BREAKDOWN: The day my body refused to back my heart and my head.

AND a few stray thoughts on the Swedish Nobel prize-winner Svante Paabo, winner for medicine this year. For a Saturday following the week when the narcotic drug scam took a U-turn with illegal taxi-drivers selling drugs for them. For a Saturday following the week when tourists were harassing Goan families living at the heritage zone. For a Saturday following the week when I discovered that a lot of young well-to-do young people suffer from TB or tuberculosis. For a Saturday following the week when I will tell you that the MRI is the safest and the most sensitive tool of investigation.
And a few stray thoughts on when in the 75 years of my life for the first time I broke down completely on Wednesday, 05, 2022. For the first time the so called strongest man of Goa started crying in public at the Goa Medical College & Hospital. I have always been perceived as a pillar of strength by my friends and colleagues and most everybody. Someone from whom others drew strength from…the person from whom others were inspired. A person considered fearless and was not afraid of anybody or any event.
On Wednesday, October 05, I broke down totally and completely. In fact almost the whole morning I spent crying non-stop. This is because of the shocking news that confronted me, that the tests had virtually confirmed that I had TB of the spine. In addition I was told that my neck muscles were not supporting my swollen head. The last straw was the claim that there was a tumor deeply buried below one of my armpits which had to be operated to take a biopsy. This was to find out if lymph nodes were also part of the infection.
I protested that I will not go through another operation. In fact, I felt that I would rather jump off from the late Manohar Parrikar’s high Atal Sethu bridge and go to God with “josh” and “hosh.”
It all started over a month ago. I suddenly found that I had very severe pain in the neck. That I could not turn my neck either left or right. That if I wanted to talk to somebody I had to make a 365 degree turn to ensure that the pain in the neck did not get worse.
Till last week my sense of the absurd was still intact. I have been a pain in neck to hundreds, if not thousands of politicians, officials, police officers and even doctors. Not to mention my fight against the goonda of Goa including present MLA of Santa Cruz Rudolf Fernandes. So maybe I thought that all those to whom I have been a pain in neck were returning compliments and becoming a pain in my neck now.
I went to see my good friend neurosurgeon at Manipal hospital whom I known for 30 years. Without an appointment and without registering myself. Dr Ajay Netalkar welcomed me like the old friend he was. Netalkar examined my neck and found that the muscles of my neck had become weak and could not support my heavy neck. The arrogant head which had attacked politicians and doctors and almost every public officials in the state of Goa. Not because I had anything personal against them. But because I could not tolerate corruption. This was because I refused to tolerate gundagiri. This was because I refused to tolerate illegal acts by any official however senior he may be. I did not spare anybody. I had no sense of fear.
I remember once chasing a pathological goon called Popat who used to attack people with a broken beer bottle. I enjoyed unlimited power because the then owner of the oHeraldo which I edited for 20 years gave me a free hand. In fact he was even willing to challenge the then Chief Minister Pratapsingh Raoji Rane when he objected to an article I had written about his wife interfering with Kala Academy matters.
I got my courage from Antonio Caetaninho Fernandes who told Rane “I pay Rajan Narayan salary. I will decide if I should keep him or sack him.’’ AC Fernandes, a small printer only wanted prestige from being a publisher of the English edition of the oHeraldo the larger good of Goa.
For 20 years I worked at oHeraldo from 1983 to 2003. By that time the patrao AC Fernandes had passed away. The son, Raul Fernandes, was only interested in money. Manohar Parrikar had just become the chief minister. Raul started pestering me to get him a gambling licenses. I refused saying that I was a journalist and not a dalal.
The result was that with my conscience intact I decided to leave the job which I did on October 10, 2003 – as the man who edited oHeraldo, which I turned into an English newspaper 20 years back.
I had just got married to Tara Patel, an old journalist friend from Mumbai. Tara (born Pankajbala R Patel) was born in Gujarat but migrated to the island of Penang in Malaysia with her mother while she was still a little girl of three or four years – because her father had migrated to Penang earlier in search of greener pastures.
Many Indians post-independence in 1947 went out of India in search of better opportunities for jobs or for business. Unfortunately, when Pankajbala Patel which is the original name of my wife Tara Narayan, was 20 years, one of girls in the small conservative Gujarati community in Penang group, ran away with a Malay Muslim boy. So some Gujarati parents packed off their daughters to India to marry Indian boys.
Tara, like me, was a rebel. She refused to get married. She studied secretarial work and worked as a secretary for an advertising agency for some time. Then did a journalism course and got a job with the monthly Debonair edited with the late Vinod Mehta. Over 30 years in Mumbai and after five years with Debonair, later Flair magazine, she worked for Behram Contractor’s Mid-Day, later The Afternoon Despatch & Courier, The Daily.
When she arrived in Mumbai for a couple of years she was very depressed and wrote an article on different ways to commit suicide. She had come to me as editor of the Onlooker to ask if I would publish her article? I published it in the Onlooker.
