personal

Headless Goddesses of Tamilnadu

This entry was posted in holiday personal photography travel on by (updated 1807 days ago)

About a year back, I visited Padavedu in Tamilnadu and absolutely loved it. The fact that it was technically a forest really enticed me. It was full of paddy crops and coconut & banana trees among other things. Life seemed to be relatively stress free and people, content. My 4g Internet connection worked fine. What else does one need? I could actually see myself living in such a place with no pollution and organic food by default!

Paddy fields in Padavedu

Padavedu is nestled near mountains

The name Padavedu came into being Since Princess Renuka (who later became goddess Renuka) camped there with her army and the sacred place was named “Padai Veedu” (army encampment). This beautiful pastoral village was once the capital of Sambuvarayar Dynasty. Tamilnadu is full of myriad colourful temples. It was very interesting to see how there was one at literally every 10 metres! At one such prominent temple, I noticed that the statue of a goddess was outside the temple and that it was headless!

Headless goddess statue outside the temple

I asked people around me why that was so, and I was told that according to legend, Princess Renuka married Sage Jamadagni and had 5 sons (one of whom was Parshuram – Ram who wields the axe). She was a devoted wife who held such devotion that she used to carry a pot made purely out of unbaked clay every day to a river, to fill with water. The pot held its shape solely due to her devotion. One fine day, she saw beautiful Gandharvas at the river, frolicking around and having fun. Her attention diverted for a split second, and the pot held together by devotion, broke. When Sage Jamadagni learnt of this, he ordered his sons to decapitate their mother’s head. 4 of them refused under some pretext or the other and were consequently turned to stone by the sage. But when Parshuram (reincarnation of Lord Vishnu) arrived at the scene, he complied with his father’s wishes and indulged in matricide.

Since he had followed the instructions, he was awarded 2 boons by the sage. Needless to say after this matricide, all he asked his father was to reattach the head of his mother & to restore his brothers. The sage complied and now there are several temples all over south India that depict this legend with a headless goddess. There is a head kept separately that is annually prayed to, attached to the goddess and then again packed back. What a fascinating legend!

There are in fact several different oral versions of this legend. One has it that when Renuka’s head was restored, she multiplied into zillions of goddesses who went to separate regions in South India and all of these are now temples which are 1000’s of years old. Another version says that Renuka had fled to a low caste village, where Parshuram decapitated her and a low caste woman who was trying to help his mother. But when Sage Jamadagni reattached the heads, he mixed the bodies. So the woman with Renuka’s body and a different head became Goddess Renuka and the low caste woman with Renuka’s head became Mother goddess Yelamma. In fact Renuka Lake in the Renuka Sanctuary in Himachal Pradesh, is named after the same goddess!

Apart from these temples there are just so many fascinating temples in Tamilnadu which are over 1000’s of years old. All I could do on my Chennai to Delhi flight was wonder about the secrets & fascinating legends that these ancient temples held! 

 


A drive to the Hornbill festival with Datsun Redi-GO

This entry was posted in personal photography travel on by (updated 2550 days ago)

Recently I was invited by Datsun India to experience the Hornbill Festival at Nagaland in the Redi-GO 1.0L. Needless to say I was on board immediately, literally. I haven’t explored North East India as much as I would like to and this was a step in that direction. And I was getting to explore the hilly roads from Dimapur to Kohima on road since I personally enjoy driving as well.

So tickets were booked, bags were packed, woolens were worn and off I went one early morning from Delhi to Dimapur. There are a very few flights that service this sector and so we had a layover at Calcutta airport. Once we arrived at Dimapur airport it was a sight for sore eyes! The moment I disembarked from the tiny Air India plane, I could smell flowers in the air and not jet fuel fumes! It was a very pleasant (also literally) surprise. Dimapur airport is a tiny one where passengers get off the plane and walk to the arrivals. On our arrival we were greeted by the local team from Nissan India who were ready with our rides for the remaining journey – 2 brand new Datsun Redi-GO 1.0L cars. And by brand new I mean absolutely factory fresh. The number plates were arranged right then and we were good to go.


