Siren, Surgery

Have been sort of light on posting lately because of technical difficulties with my rickety laptop that no one seems able to solve. But wanted to briefly put up a couple of pictures in the interim, while my connectivity ever-so-tenuously holds.

Up here in Pondicherry (a former French colony that still has a distinctly French feel to it), I saw this woman the other day, standing by the sea, wailing (moaning, maybe) intermittently in a low voice, just outside the gates of an guest house at the ashram. It was unclear whether she was doing it out of spirituality or something else, but I found it sort of weird and beautiful, like the women in the Odyssey.



Then yesterday I scrubbed in and watched one of the surgeons, Dr. Venkatesh, operate on cataract patients for a couple of hours, cutting out cloudy lenses and putting in artificial replacements, one after the other, in amazingly quick procedures. One would be wheeled out as the next patient came in, and he would switch to the new patient in a minute, already working on the new eye.