Sutured Dreams

One of the more annoying roles I played over the years was being the class representative of my batch for about 3 and a half something years. It was a thankless job which made you someone to blame for both your teachers and as well as batchmates, even for things you could never control. People come to class late? Blame me. Stipend delayed? Blame me.  So yeah, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who enjoys some peace of mind during their college years but looking back, I did learn some important life skills during that phase. The most important of them was learning how to have difficult conversations that no one else wanted to have.  I had to talk to people in authority to get some student demands (from the reasonable to the very silly) done. This often did not end well. But you slowly build a resilience to such things. I just took it as part of the job and didn't take anything too personally (most of the time anyway).  Once I became an intern and later as a working doctor, ...

Doing a movie review after a seriously long time so yeah, there'll be some spoilers below.  It's always best to go into a movie with as little expectation as possible. Expectations are what leads to to a feeling of "Wait, is this it?" later on.  So I saw Hridayam the other day, which is also known as the "the greatest love story in the history of the universe" apparently. 8.9 on IMDb and 94% on book my show got me curious enough to actually pay to see this.  There were a lot of parallels between this film and another hit movies from years ago, Premam. Both focussed on college days and failed love sagas which appealed to the masses with a nostalgia trip. And both are pretty overrated once you remove the nostalgia.  An Unconvincing Lead The film's protagonist, Arun (played by Pranav Mohanlal), is a fresher at an engineering college in Chennai. He falls heads over heels with Darshana. Everything goes splendidly until he decides to cheat on her the first ti...

A large portion of this blog has involved me venting about how I've had to deal with selfish and cruel people over the past few years. Sometimes it's easy to forget that not everyone that comes into your life will be like that. It's important to acknowledge the ones that showed unconditional kindness as well.  Jim The first time I'd met Jim was about 3 years ago. He was looking for a place to stay near his daughter's new school and my mother's old house was only a stone's throw away from there.  The house was empty for a few years as my parents had the habit of asking for more rent than it was worth. Some renovations were needed but I felt it was worthwhile with Jim interested. Money was tight but it would be a profitable move in the long run. It helped that Jim was kinda desperate as I wouldn't be able to drastically improve the place in the next year because of financial troubles. And the rent he gave was the only real stable income I had that year du...