The Story as it is Happening.

I have been flipping back and forth between BBC, CNN, and CNN-IBN (India's local CNN channel) and have noticed that a lot of information and footage has been left off of the Western/International News Feeds. So here is the information, mostly from IBN as I know it.

Sometime around 830-9pm last night A large group of fashionably dressed, well-groomed, 20-something men (their pictures are on Indian tv, not on international... there were at least 26 of them) with AK-47s, MP5s, magazines (ammunition cartridges) strapped to their arms and legs, and backpacks full of grenades got off of boats near India Gate in Colaba. Colaba is the main district where tourists, from backpackers to businessmen, stay in Mumbai.

They placed bombs at the monument and spread out. Shooting began at Leopold restaurant (one of the most famous places for tourists to have dinner, grab a drink, and generally hang out... really old, think it opened in the late 1800s) around 9:15. The Indian channels are showing the inside of the restaurant with pools of blood, shell casings and tourist shoes. Western channels aren't showing this.

Around 10pm they began firing at security personnel at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, mumbai's most famous hotel and a landmark in its own right. There were at least 2,000 people inside. At least 200 people were being held hostage in one of the major halls at one point. Reports say that the terrorists were checking people for identification, looking for Brits and Americans. The terrorists ran through the halls of the hotel shooting whoever they saw and throwing at least 10-15 grenades. There are still 40-100 people still being held hostage in the Taj. Reports say that security measures were decreased at the hotel (from 2 metal detectors and baggage x-rays to one metal detector) sometime in the past two weeks. Terrorists have used RDX to bomb one of the penthouses and the lobby. There are still fires burning in the hotel and are still at least 5-6 terrorists inside. There are many european MEPs still being held hostage and at least one killed (probably from spain) who were in town for an economic summit

Around the same time, about a kilometer east of the taj, terrorists opened fire at the oberoi, also a $300+ a night hotel. There were at least 1000 people in the hotel. The terrorists are still holding at least 40 people hostage. The terrorists bombed the lobby when the army tried to enter, severely delaying rescue attempts. Again witnesses report terrorists were specifically targeting foreign guests.

Around 1030 terrorists began opening fire and throwing grenades at mumbai's main train station killing at least 3 and beginning a firefight with police officers.

Around the same time a car bomb went off at mumbai's domestic airport terminal in a taxi.

At least 3 car bombs have gone off in Vile Parle's Juhu area, known for being the homes of many bollywood actors and foreigners. The Marriot hotel, also in this area was bombed. There were some reports Jewish/Israeli people were being targeted.

The headquarters of an orthodox jewish charity, Chabad Lubavitch, is under siege and is still the sight of gun battles between terrorits and police. There are still many people being held hostage. This has not been reported on western channels as far as I know.

Terrorists took over parts of the Cama Hospital, where victims from the attacks were being brought for care. There was a long gun battle between terrorists and police. All of the terrorists were killed or arrested. This is where the top three Mumbai anti-terrorism police were killed.

There were CNN-IBN reporters at the Metro Cinema when a police van (apparently hijacked by terrorists) opened fire on a crowd, blowing off two fingers of a CNN-IBN crew member and killing an anti-terrorism offcer. The complete video of this attack is being shown on Indian tv, but has been heavily censored or not shown at all on western channels. Another reporter for IBN has just been shot at outside the Oberoi on live tv but is unhurt.

The top three anti-terrorism police in Mumbai have all been killed.

There are reports that weapons manufactured in pakistan have been found with the bodies of the terrorists.

There are at least 100 dead and 187 injured.

Around 2pm there was an end to a hostage situation in one of the hotels. IBN says oberoi, bbc says taj.

Ok, that's it for now... I'll keep you updated as the attacks are still on-going.

And now for something, etc...

So on a blog that I once kept, ages ago, I used to put up album/movie/book recommendations to the joyous applause of the masses. Along those lines I felt like putting up some new albums (came out in last 6 months or so) that I've liked in the hopes that maybe you'll give some a listen and like them too.

