Diagnostics from across the seven seas - made easy with WeChat

I have been a fan of the medical drama House MD for as long as I can remember. It was a phenomenal show, defying all network TV conventions and setting a unique example of an entirely different kind of entertainment. So potent has its effect been that even now whenever I watch an episode I often dream of it at night. Last night brought into my sleep another such dream, only, this time spruced up with a most unexpected twist.

So here I am, one of the esteemed members of Gregory House's team of diagnosticians that help him solve, from the easiest of cases to the most myriad and twisted ones. We're the best diagnostics team in the world - Dr. Gregory House (Head of Diagnostic Medicine), Dr. James Wilson (Head of Oncology), Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Dean of Medicine), Dr. Robert Chase (an intensivist), Dr. Allison Cameron (an immunologist) and I - a neurologist. We follow a differential diagnosis strategy, writing down symptoms and possible causes on a white board and then we brainstorm together, bounce ideas and prospective diagnoses off each other, and reel under House's sardonic passes all the while. He spares no one.

The dream sees us faced with a weird case of an 85-year old lady who says she's been in a too good mood for the past many days. She admits to suddenly beginning to have sexual fantasies about younger men, especially about Ashton Kutcher (I watched an Ashton Kutcher movie a week ago. The effect seems to be manifesting in my dreams..sigh!). She says she has started writing poetry and feels like falling in love all of a sudden. The lady seems to be happy, but her middle aged son thinks it insane and has brought her in for a checkup.

The problem however is that I am on a week's leave in India for an important family engagement. But the team cannot carry out a diagnosis without my insights on such a strange case (It's my dream. I get to be all important here). Everybody's in a fix. Long distance diagnoses are usually carried out on speaker phone when one member is out while the others are together in the department. But House is on clinic duty, while Cuddy is as usual busy running from pillar to post, managing the entire hospital and staff in her tight skirts and 5-inch heels. Chase and Cameron are out searching the lady's house for possible drug abuse (yes, we go against the law and search patients' homes, because - Everybody lies.)

House is getting crankier and more sarcastic in his assaults by the minute. Right when he is about to tell the lady and her worried son to bugger off (yes, he can do that, and much more), I come up with the perfect solution. WeChat! It is an amazing app compatible with everybody's smartphones. Using WeChat, I hurriedly create a group, add all the members of our team to it and start a live chat session using the 'Live Chat' option in the WeChat window.

Since it allows for only one person to speak at a time, each one of us gets to put our ideas across without interruption (something that is hard to do otherwise when House is around. He is always interrupting and cutting everybody off, the jerk!). Aha! So finally we have a tool that helps us snub House. Life really doesn't get any better than this.

The differential diagnosis starts. Wilson is in the office and as everyone chips in with their inputs verbally, he keeps jotting it down on the whiteboard. Once the list of symptoms is made, he uses the 'Moments' option on WeChat, clicks a picture of the list on the whiteboard and forwards it to everyone for ready reference. Chase and Cameron also report that the lady's house is clean. So reportedly no drug use.

It's getting sort of confusing after a point, with Wilson having to read through the long list again and again and sending a picture repeatedly. But WeChat comes to the rescue again. Chase (the hottie wrongly believed to be a beauty without brains!!) however discovers the 'Video Call' option in the app. But since all of us cannot simultaneously access the video call, House decides to call me up instead and take my opinion on the lady's sudden personality change.

What greets me on the video call is a hilarious sight. The elderly lady is flirting with House, trying all her charms on him while he has his sulkiest face on, impatiently asking her son to keep his mother in control. The son seems to be irked himself. After all, who wants his widowed mother to dream of men younger and smarter than him, and be happy about it too? I somehow control my amusement and ask House if he has had her checked for STDs. It seems to hit him like a bullet (how did the genius not think of it himself?) He abruptly ends the call, probably ordering the lady to be tested immediately. Meanwhile all of us (except House of course) get back on the group and take digs at him. The wide range of emoticons available in the app make it all the more hilarious and we're all in splits, only until he returns with the test results, that is.

