My Great Grand uncle Valliyil Govindan Nair

My Great Grand Uncle Valliyil govindan Nair
Kerala for long followed the matrileneal system where the women of the house were given more importance ,still most of us take our family names from mothers side and a daughter was considered as a blessing more than a son once upon a time ,
of course the marumakathayam system no longer exists ,
This was where the maternal uncle was the head of the family and the husband was a vistor whose prime responsiblity was with his sister and her children ie his nephews and nieces ,
In this picture is my Great Grand uncle Valliyil Govindan nair
He was a bachelor ,hence he had only his sisters families as his responsibilty which he bore well .
Being a renkowned Textile chemist in those days and having been educated in England he worked for long in Morarjee textile mills in Bombay and there is even a textile colour dedicated to him ,
I still rememebr the bound books from Britain in his vast library in our huge ancestral house in Parappanangadi ,Kerala filled with small bits of coloured clothes with different names and details to it ,at that time for us children it was just fun to pull them out and play with them .
After working for a long time in Bombay he had a misunderstanding with his bosses as he was a man of ethics and a court case was filed on them by him ,the case went on for some time and he continued to work with full dedication but was not given a salary ,
his finances were in dire strains and it was his sister in Parappanangadi who stood with him by selling her jewelery ,
finally he won the case and got the accumulated salaries and damages which amounted to a big sum ,resigned from his job honourably and retuned to live in Parappanangadi ,
He built the palatial ancstral house of ours in a fusion style of a nalukettu ( traditional Kerala house ) with western facilities like attached bathrooms ( thoguh those days there were no closets ) ,the house had huge areas of different fruits and trees and a private pond too .
Uncle was very British in his habits and even had an inhouse butler to serve him albeit a dhoti clad malayalee one called Sankaran nair .
His dear sister who by now was a widow and her children were all living in the house Thekkepat Kovilakkam
the neices got married and thier children too lived there ,
my mother used to say as a child there were more than fifty people living as one in that house at a time not to say of the floating population of husbands visiting other relatives friends which increased dduring festivals and or marriages etc
uncle had meticulous habits and his food was served by his man friday with utmost care there were a couple of cooks and a retinue of servants ,uncle bought large areas of land cultivated them grew coconuts jackfruits and so many other trees ,his day after breakfast would be busy with people coming from these places to see him and discuss on the days labours pluckings sales etc
he had a karyasthan or manager called kuttykrishnan nair to oversee all this ,
he had great respect in the village as a learned person with lot of experience but his affinity to the British angered many youngsters who were Gandhijis followers and whom he considered as rabble !
His collection of books came fom his regularly ordering them from Britain and he also had fine funrniture but as far as his dress was concerned he wore ethnic mundus nd neat shirts
he meticulously maintained his accounts and noted all details of his day in neat handwriting in his oredered Hoe and coe diaries ,
i rememeber seeing them from 1920 to 1950 s and there was in one diary every single details of my parents marriage which I preserved the rest diaries and books were all lost sad !
in one entry for some time he had mentioned details of a business he got into with Sehsayee paper mills ,he would take up the procurement of shells used in the business from certain places in kerala and transfer them to the mills ,i reall y dont rememebr the details but it involved a bit of travel and meeting people middle men etc as the w\quantities were huge but I think he wasnt meant for it as he wound it up and settled down as a landowner and cultivator
His visits to nearby Calicut or Kozhikode which in those days was possible only by steam engined trains and took more than three hours which today takes less than one ,
Trips to Calicut were an event by itself as his schedule was as meticuloulsy laid out as that of a prime minister during his travels ,from the time he got into the morning mail to the breakfast he had in the railway retitrng room his visits to many places at times an attendance in the court for some case meeting up with his lawyer and then his doctor for a check up ,
his favourite phsycian was Dr Balakrishnan the renowkned doctor of Calicut who would occasionaly come down to Parappanangadi to see his friend and patient ,amusingly a day would come when the doctors great grandchild woudl get married to VG Nairs great grand child !,
uncle would stay in calicut in one his numerous relatives houses till all his work was over
Today there are no more diaries left fro me tospin his yarns ,and very few lving to tell me stories of this great person the house today broken and sold !!
in this picture uncle is with his four nieces and grand neices and nephews