1.) kings of leon - only by the night
2.) fucked up - the chemistry of common life (one of the best bands I hadn't heard of until a month ago)
3.) dj shadow and cut chemist - the hard sell (part three in the brainfreeze, product placement, etc... series)
4.) tv on the radio - dear science (and seriously you should still be listening to the last two tv on the radio's)
5.) the streets - everything is borrowed (better than the last but can't touch either of the first two)
6.) new mitch hedberg - do you believe in gosh? (though he died in 2005 so it's just new to us)
7.) Sigur Ros - Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust Iceland's coolest band does it again... get "( )" (their second album) right now if you don't have it already
8.) Frightened Rabbit - The Midnight Organ Fight ....(if you like the shins or anything in that vein) seriously find me a better album put out in the past 7 months. If you do it, you win a special treat from the land of cows, moustaches, and curry.
9.) Calle 13 - Lost de atras vienen conmigo. Not just a great reggaeton album... in fact it's hardly a reggaeton album at all.... perhaps this album is to traditional (e.g. Daddy Yankee) reggaeton as the slim shady lp was to gansta rap. Anyway, give it a listen and you'll definitely like it.
10.) Flowering Inferno - Death of the Revolution... best dub album i've heard in a looooooong time. Dub meets Stan Getz.
11.) The Black and White Years - The Black and White Years ... a bit like talking heads/modest mouse. Nothing spectacular but worth a listen.
12.*) Santogold & Diplo - Top Ranking - no idea what it will sound like... great new artist and great producer on a record that has only existed in rumor until this summer and is still hard to get
13.*) Mighty Underdogs - Droppin Science Fiction .... just look at the line-up: Lateef the Truth Speaker and Gift of Gab messing around with DJ Shadow, Mr. Lif, Akrobatik, The Alkoholiks' Tash, Jurassic 5's Chali 2na, Julian and Damian "JR Gong" Marley. Epic.
* - Haven't heard these two yet, but I recommend them knowing that they will be incredibly awesome.

and perhaps most amazing of all, the release on cd of
14.) Rodriguez - Cold Fact.... perhaps the greatest "lost artist" of the 1960s.... a spectacular album that rivaled anything put out in the decade but was eclipsed by captain beefheart's - trout mask replica (another all time greatest) which came out around the same time.

oh and if any of you happen to be deftones or slipknot fans, check out:
15.) the hollywood undead - swan songs ... but seriously if you don't know who the deftones are or are mildly afraid of adult men in cheap masks don't get this one.


Ok, that's it for now.

Enjoy.

The world sat up. and all listened. for the sound was righteous. and the moment correct.

Today is a day of celebration and rejoicing. However I can't help but feel that, while we learned that being African American no longer defines the limits of your potential, being gay still does. In California, proposition 8 passed making gay marriage specifically illegal. Similar ballot measures passed in florida and arizona... and in arkansas gay people were specifically banned from adopting children. Regardless of your opinion of homosexuality, why should it be legal to legislate who can marry whom? It just doesn't seem right or fair, and it certainly shows a blatant mixing of church and state. Hopefully it will be appealed up to the 9th circuit court and no further... because if the current supreme court takes it there is no telling what precedent they will set.

The Great Yellow

First, let's see what my boy Herm has to say about the color of the world. (Before you run retching into wild, please understand that I've spent the last 5 days with IRB protocols and critical care papers. Your tolerance is appreciated.)

"And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues- every stately or lovely emblazoning- the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge- pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?"

Ok, so a bit superfluous but bear with me, I'll bring it home.

Today as I walked down good old Civil Supply Godown with Kalyan, on the way to the library for the 5th day in a row, I turned to him and said through the venetian slits that have become my eyes these days, "Is it just me or is the light different here?"

You see, I can't quantify or explain it, but the light here absolutely ruins my eyes if I don't wear sunglasses. I don't know if it is just me, but I think not. I mean how many green or blue eyed Indian people (kashmiris and bollywood stars don't count) have you ever seen? Obviously there is something being selected against. Perhaps it explains why my ancestors ran squinting into battle alongside Alexander only to be driven out of the Indus Valley with our togas between our legs. I mean surely Blublockers weren't invented until at least the 17th century.

