Medical Conditions as depicted in films

1. In case of Multiple Personality Disorder, the transformation from one personality to another is characterized by facial acrobatics that can give Cartoon Network and Jim Carrey [or Animorphs] a run for their money, and special effects that wouldn’t seem out of place in Star Wars.
2. The aforementioned patients speak in tongues and accents hitherto unknown to them.
3. Psychological ailments are always diagnosed in less than a session. If it is spread over many sessions, it always leads to a doctor-patient relationship.
4. Bullet-wounds lead to instantaneous death for the villain [but not before he repeats his catchphrase atleast once, or has conceded defeat]. If much work needs to be done by the hero, no amount of ammunition is enough to stop him from keeping that promise to his bestfriend/fatherinlaw/maa.
5. No loss of blood is too much for the hero who can lose as much blood as a vampire’s 10-course dinner and still manage to dishum-dishum the villain’s cronies [one of whom will be big-bodied and bird-brained], rescue the heroine from the jaws of death [or villain] and kill the villain/hand him over to the authorities.
6. Heart patients can run for miles on end without rest and end up with only a cough or wheeze. Death is never a side-effect.
7. Victims of Cancer always cough out blood, irrespective of the type of cancer or stage at which the disease is.
8. When equipment is unavailable, the hero performs mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the heroine which happens to be a case of Kiss mein kitna hai dum.
9. And this is mostly required in cases of drowning, usually preceded by another exercise to pump out water swallowed in the course of the swim.
10. A knock on the head results in memory loss, loss of mental balance and in extreme cases, amnesia.
11. Other known causes of amnesia and loss of mental balance are near-fatal accidents, near-fatal brushes with the villain, electric shocks, shocking news.
12. The cure is normally a second knock on the head or any of the aforementioned causes. It can also be the sight of an ex-lover, sibling/other family members or the rendition of the family/love song.
13. Hospital stays are never completed for there is always Work [read dishum-dishum] To Be Done outside. And the bandages around the head [with a spot of blood on] or around the wrist pose no problems ever.

Just a general observation: beds have unique L-shaped blankets that cover the woman upto her underarms, but the man next to her only till his waist.
Well, I guess bending medical science to suit the plot only goes on to show that story and script rule in tinseldom after all.

DD-Dear

Recently we suffered a bout of “parents-overconcerned-over-lowscoring-children” at home. Result – cable TV was removed.
Since this happened just before I came home for vacation, I was a little concerned as to how I would spend a really long vacation without cable TV. When I came home, the situation wasn’t very bad. There were two channels – DD news & DD national (with a time slot for DD kannada).
Starved for news, which I hadn’t got since two weeks (because of the exams), I switched on to the news channel first. But I wasn’t very lucky. It got on my nerves in less than five minutes. The grammar is so bad that I felt the readers should attend Subbu’s PC class (Mr Subramanium teaches ‘Professional Communication’ for first year students at NITK). The pronunciation is horrible. They even stray away from their put-on English accent to their desi-English accent once in a while. Disgusted, I ventured into the other channel, which was airing a soap. I was horrified to find that it was a poor imitation of Ekta Kapoor soaps (Imagine!!!). Again, bad pronunciation came to the forefront. The telecast was bad. Unable to take any more, I switched the TV off.
For a fortnight I couldn’t bring myself near the TV. In the mean time, I had done lots of things. I had actually woven a basket from cardboard, read lots of books and the newspaper, cover to cover. I started browsing the net for longer hours (not to forget the time taken to go to the net center, two kilometers away and coming back.). I lost count of the number of times I went out. I even started cleaning home everyday!!! Considering that I couldn’t have done so much if there was cable TV, I think it has been rightly called “The black hole of time”.
After a few days, boredom set in .So, it was back to DD again.. Dear me! I could see DD in a new light. There were lesser dots on the screen. I observed that, even though the soaps were very EK-ish there weren’t so many to make the only-DD-viewers realize its ridiculousness. The NCERT children’s show seemed quite enjoyable (of course it can’t beat my all-time-favorite Cartoon Network). Unlike the latest diet fads of other channels, ‘The health show’ provides useful health tips. The wardrobe of the cast in every show is quite elegant.
Even the news channel has a variety. The consecutive news airs of the same language are not facsimile of each other. There is separate news reporting all kinds of activities. There is a weekly show on the various cultural activities going on in India. Over all even though the presentation is drab, the news is not very biased.
With the entry of cable TV in the 90s, most of us have forgotten DD. DD itself hasn’t been able to keep up with the other channels either with respect to content or with respect to technological advancements. Nevertheless we should not forget it was with DD that television was introduced to the masses. Shows like Osheen, Surabhi, etc., had proved eye-openers to many of us. I feel with a dash of creativity, DD could perform better than it ever has.
Looking into mirror, I can observe the faint traces of something inexplicable that I see on the faces of the only DD viewers, on mine.

Colonized in my living room!

