The Life of a Marginally Productive Workaholic in a Nutshell

a self portrait-in-words by  Santosh Helekar

Growing up in Goa was everything I could have asked for. I could play a lot, eat all kinds of fish all I wanted, and take long naps in the afternoon.

I wanted to be a cricketer – at first a century batsman, then a spinner, then a fast bowler, and finally an all-rounder. I grew up to become a part-time alley batsman who patted lazy balls down the alley back to a friendly under-arm bowler because neither of us wanted to invest in the effort to run across the road to fetch the ball, and a part-time under-arm electric pole-end bowler who perfected a rather deceptive type of chinaman.

I have had dreams of becoming an astronaut, a doctor, a cancer researcher, a restaurant owner, some kind of brain science guy, a high school teacher, a physicist, an astronomer, an armchair thinker, a neurophysiologist, a consciousness researcher, a Goan restaurant owner and a writer. I could only manage to become some kind of brain science guy who dabbles in consciousness research, and still thinks of owning a Goan restaurant, and becoming an armchair thinker and a writer.

I was born in Panaji in the last century to a shy but affable housewife, and an assertive but charming delegado de saude. Childhood in Chimbel was loads of fun. Chovoth, Diwali, festam, zatra, weddings, natkam, tiatr, roadside black and white movies, koinne baal, goddeanim, cricket, cricket commentary, football, kabaddi, the occasional circus, and the cold and icy damoon chepoon paanch poixe, sums it all up for me.

Of unshakable memories, mine was having to wear from age four to age ten three serially age-matched, black, almost transparent Elpar bush shirts and three matching, but thankfully opaque, Gabardine half-pants. These were tailored en masse from the last remaining yards of broadcloth in the most unfrequented clothing store in Panaji, by a crusty old man who had instinctive knowledge of the projected growth charts of variably well-fed adolescent boys, and who also possessed the added advantage of being hard to miss if you entered the second door on your right, opposite the banyan tree, just before the poder's bend in the main road in Chimbel.

Of childhood traumas, I am lucky to be alive with my masculinity unscathed from the assault of being the only boy in the fourth standard classroom of a convent school for girls, and with my mentality free of any inconvenient moral strictures, not counting the self-enforced vow of life-long poverty.

I cannot blame what I have become on any deficiencies in my lineage, my upbringing or my education. None of the knocks on the head that I can remember receiving were particularly hard, unless one of them was of a kind that selectively erased its own memory. People's High School, Dhempe College and Goa Medical College were generally fair and charitable to me. They had teachers that even tried hard to inspire me despite being choked by a rigid and fragmented curriculum.

The National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bangalore is supposed to mend people's minds, not wreck them. They would have passed out a circular, handed down from the Ministry of Health and duly signed by the Director General, if they had decided to make an exception with the one I had in my possession while I walked its corridors, trying to change my perspective on the mental world of others.

Baylor College of Medicine in Houston is a habitat for all kinds of minds, where mine got me a Ph.D. in brain science, working me long and hard trying to understand what is wrong with the brain cells of mice that are genetically prone to have epileptic seizures. There, my mind, with more time in the postdoctoral slammer, even eked out a basic discovery relevant to how normal brain cells develop mature communication channels. There, I could even become a certified armchair thinker, and have my thoughts packaged as a bona fide theory to explain how literal sparks become figurative ones.

There, I now live and enjoy the life of an unrepentant, marginally productive workaholic trying to see if I can put my overactive imagination to some practical use. I am fortunate that my lone wife and two children of serially age-matched attire-wearing ages let me do it.

So there you have it.

Santosh Helekar
December 28, 2002

Santosh Helekar Posts:

The Palming of   ' Medical Palmistry'

Illegal banning of the Kashti

Two New Commandments

The Post-Marriage story

The Hypocrisy which unites Fundamentalists

The Caste System of India: earliest form of skin color-based racist apartheid system.

Human migration into India - new genetics data