Jungle whispers

Pramodh my co brother a senior airlines executive is a born wildlife enthusiast ,he was responsible for our holiday in the core forest bungalow in Kerala last two years ,
Pramodh spent much of his free time deep inside core forests to fulfill his passion either in or out of the country .
He knew many forest officers and could converse with them or forest guards or tribal s with the camaraderie that comes out of inside knowledge
Many are the dawns and dusk pramodh had waited without a whisper for that elusive tiger or the rogue elephant that surprised.
Many are the nights he spent in the glow of a forest bonfire to beat the chill
So going to a forest with him was a learning
He would go into esctacies on the wetness of a dung or the soft prints on the mud
To him these told tales
To me they told none
he could manage elephants or tigers but found difficult to manage the frightened doctor co brother that is me !
Every turn the car made in the foggy narrow road i would jolt him with an alarm as i kept seeing fresh dung and springing leopards so much so my family named me Dr Tragedy ( Durandham in malayalam )
I was the butt of joke for the family for i was eternally putting off suggestions to drive deeper to spot the wild
As it is we are seeing wild things everywhere in this world so why go in search of them was my concept !
The siruvani ranges had narrow leaf strewn roads with thick canopy of trees covering them like an umbrella
The roads were slightly dark even in the daytime
Most of time there was a light patter of rains
In any emergency reversing the car would be a real feat in the narrow road as one could plunge into ravines or into the forest .
To me every leaf had eyes peering into us waiting to finish us off .
Every turn i awaited for surprises
I could see huge rocks as black elephants waiting with a grimace
To me every tree hid lurking cheetahs waiting to spring on us
Every vine hanging was a poisonous snake waiting to strangle us or give a lethal bite
Every shuffle on the deep undergrowth was a treacherous lizard
Every puddle we heard from the flowing stream was a leathery crocodile
So with an alarmist like me around pramodh had his hands full
But once he did listen to me and for good

We were on to a very narrow stretch
I clutched at him as we were told not to talk
The car was moving slowly he stopped it
I action ed to listen and the eight pair of ears in the car did that with our ears cocked
There was a soft rustle from behind the bushes
We could barely make out any form but could feel presence of something .
Pramodh quietly reversed the car with a great calmness while an anxious me sat with a thudding chest
Any animal nearby could hear my palpitations
We turned fully and sped off
Later we heard from the forest walker the lone rogue elephant was seen just where we had gone
For once my fears were justified
I needed no dung but lurking fear to warn me
We had a good laugh back in the cottage as we relaxed over a mojhito
Me and pramodh .

Checkpoint inhibitors

Checkpoint hero 





The band got a raucous approval, James Allison grinned after giving his harmonica a rest,
Another band 
Another evening 
Right 
No!!!
This was a band with a difference, its players were all senior researchers in cancer and the audience was from ASCO American society of clinical oncology annual meet where more than 40000 oncologists’ immunologists and clinicians gathered in Chicago year after year to procrastinate plans to fight their common enemy cancer!
Immunology was always the elusive bait to success in cancer treatment,
It’s Holy Grail almost,
if only one could muster the body’s defence mechanism to fight its abnormally growing cells no more need to be done ,something which it does routinely for any foreign cells but then there was the catch
What can one do to make it do what it needed to!
The B and T cells are the two most important immunological soldiers of the human body,
Some scoffed at them
One went to even say the B and T are the starting and ending alphabets of the word Bullshit!
But James ignored these jibes and went on his work with a determination unsurpassed.
The need of the hour was to find that elusive something that activated a T cell!
And he did find out the driving engine that could activate a T cell
Its antigen alone was not enough but needed to find out other stimulatory molecules which he did after painstaking research as a CD28 molecule which was needed to spur on a virgin T cell to action
Interestingly at this time other researchers had found that there was another molecule bearing uncanny resemblance to CD28 in its B7 ligand and suggested that this was another co stimulatory molecule needed to sustain the T cell activation but James and his team begged to differ,
They felt instead of being a stimulant this molecule was an inhibitor or rather if CD28 is an accelerator CTLA4 was the brake so if someone could take off the brake the T cell would start doing its job well
And the team proved it to be so
Allison started thinking if the T cell could be allowed to work unabated it would destroy the cancer cells and here it is not based on the type of tumour but for all tumours the same principle can be used.
It took a long ten years for Allison who was not a physician but a core scientist to associate with a pharmaceutical firm to produce an antibody against the inhibitor and go through the stringent clinical trials in association with leading medical centres and finally get approval for iplimumab the first success story in immunotherapy in cancer in Malignant melanoma and which has now become part of its protocol of management saving many who would have had to die but for it
And today two other drugs which are programmed death inhibitor and programmed death ligand inhibitors Nivolumab and Pembrolizmab is already being used
Immunotherapy has now gone on in detection of more check point inhibitors in lung, urothelial , renal malignancies and the fire lit by Allison is making a difference .
So it was a cheerful Allison who placed his harmonica on the floor after the loud applause from his enlightened audience
He now is in the Times magazine’s list of 100 most influential people in 2017

