Big day for my daughter Jasmine. She has been rolling over from her back to tummy, and is now wiggling and shuffling. Watching her attempts to crawl with the butt high up is an absolute wonder. It's the answer to anyone who wonders if they'd go straight home after work. My wife and I celebrated by giving her a big hug.

My wife was talking about the fascinating baby shuffles and wiggles when I was reading Mitch Albom's Having a Little Faith . I nodded but, oh

At a recent coffee time, with my colleagues, the conversation turned to the salary within our department.

Any time the word salary is part of a dialogue, it's a taboo. After all, asking our friends about their salary is virtually the same as (and probably more impolite than) asking their age. That being said, we all want to know others' age and salary, as what Tom Sawyer's great law of human action had predicted, "In order to make a man covet a

Just as a writer plays with words, a painter works with colours. Good painters dance back and forth across an infinite splendour of hues. For novice like me, it may require a hell of a lot of lessons to learn the know-how.

Yes, though it shames me to say it now, I wasn't sure what to answer when my wife quizzed me about the three primary colours. Truth be told, I've been having a hard time figuring out the colours of the clothes in my

When it comes to sickness, nothing comes close to the severity of a sick baby.

Mention that to parents, everyone invariably remembers the first time one's child got sick. I wasn't that impressed with the chapter on "When Baby is Sick" when I first read What to Expect the First Year . I managed to read that chapter again today; I fetched the book whilst packing the bag in a hurry to bring my febrile princess to the hospital last night. (What else could I smuggle when

There is no such thing as universal truth in the world. There never was.

Anne Lamott wrote that it took years for her to discover that the first step in finding out the truth is to begin unlearning almost everything adults had taught her. I tried thinking of words that I told my little sister when she was young. And I did discover Anne Lamott is right.

One green spring afternoon, I'd been enjoying myself in the garden while my little sister waited for the surprise his brother brought home. I

My younger sister is delighted and said it is the happiest day of her life. She gave birth to a boy this morning.

And as the nurse pushed the gurney carrying her baby out from the operating theatre, I rushed in my eagerness to take a peek. I was so overjoyed to meet my baby's cousin. The truth of the matter was, I was reading Only-Child Experience and Adulthood when I waited outside the operating theatre.

I was a middle-child of three children, and have been

Bumps on the road make a rough ride. Such bumps plague many of us, but they shouldn't - once you get used to the bumps.

One of my patients reported a history of itchy bumps 30 years earlier associated with taking penicillin. When I saw him I found a strain of bacteria in his blood. The bacteria lurked in his bone marrow, nodding with a grin, knocking off my patient's kidneys. Shaken, his defenses down, my patient had fallen over like a drunkard. The

The most important sentence in any article is the first one, we are taught by William Zinsser. The most important rule, again, is the first rule of any kind. Consider the book 50 Rules Kids Won't Learn in School . My favorite among the fifty life lessons given by Charles J. Sykes is the Rule 1: Life is not fair.

The average teenager, I was told, uses the phrase "It's not fair" 8.6 times a day. Somewhere behind these complaints

Everyone trusts old wives' tales. Our grandparents trust them. Mothers trust them. Most of all, doctors trust them. Even I trust them.

There are rules for doctors, I know, under the big name evidence-based medicine. What a splendid name to practice medicine, you must have thought. And who won't? The way to treat my recent febrile illness, of course, turns out to be a far cry from the evidence-based medicine. I was sick upon my way to work

I talked earlier about resetting my thermostat during university days. But it was before my primary school graduation when I realized for the first time in my life that I was capable of pressing the amazing reset button.

Looking back on my primary school days, I don't recall much except my mediocre academic performance; I just know I always ranked more than ten in my class. At any rate, I remembered the soccer league tables far better than what the teachers said during the class.

Then one afternoon in my final