I should say were? He was thirty […]

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