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The best drink in the world from the dawn of life to the end of universe would always be water!

As a child on a sunny day when you run and play and come home, the first thing you ask for is water!

Sometimes you drink so fast that you cough! You just can’t wait to quench that thirst! At that time it is the sweetest thing in the world and the most satisfying feeling after you drink this nectar!

Did you ever stop to think that the water you drink right now in one part of the world would one day become rain in a different part! The water in the glass right now may be trapped but it is a patient prisoner since it can wait! It will anyway outlive you and then it will be free to flow!

It can take any shape and colour and taste! And finally it can roam the skies as a cloud and get sweet in a flowing river or salty in the mighty ocean or sea!

Did you ever stop to think that the expiry date on the bottle is not of the water but of the bottle! Water does not have an expiry date!

Finally did you ever stop to think how the amount of water in the Earth is always constant! It just changes shape and state but the final amount remains the same!

Ever since you have life on Earth, the one thing which has always been constant is the amount of water!

Have you also wondered how the thirst only gets quenched for that time! Your thirst is controlled! It’s never cured! It’s because the water you drink again gets out of your system one way or the other and finally you get the thirst back!

Now it is seen that normally when we get dehydrated (as measured by an increasing concentration of solutes in our blood) thirst kicks in to make us drink water to dilute our blood back down to an acceptable level. But, once we start drinking, this sensation generally subsides within a minute or less, even if we were really thirsty!

But actually the hydration actually takes time! The feeling of satiety is so that we do not overload the body with water! Yes! Even drinking more water is not good!

So the body even has a protective mechanism against the nectar of Gods! Water! It has been suggested that receptors in the throat – and the thirst centre in the brain that’s connected to them – are able to reliably identify the action of swallowing fluid (as opposed to swallowing food) and have the ability to ‘switch thirst off’ long before the fluids have been absorbed properly. It’s like the receptors send an advance signal that says “don’t worry brain, water is on the way, you can stop being thirsty now”!

It may not be as effective when it comes to food though! But still it depends on your brain! You actually need only a couple of Puris to solve your hunger! Anything more than that would actually become your fat friend!
Now lets not digress! Quenching thirst is the matter for now!

Our whole life, day in and out we spend in quenching this never ending thirst!

You cannot have a drink of water which can make your thirst to end forever!

Also imagine that the drink of water you are drinking right now is older than not only you but also any living thing on Earth right now! So next time you drink water, just respect that for an instant!

Respect also was what Swamy Vivekananda had for Ramakrishna Paramahansa.

We can respect everyone also!

Shubh ratri!

I still remember that ad in TV where people were urged to simply give water mixed with sugar and salt to children with vomiting or diarrhea.

Our Peds posting in one such ward was spent only in advising that and the great solution which is a life saver! The ORS!

Did you know that the use of ORS was pioneered by an Indian!?

So in 1971, Dr Dilip Mahalanabis was called to serve at a refugee camp in West Bengal where the death toll due to cholera was rising day by day.

At that time though the only solution was to put a drip (IV or intravenous line) to rehydrate the severely dehydrated people who were at a high risk of dying. However, only two healthcare workers among his staff were trained in putting an IV line. An alternative had to be found to help the endless number of people who kept coming in with diarrhoea. In such dire circumstances, when he realized that they were losing the battle, Dr Dilip allowed people to give the rehydration therapy orally!

Despite continuous criticism and resistance from clinicians, Dr Dilip believed that oral rehydration therapy could be given by even untrained relatives of the patients. He kept several drums of the oral rehydration solution (ORS) by his side and asked the family and relatives to keep giving the solution to the patient. The medical fraternity witnessed the miracle of ORS when the death toll among cholera patients dropped from 30 percent to less than 4 percent! Patients were getting better soon and returning home!

This doctor had begun researching oral rehydration therapy in 1966 as a research investigator for the Johns Hopkins University International Center for Medical Research and Training in Calcutta, India. During the Bangladeshi war for independence, he led the effort by the Johns Hopkins Center that demonstrated the dramatic life-saving effectiveness of oral rehydration therapy!

The simple, inexpensive Oral Rehydration Solution (ORS) gained acceptance, and was later hailed as one of the most important medical advances of the 20th century! Even now when anyone is tired or simply sick, a glass of ORS is a life saver! It not only takes care of the sugar and salt but also levels up vital electrolytes and minerals!

