"Some people are born mediocre, some people achieve mediocrity, and some people have mediocrity thrust upon them."
- Joseph Heller, Catch 22
I was initially very loath to put any information about myself on this site - something of a personal space invasion thing (and no, I don't mean that I have my own personal collection of space invaders but merely the invasion of my personal space). However, having dismally failed to come up with any particularly inspired ideas for this site, I eventually decided to go the way of tradition and put something about myself on my homepage. Revolutionary it may not be. Boring it may be. But I did it anyway. Because I'm stubborn like that.
So, why, you may wonder, is this site entitled ‘The Last Ninja’. Well, ‘Ninja’ is a nickname I acquired at school due to a tendency I had to go around kicking people when I was annoyed and also because one of my friends thought that my first name sounded like 'Ninja'. Like most nicknames, it stuck because I hated it. To fit in with the pseudonymic culture of the net I thought I'd use it on my personal web page. My real name, which no-one actually calls me, means 'God' in Tamil (derived from Sanskrit). In fact it literally means 'He who is devoid of emotion' - which I happen to think is fairly accurate.
Anyhow, you will note that this web page is actually titled “The Last Ninja” – this is because someone sneaked in before me and misappropriated the username Ninja on Geocities, where this website was originally hosted back in 1996. “The Last Ninja” is one of my favourite games on the good old Commodore 64, so I used that username instead. I have changed very little of this site since back then, so the odd title remains. In fact, most of this site is the way it is because that’s how it was in 1996, and I’m disinclined to change it much. It’s a testament to my mis-spent youth.
Self portrait, aged 14 - I don't quite look like this anymore!
I qualified as a doctor in 2000. I graduated
from Guy's King's and St
Thomas' School of Medicine and Dentistry. GKTSMD is part of King's College, London University.
I did not always want to be a doctor - indeed I wasn’t sure about it for
most of the time I was a medical student, but that’s part of a
constitutional tendency to vacillation. Before I started my medical training I
did a Natural Sciences degree (specialising in Biochemistry) at Cambridge University. I was at Sidney Sussex College - whose primary
claim to fame is that it's opposite the Cambridge branch of Sainsbury's, a
favourite haunt of Cantabrigian students (well, the hungry ones). As a
consequence of this three year escapade, I currently hold a Master of Arts
degree in Biochemistry. Why
I was once something of a computer addict - hence the existence of this website. Nowadays, however, I'm too busy to play around with computers too much! I haven't played a decent computer game for ages - the last thing I had a chance to get hooked was Half Life 2. The limited time I have is now spent mostly surfing randomly and e-mailing. If you log into RanmaMUCK (a MUD themed around Japanese animation a.k.a. anime - a throwback to the early days of the net) I used to be a resident there back in 1994 - 1996. I've now been toaded for inactivity (though I realise that term means nothing to most people), but most of the Bubblegum Crisis World there is my handiwork (sad, but true - the internet was a different place back then). Bubblegum Crisis is an old 1980s anime series which I happen to be rather fond of, though it hasn't dated all that well. Incidentally, a bubblegum crisis is the point you reach while blowing bubblegum when any further inflation will lead to a catastrophic explosion. Apparently.
I don't really know if I can say that I have any specific hobbies as such. I listen to a LOT of music, to just about everything from punk to trance via indie, jazz and rai, taking in ‘bollywood’ and western classical and much else besides. I tend to change style focus every few years. You can get an idea of what I listen to by taking a glance at my CD Rack. I also used to play the piano and the carnatic flute (carnatic music is South Indian classical music) - though I guess that's ancient history now.
