A stitch in a long time!

On a Saturday a long standing wish came true. After a long time, I finally got some stitches!

When i was a kid, I used to jump around all the time. I was a hyper active child with ants in my pants. Running around everywhere and jumping on anything. I remember getting hurt all the time. Falling, scrapping, cuts, wounds everywhere. Both my knees bear marks of the fun i had, and along with that both my elbows as well - and both my eyebrows!

I remember three instances of stitches very well. All of them happened when i was less than 10 years old. In no particular order - the first one. A place as exotic as Nepal. I was jumping from one bed to another in the room in Kathmandu. I so clearly remember jumping around and thats all i remember. It seems i jumped from one bed to another and in the process of doing so - I rammed into the air conditioner in the room. I had to be rushed to the hospital and that is the origin story of the mark on my eye brow above my left eye. My mom tells me that I kept shouting that i am not going to cry “i am Jeetendra” or so she says. All that bravado disappeared the moment i 

The second one - I remember waking up in the middle of the night as I had fallen down from my bed. My dad comes in and asks what happened, and the next thing I know - I am being wheeled to the hospital in Dubai. It seems they heard me crying and came in. I fell off the bed and the side table had a sharp corner that cut through the eyebrow on the right. Shit hit the roof in the middle of the night. Then dad had the corners rounded and I always had a fear of sharp edges near the bed. Thats why i never had a sharp edge near mine or Jispa’s and thats also why I would always throw a few pillows on the floor near Jispa’s bed. Even the floor can get hard.

The third one was when I was playing in school with my brothers friends. I remember jumping over a pile of concrete bricks arranged  in way that the diagonal point is pointing upwards. The top point just cut through my trailing right knee. I remember seeing my white flesh and two red lines passing through. Then all the friends came in and rushed me to the school clinic. They bandaged me and the main doc said call his home and send him. This task was left to the peon. the peon calls up and tells mom that its not a big thing and it seems ok. Mom was like, ok send him in the bus. In the evening when dad reaches home, he sees the wound and boom - we rush to the hospital. It was a big wound and the stitches were painful. The scene is that since it took so long to get the stitches, the marks remained. I used to play with that fleshy bit for a long time to come. Now that I think of it, I haven't had the chance to really look at the scar since a long time.

After that I had a lot of falls and tumbles, but thankfully never stitches. In fact I used to try an avoid them. I remember once or twice get bad cuts but I used to be scolded for the falls and so I tried to get them fixed without stitches. Just keep them together with the dressing. in fact at one point i had so many wounds that parents did not even notice that i had one more!

So after that when I grew up I always wondered what it would be to get stitches. And I never did get any. Till last week before last. I was at a  friends place and to make a call I entered the balcony. I must closed the glass french windows behind me. As I was talking the call dropped. I tried calling but it did not connect, so to get back in I turned around with the phone in my right hand. Bang, Crash - i hit the glass door with my hands and the glass cracked and came down. At that time when all the glass came crashing down, I remember thinking about another close shave that i had. Once with Friends we had gone to the Barista coffee shop at Regal cinema. There was a kid with us - a bit of a hyper kid. Suddenly before anyone knew he had got out of the cafe and was on the footpath going somewhere. I screamed ‘Ali’ and tried to go behind him. As I pushed the door to get out, crack - the glass door had a small thing to stop it from opening outside. The door simply split in half horizontally and the top part remained where it was and the bottom part simply pushed ahead. The crack of the top part  was just above my hand and the sharp glass simply scratched my hand mildly leaving just white scratch marks as if done by fingernails. That was a close shave. Even one inch lower would have been enough to cut my skin real bad.

So as the glass of the door crashed down, I thought abut the door in Barista and thought - wow another close shave. Jasmine came rushing in from the other side and saw me and was wondering what happened. Nothing really i said. I checked my right hand - ok - the phone was still there - intact. And then I saw my left hand - the glass had cut through the webbing of the first and second finger by making a cut at least an inch deep. A clean cut that i could see through and through. I then told Jasmine “Jasmine - I will have to be rushed”. She tried to remove the glass so that I could get out. By then the bleeding had started and it was a rush of blood. My friends also ran in and then i got a towel and everyone started wondering where to take me. I suggested a few hospitals but Jasmine was clear. Hospitals would take too much time and the traffic was not worth risking. I guess everyone thought that i would possibly bleed to death.

