Reflections

After the fiasco of our last planned trip (to Borobodur, where the eruption of Mount Merapi forced the cancellation of our trip) we were a trifle apprehensive about our next trip this time to Sandakan, in the East coast of the Borneo islands. Just to explain, Borneo, the third largest island in the world is shared by three countries, the tiny sultanate of Brunei, Indonesia and two Malaysian states which straddle the northern part of the island and this time we were headed for Sandakan in the state of Sabah. The word Sabah means “ the land below the wind”, which implies that it lies below the typhoon belt that ravages the Philippines, Taiwan and South China from time to time. When Magellan first came sailing around these waters, Sabah had been for centuries a source of edible bird’s nests, timber and much other forest produce for the Chinese. The population has a large proportion of Chinese. Sabah has some of the best rain forest in the world, now sadly depleted by the greed of timb...

Our journalists are the most holier than thou people in modern India. They are not afraid of tilting against any windmill and have no fear of tearing to shreds any reputation, however big. The medical profession has been a particular target and there is not a single day that newspapers and TV channels do not carry an attack on the profession as a whole or on a particular practitioner whether justified or otherwise. It has always seemed odd to me that a journalist, often educated to a degree level in a third rate college could arbitrate on the capabilities (or otherwise) of a senior physician who has put in decades of study and experience. But in today’s world, journalists are king. I have also felt bemused at the vicious opposition of all the newspaper editors to free entry of competition from the Western world in their field while they are fearless champions of competition in all other domains. It also seemed odd sometimes that while journalists were so free in attacking the she...

Raj Basu runs the famous Help Tourism in Siliguri. ( www.helptourism.com ) They have revolutionized ecotravel in the North East and West Bengal by building up a network of local participants who make it possible for travelers to have a unique experience which make use of local resources and home stays and have enabled communities to participate in the profits from tourism.This approach, which is now fairly well known, was pioneered by his group in North Bengal and he has now built up a network of destinations where the local participants are motivated to preserve their natural resources because they profit from it. I first met him In Siliguri when I was organizing secretary of the ASI conference held there in 2008. His company was our travel partner. At that time he had shocked me by casually mentioning that it was unlikely that any doctors would book through the conference secretariat because most doctors are sponsored by pharmaceutical companies. He turned out to be absolutely corre...

Volcanoes are really affecting me this year. The first time was when I was returning from Chicago in May. The Iceland based volcanic eruption caused disruptions of the transatlantic flights which had to make a big detour to the south before coming north to Paris. This caused a huge flight delay and as we disembarked from the United Airline aircraft at the Charles de Gaulle airport, , we could see our Malaysia airlines plane taxing for takeoff from Paris. The episode turned out well in the end because the Immigration officer gave us a free one day visa and the United Airlines paid for our stay in Paris and we had a great time, spending the evening cruising down the Siene. This time we were scheduled to go to the World Heritage site Borobodur in Central Java, Indonesia. For quite some time before, the Merapi volcano, one of the largest active volcanoes in the world was erupting in small gusts and one large eruption had caused some death and destruction. However the flights were still g...

The teaching of anatomy was taken very seriously in our student days. The first two years were devoted to its study, a daily lecture being supplemented by a three hour dissection stint during the afternoons and many classes on osteology, viscera and surface marking. Many of us used to enjoy the grind; the knowledge of the origins, insertions and nerve supplies of every muscle and the names of the structures passing through every single obscure hole in the base of the skull used to be exciting to be able to remember. Much of the time was wasted, I now realise, as we used a large amount of time and energy learning by rote many things that were useless in the real world of medicine. However it is undeniable that it also gave us a grounding in learning facts that stood us in good stead ever since. And I do remember, to this day, large amounts of anatomy, 30 years after my anatomy examination; how useful this is something that can be debated. But I want to speak today of two teachers of ...

