Holiday in France

Holidays are great. You take time off your routine wake up- work –work out- sleep routine and you get time for yourself. At least holidays have to be like that. They should not be filled with itineraries jam packed with things to do and sights to see but they should be occasions to spend time alone and with your spouse and introspect and assimilate. Assimilation and introspection can give you some great ideas about life as a whole and the next step ahead in particular. Holidays should provide the time to contemplate sbout at what stage in life we have arrived, where exactly are we heading, what our goals are and how to get there.  Just collecting memories of sights, places and perfect photographs alone cant make a holiday great, I think.

I have at this point reached a stage where I work as a consultant orthopedic surgeon specializing in sports surgery and shoulder. I love my job. I love the place I work. I am married and have a sweet wife who is good to me most of the times.  That’s the best she could do I suppose.

I am passing through great French countryside with canals, lush green forests and pasture. It is beautiful. I am sitting on TGV, the high speed train of France and Europe.

The plan next is to expand my practice. Obviously every surgeon likes to operate more.  To get the right patients and to convince them for surgery has been a challenge for shoulder surgery.

The way to do it, I am not yet sure about how to go about it. But what I can tell is I am not going to die for it. I would like to “make” great surgeries yes, for sure. But the whining will not be there. On the long run, all that matters is contentment in life.  I can make millions and still not be happy with it. I will take life easy. I am not going to make it big like Sachin Tendulkar or Amitabh bachan in this life. Because the profession I have chosen is such. Also, the pressure of fame is not a good thing. I pity famous people. Well, fame and money is all that the world is after.  But one should know where and when to stop the search as the search is endless. The purpose becomes lost when the search gets into you and starts ruling you. I guess narrow mindedness has no place in the pursuit of happiness and fame and money. Selfishness cant give you long term happiness. Protecting your interests – how important is it?

Well, I don’t know. I will know in ten years. Life teaches you lessons with time. You can’t learn them all in one day.  Learning and aging gracefully is the goal.

Train journeys have been good for me. This in fact is the one I am taking after a  long time. The y give you time to sit back, while enjoying the country, you can think.

Toulouse has been great in some respects – like learning shoulder work. Dr Kany is a guy like Thin, only much more agile and active, and jovial at the same time. Toulouse is sort of a place I would like to visit, not too big, not too small, not much to see, so lots of time with yourself. Bernard and Christian have been good hosts, they arranged a wonderful dinner yesterday night with Ratatouille and Apple pie and lots of wine and whiskey. I loved it. We had discussions ranging from Robert Kennedy to EU elections to French history to history of the Church of England. We also had a couple from Switzerland joining us, which was good. They say Paris would be great but I doubt it.

What did we do in Toulouse? We walked on the endless cobbled streets and alleys in the centre ville. Lots of huge brick buildings. Had lunch at a vegetarian buffet place, which I liked, and Siva didn’t. Went for a swim at Leo Lagrange, a local swimming pool, olimpique size, which I liked. Sat on the banks of Garonne braving short spells of warmth and cold and rain. Went around the centre ville on the free shuttle bus. Visited a few museums – the hall of fame in the place du capitol, the Musee de Augustins showcasing Roman sculpture and art and religious art from medieval times. I hired a cycle from the excellent public cycle hire system in Toulouse called Velo Toulouse and went around the city by cycle. Visited the Les Abattoires – museum of modern art where humungous sized paintings were on display. It might surely take tremendous time and effort to complete such paintings to perfection.

The churches – cathedrals we visited were huge brick buildings built 500 – 600 years ago, some as early as 12^th or 13^th century.  France seems to be a religious nation to me, the cathedrals are divine, the silence and the pipe music both pulling you inwards. I see a lot of families with young men and children attending mass. JK is good, but I disagree with his idea that any religion is madness. To me, faith is a wonderful thing; religious places are like oasis in this desert of selfishness, lust and ambition. They help you reflect and meditate.  Something melts inside me when I see an individual convicted in his faith, praying in front of the deity. Tears some times swell up my eyes and an emotion close to empathy prevails in me for the moment. That’s the best I could describe it. The individual can be anybody – an old man praying at a temple, a woman at the church or a small boy with all his innocence prostrating in front of the sanctum. I had a similar feeling when I saw people sitting in the mass in these Catholic churches. France is a strong catholic nation and people take religion seriously here. Religious relics are the most important monuments in Toulouse. 

People in Toulouse are quite warm. They are polite and ready to help with whatever English they can manage. Bernie was a good host, the room or rooms he offered were small yet cozy, the bathroom was congested and a little more space would have been lovely. He was ready to help anytime with any thing, which was great. He spoke the best English in Toulouse, which was a consolation.

On our way here, we stopped at Frankfurt and visited the city a good few hours.  We walked through the streets which were not crowded, reached the center place, went to a church, sat on the banks of river Maine, had a beer in the restaurant there and headed back to the airport.

One ubiquitous thing present everywhere in the air in Europe is cigarette smoke. There is no gender or age difference to smoking here. People smoke like chimneys here, polluting the whole atmosphere around them.

Sitting in the return flight to Madras, as the rest of world still knows her, I think that the days of European sunshine, bright and warm enough but not scorching like back home are over. Over are the days in cities with old giant cathedrals, rivers with medieval bridges, baguettes with cheese and spinach and tomato,  lots of street side eateries and great beer and wine.  What strikes my mind when I think about this trip is the Eiffel – an amazing masterpiece of art of the modern era. If Paris is one of the most visited cities in the world, it is not without reason. The French have been connoisseurs of art like any other people who have a reasonably long period of stable governance. Back home, the 9^th through the 17^th centuries saw great monuments built with such artistic mastery and all that was possible because there were not many wars and people had stable governments. Similarly, all over Europe we can find monuments built through the ages starting from the pre Christian era to the medieval ages to the modern times. But huge monuments in the form of cathedrals of the middle ages predominate the old cities in Europe. The architecture is of a different sort, unlike the stone temples of South India; these cathedrals are magnificent brick buildings with gothic arches, domes and stained glasses. Most of them are dedicated to the Mother Mary and are under the Vatican.

People on France have generally been warm to us. Right from our stay in Toulouse, it has been smooth going for us. Talking about Eiffel, this tower redefines beauty. The perception of beauty also is some sort of conditioning. You get told about beautiful things and you start believing that they are beautiful, just like the fad for fair skin in the sub continent. With buildings like the Notre Dame and Sacer Coer and Louvre defining beauty, the Eiffel is perhaps the only non religious monument with a revolutionary style giving a new definition to artistic beauty all together. Unlike other buildings that cover the skeleton with layers of plaster and facades and cloth and paintings, in Eiffel, the steel skeleton stands proud, as if it has got nothing to hide from the world, with the might of a warrior who looks at the world he had just conquered.