 

We drove till our hotel , Hotel Lake Shilloi, located in the city centre, freshened up and had a late lunch. All of Dimapur was decked up for Christmas and also closed for the same (Quite early for Xmas!) so we couldn’t do much that day. But we needn’t have bothered because we were sitting in the heart of all action. Our hotel was located right next to the city tower and soon a massive Christmas celebrations began. We sat at the terrace of the hotel which was beautifully decorated, to view the celebration from above while the sun went down in to a crowd cheering various Santas.

 

Twilight with a “star lit sky” ?? Christmas is big at dimapur in Nagaland! #_soi #travel #travelphotography #indian #incredibleindia

A post shared by Priyanka Sachar ???????️?? (@twilightfairy) on


It was a great evening, hearing local church choirs sing Christmas carols, watching Santas dance and wowing at the chinese lanterns floating away into the sky! There was a night market that had set up right on that road and it seemed like all of Dimapur was right there for the night. Of course we didn’t wish to sample the local cuisine which was more like Intestine chutney and dog meat. However the Christmas decorations and general fervor was great. The celebrations continued late into the night while we had an early morning the next day to drive to Kohima.

The next morning we dumped our luggage in the boot of our redi-GO 1.0L for the drive to Kohima. I was quite impressed by the boot space for a hatchback. The car offers a smooth driving experience, feels light and has the ground clearance of 185mm which is the best in its class. There were 4 of us driving 2 cars, so we took turns driving and exploring the car and its various features. It has good pickup and sturdy brakes. We mostly drove in low gears because it was a hilly drive. And the car didnt stall anywhere. It has a reverse gear that works the same way as in SUV’s (lift the gear and switch it into reverse). That took some getting used to. I noticed that the power window buttons were on the gear box instead of on the doors. That appeared strange and trying to open windows while someone was driving, sort of disturbs the driver.

Datsun Redi-GO

Driving with the clouds

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are a few images of the car looking splendid with the hills . It looks quite trendy and suits the pocket just right for those who are buying their first cars because it’s easier on the pocket compared to others.

 

 

 

We reached our hotel in Kohima, Hotel Cimorb around noon , freshened up and left for the hornbill festival immediately. The festival was quite exciting with a lot to do and so much to see and explore. To begin with, the place was full of cherry blossom trees that were still flowering! However they were also full of leaves so the flowers get hidden compared to when the tree has only blossoms. A beautiful sight nevertheless.

 

Church at Hornbill festival

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We had a quick lunch and set out to explore the festival which is divided into various sections at the Heritage village of Kisama. Kisama is derived from two villages namely, Kigwema (KI) and Phesama(SA) and MA which means Village. The Heritage Complex consists of a cluster of 16 houses – one for each of the 16 officially recognized Naga tribes. All of them are different and unique in their customs & traditions. It also houses food courts, bamboo hall, a church, a World War II museum, kids play area, and areas for various concerts, competitions and beauty pageants. So There are lot of activities to indulge in, ranging from watching various tribes perform their traditional rituals, to watching martial arts, music concerts, checking out local produce and horticulture and much more.

One of the tribals at Hornbill festival

Traditional folk dance at Hornbill festival

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I shopped for some succulents because they are very expensive comparatively in Delhi.

We set back and spent the night at Hotel Cimorb, which is owned by the CM. Kohima was rather chilly at night. The next day we set out very early in order to drive back to Dimapur and catch our flight. The drive back was also smooth considering that the roads between Kohima and Dimapur are really really bad and in a dismal state with a lot of repair work going on. We had our breakfast on the way at the only Vegetarian place I had seen so far, because all I had seen were rice hotels that served rice with chicken , mutton, fish even for breakfast :). Soon we reached Dimapur, handed over the cars to the dealership and headed back for Delhi. If you ask me this was just a taste, and I need to visit Nagaland again soon, to have a full meal.

