Ha Ha Therapy - Dr. G. Lakshmipathi

It was late 2007 or early 2008 when I attended a humour-laughter workshop in Coimbatore. One of the sessions was by Dr. Lakshmipathi. After the show, as I came out I saw the gentleman outside the hall, with some of his published works and I bought 3 of them. This one, ‘Ha Ha Therapy’ was hilarious.

There are 26 chapters, one for each alphabet. Every chapter begins with quotes on the subject of the chapter by all sorts of luminaries.
The situational humour is there of course. But the humour brought out by rhyming words, phrases and lines was really good.

This is not a book review, but some of the lines that I noted. There were many others, but I could not type more than this...

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Man knows how to cry from birth, but you need to learn to laugh.

It’s amazing the little harm that they do, when the little harm that they do, when you consider the opportunities they have – Mark Twain

Please do not throw cigarette butts on the floor, the cockroaches are getting cancer.

Daydreams are the gaseous decomposition of true purpose – Henry Haskins

ACUPUNCTURE

There must be something to acupuncture after all! How many sick hedgehogs and porcupines have you seen in your life? Or a sickly cactus for that matter? – Dr. Omaguchi, Ecobiologist

Acupuncture – some points have as many as 17 names and some names are just pointless.

Chinese yellow emperor wrote a treatise on the subject – found today in great libraries of the world, mellowed and yellowed with time.

BACKACHE

Inside every fat man there is a lean man rearing to get out. And inside every ft woman, there is a lean man wanting to get in

She spent more time on her bed, halving her work, doubling her nutrition, ending up a repository of cellulite with overall consistency of a waterbed. She would move at the speed of continental drift and settle on the examination table looking like a capsized hippopotamus.

His was a lifetime of conflict between invoice and inner voice with the former stifling the latter.

CONSTIPATION

Too much commotion about motion...

It is a pity that today in urban India, ‘attached families with detached bathrooms have been replaced by detached families with attached bathrooms...

DYING

In death, one should cause minimum disruption to the lives of family and friends. Dying in places far removed from his usual habitat, or disintegrating into unwholesome bits on a highway, or dying of unnatural causes with symptoms off murder will reflect a selfish inconsiderate attitude and should be discouraged.

Death should be sudden.
Dropping dead cuts down costs dramatically 9versus prolonged illness). The body looks fresh and more attractive, and there are more genuinely sorry people at the funeral. A long and patient wait for a man’s demise gradually erodes the emotions and promotes a dry funeral.
Suicide has its advantages but the mess made by a large number who attempt this and fail miserably is alarming. Wrong choice of poison, under-dosage, poor quality rope, abysmal marksmanship, poor judgment of water depth, and proximity to good critical care facilities. At the end of all that fuss, you may end up in an ICU, with dribbling tubes, wailing relatives and trailing police.

Accident prone guy
Raju. When his mother was rushing to the maternity hospital in labour in an auto, the vehicle had collided against the hospital ambulance ...He was born premature and a power failure in the neonatal unit had nearly cost him his life...At school, as he was training in first aid, he had lost two toes of his right foot when a heavy first aid box fell on it...an instructor in the first aid course had broken Raju’s nose with over-enthusiastic demonstration of mouth to mouth resuscitation. After his electrical engineering course, during which he had suffered seven electrical burns, he went to work in Arabia as an electrician but had to return disabled when a camel fell on him. He remained client to a variety of medical specialists including a dermatologist when he developed allergy to an anti-allergy cream. He even consulted a gynaecologist when he consumed his wife’s hormone tablets for two months by mistake and suffered hot flushes on stopping the tablets. He fell off a stool when trying to hang a medicine chest on the bathroom wall injuring a thigh. When he applied a hot water bottle to it, the bottle ruptured and he ended with a scalded thigh. He decided to end it all and lay down on a railway track. But alas, engine drivers had gone on a strike and train never arrived.

