I penned my thoughts remembering my guide,my guru on this day last year.
courtesygoogle images
Perfect day to remember those guiding stars in your life,those who guided you,pushed you,instilled values in you. You were like putty in their hands. Over the years,many hands changed and influenced you like different strokes with different brushes .A stroke here ,a pat there and the canvass became more colorful with each contribution.
Question is ,do you seriously remember them all?.. There are only a few who must have left indelible impression on you. For me it was much later in my student life, in degree college, that I found such an influence. Till she came into our lives,we were like scores of other p.g.students,abandoned by a transferred guide ,directionless...
She entered impeccably dressed ,with her head held high,exuding an air of absolute authority. She took mental notes and set about setting our student life right :-)
First she removed all partitions to make the department sans any cubicles which served as our hiding places away from the prying eyes of teachers. LESSON 1-If you feel the need to hide,you are doing something you shouldn't be doing
Next she geared up for cleanliness drive.By then we had enough rebels to resist the idea so next day as the staff trickled in,they were greeted by our HOD cleaning the sinks!! One by one she was joined in by the sheepish staff and we had a sparkling deptt. LESSON 2-No job is below dignity . LESSON3-Set an example for your students and staff.
Next she took charge of our messy schedule.Many post lunch sessions were earlier spent in the library to cope up with the backlog of studies and the backlog was created in turn due to our crazy appointment scheduling.She made sure we spent enough time with each patient and never rescheduled any. LESSON 4-Respect time your own and everyone else's too and time will respect you.
She hates lies, even the most harmless ones and respects an honest explanation, always...
She took complete charge of not only our studies,but even those aspects of our lives which would affect our learning process.She made sure we were fit,ate well,were not distracted all the time etc..Distractions were part of student life and one major distraction is still a mammoth distraction of my life (Hobbs,the hubby) :-D
I even learnt the art of covering and maintaining books at the ripe age of 20 years from her.
During my stint as a teacher,I tried to emulate her in the right spirit as much as I could and the fact that I am remembered fondly by my students to this date is also thanks to her ..
I may not say it in so many words and not so often but I know, she knows, that I care ..
I am proud to be her student and can spot her students from a crowd of students anywhere,any time such is the aura of Dr.Sabita Ram.
I love Marathi theater but I rarely watch Marathi movies unless strongly recommended by someone whose judgement I trust.Of late,Marathi cinema has been churning out mainly slapstick comedies ,not my idea of fun for sure.I have been delaying it for a long time but Natrang and Harishchandrachi factory were on my wishlist so I ordered both only to be informed that Natrang was not available that day.Late at night,armed with a big bowl of popcorn and a bigger pitcher of lemon iced tea,we settled down to watch HF .And boy,am I glad I watched it?!Endearing,warm,so simple in treatment!
A biopic on Dhundiraj Phalke,the movie was much more than what I expected it to be.It depicts Phalke's journey towards making the first movie of India.The casting of characters was near perfect or so it seemed ,due to the effortless performances by the cast.Having seen a British 'moving image' in a local make shift theater accompanied by his elder son,Phalke becomes obsessed with the idea of producing India's first' moving image'.As always,this 'revolutionary' idea was ridiculed by the society so much so that his loyal friends drug his cup of tea to get him admitted to Thane mental hospital.(Is it that old!!) .Jobless Phalke fuels his idea by selling off his possessions .This scenario mostly in our potboilers is projected as a tearjerker and our so called actors ham through the scenes but not in HF.Here, the super cool wife and kids do not bat an eyelid and even end up joking about it.Particularly funny was this scene where Phalke returns home to see a mourning crowd only to be told that they were mourning the selling off of a family cupboard -(kapaatache gelyaaache kadle ,meaning,we heard that the cupboard is no more).
The film very subtly ,in a flow, highlights the society and its beliefs back then.How movies were looked down upon,how difficult it was to convince women to act in theater and how men were trained to play female characters.The myths and fears attached to trains,the reluctance to shave off the mustache(even while playing a female) and many other things have added to the comic situations in the movie.
I loved Mrs Phalke's character- loving,cool,composed and hardworking.She is an ordinary woman with extraordinary faith in her husband's capabilities.The mood of the movie is upbeat throughout.The passion,obsession and one point agenda of. Phalke along with his image as a family man is very well portrayed.Cookie and Muffin remained glued till the end without any demands of extra food,coffee etc and enjoyed the movie .