Later years, she visited me in Goa at the OHeraldo and said she was keen on working in Goa. Since she was getting much higher salary in Mumbai I could not offer her job in Goa. We decided instead to get married and start the political weekly, the Goan Observer which after 20 years had to survive as an online weekly as goanobserver.in with the occasional print issue if there was enough advertising revenue.
I NEVER broke down when my father left me, my mother and my 12-year-old sister in my care. I never broke down when I was threatened by Dhirubhai Ambani for my cover story in “Business India” magazine. I never broke down when in Goa I was beaten by iron rods by hired goons, when I exposed the then speaker, Dayanand Narvekar, for molesting his secretary. I did not break down when for five years I was in various hospitals because of wrong medicine prescribed to me by the then Head of Medicine of Medicine at the GMC after I was beaten. He kept pumping me with huge doses of steroids. Steroids are a wonder drug and help reduce pain.But steroids have serious side effects and my weight went up to 180kgs.
I did not break down when I almost lost my eyes because of the steroids. When we started the Goan Observer and when I was threatened by Babush Monserrate whom I had called a “monster rat.” I did not break down at any stage of my professional life. I was threatened by politicians and goonda. I almost broke down when I lost my good friend Ashraf Hassanwale due to the criminal negligence of the GMC. Ashraf looked after me for five years when I was on steroids and visiting hospitals. A dog bit him and he developed rabies symptoms. GMC dismissed him as a case of mental illness. The neglect probably cost my friend his life, he was only 45 years with a wife and two young sons.
I can fight politicians. I can fight goonda. I can fight communal politicians. But I cannot fight my own body which has been carrying the burden of Goan people for the last 40 years. This body of mine seen as a pillar and which continued to fight against corruption and communalism. Just when I decided at the age of 75 this year I should perhaps retire, my body collapsed.
To my shock I was told that I had TB of the spine. That I had serious problems with the muscles at my neck. The bigger shock was to see in the MRI and other so many scans that there is a deep lump inside my armpit of one hand. The team of doctors said I have to operate to remove the lump but first I must do a biopsy to check if this is cancerous….then, I could not take it any longer. I collapsed and broke down completely.
For the first time in my life I cried in public in front of my friends. I am not ashamed. I have misused my body. I have not taken care of myself and perhaps this is the revenge of the Ravana against me this Dussera day.

BRAIN STRUCTURE
AND a few stray thoughts on how we have the brain structure of the Neanderthal. The Neanderthal was the second oldest human in civilisation. The Neanderthal who lived more than two lakh years ago. To be able to understand what gives intelligence to us human beings one has to read the research and evaluation of the brain in Swedish geneticist’s book ‘Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes”. Just as humans plant a seed of a banyan tree and the roots go deep into the soil and the banyan tree lives for 100s of years. Among the biggest banyan trees are the ones in Kolkata and in Puducherry.
Just as the banyan tree draws nutrition from the soil so also the human brain grows more and more intelligent and clever with evaluation. The Nobel prize-winner has discovered that memory is the key to the growth of the brain. The growth of the brain automatically enables us to launch bigger and bigger technology. Ten years ago we did not even think about mobile phones. Now we are talking about entering the 5g and maybe the 6g world.
What all this implies is that each of us have vast storage capacity in the brain. As you study from the KG to your PhD you are using the information that you have been reading. There is a limit to the capacity of even computers. But because the computer did not offer enough storage space the IT professionals came up with the proposal of the cloud. With the cloud, you have a hard disk on which you may transfer all information.
I understand that only if you create more space in the brain for being able to store more information, you can progress. The history of humanity is that of successive learning which is used to develop more knowledge. There is a difference between primitive man of old who we call the naked ape and today’s brainy human. We have to expand the capacity of our brain.
In the absence of knowledge, it was believed that man and women were descendants of progress. When Charles Darwin came out with his story of theory of evolution all the old stories were destroyed. It was Darwin who told us that humans have developed from the great apes and monkeys. They were the blueprint in the creation of the human race as we see today.
The Nobel prize-winner has gone back over 2000 years to trace the mental capacity of the oldest man on the earth. He has now discovered that the Neanderthal man is the first human being evolved into a human being. This human brain developed till we have got a Bill Gates as example! So we have to learn how to gather information and how to use the information, and how to store information.
The Nobel prize-winner spent decades abstracting the DNA from 40,000-old bones, culminating in the unveiling of the first genome. The body is made of genome sequences. To be able to understand why you like one subject and not the other subject, you have to look at genome sequences. With a latest Nobel discovery, it may be possible to build a new generation of human beings smarter than all the Bill Gates.
Already the success in discovering the DNA of sheep or goats is there — the first artificial goat Dolly was created in England. Similarly, if scientists of the calibre of Nobel prize-winners manage to master the DNA of all humans, they will contribute to the expansion of knowledge of the universe.