However Melville would have us believe that all light is the same whether in Boston or Bangalore... made up of pure white heat, and that all deviation is merely deceit. So why would rays from mama sol here charbroil my retinas when in New York they just tickle my rods and caress my cones with their fingertips? The only explanation I can come up with is that there is a flaw in Melville's logic. The light in New York, Nantucket, and New Zealand... lands he was known to haunt on his 4 year tours.... may be pure pale fire, but as the earth warms up along its steamy waistline, here in India, it is stained with henna, turmeric and saffron. And thus, instead of painting our sallow protagonist like the slapper he yearns to be, it leaves him burnt, blind, and disoriented.

Don't believe me? Check this out:



Trust me. I'm not trying to trick you with a typical sunset passed off as midday. This was taken at 2pm! It looks like the iodine tincture of the world is going to diffuse in and stain our daintily whitewashed concrete wallpaper. Doesn't it? Er... which is to say it looks really yellow... like sticky stainy, clorox-won't-cut-it yellow.

So if you haven't seen me in a while... and you notice that my skin has taken on a certain hue... please be kind and understand... at least all of you Indian kids will understand why my right hand is stained yellow (not what you think... i do that with the other hand)

And if you're coming by the house sometime soon and think that we're not in. Just ring the bell. Odds are we're home, maintaining our natural pallors. Wonder ye then at the croconic cowardice?*

*I'll put up a normal post sometime not too far away when something other than work happens.

As I was saying....

So anyway, I'm guessing y'all are wondering what I've been up to for the past month or so since I gave you a decent blog post. Well, as most of you know, I would love to talk on and on for hours about myself however I will instead borrow a lesson from the master of daily-minutiae blogging (vidontap) and focus only on what I've been up to the past few days. Let's go.

Ok, well ...actually.... I really should start about a month ago. During the last two weeks of August I took an epidimiology/biostat/SPSS/EpiInfo course for docs/researchers run through the med school by Dr. JP, formerly of Bloomberg, who is an amazing lecturer. It was a lot of fun, though there was no A/C in the lecture hall, leaving the majority of us doing that ridiculous half-asleep head-bob thing for 3 hours after lunch. I think I learned quite a bit... or at least enough to confuse Marjory endlessly while trying to help her make sample size calculations and decide on statistical analysis. There's nothing as dangerous as a little bit of knowledge. Especially when it comes to biostat where vocabulary and logical constructs serve much like the snake charmer's waving oboe, a distraction that leaves the observer with a profound sense of confusion, impotence, and a barely suppressed desire to strike wildly at unprotected flesh.

After that, I spent a week reading papers and having meetings canceled while I tried to finally throw together something to keep me busy for the next 8 months. Despite a number of brick walls, it looks like I will have 2 ICU projects that will start enrolling patients in October, and a multi-year randomized controlled trial looking at alternative pneumococcal vaccination schedules that will start sometime in the future... maybe Jan? I'll also probably cobble together a couple of papers that I'll drag out of a giant database the TB group just finished building. Bear in mind this is completely optimistic thinking... none of this may ever see the light of day. This is India after all.

After meeting with the head of ICU research last Friday and squaring away our two studies, I was looking forward to a weekend of freedom before getting down to work for two weeks and cranking out two protocols for IRB review by Sept 19th. However my dream was crushed at lunch on Saturday when Dr. Kang (my fogarty assigned PI) told me I had to go to the Community Orientation Program with the second year med students for "at least a few days." Deciding that this meant 3 days, I embarked on an experience that was horrifying, humiliating, and yet ever so mildly rewarding. Interested parties - please read on.

COP - So the Community Orientation Program (COP) is a mandatory 20-day experience that all second year medical students at CMC must participate in. They go to a village within the catchment area of CHAD (Community Health and Development) Hospital in south Vellore. This hospital serves all of the 10 major villages and their suburbs until half way between Vellore and Thiruvanamalai (look it up on a map). Every year the COP program is in a different village, returning to each village every 10 years. The demographic/health data for these villages is so extensively recorded by people at CHAD that they serve has a 100,000+ cohort for all of CMC's community based studies. I'm talking data down to the GPS coordinates of every house, hut, and squatter's shanty. Every birth, every death, every illness... everything has been recorded in these villages for the past 30+ years. It's pretty awesome. Hopefully this will be my cohort for my pneumo vaccine study.

