helpless cortex

Accurate calculated precise timely, my intelligent cortex envies machines... motivated, disciplined, hardworking, racing against the moments, it hates me wasting my time in useless things. Rational, always thinking of the outcomes, calculating gains and losses, it thinks it knows how to get the best of everything. Careful planner, futurist, it believes in its independent existence...

And there's a wild creature, living somewhere deep, fun loving, free, limitless, hating boundaries... stronger, younger, even more intelligent than the planning elderly. Passionate, addicted, mad for some maybe trivial thing... the king, it rules every act of the conscious mind... Odd creature, has odd philosophy that my cortex can't digest... for it giving up is the best way of getting; losing everything offers more joy in some cases than gaining something. An unruly kid, it knows that certainty may be boring, searching joy in being uncertain. Constant, never getting tired, it's as stable as the existence.

I get confused, to whom shall I listen... then I give up, allowing the mad being to take control. My cortex starts planning, ignoring the fatigue, working like a machine, only to satisfy whims of  my untamed mind... partial, I don't help it.

is consciousness a curse

There's no difference, I feel sometimes, between some mindless tiny organism—trying to do it's best to survive, to protect its life cycle in some environment it has no attachment with regardless whether it's neutral or nourishing or hostile, indifferent, dumb with no capacity to peep into the future and no desire—and me, once a native of dreamland, workaholic, ambitious, confident... now just a caricature or carcass of my past, with unconscious dreams, comatose, unable to communicate with my consciousness, with hopes though shrunk resembling constructions of a grandiose mind—stubborn, alive even when the reality is in sharp contrast.

Maybe the tiny organisms are not mindless, thinking deeply, curious, trying to solve puzzles posed by nature on their minds, loving them, trying to tend them while trying to sustain... maybe they're more complex, intelligent, understanding the meaning of life, the purpose of being alive; maybe these brainless existents are born with the knowledge of  mind; maybe they're mature, grown up beyond the concept of me and mine, looking beyond punishment and reward; maybe they're huge, spiritual beings, too big to be confined in boundaries of plasma membrane and cell walls, selfless and polite, thinking of themselves just as a 'part', or they might be infinite, endless, nothing but the universe itself... maybe they're not conscious as we are, their consciousness being the existence itself, their world being 'real', not polluted by senses and feelings—just some 'impression' of the world as in our sensitive, deceptive and fool  minds.

Our world is different, subjective, limited, selfish, it's not even real—getting transformed into something different with even a slight change in perspective attitude attention or information, making us vulnerable, confined, lost in consciousness... it's worse than other animals with simpler joys and straight forward punishments; our joys are complex, punishments are strange, we lose even after winning, sacrifices can make us happy; weak, we can get lost completely—searching happiness while sacrificing our aliveness, planning, cheating, suffocating ourselves in polluted worlds created by our polluted minds; imprisoned in boundaries created by wrong thoughts, scared, insecure, suspicious, we can act as a big disease to ourselves...

Is consciousness a curse, a drawback, neurons being some powerful parasites ruling us making us mad—getting lost in illusory fake worlds existing only in our minds, giving us a false sense of being intelligent independent farsighted, enslaving us, making us to do what they want, while confusing us, deceiving, hiding information from us, masking the reality...

Whatever they do, neurons make us 'conscious'; we've no choice but to be conscious, except for some exceptional glorious moments of intense pleasure as in complete surrender during meditation or devotion in religious spiritual doings, or as in some forms of epilepsy or instances of intense human bonding what we call orgasms, there's always a boundary separating us from rest of the universe, it's hard to feel blended or a 'part'... it's hard to imagine an identity without being conscious, or a different identity— huge eternal encompassing everything; we're not that huge, our brains tell us most of the times—the times when we're 'sane'.

