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Tuesday, November 29, 2011

A Check-list Before You Start Writing Your Biography

Make sure to keep it non-controversial, unless, of course, you are eyeing some short lived media attention and long lived grudges.

Don’t let the text be loud, allow the sub-text to rule the mood.

Sit with your family and friends more often. Observe them closely and ask them for old-forgotten memories.

Visit the significant places you have ever been. In all likelihoods, you would find some new thing and recollect some nostalgia.

Click a lot of photographs and keep all the albums handy. Devote a lot of time looking out at the pictures; the childhood pics, college pics, marriage pics, ceremonial pics, holiday trip pics, family pics etc.

Divide the events of your life in some chapters and treat each chapter as a separate entity, an al-inclusive one.

Get a basic hold on Microsoft Word (or any other tool that you prefer for the similar application).

Keep a diary with you; if you are well versed taking notes on your smart-phone, it will be as good if not better.

Make a schedule of writing; aim to write daily. In the scheduled writing hour, prefer to not do anything else; even if you are suffering with writer’s block of the day, don’t keep the pen down. You can anyway refine the raw notes at a later stage.

Keep breathing space in your writing schedule. You have to be at your thinking best so offering yourself deadlines serves no real purpose.

Talk to your old friends, and if they allow, record their conversations about your togetherness.
Always keep a backup of your soft copy.

Tie up with an editor, and explain him about the job before you press the ‘hiring now’ button.

Buzz your social network about your progress in writing the biography. It will keep your close ones informed and you might get some motivation by their comments and feedbacks.

Keep the narration simple, and don’t breach its integrity.

Refrain from using opulent, flowery words. The aim is to ensure an easy comprehension.

Avoid going high on artificial stimulants to get a high (read excess coffee, tea, alcohol, nicotine); the flow is just the best when you are truly in pulchritude.

If possible, start each chapter with a theme quote. The quote can be your own. PS: I am using this strategy for my own biography.

My Most Awesome Moments

Successfully accomplishing some rare surgical procedure at my hospital.

Meeting free-thinkers that don’t really fit in the old-hat notion of predictable preachers.

Holding conversation with my old patients that have been my most ardent supporters.

Witnessing a patient in whom the recovery has been faster than usual norms.

When a new born is christened as Anil, just because the parents have been inspired by me.

When I explore the internet to find out unbelievable pace of advancements in surgical sciences.

Being able to stick to my schedules of the day and still extract some time to spend with my wife during the fag end of the day.

Standing in the court of Lord Krishna at Vrindavan / Eskon Temple with transcendental state of mind, and experiencing the inexpressible solace.

To savor Kachauri of Kota. Nothing beats its signature style aroma and flavor.

To be able to extend that extra help for the person who truly deserves it the most.

The moment I just wake up.

When I explore a new country, a new culture, a new horizon indeed.

When I experience déjà vu.

When I am able to learn a new trick in the dogma of internet and computers; whoever says new things are for blue-eyed boys, go get a life.

When I find a long-forgotten pal in some form of social media. Though I must say it has started happening virally with the arrival of facebook.

Dial Code 212 - Dr Anil Khetarpal Speaking

I love my room; the four-walled quarter, placed next to the dialysis unit in the second floor of my hospital. It has sheltered me in most exhorting hours, and in the most mundane moments as well, without changing its typical heart-warming feel. It houses some of the most sophisticated machinery required to manage an oddball personality; it has a small library, an equipped computer system with attached paraphernalia, a sofa-cum-bed, a small refrigerator, a designated space for visitors to sit and hold communication with me, a worship corner and a LCD projector system. Many a times, I have spent hours in my room, my sacred space, mugging over the theoretical intricacies of a complex clinical case, gulping down cans of red bull. The room has witnessed a spree of interviews, a binge of professional meetings with proficient peers and a fling of day-to-day customaries that we, doctors, are so used to of. This is the place where some of the most brilliant ideas have blessed my mind and where, often enough, I have been able to hold very satisfying soliloquies. I have found that late evening hours are the best when it comes to my imagination nerves; in accordance, I keep meetings with some of the best brains in these hours at my room. I don’t know whether I am addicted to my room or it has gradually become an extended home to my soul, but I miss it when I don’t step in for a couple of days.