Anyway, each group of 3 students is assigned a ~15 house chunk of town and they spend the 20 days collecting data about the people in these houses (from simple demographic stuff to household economics, traditional beliefs, child rearing strategies, etc...) and getting to know them. Two of the people each student meets during this study will be that student's patient for the entire 5 years he/she has left of med school. Talk about continuity of care!

So to participate in this program I had to get up at 4:15 am so that I could wake up and walk to CHAD by 5 am when the bus left for our village of Chinnapallapakam. I forgot how much it sucks to get <4 hours of sleep. Seems like surgery was way more than 5 months ago. During the entire 35 minute bus ride, the boys on the bus (I of course rode on the male-only bus) belted out linkin park and queen hits at the top of their lungs. Such is the musical taste of the teenage Indian lad. We started each day with the obligatory praying, bible reading and religious singing as is a hallmark of all activities at CMC. During these times, I find it amusing to watch the faces of the 7-8 Hindu students that are allowed to enroll in CMC each year. It must be very strange to go to a school that forces prayer and religoius values on students. CMC is probably the second best



med school in India, making the decision to involve oneself in what must be an incredibly strange world easy, yet I'm sure few of these students know what exactly they are getting themselves into. It makes me think back to the dark ages when the madrassas of Samarkand, Bukhara, Kashgar, Cordoba, and Granada were the great centers of learning in the world. They attracted the best and brightest of the collapsed European empires who were forced to worship and obey the laws of Islam in order to learn about math, architecture, astronomy and medicine. Perhaps that's a bit of a stretch, but as many of you know, I have a particular fascination with Central Asia's golden age. (that pic is of Samarkand, not Chinnipallapakam).

So after prayer we ate breakfast, went out and met with our people for a few hours, went for a hike up the mountains that surrounded the village and eventually returned around 10 am for 3 hours of napping before lunch. After doing another 1-2 hours of post lunch napping, we went back out into the village or volunteered to work in the free clinic offered each day until dinner time at 630. As you can probably guess, we were all a bit angry that we had to get up so early each day when really there was only about 4-5 hours of work to do.

Monday was the worst, as the one person that had been informed I would be attending was not present. After a great deal of initial confusion I was assigned to a faculty member who went out in the morning with a few students and spent the rest of the day sleeping. Tuesday I randomly picked a group of 3 students and followed them around, mostly just asking a few questions here and there since the students weren't really that excited abut me tagging along. Wednesday was a lot better as a couple groups of 3 students figured out that I knew a bit more about medicine than they did and took me around to see their most interesting cases. I was able to do quite a bit of teaching, though my lack of knowledge about tropical diseases left me wishing I'd brought along my Oxford guide. Actually I had so much fun on Wed, there is a chance I may go back for one more day next week... taking the local bus out to the village around 9 am of course.

Anyway, I stuck to my word and called it quits after catching the bus home on Wed. As it was a Wednesday, I forced myself to enjoy the weekly dinner at Darling with all of the foreign students. So hard. It was Liz, Fran, Pat, and Coryn's (the 4 Australians who arrived in Vellore the same week I did) final dinner at Darling. So after dinner we grabbed a beer while we all enjoyed our regular game of them taking turns taking the piss out of America while I spent the time defending my silly schizophrenic wreck of a country whenever possible. Liz and Fran are the two girls second in from the end on each side in this photo (fran in the green, liz = disembodied head).

There are a thousand other things I would like to blog about, but I'm currently febrile, coughing up greenish stuff, and feeling rather crap. Perhaps I'll get around to telling you all about the magical trip to the Bombay sweet shop ("how much do you like him?" being the pinnacle line of the strangest conversation I have ever witnessed), the hand holding meatheads at Vellore's only gym, the adventures of a particular urban donkey, and my weekly butt-rock (if this is not a term you are familiar with, look it up) and cheap rum parties with the hospital interns.