 


Highlights of India Design ID 2017

This entry was posted in movie/play/event/book review personal on by (updated 2005 days ago)

This year, India Design ID celebrate​d​ 5 years and I was invited by them to attend the same. Even though I am not a designer per se, any creative individual can benefit from attending such shows. A different perspective of things is what it takes to open up one’s “Creative eye”.

So this year, India Design ID 2017 was as usual showcasing a lot of decor brands, architects, interior/exterior designers along with ID symposium featuring eminent speakers from India and abroad. The latter was the most exciting part. I would have attended all 3 days of the talks, had the venue not been extremely far from my place.

Most brands at such shows have stalls which present a “vignette” of what a consumer’s space would look like. They can replicate that exact look if the consumer wants or one can buy a la carte as well. Established names such as Arttd’inox,  Antonio Lupi, Beyond Designs, K2India, Roca, BoConcept, The Pure Concept etc were present at the show. A few brands like Apartment9 gave a “complete experience” where one would enter a stall and get transported into a completely different world, which was a result of dim lighting, appropriate music, various vignettes along with mannequins performing their roles, snacks, champagne, attendants – the works!

There were a number of pop up cafes at the India design venue, Including Nomad cafe by Park Hotels, a pop up by Le Meridien and many others.

Without further ado, here are images of some of the things that caught my eye at India design.

 
“Images from India Design 2017”

From India Design ID 2017. Posted by “PSpective” – photography by Priyanka Sachar on 2/18/2017 (30 items)

Pinwheel © Priyanka Sachar
Pencil branches © Priyanka Sachar
Flying carpets © Priyanka Sachar
J J Valaya showcasing his photography © Priyanka Sachar


A dining table with 2 hands at each end and cotton candy embedded in the table! © Pr…
Some new hair trends too! © Priyanka Sachar
The thinking man? © Priyanka Sachar
Outdoor design © Priyanka Sachar


Making quirky products with cane © Priyanka Sachar
High Chair © Priyanka Sachar
Interesting Photography by artist Asim Waqif who has printed the image and then it ha…
Loved these lamps! © Priyanka Sachar


Home decor made with pompoms inspired by marigold © Priyanka Sachar
Home decor made with pompoms inspired by marigold © Priyanka Sachar
Lamps inspired by milk cans © Priyanka Sachar
Very interesting lamp in the shape of a "choori hanger" .. the hanger itsel…


Caricatures in clay © Priyanka Sachar
Some of the stalls had a whole environment – complete with entire "room" de…
An installation at India Design ID © Priyanka Sachar
Pati, Patni aur Goat, it seems. By playclan © Priyanka Sachar


Play clan © Priyanka Sachar
Stitches on wood © Priyanka Sachar
As you must be knowing.. the doors and windows from your grandfather’s house are in v…
Gunjan arora and Rahul jain’s – Scapes Within © Priyanka Sachar


Note the saxophone door handles! © Priyanka Sachar
Amit Syngle – President, Sales, marketing, tech – Asian paints © Priyanka Sachar
Interesting lighting – this is a lifesize chandelier © Priyanka Sachar
Very interesting outdoor seating. These fluid funicular structures rising from the gr…


The colour of the year announced by Asian paints is Intense ocean .. the crowd has be…
Blue Curacao + vodka – drink inspired by "Intense Ocean" © Priyanka Sachar


Generated by Facebook Photo Fetcher 2


I attended a couple of talks at the ID symposium. One of the most interesting was Humberto Campana’s furniture design with things as quirky as chairs made out of bubble wrap or stuffed toys! Have a look.

Chair made with bubble wrap!

Chair made with stuffed toys!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He also likes using a lot of raw natural materials like cane and bamboo. One must check out more of the Campana brothers’ work here and here.

