My support for the Indian Pharma Industry

Woke up in the middle of the night in my Delhi hotel room with a horrible intense toothache type pain in my left kidney and the inability to pee. Bummer. It lasted a couple of hours and then abruptly disappeared. Flew back to Mumbai and on arriving back at the apartment had another ‘episode’. Saw the doctor on Saturday morning and he prescribed some tablets:

Cyclopam: Dicyclomine Hydrochloride and Paracetamol - An antispasmodic analgesic
Rabeprazole: ???

….. And told me to drink  a minimum of four litres of water per day. All was fine for the rest of Saturday and Sunday and I was hopeful but alas early Monday morning the pain was back together with the inability to wee. Monday morning and the doctor was back. This time he took a urine sample for analysis. Analysis found puss and so I was then prescribed:

Citro-Soda: Urinary alkalizer
Norflox-200:  Norfloxin and lactic bacillus tablet

I’ve also got some Spasmo-Proxyvon pain killer caps only for use if the pain becomes unbearable.

Now: Add this to the:

Coversyl Arginine tablets for my blood pressure and
Ezetimibe tablets for chloesterol control

…and I’m beginning to feel like I should be rattling.

Its Republic day  today  and I was woken this morning by the Indian national anthem blaring out of what must be many PA  systems around the town, with the many uncoordinated sources and the echos from the high rises it’s a garbled mishmash of voices and strings that is barely recognisable. There’s going to be parades, concerts, dancing on the streets etc. Its all a bit self congratulatory  and I feel, rather self deceiving, the newspapers this morning being full of ‘aren’t we great?’ type stories in the face of  crumbing infrastructure, hopeless health and education systems, massive corruption, wholesale environmental destruction etc etc. Nevertheless the blossoming of the Indian middleclass continues at what seems to me to be an ever increasing rate and the burgeoning demand for ‘goods’, the consumerism that everybody seems to think is so wonderful flies so much in the face of the Ghandian ideals that its beyond irony. I was stunned to see widely advertised, a massively expensive pen manufactured by Mont Blanc, the ‘Ghandi’ edition and to see Ghandijis face on huge advertising billboards rising about the slums, presenting a 200 pound biro absolutely amazes me. He would, I am certain turn in his grave.
The lie that material goods make you happy and fulfilled is perhaps more widely purveyed in India than anywhere else I have ever been and this from a nation who’s culture tells us that  that material goods are a trap.
I dunno, its beyond me and its time for me to drink yet another litre of water.