Thousands of children who recovered owe their life to Dr Dilip!
Another great doctor and human was Bhakti Yadav aka Doctor dadi!
Read about her!

It’s inspiring!

Shubh ratri!

It has been said that moments after the first artist was born, the first critic was born!

The moment success comes to anyone, pride and envy comes to another!
Pride and envy has caused much more problems to the Human society even more than disease and poverty!

Like it has always been said, there is no actual treatment for both Alopecia and Jealousy! Though Alopecia can still be managed!

Did you know that there was a great Indian scientist who not only made such great strides in the field of Biochemistry but has given us such valuable products which we use even to this day!

This great scientist subsequently discovered folic acid as a cure for tropical sprue! He discovered methotrexate, a chemotherapy drug still used today and also used for rheumatoid arthritis, and diethylcarbamazine (DEC), the only effective drug for treating filariasis. He is also credited with the first synthesis of the chemical compounds folic acid and methotrexate! Imagine that!

He would have and most probably had in fact discovered many more chemicals but the green eye of envy stuck hard! A contemporary Cyrus H. Fiske, suppressed and destroyed many of his important works out of envy! 

In fact he was so talented and gifted and inspiring that under him, Benjamin Duggar made his discovery of the world’s first tetracycline antibiotic, chlortetracycline, in 1945!

Duggar identified the antibiotic as the product of an actinomycete he cultured from a soil sample collected from Sanborn Field at the University of Missouri! Yes! The same one which is in our own Bharat!

And yes! Even the scientist of such great talent was Indian!

This great scientist was Yellapragada Subba Rao; a pioneering but forgotten Indian biochemist. Many don’t even know his name; he deserved much more respect from this world! When the world speaks about Newton and Einstein; do put in a couple of words for forgotten scientists like Subba Rao!

Another great personality who is not that known is Anuraadha Koirala! A Padma award winner and a legend!

Do read about her!

Shubh ratri!

This was initially started under a Banyan tree!
And now the decisions made in this place can change the fortune of not only a person but also a whole country!

With the recent screening of movies and series of Stocks and stock exchanges; the general public has started getting to know about stocks and how the market works!

Slowly the financial sections of the paper (for those few who still read em!); which used to be in the last section, has slowly started gaining prominence!

This is because what happens in the financial world and market actually makes the whole flow in all the pages! Each and every single story in every page can finally be linked to a financial decision in one way or the other!

All said and done, Money speaks! It is a very important factor in your freedom and life. Of course it is not the MOST important which is where people falter!

Each and every individual who is a human with a social life finally thrives to earn a financial freedom!

Then again the world of stocks is full of bear and bulls and mainly shocks!

The interesting thing though is the fact that the sixth largest stock exchange in the world which is the Bombay stock exchange was started under a Banyan tree!

Bombay Stock Exchange was started by Premchand Roychand in 1875. In the 1850s, five stock brokers gathered together under a Banyan tree in front of Mumbai Town Hall!
A decade later, the brokers moved their location to another leafy setting, this time under banyan trees!
Finally in 1874, the brokers found a permanent location, the one that they could call their own. The Bombay Stock Exchange continued to operate out of a building near the Town Hall until 1928. 

The street on which the present site is located came to be called Dalal Street in Hindi (meaning “Broker Street”) due to the location of the exchange! It is also one of the oldest exchanges in Asia!

Hope you have some stocks! and of course pay tax or Lagaan!

Which reminds me of the celebrity Ashutosh Gowariker! You expected that right!?

Now lemme watch some Swades and think about home!

Shubh ratri!

Do you know that Eskimos who are surrounded by snow have around fifty names for the types of snow!

In Nunavimmiutitut, the Inuktitut dialect spoken in Canada’s Nunavik region has at least 53, including matsaaruti, for wet snow that can be used to ice a sleigh’s runners, and pukak, for crystalline powder snow that looks like salt.

You can have crunchy snow or hard snow or soft snow! Just when you thought you just want snow! What’s the great deal you ask? Well, in spite of fifty names for different types of snow, the Eskimos do not have a single name for, you guessed it; snow! 

Yes! They have snow all over but do not have a name for snow! 

Which means there is a word for a falling snow or an already fallen snow! But no word which means just snow!

Then again another surprising fact is that the Scots have at least 400 words for snow!