He returns with significant news. The lady has tested positive for Syphilis. Now the question is, how can she contract the disease when she swears not to have had any sexual activity for almost a decade now? And then it strikes me! The disease was dormant in her body all these years, only starting to attack her brain now. The idea appeals to House and he orders Wilson to have her brain mapping done. What the tests show is dismal. The lady has permanent brain damage for which there is no treatment. But there are ways to stop any further damage, Wilson says. The lady, however, admits she doesn't want to be treated. She feels happier now than she has in a long time, and she wishes to remain that way for as long as she lives. I can almost hear House smirk into the phone. But Cuddy, ever practical and respectful of patients' rights, lets the lady leave in peace. House taunts Cuddy on her brain being caught beneath her high heels. She ignores him and leaves the group chat, followed by all of us.

WeChat thus served as an easy and fast way of carrying out a diagnosis simultaneously from different locations. No need of a laptop, no slow desktop video chatting and absolutely easy to use when on the move. I think my brainwave might just have saved the day at the hospital. Or was it WeChat that did it?

Anyhow, it was only a dream. Where else could I be lucky enough to be an indispensable part of House's team of doctors? Sigh. If only reality was as beautiful as dreams. Nevertheless, one part of the surreal dream is for real - WeChat. And I guess one could always make do with that, if not to chat with big shot doctors in medical emergencies, then at least to keep in touch with friends night and day.


[This post is my entry for the "WeChat with Anyone, Anywhere!" contest by IndiBlogger. You can check out the WeChat YouTube Channel here.]

Book Review: The Homing Pigeons - Sid Bahri

A book that comes with a personal handwritten note by the author is almost always a pleasure to read and review. In the present case, luckily, the content greatly complements the author's note too. Because the book definitely made me happy.

Wading through the bottomless ocean of contemporary Indian writers churning out books revolving around common subjects like recession, life in engineering colleges, love affairs and separation, one fine day I came across an email offering me to read Sid Bahri's debut novel, The Homing Pigeons. I won't deny it came as a breath of fresh air, for the very fact that its story is not borrowed or tried and tested. The characters are greatly flawed, yet the reader can relate to their thoughts and situations as they brave the biggest lows and commit mistakes to emerge wiser (or not).

The book follows the lives of Aditya and Radhika, separately at the outset so one can establish any relationship between the two initially. Aditya, along with his family, is a childhood victim of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. Radhika is torn, from her very early years between two sets of parents both of which fail to completely provide her with everything a child is entitled to in her growing up years. With time, it is revealed that they're best friends from high school, with hidden feelings for each other ever since then. And yet, they were never really together. Now Aditya is jobless and in an unhappy, love-less marriage, somehow battling out the recession, while Radhika is marrying off her young stepdaughter from her dead, rich husband. Both are at a stage in life they had never imagined they would land up in. And in all of this, they reminisce about the time that was, when they were in love and kept bumping into each other over the years.

Saying anything more would be a spoiler, so I shall refrain from giving out more. It would however suffice to say that the book is the right combination of emotion and a reality take on the imperfection that is life nowadays. Both the characters start out as any other youngsters with a decent upbringing and certain dreams and aspirations. However, life plays out its games in such a way as to give a totally different turn to each of their dreams and land them in a soup. But the soup brings them back together, so there, a happy ending is in tow. No one's complaining.

The novel is very nicely written, with negligible grammatical errors (yeah, I do pay attention to those) and simple yet elegant language. I have always found the art of writing dialogue largely missing in contemporary Indian writers. Siddharth (or does he prefer Sid?) Bahri succeeds at it exceptionally, and thus gets extra brownie points from Yours Truly. The book is conveniently priced at 150 rupees and I'd say it is worthy of each penny. If that isn't convincing enough, I'd say buy it for the The Homing Pigeons Original Soundtrack CD that comes along with it. The songs have been created by Rishikesh - The Band, and have a beautiful feel to them. I especially loved the song 'Banjaara Dil Ka'. The songs are also available for free download here.