The thing about being 40 and getting hurt is that you know how to deal with the situation. When I got cut I did not even feel a thing. So when i saw the ugly cut, i could have panicked. But to my surprise, i did not. I kept my wits about myself. I stayed cool and calm. We discussed hospitals and treatments and were generally cool. I remember thinking about a joke and laughing. I remember seeing Jasmine very troubled, so I tried more to remain calm and happy. Take charge and relax. Control your speed of thought and see everything in slow motion. Thats the bets way to do it. Any times a theoretical question is asked of you an you never know what you will actually do in such  situation. When the chance came - i was happy I redeemed my self. Controlled action. When everyone is going to panic, the least you can do a patient is not panic. I was happy that my wits were good enough to even flex my fingers soon after the cut and then telling my wife - all cool, no nerves cut or something worse (basically thats the tendon cut test, as I learnt later)

So then we rushed to a clinic that was open on Saturday and got my stitches done. It was a fun experience. First to stop the flow of blood, the compounder asked me to hold my hand high up in the air post which the doctor took me in for the stitches. After putting a local anaesthetic he started sewing up the wound while we walked about things in life. It seems he was a childhood friend of my first cousin and we spoke about some common stuff. I told him that i was happy to see him without ties as i had read somewhere that the tries carry the most amount of pathogens and add no practical value to a doctors life. He said he ditched the tie once he saw that a light coloured tie had become dark around the knot from dirt that comes with everyday handling. 

I had gotten stitches before, but i wanted to see the procedure for my self. This time I could see it well enough. i was in my spirits and happy. The doctor had asked me if i would prefer a local or a general anaesthetic that would put me off completely. Crazy - I got a wound this big after 30 years - i wasn't going to leave this chance to see the procedure in person.

I guess i take this learning thing way too seriously. I have to have to learn from everyone and everything. What a life if not spoiled by learning!

gyan ka boon

“Do you have any time when you and the family are just chilling at home, doing nothing?” my boss asked me. That was a tough question.

It started pretty innocuously. There was a long weekend coming up and boss asked me, what my plans are for the weekend. Oh I was excited. The plans were pretty simple. I was meeting up some fitness experts for the kabaddi team. While I do my new job, i am also involved with the kabaddi team as a consultant. I am getting paid for it but largely its a job I doing as a favour for my old boss who owns the team. its run by the son of the big man. the BigMan who owns the bank i worked for is a great guy. He is sweet and largely fair. I owe a lot of my life to him in the end. After all i spent more than 14 years working for his firm. I see this as some way of repaying back to the family. Sure i worked for them and gave them growth and money but they have also been nice to me and repaid me back in many ways. Those 14 years have largely remained very happy and i can look back on it with a certain sense of happiness and accomplishment. So I couldn't say no, when the son wanted my help while he was studying for his management degree.

Also the fun bit is that I am connecting to sport thanks to this. I am able to help take kabaddi to a higher level and hopefully some of the athletes also benefit from this. When they go back with better techniques, better systems, better processes; it makes for a better sporting nation. But then thats easier said than done. these jokers are the typical stereotype of Big Moose. They want to eat a lot and work a lot.  One champion who is going to be our captain while signing with us was very clear. He said that he know what we did last year. We had a diet plan for the players. He said that kabaddi players don't need diet. They eat and play. He wants his sweets, his gulabjamuns, his rasmalais and the lot. Sure. As long as you play and perform - here eat this shit. Bum!

So I was meeting people over the week end and then i had to do some studies with my daughter and then something. So my boss looked at me and asked me “Do you have any time when you and the family are just chilling at home, doing nothing?”. Err. he got me thinking. I couldn't answer. When was the last time we were at home doing nothing? Then he laughed triumphantly - “there I got Jaimit quiet for the first time. Normally he always has some thing to say or some story or something or the other”. Well he is right on two counts - I am always with something to do or the other. My weekends are spent with family doing things or studying or watching movies or at friends or I am teaching or doing some consulting or working with other new startups. The second count - the amount i read or listen to podcasts or something, i always have something or the other to contribute to a conversation. Some story, some anecdote , some gyan. So much exposure helps me be a smarter person and I always try my best to spread what I know all around. I know sometimes it might be understood or interpreted as Smart Alec but hell - it goes with the territory.