Not many folks are aware of the well shielded identity of this room; many think it to be another private room meant to be occupied by a patient, for many it’s the doctors’ room. I have followed the measures to make sure that room doesn’t get unnecessary highlight, so that I may experience self rendezvous moments without much interference. Here, at this place, I try my hands at writing blogs, watching youtube videos – mostly surgical ones, preparing powerpoint slides, fine tuning the hospital functioning, catching an occasional day time nap between the strangulated schedules of surgeries and appointments, collaborating with my peers, opening the cork of a fizzy cola and what not. I have learnt some of the most astonishing discoveries about myself, sitting in my room, watching out of the stellar window, that so beautifully gives a close view of Delhi Metro.

I have spent countless nights in this room to ensure a 24 hour clinical vigilance to my patients. Many old patients are well aware of my room’s location and don’t hesitate to knock even in the oddest hours. They bear this unwavering faith that they would be helped by me in my capacity, and I make sure to give this trust factor a shot of steroids every time. I feel a divine connection when I am with my patients, listening to them, examining them and offering them treatment. My room has witnessed riots of laughter and rebellion of tears, with equal ease, without getting corrupted. To the less enlightened ones, 212 is the extension code of my room. Enter with faith and hope and come out smiling.

Sunday, November 27, 2011

Indulge in Self Affair. Its Therapeutic.

Memories astonish you. You are taken aback with stellar force and you feel comfortably stupefied. You realize that your character is your talisman and everything else is ephemeral.

I am writing my biography. If the pieces fit in perfectly, I would be able to publish it in a couple of months. I must say it is a very rewarding experience to travel back in the lanes of time and discover entirely new things about myself. In the hunt to woo the ordinary accomplishments, we, more often than said, tend to forget our own very existence. We breathe but don’t really feel the air, our bodies laugh but our soles remain numb, and many a times, we emote like a programmed machine. In the race of life, we tend to outreach ourselves, and there can be no defeat bigger than this. Life is meant for something different; as someone beautifully said, “God is in the details”. Is there a real meaning of life when you don’t really feel you, when you don’t really see the place you fit in the ecosystem, when you don’t really chase every intricate question that nature has to offer?

With every passing day I am discovering myself. I have started loving the whole exercise and nonetheless to say, I am falling in love with myself. Billions of cells in my body breathe life, but do I appreciate the meaning of LIFE? Where do you really fit in the axis of mind, body and soul? Who has the highest command? Have you discovered your real potential? Brain is found to be active all the times during the entire tenure of a human life, and what about soul? Brain-dead is something aghast, and what about folks with soul-dead phenomenon? I find myself lucky that I am savoring the experience and holding a dialogue with myself for a lot of people leave this world without knowing why they came here and where do they leave for?

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Find Out and Celebrate.

1. You don’t get to see any red light during your trajectory from home to office which carries 14 signals.

2. You wake up in the morning very fresh, and very awake.

3. You smell an impending headache and the sight of aspirin seeps in your visual field.

4. You go out to shop with a defined budget in your mind, only to know that the budget was an overrated one and you are left with much money even after shopping.

5. You just had the most succulent breakfast in the morning, very appeasing and very satisfying.

6. You don’t happen to read any disturbing news in the morning daily.

7. Your facebook profile shows 15 notifications, 3 messages and 6 add friend requests.

8. You look in the mirror and you appear 10 years younger to yourself. Where are those blackheads and wrinkles?

9. You observe your kid to be making same pranks as you used to do in your formative years.

10. You visit a worship place and instantly feel a divine connection; you don’t feel to come out of the transcendental state.

