In the heat of WW2, amidst chaos, anarchy, and a general spread of terror, it was Winston Churchill who proudly stood on the podium and with grim determination, said, “Alas, if only we knew the stability of freeze-dried bananas, we could have lived without fear.”

Well, ok, ok…. Actually, he said something way cooler; something like “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”; but he could have just as easily included the banana remark somewhere there. That would have been really considerate of him. I could have started this note with a true quote instead of a made-up one.

But I’m not one to hold grudges. I’ll make do with what I have. I am, as you can see, more flexible than a drunken slinky.

But I’m straying from the point. I tend to do that at times. To get back on track, today’s topic: Freeze Dried Bananas… Yes, freeze dried bananas are all the rage today. They are being studied rather studiously and documented religiously. Some of you may think that this is an experiment worth little or no merit, but you would be wrong. The turnout of this experiment would have a phenomenal, drastic, or slight effect on the university grades of my cousin, Lilia Bruno.

As we speak (or rather, as I type), she has her hands full… hands full of bananas at subzero temperatures, ardently making ‘state diagrams’ using a ‘D.S.C.’ to take ‘glass transition temperatures’ which she uses to predict the banana’s stability during storage. But it is not as simple as you may think. In her own words, which I caution may be filled with technical jargon you may find difficult to grasp, she is also considering ‘a lot of other parameters’ in addition to temperature…

This experiment has wide spread implications, stretching beyond her academics… I am referring to the fact that I have actively started calling her Dr. Banana. Surprisingly enough, she does NOT appreciate this.

True to her spirit, she remains fastidiously serious about the experiment, choosing to ignore irritating song parodies made by her cousin involving ‘Banana Mama’ and ‘Hasta Banána’… The project itself is shrouded in secrecy, the results and observations being ‘withheld until a suitable date’. Apparently the world isn’t ready for the truth yet. But Dr. Banana has assured me that there is no immediate danger from freeze dried bananas, and that we could all go around our regular routines in peace. This heartening assurance has managed to quell my nightmares of giant mutant bananas shouting “So, you like milkshakes, do you? Eat THIS!! KABAAM!” As a token of my gratitude, I should probably stop calling her Dr. Banana. She really hates that name.

The actual reason for secrecy, she says, is that the paper isn’t published yet, and she doesn’t want the concept to be stolen. I can understand her concern. People would stop at nothing to get their hands on this study. This stuff is dynamite. If the findings leaked to the press somehow, there would be widespread panic.

“Tonight, CNN special report. Bananas… What REALLY happens in the freezer?… Watch, as we go live… behind the turkey and past the ice cream… ”

The only other information Dr. Banana could divulge about the study was that she had compared the freeze dried bananas with regular, fresh bananas. Beyond this fascinating fact, I was unable to get any further information from her, despite my best strong arm tactics. I even threatened to publicly call her ‘Dr. Banana’. Did I mention that she really REALLY hates that name?

I, for one, am eagerly waiting for the results. I have to confess…I’m curious. Curiosity may have killed the cat, sure, but I think it’s a worthy sacrifice for unlocking one of the great mysteries of nature. As long as it’s not a cat I personally know, I think I’ll be ok with my curiosity killing cats. Hey, what my curiosity does in its spare time, I have no trouble with. Not that I condone its rather senseless acts, mind you. If it really HAD to kill someone, I’m sure it could have found something / someone more worthy than some random cat. After all, in today’s political… Aww, crap. I’m straying from the point again…

Well, what I mean to say is simply that I am curious about the results…I have a sneaking suspicion that one of the major findings is that under normal laboratory conditions, the freeze dried bananas are cooler than the regular, fresh ones.

Behold, thou frail cucumber, be ye eaten cold
Be thee yonder spinach’s brother, or so Popeye has told
Carrots, beets, potaytos, potahtos, minced in veggie stew
All that’s yummy and fills the tummy is… bah… I can’t do this!!!