Ageless Athens

Athens Airport 

Our Gulf air flight from Bahrain slowly looped its way down ,we were on our way to our second European trip this time to six most famous cities 

Does just going to a single city in a country and staying for two days make you claim you had seen the country ?
Yes it could 

We know Athens is just the capital and important city of Greece but the country itself has sunny islands great beaches and hilly enclaves 
Its culture ,dialects ,slang ,food, habits, would change with its places
All countries are so .
India should be the best example
Like if someone from outside visits Delhi and tells I know India i had gone there 
it would be absurd 
for a Delhiite may almost be a foreigner in language color looks habits food of say a Chennaiite 
But saying that the flavor of a country is there in its parts 

Yes be it in Delhi or Dimapur or Daman diu the Indianness is present 

Our pick up person had a fitting name  Dionysus 

He was waiting for us and gave a hearty hand shake telling me to call him Dione .that was better its all good to be in medieval Greece but Dionysisu well Dione sounded more of today 
It was around 40 km to Athens city and with some traffic jam we reached Hotel Polis grand where we had booked room .

When i had booked the hotel I thought it had something to do with a police station but later came to know it was well within the realm of the grand Acropolis hence was so called
After some rest we jaunted out as it was a pleasant evening 

Orthodox church in Plaka 

Greece to me is in one word History

Every person we see has behind his image if we have the imagination thousands of years of history 

 democrats philosophers orators debaters soldiers in  helmets women with flowing robes and Hellenic beauty who moved a thousand ships 

the images one conjures with Greeks
It all depends on the  travelers eyes
It depends on his imagination to put his soul into his travels
That travel always beats time 

it can be felt by the traveler
Its my kind of travel

It was a sunny Greece that welcomed us to Athens.that afternoon
The spring was slowly setting in and the chill definitely missing  when our flight parted  the clouds to reveal a sprawling Athens.
The Greek civilization as ancient as Indian Chinese and Mayan civilizations had many notables who are still being venerated 
Pythagaros.Hippocrates.Socrates.Plato.Archimedes were pioneers in maths science medicine and  philosophy 
Alexander was its most famous emperor whose sword traveled far into the east till india and then he returned a more wiser man but to never touch the shores of Greece  

Same way by being just about two days in Athens we did get a flavor of Greece 

Plaka

We walked up the crowded street laden with discount sales .plenty of cafes shops restaurants the famous Plaka 

this was n area with restricted traffic though a few bikes and delivery vehicles may surprise you

the streets are lined with so many souvenuir shops boutiques tobacco corners churches restaurants many on the pavemnt and slowly rising up thr acropolis 
They are excellent places to sit with a beer or a cup of coffee and watch the world pass by .
Fashionable women in high stilletos tall and dainty .older Greek women with scarf tied and a cherising smile reminds us of grannies .men in a slouchy cap and a smouldering cigarette playing cards .shiny up market branded shops with bargain prices .kiosks selling small things with plenty of sovvenuirs .an ornate church with bright idols and icons .
Street musicians who are seen in most sqaures are happy with their music and collection .
We went up and up to view the world from Acropolis 
When the lights below were twinkling and the cold was getting into our bones we returned back as it was time to get into warm sheets of our hotel polis grand of course it means acropolis not police !
Hence Plaka is pulse of Athens