You can always get some quick post death fame by carefully choosing your last words, ‘Marylyn Monroe, here I come’ could lead a variety of reactions at the funeral from frank derision to utter jealousy; ‘Goodbye Latha, I love you’ could be especially remarkable, if your wife’s name is Sujatha. ‘I have left the 70 sovereigns in...pfft...pfft haaa...’ could lead to a thorough cleaning of the entire household including the attic, something you had been asking them to do since two years.

ESSENTIAL OILS AND AROMA THERAPY

As opposed to humans, Gods are most happy when incensed. They cease to fret when fumed.

FOODS, HAZARDS FROM

To eat is human, to digest divine

These hints are only for visitors to India from countries west of Bulgaria and east of Alaska and a handful from Minsk. They are not for visitors from countries with names ending in ‘stan’. The latter are a hardy race whose food habits are fundamentally like ours (many of them are fundamentalists) and have antibodies to local germs and most of their neighbours.

Tips for foreigners visiting India
Insist on bottled water freely available in containers of very thin plastic looking like elephant condoms.
Avoid chutneys, pickles, rasams,..any item with green chilly...a few sips will make you feel like an internal combustion engine and can make your abdomen luminescent in the dark. Especially beware of a dish called Gongura popular in Andhra; made from spinach and radioactive waste, it can take a bit of your enamel with it.
Dhokla in Gujarat looks like sponge, has the consistency of sponge, tastes like a tongue depressor, leftovers may be used to clean the sink and as a diaper in an emergency.
Naan – tenacious bread that needs vigorous chewing before it will stop chewing back and surrender.
Food on Indian Railways – made of menopausal vegetables – petrified potatoes, dessicated tomatoes and ossified onions.

HOMEOPATHY

Many learn homeopathy by reading books. Learning medicine from books is like making love by post. Can be most frustrating unless licking a stamp titillates you.

Questions a homeo doc will put to you – do you like winter or summer? Do you like sweets or savouries? Are you afraid of the dark? Do you like mornings or evenings?

There will be no physical tickling or poking. He will charge you very little and sometimes nothing at all. That you addressed him as ‘doctor’ is more than anything money can buy.

ICU

Abandon hope. You will feel much better.

There are machines and gadgets to breathe for him, pace his heart, empty his bladder, evacuate his bowels, masticate and digest his food, move his muscles and do everything short of deciding which organs to donate.

There are a large number of hazards inherent in procedures like punctured stomachs, ruptured spleens, fractured ribs, deflated egos, inflated bills. All these are part of the game and nobody complains except insurance companies.

Ours was a love marriage. I thought I had married a personality. I ended up living with a character.

Gossip was her gospel and giggling was her Gita. She would make extra marital affairs sound like grave international news and inter marital tiffs sound like a sports item. She was the president of the local ladies association, a sort of clearing house for the town’s gossip.

Do you know anything more exasperating in life than waiting for a bedpan?
Yes. Waiting for someone to take it away after use.

---drugs are added, diagnosis gets multiplied, opinions are divided, patient’s bank balance gets subtracted...

Institutions are said to have a defibrillator near the cash counter to resuscitate collapsing relatives (that will be a separate bill please)

...It will be much cheaper for me to expire than to inspire...

...he had a surgery for an obstructing prostrate and that had been a great drain on his liquidity...

...he refused to eat baby corn because he felt he was committing infanticide...

JUVENILE JOYS

It is the highest creatures that take longest to mature and are the most helpless enduring their immaturity – George Bernard Shaw

In Denmark, when I was a boy my father came home and found me in front of a roaring fire. That made my father very mad because we did not have a fireplace –Victor Barge

In spite of everything that we do for our children, most of them grow up normally and end up as agreeable adults...

Breakfast like a king, lunch like a commoner and dine like a beggar...
A cosmetic error of cosmic proportions... instead of moisturiser applying piles cream on her face

A guy stroking the statue of a female nude in a museum...attempted statutory rape

We paid for his movie ticket on the condition that he would tell us about what he did in the cinema with his girlfriend – his own experience acting as a stepping stone to our sexes...