The movie will appeal to non Marathi speaking audience too, thanks to the subtitles.Planning to watch it once again.Very few movies do that to me.Simple, pure and delightful is how I will put it in a nutshell.A must watch!
Dazillion medical camps later ,as a student ,I decided not to be part of any more such non-productive camps.This was decades back and I am no student anymore so when a senile and overzealous social worker friend ( all of that and more in one person) emotionally blackmailed me ,I did the same to a bunch of other people (read-hobbs-the hubby,six interns from my clinic,three staff members and of course Cookie and Muffin as tag-essentials!) and we were off to a very remote village in rural interiors of Maharashtra.
Having spent 24 premarital years hopping from one city to another with dad in a transferable job, small towns and rural scenes are not alien to me but nothing prepared me for what lay in wait this time.We were received at the nondescript station by a proud,self declared, matric- fail ,'taempuwala'.After we loaded our physical selves into and all over it, our tempo looked like this:
tempo-courtesy google images
We were piled and arranged like sardines in the vehicle in such a way that the younger bodies fanned out of the sides of the tempo and this arrangement gave the young blood ,ample opportunity to outstretch their arms in air like Shahrukh Khan!
courtesy google images
I am not sure and I don't want to know why they seated me where they did ,inside the tempo.Thinking I was privileged,I had short lived tears of gratitude before I disappeared beneath a pile of smelly backpacks.They even arranged the bags to leave enough air pockets for me to breathe.Breathing and moi are related at strictly subconscious level and any consciousness in that regard leaves me breathless and I have advertised this fact far and wide for my own safety.Next 30 minutes,I braved the olfactory onslaught of the worst kind.Air reeking of perspiration,BO,deo, garlicky pav -bhaji and vada-pao from dinner the night before and what have you...The twenty somethings held on to each other's halves inside the tempo while the other halves continued with the bollywood tamasha.I recalled the old Fevicol ad :
Two German doctors in the group looked like ghosts at the end of the journey and had to be brought back to the living world .It was just a tin shed and four brick walls in the name of school and it was the only one for miles together.The camp was productive and I am not saying that because I was part of it.It was just a question of ready resources at that stage and manpower of course, and both we had in abundance.The lack of basic facilities was no laughing matter but in this case ,for city youngsters out in the wild for the first time, it was both,-unbelievable and unbelievably funny.While they jotted down notes for each facility or lack of it,they also exchanged hilarious experiences regarding the same.The enthusiasm was infectious and energy levels,an all time high.
Giggles (German import, giggly girl in short)as she was aptly called,suddenly could not be found and a frantic search ensued.Evening was weary and night fast approaching.Giggles was found stupefied behind the bushes where she had gone to ease her overburdened bladders.She was rendered speechless and stunned by a kid-snake crawling away a few feet across.Cannon ( another German so named ,as she was always clicking with her namesake camera) slapped her out of that state and all was well .
Giggles could be seen helping around as we assembled bedding necessities for sleep time, viz.mattresses, old sarees as bedspreads and searched for elevations of any kind on the walls and around, to tie the mosquito -net- strings ,(naada to be precise, borrowed from village belles :D) .When the nets were tied together in sequence and then the whole thing hauled together to be tied to the hooks,nails,chair handles and window grills,the actual purpose of it all suddenly dawned on the two They were absolutely 'in character',Giggles broke into peels of giggles and Cannon went berserk clicking.
Cannon clicked everything in sight from all possible angles, poverty excluded ,team yougistaan made sure of that .On our way back,Muffin , my son and Cannon were spotted with their object of interest in a gutter just outside the railway platform.It was a pig in all its guttered glory .
courtesy google images
Tiny Muffin refused to believe his mother when she said that ,what he thought of as a new animal species, was actually a pig.Now this pig was no Babe,he was as Indian in character as they come..half -and-half. like an order of Pizza ie gutter side black and other side grey/brown /whatever..The beautiful image in his mind of a pig called Babe was shattered !
I consoled him and reminded him of another fact of life he had learnt not so long ago..that milk actually is given by cows ,so what if it comes in clean tetra packs to our homes.He still has to come to terms with that but he thinks aaji's and naani's habit of getting up and pottering about the house at 4 am is cool.
