Mind of my Stroked Brain

Sometime in 2015 (I think late 2015), I started saying a chant. I don't know if it is a chant/ sloka/ mantra/ prayer etc., I refer to it as a chant going forward. I started saying it. Once everyday definitely and sometimes more than once a day if I felt like it.  It was quite a long chant in Sanskrit with 185 stanzas if I remember correctly. I have heard many famous musicians recite it in many different ways. I had not liked any of them. There was one particular rendition I had liked a lot . It was very slow, very clear and he had a very good voice. That particular rendition took 42 minutes . At a regular pace and not loudly but a silent chant would take about 16-18 minutes for me. When I learnt it, i think it took me something like 2½ months to finally remember it and recite it in one go. When I started with it, it seemed like an impossible task. I think what helped was engaging as many senses as I could to make the impressions on my mind. I used to read it, play the chant on my p

I have been interacting with chatGPT (open AI) recently. I am reasonably aware of technology. I am certainly not an expert but I don't consider myself "technology illiterate". I find it remarkable. A little beyond remarkable actually... If someone is not technology literate, it is nothing short of pure magic! I know I am suffering from the novelty factor and the feeling will wane, but I am stumped by the capability. I am not very sure if it is a good thing for us though. It certainly is a very brilliant tool which can be very useful, but will we end up using it at the cost of our development. I know, I know, why did we have to build and use calculators when log scales did the job. I get the argument. I however feel the earlier advances gave us productivity but this one - while giving enormous productivity will do so at the expense of retiring our brains. Yes, it has happened many times earlier. Earlier we could remember phone numbers, significant event dates, appointments

This thought was triggered by a conversation I had with my wife. To be accurate, a conversation my wife had with me. I had made a video - a sort of collage of photos for my daughter's birthday. It was a fun video. However, making it took a while. Except for the last 3 years, I have a very very huge archive of photos. So I looked through every one of them over many many days, selecting and shortlisting them. During all those days, It brought back memories of all those times all those years. The memories evoked all kinds of emotions - Joy, happiness, sadness, deep sense of loss, etc. Dealing with those emotions and feelings took more time than seeing and shortlisting the photos. We humans have evolved over millions of years. How and why are debatable, but the debate of millions of years has been put to rest. It has been about 200 years since photography was invented and a little over a hundred years for the video. A couple of thousand years of getting portraits painted before that (a

When I had my stroke and got back to coherent thinking after a few weeks, I realised I had completely forgotten a few things. There was no order to it, like all things in a timeframe or some other pattern.. It was completely random. It was not like the feeling one gets when some details are forgotten about an incident. It was completely removed from memory like it never happened. Like it never happened in my life. At the same time, some things from memory, which I have never remembered, or paid attention to, became absolutely crystal clear. Eg, I used to spend a lot of time when I was very young, monkeying on my rooftop. Stuff would pop up from there. The exact branches from our mango tree, the shape and even the bristles in the wooden stick - which I would pretend to be a sword, the way the zinc sheets were bolted down atop the shed I would climb, the grill on the ventilator atop the kitchen, I even remembered the shape of the cobwebs on that grill. That amount of detail was unnerving

In recent times, I have encountered the phrase "running around like headless chicken" and each time I have thought, surely whoever coined that phrase had no idea - the headless chicken is not running anywhere, period. It got me thinking on another thing - "muscle memory". Something I have heard so many times. And have taken for granted a lot. Every indication now was contrary to that understanding. If my muscles, for all their repetitions of so many things had done , had an iota of memory, something would have moved. Sure, they have memory. Every cell has dna which is a record or memory of the entire body. But it is purely biological. Unconscious. There was no conscious memory. Here is my thinking: We can regularly exercise and feed it nutritional food. But we can only make muscles strong, flexible, agile, etc. But memory, no way. Without the brain or mind more specifically, they are nothing. When Neeraj Chopra threw the Javelin, he didn't know the angle, he did

There are many instances from my past that i cant recollect after the stroke. Its as if the stroke cleanly deleted them randomly. Timeline is no matter. Some instances are recent and some long back. I have also doubted myself whether the stroke is just a convenient way for me to explain away simple forgetting of something from the past... If some more details of the instance from others jogs some recollection, i conclude its just forgetfulness. If seems like compltely unaware of, almost like others are screwing with me, i conclude that it might have happened and the stroke erased it. It's a lot easier to convince me that hypothetical instances actually happened with me these days 😀

In the initial days of stroke, i used to get very emotional when anyone had food or drink in front of me. I used to feel so very bad. It was gut wenching to struggle with a spoon of water and have someone glug down bottles of water.. or hearing which dishes were better at some restaurant or hear arguments as to what to order from swiggy... Then i came home and everyone did a phenomenal job in being considerate not eating or bringing any food in front of me, except for the occassional tea. Coffee was still banned, fearing the aroma would set me off ( i still had the trac and couldnt smell anything). My poor daughter still struggles to hide the junk she eats.. Over a period i realised i was not that which triggered it when i saw foods. I thought over time i have adjusted and become less emotional. But that wasnt the case. I have realised that the desire to eat something, apart from feeling hungry, is complex. Its like going to a restaurant and being given a menu. When you order something