11. Your work, in which you didn’t put in many efforts, gets praised by your colleagues and superiors grandly.

12. You make your parents happy, genuinely happy.

13. You are able to live your day without hurting anyone.

14. You remember all the passwords of your virtual world (that includes 3 email ids and 7 social networking profiles)

15. You feel the thrusts of wind over your face, overjoyed thrusts.

Be Unpredictable. Be Erratic.

The learning phase of a living human being starts from the embryonic state itself; we come across the hard realities and we learn the measures to move ahead. In scientific language they term this as conditioning; a process in which a human being learns to respond appropriately to the stimulus being offered. As our brain tissue keeps on getting conditioned in a hackneyed way, it starts behaving in a predictable manner. You cannot really blame the brain for this; in our society, we get punished and criticized if we don’t act in a particular way in response to a stimulus, hence with the intention of keeping the reward centers satisfied, the brain follows the traditional, utterly jejune path. This is precisely the point where we, unknowingly and indirectly, start behaving like robots. Give us a stimulus and we will behave in the most predictable way that has been taught to us. Give us a peck on the cheek and we will reciprocate, show us the middle finger and we will show you the fist, the list is never ending.

There is more to life than is visible from naked eyes and is observable from a brain conditioned to behave in the predictable manner. There have been people who displayed abundant courage and behaved in unpredictable, may be out-of-the-box manner, and have been at the receiving end of all the glory, affection and praise. Masaru Ibuka founded Sony Corporation at the age of 37 years with no clear idea of what products would the company deal in. They struggled with a failed rice cooker, failed tape recorder and kept on paying the electricity bills by the incomes generated with crude heating pads. It took them 10 years to deliver their first successful product, the pocket radio, and from that point there was no looking back. The corporate history is stuffed with examples that created legends just because t hey refused to act in the defined, particular way. It’s important to keep on asking questions to yourself; to stay active, even the brain muscles need stimulation.

Act as if there is no tomorrow. When you analyze or think, do it from every possible angle. Discard the stereotyped notions and allow yourself to see the real light of wisdom. Understand the meaning of life; it gives you opportunity to live the way you want, not the way your acquaintances have conditioned you to.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Eat, Pray and Love.

Eat. Know what to eat. Discover the perfect way to eat. Relish the experience of eating. Eat with friends. Eat with family. Eat in the setting that evokes your soul. Eat to enjoy. Eat to stay healthy. Eat to celebrate. Eat to stay powerful, physical and emotionally. Eat to learn about the cultures and diversities. Eat to know the secret spices of nature. Eat to give life. Eat to sanitize your body systems.

Pray. Pray with closed eyes. Pray with open eyes. Pray with expectations. Pray to learn and find. Pray to seek answers. Pray to ask questions. Pray to experience the darkness. Pray to see the light. Pray to find the God. Pray to identify the soul within. Pray to supercharge your emotional identity. Pray to galvanize your energy fields. Pray to gain spiritual ammunition. Pray to provide answers.

Love. Love unconditionally. Love like there is no tomorrow. Love the imperfections. Love the faults. Love the less blessed. Love your friends. Love your enemies. Love your desires. Love your ambitions. Love the unsaid commitments. Love the turbulence. Love the tranquility. Love the obstacles. Love the velocity. Love your body. Love your soul. Love complications. Love simplicities. Love, for there is no other way, that is going to stay.

A Doctor and A Tweet.

Twitter is something that always astonishes me. If facebook is akin to a coffee house, twitter is no less than a parliament. The joy is boundless the moment you come across 140 characters typed by someone you hold immense respect for. You get to know the real thing, no media manoeuvrings, no added floss or deprived gloss. You don’t have to gain the permission to get a glance over anybody’s view, except for the random souls who believe in ironies – being on twitter and keeping your tweets protected. There aren’t a lot of doctors that use twitter regularly; I have came across a lot of profiles that belong to the health care fraternity, but to my dismay, either the profiles were made in the quest to keep pace with the advancing social media engineering where the user had made little efforts to keep and stay updated, or the profiles were fake identities, created by marketing czars to advertise about the newest kid in the town of wonder diets.

