The Noble Cause

You might not be blessed to help people out of their misery/pain/troubles always but you can always do your bit. First time in life I made an attempt to help someone whom I have never known before and that too in most unusual way. This is going to be looooonnnng post.

One fine evening while returning from office I received a call where someone asked me if I had a particular blood group. Since I was driving I asked the person to call me back after sometime. When I got the call second time I realized it was attempt by an uncle to save his new born nephew. I decided without a moment I would help him out in whatever way I could. The kid was in a hospital in Gwalior and was born premature, 7 months and have been hospitalized for the last one month and needed blood(a component and not whole blood) which is kind of rare and I have the same blood group. Hence I packed and left home right in the night so that I could be there next morning, though my parents were apprehensive but they couldn’t say anything as the cause was noble.

Let me give you a brief I am regular blood donor and one of my ex teammates Jaydeep Gupta had introduced me to www.friends2support.org approx 1.5 yrs back. Ever since I have joined the corporate world(close to 6yrs back) I knew my blood group to be A2+ as it was reported in pre-joining medical tests which major MNCs do for all their employees. For most of the world life is simpler with A,B, AB and O blood groups and RH factors as + or -. Now some of might be wondering what is A2+, but don’t be surprised if I tell you more than half the docs I have met don’t even know much about it and 90% of the clinics and institutes I have visited don’t even have facility to test it. It might sound even funnier with most lab technicians I met told me there is nothing as such and someone is trying to mislead me :-). Let me kill technical details and get to the story.

I start of for Gwalior which is about an overnight journey without a reserved ticket, but happened to get one just time at the station on current booking window(last ticket on 2^nd AC) which was closing. Hence the journey starts on happy note and I reach without any problems. I was picked up the station by the anxious father at 5 o’clock morning. We reach the hospital and wait for doctors to arrive. Blood banks are completely different entity and hospitals have tie ups with them. And finally we reach the blood bank and usual testing starts. And I am in for a biggest surprise of my life, the blood group is A1+ and not A2+. I just couldn’t digest it all and ask the guy to test it again and he confirms again that its A1 and not A2. It would be understatement to say I was embarrassed, disappointed and what not. I talked with the father and we decide we will get it second opinion. And the hunt starts to find a second lab which could cross verify the result. I just couldn’t imagine how would the parents be feeling as all hopes they had for last 3 days was that their kid would finally get 30ml of component today.

We went to every lab in city and figured out none of them had the tests to verify and most of them stated that there is no such group. By late afternoon we were able to find the second place which could verify it. The tests came negative again but the good news was we figured out that the tests for A1 and A2 is never done till asked and hence there is no donor list with such classification. So we started getting the everyone who had A+ to be tested for A1 and A2. To cut story short it was tested for about 100+ people till now and none of them had A2. Since I could not do anything more, I visited the hosts place had lunch and left back for Gurgaon. I had made up my mind soon after that I will put a post so that people get to know how a small effort from them can help save somebody’s precious life. I returned last night but was so disappointed I didn’t feel like doing anything. I just got a call from kid’s father and got to know that by using synthetic method the kid was given the components from another blood and has reacted positively to the treatment, which lifted my mood. All the kid need was 30ml and generally we donated one unit(350-450ml). You never know when you small effort could help save someone life.

A humble request please register on www.friends2support.org
and here is link which might provide the purpose to do your bit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viO9IAqHeIY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhoPEUXFcT4&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPHRvbEQuiE&feature=relmfu

The Connect

Woohoo I just managed to make my post count to 5 after 5 yrs not bad, I am improving :-). Well I will start this post by wonderful status update I read on social networking site:

25-26 is not a nice age for a man....your ex-gfs are getting married, Your career has just started, Elders treat you as unproven theorems, College guys feel that you are too old to have in their group... You seem to enjoy both cartoon and news. You can no longer eat whatever you wish without putting on weight. You look like an ape if you don’t shave daily. You are not invited for weekend cricket matches. Every Aunt you meet asks “Shaadi kab kar rahe ho beta!!” while uncles-> “Career ka kya socha hai beta…”.. When the reality is that you are just riding the wave and going with the flow… You have all the confidence in the world but little achievements to show, You already have the first hand experience of the life , You know that whatever you have been taught about the world in schools has been sheer waste of time. You can be denied a job even after passing the test and you could be given a job if you know someone placed high enough… Politics till now was a dirty word but now you feel it everywhere. You know now love is not that blind and that friendship has its terms and conditions. .You know there is nothing for granted and free lunches are not free… Your overconfidence is now making way for a humble conscience...You now know it is not exactly what you thought it would be… :)

Though I seem to have topped the age-group by additional couple of years, I can eat whatever I wish without putting any additional ounce and I still do get invited to weekend cricket matches :-) but all others statements connect straightaway.

Courtesy the additional years the pressure is exponentially more on getting hitched and I still feel it isn’t the right time. Moreover you need to have a girl as well to get hitched as well and I seem to be doing pretty bad in that department too. My latest crush announced she got engazed even before I could ask her out or think something. But that’s the way life is :-).

