Focus Wellness

As I was receiving his symptoms, he said that I spoke good Hindi. Hearing his comment made me laugh deep down in my heart. Setting up my practice after graduation, I had a lot of immigrant labourers as patients; poor them were finding it hard to meet a doctor with whom they could communicate their symptoms effectively. They were so happy seeing a doctor who could "fluently" speak with them in Hindi.  At school, I never understood a single word of what my Hindi teacher taught. It wasn't her fault at all. I was a hundred percent dyslexic when it came to Hindi. Not a single word entered my head nor, would anything come out from my mouth. She used to cane and coax me a lot with total futile results. I barfed out what I had somehow pushed into my grey matter on to the answer sheets and barely managed to pass. Later, my graduation days in English literature was where I met Bollywood through DDLJ and Rangeela, and lo, I was learning Hindi through the language of love in the film...

As kids, our trips to the Ramakrishna beach at Vizag defaulted munching into roasted corn ears. The other delicacies of those days on display by the beach hawkers were puffed rice mixture and clean-cut slices of raw mango sprinkled with a rainbow of spices. The corn ears dressed in that secret spicy mix was magic to the taste buds of us kids. Life moved on with an uprooting from Andhra to my hometown in Kerala. We missed the sights and smell of those favorite beach snacks. Last week en route my daily commute, I was surprised to see a big heap of raw maize ears beside a roadside fruit vendor. It was a never before rare sight at my place.  How come such an abundance of corn all at once? And that too at a place where neither it is a staple nor a snack? Somewhere along the consumer end, few links were missing. It didn't take much time for me to figure out. Lockdown measures had halted all cinema theatres, multiplexes, and lo all the popcorn lay strewn all over the street as maize ears....