But they're not that dishonest, giving us a chance at least to suspect to wonder or to imagine that there's a world beyond our consciousness that's real, same to every eye; maybe we'll never evolve to have that objective perspective, to peep into reality to that extent... we've science, we've statistics—very strict measures to overcome our subjectivity; we bend the rules, overlook statistics, our world still being affected by slightest changes. We're not machines, not intelligent beings thinking in terms of statistics and math, even statistic experts being non statistic thinkers, we humans  are just unable to stop being affected by stimuli either relevant or irrelevant.

Maybe neurons make us powerful, the creators—authors, poets, artists, mechanics of our own worlds, the power in fact being just a perception, the world in fact being a mirror image of external world, the image depending upon the angle size shape texture and cleanness of the mirror, changing with any change in the mirror, the mirror being unstable—modifying itself, getting adapted to the perceived mirror images, changing its capacity to reflect, in addition to searching its own place in the reflection; maybe our brains are mirror houses, the mirrors changing themselves constantly, making us dazzled, puzzled, short sighted in order to keep us from getting mad, it being disturbing to know that the reality may not be 'real'...

I give up there, feeling too naive, too small, like a mindless tiny organism—trying its best to survive, to protect its life cycle in... , hoping that one day my human race will come up with the knowledge of mind, will break the bonds of me and mine, will be selfless, everyone feeling sense of being a 'part', of being responsible; feeling unrealistic as unable to think of any plan any way to reach that situation, my consciousness starts suspecting my mental status, and I—dreaming to be a realistic dreamer—shift my focus to present and near future, to my own personal subjective world without suspecting whether it's real.

to make some difference...

It's like swimming in some endless ocean, I feel sometimes, where we're tiny miserable creatures, trying desperately to come out of it, with no sense of destination, no sense of direction, no strong hopes of getting out of it, no purpose for getting out of it or for staying in it... moving hands and legs tirelessly, bearing the pain, with no joy in doing it, the waves in the form of different strange unforeseen incidents dragging us pushing us to random directions. Life, sometimes, seems like a meaningless occurrence, a negligible phenomenon with everything summing up to a big zero, meaningless, waste.

Something happens then, someone calls, asks for something, someone say thanks, someone blames... results we're waiting for arrive, either we succeed or we fail, something pleases the mind, something hurts it making a deep stabbing wound—we get some feedback... the endless moment of meaninglessness ends making us to feel alive. Part of this universe—we constantly interact with the part of universe other than us. The interactions, our actions and reactions, efforts of the body to stay alive or of the mind to know about life, the thought of we impacting rest of the universe enables us enough to keep on trying doing the seemingly meaningless tasks.

Maybe it's negligible, maybe it's short lasting; maybe we're too tiny and short living to affect the universe, but to the universe we can sense and track and keep record of—to the universe of us humans, we can hope to be something more than negligible... almost anything we do, our any decision, any action whether thoughtful or mindless can affect our world: our world with randomness as an important deciding factor, luck as a major controller; we can't control luck, but we can learn to be wise enough to control our wish to control the luck, to know the factors we can control, to be consistent in our efforts of controlling the controllable... maybe that's what we need to make some difference—significant, and essential to sustain our humankind. 

life of management

It's not just wondering about the diseases of individual patients, nor is it just paying heed to tendencies of groups, epidemics, mentality and educational levels of patients... it's not just following the government rules, or adjusting with current political trend... answering to media, local over enthusiastic political activists eager to make issue of anything to gain some political benefit, managing a team of workers elder to me by decades, paying attention to jobs of newcomers, their friendships and rivalries with each others, answering to taluka and district offices... managing economy of scanty drugs, the sanitation of operation theatre and the instruments... managing the government funds, salaries of workers, and government schemes... being a medical officer is being more a manager than a doctor...

It's hard to keep in touch with your medical knowledge, to handle everything according to standard norms, the conditions being slightly strange or not as mentioned in books... x ray machine is here though not properly trained technician, doctor is here—me of course, though not proper health facilities like even basic drugs... patients are uneducated, politically alert villagers wanting me to diagnose and treat every disease with the x ray machine and whichever drugs I have. PHC is a referral service, they say, but they don't provide any means to convince the people to move to higher centers if they show signs of  malignancies, heart diseases or diseases not treatable at PHC level... People look at the referral chit as a proof of the doctor's incompetence, or ignorance—overall lack of interest in their health condition. Many are not willing to invest that much time and energy for their own health or health of their relatives...

