A former Mumbai medical resident’s take on the suicide of a Mumbai medical resident

I’m a former medical resident from Mumbai. I am in a Whatsapp group with my peers from Medical College. As expected, there is an active conversation in the group about the suicide of the Dalit doctor in Mumbai, allegedly due to casteist slurs by senior residents. Along with that there is a relatively healthy conversation about religion, hindutva, NDA, the 2019 elections, Modi etc. I generally keep myself quiet in this because of several reasons. But I decided to break my silence and ended up posting this.
Considering that I did my post graduation from Mumbai, I guess I can throw some light on this. It's a bit of a rant, but I hope to address a few points.

Racism (regionalism) and ragging/discrimination go hand in hand in my hospital. In my case, casteism was not applicable because I was born to Brahmin parents. But I did get discriminated for being from the the South, being different, being a musician, etc. despite being not too bad at Hindi. The people who perpetrated  the coincidental happened to be, voila, upper caste Hindus.

This discrimination is more among the senior residents upward. The nurses, assistants, and staff were super nice to me. So I was able to pull through.

I had to isolate myself from orthopedics/surgery etc residents because these departments seemed to have more people with such tendencies. I thankfully got a resident from psychiatry (someone who thought like Sebind, ironically) as a room mate. That led me to me hanging out more among his friends. Eventually, I came out to them and they were super cool with that.

In other words, I was more accepted by residents from other departments who were generally broadminded.

Most of you don't know that that I have been under treatment for depression. You may remember that I was on the quieter side of things in my first three years in our college. I have had suicidal tendencies through my undergraduate, postgraduate, post-postgraduate lives.

I eventually got diagnosed and treated at the end of my postgraduate tenure. One of the reasons that I took a sabbatical was because of this discrimination/ragging aspect, which seeps through the hierarchy everywhere, but especially in North India in surgical fields. As someone said, for every publicized suicide, there may have been 10s not publicized, 100s of suicide attempts, and 1000s of victims who have somehow managed to pull through. Like me.

What about Mumbai itself? I get discriminated on a regular basis because I'm South Indian and because I'm dark. Restaurants, pubs, hotels, live events, what not.

The common denominator in all of this is this. Lack of "education", relative upper caste origin, religiousness, lack of evidence-based thinking, all leading up to herd mentality and lack of tolerance.

Guess what drives all of this? The current government. They may not commit or admit to atrocities, but they still don't clamp down on happenings. There is no open stance apart from empty platitudes. Who are they serving? The corporations. Who's benefiting? Upper caste more than lower castes. Who's feeling insecure? Any minority, let it be religion, caste, orientation, gender, etc.

Whatever truths/lies people want to tell themselves to put a coat of paint on what's going on, I will not believe it because I'm a minority in many counts, despite being born upper caste.

And the irony is that these trends are so evident in my own family/extended family, my partner's family, my ex-orthopedic peers, and some among us here.

Guess some of you may get a hint of why I (have preferred) prefer to distance myself from some of these. Basically, I'm trying to protect myself.

All I have to say is this - the world is going darker for the minorities, including the economic one. This is being driven by religion, which is one of the most potent forces that can be harnessed to bring and keep people to power. Such trends are cyclical (~20 years), but the extent of damage unleashed on the persecutees can take 100s of years to reverse.

Chennai homophobic rally

I just read this post on Orinam.net, which is a bilingual website (Tamil and English) associated with the Chennai-based group for social-support-arts-advocacy called Orinam. Similar to the Change.org petition for retaining Section 377, which has been taken down because of complaints, this is the second evidence of such blatant homophobia/regressive mentality displayed in India.

I'm out to my sister, who lives in Chennai with her family. I can completely relate to her mother-in-law and father-in-law, hardcore, conservative, Hindu Brahmins, teaming up with Christians for just this one purpose.

Sad.