Sorry about that… I thought, rather too late, that some people may have mistaken the title of this article to mean this is ACTUALLY an ode to vegetables. I thought maybe I should try and please that segment of the audience, despite how incredibly dumb they are… Sorry, I can’t do it. As you can see, I DID try.

This post is of a more sinister nature, actually… For those of you who’re in the dark, I am a recent survivor of a fever attack; a virus working incognito that had baffled doctors in two major cities before I finally got better. The doctors still don’t have a clue about the identity of the alleged virus. (Personally, I’m calling it The Bourne Viri.) This only frustrated the medical community even further. The way they saw it, they failed to

a) identify how or why I got sick and what the sickness AND
b) explain WHY I got better.

They were pretty grumpy about it in the end. They finally left me with the be-careful-for-a-while-cos-your-body-can’t-handle-it speech.

Doc: No booze.
Me: Check.
Doc: No smokes.
Me: Never was, check.
Doc: No strenuous exerices.
Me: Are you kidding me? Double check
Doc: No non-veg food
Me: ……………….

Doc: I said… no non-veg food… Be vegetarian for a month
Me: Hmm… I don’t think so, doc
Doc: Eh???
Me: I can tell you ‘ok’ now, and I’ll probably mean it too, but it simply WON’T happen.
Doc: ……………….

Me: So what about a compromise of some sort, eh?
Doc: ……………….

Me: Come on… there must be SOMETHING we can come up with…
Doc: Well, try to reduce non-veg consumption???
Me: Hmm… Ok, deal.
Doc: And no red meat… please?
Me: Wokie, doc. Let’s shake on it.

A pretty satisfactory conclusion, I said to myself… Unfortunately, when I’m in Cochin, I am NOT the master of my own life. For the rest of my stay in Cochin, dad and mom took turns blasting my food habits and slackened lifestyle. They didn’t even take cognizance of the fact that I HAD reduced my non veg intake… a bit…When I got back to Bangalore, I thought hey, at least I’m my own master here. As it turns out, I’m not.

My brother, Lewin, resumed the lectures started by my parents back in Cochin. It was as if he was the new guest lecturer taking over from dad. He even began leading by example… he said he’ll be vegetarian for a week as well, a worthy sacrifice to reconcile the differences between Health and Hamish.

Now, Lewin alone, I could handle. After all, there’s only a few years difference between us… and he IS the younger brother… but there was another lecturer in this Let Hamish Eat Grass College of Veggineering… Swetha.

Swetha used to be Lewin’s classmate back when they fought the demons of Information Technology, armed only with pens and rulers. Since both of them are stationed in Bangalore, they frequently stop to recount old war stories (“Remember when you forgot your admit card for the fourth semester ‘IT Protocols’ exam? Ha ha ha.”) and share news. When she heard of my impromptu negotiations with the doctor, she fumed.

Swetha has reason to fume. She’s an all-out vegan of vegetarian descent and vegetarian ambitions. She simply cannot digest the notion of someone not being able to refrain from eating ‘dead animals’ for merely one month. According to Swetha, there is enough variety in Vegetarian cuisines to last a lifetime. For example, she keeps rotating her breakfast between dosa and chutney, chutney and dosa, dosa with LOTS of chutney, chutney with LOTS of dosa, dosa smeared with chutney, dosa with chutney on the side… infinite possibilities, really…

So now I have Lewin and Swetha incessantly attacking my fragile desires for a modest poultry snack. To top that, my parents call from home to a) check on my food intake, and b) applaud Lewin and Swetha’s concern for my health.

It finally became too much… I relented. Drew up a white flag; yielded to superior numbers; called for retreat; withdrew from munching duty; cried like a baby… errr, ok, I’m not that far gone yet…

Stardate October 16, 2007… Vegetarian’s log… On day 5 of a 30 day exile from meat. Vision is blurry. Tongue feels perennially dry… drool is rampant and incessant. I see chickens everywhere. Juicy morsels of dry fried delicacies. So close, and yet… so far….

