In Memoriam

It has been over a year since my mother passed away. It all began on August 8 last year, when she slipped on a wet floor and got badly hurt at our home in  Kozhikode. I got a call during my morning walk here in Bangalore.

I was dreading and praying it was not a fracture, but no such luck. She was hospitalized and doctors opined that surgery needs to be done as the fracture was a complex one.

This sudden turn of events forced me to rush to Kozhikode. Luckily train tickets were available and I reached the very next day after the fall.

When I reached the Kozhikode District Cooperative hospital she was in deep pain. Initially, she was admitted to the general ward as special ward rooms were not available. The scene there was chaotic with almost all patients with plasters and slings as the ward was meant for patients needing orthopaedic care.

I then went to the Orthopaedics outpatient rooms to meet Dr Reju, who was treating my mother. In terms of appearance, he had a height that would have been ideal for a basketball player. He was a soft-spoken and affable man, probably in his mid-thirties or early forties with a substantial girth.

He said that surgery was the only way out. When I raised my concerns about my mother’s age, she was 80, he said it was still doable and the hospital will ensure that her other health parameters are in check before the surgery. “Don’t worry we will fix this,” he said assuringly.

On his mobile phone, he showed the X-ray print. There were fractures at two points on her left femur bone, along with some minor cracks nearby. He readily offered to share the X-rays with me on WhatsApp and I sent them to a distant relative, who is also an ortho surgeon. He too concurred with what Dr Reju had suggested.

I later dialled up various sources to get a room and don’t know which one worked – she was shifted to a room on the second day. This shift calmed things down a bit, as I didn’t have to witness other patients in a far worse state writhing in agony over the pain caused by road accidents and other much more serious injuries.

For me the daily routine was somewhat like this: Sleep overnight in the hospital; get up to buy breakfast etc for mom and caretaker; leave for home for a bath, shave and breakfast; rush back to the hospital before 10 am to be present during the doctors’ morning rounds; buy medicines; leave for home during lunchtime and return by evening. Luckily my home was a 10-minute walk from the hospital, and I used to walk, except while going for lunch when I preferred an autorickshaw to escape the blazing afternoon sun.

Kerala back then was in the grip of the Covid-19 second wave and daily caseload and test positivity rates were at alarming levels. The fourth floor of the hospital was a designated Covid ward, while my mom was in the fifth.

Ambulances with blaring sirens rushing towards the hospital were a normal occurrence. A couple of times I happened to be near the hospital entrance when they arrived. A flurry of activity follows, healthcare personnel fully covered with white PPT kits and Ku Klux Klan-type hoods used to emerge out of the ambulance, and some from the hospital, also covered from head to toe with PPT kits, would rush to escort the Covid patient to the waiting stretcher or wheelchair.

Almost every onlooker used to dart away from the path and keep a safe distance when the stretcher carrying the patient moved to the lift.

There was an oxygen plant within the hospital premises and it was humming with activity. While getting into the lift I often used to come across hospital employees wheeling the longish oxygen cylinder and getting off at the fourth floor.

The Covid paranoia within the hospital was very strong. Everyone was wearing double masks and I sometimes had trouble trying to make out what those nurses were saying. While the hospital was maintaining safety protocols on most floors, it was lax on the ground floor lobby. It appeared crowded most of the time with people milling around the billing counters, canteen, X-ray room, pharmacies, and outside the consulting rooms of various doctors. 

I sometimes would willingly suffer the toil of taking the stairs to the fifth floor when the crowd waiting at the lift lobby appeared too much for comfort. While taking the stairs, the fear of the virus kept me at arm’s length from the railings!

Hand washes were almost as frequent as looking at phone screens. The clothes I wore at the hospital used to be dunked straight into the washing machine on reaching home. The last thing I wanted was to contract the dreaded virus and pose a risk to others.

On the surgery day, my mother was put into a stretcher around 8 am and wheeled off to the operation theatre. As a bystander, I had to wait outside. Keeping physical distancing in mind, I occupied a seat among the waiting chairs where the next one was vacant. But as the day wore on, the crowd outside the operation theatre swelled and it became impossible to find such seats.

Once the surgery got over the nurse called out my mother’s name. As I approached her, she told me the surgery was successful and told me to bring in her toothbrush and a pair of dresses as she will be spending the day at the post-operative care and may return to the ward the next evening.

After she came back to the ward, she appeared a bit calmer but complained of pain caused by surgical wounds. She was allowed to have semi-solid food by placing the bed on a recliner position.