I would give the book 3.5 stars out of 5.

Book Review: The Secrets of the Dark - Arka Chakrabarti

They say not every man that eats can make a good cook. Likewise, not every man that watches mythology can make an epic writer. And I learnt it the hard way.

I'd say the worst part about being a reader and a book reviewer is that you are sometimes forced to read stuff you'd never otherwise have spent any effort or time on. Also given my propensity not to put down a book halfway, once I've picked it up, causes me a lot of torment at times. I completed reading one such book tonight.

Now my regular readers would know I am never really hard upon any book. There's always something new or unique about each piece of writing and I appreciate the pros as much as I highlight the cons (usually fewer). But The Secrets of the Dark by newbie writer Arka Chakrabarti, all of 25 years, has left me disappointed on many levels. I received the book about a month and a half ago, and I like to believe that I am professional enough not to take too long in reading a book I have received from a kind publisher. The title and a reading of a few initial pages, however, made me put it down and consciously keep stalling reading it till I possibly could. But I couldn't go on like that forever - so I read it over the last two weeks and here I am, reviewing it immediately after putting it down.

The plot: Agni, a prince, is forced to be taken away from his kingdom in the face of impending death, and is brought up as the ward of the King of Himadri with the king's son and his own foster family. He grows up not knowing to where he belongs or what his real destiny is. But the merciless killing of his lady love and her father throws him into a whirlwind of unexpected events that slowly guide him towards his true identity and exacting revenge upon those responsible for his loved ones' deaths. At the heart of all these events are three ancient prophecies that bind together the East and the West and form the foundation of the beliefs of the world. How Agni unravels the third prophecy and assumes his true role in the larger scheme of things is the central theme of book.

For a first, the very title of the book has been poorly selected. It is slightly childish. The tagline even more so (which goes like: '...the debt of blood is never repaid'). For any average or above-average reader, the title and the tagline would be hard to connect with the actual plot. Even uncannier is the fact that the book is apparently the first in a series of books titled 'The Saga of Agni'. I find that too much of an assuming nature on part of the writer, publisher and the book itself. I mean, to be able to write the first part of a series, one must be clear on his vision for the entire series, especially how the first book would introduce the story and the characters and then seamlessly merge into the next and even further. I found that approach lacking here. The book ends very abruptly, leaving the reader confused as to what really happened and what to expect in the next part. The ending of a book is just like the last course of a meal - if you screw it up, the entire meal risks having been for nothing. I felt the ending should have been clearer. After all, what's the point of creating so much of a mystery around your story and characters that the reader loses their mind AND their interest? The turn of events and the way parallelism has been achieved between two so far unconnected stories, is also confusing and hard to follow at times.

Another lesser, but equally vexing, flaw in the book is its language and editing. I agree, simple language is the order of the day when it comes to young newbie writers of our generation, and understandably so. But there is absolutely no excuse for such bad editing. I was faced with so many outrightly visible grammatical and printing errors throughout the book, that it made me feel I can be a much better editor if these publishing houses ever gave me a chance at it. Whoever uses the pronoun 'her' for a man, in a published novel, and that too, at more places than one? I even discovered the writer's favorite word - curt. I'd like to make a note here, for the writer's perusal if he ever comes across this review - the words 'curt' and 'curtly' may have been used in ancient or classic literature with some other, non-negative connotations, but in modern English language, these words are associated with quite negative connotations, such as rude, short and terse. The frequency and the manner in which the word has been used throughout the book forced me to make a mention here. It was nauseating, almost.