The Indian Cultural Centre at Kuala Lumpur is one of 24 centres set up at different capitals to showcase Indian culture and to project what is now called its “soft power”. It has a fine library and an Ayurvedic Information centre as well as a small auditorium where lectures and other shows are held and, we are told, movies will also be shown at a later date.It makes me feel proud that now we have centres like this in important cities. In our younger days we frequented the USIS and the British Council libraries as well as Gorky Sadan, now I can, in Kuala Lumpur visit the Indian Cultural Centre. There is a fairly large library, and they appear to be buying books all the time. The choice is eclectic and there does not appear to be much political bias in the buying. Jawaharlal Nehru rubs shoulders with Lal Krishna Advani and there are many coffee table books on various aspects of Indian culture and history that I find very attractive. There is a wide array of fiction. Amitava Ghosh, my ...

I am reading a lot of American fiction nowadays. The reason is the access I have to the collection at the Malaysian National Library via the TPM library at my workplace. Earlier whenever I thought about American fiction, i used to think of thrillers and suchlike. While Dan Browne and Michael Crichton are a good read, one would not really think about them as novelists. Because of the anglophilia of our newspapers and because of the colonial hangover, we think that British fiction, or that published in Britain is the best. I used to think that American novelists stopped being born after the death of Steinbeck and Hemingway. Perhaps this only showcases my ignorance, but that is the way it was. Now thanks to the library, i have recently read two marvelous books. Both of them, in my opinion, are far better than many that have won the Booker prize. One of them has , in fact won the Pulitzer prize, but for some reason the Pulitzer prize is not reported in our press perhaps because an Indian...

Sometimes a good politician does not realise that he is getting past his sell by date. I strongly suspect that this is what is happening to Dr Manmohan Singh. There is no doubt that he is deserving of our respect and gratitude for his work during the nineties and also during his first term as Prime Minister where he cooled down passions generated by the arrogance of the BJP following the success of their Gujarat line, declined to behave as if the poor did not exist and to my mind, most importantly, told Karat and co where to get off. However now it seems increasingly obvious to all of us , if not to his own party and to himself that it is time that he retired. He should learn from the experience of his predecessor. Atal Behari Vajpayee was all set to retire in 2004. However I think he was seduced by the power and I strongly suspect, wanted to trip up Advani and was prevailed upon to try again with the disastrous results that we have seen. He had to face the unnecessary humiliation o...

I was back in my favouritest country in the world a couple of weeks ago. I visited Kathmandu on a business trip, where I spoke to a couple of audiences and met some of the leading clinicians there, hoping to kick start stem cell therapy in Nepal. This was the first time that I have been back to the heart of Nepal since I left Pokhara on the last day of 2003.I remember that the mountains had given me a grand farewell; the entire Dhaulagiri, Annapurna, Macchapuchare range was visible in grand splendour throughout the entire month of December that year. This time I was coming to a rain soaked Kathmandu. The rains have been particularly heavy this year I was told. The clouds barely lifted, and even when they did, we could just see the mountains ringing the Kathmandu Valley, the snow ranges remained hidden. The Airport is just the same as ever, there has not been much renovation or modernization over the past 6 years. It would have been difficult, considering what the nation has been thr...

Plagiarism is a way of life in science and medical publishing. We are all familiar with the papers that are read in our medical conferences. The data is often fudged, more often plagiarized. I remember once attending the annual Indian Association of Cardiovascular Surgeons’ conference. There was a spate of papers from Calcutta reporting large numbers of valve replacements over the past year. One of the trade representatives told me that if you added the numbers of valve replacements reported during the conference, they would be more than three times the number of valves sold in Calcutta the previous year! I am told that the Indian Society of Anesthesiologists has taken note of the inconsistencies in the papers produced by a leading post graduate institution of Calcutta and later investigations showed that the data was manufactured in the canteen over a couple of days. The same holds true for many of the presentations in Indian conferences. So much for fudged data. Now on to world o...

