Just where do you draw the line?

Dr Steven Shafer, the Columbia University Anaesthesiology Professor, at Michael "Whacko" Jackson's trial on using propofol as a sleeping aid....
"'Yes' is not what a doctor says to a patient request that is not in their best interest."
"We are in pharmacological never-never land here, something that was done to Michael Jackson and no one else in history to my knowledge," he told the jury.
"...Dr Conrad Murray had acted like the pop star's obedient "employee" and not his doctor, who should have refused the star's requests for propofol."

FG was once told by his part-time casual employer not to return to do locum work as the patients were unhappy with FG's refusal to administer a narcotic analgesic injection as outpatient to someone  for something trivial (a headache) when a oral  medication should suffice. The joke is on FG as the employer went on to prosper to become a local leader and was bestowed numerous suffices to go behind his name for services rendered to society. He was also honoured with honorary prefixes to his name while FG still ploughs along, living from hand to mouth, with a clear conscious hoping to have garnered plus brownie points when he is judged at the Pearly Gates and St Peters as well as when he has to continue the karma and cycle of life in his after life!

The honourable physician's excuse of justifying administration of a narcotic injection with his ensuing danger of haemodynamic collapse and secondary injury as result thereof is that the patient will still get it elsewhere if you do not oblige!

This incident resurfaced in my mind when Michael Jackson's trial came to fore. This guy just loves pomp and publicity. When he was alive, he created a blast and he went off with a blast as well! When everybody else can go to sleep by tiring themselves or with beer or even counting sheep. No! When some of the recalcitrants sleep like a baby sucking their thumbs with Dormicum or Xanax, no, MJ needs general anaesthesia! And The King of Pop became a statistic in the Doctor's file.
Why did the good doctor do it? To anaesthetise someone for sleeping disorder? Whatever we discuss is pure speculation, as he is not giving any press statement for fear of retribution.  
Imagine what being a personal physician to MJ would have done to his serendipity of a career. Dr Conrad's asking rates would have skyrocketed and he would be confiding in his friend just to say that if he does not the take the ridiculous offer from this fool, some other clown would have taken a killing and at least he would give superior care as a cardiologist!
It is just like a state physician whom I used to know whom used to be called 'dei' in derogatory way by the not so intelligent state monarch for the flimsiest discomfort. This friend of mine used to oblige as that was his nature and he was happy that he was serving the King and country! 
Money clouds everybody's sane judgement and in the race to make a killing in the financial sense (sorry for the pun) where the margin of moral and finances is blurred, anything goes. We can go on talking and talking till cows come home and go grazing till our time on earth is up and we would have not come to a reasonable agreement!

An Excellent Lecture on Neuroscience

Back in PPSP, USM, we had a a few expatriate lectures who knew their subjects literally better than they knew the back of their hands - NBR- Anatomy; PC- Neurology; PKD- Pathology; DCA- Internal Medicine; Ed- Surgery; TS- O&G; ME, WA, LKC and many many more...
Listening to VS Ramachandran just cascaded my mind into the psychedelic spiral staircase of time into my undergraduate days.
V. S. Ramachandran, product of Madras' Stanley Medical College graduate and a post graduate from Cambridge is a Professor in Neurology in University of California, San Diego. Known by some as Marco Polo of neuroscience, he has been a recipient of multiple academic and honorary awards including Padma Bhushan from India. Listen and learn....There is a reference on him in Wikipedia.too. I just happened to stumble upon him through one of the many free TED talk podcasts found on Apple's i-Phone 4!
N.B. Prof Ramachandran's grandfather was in the panel that drafted the Constitution of India and his father was an UN diplomat who was posted in various towns in India, Bangkok and England in tour of duty.

Toloooong..! Ah Long!

Just the other day I saw two mean bad looking (not the opposite of good looking - like the lyrics of The Beatles' Come together - "Got to be good looking 'cause he's so hard to see" but rather the one referred to in Jim Croce's Bad, Bad Leroy Brown -"The baddest man in the whole damned town, Badder than old King Kong, And meaner than a junkyard dog"!) - late teenager young men with a skeletal like physique with matching drainpipe slim jeans and tight ebony black t-shirts to attenuate their appearance, blondish streaks on their otherwise straight Oriental hair pasting away A5 sized stickers to their heart's content of their services on the road signage and road side pillars! Their services? Answer to you financial woes, call mobile ##! Or rather the start of your woes!
Now, what should a law abiding country loving who loves himself more, do when public property is being defaced? Just pass through looking the other way  whistling to your favourite tune oblivious to what is happening around you, that is what! Even the long arm of the law in the country cannot do anything about it, what can a lowly ordinary citizen like me do?