Everybody looks edible…

If you happen to have a habit of walking around with a bottle of ketchup in hand, now is NOT a good time to walk into my line of sight…

For those who came in late… I was admitted into a Hospital ward on suspicion of Typhoid. This is true… I wasn’t under treatment for Typhoid, mind you… … I was brought in because of ‘alleged Typhoid-like symptoms‘. It started one lovely Friday morning… which turned out to be not-so-lovely-after-all, as I suddenly got inflicted with high fever. If the eyewitness accounts hold true, there was visible smoke rising from my body which obscured vision within the surrounding area. Of course, I’m considering this remark as a highly exaggerated, inaccurate observation, fabricated mostly by myself.

Let’s just leave it at the fact that I was pretty sick. I had to be flown out of Bangalore and into Cochin so that I can be watched over by THE experts… I’m not talking about experts in medicine… I was talking about experts on ME… my parents…

I was taken directly from the airport into the doctor’s room, where I was brought under the scrutiny of some serious doctors… specialists in prodding stomachs and frowning seriously. The verdict was unanimous.

“He needs more prodding. Admit him for observation.”

The room was top notch, something you could gauge the instant you see the Personal Cable TV perched high on a stand, playing crappy Hindi movies without remorse. The bed was comfy, and there was an interesting set-up built to stop me from falling off… I felt like I was back in a crib. At least that’s my explanation for sucking my thumb, and I’m sticking with it.

It was no picnic. No, there was no lunch basket kept on a blanket spread out in the lush green grass fighting a piping hot sun. Nope. No picnic at all. It was frustrating… waiting for the doctor to let me out…

The big problem was that… despite their big fat degrees and the framed certificates they use as wallpaper, they were unable to find out what I was suffering from. “Weird”, said the doctor, “and his illness is pretty bizarre too.” Everyday, promptly at 4 a.m., a determined nurse would siphon off a syringeful of blood, ostensibly for tests. They also did some sort of scan on me, assuring me that smearing me with jelly was part of the process, and not merely done for their amusement. Their muffled giggles did nothing to elevate their credibility on the matter.

My body has a sick sense of humor, toying with the doctors like that. At one point, the WBC count spiraled down, and the blood platelet count started its decline. I tested negative for every test they gave me. By the time they figured they had no choice but to drill my spine for more tests, things began to get back to normal. Not long after, the triglyceride count boomed up without so much as a WORD of explanation. After all was said and done, they still don’t have a clue what I suffered from, and they still have no idea how in the world I recovered so fast… But they DID know they could charge me Rs.11,560 for healthcare.

The fact that I had something they couldn’t identify… made them really reluctant about letting me go. And when they DID, they gave me the typical lecture on controlling my diet, drinking safe water, etc etc, along with a prescribed dosage of vitamin tablets. (This also started out my brief stint in vegetarianism, but that’s another story…) They also asked me to return for tests when I can… It was like I was being sent on parole. I can check out any time I like, but I can’t REALLY leave…

Usually, when I vent my rage on the bloodsuckers of my beloved hometown, Cochin, I’m writing about the highly evolved tactical team of mosquitoes ruling the region. If ever researchers were to do a full fledged study on these freaks of nature, they would unanimously agree, in my opinion, that they may be stung to death before they can complete the study…

But today, I’m talking about two legged, non-flying, professional bloodsuckers. Not lawyers in this case, cos I’m talking ‘blood’ in the more literal sense… Nurses. Now I have nothing against the profession. Let nursing nurses nurse… that was always my stand… But some of the recent activities in my life has got some blood flowing into this article, no pun intended (ya, right)

For those who don’t know, I have been out of action for a while… Two weeks ago, I was deliriously feverish (or feverishly delirious, if you prefer), leading to an impromptu admission into a hospital, where four out of five experts agreed that the medical term for what I was suffering from was… ‘indeterminate’.

