Book Review – Tongue-In-Cheek: The Funny Side of Life, Khyrunnisa A

Let me confess. I am that guy on whose jokes nobody laughs. Be it in school or in college, or even at work, not many people break into a guffaw when I utter, what I consider to be, wisecracks. On the contrary, there were always some back-benchers - or junior staff members now - who made people around fold up with laughter, by uttering simple grunts and groans. Naturally, I have always envied people with such astonishing sense of humor. As I grew up, I understood the most important trick of making people laugh – never trying to make them laugh. Good humor is based on spontaneity and smartness. While I assumed that I had the smartness, I was never spontaneous. I always tried to make my jokes smart and sharp, ending up sounding incomprehensible in the process.

For example, read this joke and tell me how quickly you understood it – ‘There were two retired professors sitting in lawn, sipping tea and discussing things. One of them asked the other ‘Have you read Marx?’ The other one promptly responded ‘Yeah, it’s these pesky wicker chairs’. It took me a couple of minutes to understand this joke, but as the sheer smartness of the joke became clear, the joke got etched on my mind. While such ultra-smart jokes are fun to feel, they don’t tickle you at once and make you roll on the floor. Spontaneity is what produces such end results. Very few people exhibit such a perfect blend of smartness and spontaneity – to make people laugh with jokes that stick to the heart. Ms. Khyrunnisa is one such a blessed writer.

Blessed with perfect command over language and a keen eye for the innate quirks of human minds, the author has beautifully documented all those tickle-worthy moments of our day-to-day lives. From simple household chores to showy weddings, health fads to age-related ailments, silly fetishes to serious mishaps, there are so many things that we go through on a daily basis, blinkered and blind to our idiosyncrasies. This book will make one stop and think about similar incidents in one’s own life and smile in hindsight. I loved how the author repeatedly kept pulling the mickey out of herself and her own family members. Even while documenting the hilarity hidden in the acts/thoughts of the people around her, she makes us laugh, without exactly making them the laughing stock.

In a world that is increasingly feasting on silly, senseless, scatological ‘jokes’ and sexual innuendos, her style of writing, steeped in subtle, sensible, decent wit all through, feels like a breath of fresh air. Her style of alluding to things past and present, historical and everything else, wordplay and funny flow all remind me of Albert Uderzo and Rene Goscinny, famed creators of my favorite Asterix and Obelix comic series.

You may not ‘LOL’ at the end of every other sentence, but the genuine hilarity of these tales is guaranteed to give you a lightened mind and some hearty laughter. Tongue-in-Cheek is cheeky indeed!

A.

Book Review – The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee

My first introduction to the dreaded disease of cancer was through movies, where the hero bleeds through his nose, wraps a shawl and goes around with unshaven face, singing sad songs about his plight. My mother’s narrations about her elder sister’s traumatic experience with breast cancer and resultant mastectomy at a young age didn’t make much of an impact on me. As I grew up, there were so many characters with cancer in so many movies that the word cancer itself started to feel like those foreign locations that the lead characters go to for their duets – exotic, intriguing, yet faraway, having nothing to do with me. But as I matured into adulthood, I started seeing relatives, families of friends and colleagues bear the brunt of this ominous disease. My brief volunteering with an NGO that works for cancer patients brought me face to face with the seriousness of this scourge of humans. Young children suffering from leukemia, men in their early twenties fighting lung cancer caused by smoking, elderly people disfigured by throat cancer due to tobacco use - cancer was no longer exotic and faraway. It was close and gross.

When recently someone near and dear was diagnosed with cancer, I felt my curiosity piqued. I was looking for resources to learn more about this disease and do what I can to spread awareness. That’s how I found this book. And, what a worthy primer this turned out to be!

Cancer is not a modern illness. Its ancientness parallels that of our own. For millennia, people have suffered from and succumbed to cancer. But what makes this dreaded disease unique is its ability to evolve at the same rate as we do. Every time we find a cure and hope to kill this disease forever, cancer evolves and moves the bull’s eye. To borrow an idea from the author, imagine an Achilles whose vulnerability shifts someplace else, just as you target an arrow at his heel.