(Sources: Orinam.net, @shrisadasivan, @hiyer)

‘Holi’day relapse

I don’t know why I hate it so much. Actually it’s not an ‘it’. It’s more like a group of ‘it’s. All have the tags ‘festival’ and ‘religion’ attached to them. On top of of the charts is ‘Holi’ and close contenders are the ‘Diwali’ and ‘Ganesh’ festivals. I’m sure I have forgotten others but I choose not to remember them because I don’t want to have nightmares. I posted about this issue on my FaceBook status message in the morning and I got a prompt, sarcastic remark.

‘Kris, I can’t believe that you are saying this. You are, after all, part of a band which is called ‘NOISE’ market. Happy happy happy Holi!’

I really don’t see the correlation. Why? Is it because I’m part of a Hindi band? Is it because the band’s name consists of the transliterated ‘NOISE’ word? Is it because I’m gay (and so is this friend who commented) and by being what we are, we are predisposed to liking ‘color’ful, festive things? Or is it because my real name, the God that I am named after, used to play pranks on the gopis during this festival? What is it that makes it necessary for a person like me to like festivals naturally? I don’t see any reason.

Of course, most festivals in India are commemorative of the victory of good over evil, or of gods over demons, or right over wrong. That IS such a noble cause. But that’s just about it. They have been shaped into something really more demonic than holy. Yes, in India, a festival means – loudspeakers and blaring music irrespective of the time of the day (or night) or the location (hospitals eg.), traffic jams due to processions, drunken people dancing to the latest blasphemous Bollywood tune being played on trucks carrying deities. Diwali adds to the mess with people getting the 'license' to cause mini-explosions which are harmful to the ears and minds of humans and animals alike.

‘Holi’ takes it to another level – invasion of personal privacy! People throw colors at each other in the form of powder or fluids without permission or provocation. Each and everyone is supposed to LIKE that and be happy at the end of it all. Hello? Have you heard of something called personal rights? Would you go up to someone and tell them ‘Hey, I thought it would be really cool to use your car as a graffiti canvas. Happy ‘Car Graffiti Day!’ So why are people doing this? If they want to celebrate among themselves, why don’t they stop bothering those people who are not interested in this?

For the last four years since I chose Mumbai as my home, I have been scared and intimidated by this holiday. I’m frightened to go out and be splattered with paint-balls. I don’t think that it’s right. I don’t think it is right for people to do whatever they want to with the excuse a ‘religious festival’. I’m sure there are many more people like me who are just shutting up because they think that it’s immoral to admit they don’t like festivals. Don’t do that. Speak up!

Date at the Railway Station

There are people who advise me to not publish my personal life in such a public forum. They feel that it's too much information which is not welcome. But that's not my point anyway, is it? The point of this blog is to let me express whatever that I wanted to and provide the option to read it or not. Nobody forces anyone to read any blog. It's a choice that you make and hence, I don't think that I'm force-feeding people here.

So, through the last few months of my social networking, I have been stumbling on profiles of men of interest to me - both sexually and intellectually. Some of them feel the same toward me to and in the event of things happening in the desired progressive sequence, we end up keeping in touch. One such person is this remarkable asura-lookalike artist from the Silicon Valley of India.

For those who don't have the faintest idea of who asuras are, go look up Indian mythology in wikipidea or something. For all practical purposes, asuras are extremely hot-looking, masculine, well-built, mostly-anti-hero type men in Indian mythology who happened to always have a history of being lustful and lust-worthy in an animalistic kind of way. A typical example is Ravana, the 10 headed monster who captured Sita and lost the war with Rama because of the monkey army.

Back to the story - I and he had been keeping in touch through the multifarious ways of the modern Internet and have expressed the desire to be with each other many times before. For some reason, I thought it was exciting to let him know that I was passing through his home-town on my way back to Mumbai and asked him if he could meet me for the brief sojourn of the train at the station.

I was surprised when he agreed. Even more so, when I peeked into the little bag that he had brought with him with a fantabulastic Indian dinner in it. Apparently, his Mom, who happens to be a wonderful cook, had whipped up the thing on request. Apart from the food, we met and had a cup of coffee at the railway station where I flirted with him (with words) in my usual effervescent manner. I wasn't acting or anything - was just feeling great about my coming out experience.