I guess not everyone can write great mythology. Amish Tripathi is a genius for having succeeded at it so beautifully, and I am all praise and respect for him. But the amounts of experience, research and hard work that must have gone into creating the Shiva series are unimaginable. Merely watching The Lord of the Rings, Kingdom of Heaven and The Chronicles of Narnia does not endow one with enough ammo to write down an entire fantasy novel, let alone a saga. I hope the writer's listening. A reviewer's job is to judge a book on all levels. No hard feelings - you have a way with words, put it to better use and I'm sure your next book shall find an applauding review on my humble blog.


Disclaimer:
The views expressed in my book reviews are solely my personal opinion, and I wish not to influence the readers' judgement in finally deciding whether to read a book or not. My review is one of the many available on the WWW. The readers know better, whether to take my advice seriously or to throw it out the window. I shall leave it to their discretion, therefore, to be the final judge.

Keep coming back for more, though. Who doesn't like followers? ;)

Once bitten forever shy.

Yesterday morning I was driving back home from Agra on the smooth Yamuna Expressway. There was wind in my hair and a glow on my face. The exam on Sunday had gone quite well and we had left for Agra right after it, family and I, for a much-needed two-day break. We stayed at one of the best hotels of Agra, treated ourselves to great food, frolicked in the pool, danced and played games and felt utterly rejuvenated after a day and a half. So much so that visiting the Taj Mahal never even once crossed our minds. And so I had a smile on my lips on our way back, glad to finally be able to clear out a lot of crappy textbooks that had been cramming my bookshelf for so long, once I reached home. That was until we entered home.

They say only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches. They aren't at all off the mark. It's funny how we have so much to say on situations when they occur to others, hardly thinking of what it would be like when it happens to us. Having a crime perpetrated against oneself is the worst kind of breach of privacy and faith. It leaves you scarred somewhere inside, not wanting to believe anymore in the goodness of people or the fairness of the universe.

So back from an awesome trip, we entered home to find out that we had been robbed. The house lay ransacked. Every cupboard, every drawer, every single tiny little box had been opened and the contents strewn about the floor. The robbers left no stone unturned, no corner unchecked. It was a thorough, time-consuming breach of our privacy. And to think we had been just 350 kilometers away, enjoying ourselves with no inkling of what might have been transpiring back at home. The sight kind of got to me. I went into shock, sat down in a corner while everyone jumped to their feet, doing what the situation at hand demanded. My parents went to the police station nearby to file a report. Investigations ensued, the police and crime branch did their job at leisure and left after a round of tea and snacks.

I was the only one of us who cried. My sister was enraged beyond measure. Mom was a rock, strong and efficient. Dad was, well, dad. Dads don't cry anyway. But I went into a weird state of shock where I was still not able to believe it was happening to us for real. The material loss was nothing extraordinary - 2 LCDs, a laptop, my beloved bag, some other stuff, little cash. The robbers actually did not find much in our humble abode - no jewelry, no insane amounts of money, no valuables - so they were forced to take away the electronics, to make all the effort seem worth it. They had after all broken down a small section of the wall at the back of the house to enter and open the back door to let their accomplices in. There is some consolation for us in the fact, however, that they put in too much of an effort to ransack each nook and cranny of the house, and yet did not manage to get much. Must have been such a disappointment to the assholes.

It has been over 24 hours since all that drama. But living in my own house has become an ordeal now. I could not sleep the other night. My mind kept trying to imagine the thieves breaking in, going through our stuff, throwing it here and there, sniggering to each other as they found something cheesy or intimate. It is hard for me to come to terms with this incident. It is scary now to even roam about the house or stay alone in my room at night. It is absurd, I know, but my mind keeps imagining noises, faces, around the house, out the window. It feels like we're being watched. At all times.

We all slept in the same room last night, because even our parents are worried for our safety now. It is common knowledge that in Delhi, no one is ever too safe, no house is ever out of the reach of criminals, no lock is impenetrable. And yet, we live in this make-believe world where we're happy and safe. Until one fine day someone comes along and breaks that faith, invading our privacy and leaving our safety net shattered.

