Amritsar

Company Gardens: Amritsar

Author: 
Vinod K. Puri

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Born in 1941, Vinod was brought up and educated in Amritsar. He attended Government Medical College, and subsequently trained as a surgeon at PGI, Chandigarh. He left for USA in 1969, and retired in 2003 as Director of Critical Care Services at a teaching hospital in Michigan. Married with two grown sons, he continues to visit India at least once a year. Sadly, three of the family members mentioned in the following story were dead by 1975.

The man wearing the shades had no legs. As I returned from my morning walk, the small figure half way up the bridge sat on the side-walk performing his morning ablutions with the stumps of his arms.

The dark-skinned man nodded and moved to an inaudible tune as if keeping time. From a distance his round face appeared much younger. With a white rag wrapped around his head, his leonine face appeared content or even happy. That was an absurd thought! But how could I think of happiness? This was a tableau, very different than what I remembered from my childhood. For over forty years I had lived abroad, and once a year got a chance to visit the ancient hometown for a few days. Several years ago I had started to go for a morning walk.

Dreams Don’t Die

Author: 
Juginder Luthra

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Dr. Juginder Luthra completed his MBBS from Medical College, Amritsar in 1966, and his MS in Ophthalmology from the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGI), Chandigarh in 1970. He moved to Nottingham, UK along with his wife, Dolly — a dentist from the Amritsar Dental College — and a daughter, Namita. They were blessed with twin daughters, Rohini and Rashmi, in May 1975. The family moved to Weirton, West Virginia in June 1975. Now their three loving daughters are married to wonderful sons-in-law, and Dolly and Juginder are blessed with six grandchildren.

There was a flurry of activities all over the house.

"Is the suitcase ready, did you pack enough mango pickle and praanthe with cooked dry potatoes placed between them? Are your shoes polished, do you have enough money for the journey? Do you have Dr. Chitkara's (Pitaji's cousin) address, at whose house you will be staying for the first 3 or 4 days?"

The last one was planned to avoid the notorious, scary ritual of ragging which every new student received from the seniors.

"Make sure your shoes match\; one black and one brown will look really funny. Don't stick your head out of the moving train, you will get a coal particle fly into your eye. Above all, no more mischief\; you are a big boy now."

The New Boy

Author: 
Vinod K. Puri

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Born in 1941, Vinod was brought up and educated in Amritsar. He attended Government Medical College, and subsequently trained as a surgeon at PGI, Chandigarh. He left for USA in 1969, and retired in 2003 as Director of Critical Care Services at a teaching hospital in Michigan. Married with two grown sons, he continues to visit India at least once a year.

Apology- I wish I could apologize to him! How to apologize for something that happened sixty five years ago?.

That means I was not more than eight or nine years old when I committed a horrible act of extortion. But the fact that I think about it and have thought about it for years – that has to mean something, right? And I seem to remember most of the events related to the incident as if they were happening on a television screen now. Let it be known that there is no way for me to apologize to the person who would be now my age, and unknown to me for the last sixty five years.

A favour for a spoilt kid

Author: 
Vinod K. Puri

Category:

Born in 1941, Vinod was brought up and educated in Amritsar. He attended Government Medical College, and subsequently trained as a surgeon at PGI, Chandigarh. He left for USA in 1969, and retired in 2003 as Director of Critical Care Services at a teaching hospital in Michigan. Married with two grown sons, he continues to visit India at least once a year.

In 1955, as a fourteen-year old, I was thrilled at the prospect of going to Bombay (now Mumbai) on a school-sponsored trip.

I was excited by the prospect of travelling almost a thousand miles from Amritsar, a small town in north India, to the glamour of Bombay, the movie capital of India. There were legions of stories of how actors and actresses had been discovered after arriving penniless in Bombay.

So it was natural for me to brag about it to my friends and other people in the neighbourhood.

Chaman Lal's mother heard about my planned trip. She talked to my mother because she had an interest in Delhi, which was on the route to Bombay.

Sour Grapes

Author: 
Vinod K. Puri

Category:

Born in 1941, Vinod was brought up and educated in Amritsar. He attended Government Medical College, and subsequently trained as a surgeon at PGI, Chandigarh. He left for USA in 1969, and retired in 2003 as Director of Critical Care Services at a teaching hospital in Michigan. Married with two grown sons, he continues to visit India at least once a year.

In 1947-48, there really was no reason to find the grapevine in the front yard of our house in Amritsar.

The arid plains of Punjab were not the place where grapes grew. My earliest memories of the vine were of a full flourishing cover along the high back wall of the substantial yard. This wall separated the house from the open fields of Goal Bagh that led towards the railway station. The grounds were separated from the wall by a foot-wide open drain. The empty space was mostly a temporary resting place among the trees for the nomads and beggars. They would set up their makeshift tents for a few days. Early in the morning, from the top floor of the house I could see the women scouring their aluminium pots and pans.

Swamiji

Author: 
Vinod K. Puri

Born in 1941, Vinod was brought up and educated in Amritsar. He attended Government Medical College, and subsequently trained as a surgeon at PGI, Chandigarh. He left for USA in 1969, and retired in 2003 as Director of Critical Care Services at a teaching hospital in Michigan. Married with two grown sons, he continues to visit India at least once a year.

The word swami has entered the English language, thanks to the writer RK Narayan and hordes of hippie visitors to India. But in this personal tale, the word has a special resonance. 

