Biological Bad Luck

I read the news report on the 1st of January, and for one moment I was so confused that I had to tear my eyes away from the story to check out the dateline. Surely it must be the 1st of April, was my first dazed reaction. How else could one explain such a ridiculously unbelievable headline on the front page of the newspaper? This was the sort of news item that was more suitable for April Fools’ Day.

“Cancer caused by bad luck,” the headline shouted, making light of a disease that continues to haunt mankind in spite of the advances in medical science and technology. 

The report said that the dreaded C-word, cancer, had precious little to do with bad behaviour or risky actions, in most cases. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University studied 31 cancer types and found that 22 of them, including leukaemia and pancreatic, bone, testicular, ovarian and brain cancer, had nothing to do with bad genes or the environment or any faulty lifestyle choices. They were caused by random mutations that occur in the DNA when cells divide. 

As the researchers explained it, essentially biological bad luck. 

A lottery of sickness that you win, without buying a ticket.

The upshot of all this was that the best way of treating these types of cancers was through early detection, when they are still curable by surgery, giving the body a better fighting chance against the disease.

Of course the remaining 9 types of cancer, including colorectal cancer, smoking-related lung cancer, were the exceptions to this odd phenomenon. Incidentally, the study did not cover all cancer types.

But in a scenario where two-thirds of the types of cancers could strike a person unawares, it was essentially very unsettling news. Being a health freak, and living a clean lifestyle could not guarantee you a long life. On the other hand, those inclined to continue with unhealthy lifestyles, trusting to the odds that this news seems to put forth, are just making life more difficult for themselves.

We’ve all known of people who have led clean lives and then been diagnosed with cancer. The little child, the housewife with two children less than five years old, the young man or woman who is adored by family and friends.

Why? That is the first question we feel compelled to ask.


All this while people with a severe addiction to smoking and drinking go on to puff and gulp their ‘weaknesses’ into their seventies and eighties, and then die peacefully in their sleep.

Another reminder of just how unfair life can sometimes be.



There was another reason why the news report rattled me.

A day later, the Husband’s cousin was diagnosed with cancer. It can’t be, we all shook our heads in disbelief. She was a hardworking woman, working with her husband in the family enterprise, two young teenage kids.

No vices, no family history of cancer.

Why her?



The news report helped me correlate its findings to her situation, but it still didn’t make any sense.

I suppose even the researchers understand that. That is why, even as they advanced their theory of bad luck, they advised that people live a healthy lifestyle in order to avoid the misfortune of “adding” to the bad luck.


Science has long been known for trouncing that which has no explanation, for insisting on reasons for every phenomenon.

And yet, deep down we’ve always known that science does not have all the answers.

It can't, for example, tell us how to go about avoiding that bad luck.

The more we know, the more we know how little we actually know.

When freak accidents strike

I had my very own Freaky Friday last week. It was a freak accident as freak accidents go. 

Waiting to board the train to work, one of the women trying to get in ahead of me fell back on to the platform, landing straight on my foot. The steely point of her high heel landed smack on the big toe of my left foot. I felt, rather than heard, it pop, and immediately thereafter there was a sharp stab of excruciating pain.

Weaving my way through the crowd, I looked down at my foot to see the nail oozing blood from three sides; the nail itself had been dislodged and had risen up half an inch out of place.

Being a fan of the “keep-things-on-a-need-to-know-basis” school of thought, that is all the detail I shall give you. No sense in disturbing the last meal you had.

So I rushed to the only doctor that I found with the ‘Welcome’ mat outside his clinic, at that time of the morning, and he ripped out the nail (this is the last gross reference to the nail), dressed up the wound and plied me with an anti-tetanus shot and antibiotics. 