KAMA SUTRA

What men call gallantry and Gods calls adultery is more common where the climate is sultry – Lord Byron

Vatsyayana – there are remarkable things about this author that should raise an eyebrow or two if nothing else...he wrote the book when he was old man when making water takes precedence over making love ...he lived in holy Benares where most visitors came to spend their last night not first night...public enthusiasm was more focused on cremation than creation...

Khajuraho – the only town in India where the youth go to the temple with genuine fervour.

Widows were encouraged to remarry. This turned out to be a wrong move and ‘Sati’ had to be introduced a little later basically to prevent large scale murder of husbands.

In Madras, sexually explicit behaviour was discouraged to the point where sexual instinct almost became extinct.

LUMINARIES, MEDICAL

A specialist is someone brought in at the last minute to share the blame.

The secret of success is to be like a duck. Smooth and unruffled on top, but paddling furiously underneath.

It is the responsibility of the media to look at the President with a microscope but they go too far when they use a proctoscope.

He generally operates with the dispassion of an airhostess demonstrating safety equipment.

Life is short, art long and opportunity fleeting – Hippocrates

An admirer of a specialist – ‘my piles bleed for you sir’. After successful surgery, she had gratefully hung his portrait on her toilet wall.

The chauffer was so well groomed – the driver had a driver to drive his own car

In the lecture hall, this great surgeon came down to becoming an anaesthetist. He was so boring, during anatomy classes, even corpses yawned.

He was active in surgeons associations, like a dietary fibre. Difficult to digest but essential for moving a motion.

Surgeons bore me because surgeons are boring.

He excelled in communication by body language besides six Indian tongues. His waiting room was filled with rich women patients who had functional disorders with no organic basis, women who felt their ‘heart beat in their teeth’, ‘pains in their hairs’, ‘palpitations in their buttocks’.

He had seen very old movies in which Victor Mature was called Victor Immature.

Specialist in neonatology – a lifetime devoted to babes and boobs.

Reason to diet – your longevity is inverse proportion to your width.

A woman bedecked with diamonds and pearls looking like an inverted chandelier.

He would prescribe drugs as available as Penguin milk.

He was of a shy disposition and chose to become an Obstetrician. This meant not having to meet the patients face to face!

He had trained in England and was a master of the understatement. About a patient brought in almost exsanguinated with a hemorrhage he would say, “she doesn’t look too good, does she?” it was like saying Sahara desert is ‘a little gritty’.

Conditions in a hospital – some of the bandages had seen service as towels with Rommel’s army in the desert in World War II. Wiping your hands on these towels after work abraded one’s hands, and we called it the ‘Irritable Towel Syndrome’!

New eating place...over decorated dim place...food is mediocre, very expensive...you have to read the menu card from right to left so that you will be forewarned on what it is going to cost you...

Jealousies abond...cut throat competition among ENT surgeons, have spinologists stabbing colleagues in the back, pulmonologists breathing down their bosses’ neck, ophthalmologists scratching each other’s eyes out and diabetologists feeling very bitter...

MUSIC THERAPY

He who sings, frightens away ills –Bernard Shaw

Music is the vapour of art. It is to poetry, what reverie is to thought, fluid is to liquid, and what is ocean of clouds to ocean of waves... Victor Hugo, 1840

We often feel sad in the presence of music without words; and more often than that in the presence of music without music – Mark Twain

Human beings are all innately musical...if the majority does not express this talent by breaking into song, it is not due to any ecological considerations, but only to avoid physical injury from those around... singing in the bath is an unrestrained expression of an instinct, as behind locked doors the singer feels safer...
Even the mentally retarded are known to respond to music, and MTV watchers will agree that some of the mentally retarded can actually produce music and often land a grammy award...
Singing a lullaby to quieten a cantankerous kid or frighten it into submission...
Music therapy has been shown to improve gait in stroke victims (at least to walk briskly to switch off the TV)...