Aravind's Personal Blog

Few weeks ago I was in the emergency room in the local hospital for a minor ailment. While waiting to be hauled for a CT scan, I overheard a nearby patient give his year of birth to the nurse. It was 1935, the same year my mother was born. For a few moments I was glad and then sad; glad, because someone purportedly of my mother's age is still living, sad because my mother is not. Of course, it is a known fact that the average life expectancy in India is about a decade lower than that in the US (69.7 versus 78.9 years, to be exact ). My mother died on Feb 26, 2013, in the ICU of a hospital in our hometown in India, two-and-half hours after I reached her bedside. About fifty hours earlier, she called me as she was getting ready to be transported to the hospital by ambulance. All she could say was that she was having shortness of breath and waiting to be rushed to the hospital. I did not realize at that time that it was meant to be our last conversation. In the summer of 2010, Atul G...

Everyone has Guardian Angels in their life at one time or the other; I have been lucky enough to have them for most of the time. Apart from parents, siblings, and cousins, they are the ones to look out for you in times of trouble and be your guide in life’s journey. Most of the time the angels' roles are filled by the closest of friends and associates. Earlier I wrote about my two friends who guided me in my transition to adult life during my university days ( here , here , and here ). This one is about an earlier phase in my life, in my childhood and teenage life when my three buddies were the defacto Guardian Angels in elementary, middle, and high school and college undergrad studies. Bheem, Jan, and I have been close friends since elementary school. Ram joined Jan and me in college. I had a whole bunch of other friends during my student days but these three were way special. Even after 60 years, we continue to be in touch and chat very often. Bheem (short for Bheemanna) is the...

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...

( dedicated to the numerous nieces and grandnieces on the International Women's day, 2021 ) My parents loved girls. They didn’t have daughters of their own but they treated and considered a whole bunch of girls their own. Since my mother’s seventh death anniversary last month, I was thinking what my parents' best trait was - They loved kids in general but girls were very special to them. They were married 70 years ago and spent most of their married life as migrants in a distant place away from their relatives. Although very closely acquainted with the numerous nieces, my parents missed the day-to-day interactions with them. My parents made several friends, many of them families with girls, and considered those girls their own. My parents believed that girls bring a great amount of sanity and good fortune to the household. As much as they loved their sons, my parents felt that angels do not tread around the house without daughters. This was a special trait in the highly patriar...

F orty years is an important milestone, more so for immigrants forever trying to make a home far away from home (as if it still is). For some, like me, it is not just a milestone but a transition point, from young to old, and an apt moment to reflect on the life and times that went past. As the saying goes, “ it is not the destination that is important but the people we meet and the lessons we learn ”, I had the opportunity to meet several and learned a lot in these forty years. I am greatly thankful for the opportunities life offered. Research at Einstein: Following my arrival in the summer of 1980 at the AECOM , it became our home for 17 productive and enjoyable years. Einstein offered me the opportunity to indulge in various scientific pursuits and also gave Jaya the chance to work. Those were the exciting times for biomedical research and grants were less competitive. We met several people, made friends and acquaintances in the research community and in the neighborhood. Snow, rai...

Edgar Villchur (1917-2011) was an American acoustics pioneer best known for his work on hi-fidelity loudspeakers and hearing-aids. His contribution to hi-fidelity loudspeakers is so important that his speakers have been placed on permanent exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution since 1993 . Without a relevant degree in the field of acoustics, as he told me, he managed to co-found an acoustics company after world war II, ran it for about 15 years, and sold his share for a huge profit. He then opened the Foundation for Hearing Aid Research, in Woodstock, and started working from a home laboratory to improve hearing aid technology.  I first met Villchur in the spring of 1985. That time he was trying to recruit volunteers for his project in developing compression hearing aids. I was referred to him by my audiologist at Einstein for biweekly sessions. By the first few meetings, we became well acquainted such that before each session we used to talk about our families, backgrounds...