Now don’t you feel lucky that all you need to know in English about snow is that it is called, well; SNOW!

It’s like you go to Starbucks or Coffee Day and there are tens of different types of coffee or drink! You have Mocha, latte or frappe! Then again you are stuck in the counter and all you actually wanted was maybe a simple filter coffee or even a Tea! But then you have to tell the person that you need a simple coffee! Nod for whipped cream or some other stuff he or she would tell and you would nod along as if you understood everything! Then when you get that huge cup of coffee after getting your name called out so loud, all you like to do it grab it and scoot!

Of course then you would drink a little and would just waste the rest! You may keep the cup with your name though!

Better to go with your daughter who would confidently go to the counter and say I want a Strawberry Vanilla Bean frappuccino with chocolate sprinles and whipped cream to go!

Now that’s snow off or rather show off! Of course when your work is as good as the work of Late Sushma Swaraj ji then thats itself can snow or show!

One of the most busiest days ever! 

A quick sketch and an even quicker blog!

Shubh ratri!

Limits to medicine:Medical nemesis is a hard hitting novel by Ivan illich tells how the present day doctors are simply the priests of yesteryears who simply comfort but actually make no difference to the disease! Case in point is how according to the author is how the fall of TB and whooping cough is mainly because of better housing and nutrition and not medication!

Of course it takes some neutrality to just read the novel as a doctor since it is obviously against them!

Then again if you do not have good critic then how would you improve!? Just be careful of those whose past time is criticism! Those who only complain and never praise do not deserve either your time or your effort and most importantly your respect!

In one of the chapters, Ivan mentions this interesting story! In fact there are so many references and this goes to show how much research has gone in the novel so let us give him due!

So the example given was of something called the Paradoxical disease control! This was in relation to the insecticide DDT as studied by Davies and W. F. Edmundson.

The author states how this is a good example of paradoxical disease control from Borneo: Insecticides used in villages to control malaria vectors also accumulated in cockroaches, most of which were resistant! Those roaches would see the end of the Universe and maybe even survive that! Anyway that was not the crux! The issue was that the lizards who fed on these ‘chemically infused’ roaches were not resistant to the effect of DDT!

So the Geckoes those fed on these, became lethargic, and fell prey to cats!
The cats thought it was a great slow food! But of course they also were very sensitive to the DDT!

The final effect was that the cats died, and then the rats had a free run!
The rats multiplied, and with rats came the threat of epidemic bubonic plague!

To cut a long story a little less long; the final solution was that the army had to parachute cats into the jungle village to get the rats! And of course the DDT was stopped! Nature is nothing but balance!

A perfect balance were also those ACK comics especially the ones of Ithihasa which were a treasure house of knowledge! Fun and informative! Especially the Magnum Opus Mahabharat and Ramayan!
The sketch of today is of this great celebrity who made many of those stories happen!

Kamala Chandrakant!
Thank you madam for the amazing work!
We will miss you! Heartfelt condolences
Om shanti

Shubh ratri…

The crux of this very useful invention was the fact that you have return customers and like the printer! Even the printer manufacturer knows that the real money is not in the sale of printer but the cartridges!

This is something which you use to cut your face every day!

Now do not get any violent thoughts! Its Shaving Blade!

The best blades we used to have were the ones from Dad’s shaving razor! The rectangle shaped blade was so thin and sharp and many times rusted!

The good quality ones used to be more clean for longer duration! Talent was to break them into two blades each!

It was a thrill to see your dad shave using those blades which looked so dangerous! Of course many of us used to use that blade to sharpen our pencils! Sharpener was only during the initial days when the school began! Even otherwise though, it was better to sharpen the pencil with a blade since the sharpener those days would always break the lead! If you do not insert the pencil properly or if the lead is broken in an angle then the lead would not get sharpened properly and the pencil would go on getting broken and short!

Of course by the time we grew up, those razors were long gone! Now was the time of the disposable razors! Even though those razors were supposed to be used only once, we used to use them lots of times cutting our face all over! The end of every shave used to look like a war zone!

Later on the double blades and then the triple ones were the routine!

My present blade called the fusion is five! Unfortunately once you are used to the higher number, it is difficult to go down! The best shave is always the one with the new blade! Every day after that cutting experience goes down!

Looking at the history it has been seen that circular razors made of solid gold or copper can be found in some Egyptian tombs from as far back as the 4th millennium BC, though many other tools were used by men to shave their faces!