The trouble with suffering from indeterminate sicknesses is that… doctors tend to take that fact as a license for bombarding you with tests. And blood tests are the usual frontrunners of these bombardments.

I had hardly stepped into my hospital room when they unceremoniously slammed a catheter into a vein from my left wrist… justifying the intrusion by saying “Hey, you never know when you may need an IV drip”… and then… proceeded to take blood from my right arm.

The IV catheter was never actually used. It just adorned my wrist for a week; an ugly piece of uncomfortable ornament… This wouldn’t have bothered me much, except for the fact that the entire process of taking blood from my right arm was not going as smoothly as I would have wanted…

The first step in taking blood is finding the vein. And that procedure varies in difficulty from person to person. There are people with veins bulging out like a bullfrog breathing in. A nurse with a good aim can possibly throw a syringe from across the room and still hit the spot. God, however, has blessed me with a virtually indiscernible set of veins, making every injection a treasure hunt. (“Arrr. I think I see something. We should dig here.”) So every morning, promptly at the ungodly hour of 4 a.m., the nurse attacks me with a thick needle, hunting around for the elusive vein.

On the average, she stabs me six times before the red fluid fills the syringe. She’s not too pleased about my veins and their habits of stealth. Hunting around for invisible veins is a taxing job. In fact, I seriously doubt that she stabs me a couple of times just out of spite…

This cannot go on. I’m out of the hospital now, ignoring the doctors’ recommendation for another 246 tests involving my spinal fluid. But as life goes on, I’m sure there will be more instances where more blood is demanded. I can’t have them jabbing me at random like this. The next time they successfully siphon from a vein, I’ll have a red dot tattooed around that spot, with an indicator saying “STOP HUNTING, DOC. THE VEIN IS HERE.”

It is troubling that in spite of having sophisticated instruments, with names you can’t pronounce without scaring the average cat, the modern nurse still can’t find my vein without several attempts; almost as troubling as the fact that the mosquitoes back home do it at the first try, every time!!!

The IT wave has indeed swept the nation. Words and their meanings change from zone to zone, time to time, and generation to generation. If you are anywhere close to my generation, then you would have seen the title and expected an article on how my computer seized up because of some nasty internet virus. But you would have been wrong on two counts.

1. My comp does NOT need help from any virus to seize up, thank you… On all matters of hanging up, crashing, acting weirdly, deleting random files, and making unseemly noises, it is fairly self reliant. In fact, it would take offence if a virus offered assistance. “Oh, what? You think I can’t freeze up on my own??? Up yours, you 10011001010010010101!!!!!” (What? You can come up with a better binary swear word?)

2. I am talking about viri in a more biological sense… Leave computers out of this for a while. Ok?

It all started one bright Friday morning (the mornings ARE bright these days, aren’t they?) when my colleague remarked that I was hot. I was about to say “Why, thank you”, when she made it abundantly clear that she was talking strictly in the literal sense. It took about a few minutes before I actually started feeling the effects of the fever.

The reason, I reasoned, are the dastardly rains that plague Bangalore these days (the rains ARE dastardly these days, aren’t they?) For you see, I am slightly more vulnerable to these pesky drops-from-the-skies than the average person. I can sing “Raindrops keep falling on my head” with more conviction than Butch Cassidy OR the Sundance Kid, who would have better sung “Raindrops keep falling on my hair… or hat”, cos unlike those lying, rich moviestars, raindrops actually DO keep falling directly on my head… owing to the fact that my once densely populated head was evicting the follicles remorselessly… and rather too quickly, in my opinion.

Be that as it may be, there I was, shivering from fever, drenched in sweat, dying on the office sofa, when God got bored. He hit the fast forward button so that the scene shifted to evening without any significant change in the plot.