I'm out of my big lovely standard books, in real world, among real patients—posing conditions similar to those described in my beloved books but in highly different circumstances, learning to deal with people with very different viewpoints than that of me—very different from one another, to convince them, to handle their differences and sometimes to make use of them, to handle unforeseen circumstances. Maybe this extended part of medical education is worth a year....

It requires strength

"I'm no more a romantic person living in some dreamland or a perfectionist craving for best or an innocent sweet child, honest, always true to her morals... I know it's nearly impossible for life to be perfect, dreams might be just fantasies, not always meant to be achieved; morals are just luxuries only lucky fulfilled and superhuman can afford, or they're rules of some mad obsessed ne'er-do-wells, or are some chants in fairytales—never working in real life. There's no true love, there's no passion; devotion is a meaningless word... selfishness being the first predictor of success, luck being the second. Loving others without expectation is killing your own soul. Trusting someone is risking yourself, promises being stepped down as cheap talks... or bluffs... cheaters are winners, believers are fools—born to be flop. I'm not describing some nightmare, or experience of some negativistic person with some personality disorder... this is real life, alas, not a fiction...."

It's very easy to be cynic in this world, series of experiences pushing us to pessimism... but thankfully it's not all desert. It requires strength—a lot of strength to see the meadows, the rivers, the waterfalls and the jungles... True love is here—able to surpass all fictions, pure care isn't mythological, here is comfort, here is trust... faith is here to make us relaxed. It's not harmful to rest in dreamland when we know what is real... It's not harmful to attempt mending the future while living in present. Number of efforts may not lead us to success, but they're bound to increase its chances—if done in correct direction. We're not passive limp non-living objects moving only with forces from outside, neither are we reptilian brained animals thinking only of me myself and my present tense... we can gain knowledge, can plan the future, can think strategically while still protecting our morals... we can get joy by doing something for our loved ones; we're humans, we're born to celebrate our humanness. 

Luck... Fortune... Life

We never like to admit it, though we can't deny it; inevitable, uncertain, unpredictable and random but for sure in every aspect of our lives 'luck' does play a central role. A collection of unpredictable things, an array of random events, life is composed of a host of life changing phenomena happening without any direct cause just because of nature's tendency of random fluctuations... It's a tendency of us humans to seek out and attribute causes, to make predictions, to expect some outcomes and to get disappointed when things don't happen as we want, or to get ecstatic  on getting unexpected boosts to expect the same victory next time.

"Fortune favors the brave," "man makes his own luck," "luck may help sometimes, work always helps," I used to be a fan of such quotes, until I realized that they're just weak efforts of humans to encourage efforts in extremely hopelessly uncertain and unpredictable environment. Fortune isn't some conscious thing to favor the brave, only the rash decision makers fortunate enough to get positive results are remembered as braves the history being amnesic to the failures. Sometimes good thoughtful decisions come out with bad outcomes, the outcomes have many things along with our actions to depend on, it's an injustice to blame only the decisions when things go wrong and an over admiration to attribute all success to the decisions and actions when we get success. Even if we consider the parts other than us while planning for some action, we can't guarantee accomplishment as there's something we can't guess in proper, that something being luck or random fluctuations of it. Winning one lottery doesn't guarantee another win,  it can be proved that 'hot hand' in games is mere a mirage... your viva may depend upon the answers given by the candidate before you, in written exams things like mood of the examiner, or the quality of your first answer can affect the results more than actual quality of your overall performance. Being good doesn't promise a good outcome, helping everyone including the wrong ones may throw you in crisis or may make you an idol, being moral in immoral situations may make you a star or leader or may throw you in trashes...