After the ID symposium got over, Asian Paints announced “Intense Ocean” as their Colour of the year. At the after party, the theme was clearly various shades of blue as we were served cocktails with a blue curacao base :). I had a good time, met a lot of creative people and it definitely gave me a few ideas for my own work as well.

 

Hostgator is Post-Traitor

This entry was posted in Customer grievances personal tech on by (updated 3440 days ago)

Here’s why you should never use hostgator’s services. They are post-traitors. They lose mail data. And then you can never get it back. In short – they can not be relied upon for hosting your data, which is precisely what their job is.

I have been using Hostgator since 4 years now for my professional photography domain www.priyankasachar.com. I started with the US servers after which my account was shifted to India servers following their expansion into India just a month after I signed up.

Since then, my experience with HG has been a living hell! Their India team is the most unprofessional team I have EVER seen for ANY service, full of incompetent duds who know nothing, pass personal comments and now they have gone and lost 6 MONTHS OF MY MAIL DATA with the following solution – “Now it can not be retrieved”.

I have raised issues several times with hostgator in the last 4 years of my painful journey and have even received calls from their US branch thanks to the unprofessional behaviour of their India support staff. I thought that with time, things will improve with the India operation because they might just be having teething troubles. However I was being impractically hopeful! Their team was AS PATHETIC 4 years back as it is TODAY.

Right after shifting to India servers, they lost a lot of my professional mail data (of 2 weeks) in June 2011 because their servers marked my mail account as a “demo account” for some stupid reason. This caused me huge losses not just in terms of the overseas opportunities I lost, but also in terms of my repute. All my clients considered ME unprofessional because I wasn’t responding to their mails, instead it was HG that was unprofessional by dropping mails and I had no idea that mails were getting dropped! Now HG has lost 6 WHOLE months of my mail data and the previous incident of June 2011 seems minor in comparison because at least then, I was able to retrieve mails from the server & get back to those who had tried contacting me and pick up pieces of my reputation somewhat, bit by bit. Currently they say that “Nothing can be done about the data loss”!! How pathetic is this organisation that loses professional data (unheard of) – the very data they are supposed to be hosting and then their employees have the gall to say that nothing can be done about it!

For the purpose of this post, I will look past the various issues I’ve faced over the years including loss of mails in June 2011, difficulties faced during account transfer to India, hosted images not showing on the site, the site being too slow, various downtimes, global outages over the years, unavailability of SSH multiple times, Google adwords credit NEVER given till date, harassment at the time of renewal for 3 years in 2012, unprofessional behaviour by Indian staff, unavailability of their tech support senior people during all this time, etc – and – get to what all I have faced just THIS year.

1. On 11 Jan’15 I realised that my site had been down on 10th and decided to upgrade the wordpress software & plugins to the latest versions. I kept trying to upgrade and I kept getting server timeouts and other errors. I thought it was something to do with my internet service provider. Little did I know that it was HG all this while! I couldn’t even access it via SSH or FTP! Ultimately when I contacted HG – following are the issues I faced:

a) NO contact information available on their website. Raising support ticket fetched no response. Live chat was offline even though the website screams 24/7/365 support!! What a rubbish claim. No contact number mentioned for support requests – only for billing and abuse. Their Toll free number wasn’t mentioned anywhere AT ALL. I was ironically, fortunate enough that my past miseries with HG had made me store their toll free number in my phone and I used it after I got no response whatsoever from even their twitter handle!! Why do they even have twitter presence when the duds maintaining it get back to people AFTER THREE DAYS!! This is how pathetic HG’s accessibility is – to even get heard at the basic level.
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b) I managed to call the toll free number which after great difficulty and very long holding times, connected me to someone who put me on hold and then the call was disconnected! And this wasn’t the only time this happened for me to think that it was an exception! I talked to 5 different people mostly because the tollfree number just disconnected multiple times! I must say that the technical support staff is MOST incompetent EVER. They do not know even the basics of what they are talking about.
Firstly, my website’s ports had just been blocked out of the blue – with no notification or email or sms or anything at all! With the amount of marketing spam these guys send, could they not have autogenerated an email which alerted me to the issue? The customer instead has to DISCOVER the issue first – time does not matter here, then bang her head against incompetent tech support staff and THEN get to the point where the issue is disclosed to begin with! I was told that there was some malware on my site which is why my site’s ports had been blocked!
Here’s what I found on running a 3rd party check on my site:

