Reflections

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...