She seemed to be on road to recovery and doctors during their morning rounds appeared satisfied with the progress. However, Dr Reju used to sometimes chide her for not being active enough, used to tell her to spend time in a recliner position and try to move the affected leg a bit.

A few days later the physio accompanying the doctor began holding her leg and moving it, and she used to shriek in pain. He told us to make her sit in bed and hang her leg a couple of times a day.

As the day of her discharge neared, we made arrangements for a wheelchair and suitable toilet seats for her future requirement. On reaching home, she continued with medicines and other treatments.

Doctors had advised us not to entertain many guests at home, as Covid was rampant in most places. So many of my relatives used to call up to know mom’s condition. In fact, some of them had already fallen prey to the dreaded pandemic and were recovering.

Mom’s condition appeared to be on the mend. She began taking normal food, though in small quantities. As the cot at home was much more low-slung than the hospital bed she found it easier to put her feet down.

It was over three weeks since I came to Kerala and I had some urgent matters to settle in Bangalore. So I had to leave and was planning to return after a few days.

However, fate had different plans. About two days ahead of my scheduled departure for Kerala, I got a call saying her condition had worsened and she has been rushed to hospital. She had a heart attack, the first one in her life.

After having lunch, mom complained of uneasiness, and the doctor couple in the ground floor flat was called. They rushed to attend to my mom and suggested that it requires immediate hospitalisation. The same couple was the first responder when my mother had a fall.  

I managed to get tickets for the 8 pm train, but by 5 pm I got to know that she was no more. After reaching home in Kerala around 8 am, I immediately got ready for the funeral. The crematorium officials had given us a slot before 9 am, as after that they only deal with Covid funerals, which required a much more stringent safety protocol.

After performing a brief ritual, the body was placed on a conveyor belt, which was wheeled into the incinerator chamber of the electric crematorium. As I came out I could see the smoke coming out of the chimney, and the grim realisation that all was over dawned upon me.

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Plastics conundrum

 

The new ban on ‘single use plastic’ is on. The government has defined ‘single-use’ plastic as something that is used once and then disposed of or recycled.

The government has listed 21 items that need to be phased out and they included plates made of plastic, cups made of plastic, earbuds with plastic sticks, glasses made of plastic; wrapping or packaging films around sweet boxes, cigarette packets among others.

While going through the extensive lists, it made me sit up and wonder as to how plastics have quietly seeped into our lives and become so well-entrenched that we can’t think of a life without them.

The durability and convenience the plastics offer have proved to be a Faustian bargain in the long run. Once we discard plastic items, they are not biodegradable and usually go to a landfill where it is buried or it gets into the water and finds its way into the ocean. They later break down into tiny particles and release toxic chemicals. These chemicals find their way into our food and water supply and are found in our bloodstream, causing various ailments including cancer, infertility, birth defects and impaired immunity.

I was lucky enough to have a glimpse of what a pre-plastic or a less-plastic era looked like. We had to carry a glass bottle or steel container while going to buy milk, a cloth bag was integral to shopping at grocery and vegetable stores, and every shop stocked discarded newspaper to wrap and pack the goods.

Some shopkeepers used the packets made out of newspapers, while others used the newspaper sheets to wrap the commodities which were tied up using a thread – of thick cotton or gunny bag material. The speed and adeptness with which those veteran shopkeepers used to wrap and tie ½ kg dal or sugar in a paper sheet and tie it up with a thread used to make me wonder how they pulled it off.

Back then, there were hardly any supermarkets and friendly neighbuorhood kirana stores were the mainstays, even in metro cities. They were basic sub-1,000 square feet stores with gunny bags of rice, wheat, sugar, and various pulses occupying most of the floor space, while bottles of health drinks such as Horlicks or Bournvita, soap, toothpaste, and other toiletries and detergents were laid out in shelves.

The storefront cupboard with a glass display was reserved for chocolates and biscuits, while toffees of various price range and various dry fruits were stored in largish cookie jars made of glass. This was how Kirana stores from Kashmir to Kanyakumari looked with minor variations.

At vegetable shops there were tokris (baskets made out of bamboo) to keep different vegetables. At meat and fish shops the mutton or chicken was wrapped in paper and we need to have a cloth bag to carry them home.

Hospitals, clinics, and medical stores doled out syrups and tonics in glass bottles. Cool drinks such as Fanta and Coke in their earlier avatar came in glass bottles, tea/coffee in hotels was many served in glass tumblers or steel glasses. In places such as Agra and some other neighbouring towns we had tea shops serving tea in kulhads or clay containers.