So to take my last blog post forward - constant curiosity is what got me here. I am constantly curious. That with a pathologically ingrained desire to help others and spread word, makes me a weird character. learn a lot and spread a lot. Keep giving a lot of gyan. My wife has the most fun. She also calls me the gyan giver. She takes jibes at me for this. Every time she will ask me who did you give gyan to. I think she understands this nature of mine. She has seen me grow from an insecure dumb ass with a lot of verve to this avatar of mine. tons of understanding, gyan and connections. She is used to me meeting people at random places and in cities around the country. I think its a good thing. Will have to figure how it pans out in my life. But i think so far its been a boon rather than not.

Pandora is it.

Jasmine reads my blog diligently. But not because she needs to read it but i suspect its just that she had it in her feedly link and it shows up there. She has hardly ever said anything about anything that I have ever written. She is a quiet spectator to the blog. So yesterday i was pleasantly surprised when she out of the blue remarked – you haven't written in a long time. Yup, I told her. My mind hasn't been clear.

You know having the best intentions aren't enough. I had the best intentions that as i join the new place i would write everyday. It would be a great experience trying to articulate and note down all my experiences as i see them for the first time in 11 years. A  new company, a new environment, a new culture. I would be excited and all fired up about cataloguing all my experiences. But i guess, nothing of the sort happened. First, this place sucks by giving a keyboard. I am so used to a key board that i find it pretty irritating to write on the laptop key board directly. Bah.

That is one hell of a bad excuse for a blog that is dedicated to my daughter. But then if my wife asks me for something, how can i not give her, so in fact of the matter that i hate typing long on the laptop, here i am writing this post. Of course there is enough of stuff to talk about...

Last month was a revelation as far as Jispa’s studies are concerned and we have decided to focus on studies every Saturday. This way there is no pressure to study just before the exams and it leaves me free to explain stuff in my own way. This time, I dont know what I was teaching but i ended up listening to the Great Hargesia Goat Bubble along with her. This a great radio play that explains how asset bubbles are formed and how markets react to them, create them and then how they eventually go bust. All using the story of goats. Its a 40 min play which i sat through with Jispa, explaining to her while pausing it where it got a bit technical. Jispa and I really enjoyed this one. Then we moved onto History and math and other stuff. History is even more fun. Indian history is simply understood by reading the official school book. Its enough history to understand a lot of what you read around you. Right now its about Babur and the advent of the Mughal kingdom in India. After Babur, Sher Shah packed Humayun off and ruled Delhi till as Jispa told me – he shot himself while cleaning a rifle. This last bit is possibly apocryphal. But the poor guy supposedly would have never let the Mughal rule take hold until he died early. He is the same guy who laid the foundations of an ably administered kingdom which the Mughals used.

So that is awesome fun. I am going to keep reading her textbooks and other related stuff and enjoy all about growing up with the pains of exams.

I think another thing i must make her do is simply google or read at least the main wikipedia  page of any character she encounters in her history book, or the main wiki page of anything she studies. It just might give her another angle to what she is studying.

Chemistry is another thing i am rediscovering. I was always reasonably good at it. So now, only a few videos later, i can explain largely most of the stuff to her. In fact the videos are so good that i don't even require to explain stuff to her. She and me just watch the videos together and then we are done.

This weekend I took sometime off to give an interview over a con call. I apologised as the call took an hour long. After that i apologised to Jispa saying ‘sorry, interview for a new job’. She was wondering that I just got a new job.

I told her that right now I am in high demand and that this is something I have to do at this point of time.

I told her that the single most important quality that i have that got me here is – now this set me thinking – I wanted to say something that completely summarises my life so far and leave something simple and interesting. I said – the single biggest quality that got me here was ‘constant curiosity’ . that came out nice, considering i thought about it for about 2 seconds. That is true. I have been curious about everything and that has led me to constantly try to learn and experiment and improve. “ah” she said “so you are like Pandora”.

Sigh – my entire life being brought down to Pandora. What else are daughters meant for?