Amol Apte

Going a little back in time. It was 27th-28th of October 2013, Aseem and Divya were preparing for their hospital visit. With loads of doubts in their mind, lots of questions popping every now and then, they were getting ready, early in the morning. The plan was that Aseem will go early and start going through the tests. The hospital has huge queue of patients. just goes to show the ever so growing number of cancer patients in India, more about that sometime later though.  So Aseem was supposed to go early and Divya would come a little later, after dropping their daughter to the daycare. She called up Aseem's parents back home in his home town, spoke to them told them about what doctor had said the other day. Aseem wasn't/isn't sure what they spoke and what the level of emotions were, he could only see Divya trying to control her emotions with all her will. She then handed over the phone to him, he somehow had become calm in these couple of day. Just picked up t...

It was the evening of 23rd October 2013, Aseem was supposed to receive his medical reports in the evening. Since about a month he has had this nagging cough, which just wouldn't go. He had a bit of a fever, the night before, and thus had decided to consult a doctor once again to get rid of this cough once and for all. He had taken a half day from the office to meet his family doctor. But in the morning, for some reason the family doctor's clinic was closed and he ended up visiting this small nursing home instead, which in it's quest to earn quick bucks made him undergo several tests. The general blood reports which come within few minutes of giving samples were of some concern. The White Blood Cells’ count was alarmingly high at 265000 against the normal 11000 max limit. It was in this context Aseem and Divya were getting ready to get the other reports and meet the senior doctor at the nursing home. As they entered the senior doctor's cabin, she just asked a few ...

It was sometime in the summers of 1991-92 or 1992-93 when I was in class 7-8. We used to live in a colony called Beemanagar in Indore. We had one community hall and it had a playground opposite to it. That ground was the only playable ground in our colony. During summer vacations we used to get up early and start playing cricket at around 7 am right up till 10 am. We had a team comprising of children between class 4th to class 8th. Me and Kshitij were the oldest of the lot and thus were undeclared captains of the group. We also had a group of slightly older boys in the colony, may be around 4 years older to us, which in school standards is quite a lot as most of them were in 11th or 12th. Since a few days the old boys were constantly threatening us that they want to start playing on the ground at the same time as we used to and that we should stop coming to ground at that time. This would have put our vacations in jeopardy.  The team was discussing this for quit...