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Which means that HG has some beyond imagination parameters based on which malware is detected! Whatever it was – was NOT SO life threatening that my entire site had to be blocked due to some reason and that too WITHOUT NOTIFYING ME!!
c) Ultimately I had to tell their staff to at least fix SSH access which was previously working, so that I could at least upload files I wanted, into my hosting account and fix the malware issue. Even that had been disabled. Sadly their tech support staff was absolutely unaware of what I meant. One had no idea of how to enable the port used for SSH. The other told me to use putty instead! This was in spite of my sharing screenshots of the SSH command issued on terminal (In Mac OS). When I told her that I am on Mac OS and that putty was only for windows she started arguing with me! Instead of putty on Mac OS, one needs to run the SSH command from the terminal (app in Mac OS). Ultimately she consulted someone senior and came to the same conclusion that terminal has to be used. and FINALLY she managed to enable the port. It took me ALL day to get this mess sorted.
d) With every passing issue, I managed to unearth newer ones! this just shows how PATHETIC their tech support staff is and how unimportant PROCESSES are to hostgator! Now that my site was supposedly infected with malware which was mind you, NOT detected by any other malware detection software in the world, except for the one on HG, I was supposed to run a malware check through cpanel each time after changes, to see if the malware had been finally removed or not. In order to do this, I had to login to cpanel. I logged in only to realise to my horror that the credentials I had been using for years did not work – AGAIN NO NOTIFICATION for any resetting of the same had been sent.
e) I finally got my password for cpanel reset (do i need to add how difficult that was?) and then realised that “change password” option was NOT in cpanel at all! I AGAIN called their pathetic tech support staff and landed with another dud, who now told me that the very round about way of resetting one’s cpanel password, was NOW through the billing account! SERIOUSLY? AGAIN, so much marketing spam and these guys could not deem it fit to send ONE mail that mattered? One informing their customers that NOW they have to go through this roundabout way for changing the cpanel password?!! And to think that I wasted so much time trying to figure our where the hell that option went! I was told that this was for our own security and benefit. Well could the dumb unprofessional hacks i.e. HG’s tech support staff not think of sending a mass mail informing everyone about this so called benefit? If they are doing such a great service to their customers, why not brag about it? Refer to the numerous amount of marketing spam comment again.
f) Finally, i managed to change my password for the billing portal, then accessed it, changed the password for my cpanel, then accessed THAT and finally fixed the problem on my website which if you ask me – WAS NOT THERE TO BEGIN WITH. Also, their tech support staff was very very rude to me in this time frame and this one particular person was constantly muttering an exasperated “oh god!” under her breath. When I mentioned that the tollfree no was still NOT listed on their website she said “if you can google it what is the problem?”.. Their staff seems to have been trained to find faults with their customers rather than fix their issues! Appalling! I fixed my issues and thought that was the end of it but the next day my passwords did not work YET AGAIN and I had to reset them YET AGAIN. However this time I knew the elaborate process – no thanks to tech support staff. Why could these people not have sent ONE mail about how this worked now?!! Priorities much? What will I do with all the crappy marketing mails if I am already an unfortunate customer of theirs? What matters more to existing customers is what my data is going through at their hands! and needless to say that even the marketing spam is useless because all deals apply ONLY to new accounts and not existing ones! So why even send the stuff to existing accounts? Why the laxity in sending mails that matter? And How dense and rude does the support staff have to be in each call? Not to mention the average holding time of at least 20 minutes if you call them.
2. I had thought that HG would at least learn *something* from all this mess that they had created but I was so SO wrong! Also, I was dealing with a knee injury and consequent surgery + physiotherapy in this timeframe, so I let these incidents go without reporting them officially, even though I had been urged to do so by HG US twitter handle. On 27th May one of my clients alerted me that she had sent me some mails, some days back. which I never received and I fired up my mail client and realised that I had not been receiving ANY MAILS since the last 6 months+ ! I have put a forwarder on my mail id hosted by HG and even though the forwarder was working fine there were no mails received from the time period of 8th Dec 2014 to 27th May 2015 on my mail server in question!

