I broke a family tradition!

I wasn't well the past few days. Each time I go to the doctor, he tries out new experiments on me but never quite succeeds in finishing me off. Every new medicine brings out new aches and pains in my tummy and generally I am much worse off than I was before I went to him. Perhaps he is trying out all the latest drugs on me to test their potency level.

While I was on yet another course of medication, something struck me which I did not think of before. The names of the drugs. I wonder who comes up with the oddball names for all the thousands and... no, millions and millions of drugs in the world. I remember reading somewhere that the name of a drug should contain at least one syllable of the main component, or something like that. So you have Crocin, Metacin, Anacin and so on. Logically it means "ci" is the syllable they used from paracetamol. From here on, each new brand brought out has more and more bizarre names to make sure they don't sound too similar to competing brands. Some of the names are so ridiculous, it scares me to ask for them at the chemist. Tagon (tag on what?), Daflon (I almost asked for teflon), Stemetil and Deletus (is that Latin for delete? Delete as in 'die'?). There is mighty little room for creativity here, what with a hundred rules set down for nomenclature. I wonder if they hire people especially for inventing new names. If they do, I wonder how much longer those inventors stay normal before this out-of-the-box creativity scars them for life.

Anyway, let me get out of this deep search for meaning in life and make an important announcement. I have broken a family tradition. Most of my family is not very happy, indeed many are quite bugged with me. We Belmannu Raos have a few traits that seem to be almost a tradition. For example, many of us stand with our feet non-parallel, heels closer than toes. A very mild version of Charlie Chaplin. Contact lenses are another thing we all have. So if any guest of ours forgets their lens solution and case, chances are they need not go back home to fetch them. Also many of us, including girls have just a suggestion of widow's peak.

And the most prominent of our khaandaani traits is high blood sugar. High blood sugar is almost expected of all men and most women of my family (father's side I mean) after they have reached middle age. Now I fell ill and my blood test showed my sugar levels to be below normal. When my father saw the report, he did not even bother with the sugar reading. I too very nearly flipped over the page when something caught my eye. "LOW". Huh? What does that mean? Slowly I realised that I had gone and done something that no Belmannu Rao has ever done before. I am not saying that I was proud of this, but it was a first-of-its-kind phenomenon nevertheless.

I am going to frame the report for future generations to gaze at and stand in awe of the mysterious ancestor who dived to the depths instead of climbing to the heights.