Pankaj Desai's Blogs

  We will call him Pravin. Pravin’s father was a farmer. They owned a piece of land in the village, a cow and two buffaloes. His parents’ lives taught him all good values and soft skills. He got his primary schooling in his village. His brilliance was obvious right from his early school days. His father encouraged him to study further. But that was going to be a challenge. The middle and high school was in the town about 5 km away and there was a river between the two villages. Getting admission to that school was not difficult. But commuting in monsoon was going to be a problem. In other months there was a very shallow strip. It was used for walking through the river. But in the monsoon season when the river would be flowing bank to bank, it would mean swimming through. Walking through, Swimming through and sometimes running through      So much was his enthusiasm to study further that walking through, swimming through and sometimes running through didn’t bother h...

I remember as a resident doctor doing post-graduation in obstetrics and gynecology there was this lady senior consultant of ours who always had her anger on the tip of her nose.  We all used to be terrified of her and many would run helter-skelter on seeing her.  Once while I was doing some post-operative routine work in the wards I heard a big commotion near the operation theater door. She was shouting at the top of her voice. Inquisitively, I went closer to find an old man standing in front of her trembling and with folded hands as if pleading for mercy. She was blasting him. It seems she on coming out of the operation theater on finishing some difficult surgery saw something unsavory.  There were beedi ( a thin, Indian cigarette filled with tobacco flake and wrapped in a tendu leaf tied with a string at one end ) stubs littered all around plump near the door of the Operation Theater. I did not need a minute to understand what must have happened. The man must b...