We went splashing in the Sanvordem waterfall today. Much fun, jumping into the cold water, and being chased by fishies trying to get a nibble at us. The trek was quite strenuous and one of our friends got hurt 😐
We are booking a cruise + swimming in the river + kayaking activity on the 31st. Let me know if any of you would like to join. The yacht has space for 5 more passengers.
"A trip on our Yachts Stoa or Red Mangrove along a Goan river, or the Arabian sea. Kayaking and/or SUP activities on the river (including jungle), or the sea. Welcome drink, snacks, beers (limited) and cold drinks."
We are also booking an outdoor activity with The Local Beat, and a stay at Nature's Nest Nature Resort . Let me know if you'd like to join us.
For the next few days, including today, we are at Silver Sands Shack in Morjim, surfing. Join us if you can. Some days we might also be a Dunes in Mandrem - depending on how the waves are.
Update: Here is what we are doing with the Local Beat on Friday. Join us if you like.
"For Fri 24th of Dec '21. Leave North Goa by 8am. 1.5 hour's drive later, your Local Beat guardians will be waiting on their bike (contact and location pin will be shared post making the payment) and driving another 25 minutes thru forests.
Park and proceed for a 25 minute mild trek to a water spot for a forest swim.
Your Local Beat guardians will serve toca boca (bites and refreshments) en route.
Swim as long as you want and then head back a short distance for a traditional lunch in veg and non veg (country chicken and fish) over feni cocktails at a reserved space at an eatery.
Hop back into your vehicle for the drive back home by around 3.
Wear in swim clothes that lets you slip into the waters. Wear closed/ strapped shoes (no open slippers at any cost). Carry towels, if you must.
We are a mindful-tourism co that works with locals and apart for retaining a service fee, rest of the poixe goes towards fees to locals, food and social impact initiatives that we undertake.
There is something that I and Aniket can't seem to agree upon.
Conventionally, a large part of the cost of RCC or load bearing wall construction, goes into preparing the foundation. So it would make sense thar anyone preparing a foundation would make full use of it by building two or more floors on top.
Why then do people build just one floor in Goa so frequently? Is it a preference or luxury? Is the cost of foundation much cheaper because of the rocky terrain? Is there something about laterite brick walls that I do not understand?
Perhaps people from Karnataka would know. Very similar terrain in Mangalore etc also.
I'm going through some emotional turmoil. No idea why I'm sharing it here. Perhaps because it said "What's on your mind, Saurabh?" on the text box.
As a single parent I need to have a lot of time available for my kids. And being available is just that - being available. I don't necessarily need to spend all the available time with them. As they get older they have their own things going on. But they like to come up to me a few times a day and speak and share. And when they are sharing I need to be present - not just physically, but also mentally and emotionally.
I have decent work life balance. Most months I am able to have a lot of time for the kids. And myself, of course. But our work has seasonality. Our government and corporate customers make all their capital goods purchases between Diwali and Holi. Things start getting really busy by December. Thankfully I have very capable team that takes care of most of the madness.
But this month things have really peaked. Apart from the usual busy season, there is the fundraise that I am working on. For bureaucratic reasons, it has dragged on, as we jump through hoops to pick up equity money. I am responsible for setting up operations in Goa, and things are way behind plan. We are hiring. We are launching a consumer product for rural India, and there is a lot of marketing work involved - work that I am not adept with. A whole bunch of people in the Gurgaon office have been sick; they think it is the weather but I know it is the pollution.
And then there are the conversations with investors. It is these conversations that have put me off of a fundraise for 14 years now. A few years after we started up, Sequoia and other such funds would just cold call us. And then when you start talking, they always find a reason to put you down. Right now I have a sheet in front of me with the list of confirmed investors. Those are the shortest conversations I have had. Some of them didn't even talk to me. They were just like, here, take my money.
The longest conversations are with people who don't end up investing. And it is OK for people to ask a lot of questions, and to not want to put money - startup investing is high risk. But there is this tendency among Indians, to insist on elaborating over all the issues they find with your business. Even Indian VCs in the US do that.
People need to stop for a minute and think. This is my work. This is my life. I've put 14 years into it. Do you really think you know better, because you calculated some ratios and they do not meet industry norms. If we've taken 14 sweet years to sort out the business before raising money, would we not have scrutinised every relevant aspect of the business by now?