Bear with Matt's Crapness

So I haven't posted in a while, mostly for good reasons. Primarily, the power situation here has been rather dire during the past week with ~5 outages/day, each lasting 1-1.5 hours. The major effect of this is not that I don't have power to run my comp, but 1.) we don't have a battery operated router/modem and 2.) with no fans/ac the heat becomes too unbearable to stay inside and work. This weekend we are getting a battery-based backup system installed and should have it much easier from here on out.

Secondarily, I'm working on an idea that I came up with a loong time ago about putting real-life audio with a photo/photos... however blogspot won't let me post anything other than still photos or video... are any of you out there smart enough to help me or know of a program that will let me layer audio on a still to make an avi/mpg/mov other than premiere (and seriously, if anyone suggests a mac program he/she will receive a fresh sacred-cow patty to the head)?

Thirdly, I'm taking this epi/biostat course from 8:30-5-ish each day plus trying to hammer out the details of my research project so I don't have a lot of time to spend with y'all. Next week, I'll hit you with an entry so big you'll need an e-plunger.

P.S. If you haven't already, check out the pictures of my house/vellore I put up on facebook.

Interlude: The Arul Incident or "He is no ordinary white man."

I apologize for interrupting the narrative, but like all great American authors (Steinbeck, Melville, Silverstein, etc...) I shall take the liberty of improving my story by diverting from it.

Plus this is just straight up weird.

So we were at Darling (you'll hear more about this in Aint No Party... pt. 2) (ok, so I guess I should fill you in a bit... Darling is a restaurant on the roof of the Darling Residency Hotel, Vellore's finest, that is widely known as the best and, in many senses of the word, Vellore's only "restaurant")... well before I get started I should really introduce the we. We = Matt, Fran, Liz, Sebastian, Sabina, Pat, Coryn, Cara, Katie, Monica, Theresa, Nina, Andy, the 2 Scandinavian girls (ouch, I feel really bad for not remembering their names,) the identical twins, the two Glaswegians, the two British nursing students who I just met, and 4 random German girls who I'd never seen before. All in all, with a few notable exceptions... the white kids.

So anyway, we were at Darling just finishing ordering our food, when our waiter... the renowned polyglot Subramani... tells me that I have a phone call at the bar. This is strange for at least two reasons. 1.) Mr Subramani doesn't know my name, thus the caller must have described me... therefore he must know me very well... and 2.) everyone who knew I was going to be at Darling is with me at Darling.... which is to say someone knew where I was without me having to tell them.

I answer the phone and, of course, it is Mr Arul. Mr. Arul is the purveyor of the college (of christian medical college fame) canteen (aka cafeteria.) Mr Arul doesn't do "work" of any identifiable sort, instead he just sweats, grows facial hair, and has inappropriately long conversations with you while you are trying to eat. And I mean really long. He will stand there and continue talking about nothing in particular (his favorite topics include: his health, his work ethic, the size of the person he is talking to, their enjoyment of the food he has sold them, and miscellaneous incorrect statements about whichever country sounds like the country you're actually from) until all divert their eyes from his face and begin eating whilst staring at their food. Btw, He still thinks I'm Australian. Now most people would not engage Mr. Arul in these conversations as this will only prolong them as well as the group suffering. However I take a perverse pleasure in happily and loudly greeting Mr. Arul, asking him about his health and why he works too much, on a daily basis. I also complain to him that his food is not spicy enough... I really should do that last one. You see, the spiciness of the food at the canteen is a topic of great concern to Mr. Arul and the other canteen staff, notably because the Commonwealthians cannot currently tolerate any of the food at canteen besides vegetable noodles (ramen with chopped veg) and fried rice (white rice with chopped veg). However each day I ask him for the spiciest thing on the menu and each day he tries to outdo himself. Although he is approaching the threshold of my tolerance, just so that we can have a daily topic of pointless conversation, I egg him on...