Apparently there are drawings on cave walls that show prehistoric people using clamshells, flint knives, and even shark teeth to shave!

A circa 1762 invention by French cutler Jean-Jacques Perret added a protective guard to a regular straight razor! This was a major step in the shaving area!

Of course the proper safety razor came later!

The first known occurrence of the term “safety razor” is found in a patent from 1880 for a razor in the basic contemporary configuration with a handle in which a removable blade is placed. Of course when it comes to shaving, then there is only Gillette! At least for now!

As a young man, King C. Gillette (1855-1932) worked as a traveling salesman. Always interested in inventions, King received a number of patents, none more important than one for a disposable safety razor blade.

In developing the blade, King was inspired by one of his employers, William Painter, who made his fortune inventing the disposable bottle cap!

Painter advised Gillette to invent another disposable item that would create a steady stream of return customers!

In 1895, Gillette worked out the idea for a razor blade that could be fit into a holder and replaced when dulled, thereby insuring a sharp blade for every shave! After an extensive search, Gillette found William Emery Nickerson, an MIT trained engineer, to produce the thin, sharpened steel blades he envisioned.

Now of course you do have many imitations but as far as shaving is concerned, Gillette blades are one of the best!

Also one of the best Padma winner is Dr Subroto Das! His efforts for highway accident victim support is simply remarkable!
He developed Lifeline Foundation which is a highway rescue response model that was among those used in designing EMS services in India.

It was noted that the foundation worked on utilizing existing healthcare infrastructure and coordinating with emergency rescue departments.
In 2007, Gujarat became the first state in India to pass Emergency Medical Services legislation, with Lifeline Foundation participating in the process!

Now he is a clear winner! Do you know him or about him!?
Well, now you do!

Shubh ratri!

When it is said that true money is in knowledge, maybe they were referring to this game!

In that you must know the word OXYPHENBUTAZONE! This is the word which would theoretically fetch you the highest points!

Am sure the clever ones would have got the game which literally means Scratch frantically!

For the other majority like me; the game is SCRABBLE! Did you know that the points have been given after careful study and frequency analysis!?

Also by the way, the game not only had a predecessor, it was also a big flop (or at least not a major success!) when it was released! In fact it was not even called SCRABBLE!

So the story goes way back in 1931 in Poughkeepsie, New York, the American architect Alfred Mosher Butts created the game as a variation on an earlier word game he invented, called Lexiko!

The two games had the same set of letter tiles, whose distributions and point values Butts worked out by performing a frequency analysis of letters from various sources, including The New York Times!

The new game, which he called Criss-Crosswords, added the 15×15 gameboard and the crossword-style gameplay. He manufactured a few sets himself but was not successful in selling the game to any major game manufacturers of the day!

In 1948, James Brunot, a resident of Newtown, Connecticut, and one of the few owners of the original Criss-Crosswords game, bought the rights to manufacture the game in exchange for granting Butts a royalty on every unit sold!

Brunot also slightly rearranged the “premium” squares of the board and simplified the rules; he also renamed the game Scrabble, a real word that means “scratch frantically”!

Brunot and his family made sets in a converted former schoolhouse in Dodgingtown, Connecticut, a section of Newtown. They made 2,400 sets that year but lost money!


Finally when a big man, Jack Straus, the president of Macy’s, played the game on vacation, the big change happened!

Upon returning from vacation, he was surprised to find that his store did not carry the game. He placed a large order, and within a year, “everyone had to have one!

Of course it was later a major success so much that it was even turned into a TV show!

The highest theoretical highest-scoring Scrabble word out there is OXYPHENBUTAZONE. Ohioan Dan Stock found the word, which is worth a wild 1,458 points. And if a player was able to add some specific hooked words to the theoretical board, they could score up to 1,778 points!

As of 2008, the game is sold in 121 countries and is available in more than 30 languages; approximately 150 million sets have been sold worldwide, and roughly one-third of American homes and half of British homes have a Scrabble set!

One of the games which entertains and teaches at the same time! Teach and teacher reminds me of the inspiring tale of Padma award winner Meenakshi Amma Gurukkal who is an Indian martial artist known as a practitioner and teacher of Kalaripayattu!

Read about her to get inspired!

SHubh Ratri!

