Reflections

One of my colleagues and I were selecting patients for the Final MBBS surgery examination which starts tomorrow. The Medical Officer led us to a gentleman who had been admitted for a repositioning of his nasogastric tube. As we talked to him to get his consent to participate in the examination, I noticed a booklet lying on his bedside table. I have the bad habit that I cannot pass by a book without having a look at it: and that is what I did. As I did so, the patient told me that he would like me to have it: it was a book that he had written. I was a little diffident but he was so earnest in his request that I accepted his gift with thanks. Mr Ho's Book  The little booklet is named Cancer, My Wake-up Call and the patient, who is the author ,is Mr James Oh. Mr Oh is an accountant by training and has had a very successful career as a financial and wealth creation expert and has been instrumental in managing several companies, one of which he helped to list in the stock mar...

                  As we wandered around the Venetian plaza, we found ourselves going towards the Parisian area. Soon we were confronted with, what else, the Eiffel tower. The Parisian streets were classier and the shops even higher end. But we had by now had our fill of artificial wonders and wanted to visit the old Macau of Portuguese descent. The Parisian casino had a convenient (and free) bus service that took us to the old Macau and here we entered the world of what was once Portugal’s last toehold in the East. There was more than a passing resemblance to Malacca, and obviously so, as they had been built at roughly similar times by the same people. There are ruins of the inevitable St Paul’s Cathedral, a fort and lots of steep windy streets full of souvenir shops and eateries. And there are tourists. I think Macau is much more easily accessible to the Mainland Chinese and perhaps this was why wherever we went there was a huge number so...

It has now become something of a tradition in our family. Each year, our daughter takes us out for a short vacation. In 2016 it was Bangkok, which I skipped as I have had enough of the Thai capital, but my wife and daughter had a great time and ate and shopped without fortunately dropping. In 2017 we all went to Jakarta, last year we went to the Komodo Island (you can read about it here  and her e ), this year it was Hong Kong and Macau. Initially I was not very keen on going. Somehow I always thought of Hong Kong as another Singapore, which is not really one of my favourite places. However nowadays we all live in three separate cities, and I would have hated to miss meeting up so I agreed to go. We were to reach Hong Kong airport on Friday morning (9 th August). Susmita was to take the late night flight from Kolkata to reach at about 9 AM, Shreya was to reach at around 10 and my Air Asia flight from Kuala Lumpur was scheduled for about 11 AM. The reporting time was 5AM a...