Are we just puppets? If everything depends on luck, what's the role of making efforts? Does it have any role... We can't control luck. We are puppets in some sense, the consequences of our actions depending at least in part on something we can't control. But we're not lifeless dolls tied with some invisible strings getting moved by some invisible hands moving on random... we're capable of making actions, and planning them before making; we're capable of thinking and learning to think, of understanding the situations our capacities and incapacities, of estimating the odds of success impartially while restricting our tendencies of favoring our own decisions or those of doubting them more than needed if we're anxious, of deciding whether to take the risks, and of controlling our emotional responses when we fail or when we succeed.  We're capable of resisting temptations and learning to wait, to have more patience, to sacrifice immediate joys to get more enjoyment in future, or to accept minor losses in order to avoid major ones in future... We're born with certain levels of optimism, but we're capable of increasing it if we lack it or of decreasing it if we're born with optimism that is delusional. We can learn to direct our limited resources to things which really matter, we can learn to be rational while still being a dreamer.... Aren't we lucky that we're alive enough?

Why violence

Horror movies with ugly ghosts, screams and shouts, or brainless violent movies with dance of cruelty, injustice and blood... we are lucky to be able to choose whether to see them, but there are humans whose life is nothing but a live regular experience of such incidents. People fight, they beat others, verbally and physically abuse others, do injustice to the innocent, behave like some angry reckless beasts that too in their own homes. Every day starts (if there is a day) with extreme fear and uncertainty about the existence, every now and then there's possibility of severe violence...

When survival is a big challenge, thinking about growth and progress is out of question. misery rules lives over there. There are bad even vulgar words; there are moans, groans, cries; there are tears and pathological villainous laughter, there are wounds, bleeding, slashes, abrasions, hematomas, and even fractures... loss of organs or organ functions....

With all hopes wiped out, life over there is synonymous with a blend of stress and pain. Before recovery can progress to healing, another assault follows. Sickness, illness or  decreased working capacity are treated with doses of threats, abuses and physical violence... and they're not some wandering ghosts or renowned criminals, for most of the times they wander in outer world as normal humans. I really can't understand in terms of traditional evolution the existence of mother beaters, wife beaters and child abusers. Do they really gain something by hurting their own kin, by transforming their own homes into live hells?

Many times they are males, sometimes addicted to one or more psychoactive drugs with those drugs seizing their controls over their own brains... sometimes they're hale and hearty, conscious, maybe without any drug flowing in their bloodstreams and they just happen to love violence; some may be very intelligent, using planning and high tech techniques of offering distress to take revenge of innumerable small offenses done against them, such as cooking something they don't like... maybe they're psychopaths, maybe they're frustrated failures attempting to get rid of the frustration by doing something injurious to the innocent.........

What's wrong with their world... who's at fault? What makes the crops of psychopaths so common? Lower socioeconomic status with scarcity of resources, scant facilities and excess of problems is said to be associated with high levels of improper aggression. And such aggression does nothing but worsens the situation. Why do people to fall into vicious cycle of scant resources to aggression to destruction of the resources, rather than using the available resources judiciously economically and effectively for helping themselves and others? Why do they choose to hurt others when in fact comforting, helping and loving others can be a great source of solace and relaxation?

Actually more than the actual socioeconomic status, person's own rating about his socioeconomic status is more strongly associated with such improper behavior. In other words, unsatisfied souls tend to be more improperly aggressive. Their aggression is the major obstacle in progress, and the major cause of distress to themselves, their closed ones and to the whole world...    

I don't know how rational it is to think to alter them... I don't know whether there is some rational way to do so... It's like a huge forest in fire, I don't know from where to start and how. For now I'm trying to keep my sensitivity alive, perhaps by chance someday the destiny might offer a chance to make some difference, it won't be a good thing to miss it mere due to indifference.