The whole point of the first few rounds of investing is that you are betting on the passion of the founder(s), and on the potential for those ratios to change dramatically, because the entrepreneur believes in something or understands something that the world at large does not. If every idea and dream was computable at inception then the large corporates would just gobble up every idea, right? Why would you need the upstarts?
But perhaps the turmoil was triggered not by all this, but by the creation and my subsequent addition to a WhatsApp group of my college classmates. I do not last in family or school groups, but this group has intelligent people who might not bring up politics. The subject of reunions is something that Hollywood has discussed ad nauseam. Here in India, we do not think about it it as much.
Reunions are a mental health disaster. They take you back to a time when you had a lot less worries, and a lot more dreams. You are reunited with people, some of whom you had carefully avoided for a long time. Folks who had not been nice to you. Folks that you had been unfair to, because twenty years ago you did not know better. But most of all, it is the whole "grass is greener on the other side" aspect.
I (re)introduced myself in the only way we humans seem to know - by putting my best foot forward. Shared pictures of my kids, talked about my life in Goa, talked about my work. My life is great.
And I created a certain wistfulness.
That was not my intent. These are people who I spent 4-5 years with. I have no intention of making them feel that their life is not as glorious as mine. Because my life isn't great. It is OK. It is not bad. It could be a lot better. If you just look at my health, then yes, I am a lot better now than when I was earlier, but I still need to meet a pulmonologist and an ophthalmologist and an orthopaedic as soon as I can.
And then other people made me wistful. I wish my kids were still cute and small like the other kids. I wish my kids had a pet. And then, the real kicker. I wish I had a corporate job. I remember the time I was at Intel and found it hard to fill the eight working hours in my day. And yet, here I am solving PCB fabrication and metal forming and myriad other problems.
So what is this state called? This dissonance. I am simultaneously delighted that I have real engineering problems to solve, and disheartened that I am not a small cog in a large corporate machine with no real responsibilities. I am happy that I have no assets to maintain other than my startup, and wishful that I had also invested in property and built a nice big apartment somewhere.
Am I Cypher from The Matrix? Should I fall back into the comforting cushion of lies that megacorps lay out for us? Most days, I know the answer. Today is not that day.
What is wrong with our plants? We see ants everywhere. Are ants eating our plants?
Someone gave Nilay a bottle of orange liquid made from citrus peels, a couple of months ago. Is that organic pesticide? How do we use it?
In Gurgaon my dad had a bottle of pesticide. The gardener would spray it occasionally. Foul smelling stuff. Do I get some pesticide? Which one? Can I buy organic pesticide from somewhere? Please don't ask me to start eating oranges and making enzyme; I've got my hands full rearing kids.
The plants that are in deep ground are completely unaffected. They are super healthy. Its only plants in pots, and those in shallow mud (two-three inches of soil over concrete) that are suffering. So my cook says it isn't an infection, it's just lack of soil and sunlight.
Hey folks. Thinvent needs help in hiring. See if you can refer us some motivated candidates.
The plan: After successfully figuring out the B2B space, we are expanding in the D2C space. A majority of the children in Indian schools have never used a computer. They may know how to use the Internet through a smartphone, but they do not know how to create documents and presentations. To address the digital divide, we are launching a ₹10,000 (plus taxes and shipping) desktop computer (PC, monitor, keyboard, mouse and UPS). Later in 2022, we will launch an all-in-one computer which costs ₹10,000 including taxes and shipping.
The need: We need a team of people to communicate the value proposition of this computer to decision makers. We do not believe in endlessly burning money on ads. We have already impacted the lives of hundreds of children in a positive way, and we want folks to capture and narrate these stories in text and video. Then, we want folks who can drive social media conversation on the digital divide.
We are looking for people who can work magic with words and videos. Who can engage people in digital media conversations. Content writers, video makers, social media marketers, technical writers, inbound chat and call reps, e-commerce marketers, technical tele-support technicians, and salespersons.
We are also hiring embedded engineers, Python-Flask programmers and devops engineers.
Location: Either Gurgaon or Goa (Remote work available for some roles)
Please message me if you know the right people, or email me on saurabh@thinvent.in.