An old nursery rhyme went, “For want of a nail, all was lost.” My situation, thankfully, was nowhere as bad as that. The freakishness, in my perception, arose from the fact that having my feet stamped is not a new experience for me. On an average, I get my foot stamped at least once every two days. I don’t know what cosmic meaning to imply to this. Why people become incapable of standing on their own feet when they find themselves in my immediate neighbourhood, I do not know.

Following this accident, many people asked me if I gave the offending foot stamper a piece of my mind. I said, no.

For one, I was in too much pain to go out looking for her. Besides, I had just about caught a slight glimpse of the murderous heel. I couldn’t very well identify it in a lineup, unless the pointy end of the heel had my blood on it.


This morning I read about another freak accident. A young man, barely out of his teens, it seems, climbed up the cage of a tiger at the Delhi Zoo, crossing the standoff barrier that separated the majestic animal within the cage from the cruel animals outside it. A witness said he had been trying to get a better shot on his camera, when he tumbled in. As fate would have it, he got an opportunity to click a selfie with the tiger.

The tiger didn’t pounce on him immediately, but stared at him for a while, that some witnesses have described as 15 minutes. The man must have wished for unconsciousness, blessed unconsciousness, so he wouldn’t feel the moment of death.

But terror often heightens the senses.

That was when the Freaky Quotient of the whole incident exploded.

Some do-gooders thought they’d be doing the hapless ‘insider’ a favour by pelting stones at the tiger. It only served to enrage him.

The media has gone overboard with its descriptions of what happened next, but since I’m keeping it on a need-to-know basis, I’ll just tell you that the poor man was mauled to death.

The incident got me thinking about freak accidents. Accidents where the most insignificant and trivial incident leads to damage far beyond the cause.

The effects could be death, injury or damage to property, or a combination of all of these, but what marks the freak accident is that it occurs in such unusual circumstances that no one can predict that something could go so wrong.

That's the thing about freak accidents. 999,999 times out of 1000,000, all goes well. And yet once in a freak while, things go so horribly wrong, as if fate, old fate, were trying to make up for all the moments we’d been allowed to go scot free.



Have you ever experienced a freak accident like this?

Stand Up for Your Book (Day 16: Ultimate Blog Challenge)

When was the last time you looked at a book reader?

Just looked?

I did. 

Yesterday on the way home, I passed Flora Fountain, an area that is a landmark in the Fort area of South Bombay. As I waited for the traffic signal to allow me to cross, I saw a girl standing in the middle of the walkway around the heritage monument. There was a messenger bag lying at her feet, and she was completely engrossed in reading a book.

At first I thought, she was waiting for someone, and reading the book to help pass the time. That’s what I would have done if I had to wait for someone. But then I would have stood quietly beside the iron railing surrounding the monument, and there I would have read, oblivious to the world. Who enjoys being jostled around when you’re trying to read?

Apparently this girl had no such issues. She stood there reading, immune to the stares, the comments, the laughter around her.

And then I saw another girl standing about six feet away from the first girl, and then a guy, standing an equal distance away from the second girl. All in exactly the same pose, both hands holding the book at chest level, both feet touching, each with a book in hand, a different colour and type of bag at the feet.

As far as I could see, they were all reading different books, so it wasn’t a book promotion.

There was no placard or board to explain the significance of this human installation. To help the rest of us understand why these three people had chosen to just stand there and read. If they were trying to make a statement of some sort, shouldn’t they have come out and said it loud and clear?

At one point, I considered walking up to them to ask them what it was all about. And then I remembered that I didn’t enjoy being disturbed while I was reading.



Most people looked, laughed and moved on. Being a reader myself, I stood there for a few seconds longer, and wondered what they were trying to achieve.

Were they trying to encourage the habit of reading?

How long had they been standing and reading?

How long did they plan to stand?

What would happen if it suddenly started raining? Would they run for cover? Or would they continue to read, to show that the habit of reading was proof against any physical discomfort?

I hoped they’d have the good sense to run. Experiments can always be conducted another day. But a wet book doesn’t make for good reading.

