to search someone

Crisis isn't a good thing to have, but it's the same phenomenon making us stronger, tough enough to survive it, and making us to introspect, to search the reason of tolerating, the meaning of being alive; it's the same phenomena forcing us to get introduced to the stranger hidden in our mind. It's not a stranger in reality, it's we only, but years and years of masking it and hiding it from ourselves, the practice of assuming a normal appreciable suitable personality makes us strangers to ourselves.

To me, crisis is the incidence when the focus is lost, and the sense of direction is lost, when hopes are dead and we don't see what's ahead of us leave apart the finish line, when we search but don't find the zenith of our dreams- making us to believe that it's absent, when we stop believing- believing in ourselves, in others, in anything we used to believe, when we stop loving ourselves and then our loved ones, when we start thinking of life as a meaningless co- incidence or as some disgusting existence, when every single activity becomes a war against ourselves, when we start making mistakes while attempting to find solace, and when we become depressed, sad and destructive after finding out that there's no solace... when the soul is getting crushed every moment under burden of some unexplainable pain, when tears of loneliness get circulated with every beat of heart, when we are losers, tiny loathsome miserable creatures unable to make any difference in ourselves and in our filthy surroundings, when there's no beauty in sight, all smiles are artificial, kids are annoying and adults selfish... the problem is in us, to us we're unlucky mortals destined to be failures.

In other words crisis is the time to clean up our minds of the layers of dust of bad feelings, to get introduced to the beautiful sweet confident winner hidden inside, who's never dead, and who thinks of life as a chance or as a mission, and her loved ones as gifts from heaven, who finds beauty in even ugliest minds and rays of hopes in darkest situations, who knows herself and has endless faith in herself undeterred by adversities, who believes in smiles, in innocence, in good purposes and in her dreams, whose heart is a heaven itself or is the endless sky wishing to protect the innocence of every mind she comes in contact with, who's not ignorant to pain but believes that it can be erased by helping healing other wounded souls, who knows that she's not some static or stagnant thing but is a dynamic human having a capacity to be better stronger and more helpful to the world, and her activities are bound to make difference in her life and in that of others... she knows that she can always choose her response to the situation... she can always choose to be an angel when she can be some lethargic inactive sufferer or even a demon.

These are two extremes, and crisis gives us a chance to move from the bad end of the spectrum to the good one... and we can always choose to stay at the good end by not allowing the bad feelings to mask the depth of our minds.

a reason to survive

Baseless, formless, ambiguous, and directionless...
I had no idea where my little life was headed,
I had dreams those were so foreign
to my environment and my being
that I had got convinced,
they were never going to get fulfilled

I had started mocking my desires,
had become sarcastic to my own feelings....
Too many failures kill the hope;
too many adversities mutilate the soul
Traumatized, mutilated, and yenning for escape
my heart feared, had it lost its face?

Skeptic, pessimist, and dreadful...
was it really life or was some punishment?

Wonderful world in my dreams had got shattered...
there was darkness and were oceans of tears.
Reality was there, still intact
what that had got damaged was my idealism.
Rigid, immotile, frozen and shaken
my mind was searching ways to get rid of its existence

Was it some reward, or a dose of success
that would heal my mind and bring back its pleasant sense?
Did I need drugs, or some psychological treatment,
to make the heart of my hopes to beat again?
Or was it some god or a flying angel
destined to make me happy and to stimulate?

No reward, no success, idle gods and mythological angels
Life had become completely hopeless...

But then something unexpected happened;
during a listless, aimless, and lethargic stroll
my mind bumped into my lost dreamland.
It was flourished and was so alive...
I found my vigor, my reason to survive;
and it is to make this world a better place for humankind!

diary or an attempt of it

I don’t know what the government wants to achieve by building such primary health centers and by compelling us new doctors to work there as bonded medical officers… do they want us to forget our medical knowledge, ethics, and to learn to manipulate the situation, to exploit the lack of knowledge of others? What’s the role of a phc? Aren’t we there to take care of their health? Or are we there just to satisfy illiterate whims of the village people? Isn’t health education mandatory or at least necessary? Why the useless, old age, antique drugs still exist in phcs? What the doctor is supposed to do if nearly all of her patients refuse to follow health advices and keep on demanding ‘magic drugs’ that would cure everything within time period of minutes or even seconds?

