Well Played, Clap, Clap......

Disclaimer: Not based on a true story. All characters and dialogues are purely fictional. Any humour is purely incidental and unintentional.

At a Location near you…..A Few Days ago…..On a Lazy Sunday...

He : Hi!

She: Hi!

(Long silence follows)

(He in mind voice: Damn this is so awkward. Talk, talk, what to talk about?)

He : So what do you think?

She : About what?

(He in mind voice: damn woman you know what I am talking about, why make this so hard on me?)

He: hmmm....this arranged marriage thing? You ok with it?

(He in mind voice: with it? IT? Of all the stupid things to say. Why didnt I say with me? ME? Now what will she think?)

She: I guess it’s ok. If it’s ok with everyone, it’s ok with me.

(He in mind voice: uh? Now does that It mean Me or does It mean the whole arranged marriage thing? Why is she so cryptic? Is she playing hard to get? Why are women so frustratingly hard to understand? Ok, let’s underplay it and see where it goes)

He: Thats nice. I mean your being Ok and all. Anyway what do you think about the future? About what we should do I mean?

(He in mind voice: there, that’s out. I have indicated to her so subtly that I am ok with her too. Damn I am so clever, am I not?)

She: you first tell me what you have planned about the future and then I will tell you.

(He in mind voice: Ohoh!! so now we are negotiating are we? Well, its time to roll out my Mother Theresa speech...Yo! Nobel committee- hold that peace prize)

He: Me? I want to serve society. I want to make sure that my talent and education does not go waste. I want to help poor people. To reach those who do not have access to good healthcare because they live in rural areas. I want to and practice my calling, my noble profession in some small town or rural area where there is no adequate medical facilities.

(He in mind voice: There, I have said it with a straight face. Oh wait, she didn’t take me seriously did she? Is that a tear peeking out of the corner of the eye? )

She: Hmm!! good.

(He in mind voice: Good? Just good?  I am outraged...that was an ass-kicking performance even if the audience didn’t clap on cue. Do you know how tough it is not to laugh out hysterically when speaking such douchey dialogues. By rights this was a shoo-in for an Academy Award for Best Actor...dude, where’s my statue?)

He: So, what about you?

She : Well, I want to enjoy life, experience it, I mean. I want to go have adventures, you know?  Trekking in the Alps? Scuba diving in the Bahamas? Go on an Alaska cruise. Go see the Angkor vat temple in Cambodia. I want to experience all of these things. I just want to get on a bike and go riding away into the sunset.

He: (After a thoughtful pause) I see. So this what you plan to do every vacation?

She : Well no...this is what I want to do daily in my life. Not yearly once on annual vacation like boring people.

(He in mind voice: boring people uh? That means the rest of humanity bar you, I guess, you stupid -----)

He: You know who you remind me so much of? Angelina Jolie. In..what was that movie? Ah!! Tomb Raider..you look just like Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider

(He in mind voice: yeah! Especially that part where the robot bashes her skull in. That would account for the previous statement you made)

She: Thank you. A lot of my friends have also said I am like that only.

(He in mind voice: And you believed them? Never realized they were simply having fun at your expense? How stupid can you get?)

He: (in neutral voice) : So, how do you plan to do this? Going to the Bahamas, Alaska and all will be very costly, you know. All this experiencing adventures stuff will require a lot of finance. Have you made any killing in the stock market recently?

She: (shaking her head) No. That is why I am marrying. In fact that is why I agreed to marry when my parents convinced me. My father does not understand my ambition in life. That’s why I agreed to arranged marriage- as I want my husband to put money in my account and I will take it off the ATM and go have my adventures. How can I enjoy life, if I have to keep working to save money? The best thing for you to do would be to go to your village and serve people, make money and send it through wire transfer to me, wherever I am and then we can both live the life we want.

(He in mind voice: Money one man, enjoys one man, ah? Nice plan...and what do I do alone in the village? Sit around and scratch my itch? You...you..you..Spluttering in outrage...)

He: As to that, let’s talk about that later. You should know that I am very conventional type. I rarely go out. I even go to see a film only once every three years or so. I never take leave from office for vacation also. I am very busy, dedicated type. Dedicated to my profession, I mean. We are total opposites. My life is very routine and boring you know.

(He in mind voice: damn woman, understand. Do I have to spell out everything for you in black and white? Go on...make the connection.)