a) I called up HG immediately and (after being on hold in 4 different calls due to their pathetic tollfree service, finally connected and) spoke to a tech support person, who pretty much like previous encounters with their unprofessional staff started blaming ME for not having reported this issue earlier! Excuse me but how is the onus of this on the customer? Then she went on to ask me WHAT I was doing in the past 6 months and if this was a professional id , I should have been checking it more frequently! Flabbergasted at this personal investigation, I even asked her what business she had asking me such personal questions! Seriously, do these guys not record ANY calls? Do these people not train staff on mere basics?
b)  I had dislocated my kneecap in december, fractured it, ruptured one of my ligaments as well, and had to undergo surgery followed by intense physiotherapy to fix these issues and was bedridden for quite some time. This summed up my time from all these lost months. So excuse me, the customer, for not being able to live up to the high standards that HG has for everyone except the quality of their hosting, processes or their support staff. I had placed my faith in HG and thought that if I make whatever changes I have been asked to, post server migration, at least the rest would function fine and wouldn’t need my intervention, especially if I have other things to deal with (surgery and post-op rehabilitation). Clearly that faith was wrongly placed. Once the tech support person, got to know the reason for my absence, she was quite apologetic but she wasn’t sure about retrieval of mails.
c) Since 27th May, several people have written to me in context of this support request and the ONLY answer they have repeatedly given to me in these 2 whole months, is that the mails can not be retrieved because that server has been shutdown. SO? how does that concern me? They should have retrieved mails from backups. How to fix this issue is the tech support staff’s problem! The mails have NOT EVEN BEEN BOUNCING. My clients told me that the mails have been sent and yet I did NOT get them. They did not get any mailer daemons. So they have gone SOMEWHERE. The last time this happened in 2011, the duration was 2 weeks and the mails had been retrieved. This time the duration is MORE THAN 6 MONTHS!! And their staff says “Nothing can be done”. Well who the hell is responsible for this mess?
d) At the time of their server migration on 8 december 2014, the mail that was sent to all customers did NOT mention that mail settings had to be changed! Yet this is what ultimately had to be done to even get my mail to start working again! This is what was sent. No mention of mail anywhere.

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e) Why could an automated mail not be sent for the mail server changes required? Was their tech staff sleeping all this while? What caused this major oversight? In fact I was told by their staff that they had been fixing problems as and when they came in!!! THIS is beyond shocking! As can be seen by the previous examples as well, Hostgator as an organisation, WAITS for their customers to first DISCOVER that there’s an issue, then to discover WHAT ISSUE and THEN they bother to fix it – not without personal comments & incompetence! This is the most unprofessional practice I have ever seen. Not to mention that the likelihood of people discovering problems at a point when nothing can be done, is rather high. And this is not for the first time with HG either. This is after having seen various service providers in the business because I have been maintaining several websites since a decade now! As showcased in the 11 Jan incident, Hostgator has NO processes whatsoever. And this is a wordlclass MNC we are talking about. They just put the onus of all problems on their customers. Even for basics like changes in login details and password resets and mail server changes!
f) Most importantly, WHY is the staff busy making stupid excuses now to justify the data loss which in turn is an unheard of thing! If a server is being phased out , there are backups, there are processes, there is documentation. There is absolutely NOTHING that Hostgator has here.
g) I have been exchanging mails with their idiotic India staff over this issue, since 27 MAY 15 now but to no avail.