Mr Arul has come to expect me at his cafeteria every night, as I can get more food than I can eat for about $0.75 (this is why I haven't done any cooking.) Plus the white kids live on campus, right next door to the cafeteria so it's a good chance to meet up and hang out with some non-Indians for an hour or so a day... not to say that I don't like hanging out with Indians... just that right now 12 hours a day is a bit much... I'm still working up to 16.

When I didn't show up Wednesday, he figured I was at the only other restaurant in town and called to check up on me. Why me in particular, I can never be sure... perhaps because I look like the sort who might sweat, grow facial hair, and run a restaurant sometime in my future... a protege if you will. Before asking to talk to me however he spoke to Subramani and, after replacing my order with a dish of his choosing, told him "he is no ordinary white man. make him the spiciest chicken cherulchadarlaricashamum (i don't remember the exact spelling) you have ever made. he can handle it." This is an exact quote from Mr. Arul. Needless to say the chicken was spicy, but not really more than my daily tofu stir-fry (I'm looking at you Mr. Yuan.) It wasn't even up to the chickeny-heat standards of Pollo Rico or Fat Chix.

Follow me on a sentimental digression.

Mr. Arul is quintessentially Indian. Overbearing, socially awkward, nosey, self-important, etc... but at the same time he genuinely cares that I, someone he only met 2 weeks ago, has a nice time out. Even if I'm not going to his restaurant. The people here are all hewn from that same vein in some degree or another... they will go out of their way to make sure that you are comfortable, even when it means a threadbare old man standing up and demanding you take his seat on a bus, because to them it is obvious that you are a guest... in their home, their country, their discount meat emporium, etc... and in all guests they see god. Well not all of them surely, some just see an oddly dressed sap with dollar bills sticking out of his orafi. But I'd like to think that those are the minority... and like all bad minorities I'm going to assume none live in my neighborhood. And if I find any, I'll scour at them appropriately until the cease their charlatan ways and start behaving more like Mr. Arul... with less facial hair of course.

Aint no party like a White Kid Party, pt 1

Hello.
I apologize for not updating this little one-sided conversation of ours earlier, but frankly I'm busy and you give me little to work with. That said, let's talk about India this week...

I shall begin last Saturday, with a particularly interesting conversation I had with Kalyan and his pal Varghese-my-neezy-keep-my-knees-so-breezy (although he said his first name to me about 10 times I never remembered it, so to avoid embarrassment I made more and more baroque versions of his last name, like that one, to the amusement of us all.) We were discussing Kalyan's obsession with Pink Floyd, an obsession that won him a free cell phone at a trivia contest two weeks ago, and how utterly crap classic rock is (my opinion, not his.) He wished to know what music I consider worth listening to... to this query I made an unforgivable blunder. I played MIA. Now for all of you unfamiliar with her work, MIA is a brittish pop/rap star whose father was the founder of the particularly militant student branch of the Sri Lankan rebels, the Tamil Tigers, who has been living in exile in England for all of MIA's life. I live in Tamil Nadu. So immediately Kalyan and Varghese-why-is-my-green-soup-so-split-peas-y have a problem with the fact that by purchasing her album I was indirectly supporting a terrorist organization. Once assuring them that I would never purchase her, nor anyone else's, album we got down to listening. Oh crap. So apparently MIA's new album KALA, has borrowed all of its samples from last year's Tamil hits. To a couple of non-Tamil boys like Kalyan and Varghese-the-magic-word-is-please-y Tamil-anything is the hallmark of low culture. To add to their disbelief that Westerners would appreciate any aspect of Tamil culture, I told them how pretentious high-school types in the US (not like me, but in a similar vein) smoke beedi cigarettes (made and consumed by rural villages in Tamil Nadu for about 10 rupees [$0.25] per 100.) To this they added a list of other shitty Tamil things I can take back with me and introduce to American Culture:

1.) The Lungi
2.) The Urban Cow
3.)The Autorickshaw
4.) Forget plates... let's use leaves!

Saturday night I went to the house of my research advisor, Dr. Kang, for dinner. What surprised me was not the fact that she had a dascheund, but was the fact that upon arriving I was offered hard liquor. In terms that you would all understand, that's about as socially acceptable in India as being offered a line of coke upon visiting a professor's house... especially since drinking is forbidden in all CMC staff housing. Having experienced the ravages of Nepali whiskey and the days of recovery after drinking Nepali gin (I was put up in a posh hotel by Peace Corps medical and given what I think was a banana bag by a nurse after a particularly bad encounter) I settled on the local brew, a Kingfisher.

