A night to remember

As the sun set and the cool breeze started blowing, we decided to walk back home crossing the bridge over Sabarmati. I looked sideways to see Sudha smiling and talking animatedly, yet never looking at me.

'So have you ever tried the filter coffee at Sridarshini?'
Karan laughed out loud and said, 'That's not exactly fair, am just a day old here and all I have see so far is you, though still not enough of you!'
Sudha pondered for a while and said, 'You men, all are just the same!'
She complained, though her cheeks flushed and she fumbled with words.

We all went silent after this, I tried to pretend that I was busy looking down at feet, while they got busy looking at their hands and nowhere in particular. I knew this moment would pass and we would get back to our composed self soon. Somehow it was always left to me to make a humorous remark and break the sudden conversation barrier, but this time I decided to let it linger on for a while more. I wanted her to feel my pain, or whatever unusual emotions I was going through for the past two days.

We walked in silence for the rest of the journey. Maybe Karan already felt guilty about what was going on, and was happy to be away from conversations, or perhaps he was just happy and content with the breeze, but he remained silent. I knew we were finally reaching a point where we needed to talk, and have a conversation where I was also involved. Karan was leaving in the morning and I could feel an odd tension building up between the three of us.

I broke the silence and asked them if they wanted coffee, they both nodded. We were already in the new part of the town and so decided to go to the nearest posh new coffee place, sit in the open and enjoy the weather. The rains in the evening had ensured that the air was cool and extremely pleasant. Karan lit a cigarette and after a couple of drags, offered it to me. As I took my first puff, he started talking. I could see he was waiting for the moment, but somehow I panicked. I was not yet prepared for what I knew was coming, and when the words did start flowing, my world vanished.

I walked back home alone that night with the promise that my world would be returned back to me tomorrow. I wasn't sure anymore; Karan was my best friend and Sudha my wife, yet these promises somehow meant so little now.

Thanks to Vikram Tej for the superb illustration, read and know more about him here and here.

Researching Healthcare in India - Rural India, Primary Healthcare Centers

I wrote this last year for another blog which never took off. Its a series of articles based on my personal experience on Researching Hospitals in India as a designer.

Hospitals are not an easy place to be, especially when you visit them with the intent of clinically observing what all goes on there, very objectively drawing conclusions, making connections and finally deciphering workable solutions for the very many opportunity areas which require attention in this very dynamic scene.

This is a series of articles based on my experiences in researching in hospitals for various products/ services.

The first in the series starts right at the bottom of the pyramid i.e in the villages. Most of the inferences drawn here are from my visit to a series of villages in Kutch as a part of one of my classroom projects while in NID.

At the village level, most often its only the government which reaches. There are very few private clinics or doctors, if at all any. It is at these levels that PHCs exist. Primary Health Centres (PHC) are the cornerstone of rural healthcare in India. Primary health centres and their sub-centres are supposed to meet the health care needs of rural population. Each primary health centre covers a population of 1,00,000 and is spread over about 100 villages. A Medical Officer, Block Extension Educator, one female Health Assistant, a compounder, a driver and laboratory technician look after the PHC. It is equipped with a jeep and necessary facilities to carry out small surgeries. However, not all PHCs, are equipped with all these, some manage with much less.

To be able to visit and do good amount of research at these centers isn't easy and requires a lot of perseverance. Also visiting a few would not exactly be very useful, one needs to visit many such centers to make any definite conclusions. Its a challenge not just for the researchers but also for the staff at the PHC, we visited one of the PHC where the doctor was a Bihari and couldn't understand the local language.