[ 1. Our customer base lives in villages or small cities. It is not affluent. It largely does not speak English. Naturally, our employees are also more successful with customers when they themselves are from similar backgrounds, and are fluent in a couple of Indian languages other than English. 2. We do not consider educational qualifications, and definitely do not consider marks, when hiring. ]
It's a good day to be out at the beach. There's a cool breeze blowing, and the sun is behind the clouds. We are surfing at S2 in Morjim, in case you're in Goa and would like to join us at the beach.
Nilay has a Russian friend from school. Russian+Kazakh. K and his younger brother L stayed over last night.
My kids can do things around the house. They can cook, change a tyre, fix a bunch of different things. But these boys are a class apart.
We planted grass yesterday, and although we'd dug up and fixed the level for drainage, it wasn't perfect. So I told Kavin to add more soil under some patches. He was just standing there, wondering how to do the task without getting his hands soiled (it had rained overnight and everything was a mush). Along comes little L and digs right in, his hands all chocolatey with mud. He knew exactly what to do.
There is this thing about boys/men who know how to work with their hands. For instance, they know what stance to take when lifting a heavy slab - they neither injure themselves nor drop the slab. And the only thing that can give you this confidence and this body language when doing handiwork, is to have regularly done it before.
(It is a pity that a majority of the people I've known in my life - people working desk jobs in offices or going to university - wouldn't even know how to fix a lightbulb.)
K cycles all over Goa on his non-electric cycle, up and down slopes all day. He is sometimes out cycling well into the night. Nilay was cycling late last night and I was trailing him in a car. I suppose I have to learn to let go... just like Russian parents.
Two girls came by last evening to give this to us. Teenagers, perhaps still in school, walking about in the dark during a power cut.
I told them to go tell the idiot to not do this idiocy in Goa. They laughed merrily. We all agreed that there is much more to do in Goa than send people on pilgrimages.
Kavin promptly used Google Maps to figure out what tourist attractions there might be around Velankanni or Shirdi. Free tickets, why not.
My dream house. I pass by it often on my morning walks. या यूँ कहिये कि I route my morning walks in a way that I pass by it frequently. Notice the tiny flamingoes in the lawn.
I fully support the government of India's decision to clamp down on cryptocurrency.
It is the government's job to regulate highly speculative investments that could lead to major losses for retail investors. With no underlying value or purpose, cryptocurrencies cannot even be called an investment. Their only meaningful purpose seems to be in hiding cross border transactions - something that the government must regulate.
Just because I disagree with the government currently in power, I cannot undermine the very purpose of government - to protect citizens from speculators and cross border criminals. A mechanism to carry out domestic transactions in an anonymous manner already exists - cash. Currency under circulation has doubled under the NDA regime, in spite of all the noise they make about digital economy.
But the most glaring aspect of crypto is the sheer wastage of energy and the mountains of e-waste generated by this pointless activity.
This man Gopal Sharma has 14 FB friends in common with me. He reached out to me over FB messenger on my birthday and asked for financial help.
When I wrote to some of our common friends, I found out that over the last few years, he had asked each one of them for money. Some of them had lent him money, and then he never returned it to them. None of these people know him personally.
He has 1.6K FB friends. If you are friends with him, that lends him the credibility he does not deserve. Please block and report him.
As I was saying yesterday... liberals have perfected the art of appropriating credit for other people's hard won battles. Liberals, leftists, Savarna activists.
The unique thing about our strong leadership is that everything is done by surprise. Surprise, new rules. Surprise! Rules gone.
So I am taking a leaf out of our leader's playbook. In future, I will practice surprise parenting.
Me: Surprise, I got you guys ten pairs of orange underwear.
M1: Why ten?
M2: Why orange?
M1: Why underwear?
Me: Why so many questions? I love you guys. This is in your best interest.
M2: You know we are growing, right? We need new sizes frequently. Did you get ten of the same size?
Me: Umm, I do not have information about the underwear sizes.
M1: You did order them yourself, right?
Me: Look, they're orange. That way you'll draw attention to yourself. Road safety!
M2: Dad, that's not how underwear work. They are not supposed to attract attention.
Me: Why so negative? So much criticism. Can't a man get some work done around here.
M1: Dad, you're a fixed income kind of guy. If you're buying us ten undies now, you're going to cut on some other expense later.
Later that week...
Me: Surprise. I returned all of those underwear. Problem solved.