Evil that men do 2!

Just attended a gala charity dinner organised by a college in town. It was held to honour orphaned children from three orphanages. Sounds like a noble cause, the well endowed high heeled paying back to society, to entertain attention deprived kids and to raise funds for their daily needs!
Yeah right! The nihilistic part of prefer to see it from another angle...
The college run by fat capitalistic businessmen who, realising the raising concern on the decline and apprehension of the standard of public education in Malaysia, built colleges to offer quality education with affiliation to well renowned overseas universities to entice the ever unhappy paranoid Malaysian (who never believe the official version of Malaysian statistics) to send their spoilt bred kids to them for studies at exorbitant fees.
Feeling the guilt and increasing brickbats from the lower strata of society, like the heat felt from the Wall Street demonstrators, these business conglomerates try to wash their 'sins' of charging exorbitantly by having CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) projects. The function I attended above was the product of one of those. The college offered scholarships to students with exemplary academic and extra curricular activities performances with the understanding that these creme ala creme students will end their term with a project like this- to invoke a tear drop to attendees at the dinner and feel the 'empathy' as felt by the rich college. Everybody is happy. The attendees, having contributed to a worthy, tax-deductible cause; the students' for the experience of seeing and feeling how the underprivileged live as most of them were born with silver spoons; the bosses for a feather in their cap which would make them eligible for conferral of honourable award from monarchs which will further elevate their status in the Tatler and lifestyle magazines; not to forget the caterers, the hall owners and the events management manager who made a killing from the function.
The teenagers, which with the wealth of imagination and exposure, did a splendid job of setting the mood with the ambiance (of multiple hues of light, as though we were caged in a submarine) and backdrop. The bourgeois and fine upbringing of the students were apparent from the ushering of the guests, the multi-talented music extravaganza displayed and the smooth seamless handling of the show by the designated masters of ceremonies. Even the glitch of the non functioning microphones was wittily replaced with sign language and the disturbance of the media player was cleverly handled, kudos!
Sad to think that these young talents may one day leave our shores for greener pastures leaving us with non-employable graduates unable to converse in English and need prodding for everything like a snail with the danger of them withdrawing in-toto into their shell if the prodding is too intrusive!
The hosts managed to convince (I always wonder if 'con'ning is part of 'convince'ing?) the many sponsors to part from their moolah which were used to pay for the orphans' dinner ticket. The balance of of total collection (RM35,000) was given as a mock cheque to be shared among the 3 bodies, much to the delight of shutterbugs who were clicking away shots which would be used as CVs and KPIs of college directors and students alike. The students will supplement their long list of certificates with the experience of working with under-privileged kids to keep themselves abreast ahead from their peers in their next scholarship interview, entrance to Ivy League or Oxbridge or future job opportunity in a multinational company.
Coming to the real guests of the honour of the night, they performed to their best ability to entertain their hosts. Unlike their host and the rest of the paying guests who were dressed to kill to nines in their branded cocktail body hugging dresses and stilletos, the children were contented with their regular down to earth street clothes (probably contributions of kind souls) performing to their hearts' content to please their hosts and well wishers to make it worth while the time and money spent!
Call me weird, but in their shoes, I would feel humiliated performing like a dance monkey, performing to please my masters with their corny speeches and material splashing just to fatten their inflated egos.
Evil that men do! Because of some (wo)men who used intimate moments as a recreation rather procreation and society's frowning and denial of promiscuity as a real problem and ostracization of the products thereof, lack of social net for children abandoned by parent(s) who puts more importance in their own worldly satisfaction over their children welfare, orphans exist.