How nice it would have been if I were ignorant, not a doctor, or even illiterate… I would be able to live. Drunkards (mostly village politicians) come here, fully laden with alcohol, and say to me that, “alcohol causes dehydration. I’ve consumed two bottles of it in morning. You must administer intravenous saline to me.” When I tell the ailing to open their mouths to examine oral heath, I encounter tobacco, pan masala or paan blocking my sight to their pharynxes. Even kids have these things, leave apart male and female adults. Even if I give strict warning about avoiding cold foods and drinks kids go for infective ice candies on street as soon as they get out of the hospital after taking treatment, that too in front of me and then blame me for giving them ineffective tablets. People laugh at me when I tell something like, “smoking would deteriorate your lungs.” And get disappointed and even curse me when I don’t examine their arthritic knee or shoulder with stethoscope.

Is it advisable to administer IV drugs like metoclopramide and dexamethasone to everyone, even when they don’t need it? People are addicted to a ‘saline’ (a formula having a bit of many drugs in NS) and they want me to administer that ‘saline’. One of their superstitions is that tablets and capsules are useless and to get ‘cured’ and to gain some strength you need a saline and some injections, the only injectable available here is chlorpheniramine maleate. Doing private practice in government hospitals is a common trend; people hate me when I refuse doing that. I have no words to describe the corruption in this field, maybe I lack strength, or maybe my brain freezes when this topic comes into my mind. The only one person I can keep away from this dirty business is me, and I do it successfully… but still… it’s very very hard to handle everything, and still be able to think.

I feel like an alien, an outsider. It’s very hard to blend in this business… also it’s very hard to convince them about the small acts of taking care of their health… I keep on trying… but I’m not some deity, I’m a human. And I get frustration too. To the world I’m a successful person, a medical officer, with a staff of ten working under my command… but to me, I’m as helpless and depressed as I was never before. I even can’t call for help, because I don’t see anyone… In fact it’s so dark here that I see nothing.

Maybe… one day I’ll be able to think, to find some solution, or to seek some help to change the situation… till then the biggest challenge before me is to keep my dreams and my own innocence alive.

to get it or to forget it

Satisfaction is a strange word, or it’s vague, obscure having no clear meaning… or it’s some ideal condition unachievable in real situation. It’s a stimulus driving some strange humans to do some strange things. Not all people are mad for it, but for sure it drives those people mad who strive for it. It’s not money, not pride, fame; it’s not security, position, not physical pleasures, not even love… but alas, it’s not ‘nothing’. People get tricked when they search it in the above things, they sell their self esteem, sacrifice their innocence, do the bad things, get corrupted to feel secure to get some money, position, fame or anything they think will make them satisfied, and die in the end unsatisfied, worried, hungry or forlorn.

Maybe it’s different for different people, making it a useless term. Maybe some humans exist who get satisfied with piles of currency and luxurious facilities and fame they don’t deserve… maybe some hearts do achieve eternal peace in filth of corruption… but mostly such people are unsatisfied, misguided or blind worrying for what they lack when they have nearly everything… or they are scared, weak, unable to change the situation, unable to achieve or to find out or even to search for the missing thing that would fill up the emptiness in their lives.

There are people with personality disorders, neurological and psychological pathologies making them blunt minded, or ignorant to others, or extremely selfish… but it would be really a horrid situation to think that most of the people in society are affected with such miserable conditions… Is it really a ‘normal’ thing to be corrupted, to get black money, to cheat in exams or in other things, to do things that could harm others for our own benefit… and if it’s not why is it acceptable to the community? If satisfaction a tell tale or a mirage… and if it’s not why it’s not getting any importance in human life?