                                                                 

Frustrating Stimulating

Stimulus is the prerequisite of any action, it's the soul of efforts, fighting spirit, the thing making us strong enough to sustain and keep working even in highest adversities... some sort of stimulus is mandatory to sustain the urge to stay alive. Adversity on the other hand can be defined as lack of stimuli for growth, it's the scarcity of positive things, positive feelings, a threat to existence... The quantity and quality of adversities we face may be the results of our actions or may be purely matters of chance or maybe a combination of both... but they do come; the bad thing ends and the worse follows; surprises come one after another to the extent that you may stop getting surprised... typhoons come, tsunamis happen, earthquakes occur in your delicate mind and push you backwards sometimes far behind the starting line and you've to strive to reach to the starting line leave apart reaching the finishing line.

It requires a highly developed and strong frontal cortex for animals to think of the future and to keep on pressing the lever even if the food reward doesn't come for one time, two times, tens and hundreds of times... but what that poor frontal cortex shall do if thousands of presses are fruitless, and instead you start getting shocks..... I think frustration is a natural phenomenon if the situation is too frustrating. Frustration doesn't come alone; depression, aggression, decreased cognition are all it's companions. It's a vicious cycle, and it goes on affecting each and every part of our lives, making us a person we hardly would have imagined when we were not frustrated. Firstly we lose our voice and then our desire to have our own voice... the pen is there, so is the paper, but the collection of words is often soulless.

It requires intact cognition, lots of energy and high spirits to search meaning in meaningless tasks... it requires extreme confidence, passion and devotion to search traces of hopes in hopeless conditions. Sadly to frustrated tired brains even life saving tasks seem to be meaningless, slightly joyous tasks seem to be extremely mundane. Dullness, boredom, hopelessness, meaninglessness and also sadness... life gets soaked in such dark shades, we become adapted to them and eventually forget the sense of brightness. We come to a point where life can become extremely unproductive, highly dependent on the very scarce sources of stimulation it has... With all joys disappeared from it, the life can become synonymous to painful suffering.

But pain isn't a neutral thing... it's a stimulus. Frustration sensitizes us to all the little positive things we have in our lives, they all when combined are enough to make us to get up and start again with a different approach. It is painful of course, but pain is I feel a foundation of some sort of creative thinking... though this thinking is totally different from the creative thinking due to joy, it can be very productive. Even the act of imagining of how life would have been if things were slightly different is very soothing. Frustration is better than having no emotions at all, it doesn't feel good and thus can act as a stimulus to do something to get out of the situation... If compared to writing frustration isn't the end of the story, it's not a full stop nor is it a comma, it's writing the same sentences with a different tone and maybe with a different meaning... who knows if tomorrow something blissful happens and the next paragraph contains a tinge of smiling heaven in it.  

It is and that's what matters

"It's like a big zero, meaningless, blank, painful, pitiful, extremely hopeless, hopelessly useless, cruel, demanding, demeaning...," sometimes life comes to a point where all efforts seem to be fruitless, we get bombarded with one disaster after another, we get one proof after another of our miserable ineptness, when we lose the sense of direction as if we're trapped in some irremovable fog, noises become so loud that we can't hear our own voice; all we hear are demands, orders and expectations from others especially from our loved ones who somehow seem to have forgotten to love unconditionally; in the bottom of our hearts we're forced to carry an ocean of endless emptiness studed with dying desires, comatose mutilated dreams and above all with an incurable sense of agonizing loneliness... it's the time when we're forced to find out the cause to sustain life or to bear it, to choose whether to continue or to quit... "Why me," is another pathological thought that consumes much energy to get repressed.

This painful feeling grows with age and by the time a kid reaches young adulthood it already has become overwhelming... Some are lucky that they never get these bouts of madness, some succeed in getting rid of it and living a 'normal' life, and in fulfilling all the expectations while still carrying that ocean of emptiness buried somewhere in depths of their minds... some quit, and the remaining ones make their names as synonyms of madness... prove either to be extremely productive or to be completely useless, all their fate depending upon where they direct their search for themselves.

Madness isn't that worthless I feel; it does worth a try or maybe many. Life is slippery, we can't hold it; no matter how stagnant we feel it is, it's always on the move. We're not stationary things, we're humans, time is bound to change us, so are the situations, our feelings and experiences. What we have today there's no guarantee that we'll possess tomorrow... and this includes along with our talents our adversities, pains, failures, all the noxious stimuli evoking fears tears and cravings, our madness, desire to do something, to love, dreams of creating something, of making some difference, our energy, our youth...