Dinner went well. I spent most of the time talking with Dr. Kang's husband about American football and how living in Houston is still worse than living in Vellore. A bold, though true, statement.

I wasted Sunday cleaning up the house, doing laundry, skyping with various individuals.

Monday was my first day at the hospital. It felt a lot like third year. We began with a bible reading, a group prayer and a discussion with the chaplain about personal responsibility in bad medical outcomes. Then we had journal club and a bit of breakfast. After that we went on rounds.... yeah, did you notice the bible business and the prayer too? Based on the scouting report from Mark, my predecessor, this is business as usual... and next time I'll be asked to lead... *gulp* I really hope that my impromptu prayer does not read like my rough drafts of these blog entries, full of colorful anthropomorphic expletives, vague sports cliches, obscure literary/film references and long winded stories that everyone has heard before. If I hit a mental traffic pylon, I'll just recite the Jesus prayer from Franny and Zooey.

That was a joke.

Monday night shall be known as White Kid Party #1.
After getting a text around dinner time from local Canadian idealist P-Daley, I set out for the med school campus for August's edition of the monthly foreign student program and mixer. I was shocked to see that so many foreigners were around, about 20 in all, varying from a high school student from Northern California to a Cardiology fellow from Tanzania. For our entertainment they (the gypsys, not the foreign types) put on a show of traditional gypsy dance. This topic would be otherwise unremarkable if it weren't for the 25 minute introduction given by the organizer of the program about how God told her to save these people from their lacksadaisical ways and help them get jobs, go to church, save money, wear underpants, and other such important things. After speaking of her aforementioned successes, she also spoke of the fact that gypsy children cannot stand to go to school, gypsy men are only qualified to make slingshots to sell to tourists, and gypsy women suited only for beading. She said all of this in the same matter of fact way you might say that I have magazine advertisement related OCD, or Farshid cooks stinky rice.... i.e. like facts. All of us foreigners looked uncomfortably at one another during the duration of this lecture before retiring to tea, nescafe, and biscuits.

I met various foreigners which I shall tally here:
Americans - 3.5 (two of them are identical twins... I wasn't sure how to count that)
Australians - 4
Brits - 4
Canadians - 1
Danes/Dames - 1
Germans - 5
Omanians - 5
Malaysians - 1
Swedes - 1
Tanzanians - 1

After hearing the phrase "what is med school like in your country?" repeated at least 381 times in different manners of broken english, we dispersed... agreeing to meet again on Wednesday for dinner at Vellore's only proper wait-staffed restaurant, Hotel Darling.

I will, of course continue this post at a future date... but for now I must retire.

Hey... I'm in India....

So explanatory titular email out of the way, let's get down to business. I arrived in India Thursday morning (July 31st) by way of San Diego, Los Angeles and Hong Kong, landing in Chennai around 1:30 in the morning. Trips that long (25.5 hours from take off to landing) are bound to be full of stories, but I'll spare you the mundane. Highlights include: my own row on the 13.5 hour transpacific flight (given to me by the tardy flight attendant who I let cut in front of me in the security line,) my own row on the 5 hour intra-asia leg (after an angry lap child refused to remain lap-bound and demanded his own seat), watching the last 20 minutes of Definately Maybe that were so cruely denied me by the LIRR schedule, a free cookie with my $4 grande coffee at the Hong Kong Starbucks simply because I winced at the price, and the 60+ year old business man sharing my table at the Hong Kong airport food court who frustratedly demonstrated the proper way to eat noodles without splashing your well-vested tablemate.

Once securely arrived in India, by that I mean through immigration, baggage retrieval, customs, etc..., I was met at the airport by a taxi driver with a properly ink-jetted sign stating to all who could see that he was picking up "Mathuw Grifft." I really hope there isn't some poor danish fellow still wandering the grounds of the Chennai airport waiting for a taxi to take him to Vellore.

