Back from hibernation

Something about visiting the places where you grew up that compels you to come out of a long slumber.

I'm talking about Gandhi Bazaar and Chennai, respectively. I guess what has happened is that the old shops have been replaced by new ones. Traffic has increased a fucking million times over. It is heartening to see a lot of the old shops, the old vegetable vendors sitting in their old spots selling vegetables that are not packed in plastic bags, don't have stickers on them and don't have a dude swiping your credit card. They still take cash here, keep it in a small pouch and sometimes act rude towards you.

The number of people riding cycles has reduced dramatically. Replaced by cars of all makes and sizes. Bikes are much more too.

I think the only thing that has reduced is human interaction and human experience, and this has reduced to an extent one would never have thought possible.

We tend to get wrapped up in our own little microcosms and tend to exclude all that is human in our day to day lives and see it replaced by electronic media, be it for communicating, transacting or for entertainment. Whatever happened to a face to face chat on a park bench with the one you love? Instead of sitting in front of the television and allow the images to eat away at what is left of your energy and initiative?

I never thought I would be the old fashioned type, but I'd still like to think that a cell phone is only for keeping in touch with people and should be treated like a phone and not your entire life synthesized into a single tablet of circuits. Which is the trend these days. I also feel that a chat over the phone does not substitute for a google talk chat. I suppose we need to hold on preciously to these moments because the day is fast coming when we won't have any of them to rely upon. We'll have .avi files and the like to keep us company.

As for me, a lot has happened in my life since the last post. I completed by MD and am engaged to be married to a wonderful person by name Megha. I suppose I am not celebrating my own personal highs because the larger scheme of things has me worried. I guess we can do our own bit to reduce the burden of the electronic device in our life. That is, if we want to.

What are your views, dudes and dudettes?

I'm a Star Trek geek!

Today I'm going to talk about Star Trek. Ok, Ok, have your laughs and get it out of your system already!

I know that killing your enemies with a single photon torpedo while they have all guns firing at you is a tad unrealistic, but think about the larger implications of this franchise; there is life outside this planet, outside the galaxy we inhabit, outside galaxies that surround ours as well. Other beings, other life forms, other forms of energy, dimensions of time that exist in parallel with our own, the possibility of multiple dimensions, it's so rich!

I find it a fascinating concept and its never failed to draw my attention to the exciting possibilities that it has to offer.

Imagine meeting another form of life that may or may not be vertebrate. Imagine they were a peace loving species, one that does not feel the need to conquer or mutilate owing to their own internal insecurities. How would we be able to handle them? Rape and kill them due to our collective fear of losing control over what we perceive to be our personal space?

Or would we be so bold so as to actually learn something from them? Can we foresee ourselves as being so open so as to be open to another fresh, interesting idea, instead of rehashing old ones time and time again?

Mind you, in that day and age the human race has eliminated hunger and poverty!So an idea like that may well be improbable.

But we tend to make the same assumptions that issues that exist in this day and age will continue till the 23rd or 24th century or whatever: Imperialism, Fascism, Deceit, War, and anything else gory. Which is why I find the franchise a tad too presumptuous in thinking that these issues wont be solved given the extent to which humanity as a species has evolved in the past 300 years!

If any of you have browsed through my blog it would please me a great deal if you took home the message of personal growth, personal choice and the importance of a live-and-let-live attitude from it. These are the things that interest me a great deal; but I have to admit that there are times when I find these practices far more easy to preach than implement.

Recent events have in so small part been responsible for my frustration but I would still like to believe very much that it is possible to overcome obstacles that seem insurmountable, change oneself when it seems least likely and to dream the impossible dream. But what I have come to realize is the sheer amount of singular intensity it takes to see these dreams translate into an equally satisfying reality. I have also realized it is far more easy to preach and that the enacting and application of these principles are a bitch to deal with in real life.

I would love to see my own dreams come to fruition;whether or not I have the strength of purpose to actually make it happen is a different question altogether. I suppose people who have succeeded in making their dreams a reality will be far too busy to actually advise others as to how to go about doing it!! But it will be interesting nonetheless.

Think like a superhero!!

Food for thought: If you had the power to control the minds of other people, would you manipulate the mind of the one that got away to fall in love with you for eternity? In a single, precise moment of a much needed intervention? Think about it!

Of Actors and Acting

Leon: The Professional is a film by Luc Besson made in the early 90's and stars Jean Reno as a socially challenged hitman who drinks a lot of milk and kills with startling precision and efficiency. It also stars Natalie Portman in her film debut at age 11. And man is she awesome!! Her performance is faultless, brilliant and touching. There is also Gary Oldman who plays a corrupt, volatile police officer who is hooked to either opioids or amphetamines. And boy is he scary. I had my jaw wide open in the first couple of scenes where he was featured. What surprised me all the more is that this is the same man who plays Jim Gordon in Nolan's Batman Universe!! What a startling contrast and a testament to how good, nay, brilliant a performer this guy is. PS: He plays Sirius Black in the Harry Potter movies as well!! Portman and Oldman should have won Oscars for this, in my opinion.

Acting is one profession that I have always been interested in and I also like to mimic sometimes. I would not be lying to you when I say that I mimic fairly well too. While we see the glamour of the acting world and the money and the limos, little do we realize how difficult it actually is to play another character apart from yourself. And to do it for a sustained period of time, take after take after take, is hard. Of course cutting through a man's insides and removing his appendix is tough too, but the point is that these guys have put in their dues in training and deserve at least a part of the money coming their way. They do get paid outrageously high amounts though, I must admit.