The hole in the back wall has been repaired today, but the hole in our psyches remains. Who knows, maybe forever.

When life gives you lemons and you've got no sugar for lemonade!

Life lately seems to be going along a totally different tangent from anything I'd ever expect it to be. It's like I'm being showered with the choicest of lemons and I don't even have sugar or water to make lemonade out of them. Hapless, hapless days.

So right after I wrote here about my sudden craving for world travel and the lack of resources preventing me from doing that, life threw another big rock in my face. The family gossip tree came out with yet another juicy piece of gossip that went traveling through the entire family to reach me today. This very distant cousin of mine, who's a total nerd, and is settled in Saudi Arabia and minting huge money, and of whose very existence we learned only after he got settled in the Gulf and started minting money - surprisingly, this guy has finally tied the knot. To a seemingly pretty girl. And he's going for a Switzerland honeymoon now! Can someone kill me, please.

The Alps, Swiss chocolates, and beautiful watches. That lucky lady is gonna have it all, while I'm doomed to sweat in Delhi's sultry heat and sit for an important exam in 2 days. Why does life have to be so unfair! Yes, yes, I know I'm probably being hormonal and reacting too much, but this is NOT FAIR. I just so wanna get done with all the career-building, educational and responsibility-related exercises of life as soon as possible, so that I can finally be on my own and do whatever I want, wherever I want to. But no. Not so fast dearies. Life isn't all sugar and candy. They'll first grind you, make you clear exams, get jobs, work your butt off, crush your spirit beyond recognition and when you're finally at the height of glory and got lots of money in the pocket and time at hand, you'd have lost that passion that made you wanna do things and see places. So you'll probably just sit in your big house watching TV, gaining weight and reminiscing old times when you used to dream of going to Switzerland.

Okay, I know I've started with the same downward-spiraling thought process all over again. I need to digress from here.

So I dug up some more information on the Saudi cousin's story. Apparently, luck has been shining rather too brightly on the couple lately. Right after they'd decided the dates of the wedding, the wife came across an online contest where a trip to Switzerland was among the top prizes. She registered for the contest flippantly, not expecting to get even a consolation prize, but as destiny would have had it, they actually won themselves a free Swiss trip. And with its dates coming up right after their wedding too. Luck is such a bitch sometimes when it is so kind on others and not the teeniest bit on you.

I wish I could switch places with that couple and scale the snow-clad mountains while they gave my exam. I wish my family aunties did not have to propagate such gossip like wildfire. I wish Delhi's temperature dropped to like 15 degrees Celsius. Ah, wishes. I should probably just get back to my books.

See you guys around after Sunday.

If only I had money...

If only I had money, I'd turn a globetrotter, leaving everything and everyone behind. *sighs*. And no, not that cool-dude-photographer kind who travels around the world with a camera in hand, observing anything and everything through his lens. If I were to travel, I'd keep the camera aside for most of the time, only taking it out once I was sure I'd captured all the magnificence through my eyes and stored it in my heart.

Umm...wondering what's wrong with me? Why the sudden craving for travel and money? *sighs again*

So, coming to the real (less fun) part of the story, I just happened to come across this link on makemytrip.com that lists rates for a round trip to some of the most happening travel destinations across the world. London, New York, Hong Kong, Dubai, Singapore, Bangkok - it had me drooling all over myself, more so because the rates seemed to be discounted and within reach of a decently earning professional (read: future me). And thus I've been chewing away at mommy dearest's head, thinking aloud, hoping and praying to get professionally settled very soon and earning in lacs, so I could finally realize my dream of traveling around the globe.