If you want to be on twitter and make the most of it, you have to keep on tweeting. Tweeting is expressing your thoughts, ideas and observations in 140 characters or less at a time. The more you tweet, the more buzz you create and more credible your online presence becomes. Twitter is a practical and powerful tool as it gives you the power to express your thought and send it to any chosen user in a moment of time. You can retweet to spread the thoughts expressed by any other user as well; your timeline (the synagogue of facebook wall) gives you a compact view of all the tweets posted by people you choose to follow. Like a tweet? Now you have plenty of options; retweet it or put in a reply or type your views and send it to your choice of end listeners. However, things don’t work on auto-pilot mode all the time; you have the power to plan the delivery of your tweets but you have to browse every now and then to know about the twitter trends. What is a twitter trend? A twitter trend is a word or phrase that is been most talked about in the world of twitter. There are different twitter trends for various geographical locations and are hugely inspire by the events happening in various places. Did I hear someone say twitter is the public spittoon? It is indeed a myopic view. Twitter opens countless minds in front of you; the more you read, the more you learn.

Tomorrow must be grief-free

There are instances when a doctor feels terribly helpless. Imagine the plight of a family who comes to know that a doctor can do little to combat the myriad of illnesses they are bestowed over. It occurs a lot of times when an occasional case of advanced multiple sclerosis or that of terminal stage of malignancy pops up in the usually serene OPD setting. Medical advancements have been great but nature’s modes are, and will never be, poorly fathomed. It happens most of the times that a family’s faith is shattered when they come to discover that one of their loved relatives is suffering with an illness that has little hope to be conquered. We, the medical practitioners, also find ourselves drenched in the pool of despair in such settings. Hope is the functional steel of the life, and when a person has no hopes left, how vulnerable would his mental state be? Is there a worse emotion in the world than that of an impending loss?

A loss is a very serious occurrence. It is akin to betrayal; the sense of bereavement is something that one would never want to imagine. The race against time serves no real sense to the sprinter; you end up feeling the egg on your face. Had there been an appliance that would have rendered emotional immunity on demand, a lot of worldly problems would have ceased to exist. Care must be permanent, unconditional and supreme when it is needed the most. Nature’s rules are multifarious enough to shake the faith of the ordinary human being; the road to enlightened knowledge has dark tunnels, labyrinthine in course. Would there be a day when we will be able to combat every malevolent illness? Would there be a moment when the world would witness a mass grief-free moment?

Saturday, November 19, 2011

Don't delay. You might just miss the bus.

In the torrid paced setting of the modern-age world, it sometimes begins a habit to procrastinate. We've all had moments in our lives where the urge to procrastinate is extremely tempting and at times indefatigable. Putting things off or choosing to adjourn rather than actually getting work done can lead to multifaceted problems in the long run. And why just in long run, your important work schedules can go for a serious toss in the short run as well. Procastrination is comparable to looming in the dark with the belief that light is your muse; it doesn’t happen like that all the times. You must try to work over the mental settings that regularly push you for postponing your works.

Break your work into reasonable parts: Perhaps you've wanted to reorganize your shelf, but it's such a huge project you procrastinate and are reluctant to begin.If this is the case, then break up that large task into to smaller increments so you can't really procrastinate. Not only will it seem easily doable, but you'll find the work getting done in a relatively short amount of time. Your brain’s reward centres would feel stimulated and the positive feedback phenomenon would keep you revved high to not to try procastrination in the future.

Lightening up your work helps a lot: Another helpful tip in combating procrastination includes exploring your psyche and changing your mindset. If you're a perfectionist, you know that the thought of even beginning a project is overwhelming because you're consumed with having it turn out "just right" which causes many to delay it incessantly without any logical reasons. Getting rid of or suppressing this urge for flawlessness will definitely help your project get under way and stop the annoying urge to procrastinate. Always remember, early you start, more are the chances of getting the work finished in time.

