Just read my child’s LJ, where she bemoans the lack of social content in her life at present, as she juggles with a demanding job and two moonlights…and says that her friends seem to have emptied themselves out of the US…and I realize that some of them are right here near me! In fact, I want to raise a toast to the wonderful friends she has always had…I have always been full of admiration for them. Sensible, unassuming, helpful, responsible youngsters who grew up into the kind of adults the world is proud of..and certainly I am proud of!They are very articulate, very humorous, and deal with life with grit, making career and life choices and standing by them in truly adult fashion….and each set of parents I have met through them has been a great experience, too. I have met architects, lawyers, scientists, business people….and have liked all of them.

went a couple of days ago to my favourite theatre which is close to home…made a friend drive an hour, battling heavy traffic, to get there…4 of us then sat and watched an incredibly foul performance, by a group that would have been outdone by any amateur school playgroup! It was so bad we laughed all the way through….what should have been an intense, tragic play.

Why are we such mealy-mouthed hypocrites? Heroes are sooo mother- and father- and family- loving and marriage is soooo touted and all other relationships between a man and woman are frowned upon with shock and scandal and of course man-man or woman-woman relationships are NEVER dealt with…when Deepa Mehta’s picture came out, there were people trying to set fire to the movie theatre in typical style…when are Indians going to grow out of Victorian hypocrisy and prudery and GROW UP???

Another LJ-er, some time, described the horror story of his friend’s hospitalization in the US…..last week, a friend was diagnosed as having a block in a major artery….the hospital where he had been admitted for his angiogram did not offer him any options, tried to force open-heart surgery on him when angioplasty, a minimally invasive procedure, would have worked just as well. It was only because I have gone through this scenario myself, for my spouse, that I was able to get him to take a second opinion. The doctor who is noted for angioplasty is at another hospital..which said they would not honour his insurance. We spent an entire day running around trying to find solutions before the matter was simply resolved…by the surgeon telling the administration to accept the insurance policy. Why a doctor should have to interevene in hospital administration is beyond me; why a hospital administration should behave like a government office, is, of course, understandable…..the minute one gets the power of veto over another, there seems to be great pleasure in exercising it. The mindset is never, “Let us see how this can be done”…it is always, “This can’t be done…now you can run around all you want.”….when all the time, the right lever or pressure will ensure that it gets done.

Several people had asked for this article, so here it is: