A month's worth of newness

Well it’s been more than month since I have posted anything here and it’s damn well about time I changed that. I have been incredibly busy and have been totally absorbed by medical school and all the burdens that go with moving to a totally new place and getting adjusted to living there. But now I have begun to settle down into a fairly convenient routine and can give a good retrospect of the month that just passed.

On August 8, I boarded a painfully early morning flight from Los Angeles to St. Louis to start medical school at Washington University. The founders of my school must have been fond of misunderstandings, since its name provokes a lot of confusion.

“Is it in Washington?”

“Is it in Washington, D.C.?”

These are the two most common follow-up questions I get whenever I talk to someone not in the medical community. No wonder that in 1976, the Regents of the university finally sneaked in the qualifier “in St. Louis” to the school’s name to make it “Washington University in St. Louis.”

Usually its shortened to either WashU or WUStL. 

BTW if you haven’t got it by now, the school was named after our first president.

Orientation was from August 9-12. I was at a slight advantage at meeting a lot of my new classmates because more than half of the class had arrived in St. Louis early to do a week-long community health program. First day went by fairly briskly, and I spent an awful lot of time shaking hands and smiling and introducing myself. The two most common questions following introductions – “Where are you from?” and “Where did you do your undergrad?”

If time permitted, these were usually followed by “Where are you living right now?”

That evening, the school rented out the entire City Museum from 6-9 and threw a lavish reception party, replete with an open bar and a generous dinner. This was the type of affair with waiters circulating in and out of crowds, carrying trays laden with delicious appetizers and some kind of wine. The entire top brass showed up, and the Dean of admissions was seated at my table. I was awestruck. This man was literally directly responsible for my admission to the school. He was my interviewer way back in November of last year, and he was the one I wrote to express my interest after being waitlist. And he was the one who called me the next day to announce the happy news.

There were four other students at the table, and the talk turned to California. My class has a lot of Californians. The Dean made a joke about it: “When the creator made the world, he/she took the whole North American landmass and shook it thoroughly, and all the nuts fell down to California.” 

Hey-O!

The rest of the orientation days were, sadly, neither as eventful nor as exciting. We were bombarded with lectures and protocols and forms. Orientation culminated in what has now become a standard practice among medical schools, the white coat ceremony. It is a fairly recent tradition (Wikipedia tells me it was first introduced in late 1980’s) that marks the initiation of new medical students into the medical community. Each student is given a white coat and the class as a whole recites an oath to uphold the principles of medicine.

WashU makes us construct our own oath, partly because the Hippocratic oath is terribly outdated (it includes clauses like "to live in common with him[i.e. teacher] and, if necessary, to share my goods with him; To look upon his children as my own brothers, to teach them this art." ) and partly because the school acknowledges that while the main tenets of medicine may not change, each new generation of physicians-to-be brings its own set of ideals. 

For that purpose, we were split into small groups. Each group, under the guidance of a faculty mentor, spent two hours brainstorming various ideas worthy of including in the oath. Two representatives were appointed from each group, and all the representatives met again to write the final product. If anyone is interested, here is the oath in full: Oath.

Now normally, I am faintly leery of such displays of solemnity because I think people take them for granted, thus diluting the significance of these events. However, I was very impressed with the gravitas and authenticity of the whole ceremony. Granted, we are all at a very young stage in our careers, but the boisterious idealism on display at the white coat ceremony is necessary to sustain the tough years ahead. Plus, everyone’s parents had a nice reason to feel happy and overwhelmed, which is always good. This post has grown too long already, and I will talk about classes, daily life etc. in my next post.

On the Road - 11: Viva Las Vegas

On a sweltering July 27, I set off for a mini-vacation to Las Vegas. With me in the car were two friends, M. and R., both of whom I have known for more than fifteen years. We packed our car wisely: a half-eaten box of Pappa John's finest, two mountainous crates of bottled water ("buy one get one free" at Rite-Aid), a dazzling array of beverages thoughtfully buried in chips of ice in a giant cooler, and two ipods filled with road trip-appropriate music.

This was R's first time to Vegas so he was very excited. He kept asking all sorts of questions, most pertinent, others not so much. Pretty soon we were out on the Interstate 15, going a leisurely 80 miles and admiring the scenery. The land out there is so bleak and so vast that it naturally inspires awe and a deep sense of isolation. The mountains that crop up alarmingly close to the roadside are stark and stern, studded with harsh rocks and nothing else.

While I was busy driving, M. snapped pictures from the passenger seat.

3.5 hours and multiple iterations of "Hotel California" later, the Vegas skyline emerged triumphantly from the desert. I have been to Vegas before, but each time I go I feel the same feeling of contentment at the first sight of the skyline. Vegas has a rejuvenating quality to it. The city itself is nothing short of a miracle, prospering (although not so much in the recent years) in the middle of the desert and being an evergreen hope-refueling station for millions for decades. During day it looks surprisingly ordinary. At night, with all the lights turned on in their full glory, it transforms into an astonishing world, one that is self-contained and endless at the same time. It is earnest without being too ironic. Which is why it is able to pull off showy gimmicks without seeming kitschy. Where else would you be able to visit a replica of the Eiffel Tower or see a miniature Statue of Liberty or a giant-ass Sphinx without lapsing into peals of derisive laughter? Vegas takes itself seriously, and that compels you to do the same. True, its unabashedly consumerist and capitalist nature turns many away, but the beauty of the strip is it offers something for everybody. You can manage to have a terrific time without once having to gamble. Or drink. Just walking around and seeing the charged crowds gliding on the hot concrete is enough to get the adrenaline going. I have walked many many miles on UCLA's campus over the last four years, but none of them can beat the walks I have taken on the illuminated strip at midnight.

Reader's Log Part II: The Man and the Premise

Welcome back everyone! Today I’m going to give a brief (Brief!) introduction to Rousseau and the central premise his 1762 piece, “The Social Contract.”

Rousseau was a philosopher, political theorist, and writer who graced the European arena from 1712 to 1778. He was a Calvinist-turned-Catholic generally regarded as something of a heretic. Rousseau lived a tumultuous and messy law, a portion of it on the run from censors. His achievements include founding the autobiographical genre, shaping the development of the modern novel, and inspiring almost every detail of the French Revolution.

Rousseau believes in the Republic. He envisions a system in which the people are the state. Each individual citizen gives himself and all his resources over to the state, and is henceforth both a member and a trustee of the collective good. The state itself is governed by the “general will,” which is the net sum of its citizens’ individual wills.

Why this particular system? What would a Republic of this nature give Rousseau that a constitutional monarchy, perhaps with a Bill of Rights, would not?

Rousseau believes that nothing can resist brute force. John Locke had, in the late 17th century, proposed a system of rights and limits that would intervene between the government and the people. Rousseau apparently does not think these safeguards are strong enough. Rousseau believes that the only way to protect people from the government is if the people are the government. Because the resources of the state are the resources of the people, the majority will would be backed up by the majority of force in the state. It is an elegant solution, but notoriously difficult to implement in practice.

In the coming weeks, I’ll attempt to tackle key elements of Rousseau’s theory. Please note that these are the musings of a mere student, one without much formal training and who is working outside the scope of his own department. I earnestly invite anyone interested or educated in these matters to please, please chime in and comment on these logs!

Next time: Was Rousseau a Socialist?

Happy first birthday UG!!!

We here at UG are very proud and happy to announce that today is this little guy's very first birthday! In a year, we published more than 150 posts and got more than 14000 visits. Now these are obviously not blogger of the year numbers, but they are fairly heartening for us since we didn't do much other than write our idle thoughts and opinions.

This auspicious day calls for a celebration so will you please put your hands together for the lovely Marilyn Monroe singing "Happy Birthday":



In addition, I have dug up four posts from our archives for you to enjoy.

• The "On the Road" series has been the most popular reading material on this blog, with over ten installments. Initially, I conceived it as a travelogue of sorts as I traveled around the country for medical school interviews. Next week, I am leaving for St. Louis to start medical school at the Washington University. Here are my thoughts about my interview day visit to the city: On the Road-8

• The squirrels at UCLA are notorious for their monstrous appetites, tenacity and open defiance. Here's a post about them, written back in October: Squirrelus Bruinus: here, there, everywhere

• One of the earliest posts on this blog dealt with medical ethics, written by our resident ethicist and Francophone, Citizen Lafayette. Relieve it to get a view of his moral compass and his impressive intellectual depth: The Ethical and Practical Problems of Medical Rationing

• Our third blogger, Your Faithful Servant, has been largely silent over the past year but she was very vital in redecorating our site (all that fancy artwork that adorns the banner was designed by her). She seems to have preferred quality over quantity because her post about cooking a spectacular meal was, how do I say it, very filling: An America Saturday

Hope you keep coming back to our little corner of the vast internet!

Strange encounters - 2: The story of Jean-Paul Sartre and the free swipe to Late Night

Ten days ago, I wrote about how I was rudely interrupted at lunch by a girl (a complete stranger) who foisted her phone number - unsolicited - on my sudoku-deprived soul.

Writing about that encounter inspired me to write about a few more. Whereas the lunch incident was just plain bizarre, the one described in this post was pleasantly out of the norm. Coincidentally, this one happened in De Neve dining hall as well.

For years one of the major attractions of De Neve has been the availability of delicious fast food after hours i.e. from 9-midnight. This service, called late night, is enormously popular among starving (and not-so starving) UCLA students who flock there like moths to a light source, especially during finals week. Even apartment dwellers congregate here owing to the general cheapness of food.

One fine night my roommate and good friend JP and I walked up the hill from our apartment to avail ourselves of some burgers and curly fries with parmesan and a giant container of sprite. As we waited in line, I ignited a complicated philosophical debate. Around that time I was suffering through my "Sartre phase". Jean-Paul Sartre was a French post-WWII philosopher, public intellectual, litterateur, and an all-around badass who is arguably France's greatest gift to the thinking world. He provided a major boost to the philosophical movement of existentialism through his now seminal lecture "Existentialism is a humanism", and later through his numerous plays and novels and a largely unreadable opus "Being and nothingness."