Anyway, I quickly established that my taxi driver's name was "Gajjarraj" which, using my vast knowledge of sanskrit, I deduced meant "Carrot king." CK and I motored off to Vellore chatting about this and that, mostly the cost of things (cars, motorcycles, various roadside edifices, etc...) because all he really knew in English was numbers and all I knew in Tamil was how to point at things. This carried on for an hour until CK stopped for his 3 am tea while I nearly peed on a nearby sleeping goat. Ok, fine... replace "nearly" with whatever word least offends you... that still indicates I peed on a goat. It was very small and black and hard to see in the moonshadow of the Tata truck in which it slept.

Around 4:30 am CK delivered me safely to my apartment, which is really the second floor of an old woman's house, pounding manaically on the locked door until our good pal Kalyan opened up. Kalyan is in his last year of medical school, which translates to our intern year. He is working in the Wellcome lab (my new office) doing rotavirus research. Basically he has also been assigned my wellfare and is generally doing a good job at it. However I'm sure he didn't imagine this would involve being woken up at an ungodly hour by a semi-bearded caucasian and a man with demonstrated dominance over a particular root vegetable.

Once bathed (via bucket... oh yes, there is no working shower so I'm back to the old BBLB, big bucket little bucket, system of bathing) I collapsed face first into my dirty bed (though I did wrap a t shirt around the pillow to make a stylish impromptu pillow case) and slept until 3 pm the next day.

During the rest of the day, I managed to do a bit of cleaning/unpacking, discovered the cricket channel on tv, talked for 2.5 hours with my 92 year old landlady, toured the medical school campus a bit with Kalyan and Deepthi (my fogarty counterpart) and crashed again.

Yesterday. So yesterday was the day that our old Vellore was finally promoted from Town to City status. No one was quite sure what this means, but all agreed that it was worth a giant party that shut down all of the roads and public offices in town after 9 am. This severely limited my ability to do anything yesterday, but I did manage to get an account set up at the hospital cafeteria. This is essentially like becoming a member of a mediocre Indian restaurant... it doesn't really give me any benefits or discounts, but it does mean that a portly man in a blue uniform examines my plate before I can eat and makes notes in a little book. Since the cost of the meal is the same regardless of how much you take, I can only imagine he is recording how much a chubby white guy can eat out of personal interest. Perhaps soon he will move to photos.

Beyond the cafeteria success, I spent the rest of the day in the office occupying space and nodding graciously as people told me their names before promptly forgetting them. Not only are Tamil names difficult, but the people I met yesterday all seemed to have a severely unamerican volume deficiency problem when it comes to speaking to one another at close distance. So after a morning of showing my coworkers how much money doctors in America make and what Step 1 scores they need to get accepted into US residencies (their idea not mine) I decided to walk around town... eventually visiting the famous Vellore Fort. While I was there I shot a video of a cow eating garbage and have loaded it here.



I promise to load more interesting videos in the future.

Anyway, last night I passed out around 6:30, waking briefly to be told that I was too tired to go to a party at one of our PI's house. I proceeded to sleep until around 6:30 this morning. Hopefully I will kick this whole jet lag thing before I miss another chance to party with the "Parasite Queen"... ok, so I didn't make that nickname up, but it's kind of amusing that anyone's life would go down a path that would result in such a nickname.

Today. So today I finally got a SIM card and thus a new phone number. If you want to call me just dial 011-91-989-441-3230. Easy, right?

Alright, that's enough for now.

தர்மொப்லச்ட்டி (Dharmoplasty)

So dharma is the essential nature of a thing. It's the "you"-ness of you, or the "universe"-ness of the universe. Even though you may grow old, lose a nostril, grow hair in your ears, etc... you are essentially still you... your dharma is unchanged. For those of you who speak Medicine or Greek, you see therefore that the title of my blog is a bit of a cosmic chuckler. For those of you who don't, "-plasty" refers to the act of moulding or shaping, implying plasticity... changability. So perhaps taking a year off from medical school to do research in India won't change my dharma... but I wouldn't bet against it.