A diary on Dr. K



As an active listener, I often nod my head as I listen to people.  Turns out that I do it a little more vigorously than most other people – and this has become a trademark.  During a visit to a very remote village in Rajasthan, all the children of the village followed me for a whole day.  They would ask me questions and when I nodded in agreement every one of them nodded with squeals of laughter. My nodding also has its South Indian touch to it, and so I nod slightly differently when I answer in the affirmative or […]

You’ve got my nod


I have been wondering for a while how I would announce to you the gender of the child once we got to know it.  If it’s a girl, I’ll change my website to a pink theme and have balloons floating around was my first thought.  I did not have an idea what I’d do with a boy.  The thought lasted just a few seconds before I embarrassed myself with putting the child-to-be in gendered containers.  I myself had been fond of pink for a long time.  I remember a shopping trip during my primary school days when I demanded pink […]

It’s a…



Joy, fear, pride, panic, love, relief and a range of other nouns could have explained my emotions when I heard the news from Dr. K.  To be honest, my dominant reaction was ‘eh, ok’.  After all, it’s not a new release of an iPad or some other cool gadget on which you start getting excited nine months in advance, right?  We were merely dealing with an organism that was then just a set of twenty or so cells, dividing itself like bacteria and fighting its way to a temporary shelter. Not something to be excited about so much in advance. […]

The start of a long journey





There is never a moment of dullness when the opposites meet “I hid the camera, is there anything else that I should hide?” The preparation for Vipul’s visit started with this. Vipul and Dr. K and polar opposites in two ways. Vipul’s cardinal philosophy is: if I see a button, I press it. Inevitably, he has a history of ipods, laptops and other devices crashing with his interventions. The highlight of this trip being the crash of the ticketing machine at the railway station; he could simply not resist playing with while he waited to be picked up. Dr. K […]

The twain shall meet


Love needs surveillance, and nothing escapes the eyes of Dr. K. She has the uncanny ability of retracing my day with telltale details. Within minutes of returning from work she normally recounts whether I ate, napped, read, did the laundry, etc. Normally her account is accurate. So, when she came home and declared that I did not go swimming as I had promised, I was surprised. “But I did go swimming”, I told her. She looked puzzled and asked me what towel I used and I pointed out the brown towels that we regularly use in the bathroom. “You don’t […]

A nightmare abut towels


A few days ago I was listening to a biologist who recounted a philosophic conversation. In it the philosopher asked a man who had gone to the market why he was there. “To buy vegetables”, the man answered. “Why do you want vegetables?”, the philosopher continued. “So that I can eat” “Why do you want to eat?” “So that I can be healthy” “Why do you want to be healthy?” “Because I will be unhappy if I am not healthy” “Ah, you are in the market so that you can be happy”, said the philosopher and stopped his round of […]

Where questions stop



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This is a desperate attempt to create a story where none exists. As a young man who has freshly returned from the United States after announcing his white girlfriend, I expected some fireworks when I got home; but all was calm on the eastern front. I thought, perhaps an announcement that I will be moving to LA with her could create excitement; that did not help. Will it help if the cause if I make it clear that we have not decided to marry? That did not either. I am sorry to tell you, my reader, that I have no […]

Creating history


For the purpose of this post, I’ll call her Dr. K. She is not one of those real doctors, the kind that I will be. She is the kind that deals with medicines and treats people one-by-one. Her speciality, I am led to believe, involves slashing people’s throats regularly and whipping people’s faces into shapes that she desires. In fancy words, she is an ENT and facial plastics surgeon. She is an avid reader, a pilot, compulsive shopper and (to borrow her friend’s words) her sunscreen budget rivals the GDP of small nations. Despite her sunscreen budget and a thousand […]

Dr K