What gives

Ashford Baptist church. Joshua is standing on the banks of Jordon about to step into the promised land and the words he gets from the Lord is in Chapter 1 vs 9. 'Have I not commanded you,be strong and courageous.DO not be discouraged,do not be afraid for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.' There were three issues discussed in the setting. 1.How to deal with sometimes strange and enigmatic plan of the Lord. After forty years in the desert,they come across the first city,Jericho-a city strong and powerful with solid walls and soldiers within it,all of us would imagine they would be raring to go but when the order comes in from the Lord,it is not what they expected. For six days they are just supposed to walk around the Jericho wall and on the seventh day they are asked to go around it seven times and shout. Interesting thing is they do do what the Lord says and the battle is won.Counter intuitive and strange it may seem but the peace of God will go with us...

I am a Ranveer Singh fan and I follow his movies closely.Infact he is the only actor I would make the efffort to travel the distance ,pay money and watch in a theatre.So I took the trouble to travel to Strastford's Westfield on a saturday morning to watch Padmavati. I have been listening to the audience review of the movie on youtube and I understood what they were meaning to communicate but could not at the spur of the moment when they came out of the theatre. Let me start with Deepika and Shahid's performance.In the first half of the movie it was a pain to watch them,Deepika seemed palid and something seemed to be missing in her work,Shahid was allright,sometimes almost wooden,there was no chemistry.For me I could not but imagine Vidya Balan in the role ,who I think would have taken it to another level. On the other hand I could palpate Deepika's vulnerability and I liked her more as a person.In the second half of the movie,the fire picks up and she performs well. Ran...

I spent the better part of my morning in a specialist endocrine clinic.There is so much to learn.Majority of patients were ones with thyroid or diabetes and we had one with Conn's and a few with multi-system involvement.Take for instance diabetes,the protocols in it move at breakneck speed.There are so many newer drugs and insulin coming into the market,managing it is a full time speciality.We saw patients with pancreatic implants,talked about it's limitations,insulin pump,newer insulins which give a more stable baseline than Lantus.....and the list goes on whereas in thyroid there was not really much new. Just sitting in the clinic one morning my learning curve just went on a surge.I learnt more in a few hours than I have in the last one year ,I think. I spent a better part of one morning just learning echoes from a very patient person.I believe there is a course called critical care echo which I wonder if I can get done before I leave for home. Don't get me wrong I am ...

I don't look at my room too hard on working days.I pick up things I need and I just leave the room.I know exactly where I keep them so I never have to search for them besides mom is not around here to clean after me,yes it still happens. Every now and then I take one long look at my room and I know I have to clear things out.In a consumer culture like the UK every week comes with it's waste. I go through my dressing table,clean my combs,segregate my finished and finishing products,old toothbrushes which have seen better days-room fresheners which have evaporated,paper labels of new stuffs I have picked up,My toiletries also go through a strict vetting process. I go through my clothes ,segregate the ones I don't wear,from the ones I need every now and then.I go through my store cupboard and throw away labels and carriers of things that are about finishing. I clean my study table of last weeks junk I have knowingly or unknowingly picked up which could be receipts,papers,c...

If I have idolised a man in my growing up years it has been Dr Martin Luther King.Like a lunatic lying on the lawn in my boarding school,standing before the mirror,just gallavanting with my friends I used to recite the 'I have a dream'speech .My take home book from the library often used to be biographies of Dr King.His civil right movement was solidly built on a firm foundation of a solid ground,the gospel.He was a man of God,fullstop. When Barack Obama was elected to the office for the first time ,I wept.I was so proud of USA,just watching the entire drama fold out in America and I really thought America was the greatest country in the world.However as his tenure unfolded,some of his policies would have made Dr King cry.He became more popular but I liked him less ,for whatever it is worth. The last elections America pulled out a rabbit from it's hat.The world gasped in horror as Trump won the elections. Eversince,american politics has been like a soap opera exposing it...

