This too shall pass

There was a time when I would spend all my time in just reading. I never felt guilty of not doing anything in life but reading. Then life was not stressed with things like a stable bank balance, settling in life and all that jag. Pages after voluminous pages of Harrison/Nelson were guzzled like some maniac Oktoberfest OCD. Private practice was a sinful abomination, and the GP was then what one should not be like- mediocre depraved cold cough remedier of Multivit A to Z school of medicine, coached by cravatted dumb-em- down Med reps and slaves to the Pharma dementors.

The essence of existence then was to dream, close eyes and float spenta amertal on raf kinases propelled nanomotors, hiking through TyKs seeking all that is new and unique, and catchy, perhaps contorted- looking for the rare syndrome, the gestalt agglomeration that stretched the limits of your associative memory – Tore Solente Gole or Rubenstein Taybi , LEOPARD, LAMB/NAME. and all that fancy pansy orgiastic quasi-intellectualism. What was the motivation to hoard so much ‘knowledge’? It was a phase where the more you know/memorise, the more successful you were. The secondary gain ( should be primary gain??-perhaps??) of this cannabinoidated phase of life, was learning how to read, what to gain beyond mere pages of print, how to browse the authors list in a book and imagine the his/her personality, work, workplace- looking at perhaps how to learn to think like the rara avis that dreamed of gene splicing or histone deacetylases or gene sequencing and all that jhakasmaal.

That salubrious cirrus does not however feed the mundane rigmaroles of nine to five (to perhaps nine.) The bottom line being that “No one pays you to just sit and read.”

When I visited the book exhibition last week I really felt like buying every single book I liked and wanted to dirty with pencil underlining and comments and doodles like in days of past. But unfortunately I do not have the money to satisfy my fetish.
I hardly seem to get time to sit and read I tried to reason with myself. When will I read if at all I were to buy Bartlett’s tome or Fishman or Feigenbaum. ?
Amedeo is left undisturbed since Sept 2007, CCO sends me more updates than I can keep track of. OTM by June is a target that seems fuelled by a bit of misplaced enthusiasm. Schlossberg seems to be gathering dust as I seem to be drifting into that private practice mould of work. Surprisingly I do not find myself worthy of all the maaki stuff I used to think this type of functioning merited being called. This too shall pass. Maybe.

Movies have already been hijacked out of the budget of the middleclass mensch by the multiplex mafia. Now we shall have the IPL brand of superfowl larceny. Tickets for 500 and 750 to see your city play!!!!!!
Sharad Power and his BaCChI have demonstrated its testicular/dallar fortitude amply, but the bidding telecast where a Bombay dyer fought a booze badshah and an androgynous filmstar for nonsons of soil was a mockery of the Utappam Dhoni breed of cricketers, not ‘tribute to their merit’ as some moron Suhel Seth would have us believe.

As they say: ‘the difference between men and “boys” is the size/price of their toys’