In the seventies this area was a bit seedy with loud music halls and women later the Government cleaned it up to make it a hub of fashion shopping souvenuirs and food
We slowly walked up the winding road that led to the Acropolis hill

Acropolis entrance closed in evening 

sunset from Acropolis

night view from Acropolis

ruins of the Acropolis

Agora

From the Acropolis

A mellowed sun was dipping the sky with red vermilion ,descending into the ruins that shone with a brilliance of the past 

The ruins were all over but as it was evening the main ruins were already closed ,of course we had booked for a tour the enxt morning thisevening was more of a trailer 
We went up last bit by a staircase to climb a hillock get a view of awesome Athens

The city spread on all three sides with prominent landmarks well viewed on one side rose the Acropils ruins itself close to us and above 

as the sun set the view became more ethereal and as the sun dipped the dark was punctured by  blinking lights in thousands which made Athens look magical 

We descended down lost our way for some time but hit the winding  roads and finally reached plaka again 

chef in Melliatros 

we went into the Meliorates  a very warm homely patisserie 

The windows were full of fresh fragile creamy chocolaty delights luring many into its folds .
After the exhausting climb up Acropolis ruins and gazing at the twinkle eyed vistas in front and below us  we were ravishingly hungry
The handsome Greek chef was full of smiles and his welcome was as sweet as his cakes .
Finally we settled for a plate of warm crispy soft chocolate covered cheese crispier for premila who was veg for the day (sivarathri )and a juicy lettuce tomato cheese topped crispy onion ed delicious patties multi layered burger for me brought to us with so much passion .
As we dug into our food and as the juices churned its delights the true meaning of Athens the city dawned on us .

We walked back to our hotel in the growing chill and had a fitful sleep 

the day dawned and after a hearty breakfast in our hotel we were off to reach our tour pick up 

we had a tour of Athens and so union bay that day  

breakfast in ?Acroplois hotel

break fast

After a sumptous breakfast from our hotel we started the day 

The tour was booked through viator by me online .most of the good tours for this trip was booked by us like this and we never regretted so perfect and professional were they 

Most tour guides were higly educated and knowledgable ,some were Phd in history or architecture and knew exactly what they were talking ,even thoguh a bit costlier these tours really give you the whole insight and are very slickly organised 

We started off in the Panathenaic stadium 

At first built years before Christ era it was rebuilt during the Roman reigns ,s Atheltics participated in nude several events Emperor Herodes spent a lot of money between 139 to 144 AD to refurbish it ,those day ,it was called the marble stadium as it was entierly made of marble and though in disuse for long once christianity became strong and the games were considered as pagan celebrations the marbles stolen and the vaults in disarray used by some virgins for rituals to get a good husband !

It was revieved back to host the first modern olympics in 1896 , 

2004 Athens olympics was innaugrated here several games were held and even today the olympic flame startes from here summer winter and youth olympics

Panathenum stadium

  

After this we went to see the Acropolis 
A hillock about 500 feet in Athens city is also its most prominent part ,obviously in the past such a spot would be a military stronghold protected by a wall till about fifth century BC
a temple to reining deity Athena Polia was constructed around 550 BC on the place where the famous Parthenon would come up 
the older Parthenon was demolished by the Persian invasion in 480 BC and it took a while to start rebuilding after the Persian crisis
in 437 BC Paoylea a colonnaded gate was constructed with massive marble Doric columns
the eastern part was built the Temple of Athena and the western part to the Poseidon Erectheus 
during the Roman period several temples were repaired newer  ones built 
in the Byzantine period the Parthenon was converted into a church but during the Ottaman period it was a military garrison and the Erectheium was the Governors harem ,the Parthenon was also used to store gunpowder and during one war was blasted away to pieces 
A mosque was also built during the Ottoman period which later on was cleared 
from 1975 a massive restoration of the Acropolis is on almost achieving fruition now 