Maybe satisfaction is a highly personal thing, depending upon the value system our parents and the society has imprinted in us, or on the situations we’re exposed or on our experiences in our life… maybe it depends upon our motives, our goals in our lives, our intelligence and our ability to feel others. We can’t expect a beast to be altruistic and yet be happy… but we’re not beasts. We need not to be beasts, we can still live life of human beings; and it’s our responsibility to stop the evolution of the community in direction of being that of beasts.

I may be too young or inexperienced to define something as complicated and abstract as satisfaction… but I guess it’s a good feeling, it’s a strange joy, the strange feeling we get when we make someone happy really for nothing, when we sacrifice our most beloved thing for joy of someone else, when we fight for justice for strangers, when we tolerate for benefit of others, when we protect our self esteem against all the temptations… the list has to be big, as satisfaction is a big thing… though it’s vague, it does exist.

Why violence

It was a pleasant moment, some joke had happened and was blessing everyone with a smile, was trying to relax their tired minds… but the moment ended, and their minds screamed, the smiles disappeared, and the faces got covered with that regular fear. The horror occupied their hearts. The older ones were so adapted to this fear that fearful expressions were tattooed on their wrinkles… because this wasn’t new; this was a usual scene in their house.

I don’t know whether it’s insecurity, or lack of confidence, whether it’s some kind if epilepsy, or some prefrontal lobe lesion… effect of media or wrong concepts of manhood; I don’t know what makes people so violent that too to their closed ones, to those who’re extremely harmless and even useful. Why on Earth is domestic violence so profound? What makes them to make their homes most dangerous places in the universe and most painful and harshest to survive to their own loved ones?

Is it some kind of territorial display or is it some effort to show dominance… an effort to hide incapacities, or pathological method of gaining some confidence? Or is it some revenge of some mighty harmful person around, directed to the harmless ones? Are those acts thoughtful or are they just thoughtless tantrums thrown for some thoughtful purpose? Why do they get isolated from their family, why do they suspect their family? Why do they wish to ‘own’ their family members instead of thinking of themselves as a part of the family?

The questions are endless and they don’t have good answers. Maybe it’s the mixture of everything above… whatever it maybe, it’s very painful to have a home that lacks safety. Insecurity stimulates the efforts to survive and they are not always good ones. Like a genetic disorder violence spreads from one generation to the next and like some epidemic it also haunts complete societies. Media, movies celebrate violence… and it takes just some little anger to convert a human into a blood thirsty ghost.

The future of this violence is dreadful… we don’t want to be an extinct species killed by their own pals, we don’t want to end up in low intelligence species consuming most of its time in fighting and then recovering from the big injuries. This must end somewhere… but who’ll end this and how?

Thoughts as a ‘Post intern’

Being a parent isn’t a negative thing, I feel. There are tons of biological, psychological and social benefits of having an offspring and of raising her. There’s sense of responsibility, sense of joy, pride, achievement and also curiosity, initiative and creativity a child gifts to a parent. Caring someone without any expectation is the most wonderful thing in the universe… but it becomes troublesome when care mutates to worry, and tons of expectations take birth. It’s nothing less than horrible to worry about the future of creatures who by no way simulate the parents, or who don’t listen to them or refuse to act as extensions of the parents. Kids are different than their parents and they grow to be yet more different adults; though not always they’re bad, I get a shivering sensation when I imagine myself fifty plus or something and having a daughter who’s like how I am now.

