Mind of my Stroked Brain

In the past decade more than anytime earlier, our media (print, traditional tv, internet, social media, OTT, etc) they have all evolved and become more and more complex with more choices. While these categories of content have existed in the past also, they have increasingly got merged (amalgamated) making it hard to distinguish them with hard boundaries. There might be many more, but I broadly bucket them into 3 categories: 1. Entertainment 2. Information 3. Noise/ Disinformation 4. Purposeful time  Even news, which is supposed to be only information, depending on the channel, has various percentages of disinformation and entertainment. Of them #3 is the hardest thing to identify. Usually it is very difficult to identify it in isolation. We can Only recognise that it is mostly noise and disinformation when we consume similar content from different sources for a period of time and are able to recognise the patterns in them and be able to contrast them. The first two categories however

Last night, the TV remote hung for some reason and didn't work. When it was time to sleep, it didn't work to switch off the TV. The nurses tried for sometime. Tried the usual, which we all do - taking it closer, slapping it on their palm, opening and adjusting the batteries... It wouldn't relent.  Then they did the next logical thing - try and find the "off" button on the TV. I have a "smart TV". It will outsmart anyone trying to find the off switch. It has no buttons on it. (Don't know if it's by design or they simply forgot to put it!) Anyway it was fun! Not their struggle, but the recollection of a similar scenario... When I was in the hospital (just after the stroke), there was a TV in my room. It had a peculiar mechanism. All the buttons on the remote worked, except the "power" button. So you had to go to the TV and switch it on, then operate the remote. The "on" button was hard to find on the TV - it was somewhat hard to

Some days back, my high school friend contacted me on chat. I used to meet a bunch of them often. Social media reunion. It used to be fun. There used to be a overactive WhatsApp group. They were a bunch of very networked and informed group. So they would have surely known about my stroke. The language and tone of interaction made it certain that he knew. Yet the chat was dancing around the main thing. After so long, amongst so many of them in that group, he had mustered up the courage to make contact, yet the poor fellow was clearly struggling to ask the question how I was doing now. I remember, there was a Cancer Survivor in that group. He had a relapse sometime close to my stroke. I had met him a few times in the group. But I never had the courage to meet him alone. Never had the courage to ask him directly how he was and about his illness. But seriously, how do we do it, interact when uncomfortable? There is no training for it. All the time when we are growing up, mostly, these are