Dr.Trekker Explorer Farmer

 My travelling genes come from my mother. She has traveled almost all over the world and in India. She took me along when I was a school kid for few trips in India and those were the group tours through different travel companies. So the timetable would be like 6am tea, breakfast at 7.30,bus starts at 8.30,1 hour at this attraction,2 hours some another packed lunch,evening shopping time and dinner at 8pm. We went to places,plenty of cities,towns and tourist attractions but never explored places let alone experiencing them. But no regrets! Travelling on your own has its own advantages. You select the places,days,time spent at a particular place,place to eat,mode of travel and finally place to stay. But then one has to do lot of R&D,spend lot of time to make it happen. I remember my first ever trip which I planned was to Ladakh,then a remote place in India and this was in year 2006,way before those 3 idiots exploited that place. I got hold of a detailed road map of Ladakh from a ...

"Aavi gayu....Aavi gayu" are the words from the middle aged gujju pediatrician from Ahmedabad who was terrified to say the least. We all see dreams don't we?but few experience nightmares. And these gujarati words itself gives me one! It was a last long weekend of the last week of April and myself and few of my colleagues flew to Kathmandu for a nutrition conference. check.in in a posh hotel and in few minutes we all went to Pashupati temple and then to the Thamel area for a brief visit to Northface outlet for window-shopping. This ever crowded place is mecca for trekkers like me. Early to bed as the next day, Saturday,we were supposed to leave our hotel early to reach a resort on the outskirts of the capital city of Kathmandu,where our conference was scheduled. We started on time but in few minutes the bus tyres gave away and we waited for the replacement vehicle near the huge ground where our own Baba Ramdev was conducting a yoga camp,twitching his abdominal ...

 A cat has nine lives. For three he plays, for three he strays, and for the last three he stays" and I had few already. Calamities makes one more stronger and in my life have faced few death defying natural calamities. This is one of them. After giving my postgraduate exams in pediatrics that was in year 2000, I along with my maternal uncle and son of my friend who had appeared for his 10th standard exams decided to trek in Himalayas in the month of May. Gaumukh-Tapovan trek in the far reaches of Uttrakhand to be precise. Reaching Gangotri from Mumbai took us four complete days hopping from Delhi-Rishikesh-Uttarkashi and finally Gangotri covering almost 600 odd kms in a rickety bus on a never-ending road tiring our bodies to no end. One could not afford luxury of a private vehicle then. Gangotri as the name suggests is a place where River Bhagirathi originates from an icy cave resembling the mouth of a cow thus named Gaumukh. Due to global warming this place (Gaumukh)has receded b...

Almost 24 years ago,I joined Sion hospital for my post-graduation course in paediatrics. Our lecturers and Professors did an ice-breaker session with us to get to know each other well. There was a questionnaire to be filled by us and one of the question was What's your hobby?? my answer to this was "Bird Watching". My colleagues and to a certain extent my lecturers understood what I meant by my hobby. My HOD oblivious to the sarcasm even invited me to her place to watch and share my knowledge about birds as she stayed at a place which had lot of trees. I never dared to accept her invitation and  share my rudimentary knowledge about birds as I lacked every bit of it. After almost a decade as I was into midst of demanding practice, read about Namdapha. As I had trekked many a times in Himalayas in the past and Namdapha was about exploring the jungle and that too on foot. I had never trekked in a jungle and this was something unique so myself along with couple of my trek-mat...

 I started my practice after doing a stint as a locum at Leelavati Hospital. I knew it would be tough to establish practice from the word go. With no family background in medical world (my father being an architect and mother a retired school teacher) and a last person to do any kind of compromises, I started going to my clinic at Girgaon. A rented place where a general practitioner used to practise. Couple of hours in the morning and three in the evening with no affiliation with any hospital,my day was pretty fixed in a way. Newspapers in the morning and few paediatric journals in the evening I started killing time. In my first month of practice I saw only one child,a neighbour in my clinic building,came for a school fitness certificate. Next couple of months the only people who came to my clinic were the medical representatives we fondly call them MRs.  After almost 90 days,one fine evening as I was keeping myself in a cheerful mood,came a lady. 'Baccha kidhar hai? I asked h...