Couple of other notable performances that haven't won Oscars; let me know what you think too:

Sharlto Copley: District 9
George Clooney: O brother where art thou?
Aaron Eckhart: Thank you for smoking/The Dark Knight
Christian Bale: American Psycho
Gary Oldman: Bram Stoker's Dracula
Meryl Streep: The Hours
Julianne Moore: Boogie Nights/The Hours/ Far from Heaven
Ralph Fiennes: Schindler's List/The end of the affair
Robin Williams: Insomnia
Mark Walhberg: Boogie Nights
Josh Brolin: No Country for Old Men
Heath Ledger: Brokeback Mountain
Alan Rickman: Die Hard
Denzel Washington: Philadelphia
John Cusack: High Fidelity

The list in only a few people whom I felt were not given their due share during the award season.

Indian Performances:

Sharman Joshi: Life in a Metro
Boman Irani in anything!
Kay Kay Menon in anything!
Konkona Sen Sharma in Omkara
Farhan Akhtar in Rock on/Calling Karthik
Abhay Deol in Dev D

Agree? Let me know what you guys think.

Hello Ladies and Gems.

As of this minute I'm sipping a Carlsberg and browsing the web and seeing a couple of my friends' blogs. I haven't done this is a while I must say!!

I am also doubly at leisure today because I had a presentation in my Unit yesterday and, as all presentations go, was conceptualized and executed in the wee hours of the morning and I had barely slept. The presentation had gone on a bit better than expected and so I was more relieved than happy when it was over 'cos I really wanted to sleep after that!

What made the experience more palatable for me was that one of the faculty members, whom I have a lot of respect for, told me that I had done a good job with the presentation and basically a well done comment was made. I was quite happy actually, and that comment sort of made the day for me.

Please bear with me here. This is not an ego trip I assure you!!

The need for validation by outsiders is a phenomenon that I have been quite fascinated by. In an ideal world, one should generally be secure in one's own identity and have a sense of worth that is independent of praise of criticism.

In reality, it often doesn't work out like that. Self-actualization is a process which, according to my understanding, is where one is finally comfortable in one's own skin. Knowing your strengths and more importantly, limitations. And also knowing there are somethings your limitations will prevent you from obtaining. I have come across a few in my time here in NIMHANS and I have noticed that they are often so calm and composed and seldom go all "I am going to screw the residents today"

I guess this process takes time. You need to experience a lot to know who and what you are, what are the things you can do and what you can't do. And coming to peace with that, not allowing outside static to change your point of view or your disposition,at the same time being a man of action and not caring about the reasult, is what I would term self actualization. I find it to be a Buddhist way of being.

Mind you, Hitler had a lot of the characteristics I mentioned above!! This applies to men of peace, not war!

A Million Little Pieces

I am in the process of reading "A million little pieces" by James Frey the second time around. This book, this wonderful work of art, is about the author's struggle as a drug addict and his struggle in a rehab center and how he befriends the other recovering inmates of the center and their individual stories (to a much smaller extent)

The author was criticized by the keeper of our collective world conscience,Oprah Winfrey in 2006 (not sure about the year), when it was revealed that he had manipulated certain elements of his true life story into something more dramatic and readable. As a person who has worked in De-addiction Psychiatry, let me be the first to tell you that the lives of these people are anything but readable. They are powerless over a crippling addiction, their families despise them for who they've become, and they are alienated by society in general. And they are angry at the world for looking at them with unsympathetic eyes. Yes, it is also true that they lie, they cheat others and they steal in the process of them becoming dependent on the substance they very often wish they could do without.

While Frey may well have manipulated certain aspects of the book, the book is in itself a haunting portrayal of one man's reluctance to seek help, his anger and defiance while in rehab, and his coming to terms with his own problem. And it should be read by anyone who is interested in addiction, or who has a substance use problem, or thinks they might have a substance use problem. In short, it is a masterpiece.

The author has publicly gone on to say that he thinks addiction is not a medical illness and that the element of free will involved in the process of becoming dependent is not present in most of the other medical disorders in current literature.

While I do agree that the environment plays a key role in any illness, let's look at this from a different angle. Is it possible to choose that you keep on drinking daily and consistently until you wake up every morning with trembling hands? Is it not possible to make a conscious decision to stop when you feel that things are going out of control?

I feel that it takes something far more than personal choice in order to make a person want to drink repeatedly and repeatedly. It might be easy for us to say that it is an illness caused due to a lack of will power. Aside from James Frey, I have not come across a person who has overcome the illness who feels that it was something of their own making. The responsibility to seek help for their illness is their own, but whether or not they choose became a habitual, problematic drinker or not is something I am not truly convinced about.

Personally, it was very hard for me to identify with many things that these people were going through, until I realized that there may be something more than a lack of pure will power involved here. The external manifestations, or phenotype as it is called in genetic language, is such that these people often have a history of cheating, stealing, lying to everyone-including the treating team, that makes it very difficult for a clinician to feel sympathy for them. However, once things are seen from a biological perspective, I think our outlook on these people will change.

Alcohol Dependence is the classical bio-psycho-social disorder, meaning that the person's biological constitution, environment and social milieu are all to blame for the illness. I think it's time we spent more effort in hoping to unravel the biological mechanism behind this illness while promoting social therapies like self help groups as a cornerstone for the treatment, or maintenance of this illness.