She: I see....in that case...we have to think on this. I am very adventurous. I don’t like sitting at home, cooking and all.

(He in mind voice: Yes. Yes. Yes. Thank God for that. At last. My hard-earned bank account is safe.)

He: hmm..that’s what I was thinking too. We wouldn't sync. I am a very conservative and chauvinistic type you know. I would expect my wife to do all the work at home while I work all the time at the hospital. I also want a dozen kids, half a dozen of this and another half a dozen of that, you know, boys and girls, I love children, they are very special...and..and...(Should shut up and stop babbling in fright)

She: Really? You want that many?

(He in mind voice: that’s it...go on..go on..say it..say NO, no?..please...don’t make me beg)

She: Well, I will think about this and let you know. You too think about it, ok? Take your time.

(He in mind voice: its 'Bout time. As if I need more time to think.)

He : OK..see you then...have a nice life, adventuring all over the world. Send me some picture postcards from wherever you go. Bye see ya.

(He in mind voice: Run Forrest Run.....)

Later.....a Long Time Later....

(He in Mind Voice: why do I have a nasty suspicion that I was played totally like a fool? Right from the beginning?)

Genes, Clones and the Quest for Immortality

Genes, Clones and the Quest for Immortality

I happened to have a cup of coffee at the canteen with a friend from anesthesia, for I have a habit of hanging out with people from different specialties every day, in the hope of keeping up with the latest news. Medicine is so fragmented with specialties and sub-specialties that it’s difficult to stay current (however much you read) with what’s happening in everything unless you get a distilled synopsis from different specialists on what’s the latest treatments going on in their field. And that’s how I wound up talking to my anesthetist friend this morning about the recent news in Lancet of people retaining memory of what was happening to them under anesthesia and the resultant post traumatic stressful effects causing unexplained depression years later. As usual with such talks the topic veered around to the basics- what really is anesthesia? Is it a deep sleep or near death? Both descriptions are not enough so the truth lies somewhere in-between, as no one including anesthetists, can say what exactly happens when a human mind loses its consciousness. As the stages of anesthesia get deeper and deeper the human mind goes to a level of near death where its kept hovering by the drugs being given and when the mind recovers from general anesthesia it is as near an experience as regaining life from the brink of death and a far more different experience than just waking up from deep sleep.

And that turned my mind to the intriguing question of immortality. Throughout human history we have wondered whether we can extend our lives, if not to become truly immortal. A lot of legends and myths run on the quest for immortality from the garden of Eden to the fountain of youth to the cup of life. But leaving aside myths and allegories, when we see it on a purely scientific basis are we finally at a stage where death is not commonplace (and accepted easily) anymore? With our current scientific and medical advances, are we at a stage where we can cheat death, so to say. When we intentionally take a person to the brink of death and bring him back are we not we already at a point of controlling death

To simplify it further, what is death to you? To answer my own question when we talk of death we mean a simple thing - stopping of breathing and stopping of the heartbeat. Like when someone suffers a heart attack and stops breathing and the heart goes silent. But with a machine called the ventilator to give artificial breathing we can even restore the breathing of someone who has stopped breathing on their own. And even if our heart stops working on its own, with a machine called the heart-lung machine to hook us up to, we can restore blood circulation to our body till a donor heart is found and transplanted and that can keep us going for a pretty long time. So can we say that as we have got our breath back and our new heart has started pumping, we have gone beyond accepting death as finality?

And that brings us next to loss of consciousness in brain death or coma- when a persons brain stops working due to lack of oxygen supply to the brain. As everyone knows if we starve the brain for more than 5-7 mins without oxygen the brain cells start dying and all our memories are erased with those cell deaths. But recent research has shown that there is even more damage when the brain starts getting oxygen back after an absence - called reperfusion injury and caused by the toxic gas oxygen and its free radicals which damages the mitochondria, a small sac-like thing inside each cell which is responsible for making use of oxygen to produce energy for running the cell. If we can somehow prevent the oxygen free radicals (by anti-oxidants at cell level?) from damaging the brain cells then we can revive a brain dead patient and restore him to the living as good as new with perfect memory. That’s a kind of an immortality too isn’t it? Waking the mentally dead? Like in the movie The Mummy?