Finished 4 days of night duty and it does play havoc with your circadian,at 11 PM at night one is wide awake like an owl with no sleep in sight.One does get three days to get back but it just does not work that way does it? I am so glad about it though,a year back I would have found this sort of rota for extended periods almost impossible ,ofcourse there is the fact that back home the rest part is not woven into our erratic schedule. I would like to attend church today,hopefully I will be able to hold up for the day and catch up on sleep a little early tonight.Tomorrow I start my clinical week and I hope to spend the next five days in the echo department picking up some skills. I have all of three months with the trust and another month travelling through UK if the Lord wills it,with my brother and niece. I have almost begun my count-downs and all said and done I just have a handful of days. This year has been a thought provoking year,hopefully I have shed more than just a few kil...

It was such a joy to attend church after three weeks of missing it due to my work schedule.It was the week of epiphany,a week when all over the world christians celebrate the magis or the wisemen from the east coming to worship the baby Jesus in Bethleham.In different parts of the world it is celebrated in different ways.In some places in central Europe,I believe the cross is thrown into ice cold water and the men of the church dive into the water to retain it.We saw a picture of a man who had retrieved it who was holding it close to his face and kissing it with such joy in his face.Diving into the water is also a form of baptism. As I sat in the church worshipping today the Lord brought to mind so many of my dear friends scattered all over the world literally ,in transition or already moved to different places where everything is new for them.As one of my colleagues who has moved to Basildon put it in a message on whattsapp today -'out of their comfort zone'. I have broken ...

Even as I slowly pack my mental bags one by one I have been planning to make a detour via Bangladesh volunteering with Samaritan's purse hospital in Molangiri for a month to replace the doctor on furlough.I have been praying about it.I have been planning to fill my application form today.I dreamt of my mother the whole night,it was a disturbing night and I woke up early very,very restless. I desperately needed to talk to my mother and I did.It is the same sort of urgency I feel sometimes when I know I have to talk to my God,the father. I have had to miss two weeks of church because of being on duty on two consequtive sundays and christmas ,I feel almost parched for the church. My heart's desire has been to experience a church based,para church work and see how it functions ,whether there can be some learning I can take back wherever I am,in the future. Josh Groban sings... '...Each restless heart that beats imperfectly, but when You come ,I am filled with wonder some...

My dad loves his kitchen gardening.He is nearing ninety but his soul beats for the vegetables in his extensive kitchen garden and he keeps the house overflowing with seasonal greens.He took this up in his seventies when all the children were well into doing their own thing and mom was engrossed in her school,it has been a very amiable partnership indeed.However age does catch up.He is as active as a sixty year old man should be physically but his mind is as driven as a man in his fifties. Today when I spoke to him on the phone he seemed bewildred by something that happened to him today.He was apparently working in his garden and noticed a whole lot of things that needed done which he thought he might not meet up to physically.He was just about sighing inside when an able-bodied young kid just entered the garden and started working beside him without a single word spoken.My dad gathered he was a school going kid who was studying in his tenth standard.He took it for granted that he must...

A bill is being tabled in parliament today which will allow the practitioners of parallel medicine to prescribe allopathic medicine in India.Indian medical association has apparently protested and had called off the out-patient work in Delhi today.I am not exactly sure what to make of it because at the end of the day ,the government is just trying to make legal what is a practise in most of India anyways.The amount of time ,money and discussion that is being spent in curative medicine just because the lobbying from the corporate hospitals are stronger is pathetic.Now to set the record straight so as to be clearly accountable to the public ,the parliament annexe needs to have a parallel medicine department with a transparent record of the attendees being catered to the various forms of medicine so that the public know that the parliamentarians who pass the bill know and believe in what they have prescribed as a solution for the country and they will swallow the pill they have prescrib...

All of us take snapshots of times and memories they hold dear in their hearts and treasure them in their albums and folders .However ,for me the most precious memories are very often not photographed.It is those times when I have felt a deep joy in my heart.I had one such moment just the other night.The emergency the past few days have been beyond mad.It is a continuos process of engagement with very sick people for thirteen hours straight with a small break for lunch if one can help it. I was doing the post-take rounds with one of the consultants .We had some sick people ,but we also had to keep the line moving with discharging as much patients as possible so that we had beds for the sick ones. In all the confusion ,I had some job trying to trace one of our sick patients who had been moved to another ward.After doing the rounds of three wards I was mighty glad to trace the patient and was examining him and writing up the prescriptions when i heard a gibberish yodel from another part...