I’ve been getting frustrated at how messy my room is. Bed is full of junk, tables are full of junk, floor is full of junk etc etc etc. My bed is covered 80% with books, bills, paper, old clothes, bags and I curl up in the other 20% to sleep at night!Today I got fed up and set my bed right!! Now I can use almost 100% of it to sleep!!! Hope it lasts long.

Today was a planed electricity power cut at the hostel for 12 hours. I managed to sleep in the afternoon till 5.30 PM, but then spent the next 2 hours very restless as there was nothing I could do. No lights, no computer, no TV, library was closed and blah, blah, blah! David and I ended up chatting for a looooong time on the future of CMC hospital and it was quite eye-opening. I guess God uses times like these to open your eyes to a lot of things. Also left me wondering – what did people do before there was electricity??!

Sam got married today. The wedding was in Thirunelveli – about 650 KM from Vellore (where I stay). Sathish, Arul, Venky and I set off last night by bus and reached this morning. It was a 13 hour journey. We took a luxury bus and it was quite comfortable. We made it to the wedding on time and had a good time. We then set back on the 3.30 PM bus which was …er… not a luxury bus. Just about survived the journey! It took 16 hours and there was an unprecedented 1 hours stop at 2 AM!! The route was different from what we took in the morning and it was quite bumpy!Anyway, we reached back at 7.30 AM…

I’d spent the last few days tallying and aggregating the 671 births that we had had last month. It’s a delicate task as there’s a 6×8 table where each entry has to be tallied and then numbers matched. Nupur and I spent a couple of hours doing it and we seem to have got it right the first time! I then just aggregated the data together. In fact we were so accurate that we picked up something that the office records had missed!This morning I went through some case histories with Dr. Jana . The presentation in the afternoon was only 5 minutes – but so many hours of work behind it!Went on well!!

After nearly 6-7 months when I couldn’t lead worship, I finally got to lead worship today. I decided to try out an LCD projector this time. I managed to rent one out cheap from our office (cost me just 250 Rs. ie 6$!). Finny and I managed to lug the projector, the laptop and the guitar on a bike to church on saturday for practice.The fact that I even managed to lead was amazing. I was posted in the Immunization clinic -a very relaxed posting. Unfortunately I ended having to do a few night duties – wednesday, friday and saturday: didnt sound good! That meant I had only thursday to work on the powerpoints, my mortality stats meeting work etc….

Sometimes God allows you to function and think beyond your normal abilities!Got a call after midnight about a 3 hour old baby who was referred from another hospital with severe breathing difficulty.I saw the baby and thought he had a pneumothorax – air leaking out of the lungs and into the chest – on the right side.Its not a very straight-forward diagnosis, but for some reason I was sure of it.I called the XRay people to the ER itself (normally we admit them and then take the XRay) and also convinced my consultant that we should admit the baby althhough they didnt have much money to pay.We quickly shifted the baby up and soon the XRay images were available –…

I made it to Church today – that makes it 2 out of 3 weeks this month! It was quite a surprise. Normally there are three of us who do rounds on sunday mornings… and one of us goes off in the afternoon. Today it was s’posed to be my turn to get an ‘off’ in the afternoon. But I was allowed to go off in the morning, if I did the ward rounds earlier or anytime according to my convenience. I tried getting to the ward at 6AM, but sleepy, lazy me reached at 7.30 AM. By 9 I finished 3 of the 5 wards and told Sanju, I’d be back at 12 for the rest. I borrowed Vinu’s…

I guess it’s a bad week for the electrical stuff in my room. I discovered that the bulb in my bathroom had fused tonight. Ouch! That meant a walk all the way to the store to get a new bulb – and I was too tired for it. In desperation, I searched my cupboard to see if I had a spare bulb… and buried beneath a pile of clothes – voila! There it was – a brand new bulb! Excited, I screwed it into the holder and soon my bathroom was bathed in the soft light!Felt relieved!

Today, I returned from work to my room at 7.30 PM and was greeted by a dark room… my room had no electricity. A quick scan revealed that the other rooms had power supply and so it must be a local problem. I called the electrician and he prodded around for sometime and said he’d be back. I had a quick dinner and then dozed off in a chair … no sign of the electrician yet. I went back to my room at 9 PM and dozed off in the sultry darkness. Finally they turned up at 9.30 PM and felt the problem was in the meter fixed for my room. They stripped it away and rewired it and soon…

One of my colleagues, Jolly, and I had to take part in a quiz held at Chennai. Both of us had busy schedules and hence could not spend a lot of time learning. We took a taxi for the 3 hour drive and went to my home (in Chennai) and after lunch went to the venue. We went in quite nervous. We started off badly – the first round was on embryology and we did not answer a single question. We started answering a few questions after that. To cut a long story short, we finally ended up in third place (we actually should have been second if the the quizmaster had not made a very controversial decision). Anyway, we…