 Which brings me to cloning. If you don’t know the word, it means taking a single cell from someone and making a completely new person with it. It’s been done with rats, with sheep and with cattle. But not with humans- till now. Or at least not legally (or atleast not as far I have heard- but who knows what’s happening in North Korea?). But the major problem with cloning is, even if you clone yourself, you only get a physical being who looks like you but without your memories or your thoughts or experiences. So unless we find some way to download our memories onto a supercomputer for restoring back to our new bodies which are cloned again, our memories which make up our self-awareness maybe lost forever. So even if our bodies are immortal our minds may not be, which is not what we claim by true immortality is it?

 And human cloning also raises certain hard ethical questions. As they say in warfare- no perfect plan survives contact with the real world, similarly cloning ourselves for immortality is a fine concept but there are lots of armchair theorists (of the Hollywood scriptwriter style) who suggest that cloning will lead to a new form of slavery where instead of just personal cloning, commercial cloning will become available for a price. It’s just a matter of time before some celebrities start selling their clones (or just their cells) for a huge price. So if you ever fancied an Hollywood celebrity you can buy as perfect a physical copy of her as you want and keep at home. Why stop at ogling the kingfisher calendar girls? You can buy the whole damn set, the clones of the girls and keep them at home. This is just an extreme example but you never know about the future and the possible real world applications of scientific discoveries, do you? The Internet was invented as a military communications system to survive a nuclear first strike, look at what it has turned into now.

There is a popular joke in cloning called the taj mahal paradox which states that if cloning had been around in shahjehans time, we would never had the taj mahal because shahjehan would have cloned his wife Mumtaz for the first time at 20 years of age and by the time he turned forty (twenty years later) he would have had a new 20 year old Mumtaz to play around with for another twenty years (you cannot accelerate physical growth- so it still takes time), and if he cloned her again and again he can have a new 20 year old mumtaz maybe every ten years or every five years or whenever he wanted- a like replacement for like. And you think he could have got around to building anything leave alone had time to think? So there goes the Taj, once you have cloning.

So what if we don’t want to replace our entire selves? But just do patch work repairs of worn out organs? Isn’t that possible with stem cells you ask? Yes. We can do the new organs for old thing pretty soon. Organ replacements are of two types. The first is building up a entirely new organ from the ground up (using your own stem cells) and the second is stripping an anonymous donor organ off its original cells (leaving just the supporting framework behind) and replacing them with your personal cells which means the organ you get fits you perfectly as if it’s yours. The second type of cell replacement technology is currently available but the other type of growing a new and entirely your own organ is still not available with our current science. But we should get there soon. With the speed of research in stem cell technology, in just a few more years we can have tailor made organs from our own cells. And then we can just replace damaged parts and retain our own overall body and mind. Not real immortality, but something halfway to it.

And finally we should realize that there are some true immortals walking around among us. Or leastwise people who get as close to immortality as possible- the long lived ones, the genetically fortunate ones with robust immune systems- whom nothing kills easily. Forget all the claptrap of the dietary recommendations- people who live long eat the Mediterranean diet with lots of olive oil, the French diet with lots of red wine, the Japanese diet with lots of fish liver oil. Everything is just a myth. There are people among us, walking around unrecognized amidst us, who could eat toxic nuclear waste and survive somehow. They can and do smoke continuously, eat whatever they want, never exercise, have unprotected sex with any number and rarely die of anything except old age. These people are from the deep end of the genetic pool, the blessed original genes of the homo sapiens species with the minimal number of harmful mutations and recessive genes. Their natural immune systems would put any billion dollar defense system to shame. Anything and everything which attacks their body is cleared up without a fuss.  Their immune system eats up bacteria and viruses and allergens and cancer cells with rarely a sweat. And if you are the type of person who goes down with pneumonia when someone sneezes in a room full of people, the best gift you can give your next generation is to marry as far from your own genetic pool as possible. When it comes to genes, the bigger the diversity of your gene pool the better. If you are an Asian marry a Caucasian, if you are a Caucasian marry a Mongoloid, if you are a Mongoloid marry an African. Diversify your genetic alleles to give them the best chance to survive.

And for those not born with fortunate genes, the only way for immortality is to hope science catches up with science fiction soon. Or to find that fountain of youth in Eldorado. Or Amrut from Indralok.

