I close my eyes...
..and imagine...
the person in front of me is tied on to a chair,and I am splashing hot boiling water on his face...
he minces in pain...
but I am not going to show any mercy..sorry..
next I make him lie on a slab of ice..he screams ... but I just smile a wicked smile...there's worse in store for you mister..
..then I make him travel in an auto rickshaw in Mumbai which is following the exhaust of a truck all the time...and the stream of exhaust is directed right at his face..his hands are tied so he can't even cover his face..all he can do is cough...
...then I make him stand on a railway platform in Mumbai at 7.30 in the morning..and make him board each local train and alight it on the same platform...the mad crowd does the rest..abusing,kicking and punching him at all places..
..and then...it just keeps getting worse..
"Mandar..I think we are done for today, you can open your eyes now"..says the dentist.
I open my eyes,and smile in relief.."done for today"..three golden words I was waiting to hear since the last hour an hour..a period in which I made the dentist go through so many different interesting things in mind...
A root canal is one of those things which you would not want even your worst enemy to experience. And unfortunately, I have had two in the last year. Somehow my teeth behave rather strangely - they skip all the intermediate stages of decay (that I now have by heart what with staring at those posters waiting outside for my turn at the dentist's clinic) and start paining only when root canal is the only solution left - and I have to find more creative ways of punishing the dentist while he is operating on me.
Nevertheless, the visit I had at dentist's yesterday was by far the best ever I have ever had. For the first time I went to the dentist for a "routine checkup" - and not with holding one side of my jaw. It was over even before I thought it started - the dentist gave me a clean chit after having a look at my teeth. And I was more happy than I was at that point in our XLRI adventure trip - when we successfully built our own raft, touched the other end of a lake in windy and rainy conditions, and came back with the same number of passengers as we had started with.
So the moral of the story is - brush twice a day to keep the dentist away - a small piece of advice that we have been hearing since childhood but hardly does anyone adhere to. This -as you must have observed in the first part of this blog - is one of the reasons for the increasing violence in this world. This world would be so much more peaceful if only everyone would brush twice a day! ;)
