Reflections

Yesterday I attended function held to inaugurate a new Hospital in Jalpaiguri, the district town of the eponymous district, about 40 kilometres from Siliguri. The road is execrable, many parts resembling ploughed fields rather than the State Highway it is supposed to be. And the government wants investment in North Bengal! Anyway let’s not chase that rabbit but come back to what I was saying. The function started about 40 minutes late, inevitably as the organizers had invited the local MP and one nondescript minister of the West Bengal Government. There were the inevitable speeches; I noticed with some amusement that a Ramakrishna Mission monk who inaugurated the function could talk effortlessly for ten minutes saying nothing in particular as well as any politician! The local MP stood up to speak. She informed us, without batting an eyelid that the Government run health service is the best in West Bengal among all the states of India. Apparently 73% people avail the services and “most

This a account of our visit to Sigiruya in Sri Lanka in 2004 Traveling to Serendip was a long nurtured dream. Working as we were then at the Manipal College of Medical Sciences in Pokhara, Nepal, we had a large number of Sri Lankan students, many of whom had often invited us to visit their country. Once, returning from a vacation, a group of them brought a huge collection of travel literature for us. As a seasoned traveler knows, reading about a place and planning the trip is half the fun and we spent many happy hours in the Emerald Isle, albeit that of our imagination. But when the opportunity came it was unexpected. Susmita was going to Sri Lanka: she had been invited to address the Annual Conference of the College of Anesthesiologists. Would I also like to come? You bet I would! The trip however would last only three days, so Colombo, Kandy, Sigiriya and Dambulla would be our destinations this time. The beaches of the Deep South and the National Parks of the East Coast, not to speak

I have recently become a founder member of an organisation that plans to highlight environmental issues in Siliguri. Rather unoriginally we have named it GREEN. We are about 40 strong and in the two months or so of our existence we have scored one minor success. We have managed to persuade all the residents of Green Valley, the apartment complex where we live to stop using plastic bags.We also talked to the management of the Cosmos Mall, the largest and the most hip hangout in Siliguri to stop plastic usage in the Mall. This made it to the newspapers, Check it out at http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080603/jsp/siliguri/story_9356033.jsp We will be planting10,000 trees in a space provided to us by the Army Authorities near Sukna, This function is scheduled for the 3rd August and is likely to be attended by the Corps Commander( a bigwig, i am told). We have a website, rather basic, though we have plans. Visit us at http://greenslg.com/

Recently I had the misfortune of being involved in the management of a young boy. He was the only child of his parents, a bright young man who was studying for a Master’s degree in Microbiology in the North Bengal University . Exams were scheduled and he was crossing the road to catch an auto on Hill Cart Road . A fast moving SUV crashed into him. The fault was probably the boy’s, he had been talking to his father while he crossed the road and did not notice the SUV. The driver of the vehicle , to his credit, did not zoom away but stopped, took the boy to the Siliguri hospital, where he was told that he should be shifted to a place where better facilities were available. He was shifted to this facility, admitted to the ICU, ventilated and finally died at 9 pm on the same day. The point is that the death was totally unnecessary. He was ignorant, or ignored the basic rules of the road. Possibly the driver of the vehicle was also speeding.. Basically he was only the latest victim of

There may have been a lot of irregularities. It is not possible to believe that all those BJP and other opposition MPs voted against their own side out of sheer conviction that th Nuclear deal will benefit India. However i can vouch for the fact that around 70% of all people that I polled ( In an entirely unscientific manner) were pleased that our great revolutionary from the Kremlin on the Jamuna, Mr Prakash ( Fathead) Karat got his comeuppance. We can only hope that the Bengal comrades now put their foot down and tell him where to get off. It is incredible that he should ignore the needs of his own party to massage his own ego. It is also amusing that the opposition which was so eagerly crowing about the defection from the Samajwadi party ( all of whom defected because of their conviction that the government was selling out to the Americans of course, ) became so het up when Amar Singh got into action from the other side. One thing however, Manmohan Singh may be principled and all t