Sutured Dreams

I've been writing this blog for a long time now (since 2018 actually, which sounds incredible even to me) but I've stayed clear of posting about certain aspects of my life. And for good reason.  I haven't posted anything about my (failed) romantic relationships for several reasons. Firstly, I generally prefer to keep most of these issues private. Secondly, a lot of this can become "he said vs she said" and I'd probably be an unreliable narrator. Thirdly, I usually hide the identities of the people I write about in this blog so they won't be identified in real life but that becomes kinda difficult in this scenario. And lastly, some of this shit is just plain hard to talk about.  But as much as I'd like to pretend it wasn't the case, my relationship issues do have a space in my hall of pain over the past 6 years or so.  Welcome to Heartbreak City It's likely that most people will experience heartbreak at some point in their lives and that's o...

"You're a whimp," said Arun.  It was the day my father died. After the funeral rituals were done with, I'd returned home. There were a couple of friends and relatives who decided to stop by. Most of them were drowning their sorrow in a bottle.  "You need to do something," he said.  Arun was a family friend you could say. He was basically trying to motivate me to take Aunt May to court . To make sure she is made accountable for her misdeeds over the past year leading upto my father's death.  Things aren't really that simple though. Court cases will be long, drawn out and hard on the bank balance. And who really wins in the end, other than the lawyers? Sure, I could make Aunt May's life miserable for a while by freezing some assets (and she did do some things which were not exactly legal) but it wasn't going to bring my father back.  Forgiveness and revenge are 2 sides of the same coin. A coin you toss in search of closure. To find a way to hop...

It's not an easy job being my friend. People like to be around happy, cheerful people. Now I can be that, for a while. But eventually, my pain and scars will become apparent and I'll start making them uncomfortable with my sorrow. This problem gets worse each year.  Every time I go through a life tragedy, something inside me changes. And more often than not, it's not really for the better. I feel myself becoming less resilient as time goes by and more & more dependent on those around me.  The fact is, I don't have any sort of support system at home. That means I get incredibly attached to people very quickly and as one can guess, this sometimes does not result in a happy ending for me.  This is what I feel when I look back at the remains of my friendship with Cathy. A friendship that was ultimately only meaningful in my own head for several years.  Our friendship felt really special for a while. And I must stress on the word friendship here. It was the most pla...

ERs in peripheral hospitals are a completely different experience from those in tertiary care hospitals, as one would expect. Peripheral ERs involve a lot of primary care and preventive medicine. Only a fraction of the total number of patients coming per shift will actually need referral to a higher centre. Although technically meant for "emergency" cases, you'll always have someone come in just to check their BP (even at fucking 4 in the morning).  Some patients used to come daily. I had one patient who used to come almost daily for vague problems. She was an old lady and I learnt that she lives attached home alone nearby and just feels lonely. After that, every time she'd come during my shift I'd crack some stupid joke just to cheer her up a little bit. This wasn't exactly the kind of medicine we thought we'd be practicing during MBBS but you learn these things after a few years of practice. Working as a doctor in a village is like being a celebrity in t...

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...