Divided we stand!

I was standing in the bus stop which has now become an eternal pool of ideas for my blogs. Another fellow Indian sat next to me. I smiled at him, but he darted his vision away from my face. After a few seconds he stood there expressionless staring at me like an archer staring at his bull’s eye. I got a feeling if this person had a super sense of seeing through people’s body and I felt transparent.
I smiled again trying to invoke a response at this human face staring at me. He was a statue. I then shifted my sight on an attractive advertisement board glittering away on this lonely and dark street.

The bus was unsurprisingly late and I had to wait that bit longer. In the course of just loitering around I saw this person trying to see what I was upto and was definitely trying to judge me. This made me uncomfortable. All he had to do was just smile back and connect. But he chose not to, but I could sense the curiosity etched on his face trying to find out more about me. I brushed it away as another one of those instances which I have been in before.

In my short stint of living abroad, these kind of situations pop up very frequently. Our own countrymen do not greet each other. There is an inherent fear among Indians living abroad that other Indians tend to stick to them and would ask them for help if they get friendly or even to just exchange courtesies. Why do we forget our human relation values which are praised and so widely spoken about in other cultures?

I don’t see the logic behind this narrow mindset. I think most Indians living abroad have their own competence which helps them get there. Why do we fear people who come from the same motherland elsewhere so much?

I see the division of an Indian society here much more than back home. This is silent and unexpressed but inherently a very strong kind of discrimination because it is led by some of our country’s fine tuned brains. I would like to call it intellectual discrimination. So here we are, half the globe away from our beloved country land and surprisingly (or unsurprisingly!), divided we stand!

been there done that.....

I was eating dinner and flipping through the television channels at home and suddenly there was something familiar that caught my eye. The channel reception was not good and I could barely see the actors. The information bar on the bottom told me that it was a weekend movie named “The Motorcycle Diary”. I am not too sure wether the last word in the name was singular or plural. I may have been wrong on that. But the important news is that I had watched this movie back in my home country and it was about this Argentina born Cuban revolutionary persona, Che’ Guevara.
So, what is the attention grab in a revolutionary for a wannabe scientist with a bird brain like me?! The only similarity between both of us is the fact that we are both doctors and the parallelism ends right there. Che’ failed the army entrance test because he was an asthmatic. But the failure turned out to be a blessing in disguise. This gave him a chance to join the medical school. During his time as a medical student, he took time off to volunteer as a health care worker even in the presence of his chronic asthmatic condition. He travelled extensively throughout South America on a motorcycle with a biochemist friend volunteering at different medical communities helping them in treating people.
Among them is one instance I remember very vividly is his act of treating leprosy patients in an island in Cambodia and spreading awareness about leprosy to the other unskilled health care workers. The lepers were isolated on a different island which lay across the river and the health workers would cross the river everyday to treat them. Che’ brought about a psychological change in these patients by spending time with them and improving their self confidence. He was their star! Che’ then travelled to other South American countries before finally getting back to medical school to finish his studies.
His revolutionary ideas then made him Fidel Castro’s aide in the Cuban revolution era and the rest is popular history.
Well what I like about Che’ is his daring medical travels that took him to the most unlikely places on this globe which benefited the people in distress. It is amazing to be able to come in contact with the people who are miles away from the nearest health professional let alone a hospital. Health care in many countries is in an impoverished condition and millions die due to lack of health care facilities. For me Che Guevara is a personality who beat the odds which no medical professional would dare doing. I would definitely remember him as a “medical revolutionary” who had, been there and done that!

Colourblind…….

As always I was on my way to work on the bus which now I have found quite entertaining. Thanks to my blog writing habit to keep me awake through the journey.

I was passing through the central business district and there was something that I found was missing, but was hard to nail it down. It happened for more than a couple of weeks. The moment I enter the CBD, my eyes were seeing a void in something that it was usually wasn’t used to. Then the vision would lead me to a sense of boredom and a pinch of depression.

And then one day, eureka! I figured out what it was! It was the lack of colour I am used to seeing back home in India. The colours that Indian people project especially in clothes are really remarkable. You would definitely see a rainbow of colours or even some outside the spectrum if you were to walk through a crowded street. I was used to seeing the multicolour combination on the saris and the suits of women. I am used to seeing men wear solid coloured shirts and gleaming trousers to work.The colours that rural India has to offer are amazing. The shandies and fairs and the next street market is a painter’s palette.

On the contrary, all I see here people wear are shades of blue, black which is the most predominant and the occasional browns if you are lucky. I really cannot figure out the lack of colour in this supposedly lively place.

My appetite for colour can never be quenched here I suppose. I just hope the Lamarkian theory of the use and disuse of organs does not act on my optic nerve and render me colourblind!