One of the central tenets of the greens, though not often actually enunciated, is that humans are the only species that are greedy and exploitative and often overuse natural resources to such levels that they lead natural stocks to extinction. According to this sentimental view, animals live in harmony with each other and with Nature and never overexploit any resource, sharing the goodies with other members of the ecosystem that they share. While this may fit in with the image of the ugly human, it does not square with facts. Less sentimental environmentalists have suspected this all along and now there is definite evidence to show that a bird species has overfished in the Baltic Sea to the extent that the survival of several fish species has become endangered. This story started in the 1950s when the greater cormorant (which can often be seen near Indian water bodies, drying out its wings, was protected by the Governments adjacent to the Baltic Sea in order to prevent their extincti...

“People do read travel literature in a cheerful frame of mind, imagining themselves at leisure and the world at its best. It’s an intrinsically optimistic thing, travel” The above is a quotation from a novel that I was reading the other day. Nothing great about the novel itself, but the quotation stuck to my mind. It really struck a chord. As I reflected on this I realized that the writer was absolutely right (alliteration unintended). Travel is something that you do with a very positive frame of mind. When you travel, you expect new experiences, new friends, new sights and new sounds. And you never travel unless you expect to enjoy the experience. It is a different matter that the expectations may not match the experience. This, is also very common. Tiresome, irritating and sometimes even downright scary experiences do occur during travel. However a seasoned traveler takes it in his stride and can always extract some enjoyment out of any experience. In fact this is the hall mark...

Yesterday I got into an argument with one of the Indian residents of the condominium where I live. This young man, while discussing living conditions in Malaysia nd how it compares with life back home began to bemoan the lack of independence for Malaysian women, particularly of the Muslim faith. As proof of this he cited the widespread use of the tudong, the head scarf, which is widely, though not compulsorily used in Malaysia among Muslim women. (The Prime Minister’s wife does not wear a tudong.) There has been a hoo-hah in the press recently about some teacher who insisted that his schoolgirl charge wear the tudong at least during the duration of the Ramadan month . This has set off a lot of brouhaha in the press and the comment was in this context. In recent times, Muslim women have been criticized for sometimes voluntarily draping themselves in burkhas, hijabs and for covering their hair. This has led to even legislation in Western European countries preventing them from doing so...

A major fracas has erupted in the healthcare and political world after a study published in the Lancet. The paper entitled “Emergence of a new antibiotic resistance mechanism in India, Pakistan, and the UK: a molecular, biological, and epidemiological study” which was authored by a total of 31 researchers from places as diverse as Chennai, Kolkata, Lahore, Karachi. Stockholm, Cardiff and Brisbane (among others) has sparked off a bitter row in India. Accusations are flying around about motivated reports aimed at tarnishing the Indian image and trying to damage the burgeoning medical tourism industry. What is the fuss all about? As is well known, one of the biggest threats to life is infections. In fact before the thirties there was nothing we could do about most infections. But after Fleming’s fortuitous discovery of Penicillin we have been gifted with a wide array of antibiotics that have been great help in Man’s battle against infectious disease. However over the past decade or so ...

One of the biggest problems that patients face is a lack of information. This problem may have been mitigated to some extent in the developed societies with the ubiquity of the internet, though the huge amount of anecdotal and even misleading information may be confusing rather than useful. In India this has always been a problem and remains so today. Anybody who has been in medical practice in India will acknowledge that patients are information deprived, about their disease, their prognosis, and the best places for treatment and about the costs involved. This has led to a lot of information published by newspapers which almost all have a health page nowadays. However these are almost always sponsored by hospital chains and peddle half-truths and sometimes plain lies in order to direct patient traffic to their facilities. The newspapers of course are totally regulated by their advertisement departments, and even the interviews that appear in them, extolling the feats of Dr X or Dr Y...