Some of the following tips may be useful:

• Its very important to understand the local language, even if you cannot converse in it. If not you, then at least someone else in the group should be able to have conversations in the local language/ dialect. In any case, make sure you record all conversations for future references.
• Often its not easy to get people to talk, especially when they anyway see you as outsiders. A good research would happen only if you are able to break the ice effectively, and do it as early as possible. Always have a strategy about this, and this shall be improvised to the place that you are visiting.
• Once the ice is broken, people would talk and would be willing to listen to you as well as give feedback on what you ask. Its alright to have a questionnaire for this, but more effective would be some games that you can ask the stakeholders to get involved in. One of these could be role-playing, where everyone enacts out their roles and its an amazing time to observe and learn.
• Be gender sensitive, males may not always be welcome at all places. An effective group is the one which has both male and female members. One of the most common visitors at a PHC are women, and one person who can give you a lot of information in an ANM (Auxiliary Nurse Midwife). The purpose of the visit could possibly be completely lost if no woman is there in the research team.
• Just like any research, do have small gifts for everyone. Its would make sense that these are things that are not commonly available there. You might always need to go back to the same place again for validation of your concepts, and a rapport once built would go a long way in any further research as well.
• Carrying a consent form is a good idea, and get it signed by the doctor  or the ANM. It always makes the process more official, apart from ensuring that the design ethics are also taken care of. Always explain what the document states before getting its signed, treat the people there as equals and make them participate in the whole process.

The next in the series (Rural India Primary Healthcare Centers Part II), will also include some quick case studies and some examples of how and what can go wrong while researching the Rural India.

p.s. Thanks to Muzayun for helping me with editing this.

The BBC List of 100 books to read!

Disclaimer: This post has been derived from Aakanshaa's blog. Do go there and read some fabulous reviews :) 

Top 100 books chosen by viewers (re-edited and remastered from the BBC site). The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. See the original list here.

Copy this, Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice  - Jane Austin 

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible  (Some of it)

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials –  Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare  (Some of it)

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis (Btw this should  be in the Chronicles of Narnia)

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Inferno – Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (English)

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas (Unabridged and all three volumes)

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Additional books that seemed to have been excised from the list above and replaced with some others.

28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving

31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson

33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett

41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery

45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian

50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher

53. The Stand, Stephen King (Some of it)

56. The BFG, Roald Dahl

57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome

58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell

59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer

64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough

65. Mort, Terry Pratchett

66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton

67. The Magus, John Fowles

68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett

72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell

73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett

74. Matilda, Roald Dahl

79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens

80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson

81. The Twits, Roald Dahl

82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith

83. Holes, Louis Sachar

84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake

85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson

88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons

89. Magician, Raymond E Feist

91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo

92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel

93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett

94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

95. Katherine, Anya Seton

96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer

98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson

99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot

100. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

Indra's luck...

I knocked on the door knowing fully well what to expect – a lonely, beautiful woman unsatisfied by her beloved.

‘What you doing here Neil? I thought you were on your way to Ambaji’, she asked, her steaming cup of chai evaporating the air and aura around her. I decided to ignore the not-so-concealed mock directed at my faith; I was a man on mission today and nothing was going to distract me from my new found purpose in life.

‘I am Indra and today am here to help you help me release my rasa, so as to help you feel complete and content in life’, I said this with all possible seriousness. Alley listened to me carefully, and offering me a cup of chai asked casually, ‘But I always thought you were Neil?’

‘Not today and certainly not for you’, said I. She was certainly amused now, and decided to play along, lightly pulling at the hair of my hand and looking oh-so-briefly into my eyes. ‘Hmmm…so what brings you here today Indra? I am sure there are lands parched elsewhere as well, and need more rains than my humble abode’, as she said this her hands curled seductively around the remote she had in her hand; the channels flicked at an uneven pace, and the sounds from serials intermixed with the squealing penguins from the more earthy channels. The message was confusing, yet the array of broken, mixing sound was surprisingly seductive.

Soon we were on her bed, our clothes on the floor and all our rasas flowing, inside and outside. Alley's hands turned into claws and she drew blood with them, while her teeth left a trail of marks on my muscles. I was a feast for her, and she was making sure she left nothing to be had later.