Aside from the obvious delight that traveling to a foreign destination offers, airports and airplanes are great fun too. Airports have those awesome duty-free shops where you can get anything and everything, though end up buying nothing because everything's too expensive. Then there are those tiny candies, chocolates and packaged foods that they serve you in flight. Not to forget the air hostesses. Their perpetual forced smiles and monotonous speeches can get really nauseating at times, but it is fun to observe them nevertheless. And at the risk of sounding extremely racist and discriminatory, I maintain that the air hostesses on the middle-eastern and oriental airlines are the most enchanting and beautiful - a treat to look at, even for individuals of the same sex (read: yours truly).

Now mommy dearest has been to Dubai twice - the only member of our little family to have traveled abroad - and goes on and on about how good it was. And so Dubai, for better or for worse, is one of the destinations I really truly wish to visit once, the others being parts of Europe and Australia (as I've mentioned earlier in my posts). Add to that an obvious penchant for oriental flight attendants, and there, I've already zeroed in on the carrier I'd most likely be flying with - pretty obviously either the Emirates or the Gulf Air, both of which fit the bill perfectly. I wish they'd give me free air tickets in exchange for this mention. I did ask too, but alas they said it wasn't policy, so....I guess I'll just have to get that darned elusive job, to earn in lacs and to buy myself tickets, so as to go about with my original plan of being a globetrotter once I have the money. 

Oh wait. Aren't we back right from where we started? *sighs* So much for wishful thinking - it leads you absolutely nowhere. That's established.

Guess it's a good night then. Keep dreaming folks!

Book Review: Salvation of a Saint - Keigo Higashino

Being a blogger has had more perks than I had ever imagined possible before creating this blog. It was only a means of self expression for me back then. How much it has indeed evolved over these three odd years, with it now being a source of some amazing new literary works for me to read. And trust BlogAdda to come out with the most varied genres of books when it comes to their Book Reviews program. Despite a severe shortage of time that is currently keeping me from reading or writing anything much these days - I am not complaining!

The book today at The Bookworm's Word is Salvation of a Saint - a Japanese murder mystery by Keigo Higashino, translated into English very adeptly by Alexander O. Smith. An uncanny pick, since I don't read much of crime fiction and I have never really read a non-English work before. But it was inescapable, really.

The core of the story is as simple as it gets. A Japanese couple on the verge of a split-up are hosting what could perhaps be their last get-together as man and wife. And then the wife goes over to her parents' for the weekend while the husband is found dead at their house under mysterious circumstances while she's away. The wife as well as her young patchwork apprentice come under the investigative net. Both seem to be deeply involved in the twisted thread that holds the mystery together. Moreover one of the detectives becomes unusually partial to the wife, while another is dead against her from the word go. A genius scientist ultimately has to step in to help unravel what is touted as 'the perfect crime'. How they together arrive at a solution makes for an amazing journey.

Who dies, and how, is no big secret and is revealed quite easily. The 'who' part is somewhat guessable a few chapters into the book, and even though you'd never be sure if your guess is right until almost the end, you can safely assume you know the killer. But it's the 'how' part that sends everyone into a real tizzy. And the end reveals one of the most innovative and unique ways to kill somebody that I've ever come across in literature or on TV. I hope no psychopath gets around to reading this book lest s/he gets any ideas!!

The translation from Japanese to English is particularly exceptional. In sheer defiance of the saying 'lost in translation', the intensity of the writing and the details of daily life within a Japanese household and society are perfectly expressed throughout the volume. It was an insightful read and at the same time really un-put-down-able (yeah I just love that non-word). The details, the characters and the circumstances have been meticulously crafted and students of science like me would find it utterly intriguing to read and make their own conjectures and predictions. Though it was stretched a bit too much at a couple of places, especially towards the end, but a really good read in its entirety. I am given to understand that this book is a part of the author's Detective Galileo series, with the major characters remaining the same throughout the titles. Nevertheless, a first timer will not find anything amiss and will enjoy the book as an individual piece of crime fiction.

The 377-page book, being an international title, is rather steeply priced at Rupees 350. I would give it 3 stars out of 5.

This review is a part of the biggest Book Review Program for Indian Bloggers. Participate now to get free books!