In those days, I was valiantly wading through his book of collected essays and was naturally itching to discuss some of the stuff with someone. My closest target being JP (BTW I just realized my roommate and Sartre share initials, sort of), I took my aim.

Reader's Log Part I: Why the Enlightenment?

Hello everyone! So, I have a quick personal story to relate: Last week, I happened to attend Mass at the University Catholic Center of my alma mater, and caught one of the final homilies there by Father Ivan, a wonderful priest who always seems to nail down simple but elusive truths. His topic was passion, and his premise was that, regardless of what we are passionate about, nurturing that fire and developing one’s gifts would ultimately help us do God’s will.

I’m passionate about the Enlightenment, so dammit, I’m gonna run with it and hope it makes itself relevant!

I’ve been re-reading Rousseau’s “The Social Contract,” and have decided to start a reading log. The problems with this approach is that, as you proceeds in a book on political theory, the questions you have tend to answer themselves, and the impressions you get are modified by new information. So, I’m tackling the book in chunks, and am trying my best to stay focused on the larger picture.

In my next post, I’ll focus on the first book of “The Social Contract,” particularly Rousseau’s opinions on property. In the meantime, I’m going to force you to endure a few sentences explaining my personal interest in the Enlightenment. I expect you will find them incredibly dull.

For those unfamiliar with “The Enlightenment,” it was an intellectual movement from the late 1600’s until 1800 that emphasized the application of reason to every human problem. It is the movement of that birthed both the USA and the French Revolution.

So, let’s start off with a question: Why the Enlightenment? Why study political and philosophical thought devoted to solving the particular questions of the eighteenth century, especially when the answers it provided were embodied in the dysfunctional government of Revolutionary France? The great thinkers have moved on in the last 200 years; why haven’t I?

I think the appeal of the Enlightenment is best expressed by Enlightenment thinker Emmanuel Kant:

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! “Have the courage to use your own understanding,” is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.”

In other words, the Enlightenment is about faith: faith in reason. Enlightenment thinkers had a faith that reason could solve every problem, and (perhaps more importantly), that with proper understanding, and a dash of courage, every person is capable of rational thought. This faith is fundamental to belief in free will, and is the foundation of my own worldview. It is a faith that has been under attack in the 200 years since the Enlightenment.

I lack the philosophical muscle to prove or disprove the existence of rational free will. But, I can put it to the test, and see what conclusions it yields. So, I’m studying Rousseau to understand the logic that underpins the American and French Republics,  and to see where that logic leads.

Rousseau was the last and greatest of the Enlightenment thinkers. To a point, all subsequent human thought could be considered a particular interpretation or reaction to Rousseau.  I want to gauge whether this giant of the Enlightenment was capable of cutting through the most difficult philosophical knots, or whether he simply leaves our thoughts as tangled as ever.

Stay tuned.

Thoughts on the conclusion of the Harry Potter phenomenon

The last Harry Potter movie hit theaters with the impact of an artillery shell last week. Millions of rabid fans dressed up as their favorite characters and lined up hours before showtime to celebrate the end of the thrilling saga of "the boy who lived".

I was airborne when the movie arrived, squiggling around in a miserable economy class seat, itching to get off at Los Angeles. I obviously didn't get to see it on opening day, and since most of my friends had already seen it, couldn't find anybody to come with me until today. I saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 in a 70% empty theater in Anaheim Hills. And I thought it was the best out of all eight.

Now plenty of reviewers and internet pundits have done some extensive analysis on the movie and expounded upon its many themes, prominently highlighting the end of childhood aspect of it. I won't do much of that anymore because, frankly, it's boring at this point. I just wanted to offer some of my personal thoughts on it.

I am huge huge HP fan since I was 11. That's when my parents bought me the four-book set (the fifth one hadn't come out yet). I think I finished them off in a span of a month. I was so sorely disappointed that the fifth part wasn't going to be out for a long time that I spent hours conjuring up storylines for it. I have a rule that I don't read the same book twice, but I made a grudging exception for HP. In later years (after all seven were out), I would randomly pick up one of them and flip right to my favorite parts. I remember spending an obscene amount of time on this one website, called hp-lexicon.com, reading up on every little detail and reveling in the eclectic essays posted by crazed fanboys. (BTW, last I heard the owner of hp-lexicon got sued by Rowling over plans of writing an encyclopedia and lost)

The world crafted by Rowling is incredibly imaginative and very complete. Her attention to details is admirable (minor plot points initiated in, say, the second book find resolution in the sixth). Her humor (or humour, I guess, in her honor) is like Diddy Riese cookies: thoroughly delicious and always fresh. Sure she kept readers waiting for answers in the early books - what is up with the diary? Why can Harry talk to snakes? - but the payoff was worth the long waits.

I grew up with the books and it was one hell of a decade living with more books or movies to look forward to. But I guess it must all end at some point. Hope the actors find other good work down the line, and more importantly, Rowling overcomes her firm insistence on not writing anything Harry related. Would love to experience that thrill, that anticipation all over again.