An old photograph of Stony Brook University Hospital shows a complex of concrete buildings that intersect around central glass corridors in the background. A brown-skinned man with black hair and a mustache sits in the foreground, posing on a low wall in a dark blue windbreaker, a plaid shirt, and jeans, one leg bent over the other knee.
An old photograph of Stony Brook University Hospital shows a complex of concrete buildings that intersect around central glass corridors in the background. A brown-skinned man with black hair and a mustache sits in the foreground, posing on a low wall in a dark blue windbreaker, a plaid shirt, and jeans, one leg bent over the other knee. Courtesy of familial archives.

மருத்துவமனை

Maruththuvamanai (hospital)

Content note: intellectual elitism

A group of men was crossing the Ganges in a rowboat. One of them, a pandit, passed the time by flaunting his erudition, asking each passenger in turn, "Have you read the Vedas? The Silappathikaram? The Bhagavata Purana?" and preening because no one had. Then a sudden storm cracked the sky; rain swiftly filled the boat. As the boat began to sink, a passenger asked of the pandit, "Revered sir, can you swim?" The pandit could not. And the passenger said, "Sir, I may not know The Silappathikaram, but I can swim" (Sri Ramakrishna, 1947, p. 122).

What will a person gain by mastering theory alone? The needful thing is action.

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