Things change with time, just for example- once upon a time I used to write comedy, now comedy seems to have divorced to my pen; it just doesn't come, every sentence comes with a tinge of tears. I wish I would have written some more at that time..... I may write it now if I try hard, but some things are just irreversible. I can be curious, but I can't be a kid. Time affects every single aspect of our lives. To avoid this 'I wish I would have' feeling in future, we must move today.... Our desire of doing something, the endless craving, the sense of not feeling satisfied with the current situation, in other words 'the madness' is only the chance we've been given by the destiny, we shall not lose it by feeling overwhelmed... what if all of a sudden we get some frontal lobe lesion and like Phineas Gage get converted into creatures those can be called in words of his friends as 'no longer us'... we shall not ignore what we have and waste it in crying for what we haven't.

Instead of feeling sad due to the expectations from our loved ones, or feeling that our love is unrequited, we shall think of exploiting our desire to take care of them.. who knows tomorrow some pathology or trauma might happen to our brains and we may lose completely the sense of heavenly pleasure we get for caring them. This uncertainty applies to every field of our life, and this makes the current moment crucial.

It (the current moment) may be like a big zero, meaningless, blank, painful, pitiful, extremely hopeless, hopelessly useless, cruel, demanding, demeaning whatever... but it is and that's what matters, and we must make something from it before it passes away.

discard labels... be humans

I hate boundaries, I always have... Restrictions suffocate me, so do some unexplainable rules. Division of humankind on basis of states, countries, continents and even casts, religions and races make me uncomfortable. Maybe I'm immature, maybe completely mad, but I really can't digest the concept of nationalism, can't understand what on Earth people try to achieve by fighting for boundaries, ruling other nations, or by killing for religions casts and some strange beliefs... and even by saluting to some flags. Can't there be a constitution bigger than the constitutions of each and every state and each and every nation, a constitution of humankind? Can't there be a big flag representative of the whole of the humankind rather than that of a tiny fraction of it? Can't there be a sacred book sacred to people of all religions? Can't we remember the fact that we're humans before we get labeled as members of some tiny community? Is it mandatory to waste resources such as money time and manpower and to sacrifice lives for fighting for little causes like what little immature kids do? Is it mandatory to look at our near and distant neighbors as our competitors, and to set our goals as to overpower them and to make them to lose, especially when we know that there are real problems out there those we need to tackle as humans? Can't we be partners instead of being rivals and work as a team using our differences to compensate for the weaknesses of each other to reach to a common goal of making human life better?

It sounds good to focus on a tiny part of a system and to feel dedicated to it, as it sounds easy to improve the tiny part than improving the whole system... but it'll be a foolishness to ignore the fact that the tiny part is a part of the whole system, and any damage to any other part of the system is bound to cause at least some harm to the part we feel we're dedicated to. Even if we happen to live in an isolated community on an isolated island, still there are things like pollution global warming and altering balance of the ecosystem which can affect us directly or indirectly... and most of us aren't that isolated. A citizen or member of some community is a bigger word than just an individual, but it's much tinier than the word human as we all are members of humankind.

It seems hard to think of equality when things aren't really equal; there are differences in geographic conditions, educational awareness, health and hygiene, availability of resources, faiths and belief systems, extent of social pathologies like money mindedness and corruption... and many more; but we're always free to grow, to introspect and overcome our weaknesses; and instead of looking at others as obstacles in our path or as potential threats to our existence or as something we've to overtake, we are free to look at them as other part of our world and learn from them and seek help from them to overcome our shortcomings while simultaneously helping them to overcome theirs. We're always free to choose to be helping humans instead of acting as area or dominance driven quadrupeds. I think that cooperation rather than competition is the key to success, satisfaction, and evolution; but it requires more strength patience and dedication, and an entirely different mindset... and fortunately all of these are achievable by practice.