The way their staff has been consistently unprofessional and technically incompetent, the way my experience has been over the last 4 years, needless to say I am not going to stick around with hostgator anymore. In this day and age, these guys are inaccessible be it social media channels or other traditional channels put up by them as their forefront. HG india twitter id got back to me after 3 whole days of the whole fiasco on 11 Jan. HG US twitter id however got back to me immediately. Why are the standards not same for both? Why are they even trying to run the HG India twitter id if the people handling it don’t operate as often as the social media world requires them to? Just shut it down. I would in fact, recommend shutting down Hostgator’s ENTIRE India operations because THIS PATHETIC an experience after shelling out so much money is not anyone’s cup of tea. In fact my local hosting service with no multinational operations has proved much better for the rest of my sites. At LEAST they don’t lose my data and then make stupid stories about it.

I would like to hear their Senior management’s comments on this. My hosting with Hostgator expires in 2 days. Knowing how unprofessional they can be, I won’t be surprised if they do nothing for the next 2 days, after which this issue will sort of become a moot point for them. But then there is consumer court for issues like this.
I don’t trust these people anymore. And going by my experience of last 4 years, neither should you. If you have faced any issues with your hosting provider, please share in the comments.


Had a Kneecap dislocation & now need MPFL surgery 9

This entry was posted in Health personal sports on by (updated 3620 days ago)

It’s been a while since I’ve seriously blogged any personal stuff here or even blogged at all, for that matter. I’d been planning to get back to blogging since quite a while now (does anyone even read these blog updates anymore?) … but twitter always stood in the way of expressing myself in long form. Or even reading long form for that matter. I digress.

To cut a long story short, I’ve had a kneecap dislocation (patellar dislocation) & it turns out that one of my ligaments (MPFL) is now torn to such an extent that it needs reconstruction through an invasive surgery 🙁 The post op rehabilitation time is 3 months to say the least to get back to normal movement. It takes longer to get back to an active lifestyle. And I’ve already spent 24 days in a brace (Immobiliser) following the kneecap dislocation. So I’ve been planning all these mini-projects to do in this bedridden state. One of which is, not just getting back to blogging, but also blogging through this entire experience as a coping mechanism & also as an education to anyone else who needs to know the medical details of such an episode (there really isn’t much in terms of personal experience online). Other mini-projects include knitting a muffler (nothing to do with the fact that I support Kejru), editing a hell of a lot of photography stock that I’ve accumulated over the years, purging faltu data from all gadgets, formatting/upgrading all software on existing devices and may be learning how to code ios/android apps. I might even get back to some of my favourite activities as a child – decoupage, papier mache etc. Let’s see how it goes.

Now the long version of what exactly happened.