P.s. Pics courtesy Google Images

Run Woman Run, Don’t Stay To Fight

A couple days ago, I accidentally happened to notice a flyer stuck on the gym wall a grandiose announcement for a one day self defense course to protect women from male predators and asking a lot of money for a single days training camp in kick boxing for women. I suppose that it was to be expected that people would try and cash in on all the outrage after the Delhi rape incident, try to make  money out of women’s fears. But offering to train someone in just one day to defend themselves, especially in such a hard discipline like kick boxing smells like an out and out scam to me. You pays your money and we takes it and run is the modus operandi of these scamsters. And usually I have no sympathy for the fools who fall for such things and fail to look beyond their noses. But this time, I am slightly worried that all these self defense scams which are springing up all over the city are going to give women a false sense of confidence in themselves and they would opt to fight rather than choose flight when faced with a sexual predator. Dont take me wrong, I am not being gender insensitive or being overly misogynistic in advocating that women run from rapists. If you feel that way about me, please stop reading this post now and go do something else. But if you are interested in reading my reasons please bear with me while I take my time to explain.

Whether you are a man or woman when faced with a violent person it is absolutely no shame to turn away from a confrontation. You need not fight when there is an option to escape from there. Violence should be resorted to as a last option, when there is no other option left to save yourself. And consider this carefully-ALL THE TRAINING IN THE WORLD DOES NOT PREPARE YOU FOR SUDDEN UNPROVOKED VIOLENCE. Please read the previous sentence again and again. For thats the carry home message from this post. If you see from the Delhi incident the girl was attacked by six violent men carrying weapons. To fight someone who carries a dangerous weapon can only be done by Bruce Lee or Jet Li. Ordinary mortals will get stabbed every single time, even if they have brown belts and black belts by the dozen. Kick boxing, karate, judo and all other kinds of martial arts prepare one to fight in tournaments (for points) with carefully made rules and watching referees to prevent injuries. They cannot equip you to fight a sudden assault on a dark empty street, especially when the numbers are overwhelmingly against you. Street fighting is an art. Its not acquired in fitness centers or in martial arts classes. And more than anything else it requires rage, a blind heedless rage to fling yourself unthinkingly into battle where running is not an option. But if you do have the option to run away, take it. Run. Don’t worry about being called a coward. Discretion is the better part of valor. Be safe first. Swallow your pride. It won’t help you survive. Be practical.

My first brush with street fighting was in my younger days, my school days, courtesy my large and extended family. When you have a bunch of male cousins (macho fellows at that), you cannot escape being dragged into fights whether you want to or not. Elder cousin brothers have a way of getting the younger involved in all the feuds they pick up merely because you belong to the family. When the blood calls you have to go, you cannot refuse family. Growing up in an extended family, I had a large bunch of male cousins (me being the youngest) who used to get involved in fights often, sometimes for no reason at all and whenever someone heard that yet again one of our cousins was involved in a fight somewhere, the call would go out and we would all rush (or be dragged along unwillingly in my case) to join the fight in a general free-for all on the principle that if you hurt one of the family, you hurt all of the family. There would be guys there who wouldn’t talk to us in the normal course of things, cousins from distant branches of the family who wouldn't step into our house due to long standing family feuds, but they would be there, they and their friends (or whoever was with them when they first heard the news), fighting for the family and walking away silently when it was all over, without accepting a word of thanks from this branch of the family. They weren't fighting for us, my eldest cousin would say, they were fighting for the family name. You hurt one – you hurt all -a concept which I found hard to understand as a young kid.

I remember one fight in particular, from so long ago. My chinna-annan or my youngest elder (cousin) brother, once got into a fight with some guy who was supported by a bunch of tough guys from a different area, over an illegal drag racing (bike racing) escapades in the streets. When he came to our street for reinforcements the only unfortunate who had the bad luck to fall into his clutches was yours truly. I was sitting at home reading some comic book about archie dreaming off ronnie (archie comics anyone?) when I was dragged off (kicking and screaming in protest) to a mechanic shed in a nearby area for a no holds barred street fight. My brother and I were outnumbered- there were half a dozen of that area guys there- street-toughs, ready to thrash the two of us for invading into their locality. My brother as was his wont, recklessly went in fists flailing and reluctantly I joined in, even though the odds were two to one against us, all the while kicking myself that I hadn't been able to avoid getting embroiled in a fight for no discernible reason at all. The fight was hot, brief and as regular street fights go it was a brutal anything goes type- you could kick, punch, bite, butt, push, trip, anything at all. By and by, things seemed to slacken a bit. Of course when you are in the middle of something hot and are getting thrashed here, there and everywhere, you don’t take the time off to look around you. Its only when it’s all over, you lean panting with breathlessness, half bent clutching your stomach and look around you. And to say I was surprised was to state it mildly. The reason those toughs had broken and run (in their own area) was because the odds were now two to one against them. Unnoticed by me, by the time the fight was at its most earnest, a lot of my cousin brothers and a few friends of theirs had come up there and had joined in with us. No wonder we weren't slaughtered as I fully expected going in but came home with every organ intact. And I vowed to myself, that never again would I let a false sense of family obligation drag me into such stupid situations, a vow I made many times in my life but somehow never kept.