We saw the huge pillars rising above majestically their smooth marble reflecting the weak sunlight 
coming down we saw an accordion player with lilting tunes before we got into our bus to go to the Acropolis museum 

Parthenon

the Acropolis museum is one of the best museums in the world with priceless antiques ,its well designed with a below ground original archaeological dig under a glass floor on which one can walk ,in short one walks on ancient Athens ,its halls are neatly lined up with computerized voice overs and in many halls photography was prohibited

Acropolis museum

With our time limited and pretty hungry and our afternoon tour in 30 minutes we asked the waitress with a quaint tattoo of a molecule formula on her forearm to get us a chicken soup as it was pretty cold and some grilled chicken
Food is wholesome healthy and in large portions in Greece
The Greek like to eat and healthy food what with
plenty of fruits vegetables and meat .olives cheese and olive oil go well with Mediterranean food .
Our soup was filling and tasty we made it a tad spicy with liberal sprinkles of pepper 
Chicken grilled tasted like our tandoori juicy hot tender and succulent
One couldnt ask for more 
It was the right start for wanderers

soup in syntagma 

waiting for Greek lumch

Though wouldn’t call it strictly Greek food the restaurant was a typical Greek one at SyntagmaThough wudnt call it strictly Greek food the restaurant was a typical Greek one at Syntagma Athens .
With our time limited and pretty hungry and our afternoon tour in 30 minutes we asked the waitress with a quaint tatoo of a molecule formula on her forearm to get us a chicken soup as it was pretty cold and some grilled chicken
Food is wholesome healthy and in large portions in Greece
The Greek like to eat and healthy food what with plenty of fruits vegetables and meat .olives cheese and olive oil go well with mediterranean food .
Our soup was filling and tasty we made it a tad spicy with liberal sprinkles of pepper
Chicken grilled tasted like our tandoor juicy hot tender and succulent
One couldnt ask for more
Best part is Greeks love yoghurt our own Amchi hamara curd which iam passionate about probably only country where they made so much fuss on curds
Some countries ask whats yoghurt ;(
The other thing Greeks have is Halva which is the wind blowing ftom Turkeys known for its succulent halwas
So a hearty lunch indeed 

The temple of Poseidon and sounion bay was the agenda for the 
Afternoon tour 
65 km away from Athens we cruised along the coast .





The weather was sunny but cool
The waves shimmered as they crashed gently into the small beaches .
All these beaches will be full of umbrellas during season said our tour guide 
Quaint resorts dotted the beach .
She pointed out to an exotic huge statehouse 
That one was given to the Government by Onassis group yes the very famous Greek shipping magnate who married Jacqueline Kennedy .
She also showed us another house up the hill belonging to same person up for sale !
Well should seriously think about that !!

The area was full of archaeological finds 
In fact whole of Greece is one huge archaeological dig 
Every side one turns one finds columns pillars balustrades and stories from the past fly in the air .
As we climbed up to reach the towering marble pillars of the Poseidon temple standing tall with its back sides and front to the sea on a clifftop we were regaled with the story of Theseus and Aeges .
King Aegeus ruled Sounion bay 

Sounion

Sounion  bay

Poseidion temple 

 bay

At that time Crete island had a king who took a blood tax from Sounion in a war that seven young men and seven young women will be sent every year to feed the man bull monster in his underground labyrinth .the monster minatour which would eat them up .
Theseus son of king Aegeus of attica asked his dad to allow him to go to Crete and try to kill monster
The king finally agreed but tells his son
Dear son i will wait for you every day up the cliff 
If you come back alive please raise white flag instead of the existing black flag 
the son thesus goes tot ht labryhth kills the minator and returns from labrynth with the help of minos the daughter of king minos who had fallen in love with thesus and brings her back but in the elation of his victory he forgets to raise the white flag and king aegus wauting in the shore not seeing the white flag but only the black one jumps into thte sea thingking his son is no more ,the sea is still called Aegean sea fter him 

Thus ended our day in Athens and we were abck in our room dreaming about the Greek kings thier buildings Gods and thier wars