Plastic was confined to a few items such as toothbrushes, pens, face cream containers, lunch boxes and water bottles for schoolchildren, and educational stationery such as rulers, protractors, and set squares.

Later milk cooperatives adopted plastic bags, as they offered hassle-free milk delivery. Customers too readily accepted it as milk bottles or containers were no longer required.

The introduction of Polyethylene Terephthalate containers or PET bottles and the concept of bottled mineral water dealt a body blow to the glass bottle industry. Colas, cough syrups, liquor, shampoo … all that were hitherto packaged in glass bottles, began getting replaced by PET bottles, as they were unbreakable.

Soon some of these bottles found their way to trash cans. But in many households these bottles began to be reused for other utilitarian purposes such as storing edible oils.

Moreover, ragpickers, who act as links between the community and plastic recycling units, play a major role in bringing down plastic waste. These men and women live on the margins of society, and their working conditions are hazardous, rummaging through garbage mounds dotting most urban areas of the country.

However, it soon proved to be a losing battle for them, as plastic usage kept on increasing and even getting introduced in hitherto unused areas.

One of the early disruptors of this already worsening situation was plastic cups. They began making their presence at railway stations. The areas near the railway tracks began bearing the brunt as passengers began throwing discarded cups through the window. Soon all tea shops began dispensing tea in plastic cups as one need not wash cups and users also found it easy to carry and not bother about returning the glass.

Then came the plastic carry bags, which just turned the whole packaging industry on its head. The first to go was the paper bags and newspaper sheets as shopkeepers found plastic carry bags to be more convenient to use - no time-consuming wrapping was required.

Customers too were drawn to this novelty as it gave them freedom from using cloth bags and they could carry it easily, come rain or shine. They dealt a body blow to the discarded newspaper business, as shopkeepers traded paper bags with plastic ones.

Soon plastic carry bags acquired a pan-India presence and they were used to carry just about everything - from groceries to vegetables to fish and meat.

After the novelty value vanished, the devastating effects of these bags began to set in. They were found discarded in trash cans and on the wayside. As they were lightweight they got easily blown away by the wind like cotton seed flowers and soon became ubiquitous – and were found even in the bellies of stray cattle.

For garbage managers, they became a major headache and soon municipal landfills soon got overwhelmed by plastic bags. City municipalities tried various methods including waste segregation, a ban on the use of plastic bags, and a crackdown on stores violating these norms, but these bags of 40-50 micron thickness continue to elude any viable and long-lasting solution.

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Food For Thought

 

Kunal Vijaykar must be a worried man. Who would have imagined that his rather innocuous TV series on restaurants across India, will turn out to be a vital ingredient for a political storm? In fact, Vijaykar has done many political satire gigs with Cyrus Bharucha for The Week That Wasn't and The News That Wasn't, but stayed clear of any major controversies.

The programme in question was his visit to a restaurant named ‘Silly Souls’, run by Union Minister Smriti Irani’s daughter Zoish. It looked like one of those fine dining restaurants located in suburban Goa, which also calls itself a “Southeast Asian & Italian Restaurant and Bar” offering an eclectic fare ranging from seafood to pork to beef.

The programme got aired without much ado a few months ago and the minister later was quoted by a website saying she was proud of her daughter’s achievements. Trouble broke out when the restaurant got caught up in a controversy regarding its bar licence. It was issued in the name of a person who died a year ago.

This was a Godsend opportunity for the Congress party and it was quick to fire potshots at Irani. She tried to deny the allegations and even held a press conference to say that her daughter was a college student, and the Congress party was doing all this because she had taken on the Gandhi family. The presser got wide coverage in the government-friendly mainstream media. 

But all her spirited defence came unstuck thanks to Vijaykar’s video and Irani’s own earlier statement praising her daughter for her entrepreneurship. Her detractors are having a field day sharing these two widely on social media.

Her supporters, meanwhile, are a bit wary to back her as firstly they see her on a weak wicket with she herself endorsing the restaurant, and secondly, the issue involves alcohol, beef and pork - not kosher to their saatvik sensibilities.

People generally steer away from politics and crime reporting and opt for food and lifestyle reporting to keep controversies at bay. But no such relief for Vijaykar - His food video has become an innocent cause for a political blood sport.

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KK: Hum Rahen Ya Na Rahen Kal

 

As Tuesday and the month of May were drawing to a close, the tickers on TV news channels began flashing that popular Hindi singer KK died after a concert at Kolkata. Soon I began Googling for more information. Certain early bird publications had come out with bare minimum details about the tragedy that had befallen the playback singing world.