The reason I share all these long personal anecdotes is to drive home the message that however much prepared and trained to fight you are, still all that training cannot give you the slightest preparation of what it actually feels like at the time of the threat- the spine chilling fear you feel when you have to fight for your life. A few years ago, in a moment of temporary insanity, I went and gave in my name for a mixed martial arts tournament. Despite joining a training academy with a kick ass coach who made me as ready as I could ever be, I only have memories (nightmares) left now of the sheer horror of each bout I fought in. Every single opponent looked like a 7ft tall giant with arms as long as an octopus and who was ready to kick my ass from the moment the bell rang for the round. It was sheer fright, blood chilling terror to fight round after round and to survive being massacred and thrown round the ring like a doll. And this was in a safe and controlled environment with referees and judges watching and  there was no chance of being killed or mutilated all alone.

Think how it would be when you are suddenly surprised on a dark street corner and have to decide in a split second whether you should stay to try out your new and expensive martial arts training acquired in a one day workshop or whether you should just turn and run as fast as you can. Me, if given a chance would turn and run like Usain Bolt was after me. I would rather be a live coward than a dead hero. And I say with this absolutely no shame. You pick and choose your fights, pick and chose when and where to fight if you want to survive. There is no ego or pride involved in running away when the odds are against you. You merely live to fight another day. You cannot for instance, despite whatever martial arts training you have (and I have had plenty in different disciplines) fight with more than three persons at a time. If you are not prepared, even one is too many. Just turn and run. Survive for now. Think with your brain instead of your heart.

And finally, I come to the vexing question of firearms. One of my friends, lets call him K, was a very strong proponent of guns and how being armed would help prevent crime. I remember quoting to him a line from Ian Flemings James Bond novel “the man with the golden gun” where bond says that men compensate with big guns for their physical deficiency in other areas. This was when my friend Krish was living in Russia and we were discussing whether he should buy a .32 caliber gun as he favored or a mere .22 which I recommended as more than enough for close work- when threatening any would-be muggers who would be standing as close as possible. After many months of carrying around the gun Krish finally got the chance he was looking for, a chance to use the gun. He was mugged on a dark rainy day (in Moscow most days are like that it seems) and when we chatted about the incident later, he told me the thief had taken everything, everything on him. When I asked him why he hadn't shown the thief the gun, he told me plaintively that he had and the thief had taken it too. Right out of his hands. He had simply frozen in fright when the moment came. So even owning a gun doesn’t make you safe, if you are not mentally prepared to use it. And hence people who say that women should carry guns with them to prevent getting raped, should also consider whether the woman is psychologically prepared to use it if needed. Mere threatening wouldn't work; it might just increase the danger and force the criminals to respond with more and immediate violence. Remember they are used to casual violence (split second violence on a whim)while we as law abiding citizens are not and we tend to think things through and hem and haw and procrastinate. If we hesitate, that single moment of hesitation will be fatal for us- they won’t hesitate to stab you. So unless you are prepared to stab someone, don’t carry a knife and unless you are prepared to shoot someone, don’t carry a gun. You will only be hurting yourself if you do.

So, to conclude, I come back to my original advice, the premise of this entire post. Dont trust your life to all these fly-by-night operators who advertise martial arts training. Take precautions. Use commonsense. Avoid getting caught in compromising situations alone. But if caught in one unavoidably, just turn and run. Run like hell. Don’t freeze. Don’t stop and think. There is no shame in running. Get the hell out of there and stay safe. The Delhi Rape victim had no choice. But if you have a choice to escape– use it wisely.

And thank me later for this advice.

P.S. This advice equally applies to men.