By Swamiji, I refer to was my grandfather's younger brother. I do not even remember his given name. This was a bizarre incidence in the family's history! You would have to imagine that a family of middle class traders amongst them had produced a saffron clad personage who in his lifetime renounced the world for the good of humanity!

By the time I first had a look at the face of Swamiji, his older brother Lala Charan Das, my grandfather was dead. My grandfather was something of a legend in Amritsar because of the amount of wealth that he had accumulated and the fact that he had married three times! They were perfectly legal marriages, after the demise of consecutive wives.

Kalu Taya

Author: 
Vinod K. Puri

Tags:

Born in 1941, Vinod was brought up and educated in Amritsar. He attended Government Medical College, and subsequently trained as a surgeon at PGI, Chandigarh. He left for USA in 1969, and retired in 2003 as Director of Critical Care Services at a teaching hospital in Michigan. Married with two grown sons, he continues to visit India at least once a year.

Almost every family in Punjab used to name their darkest child Kala (black, dark) if a boy and Kali for a girl. Many children grew up bearing the pain of derision but often parents or relatives meant it as a term of affection. This is how the old man we called Kalu Taya probably got his name .

Taya means father's older brother. Kalu Taya, my father's older cousin (at a time when cousins were often considered as siblings) was so different from the usual crowd of my older uncles that he remains vivid in my childhood memories.  Of medium height, he was blind in one eye with thick white cataracts, bushy eyebrows, unkempt long hair and a beard. His smelly clothes often appeared to be unwashed. This was unusual among the middle class families, who literally used the Urdu word safed posh (white clad) to describe their status on the economic ladder.

Her three sons

Author: 
Vinod K. Puri

Category:

Tags:

Born in 1941, Vinod was brought up and educated in Amritsar. He attended Government Medical College, and subsequently trained as a surgeon at PGI, Chandigarh. He left for USA in 1969, and retired in 2003 as Director of Critical Care Services at a teaching hospital in Michigan. Married with two grown sons, he continues to visit India at least once a year.

When I sent five thousand rupees to Lal Devi in Amritsar, I knew that I would hear about it on my next trip from the US to India. I heard about my ‘generosity’ from an aunt in Delhi.

The reason she knew about it was what I should have known from my childhood. Lal Devi loved to talk or, as most neighbors said, ‘blab'. She was the gossip in the neighborhood and could spread a piece of information faster than the dhindorchis (drum-bangers).

When I last saw her she was blind as a bat. "I miss your mother!" she talked about my dead mother as she sunned herself in the winter morning, on our verandah. She was over eighty years old. As usual, she had had many complaints about failing organs and ingrate grandchildren. She bemoaned the fact that she had outlived so many of her neighbors and friends among others.

"I will be dead the next time you visit Amritsar," she said.

"You will live to be hundred before you die".

Memories of Bombay 1950s

Author: 
Joginder Anand

Category:

Dr. Anand - an unholy person born in 1932 in the holy town of Nankana Sahib, central Punjab. A lawyer father, a doctor mother. Peripatetic childhood - almost gypsy style. Many schools. Many friends, ranging from a cobbler's son (poorly shod as the proverb goes) to a judge's son. MB from Glancy (now Government) Medical College Amritsar, 1958. Comet 4 to Heathrow, 1960.

Ancient widower. Two children and their families keep an eye on him. He lives alone in a small house with a small garden. Very fat pigeons, occasional sparrows, finches green and gold drop in to the garden, pick a seed or two and fly away.

In 1956, or was it 1955, I Spent about two months in Bombay. Rented a large room with bathroom and toilet but no kitchen, jointly with a young man (sight unseen) who worked in some office. A decent man, he went out early, came back late.

The room was on the first floor. My bed was next to the window. Out of the window you saw the Arabian Sea on which you saw little freighters with seamen wearing rings hopping in to boats. They would wave but I never waved back.

It was the monsoon season. You had a shower and "dried" yourself with a wet towel. The towel never dried. Every other day the towel would become mouldy and had to be thrown away.

Food? First thing in the morning I would get dressed and walk down. Catch a bus. Would alight by a Poori Bhaji stall. Then walk a bit and buy small red bananas.

Dr. Bhowani Dass

Author: 
Vinod K. Puri

Tags:

Born in 1941, Vinod was brought up and educated in Amritsar. He attended Government Medical College, and subsequently trained as a surgeon at PGI, Chandigarh. He left for USA in 1969, and retired in 2003 as Director of Critical Care Services at a teaching hospital in Michigan. Married with two grown sons, he continues to visit India at least once a year.

He did not look like a doctor. He was a tall, round- headed, athletic looking man with very short hair, which would today qualify as a buzz-cut. His features were thick\; hue dark that in north India is charitably termed ‘wheatish', and his face had the appearance of healed pockmarks. Yet his cultured voice belied his appearance. He had a look of constant amusement on his face. He usually wore white shirt and pants. 

His clinic was located past D.A.V School (in Amritsar) that I attended. After crossing Hathi Gate and actually in what was known as Katra Praja, his clinic did not inspire much confidence. The usual brown painted wooden benches for the waiting patients were often empty.  The compounder's enclosure behind which his non-descript assistant mixed elixirs and medicines was also unprepossessing. A sign in white letters on a small wood panel indicated that Dr. Dass's consultation fee was 5 rupees. By itself it was an unusual sign, as general practitioners in town were not ‘consulted.' They were simply paid for the medicines that they dispensed.

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