Profiting from Idleness

That title will need the following eight paragraphs to unravel its potency on you, and hopefully you will profit from your having read that far.

I deleted my accounts on two major and rival social network platforms, this time, I hope for good, and, out of sound faith in my reasons for doing so.

In some fleeting moments of clarity one is  aware of a sort of cognitive discomfort  where, when you know you have got nothing to do with your time, you desperately seek to plug the discomfort by doing something, just any damn thing, in the misplaced hope that the given activity brings some relief from the pain of boredom; only in retrospect does it dawn that the activity was meaningless and distracting. An example from a previous era hits the point home: elderly gentlemen would read the day's newspaper over and over again, all the while muttering,
"there is nothing new in the newspaper today."
Their hope of being relieved of their boredom was repeatedly belied. That same trait is at work- with some significant differences - when one connects to the social network: seeking relief from the desperation of boredom. The rest of this post is about those differences.

Santa Cross

Most people want to think through, rightly so, about their situation and the treatment options available to them if there is time- if the condition is not desperate. In a non-urgent situation, multiple factors come into play and the least examined (by the patient) is the influence on their decision of the appearance and demeanor of the doctor. Has it occurred to you?

A Different Dubious Distinction

The farm laborer, hailing from the interiors of my district, had come through the recommendation of his local grocery shop keeper- a person I had no remembrance of. He was told that if he found that nothing works elsewhere, at least here he would get a diagnosis. I was mortified by that impression of myself. It is easy to live upto a plain human being's impression but to impersonate a person with powers you don't have is very taxing from the very first moment of interaction.

To cut the story short (so that another story can be appended)

From Ink to an Inkling

Recently I resurrected a fountain pen that came as a gift long back. Under the onslaught of speed and convenience fountain pens came close to getting extinct. Resuming some writing with the ink-pen (as the fountain pen is called), I noticed that legible writing with one is much more arduous than doing so with a ball point pen. This led my thoughts astray for a while and a hitherto unthought-of landscape unfolded in my mind-space. 

Just Missed - A Pregnancy

A dear friend of long standing presently works for a corporate- the same one he joined as a graduate engineer many a summer  back. At one time this entity was the place to work in, and the employees' residential facility was the address to live in India. A fellow graduate engineer joined the company at about the same time as my friend did and as fate would have it they soon got married to girls with the same name. Lets give them both another name for the sake of anonymity; say, Prema.

The two families got close because of proximity and the wives, both Premas, would visit most places in the township together, so much so that they would sometimes need medical attention for minor issues at the same time.

On one such visit, each Prema having her own agenda, one lady's sample tested positive for pregnancy, while the other one was not tested. To confound the matters,