Just happened to return from whirlwind trip of beautiful city Bangalore but it felt completely different from how I had seen it 2 years back. The time I had moved out, it was just a temporary stint and I was bound to back, but things do change and they change fast when you don’t want it and when you really want it change somehow the time just stops(theory of relativity ;-)). It was memorable trip as I ended up winning 2 IPods and getting to know some more cool people. Maybe it was just too short a trip but I never felt at home the way I used to before.

Time to closeup and head to bed, since I am supposed to get up early and resume my half marathon practice which I have been missing for 2 weeks now. I hardly have time, about 25 days before my second half marathon where the aim this year is to improve my time and without any cramps or sprain and not to forget the noble cause I am running(more in next update).

Cheers

Updates

As I promised here is the next post. Well first of all let me clarify the title of last post. I am guy who loves automobiles and member of forum called Team-Bhp and love to drive as well. What happens when a car doesn’t self-start because of battery, you need to find a jumper and connect it to fully charged battery and Jump Start your car. This is exactly what happened with me and the post came after I came out of long slumber hence the last post title.

I have seen people around me using blog for lots of reason, and here is how I group it
1)Passing on technical know how on topic (Techie’s Blog)-honestly complete bouncers for me unless I am working on code and get stuck with errors and that's when I start praying someone should have encountered it before and documented on how to solve it :-P
2) People with a cause (socialist/environmentalist etc.) - I admire & support quite a few
3) Artists (poets, painters, photographers etc.) for display of their skill- they teach me that I have a wonderful world around me
4) Random people who just want share what’s on their mind
I consider myself on the last category and I am sure they aren’t a rare species by any stretch of imagination :-P. Well all my life I have been claiming my life as an open book and just happen to realise that I haven’t been sharing things which have been on my mind for sometime now.
Well the updates first, I moved out of Bangalore around an year plus couple of months back to a completely new city Gurgaon but with same firm. And believe me it hell of a change which took a good amount of time to get used to. For someone who had been used to the pleasant weather throughout the year, the winters were a welcome change but then the summer made me realise it would have been better if I would have stayed back down there instead of coming here.

There is old proverb in Hindi “Vinashkale vipreet bhudhi”(means when the time is bad your thought process gets screwed as well) and therefore I started digging the grave of my bachelorhood :-). On a lighter note things just dint work out and I read a beautiful quote somewhere which would sum the experience- “I may never know your reasons why, but someday I'm gonna see the good in your goodbye.”

But now the story doesn’t end there since my dad retired from his govt. job in August 2010 and hence mom and dad moved in with me. And I just loved the transformation to a family guy now who doesn’t need to worry about food anymore :-). As I have already stated that my parents are more of my buddies so they knew everything about whatever was happening in my life.

Now when I just need sometime for myself but they feel that my life (is just like some outstanding payment or bank liability which) should settled or taken care of. To add more salt and pepper to the wound all my chaddi-buddies (“childhood friend”-term coined by pal of mine who had a wedding last night) are falling left right and centre and since I happen to be in North I am attending all weddings. The only question anyone who meets there is so when is your number (remember the Pepsi commercial), and you just smile and don’t reply back. The only silver lining in cloud is that my sis is abroad for another year atleast and hence I could be safe (remember another commercial for Bisleri “Play Safe”) for that period.
Let me end it now more in the coming posts.

Jump Start

I will start exactly like my last post by the credit, this time it goes to 2 events first- old pen pal of mine who got in touch with me as she was got an interview call from the same firm I work with and
second- the movie “Dhobi Ghat” (Note: If you haven’t watched the movie yet please don’t go ahead with this post of mine as I might end up spoiling your movie experience)

Let me try to give a brief first about my blogging habits, oh that’s a wrong term I used here(2 blogs in 5 yrs :-Q) and I call it habit? Since the last post let me try and recall, hmmm so the count is three or four times I have tried putting few sentences and sometimes even a couple of paragraphs together and come up with a post but have ended up closing the word doc without saving it.
So it is not that I wasn’t trying but just couldn’t find enough words/ just ran out of ideas/sometime lost the steam before I could complete a piece. Enough of clarifications for being incompetent or lazy bum :-). There are so many things on my mind right now that I am literally struggling to pick one thread and give some shape. Every time I have gone in chronological order to describe events let me go reverse now.
Just back after watching the movie which I went with couple of colleagues of mine and both of them ended up not enjoying it at all. I won’t try to defend the movie since I am not paid for it :-P. But here is what I think about it, the audience at the end are left with lots of things unanswered and for them to complete on their own. Can somebody suggest alternate ending? Usual happy ending would have been
1) Shai ends up being with Arun
2) Arun being reunited with his kid/wife back in Australia
3) Arun finding Yasmin who didn’t die and is a loner now like him.
I am sure there could be lot of possible options but what I liked the most was unconventional end of the movie and some really cool shots of human emotions like Yasmin first talk on the tape or Munna posing in front of mirror thinking about his portfolio or the guilt Shai felt being caught at Arun’s place when Munna is delivering clothes etc.
I won’t try to hurt anyone feeling by saying that you need to understand to like a movie( have already done it once) but I applaud the filmmaker on trying to make something different and can assure I wasn’t the only one who came out of theatre enjoying the movie. There is not much story but loads of emotions in the movie and pretty well captured.

Well let me end this post by just being a review and defending the movie which I said I wont :-P. I would continue with reverse order of events in the coming post and for now let me think of title before I can post it up.