What's in a name? (NaBloPoMo Day 23)

One post every day in November

A woman in London has named her baby daughter, ‘Hashtag,’ in honour of Twitter. She is an ordinary woman, mind you, not a celebrity, so I don’t know what her excuse is. Celebrities, particularly of the Hollywood and popular music fraternity, have a history of giving their children names that are out of the ordinary.

Some examples: Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter is called Apple. Nicholas Cage named his son Kal-el, which was Superman’s name on his planet, Krypton. Singer Frank Zappa named two of his kids, Moon Unit and Diva Thin Muffin. Actress Alicia Silverstone named her son, Bear Blu. Sylvester Stallone named his son, Sage Moonblood. Gwen Stefani named her son, Zuma Nesta Rock.

I wonder why celebrities think their status makes them exempt from using their common sense when it comes to baby names. Joaquin Phoenix’s siblings all boast of dreamy, romantic names like Summer, Rain, Liberty and River. Even Joaquin changed his name to Leaf for some time because he didn’t feel as if he quite belonged to the family.

When Katie Holmes delivered a baby girl, Tom Cruise's spokesman announced that the baby would be named Suri, which meant princess in Hebrew and red rose in Persian. We would have told him that it means knife in some Indian languages.

Celebrities will be celebrities, with their feet high above the ground. What prompted the lady Jameson to pick up such a name is not known. Incidentally, Baby Hashtag’s mother, identified only by her last name, Jameson, chose to make the announcement on Facebook. She wrote, "Hashtag Jameson was born at 10 oclock last nite. She weys 8pounds and i luv her so much!!!!!!"

The twitterati were aghast at the choice of name and very quickly expressed their feelings with other trending hashtags like #Foolishparents, #YourParentsHateYou and #StupidestNameEver. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution poked fun at the name, joking that Hashtag’s sibling would be named “Retweet."

I shudder to think of the bullying and taunting that that little girl is going to face on the playground and at school. Unless this is one big elaborate joke or publicity stunt. What is increasingly more likely is that the child will fit in very well because she will be surrounded by other kids named Denim, Flying Rock and Chromosome.

In 2005, a Swedish couple named their baby boy, Oliver Google Kai. Another little baby in Sweden is called Lego. In 2011, an Israeli couple paid obeisance to Facebook, when they named their daughter, Like. Another gentleman from Egypt went further when he named his daughter, Facebook, apparently in honour of the website’s role in the Arab Spring that led to the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak after 30 years in power.

The search for the most unique baby name is sending parents to the weirdest sources. Baby name books and websites are not the only places of choice. Increasingly some parents, still the exception, thankfully, are looking up the dictionary, the shopping mall, the cinema and all around for inspiration.

In India, a lot of parents read up on Indian mythology to get the most unique name. Sometimes they try spelling a name differently. Sometimes, though, they just let their feelings and prejudices dictate their choice of name. In 2011, the district administration in Satara, Maharashtra, identified 222 girls under the age of 18, who had been named ‘Nakusha’ or ‘Nakushi,’ meaning "unwanted", without the traditional naming ceremony, because their families had hoped for boys. There is also a belief that if a girl is named Nakushi, the child born after her will be a boy.  These girls were subsequently either renamed by the district administration or asked to choose a name for themselves.

Weird names such as these have caused the governments of certain countries to take a keen interest in naming trends. New Zealand has banned names like Number 16 Bus Shelter, Fish and Chips (for twins), Lucifer, Duke, Messiah, Bishop, Baron, General, Judge, King, Mr, 89 C, D, I and T. Sweden has pronounced disfavour on names like IKEA, Metallica, Veranda, Q, Superman, Metallica and Elvis, and Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116 (pronounced “Albin”).

If you are in the UK, you may not name your child 4Real. And Chow Tow, meaning Smelly Head, is out in Malaysia.

So will baby Hashtag sign herself #? We will need to wait and watch.