                                                                     --

Gautam was humming to himself as he walked up the steps to his house. It was for the first time he actually walked up instead of taking the stairs, as Alley always demanded. He was happy as his weight had shown a reduction of 2 kg over the last three weeks. Just 15 more kgs and he would be a perfect husband. He knew she would be pleased today and might even allow him some bread for dinner. 

There was much in life that Gautama was unaware of, including the fact that he had special powers that could wreck havoc in the materialistic world around him. He didn't yet know that his curse could castrate a man, remove his phallus and cover his body with a thousand vaginas. All he had to do was say - your body will be covered by that which you desired so much!

                                                                     --

Gautam's first reaction when he saw his beloved Alley entwined with what looked like a bundle of injured muscles, was horror. He was afraid for the man, who he thought was being eaten alive by his virtuous wife. He screamed and suddenly the world around him started moving in slow motion, and he alone moved in real time. He realised what was going on and had a tremendous urge to do something.

He looked at the sky, but his view was obscured by the ceiling. While everything was still slow, he went out in the air and got instant karma. This was the moment his cursing abilities were revealed to him!

                                                                     --

The last thing I heard was Alley's fat husband screaming 'Your body will be covered by that which you desired so much!' All of a sudden, I ceased to exist, my existence only a joke...

Meanwhile Alley fell on Gautam's feet and begged forgiveness which he instantly granted. It took only one look at my thousand-vagina-covered body to make her realise that a fat husband was better than the unusual and helpless mass that I was at that moment. They walked away from my quivering body, while the TV in the living room screamed 'You have to try this' for a shampoo ad...

Alley and Gautam lived happily ever after.

Closure, an end

Ref: www.redbubble.com

I lit one another cigarette, and was yet again engulfed in the dark cloud of smoke and despair. I knew it was senseless to wait anymore, but it was impossible not to. I continued to wait, staring out from the closed window into the dense darkness and the feeble fog of the listless night. There was smoke coming out from the house on the near-by hill, perhaps the man in family had just come in and food was getting ready for him, or maybe it was just the smoke of death coming out from the abandoned house.

We had agreed to meet here a few years ago, as we walked along the river on a cold moonlit night. She had her head on my chest and was humming her favorite tune - a jazz number from the era gone by, about lovers separated by time. The small town down the hills was already sleeping and we had absolute silence around us. As we sat right there, looking at the stars after making love slowly under the moonlit sky, she asked for this promise. It was not something she would normally do, she was just not the sort; perhaps she was just happy and content then. We cuddled into each other and agreed to meet at the same place, ten years from then. Maybe she already knew then that we won't be together for long; however, for me it was a promise in blood, and I always thought we would come here again, together...

The coffee was ready now, my fifth so far. Smoke and coffee don't always go well, but I was savoring its bitterness today; it helped me kill the time and also relive the past. I had buried it with much struggle a couple of years after she suddenly decided to leave me. The end was as torrential as our brief spell of togetherness, but the parting always remained incomplete, open. But she moved on, and eventually so did I. 

For the last one year, the itch was growing again to meet her one last time and seek answers for all my unanswered questions, or perhaps just to hold her like I did in our moments together. I often looked into blank spaces, flickering lights, and slow moving fan and wondered if she would even remember the promise she had taken from me. I knew that she would, just as I was sure she would come and meet me one last time today...

The sound of the chirping birds woke me up, and I got up with a start. Warm early sunlight was filtering into the room through the wooden blinds; somehow I had dozed off after my nth cup of coffee. Was there a faint familiar smell lingering around my chair? Had my coffee table been moved and the cigarettes collected neatly and kept in the makeshift ashtray by someone else? Everything looked just the same, but my heart was not ready to believe that nothing happened while I was living through hell in my sleep. Maybe she was here last night as I slept off on the rocking chair, maybe it was just my imagination. My heart struggled with more questions...

Already late for my train I rushed out quickly. It was finally time I moved on, seven years is a long while, and for once I was willing to start all over again. This was finally closure for me; or so I thought...