Delhiwale: A recovered doctor’s confessions

Proust questionnaire with a health care professional

These days, all families are alike in symptoms. The young doctor caught COVID, and then everybody else at his flat in Noida’s Sector 50. Thankfully their symptoms were mild, and radiologist Sushant Mittal exploited the quarantine to answer the Proust questionnaire in which folks are nudged to make “Parisian parlour confessions”, all to explore the lives and experiences of Delhi citizens. Meanwhile the household has recovered and Dr Mittal gamely posed with wife, Dr Sarika Jain (dermatologist), and kids, Ambika and restless Shantanu, for a WhatsApp portrait.

Meanwhile the household has recovered and Dr Mittal gamely posed with wife, Dr Sarika Jain (dermatologist), and kids, Ambika and restless Shantanu, for a WhatsApp portrait.

Your favorite qualities in a woman

Knowledge, poise, love a bit of attitude too

What do you appreciate the most in your friends?

I do not appreciate anything. Appreciation lessens the motivation to be a better version of oneself (psst: my friends know and loathe me for this, although I love how they are there whenever I need them)

Your idea of happiness

Tucked away in the mountains, sitting by a window, with good books and jaggery tea. Give me lots of Ruskin Bond and Rabindranath Tagore

Your idea of misery?

Losing a loved one. Heart breaks when I look around what’s unfolding these days

Where would you like to live?

Ranikhet Cantt, with many deodar trees around. Cotswold villages in England are inviting too

Your favorite bird

Sparrow, so comforting to see, and mountain thrush

Your favorite prose authors

Ruskin Bond—his prose is loaded with mountain freshness and silence. Gulzar

Your favorite painters

Monet, Tyeb Mehta and Ambika, my daughter

Your heroes/heroines in real life

My father and mother. They gave up everything to bring us up

Your favorite names

Gayatri , Devbandhu

What do you hate the most?

Admiring false heroes. I hate when our politicians choose to look away. I also hate lies and deceit

The military event you admire the most

Not sure.. not my cup of tea

How do you wish to die?

Peacefully under a deodar tree—Ruskin Bond says it is the tree of the Gods

What is your present state of mind?

Heartbroken. I feel so helpless in this pandemic

Faults for which you have the most tolerance

I think there are no faults, only the choices we make. What is a fault in my eyes, is maybe a choice someone wants to make