Schedule your space and time: If you can't seem to get started on anything, make a list to battle your habit to procrastinate. Rank all of your projects in order based on when they're due and how difficult they are. If you are more of a computer person, there are a plenty of desktop applications that provide the virtual reminders and to-do-lists that keep on glaring in the background of your desktop. It's hard to procrastinate with a list in front of you, guiding you through the day. Make sure to order the tasks in terms of their relevant priorities.

It’s important to reward yourself when you accomplish a task with precision and without delay. Planned relaxation time is great, as long as it stays within set boundaries and doesn't turn into time where you put off the scheduled assignments. So whatever your personal barriers are when it comes to tending to procrastinate, just keep structure in mind when planning your day, your month or your year. Keep small chunks of time as a buffer but don't leave super large slots of time that could cause you to procrastinate. Wings of time don’t wait for anything, and they flutter fast when you are busy doing nothing. So roll up your sleeves and stick to the schedules; your reward centres must get their daily supply of stimulation.

Nothing is a Myth.

As I write this I put enormous faith on the interdependent nature of energy and mass. Whatever happens, holds a good reason behind for its occurrence. What I have gathered through years of my interaction with people and my real-life experiences is that nothing happens just for the heck of it. We explore, sometimes quite deep inside, to find the truth and then dig deeper to find its origin and relevancy. However, most of us miss the essentially stubborn point, that is, after a certain level, everything is as complex as a ‘zero’. Nature is born with a mind and its rules know no other path than the one that establishes its supremacy.

We are all born with our energy fields and live them. In the processes of life, we tend to maneuver our energy fields a lot. A truth is a truth to the person whose energy field is compatible with it, for the other person it may be false, or between the shades of truth and false. You challenge the highest authority; you challenge yourself and the fun is not in discovering a greater force than you. The fun is in realizing that the biggest powerhouse dwells in your own very DNA. Legends are not created when the energy fields assume mammoth proportions so as to evoke mass reaction, that too in a sustainable and reassuring way. A myth is something that doesn’t exist; it’s a relative reality of the mind whose energy fields bear self-doubts.

You are the light and you are the shadow. You have the capacity to absorb the world’s energy in the way you want. Get ignited or get burnt. Get a life or plea for one. Focus on the enormous reservoir of energy lying inside you or pass your life bitching about the achievements of others. We are born with five essential senses to know the world around us and nature has more than five senses to overpower us in the times of a head-on collision. Put faith in your abilities, identify the soul within and you can explore senses that defy ordinary capacities. Know the world from inside out and keep the methods simple. Start the celestial journey from the centrum of your soul and you shall never be defeated. Oh did I mention defeat, sorry, it’s a relative word too.

Missing the Buzz... Here I am.

I am writing this post after many months; and I must establish that by the end of April 2011, for the unfathomed reasons, I had the gut instinct that I may be kept denuded of my virtual social life for the weeks to come. Professional commitments come in the unyielding coats and, like most of the toffee-nosed bosses, demand unflickering attention. Initially I felt bad for now adhering to my daily ritual of blogging, then the craving diminished as the time passed. When time decides to move on, it virtually gives horns to your internal processors, complimented with a comfortable amnesia, selective of course.

It was an usual morning about a week back and I could experience a sudden jolt in my telencephalon. What the heck I was doing all these months? There had been moments of ecstasy, randomness, accomplishments, failures, humdrum and what not? Why was I careless enough to keep my readers devoid of their daily dose? Why not spread the whiff of my experiences to the folks? To observe is the bliss and to disseminate the knowledge is divine.

It is hard to extract some slice of life from the over-congested schedule of my daily life as a doctor; but it had to be done. And as I write this small piece, I feel content. I feel like a child who just found an uninhabited jungle of mango trees, with bunch of ripe mangoes hanging from every branch. The more I write the more I know myself. To discover the untouched facets of your mind and soul is indeed an experience. The more you discover something precious, the avarice increases exponentially. You keep on exploring till you start nearing the kernel of your existence, your innerself, in its purest form. I make a promise to all my friends, colleagues and readers that I will continue to write till the time I think my rendezvous with life bears a potential to be shared.