M1: Dad, they're underwear. They're not returnable. What did you do with them?
M2: All ten? We could have used, like, two.
Me: That's it. You're terrorists, both of you. You don't get to wear underwear any more.
M1 to M2: Can he really stop us from wearing underwear?
M2 to M1: Nope. I don't think he can. But you don't wanna tell him that and piss him off right now.
M1 to me: Dad, we are going to vote on this. You can't just decide for us.
Me: Yeah, voting is in ten days. But I have more votes than you guys, so I've already announced my decision.
Them: 🤷🏽♂️
Me: If you'd respected my authority, instead of arguing and wanting to participate in the decision-making, you'd have had an abundance of clothes. Now you're naked and it's your fault.
(Wrote it this afternoon because I was bored writing a technical document all morning)
Sometimes what makes a movie special is that it has dog whistles. Little things, a scene that goes away in a few seconds and most people don't even notice it. But in a certain set of the audience, it triggers a flood of emotion and connection.
The closing scene in Jai Bhim is just that.
Like any other good movie that deals with the evil of Caste, Jai Bhim has a string of small incidents that convey caste heirarchy. If you've lived in Indian society, you pick up the cues. If you haven't, you may not even understand what just happened. The caste of each character isn't spoken out. The way they conduct themselves, and the way others expect them to conduct, is how we know who is what caste.
And then, in the end, the little girl learns to assert herself. Or rather, she inherently knew how to respect herself and assert her identity, but Chandru simply encourages her to be herself.
It is the little things that make a movie a classic. What Rajni could not achieve in Kaala with all his histrionics and superlative action, Suriya achieves with a simple nod and smile.
Factory made houses are beginning to be a big deal, in India and the US.
In the US, companies like https://buildcover.com/ let you design your house online, then factory build the house and bring and assemble it on your land. They also take care of building permits etc.
In India, https://www.loomcraftsprefab.com/ does pretty much the same thing, except you don't need permissions in most places because a prefab house is still considered kaccha construction, not a pakka house.
Both these companies use LGSF, Light Gauge Steel Framing. Google for the term and you will see dozens of large vendors in India, doing rapid construction of everything from factories to low cost housing.
The death of RCC and deep foundations (piles) in low rise housing, couldn't arrive any sooner.
Delhi Airport, Terminal 2, security check. There are an equal number of booths for the frisking of men and women. However, male passengers outnumbered women 10 to 1 (why the imbalance, even I was surprised) today. The female security personnel sit idle most of the time, but do not frisk men; they are for women passengers only. The cozy little enclosed booths for women lie empty. The queues for men have more than ten passengers each; no covid distancing. Women passengers, frisked quickly, wait for over 15 minutes for the men they are traveling with to cross this labyrinth. As they wait, they are forced to look at men like me lift our T shirts and expose our pot bellies to them, while we put our belts back on. Nobody bothered to make cozy booths for us, you see.
Equality. Not equity.
95% of India's domestic air travelers belong to the 5% elite urban savarna class. In such elite places like airports, the Indian establishment throws a bone of equality at elite women. Equal number of toilets. Equal number of queues. We are prepared for you to reach equity, is the messaging.
And then, the moment you step out of these elite spaces, the inequity between women and men is starkly visible. But most of that inequity exists for the oppressed classes. There are no public toilets, for example, in India. Indian men pee wherever. Elite Indian women walk into restaurants and malls and use their toilets. But where do the poor Indian women go?
Most elite Indian women are kept busy in fighting for equal access to toilets in their own elite spaces (offices, malls, universities). And silenced by giving them what they want, occasionally. Voices that could have spoken for the vast majority of India that is poor and opposed, are silenced like this. By throwing a bone.
[Flying off now. Can't see your criticism till the morning, thank you. Probably won't look at it then too 😁]
I was waiting by the road side for my ride to arrive. A car pulled up in front of me. I looked down to see the lady driving it staring at me. I didn't know her.
Since our eyes had met, I smiled, nodded my head, and greeted her with a "have a nice day". She was initially startled, then indignant, and drove off in a huff.
That's when I remembered that I'm in Gurgaon today, not Goa.
"Since 2016 the volume of homeopathic products sold (in Germany) has fallen 12%"
Ha hah. Someone is finally fighting the scourge of homeopathy.