2014 has been a pathetic year in many ways & just when I was getting ready to bid it adieu, it gave me the worst blow of the year – or later as it turned out, perhaps much more. So on 31st Dec, I got ready, packed some stuff, set out from gurgaon for my parents’ place in Delhi. During the entire drive I felt some discomfort about something not being right. But I attributed it more to the car. Reached home, parked car in garage and then proceeded to take out the stuff from the backseat. My laptop was nearby but the main bag was far off towards the other end. The backseat part of the car was on an incline and my right foot was I think between incline and flat. I made one lunge to get to the bag.. and suddenly my right knee snapped and i was SHOCKED beyond belief. I screamed inadvertently in pain and also realised that my kneecap had dislocated like it had once earlier, 20 yrs back. At least this time I knew what was happening to me, but then it wasn’t relocating back at all unlike the last time when I was a teenager. This time the pain was excruciating cos the knee joint just wasn’t snapping back. Then in about a minute it managed to snap back and I slowly gained cognisance of what had happened & the world seemed to be crashing in front of me. I sat down in that very backseat and called my parents, who were two floors above, oblivious to what all had suddenly happened. And then another dislocation happened just when i was trying to straighten my knee! Each time the pain was excruciating and the knee joint just wouldn’t come back instantly either! Then it happened a 3rd time too! The conclusion now, was to somehow shift the car back out of the garage, shift myself completely into the backseat and go to a hospital like that. With great difficulty, I managed to drag myself in to the backseat and finally my parents & I, left for the hospital… and on the way another fucking dislocation happened AGAIN!!! The fact that it just wasn’t stopping was most disconcerting! And i worried about how much damage each dislocation was causing!
Once we got to the hospital, an immobiliser was tied to my right leg (which I still have on, 24 days later) and I was prescribed medicines to bring down the inflammation around the knee joint & address the pain. An X-ray was done but it was just basic & X-rays don’t show ligament injuries. At that point my knee joint was also too sore for it to be inspected physically and chances were that more dislocations would have happened if an attempt was made. So after this whole immobiliser, wheelchair, stretcher, xray, wheelchair session, we left for home. I was told to visit again after a few days when my knee joint had “quietened down”. Now the next hurdle – my parents live on the 2nd floor. I’d asked the doctor the procedure to climb stairs in this condition and with great difficulty managed 2 flights of stairs of our ancient ancestral house. Everyone had missed lunch due to this medical emergency and now we finally got home to take stock of the situation & what was left of our new year’s eve. I finally broke down & had a crying, hugging session. The shock of the whole thing was just too much. I was just going about my day as usual and suddenly I couldn’t even walk anymore, was bedridden and was looking at, at least 2-3 months of rehabilitation time. The unfairness of it all was just hitting me. The fact that it happened while doing something I’d done infinite number of times was very disconcerting. (More on what makes it happen, later). I knew that my extra flexible joints (I can twist both my thumbs outwards and touch them back to the wrist) made me vulnerable to this. In fact I’ve already had a kneecap dislocation 20 yrs back.. but that was a walk in the park compared to what had happened this time. Ultimately I tried to make myself believe that may be something worse had been averted and I got this “gifted” instead, but at that point I could barely reconcile myself to the situation.
Next up – after a week, MRI and digital x-rays were done. By this time I had reconciled to the situation and since I’d already dealt with a kneecap dislocation earlier, I knew the challenges. Back then the medical advice I had got was hardly anything. 20 yrs later, things had obviously advanced much more. Now there were ice packs, immobilisers, physiotherapy sessions, the internet as a huge resource and what not. As a teenager, I was just given a crepe bandage and sent off. It took around 6-9 months to get back to normal back then, but once it was ok, I forgot all about it. I thought this time the recuperation would be faster because I was equipped better. But when we showed the test results to the doctor – the first thing he said was, this would have to be cut open and operated. There is damage to the patella (kneecap) and the MPFL (the ligament towards the inner side of the knee) is torn and would need reconstructive surgery. Blood drained from our faces. There was shock once more. None of us could believe that the situation was THIS bad. We decided to take another opinion. Then another. And another. This includes a govt hospital, a sports injury doctor and a different hospital. They all say the same thing unfortunately. So here I am, gearing up for surgery now.
I’ll be writing in more detail about how these things happen, challenges & what to do in rehabilitation. But first a tiny note to all gyaanis, free advice givers, self appointed experts & well intentioned but ill informed wellwishers – kneecap dislocations have nothing to do with weight. Any surgery in the knee is not the same as “knee replacement”. Anything to do with a joint is not about weight. Yoga though an extremely beneficial regimen, can not cure everything.
As I wrote earlier, I’ll be updating my blog much more frequently and hope to hear from blogger fraands as well as people who have been through something similar.