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.