seeking for a balance

"Daydreaming isn't good, even dreams during sleep shall contain something useful, meaningful and practical, like study, questions papers, answers, scoring in exams, and thoughtful planning of career and of life overall," once upon a time I used to try to threaten myself... I used to feel embarrassed about the wild absurd ideas completely irrelevant to the syllabus, and to the path of my career, completely useless in current educational system and apparently irrational. I wanted to be a really good student, a scorer, topper, disciplined doing the homework on time, mugging up the details in books for writing in exams without getting bored, fitting perfectly in the norm, thinking within the square, fulfilling each and every criteria of a good student... a teacher pleaser, a parent pleaser, a people pleaser...

"Cats don't talk, they don't make friendships with dogs, there's no such river anywhere in the world that would heal every wound and make you immortal on having a dip into it, chocolates are made in factories, there are no trees that could have readymade chocolate candies as their fruits; heaven and hell are things in religious books, they are not traceable in real; carpets lack the shape, form and machinery that would enable them to fly," I used to attempt hindering my fantasy trips when I was a preschooler and when I was in primary school, it was long before my mind got occupied with fairies, witches, giants and aliens, Bermuda triangle, Maya culture, space life, alternate universe and parallel worlds... again I was wise enough to enforce myself to remember their non- existence... Why was that I couldn't focus on the facts and details given in syllabus books? Why was that I couldn't be a student that I should be...? Why was that in my night dreams I used to be (and that's the case today also, miserably) a worrier princes, an angel or a mad but successful scientist instead of being a gold medal winner? When exams occur in dreams, the dreams are inevitably nightmares! I grew up little bit and got captivated by mind, thoughts and their origins, consciousness, self awareness, free will, love, hatred, selfishness and altruism... "though we can attempt explaining some of them using findings in neuroscience, most of these are enigmas, unsolved things... not much useful in practical life," I tell myself hundreds of times, but alas, as usual, I'm not of my own... not an ideal student, not an ideal doctor, not an ideally practical person. I continue dreaming of my dream world, boundary free, rich, happy, healthy, curious, adorable world, getting governed by emotions of love and altruism, and by knowledge of facts without any ignorance.

Thinking of practical ways to achieve such impractical dreams unexceptionally leave me confused, fatigued, and above all embarrassed. Do I have some serious anomaly in my brain, some serious imbalance of neurotransmitters, excess or deficiency of some kind of neurotransmitter receptors, or is it the neural structure that is abnormal? I got from an article that having lesser latent inhibition in brain makes you to do such absurd things, makes you more creative, but it’s the same thing that’s found in psychoses... the only difference is the ability to detect the boundary between reality and the contents of the dreams. But the boundary is painful, it mocks you, reminds you of your absurdity every moment you see it. Before I would start dreaming of being completely psychotic and enjoying the heavenly pleasure of living in your dream while leaving in some asylum, I decided to write novels to quench my desire of creating a better world, my desire of creating special characters and living with them... a desire of solving mysteries of life. It does soothe me to some extent... but as my parents say, writing a novel is a useless job, having no practical implications, if you wish to create something new to this extent, create it in real (and as you lack the chances to do it, stop thinking about creating)!

But imagination or dreams are not that useless; I feel that today's dreams are foundations of tomorrow's real world... I've experienced certain incidents in life a long before they really happened; they won't believe in this but I know almost all of my best friends since more than a decade before I actually met them. It's like I dream about strangest things and they're out there in this world waiting for me; I don't search for them (thinking that they're absurd), yet they come to me hinting to me that dreams no matter however strange can come true... It's like as if dreams are predictions of mind about the future, about the chances of occurrence of some of the endless possibilities, or maybe they're just some wild constructions of semiconscious mind, and the world or destiny itself is equipped with such wild semiconscious mind.

Currently I'm stretching my limits, trying hard, moving heaven and earth to attain a balance between being impractical and practical at the same time, to believe in my dreams without ignoring what that is real, to allow my imagination to contribute in building the future world which I want to be a photocopy of my dream world...

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.