Arrow wounds are not common. In my long stint in the Government hospitals of West Bengal, I can remember one patient with an arrow embedded in his neck. He was admitted in the Casualty Block of the Medical College Hospitals where a general surgeon referred the patient to me because the arrow head was lying very close to the carotid artery in the neck. We explored the wound and managed to remove the arrow head from its precarious position. The patient recovered and went home in one piece. He was from the tribal belt of western West Bengal where bows and arrows are still a way of life among the Santals and other tribal groups who make up the mosaic of peoples who try to cling onto the way of life that their forefathers had made their own. Of course in recent times carrying bows and arrows is more a statement rather than an actual weapon, but sometimes they a`re used in anger and result in the sort of wound that we had seen. I was reminded of this tribal lad when reading about Dr Jose...

The entrance exams to the Medical Colleges in India are perhaps the most competitive in the world. This has been so for many years now. We were among the first few batches that had to appear for the now famous Joint Entrance Examinations and I remember appearing for it at the Jaipuria College In Centtral Calcutta. Coming from the cloistered confines of Don Bosco School, the environs were a culture shock for me. I remember that the invigilators were the clerks and this shocked me. We were used to our teachers sitting on their desk, and their sharp glances at any of us if we dared to raise our eyes. Some of my fellow examinees talked quite openly among themselves, oblivious to a mild reproof from the invigilators. These were the days of mass copying and the newspapers were full of horror stories of how the University examinations were turned into a farce by brazen cheating. When we finally got to the Medical College, we used to hear hushed stories about which one of our seniors hi...

July 31st is the 46th Death anniversary of one of my favourite singers. He was perhaps the first of many entertainers who died in a plane crash and he was just 40. In the fifties and the early sixties he strode the music scene like a colossus and was known by all and one as “Gentleman Jim”. I refer, of course, to Jim Reeves. I am not sure whether anybody listens to him nowadays, but I certainly do. Fortunately CDs of his songs are available and I wallow in nostalgia of an occasional evening when he brings back memories of so many girls who I thought I had loved and of heartbreaks that I had thought I had forgotten. Jim Reeves was a true blue Texan, born in a small village near the central Texan town of Carthage. He played semi professional baseball for a while before attempting to enter the world of music. Those were the days of crooners like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby and he was heavily influenced by them. The story goes that he got his break when the invited singer ...

The Indira Gandhi Park In Hanoi Right: Speaking at the Institute of Cancer, Hanoi As the Malaysian airlines flight descended towards Hanoi, the landscape below could be that of our Bengal, paddy fields, each small patch demarcated by small raised embankments, the occasional peasant visible in short trousers and shirt, with the conical hat that became the hallmark of the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War. We cross the muddy, but wide Red River, some barges visible ferrying goods down stream and this could easily be our very own Hooghly. Only a small ring of low mountains betray the fact that I am now about to land in a Communist country, my first such visit. (Living in the realm of the Emperor of Bengal, Jyoti Basu, excepted). The Airport is reasonably modern looking and efficient, not too crowded. Unsmiling uniformed migration personnel speak broken English and use sign language as they issue my visa and then wave me through. A car is waiting for us to ferry us to our Ho...

The birds pictured above are: 1 Superb Starling,2  African White Headed vulture,3 Baglafecht Weaver, 4 Black Bellied Bustard,5  Egyptian geese, Maribou Stork and Greater and Lesser Flamingos, 6 Grey Backed Fiscal, 7 Grey Crowned Crane 8 Griffon, 9 Helmeted guinea Fowl, 10 Maribou Stork foraging in a drain : early morning in Nairobi downtown, 11 Ostrich, 12 Sacred Ibis, 13 Superb Starling East Africa and specifically Kenya has a wealth of wildlife. As many as 1089 bird species that have been recorded in its territory. The same landscape is shared by Northern Tanzania which therefore shares most of these birds. However the Great Rift Valley has divided the ecological landscape into several areas where endemic birds abound. Thus birds are often located only in a small band of territory. This has added the vast wealth of birdlife. I recently visited Kenya and could do some bird watching in the Mount Kenya National Park, The Masai Mara Game Reserve and the Nakyuru Lake are...