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.