"Homeopaths typically spend a lot of time with patients, asking not just about symptoms but also about emotions, work, and relationships. This is all meant to find the root cause of a patient's suffering and is part of its appeal."
"offering treatments that contain a fragment of the Berlin Wall to cure feelings of exclusion and loneliness or a powder exposed to cellphone signals as protection from radiation emitted by mobile handsets"
Even though homeopath quacks spend a lot of time talking to patients and making them feel good, that is really the only healing they can offer - because they have no medicines, no cures beyond talk. Patients who live with diseases like spondylitis, arthritis or exostosis - chronic diseases that are debilitating and painful but have no known cure as yet - are easy prey for homeopaths. The homeopath fills in for a therapist, who would help the patient overcome the emotional trauma of living with a disease that can only be managed and not cured.
It would be fine if the homeopath restricted themselves to just listening to the problems of a patient and offering trauma therapy. However, not only do they insist on dispensing useless white pills containing nothing but water, they also specifically ask their patients to not consume modern medicine once they start consuming these pills. This keeps chronic patients away from drugs like DMARDs, which may not cure, but can very effectively manage inflammation and a wonky immune system.
Remember how scary AIDS used to be when we were growing up in the 80s and 90s? HIV infection is still terrible and definitely should be avoided. But HAART therapy, if started early and continued diligently, can very effectively prevent HIV from progressing to AIDS. Or TB - the terror of the 70s. DOTS therapy, even when administered through our miserable public health system, is able to cure TB for the poor. But what happens if, heavens forbid, an HIV or TB patient ends up with a homeopath or a reiki practioner because they ran out of patience with their slow acting but effective modern medicine therapy.
What Germany and the UK are finally doing, is slowly legislating away homeopathy, so that such quacks can no longer target unsuspecting and ignorant patients. Of course there is the "freedom of choice" lobby in both countries, insisting that they be allowed to wallow in ignorance and pseudo-science. Their arguments are very similar to the anti-mask and anti-vaxxer lobbies - that we do not want to be injected with artificial substances, and much prefer pills made of naturally occuring substances like artichokes and dandelions. They forget that an overwhelming majority of toxins and poisons that we are at risk of consuming are naturally occuring and not artificially made. Belladonna and Heloderma are just two homeopathic "medicines" - rather popular "medicines" that even I have consumed as a child - that are made from a toxic plant and a venom respectively.
This is my morning rant. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed blustering it out.
Un ami: And how did you get them interested in science and maths? Was it through some conscious efforts, or it just came naturally to them?
Moi: They were naturally interested. All kids are interested in the material world and how it works. If you honestly answer their questions on science, they'll get very interested. They'll realise that there are layers to the question "why is the sky blue". Then you should buy them books.
The Aha Guide to Atoms https://www.amazon.in/dp/8192704416/ The Aha Guide to Newton's Laws https://www.amazon.in/dp/8192704408/ What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions https://www.amazon.in/dp/1848549563/ Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words https://www.amazon.in/dp/1473637317/ We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe https://www.amazon.in/We-Have-No-Idea-Universe/dp/0735211515 How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems from Randall Munroe of xkcd https://www.amazon.in/dp/1473680344/ The Cartoon Guide to Physics https://www.amazon.in/dp/0062731009/ The Cartoon Guide to Chemistry https://www.amazon.in/dp/0060936770/ Cartoon Guide to the Environment https://www.amazon.in/dp/0062732749 The Cartoon Guide to Biology https://www.amazon.in/dp/0062398652/
https://arvindguptatoys.com/ this guy is a genius and my kids are huge fans. All his books are on his website, free. Kids love making useful things out of trash. Its an obsession.
[ Thank you @[1214257652:2048:Meera] and @[1095357210:2048:Rajeev] for introducing me to Larry Gonick. And @[564198067:2048:Balaji] for writing AHA books. Will you keep writing, now that AhaGuru is growing? ]
On October 14, 1956 - Dhamma Chakra Pravartan Din - Dr. Ambedkar converted to Buddhism at Deekshabhoomi in Nagpur. (It is said that more than half a million followers converted along with him, effectively reviving Buddhism in India. 87% of Buddhists in India are Ambedkarite Buddhists.)
I've always struggled with why Babasaheb chose to convert his religion, rather than give up on religion completely. It is understandable that he left Hinduism, a religion that gave him so much pain and suffering throughout his life. But why choose Buddha's eightfold path?