All those centuries of painstaking research has taught us one thing – this disease emerges from within. While external agents – like viruses and carcinogens - play a crucial role in waking this demon from its slumber, cancer is something internalized. It is our own body cells gone rogue, disobeying the lifecycle of birth-growth-decline. In a cruel twist of fate, our own body cells, nano-representations of our own selves, find a mutated vigor for ‘life’, start proliferating so profusely that they end up killing us, their collective image. Killing a harmful virus or bacteria has been relatively easier, because they have definite shape, purpose and, especially, are apart from us. But cancer is a part of us, our own cells, our genes, DNAs gone rogue. Not just that. Each of these mutations takes its own unique form as there are individuals. Cancer isn’t one single disease to find a cure against. It is a bunch of mutations, the perverted race of cells to proliferate and spread all over.

This book taught me those things in an intense way. Starting from the earliest mentions of this disease in history, nearly 2500 years ago, to the latest development in the field of oncology, this book tries to light up a very vast area. And, it succeeds too. The tug of war between cancer and science, the misunderstandings, poorly designed treatments, lessons learnt, sacrifices by patients as well as physicians, their tenacity in the face of adversity, emotional / physical reliefs brought by discovery of cures, relapses and remissions, egos and ebullience of the people involved, this book tells it all. If you are looking to learn what cancer is and what a devastating trail it has left all through the annals of mankind, then this is a book you must start with. The sheer effort and research that fills these pages is astounding. Dr. Mukherjee has put his heart and soul into this book.

The book is comprehensive but not complete though. For example, the book doesn’t dwell into ovarian cancer, something that I was so keen to learn about. The book doesn’t provide any advice on how to prevent cancer, if at all it is possible, or what kinds of lifestyles are prone to the risk of it. But, of course, the good doctor promptly justifies his reasons in the annexures.

This book doesn’t tell you everything that you would like to know about cancer. But it will tell you all the basics that you need to know about it. If you are pursuing the subject with curiosity, this is a good book to begin with. Not an easy read, but definitely worth the time.

As I finished reading and sat staring at the covers, I had this strange emotion – in their traits of reproducing profusely, migrating to wherever possible, reshaping the landscape of their destination (organ), and increasing ability to defy death that results in the ultimate demise of the host organism, isn’t cancer quite akin to us humans? Are cancer cells the microcosmic parallels to what we humans are to the macrocosm, i.e., the Universe?!

Who knows?! May be, we are!

Happy New Year 2021!!!

 

Hope!

In all these years of my life, of whatever little duration I have been fortunate to be here, never have I seen a single emotion dominate the collective consciousness of us humans like the way hope does now. In the past, we have started our years with dreams, desires, passions, ideas, goals and ambitions. But in living memory of the majority of us, this must be the first year where we have all started the year with burgeoning hope. I see ‘hope’ being the keyword in most of the wishes I have received throughout the day.

 As I have been repeatedly telling, Nature doesn’t care for our definitions of Time and Space. These notions of months, years and hours are all abstract little chunks that we use to understand Time. So, as we move from one little chunk called 2020 to the other one named 2021, we have all decided to leave behind the fears, chaos and uncertainties that ruled most part of 2020 and face 2021 with abundant hopes in our minds.

2020 was a year of mixed emotions. It gave immense pain to many of us, but it also fulfilled lot of our dreams. So many people lost their lives, but there were so many new arrivals too. Many businesses shut down, but so many new entrepreneurs found their passions. So, let us be thankful that we did weather through one of the toughest time periods in our living memory and are entering 2021 in good health and hope.

I am sure you are also one of those innumerable good people that are starting 2021 in hopes. My wishes to you is that may you spend this whole year in good health, with your heart and mind soaked in love, peace and compassion, surrounded by the people who matter to you and to whom you mean the world, with enough of good things for you to enjoy and share with those around you! May your positive aura rub on those around you and lift them higher. Convey these good wishes to your beloved ones too.

Happy New Year 2021!