My house, My home, My kingdom

The tallest mansion of squatters!
One eye Jack is king in kingdom of blind

Growing up in RRF, we yearn to have regular addresses, not an address with block number, floor number and unit number. We were quite fed-up explaining to our schoolmates why there were so many dashes, hyphens and digits on our address instead of just the house number and road name. I suppose the stigma of living in a low cost high rise slump-like flats in the 70s was more the reason of the above. Even though living in the 21st century means condominium resort type of living is norm, we from RRF still find contentment living with our feet on the ground in landed properties!
Why am I writing this?
If you have access to people's addresses like I do, then you would have noticed that some addresses leaves no place for imagination on their social economic strata. Home addresses like 'Projek Perumahaan Rakyat', 'Projek Rumah Murah', Taman Bukit Mewah' will tell you how their home would look like.
Someone told me that many years ago, the mental facility in Kuching, Sarawak used to be called 'Rumah Sakit Orang Gila'! And Tampoi Psychiatric Hospital had been known as wad 'Orang Sakit Otak'.  When we grew up in Penang, anyone originating from Tanjong Rambutan was mental unless proven otherwise as the premier northern region Psychiatric Hospital was stationed there.
There is a place in Sabah called 'Menggatal'. Are the people ridiculed to be promiscuous, I wonder?
One cannot help it but over time certain names are acceptable by public may one day become hurtful or politically incorrect. Many years ago, children with Trisomy 21 (Down's Syndrome) used to called Mongols without batting anybody's eyelids. Ever since, Mongolia started being heard on CNN and started producing models, nobody called them Mongols anymore. Down's baby and special child they are!

The parasitic pirate life

Surin Gnanalingam
Director and Story teller

It is ironic to find a DVD named 'The DVD - pirate copy' from the friendly neighbourhood DVD peddler. This movie is a low key 2008 Malaysian (bilingual Cantonese and Manglish) movie which hadreceived 2 international indie movie awards (California Indie fest Excellence Award 2009 and entrance to South African International Movie festival). It is a story of a college boy, his widowed mum and his involvement with the big bad dudes of the illegal DVD business which is closely related to the city gangsters.
At one look, on screen, it looks like everybody in Kuala Lumpur seem to be donning T-shirts bearing logos of English Premier league clubs like that seem to be the national costume of Malaysian teenagers, which actually is quite true. Teenagers and even adults alike, have no love attached to our local national football teams as they are all in doldrums run by pompous feudalistic monarchs and their cronies just to laze off their free time !
A good 85 minute movie but does not really stand out. It feels like a made for TV Disney movie with PG13 rating! Actually there are only a few scenes with knives being brandished but hardly any flesh being exposed unless young ladies gyrating in the usual spaghetti dress or tubes as tasteless!

Angered by Angry Birds

It looks like in a cycle of every 10 years, someone from some corner of the world will come up with some droll characters which will be personified with human characters and cute aesthetically pleasing features and the world by storm. At the end of the day, it would be aimed at reaping financial benefits out of it. That is always the bottom- line, is it not - $, £, ¥ and €?
In the 1980s, it was the irritating pink female feline kitten which ruled the world. Suddenly, it was Hello Kitty everywhere! There were even shops selling only Hello Kitty merchandise - dresses, slippers, make-up, night gowns, accessories, you name it. I suppose even before that people used to have to fetish for domesticated hairy bears fondly named Teddy after Theodore Roosevelt! And the China Dolls, of course now it means something else...or Japanese porcelain dolls ala Chucky!
Just for information, as of 2003, Sanrio, the Japanese company who designed this Kitty, was earning USD 1billion annually.
Then in the 1990s, it was the reign of the violent Pikachu characters of the digital Pocket Monsters (Pokemon). Maybe, because they were Eastern in origin and came out at the correct time when computer games was at an embryonic state and had the world by storm, many sore loser hurled many brickbats against them. The Christians, Jews and Moslems discouraged people of faith to embrace into its cult-like practices of violence, albeit being just a mirage! If that is not enough to add to their list of problems, some children started having seizures after watching one of their stroboscopic red and blue lighted episodes on TV and it had to be discontinued. 2 kids in Japan filed a legal suit blaming Pokemon for making compulsive gamblers.
Not to be left out in the race for cute animal craze of the world which had been dominated by the Japanese all this while, a Finnish company managed to capture the hearts of the pet-figure deprived population of the world with their computer game called Angry Birds. Suddenly you see people wearing T-shirts bearing the grouchy irritated faces of these avian species and carrying balloons with their caricature! The whole aim of the Angry Birds' game is for the birds to destroy the hiding place of the pigs to retrieve their eggs which were stolen from them, hence their anger!
So, download the application on your i-phones (intelligent phones) and degenerate your brain cells in the process and kill your precious time  in this time deprived fast world as if you have so much of them. Hurt your joints, dim your vision, have a headache, be a recluse, be addicted and basically use your skills to hurl things at pigs like a bird brained loonie! Enjoy...