Love- a setup?

Hardly a controversial idea. Anyone in any sort of an intense love relationship, whether husband and wife, a mother and child or siblings who stay close, can attest to the strings attached to the much lauded joys of this mysterious emotion. How about the possesiveness, the over-amplified hurt radar, the dependency and the compensatory indifference, the overreaching interference, the smothering resentment of an individual identity, that can accompany this all-too-powerful state of connection with another being? When you can die for someone, it also usually means that you can make their life a living hell.
I quoted a verse on love before in this blog that is worth repeating because it represents the ideal love that we all seek, and more often than not fail to both give or recieve. Yet, we can aspire, because love with all its foibles, still seems the one ideal worth striving for-

"Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance."

Now that I am finally ready to work, what will my job look like?

Anyone entering or even thinking about the field of medicine knows that the training is long and rigrous, and finacially it will be an investment without any immediate returns well into your late 20's. Now as I get ready to graduate and enter the world as a working adult, I am beginning to ponder what will my job look like in the next 5 years or the next 20? The healthcare industry, for long an economically unsustainable and socially inequal field, now totters on the verge of collapse. The number of uninsured has mushroomed to 45 million while the insurance premiums double every few years for those who do manage to get employer-paid insurance. Health care reform and universal healthcare in some avatar or other seems inevitable. Add to that the slow pace of tort reform and the ever-inceasing malpractice insurance rates in this highly litigous society.
I anticipate practicing in a vastly different scenario than the one that existed for the generation of doctors before mine. Private practices are becoming an icon of the past, and patients are now thought of as "consumers" or "clients". The whole ethos of medicine seems to have chaged to bring medicine, a field traditionally ensconced in the halo of selfless service, more in alignment with the modern realities of business and individual choice. Doctors are hardly known for standing up for themselves until almost too late. We are usually so wrapped up in the cozy prestige of the profession that we assume society will take care of us. Maybe that's why while labor laws for most fields came into being early in the last century, the 80-hour workweek rule for medical residents was instituted only a few years ago. While insurance companies spent several decades finessing how to cheat doctors and patients out of resources to increase their profits, physician led organizations such as the AMA have only begun to fight for dramatic cuts in physician compensation in the last 5 years or so.
As government now focuses its sight on doing something about the flawed idea of employer /individual insurance that leaves many with little option but to use the emergency rooms as the one and only stop for healthcare, I wonder what does that mean for future practitioners of medicine? As the insurance billing nightmare grows bigger, many doctors are looking to less patient-oriented but more paying options to make a living. Discussions of entering into lucrative healthcare-related business ventures such as MRI/CT Imaging centers or getting special training to do mundane but well-compensated procedures are not uncommon among newly graduated physicians. It makes me sad that at the end of 7-10 years of medical training, their mindset is hardly different form that of a new MBA grad dreaming up business ventures. So is medicine then really just another form of business? What will the job that awaits me in the real world really look like 5-6 years from now? Will it fail to meet the basic expectations that I had of the field of medicine on entering it? Will I have to compromise the ideals of service and patient care so that I can make my ends meet? These are scary questions. I can only hope that the answers can be more favorable if sought collectively rather than for each physician as an individual.

The Prayer Beads

The Prayer Beads
By Neha Jain Sampath
for Rani Aunty

It was crowded in the CT scan room. Three generations in the cramped space, all with worried expressions mirroring each other. Her daughter and her mother were hurrying to undress her and take away all the valuables. Her liver was failing and they needed to find out if the cancer had spread to it. Nobody even paid attention to the dark saffron beads as they were unceremoniously stuffed into the duffel bag…

And then when she died, nobody could find them. The whole house was turned upside down, they had been her favorite beads, a precious momento. It was as if she had carried them away into the after-life with her. It was a small disappointment, one of several to come through the years when she would not be present at graduations, weddings, the birth of her grandchildren…

Her husband wanted to fulfill the one wish that he knew she had held in her heart even though she had never asked him for it. It was one of several cosmic secrets she had carried in her heart, for she had been special- one of those rare spirits that moved everyone she touched, who gave always without asking for anything in return, but inspiring generosity anyway. He visited her spiritual sanctuary, the small ashram in a beach town in India that had given her peace and strength through the years. She had always wanted to visit with him at her side but was willing to wait till the desire came from him. And now, time had run out. He went there with his children, hoping to find an absolution…

As they sat watching the sunset, he reached over to grab the camera from the bag that had accompanied him through several towns over the last week, like a faithful companion. And that’s when he found them. How could that be? He had looked, Sameera had looked, Ajay had looked, over and over, into that very same pocket of the very same bag. And yet there lying innocently, as if they had been there all along, were the beads that they had all somehow missed. Then, he laughed. It was her little message to him. She had come with them on this trip afterall.

Sufi verses

The Happy Virus- by Hafiz via Daniel Ladinsky

I caught the happy virus last night

When I was out singing beneath the stars.

It is remarkable contagious-

So kiss me!

Maneesha Jain's books recs

I am posting this for chachi:

Here is the list that I read in last four months ( *=my ratings):
Sidhartha by Hermann Hesse:***
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee :*****
Notes from underground by Dostoyevsky:***
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho: *
The cry of peacocks by Rupal Jain:*****
Starting "MiddleSex by Jeffrey Eugenides" this week.
Everyone here is talking about "The Secret" by Rhonda Byrne. I think there is a CD or DVD that goes with it. It is not a fiction.

The Kite Runner

I can't believe I waited this long to read this much-acclaimed book that came out a couple of years ago, but I am glad I finally did. Though author Khalid Hosseini writes of his homeland Afghanistan, his colorful and rich characters have echoes of the open-hearted compassion, and neighborliness of the citizens of pre-independence India. Not surprising, given the close proximity and shared histories of the two regions. This novel had it all- loyalty, friendship, betrayal, redemption and the bittersweet quality of reality. The setting is that of pre-Russian occupation, pre-Taliban Afghanistan. The story is of the innocence and end of childhood, of the frailities and imperfections in the best of us, and of new beginnings and coming full circle. For a first novel, and by a physician at that, it is a truly inspiring treat!