He told me stories about how he had dressed up for a professional photo shoot dressing up as Ravana the other day. I could so see the handsome, sexy asura that resided in his body and I did feel the lust to give him a peck at the least. But I can rein in my feelings. And I did. One thing is clear to me now though after seeing a near-perfect Ravana - I firmly believe that Sita would have preferred to be in his gardens in Lanka than in the plains of northern India with the rather docile Ram.

(PS: For all the Ram Sena activists - this post is is just a modern, sarcastic take on Ramayana. Just like how Dev-D is for Devdas, the novel. And besides, you aren't interested in gay-bois anyway - you guys would much rather molest young straight couples!)

The Erstwhile-rs : College mates, friends and the rest

The absolute last day of my visit was spent in meeting up with the rest of 'em who seemed important enough to me vis-a-vis my parents. Is this selfish, one might ask? I feel it is. But then, you have to be selfish to achieve anything in this burdening life and once you have achieved what/whom you wanted, you can be selfless to that/them. Thereby, you get to be even-steven and probably get through to Jew-Parsee heaven.

Jokes apart, I had a quite weird encounter with my medical college batchmates. I had wanted to meet more but I just managed to meet just 4 out of the 200 who had once set forth to be doctors in August 1996. Everyone else was/is busy with their lives working, marrying, copulating, nursing, parenting etc I guess. I got to meet three of my close buddies, all of them surgeons, over dinner that night.

J, the closest and kindest of them all, was as wonderful as he has ever been. Despite being a devout Christian – he would be at the Christian heaven even if it files in for Chapter 7 bankruptcy – he listens to me and tries to understand about homosexuality. He asked me how it was to be in a relationship, the hardships that I faced, the responsibilities that I would face after my eventual adoption/parenting of a child.

He is the only one left back home who I can trust with to deal with my parents. The others like Dee. and the remarkably homophobic catholic Pauletta, are either busy or simply not made-for such a responsible role. We three, discussed stuff ranging from our careers the sudden outcropping of out gay folk from our own batch. Each of them has a kid and I tried to, without much avail, extract information from them as to how it felt like to be a father.

J and I, soon afterwards, went to visit a the still-stunningly-beautiful looking colleague of ours, at her home where my erstwhile Head of the Department (her Dad) was present. It was such an unfortunate situation when we started discussing how my career was more music than Orthopaedics now; the Professor was not even making eye contact with me.

Later on, J came home and met my parents which I thought was an extremely nice gesture from him. But then, I'm used to stuff like that from him. He was the one, after all, who had taken care of my father (and mother) when he had an acute attack of breathlessness (and panic attack respectively) one night a year back when I was here in Mumbai doing my residency.

Apart from them, I met my close friend and erstwhile neighbor and his family. He too has a child in his life – everyone who's anyone, in Kerala at least, seems to have one these days – and we discussed things about my life as a rock-star in Kerala. He had been the one who had sorta challenged me to try and achieve success in music (link). But the most entertaining part of that rendezvous was the wonderful conversation that I had with his father in law, a poet/linguist/teacher, about things as wide ranging as the anatomy of the nervous system and the paintings by his son!

I also happened to coincidentally run into the most wonderful neighbors that I have ever had in my life. It was at the railway station where I had gone to meet someone else where I met them and then eventually went to visit them at their new home in Thiruvananthapuram. I was so happy! Catching up with fun folks is always fun! The absolute icing on this cake was the wonderful Thanjavur paintings that I got to see made my the Mrs. of the house and the wonderful nibbling that I received from a 2 month old Pug pup which was the latest entrant into their household. Believe me, I have never had any thing chew on my Adam's apple or my nasal cartilage - man or animal, ever - and it felt good!

The last little snippet here about the meeting that I had with the father of my friend. He was one of the people who I kinda respect because of the way he treats me – not just as his son's friend, but as a friend or an intelligent person. I was forced to come out to him during the conversation and it was surprising to see the kind of reaction from him, given the background that he was trained medical postgraduate. But that's his generation, not his education which imposes itself on such contexts unlike religion as with the case of Pauletta. That just made me aware of how fortunate that I was with the set of parents that I have.