It’s natural for the parents to crave for the safety and success of their kids and anything unusual, eccentric, or adventurous is ‘less safe’ or riskier than what is traditional, conventional or routine behavior (no matter however mundane it is for the kid). Worry takes birth in mind of a parent when their kid’s ‘safety’ comes to question; and the worried mind can’t understand that safety isn’t ‘everything’ in life of any person. We can’t shoot for any goal unless we take at least some risk. The more we take the risk, more are the chances to achieve or to lose something; and it’s not like that we always have to lose something. We’re humans, not machines programmed to achieve success or to do tasks incapable of captivating our minds. Goals matter to us, so do dreams. We become restless, and it’s a fact that we can’t enjoy anything until we ‘get’ that thing. There are passions we can even die for and there are attractions transforming us into miserable iron particles dancing to reach to that merciless source of magnetic force. There are addictions, some habits we go on craving for even when we get hit on our face in trying to quench that thirst.

Of course, I’m not speaking about addictive drugs, or habitual wrong behaviors; but alas, behaviors those are not routine even though they’re good are also considered as ‘wrong’. Neither I’m saying that following our mind is always rewarding, or blessing us with positive outcome… there are hitches, negativities, frustrations, depression, tons of loneliness, and pools of tears when something goes wrong, when we lose something or when we fail or fall. But one failure doesn’t imply that we’ll fail always. Losses are not permanent; though they’re painful sometimes they act as essential keys to open the doors to success. But alas, the worried mind looks to such sentences as ‘bookish unpractical statements’; it ignores the fact that books are nothing other than written or typewritten experiences or thoughts of some living human beings. Of course it’s very hard to convince this to my worried parents… still I know that they don’t hate me; it’s obvious that they want all the things to be positive in my life. I can feel the heart of them, and I’m not having any prefrontal lobe lesion to accept useless and harmful risks (though it’s a fact that risks bless us with the ‘high’ of adrenalin rush). But even after thinking a lot over it, I find some risks are worth to be taken… some dreams are worth sacrificing the ‘safety’ and even ‘whole of the life’.

But truly (don’t tell this to my parents) sometimes I feel relaxed that I’m not a parent of a kid like that of me…

Thoughts as a ‘Post intern’

It wasn’t easy to retake the entrance examination… in addition to reread the books you know line by line and to get the damn boring job of solving those mcq papers done again and again, I had to face people offering tons of advices, trying to convince me against wasting a year… my parents used to trust me as they always do, but they were also unable to hide their worry from their faces. I was immature (and it’s normal for a teenager), and was determined or more properly I can say I was haunted, fascinated, infatuated by the medical field. Even sight of a white apron or stethoscope was sufficient enough to elicit physiological changes in me showing excitement. My habit of daydreaming is as old as I am, but this time it was very intense, like some drive. But improperly for a teenager I was worried too, was extremely tensed, I couldn’t imagine myself taking admission to any other course than this MBBS… the thought of failure used to affect me like some terror attack would do, I used to have panic attacks, crying jerks and all those psychological symptoms a person exposed to extreme stress would have. The door of private medical colleges was closed for me; we didn’t have that much money… in fact that was the only reason for which I was retaking the exam.

Some years have passed since then; today I’m waiting for some documents to apply for MBBS degree certificate. I’ve completed my MBBS from a government medical college and am about to be a registered medical practitioner… I own a stethoscope and a couple of aprons and have been attaching "Dr." before my name since last one year. But strangely, I miss something. I don’t feel satisfied; I feel I still haven’t got something I wanted to have.

I’m no more a rebellious immature teenager. I’ve learnt to think hundreds of times before doing anything. I’ve developed methods to keep myself away from infatuations… and to stay calm in stressful situations. Nowadays I don’t get excited easily either. But yet, I’m not the person who I was craving to be… and ironically to be that person, I’m still craving. And am still figuring out what I shall do to quench that strange craving.

But it’s not easy to sit and think upon this… in addition of attempting to get over this frustration and searching for some stimulation in this medical profession, I’m facing people who call me mad for not feeling satisfied… my parents too are confused, now they don’t even attempt to hide their worry and even force me to try for a stable life, to appear for MD entrance to get MD to get money and position…

Is it possible to be an adult and still be an immature or to be mature and still searching for some satisfaction?