I look at the world from the lens of atheism - all religion is bad. Babasaheb, on the other hand, said that people are unable to live without religion. The solution is a good religion, not an abolition of religion.
It is, to a very large extent, true. My vegetarian diet, for example, is dictated by the religion I was born into. I may have become an atheist, but can I change my diet? Never. Disgust for meat is baked into my bones. So you never truly leave a religion, because it's practices have already become your way of life by the time you are aware enough to leave.
On 15 October 2021 comes the news of Nihang Sikhs brutally murdering a man suspected of having the intent of committing sacrilege. Already, I hear murmurings of how all religions are violent. Is Buddhism completely non violent? One only has to look at Sri Lanka or Bhutan to know that it is not.
Yet, Buddhism as practiced in India in contemporary times is closer to pure non violence than any religion anywhere in India. There is not one loony Buddhist preacher that I've heard of; not one mainstream or fringe monk demanding violence.
Have you ever figured why the North East of India is called the "North" East. Why North? It's just the Eastern part of India. Why not just call it Eastern India?
Is it because the Bongs insist that they are East India? If we really named our regions like the Americans, then Bengal would be the midwest of India, right?
So if the East is really North East India, then what is South East India? The Andaman and Nicobar islands?
The center of India, as clearly marked by the GIF circle, is Chattisgarh, Jharkhand and Odisha. That's our heart. The Bongs are almost at the center, not to the East. Maybe they were East when we were one huge country with Pakistan and even Afghanistan inside our boundary.
Anyway. This post isn't about Bengal. It's about the North East. Which is just the East.
Wait no more. Simply call ICICI, and try to get a simple request serviced. Your ego and esteem will come crashing to the ground.
Disclaimer: Also works with other banks like SBI. But they won't attend your phone calls - you'll need to visit them in person to get a reality check on your औकात (or rather the lack of it).
So, it looks like the kids and I had Covid over the last couple of weeks. Here is the whole story... because y'all are jobless and like reading stories on FB.
Two Sundays ago (26 Sep) we were "galivanting about Goa" (as Tarun likes to put it). We assumed that swimming in a warm river on a warm day gave us a cold. The kids were mildly sick through the week. I got more than mildly sick by Thursday (30 Sep), got a two minute online consultation with my doc back in Gurgaon, and was prescribed antibiotics for my chest infection.
Saturday night (2 Oct) we learnt that our cook is hospitalised with Covid. Being decent folk, first thing on Sunday morning we went to Asilo† to get tested. Kavin and I tested negative but Nilay, bada bing bada boom, positive. This was quite unexpected. We were asked to meet the casualty duty doctor. She was a very nice lady, and gave us all the medicines Nilay needed. She also had a long and calm chat with Nilay about all the care he needed to take.
He wasn't feeling too sick, but we had to quarantine Nilay in a room and bore him to death anyway. On Tuesday (4 Oct) Kavin and I went back to Asilo for another round of RAT and RTPCR tests. Negative again. This time the nurses made us meet the OPD doctor. Now, I can't recall the conversation with the doctor verbatim, but this is broadly how it went:
"So you're saying that all of you had a cold last week. But it was not Covid, just a cold, even though you did not get tested. Then on Tuesday your cook traveled from Hubli and Wednesday and Thursday she came to work and then she fell sick on Thursday and now she has Covid. You suspect she got Covid from Hubli and gave it to your son. Maybe all of you had Covid all the while and gave it to her - these things are not easy to say. And now you are saying that your elder son is positive but you both, who live in the same house with him, don't have Covid, just because you tested negative twice. Sir we have to use our mind, we cannot just go by test reports. We three are all in this room. Is it possible that one of us has Covid and the other two do not? It is not possible - you know this disease well. So I will treat you both for Covid. Anyway you are fully vaccinated with CoviShield, so the effect of the disease will be very mild for you. You have already had antibiotics. I will prescribe them to Kevin also here. And all of you get blood tests please."
Kavin was quite surprised that everything at the hospital - rapid antigen test, RTPCR, doctor's consultation, expensive blood tests like Ferritin and D-Dimer, medicines - everything was free, and we didn't even have to wait too long (3-4 folks ahead of us in each queue). I told him it isn't free - he pays for it every time he buys a packet of Parle G.