Getting a new knife for the kitchen is a great event most of the time because the new ones would be so sharp!

Of course more sharp also means that you can get cut more easily!

A clean new knife also makes a clean cut! That is the only solace since the cut normally happens when you are in a hurry and you have to cook a lot of food!

I have lost counts the amount of cuts I have had and continued with the little thing which kept the ‘area’ blood free!

Yes the band aid! Band aids are one of the best inventions ever! Wrap them up and you are good to go!

Of course when we were kids, even small cuts used to get wrapped in them and we used to get cuts just so that we could wear them!

The competition was to see who could wear them the longest! The clean brown dressing would become dirty and half open and slowly try to escape! But we held on! Later on removing them was a hassle if you had hair!

Did you know that this amazing invention was done by a dutiful husband who did not want to see his blood wife! I mean his wife with blood! I mean blood on his wife…You get the drill!

So in the early 1920s, there were no proper methods to bind up minor cuts.


Earle Dickson, was a Johnson & Johnson employee,  in Highland Park, New Jersey and when he saw his wife Josephine frequently cut and burned herself while cooking, he made a portable dressing with cotton and a adhesive!

The prototype allowed her to dress her wounds without assistance!

Dickson passed the idea on to his employer, which went on to produce and market the product as the Band-Aid.

Dickson had a successful career at Johnson & Johnson, rising to vice president before his retirement in 1957.

Initially, Band-Aids were sold as a single 18-inch long strip of tape that had to be cut into smaller pieces in order to be applied to wounds!
Later on these were cut down to the present size and now they even come as a spot! Later on they have also come as waterproof ones!

So the original Band-Aids were handmade and not very popular.

By 1924, Johnson & Johnson introduced machine-made Band-Aids and began the sale of sterilized Band-Aids in 1939!

In World War II, millions were shipped overseas, helping popularize the product. Since then, Johnson & Johnson has estimated a sale of over 100 billion Band-Aids worldwide!

In 2022, Band-Aid was named the most trusted brand in the United States, beating the second place brand, Lysol, by more than two points! So much so that just like Xerox which has replaced the actual word Photocopy; the little adhesive dressing is called Band-aid no matter the brand!

Talking about safety comes to mind the Padma award winner Bipin Ganatra! He is a fire fighter volunteer and his life will inspire you like fire!

Do read about him!

Shubh ratri!

The original name of this very popular game was changed only because it sounded very close to one of the most common swear word used in the ENGLISH language!

The short form is WTF! Though according to Sheldon it may be What the Fracas!

The Game is a pretty simple one in which you have a central character who looks like the first emoticon! And all it does is gobble up the dots on the screen while trying to escape from ghosts like characters!

Got the game? Well, it is PAC MAN!

By the way it was first called PUCK MAN! No need ask why they changed it to PAC right!?

The idea of Pac-Man was taken from both the image of a pizza with a slice removed and from rounding out the Japanese symbol (kuchi, lit. “mouth”).

The character was made to be cute and colorful to appeal to younger players!
The actual name was derived from the Japanese phrase ‘paku paku taberu’ which apparently means “to gobbling something up”!

The title was changed in international releases to avoid it sounding too similar to an expletive (the Japanese pronunciation of paku being similar to ‘pucku’) and due to fear of arcade cabinets being vandalised by altering the P in ‘Puck-Man’ to an F!

Pac-Man has the highest-brand awareness of any video game character in many countries, becoming an icon in video games and pop culture. He is credited as the first video game mascot character and the first to receive merchandise. He also appears as a playable guest character in some other games, most notably in the Super Smash Bros. series (specifically in the fourth and fifth installments) and in the Ridge Racer series!

In most of the earlier Game zones or malls or even game events; there was at least one Pac Man zone or game! The simplicity of the game along with the fast paced nature of the game made it instantly and constantly popular!

The player controls Pac-Man, who must eat all the dots inside an enclosed maze while avoiding four colored ghosts. Eating large flashing dots called “Power Pellets” causes the ghosts to temporarily turn blue, allowing Pac-Man to eat them for bonus points.

The character has been included on several lists for the greatest, most iconic, or most influential video game characters of all time.

And to think that it was almost called Puck; man!

Luckily it’s all not in only in the name! Of course by any other name the great Tribal artist Sri Pandi Ram Mandavi would still be great!

Another well deserved Padma

Do read about him

Shubh ratri…