Aravind's Personal Blog

Soon after my parents got married on the second day of 1951, my father built a small house in our ancestral village in a south Indian state. The one-bedroom dwelling with a mini-courtyard (actually two, in both front and back) and an open kitchen was built in a corner of my paternal grandfather’s property. In those days that house stood like a laser among candles. Ironically, my parents never lived in that house. I suspect the decision to informally abandon that house was partly the result of the time my parents spent on a long vacation that followed their wedding. It was sort of an extended honeymoon, for several months in New Delhi, the nation’s capital, more than 1150 miles north of our village. India just became a Republic a year before and what followed was a mass exodus of people from the educated south to the capital city in the north seeking suitable employments in the several newly created government departments. I recall my parents telling us that they stayed in Karol Bagh, a

I had my cochlear implant (CI) on the right ear exactly 15 years ago last month. It has been a very productive and gratifying journey, restoring, I would say, more than 75% of hearing in my right ear; much more than I expected. I first learned about CI in 1984 through an article in the New York Times on March 27th. That morning my associate and research mentor, Jag Gulati, spotted the NYTimes article and passed it to me. By noon, excited by the prospect of the new procedure, our senior mentor and the famous cardiologist, Ed Sonnenblick called the CI surgeon at the NYU Bellevue Hospital who apparently performed the first surgery there to enquire the suitability of me having the CI. As the CI surgeon explained, the procedure was still in its infancy, and told my mentor that if I can respond to a “hello” then I was not a candidate. This was the scenario in mid-1980s. During the next quarter-century, CI hardware evolved from a body-worn crude device to a most sophisticated programmable mu