Anyway. Public health in Goa gets a 4-star rating from me. Government hospital doctors have their ears to the pulse (see Yashodhara, I can mix metaphors whenever and wherever) of the wider public, and know much more about pandemics than expensive private doctors who are only catering to the "echelons" of society. Which is why I did not spend another ₹1,000 on a follow up consultation with my family doctor on the 3rd of October - she hadn't prescribed me blood tests or a Covid test, even though I'd had a prolonged "cold".
It looks to me like Covid has replaced the common cold and influenza as the most prevalent coronavirus. The doctor at Asilo felt that the Sars-Cov-2 virus will become endemic pretty soon.
I had full scale panic on the night of the 3rd. I assumed a replay of my sickness from an year ago, when I ended up in the ICU struggling to breathe. I was back in that room, sweating, being told by the ward girls to soldier on for the sake of my kids. Worried, I hammered out a document with useful information for my friends and relatives in case I end up hospitalised. (And I'm not even embarassed I did it 😂 )
† North Goa District Hospital, Mapusa. Higher than PHCs, SHCs in the public healthcare foodchain. The word asilo literally means asylum or hospice in Portuguese.
These star kids inherit fame and wealth. In the (social) media driven world they are able to immediately transform their inherited fame into personal wealth. All the while setting the most terrible example for kids - that life is all about splurging money, not about studying or working hard or honing your talents.
Now I'm supposed to feel bad for a 23 year old man who most likely had illegal quantities of dangerous drugs. No thank you. These are the kinds of morons that my kids will be pressured into idolising, as and when they get onto social media. Let this person who I don't know or care about, and who has so far achieved nothing in life, be made an example of. Drug enforcement is all about setting examples.
Liberals wasting acres of newsprint whining about Aryan when younger men than him are laying down their lives in protests.
Yesterday I was ranting about how slow the ICMR is. Now handle this. This cough syrup was handed out (for free) to a friend at the Mapusa District Hospital. This is not a homeopathic hospital, like the ones that the Delhi state government runs. Of course this syrup isn't working, and my friend is now going to a private pharmacy to get lozenges.
What next is coming to a modern-medicine hospital near you - गाय का पेशाब?
In 1993, when I was relocating from Delhi for Bhopal, Tarun gifted me a cassette with some Bob Dylan music.
An year later, visiting family friends who lived above some shops in 10 Number Market, I heard another Bob Dylan album. Not wanting to copy music, I pedalled all over Bhopal looking for a cassette of Under The Red Sky, unsuccessfully.
Spending the summer of 1996 at Panjab University Chandigarh, I finally scored another Bob Dylan cassette in the Sector 17 market, for the princely sum of ₹150.
A few minutes ago, I opened Spotify and typed in Bob Dylan, and every song ever created by the legend was available to me.
So accustomed are we to the relentless march of technology, that new developments rarely shock or excite us. Till something we do brings with it a flood of memories - of longing, of searching, and of wanting to belong.
[Nilay is the same age now. Every Saturday evening he cycles to Anjuna Beach, where a bunch of teenagers gather to skateboard and hang. He belongs, in a way that he has never belonged before. When he gets back home, the 25km range of his cycle battery has long been spent. The freedom to go wherever they want, be with whoever they desire, and do whatever they love, is all that teenagers (or any of us, for that matter) crave.]
The neighbour's kids were bursting crackers, just for fun. Nilay and Kavin were initially annoyed by the smoke and noise - their default reaction to crackers. Then they went and joined in for a bit.
Once done, the kids† cleaned up the street together. Kavin claims that you can't even tell that crackers were ever burst on that road. He says that in Gurgaon they'd just mess up the place and leave it like that.
I've put an inordinate amount of effort into moving to Goa. But it is moments like these that pay me my dividends. I'm not saying Goan society is perfectly casteless or classless. But the absence of indentured labour or vulnerable poor, coupled with greater civic awareness, means that every mess you make isn't automatically someone else's problem. I am hopeful that Goa will erode some of the sense of entitlement that the kids would have absorbed growing up in NCR.
† For both the bursting of the crackers and the cleaning of the streets, the neighbour's kids took the lead and my kids merely followed. That's kind of the point of the post - if my kids already had these values perfectly in place, then we wouldn't need to move cross country for them to learn.