The next day morning there were more details. After the singer left for the hotel, he felt uneasiness. Though he was rushed to a nearby hospital he was brought dead. That he was just 53 – evoked a feeling of heaviness in my heart, as he was a couple of years younger than me. And certainly, not an age to go.

The whole country was in shock. As details began trickling in, the shoddy arrangements by the event organisers became very glaring. The auditorium was packed way beyond its capacity, there was no air conditioning and the bright lights were adding to the hot and stuffy atmosphere of the auditorium. These lapses have prompted the police to register an unnatural death case.

The initial report of the post-mortem suggests that the singer died because of a heart attack and there was no foul play. The singer had cardiac issues in the past. Surely the organisers left a lot to be desired while staging the event.

Krishnakumar Kunnath aka KK began figuring in the music channels like Channel V and MTV in the late 1990s with his debut album Pal, which was composed by Leslie Lewis. After it gained popularity, he began getting Bollywood offers, and the first song was Tadap Tadap in Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam.

After that, there was no looking back. A steady stream of offers came in and KK’s soulful rendition began winning many hearts. He soon was a household name, and for the nineties kids, his songs became the coming-of-age anthems. Be it the first crush, falling in love, or breakups, KK’s voice moved them in a way no other singer could. His influence over this generation was akin to what Kishore Kumar had over the 1970s children.

But KK wore his fame lightly on his shoulders and went about churning one chartbuster after another. He was not the person to court controversies or indulge in publicity stunts. As one Twitter user said he was the Rahul Dravid of playback singing, he went on with his soul-stirring songs with remarkable ease setting new benchmarks.

I had a sketchy picture of his accomplishments. Hence when I began checking out his body of works, I was astounded. Almost every second good film song that was a major hit after 2000 was sung by KK. I had heard most of them in the past on music TV channels or on FM radio while driving my car but had no idea they were sung by him.

Hence, it came as a major surprise laced with a tinge of guilt – here was a singer who has now fallen silent, and I haven’t had the foggiest idea about his accomplishments while he was alive.

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Wordle Diaries

 

Jan 20: Of late, on my Twitter feed I have been noticing some tiles, interspersed with a combination of green, yellow and white squares. When I closely watched I saw that on top it was written ‘Wordle’, along with a number, followed by fractions like 2/6 or 4/6. The one with 2/6 closely resembles a dairy milk chocolate pattern.

Can’t make any head or tail of it. Looks like some colour puzzle.

Jan 24: Got a WhatsApp forward from my friend providing a link to an article regarding Wordle (Well it is a word game after all) and its ground rules.

I have been a jumble word puzzle enthusiast and used to pore over newspapers for such puzzles. Many a weekend and office hours were spent solving them. And I am quite proficient in it. So Wordle must be easy. 

Sigh! My cockiness was misplaced. I wish I had the patience to read through the ground rules. Exhausted all six tries without hitting the right word.

Pored through the ground rules and tried to access the game again. Heck, the next game will happen only the next day. Wordle follows only one word per day! Even newspaper jumbles had five words. Anyway, no apps need to be downloaded.

Jan 25: Today I was able to solve it 6/6. Looking back I realized I did goof up a bit. Had used those grey marked letters in subsequent words. So basically it is a guessing-cum-elimination word game built on a bedrock of sound vocabulary. It allows only six tries and a useful rule of the thumb is that if a letter falls into a grey tile, ensure that subsequent words you guess don’t have them.

Jan 26: Wow! Got 3/6 and as soon as I finished, the screen flashed ‘splendid’. Began doing some Google searches about the background of the game and its creators. From all those readings I could gather that the game’s inventor is a guy named Josh Wardle and he did so to entertain his wife Palak Shah. This Indian connection surely must have warmed the cockles of many a desi heart. Wordle made its debut last October.

Jan 30: By now a couple of my friends have also started wracking their brains for that elusive word that could paint the row green within those six tries. I began getting their results on WhatsApp. From the timings of their messages, I felt basically the Wordle universe can be divided into two. Those who solve it at around midnight by keeping awake at those unearthly hours and those who do it first thing in the morning.

Feb 1: Got a few forwards of links stating that the New York Times has decided to purchase Wordle for ‘low-seven figures’. Checked Twitter and it was abuzz with opinions and memes ranging from plain wonderment that a game, which is a few months old, could catch the fancy of a reputed brand like NYT, to fears that the game would soon go behind a paywall.

Feb 5: The NYT acquisition seems to have made Wordle a talking point and brought in more players. In certain WhatsApp groups, I came across people asking ‘Wordle anyone’. Meanwhile, the Wordle results of friends on WhatsApp are also on the rise.

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