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I read a considerable amount - about pretty much anything. If there's one thing I could claim to be addicted to it is the acquisition of knowledge. I'd like to justify that with Francis Bacon's maxim that "Scientia potentas est" (knowledge is power), but it's probably just because I'm a rather sad human being. Anyhow, my work suffers as a consequence of this pathological curiosity as I have a very tangential mind and, having the attention span of a goldfish, constantly flit from one thing to another. I’m not sure I can put my finger on what interests me most, but science in general, and particularly cosmology, astronomy, evolutionary biology, palaeontology, anthropology, archaeology, neuroscience and computer science. I’m also very interested in history, politics and current affairs, and also in linguistics. I suppose I could tie all these things together as having a central theme, that is: “Where do we come from and who are we?”. Maybe it’s a quest necessitated by my atheism. Who knows? I await the psychoanalysis. I also read quite a lot of fiction. If pushed I’d say that my favourite books are “Love in the Time of Cholera”, “The Little Prince”, “The Name of the Rose”, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” (in no particular order). Other than reading I tend to enjoy most sedentary pursuits - cinema and theatre (though I detest musicals). In fact, probably the only sedentary activity I don't like (with the possible exception of knitting) is eating. Food generally fails to enthuse me, unless it's chocolate chip cookies, or something else which allows me to OD on cocoa. I eat to survive - call it natural philosophy if you will. Mind you, for someone who isn't interested in food I do spend a bizarre amount of time in restaurants. Presumably there is something of the flock-mentality in me as this is indubitably due to the insidious influence of my associates. I also have a bit of a travel bug . I can hardly claim to be a globe trotter but I have visited, to greater or lesser extents, Sri Lanka, India, Singapore, Malaysia, Italy, France, Germany, Spain, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Ireland, Canada, the US, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Tunisia, Mauritius and, of course, the UK. |
I am quite politicised. My politics are somewhat left-wing although I don't subscribe to any particular ideology. Incidentally, the red star on my index page is merely a testament to the power of imagery - I am NOT a communist. To an extent I use its iconic status to signify my egalitarianism and atheism, but it’s actually there primarily because I put it there back in 1996 and am now disinclined to take it off. Anyway, my History of Slaughter page may be of some interest – a little side project to provide some context and real information through the hypocrisy and biased reporting seen in most news broadcasts.
I'm also very anti-religious. This doesn't mean I don't have any religious friends or am intolerant in any way - strangely, almost all of my friends are quite religious. However, my atheism is a major driving force in the way I think. I was brought up as Hindu at a Christian school, but rejected religion outright in my early teens after I decided that it was irrational and inconsistent with science. See my Refutation of Religion for more details. The encouragement of apostasy is something I used to engage in with an almost evangelical fervour, but I've become far more placid as I’ve gotten older and now only argue with people if someone challenges me. My atheism is part of a more general rationalism and astrology, numerology and other ‘–ology’ abuses are guaranteed to invoke my ire every bit as much as theology does.
I am not remotely interested in sport, and firmly believe that Rugby players are the lowest form of life on the planet. Followed by people who row, and Physical Education teachers. My dislike of 'Rugger Buggers' and 'Boaties' stems from having been at Cambridge University where the afore-mentioned sub-amoebic life-forms are rather more bountiful than in the general population. And I hated P.E. at school. I did do Shaolin Kung Fu for a while on a semi-regular basis. But when it came down to it I was just too lazy and unmotivated.
Finally, I have taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator twice and, despite my scepticism, the results were the same on both occasions, and also correlated quite well with my opinion of the way I am. Mind you, I recognise myself in the diagnostic criteria of a number of psychiatric disorders, so (since I'm disinclined to think that I'm mentally ill) I'm forced to conclude that my acceptance of the MBTI is affected by agreement bias. The first time I took the test was for a careers thing at Cambridge - the number 1 most popular profession for people of my personality type was Biological Science (which is what I was studying at the time), and the number 2 was Computer Science (which is what I was thinking of doing afterwards, though in the end I opted to study medicine instead). So, anyway, just for your interest, my MBTI personality type is INTP (Introverted,iNtuitive, Thinking, Perceptive). Interestingly, I was recently informed that neurology is in fact the most common career choice among medical INTPs, though I haven’t verified this myself.
Oh, in case you are curious - here's a
photograph of me. This was taken in 1998 in
And That's All Folks!
Amazingly, this page was updated (well, trivially modified) in 2004, unlike almost everything else on the site.
Any comments can be e-mailed to ninja@refutation.org.
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