Guest House

My place for a few months. These are the lounges at the entrance, plus the famous portraits of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, which hang in the entrance of all Aravind buildings.

"To Cure Unnecessary Blindness" is their motto, and they're having a good go at it, too! Today I watched 17 phaco surgeries performed by one surgeon in 2 hours and 15 minutes. The OT (OR) Sisters are so fluid in all they do, it took me 5 cases to see what happened to most of the materials. There are certainly some things that would never make it over to the US, but overall the surgery - and the material use/reuse - was quite impressive.

As I only got 5 hours of patchy sleep last night (still suffering heavily from jetlag) I actually drank some coffee, as well as two cups of tea, and I managed to stay awake the whole day- though making it the next half hour to dinner is taking some effort. If I don't sleep 8 hours tonight, I might have a meltdown... but I've been managing to hang on to sanity because it's just so interesting.

As a side, they issued me a little pamphlet book called "Functional Tamil for Ophthalmologists" and I am learning to say phrases such as "If the suture is removed it will be alright." and "Do you have blood pressure ?" and "Can you identify this smell?" To be fair, there are a handful of phrases which would be useful in daily speech (what is your name, what time is it) but they did skip the general greetings that most language books start with.