We are, according to a very eminent author I read recently, living in an era of Coca-Colonization. So it came as no big surprise to me when I realized that our favourite , sorry, favorite soaps are not the desi saas-bahu sob stories, but Uncle Sam’s tattle tales. Not Kkusum, but Caroline, not Saans, but Sex and the City. No, I didn’t take a TN-Sofres mode survey, but just a random one on a friendship portal called Orkut [yet another Yankee one].
Which brings me to think: why does the US of A so dominate our entertainment?
The only answer that comes to my mind is that the Indian entertainment industry doesn’t really cater to the Multiplex Audience [a term coined by the Indian English media to describe the Angrezi speaking crowd]. Which it should, considering that we are not just a niche audience anymore, what with our growing numbers as more and more youngsters come under the call-center umbrella with phirang accents that don’t seem so phirang anymore.
Let’s face it, English IS our national language. If not, why don’t Bollywood films roll titles in Hindi, or even Urdu as they used to[or any of the 746 languages and dialects spoken in various parts of the country, some beyond the reach of Bollywood]?
Or, why is The Times of India the largest selling daily not just in India, but [according to ads published regularly] the largest selling English daily in the world?
It’s about time we moved away from so-called Hinglish [or Tanglish or Manglish or Kan-hin-glish....if you don't believe me on the last one, sample this from an Uppi-starrer: "goli maaro ee society-ge/goli maaro rowdyism-ige/goli maaro duniya-ge"(!)] spoken in today’s phillums to more realistic language which gets spoken in our metros. And no, I don’t mean the fake accents of Shahid Kapur["luvv storry? Hah, diz iz gonna be a heit storry" in Fida] or Koel Purie ["Oi lloike theiss kut" in Everybody says I'm Fine].
It’s about time the English speakers of India standardize Indian English [and we needn't use the Queen's version as reference] and thus get the Indian English entertainment industry [which includes literature, music and films] organized and help us English types get some decent entertainment in a language we speak and understand.
Or, we can surrender to the Foreign Hand. In that case, not much remains to be done. We just need to continue watching Friends, lifting themes from Hollywood, watching the Oscars awestruck……..and most of all, keeping our fingers crossed hoping that an Indian wins an Oscar. Colombus is probably grinning in his grave, he did get the Indians somehow.

IST – we are like this only

It was a few days ago when I was rudely awakened from my mid-morning catnap [one of many, which include mid afternoon, mid evening, mid mid morning all culminating in 40 wink long hibernation.] by an incessant banging on my gate.
Looking outside, I saw a man in khakis, smelling strongly of gaur-mint [the complete antithesis of sweat, blood and tears]. “What do you want?” I cautiously asked.
“You had called, hadn’t you?” On seeing my puzzled expression, he gestured to the truck behind him with BWSSB written on it in big bold letters [That is the Bangalore Water and Sewerage Supply Board for the uninitiated.].
“What? Oh!” I suddenly remembered the emergency call I had placed to the BWSSB a few days back. Well, I WAS justified in not remembering the call, today couldnt have been more different from that day, with the sun shining hard and bone-dry roads,poetry-weather and all that.
On That day, my street was flooded knee-deep with rain water mixed with all unsavoury stuff, due to blocked drains by friendly neighbors due to ‘the smell’.
Since we Janaagraha citizens Help Ourselves, we decided to open the stormwater drains. We succeeded on SWD 1 and 2 but instead of water flowing back into 3, there was water and a plethora of solutes, suspended particles and floating objects being spewed out!
Go To The Government, suggested someone wisely.
Hence the call.
“We’ll send someone soon….” was the last we had heard of them. We had then Helped Ourselves, with a little from God’s side with sunny days that left the road bone-dry.
And here was Our Saviour from the Sewage, our Drain God, waiting to show his expertise on blocked drains.
The shock of waking up still remained and I practised all the sarcastic lines I knew on the gaurmint man, who went away, truck and all, visibly embarassed.
THE END.

Is this Vintage Bangalore, and is this story going to become one of those reserved to start conversations with [it has both the Elements, the weather and government, ideal kickstarter] , or to render at family gatherings or to guests who seem to think that you have it all?
What were the officials playing at? Don’t they KNOW that these problems can be sorted out only while they last, which is not very long?
Aren’t we ever going to be ashamed of our pace? Will this be shrugged off with a ‘we are like this only’?[probably will, what else we can do, ya?]
When is it going to be fashionable to be on time, to not jump lanes, to not jaywalk, to pay taxes on time?
Miniskirts may come and go on Middle East streets, but this is one fad that will take a long time to come.
Only hope it takes a long long long time to go.

What’s in a name?

I’ve always wondered when I hear someone’s name as Tom, Dick and Harry or Ram or Shyam or Vinay or Shwetha or Shilpa (pardon me if its yours), how tough it is for them to deal with someone of their own name. But they often tell me its not that tough considering that the other person might not have the slightest correspondence to themselves. Even then its hard for me to believe.
Having a name really rare, I was in for a shock when I first came across someone of my own name, “tuhina”. I felt weird when I imagined myself calling the other “tu-hi-na”.
Since then, I’ve seen the name in many places (thanks to the internet). Now I would want to tell you that “tuhina” means ‘snow’ in Sanskrit.
Considering the way it sounds, I shouldn’t be surprised that people think I’m of ‘that religion popular in the middle east’. If I make a list of all the not-so-evident comments, it’ll uphold the diversity of India. Imagine my plight when I (very often) run into certificates or lists with my name misspelt (some without a ‘t’ or an ‘e’, its place any where in the name).I always make it a point say ‘t-u-h-i-n-a, tuhina’ when someone’s writing down my name. My troubles don’t end here. Some pronounce irrecognisably. Some others change my gender.
You might be horrified. But coming from a family with “weird” names its not that hard for me. In fact I consider it a boon. (much to my mother’s relief). I’ve always been able to carve out a niche for myself in the minds of the most forgetful people .It has actually given me a sense of uniqueness. At times its even fun to see the others struggle (if I may take the liberty to say so) , something to relieve me of the mundaneness of life.
I remember a lesson in middle school, about two boys, Krishnamurthy and John, one of them complaining that their punishment (writing their names a hundred times), unfair, as his name is too long… So, Is it right to say “whats in a name?” or is the converse too evident?