There were shouts and cries of joyous exuberance as the clock struck the appointed hour… Most of my colleagues leapt off the office in single bounds (one bound per colleague; hence the plural form)… Thankfully, I was not left alone. With lightning fast reflexes, I had managed to… well, just lie there…

But… with slow, but steady reflexes, the kind that God gifts the clueless, I managed to cling on to ONE of my colleagues, who I pestered into helping me home.

Being a staunch practitioner of the philosophy “Ignore, and it shall go away”, I decided to spend my weekend in bed… Concerned friends, family members, and in fact, one weird stranger I met on my way home, suggested I consult the doctor, but I stood by my principles… for a while… My fever was getting stranger by the day, giving me a roller coaster ride I couldn’t wriggle out of. I finally decided that I needed an expert view on the matter. I needed to know what I was suffering from… at least I’d be able to tell people something other than that I was suffering from ‘some strange case of fever’. Hence, I limped into the local clinic… where the veteran doctor diagnosed with my condition and announced that i was suffering from ’some strange case of fever’

This, of course, was not helping me at all. I needed expert care, attention, and tolerance to my irritating wails. I needed mom. I’ve booked me the first flight back to my home, Cochin, where I shall undoubtedly displace a vertebra, thanks to the horribly bumpy roads on the way to the hospital…There, in addition to ‘a displaced vertebra’, I hope to be diagnosed with something better than ’some strange case of fever’.

I’m not really a travel fanatic. I’ve had to travel a lot of places due to my work, yes; and I cant say I haven’t enjoyed some of those trips… But I feel more at home when… well, when I’m at home. But the point is… I HAVE traveled a bit, and it is with that air of authority with which I am declaring this – Cochin has the WORST roads of any city of India.

The roads were never the big attraction in Cochin… No tourist has ever said, “Wow. Leave the backwaters alone. Take a dig at this road!!”. But then again, I have to say there is enough evidence that someone has indeed been digging right in the middle of the road.

If last year, someone had told me that the roads were going to get worse, I’d have mocked him. “Get out of here”, I would have said, followed by some smart alec salutation, like ‘looney’, ‘idiot’, or ‘dumbass’… On retrospect, I’m glad this did not happen, cos by now, this someone would have come back to do the infamous “I told you so” dance, throwing in more choicy salutations to highlight the event.

It was definitely a challenging job… but my government did it!!! They’re not ones to back down from a challenge, oh, no… Not MY state… The roads are indeed worse. It is now a series of high plains and low plains… Pits deep enough to host a circus… I saw a Maruti esteem stuck in the middle of MG road, its front tire hopelessly wedged in a pothole. For all the non Cochinites who might have trouble visualizing such a pothole, imagine driving a monster truck through the Grand Canyon…

I feel sorry for the amusement parks, though. They’re probably losing business. Who’s gonna pay 25 bucks for a roller coaster ride when you can have the same thrill for a 2 rupee bus ride? The buses of my fair city are not concerned with roads. They go upwards of 90 kms per hour within city limits, road or no roads… As a result, the passengers keep bouncing up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down… you get the picture…

And my own home sweet home seems to be embedded right in the center of the whole mess. On the bright side, it’s now easier for me to give directions to my home … “Hey, it’s easy. Follow the ‘path of the bad roads‘. Keep taking the worst possible road that you find in front of you, and eventually, you’ll end up at my place.” Ya, most roads may lead to Rome, if the saying is right… but all the bad roads leads to MY home…

But call me optimistic… I can see good sides to almost anything. If these potholes go any deeper, we may hit water soon. Hundreds of wells all across the roadway, quenching the thirst of thousands… until eventually they catch something awful from all the polluted water.

But call me optimistic again… eventually… not soon, but eventually, one of the wells might hit oil and not water… and we could be self sufficient in all our petroleum needs… and rise to glory and prosperity… until of course, America hears about it in the CNN and nukes our country as part of their “War against terror”…

What do you know… I’m not that optimistic after all..