Reflections

Aravind Panagriya and Jagdish Bhagwati have been painted by media (the non presstitute kind, which are fervent Modibhakts) as opposed to the last UPA government and its doings. It was with curiosity then that I took up their well-known book “Why growth matters” . In most editorial and oped columns, the book has been depicted as ferociously opposed to the UPA economic policies and it has been claimed that the book has shown how the UPA government had derailed economic growth. However when I read the book, which was published in 2013, and presumably written in 2012 , judging by the tables published, I was bewildered. Nowhere did I find any denunciation of the UPA policies. To the contrary, all their calculations have shown that the UPA government did quite well in most of the economic parameters that they calculated. Let us take for instance the question of poverty reduction. The opposition ( read the BJP) at that time made a huge hue and cry about the poverty figures and claimed t...

Pokhara , where we lived and worked for 4 happy years The Nepal blockade is unbelievable. Contrary to all international laws, India is blockading a small landlocked country in an attempt to bring it to its knees . One would understand if the Hindutwits who run the Indian government thought that they were striking a blow against Islam.( as those idiots who are abusing people like Dr Bhargava think). Nepal is even more Hindu than India. The country has always been the only one in the world that lets us visit and work there with no questions asked. Some of us have had the privilege of doing so and many of us remember those times as the happiest and most relaxed times we have ever spent among some of the most friendly people on earth. It is time to speak out about this. It is totally unacceptable that India should treat Nepal in this manner. No matter what the provocation, this MUST STOP. I am reproducing an article written by Kunda Dixit in Nepal Times which may give a flavour of...

Travelling abroad, particularly to the developed world is a real pain in the neck. While Malaysians and Singaporeans and South Africans and Brazilians sail through most immigration departments with no need for a visa for at least short visits, no country appears ready to let us enter their soil without a visa.     Our peripatetic Prime Minister has made it possible for many visitors to come to India without a visa (or has he? The e visa is a visa, it requires all the procedures and documentation, and you just get it stamped in the airport that is all). There was brouhaha about Canada having now allowed Indians to get a visa on arrival. This is not true. What they have done is allowed us to do all the paperwork and come with a document which allows the visa to be stamped at the entrance port, the hassles remain the same. If you google visa free entry for Indians you will find that around 54 countries allow visa free entry or allow you to get a visa on arrival. Th...

Baba as a young man  What can you say about an 86- year old man who died? That he was a good husband and father, he loved his grandchildren, he lived a long life and now his allotted span has ended. My father died last night. They say that you never really become adult until your father passes away. In that case I am finally an adult at this ripe old age. It is clichéd to say that an era has ended, but that is exactly what has happened. He was the last surviving member of his generation of a family that boasted 10 siblings. He belonged to a time when fathers were firm, stern and heard. His idea of parenting was a model had probably passed its sell by  the time he became a father, but nobody told him. We, my sister and I, loved him, but were scared of him almost in equal measure during the days that we were growing up. But as I grew to adult life, I could see him more a person, a man who had his faults and his strengths, who did good most of the time, but sometimes di...

Why is the Indian polity so corrupt? Forget the fools who talk about oriental values which do not include honesty and all that sort of patronizing nonsense that the West has told us over the years. What we do follow are the values of the early modern and medieval periods where corruption was not looked down upon. In medieval times as well in early modern times, it was considered normal to “look after” your family and friends, call it a feudal value if you like. The West was as corrupt as say, India is today. The corruption of the East India Company is legendary, as was the corruption among officials of the Colonial government. The celebration of honesty is quite new, it arose in the early days of the twentieth century. Before that and even after that, England itself witnessed political and commercial corruption of a very high order and today, the banking system, is, even today, by any standards as corrupt as hell. However, the West has moved on, they have embraced modern values whi...

The ubiquity of smartphones and the cheap data plans in India have spawned a new phenomenon; that of whatsapp groups. In today’s connected world one can scarcely find somebody who is not a member of one or more such groups. Let me confess: I am a member of several groups. Some groups are those belonging to my students in each posting: these groups are useful as we can disseminate information regarding classes and any changes immediately and it acts a good chain of communication between all the members of the teaching group. A second type of group are the special interest groups; one such is the group that I belong to which comprises our batch at the medical college I attended. There are several others that I belong to, or belonged to, though I must admit that a family group that I used to belong to seems to have expelled me. I think it is because I kept objecting to mindless posts. I spent some time analyzing behavior of those who are parts of the group and I present my fin...

All of us who belong to the non entrepreneur groups ( we Bengalis are prominent among them ) look upon the Gujaratis, more specifically Patels as the epitome of all that is the business spirit of a community that has by all accounts taken charge of entrepreneurship In India. They are the ultimate risk takers, hard workers, ready to nose around for profits everywhere and have a proud record of successful business not just in this country but all over the world. It is well known that half of all motels in the USA are Patel owned. See here.  Wellspun City, Gujarat  Which is why a recent report in Economic Times which reported a militant movement that has suddenly taken wing in Gujarat shocked me to the gills. The Patels, we are told, want reservations as members of the Other Backward Classes ( OBC)  group. They want what? Reservations in Government jobs? That too in Gujarat, the shining Gujarat that has broken all bounds of growth in the past 15 years? The Gujara...

A 1916 pamphlet from the New York City Department of Health offers sanitary advice for polio prevention. http://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/nyc-polio-pamphlet-1916 Polio has been eradicated: but not quite. The familiar litany of two steps forward and one step back has left the polio eradication programme tantalizingly close to the goal that was originally proposed to be attained in 2000, but has taken a couple of decades more. I firmly believe that notwithstanding the so called Islamic or better described as anti-modernity warriors in Nigeria and the Af-pak region, we will soon see the end of what was one of mankind’s principal scourges in the twentieth century. Surprisingly while Polio has been documented in Ancient Egypt, and Ancient Rome (think Claudius), most societies did not really record epidemics until the twentieth century or at least  till the fag end of the nineteenth. The principal epidemics that brought it on the map were, of course, the  New Yor...

In Bertolt Brecht’s famous play Life of Galileo, there is a famous scene where Andrea laments “ a land is unhappy that breeds no heroes”. In reply Brecht has Galileo riposte “No, Andrea: unhappy is the land that needs a hero .” I have had many heroes in my younger days. Rammohan Roy, Gokhale, Rabindranath(of course) , Netaji and Fidel Castro were and still are my heroes. There have been some more, of course. But as I grow older and I reflect on the ways of heroes and the implications of needing heroes, I am in more and more agreement with Galileo (or Brecht) that it is an unhappy country that has need of heroes at every turn of history . This probably makes India one of the unhappiest countries on record. This is because we are the past masters of heroes and heroines. In recent times, the cults (which is the only word one can use) of Indira Gandhi, Rajiv, and now Modi and the smaller but no less intense cults of Jayalalithaaaaa (or however she is writing it nowadays) , Ma...

The second and final part of the paper by Moynihan et al  Mild symptoms as portents of serious disease: irritable bowel syndrome Irritable bowel syndrome has long been considered a common functional disorder, and a “diagnosis of exclusion” covering a range of symptom severity, yet it is currently experiencing something of a global ``makeover.” Without question many people with the condition are severely disabled by their symptoms, but the arrival of new drugs has seen manufacturers seek to change the way the world thinks about irritable bowel syndrome. What for many people is a mild functional disorder—requiring little more than reassurance about its benign natural course—is currently being reframed as a serious disease attracting a label and a drug, with all the associated harms and costs. Confidential plan to “shape” medical opinion A confidential draft document leaked from a medical communications company, In Vivo Communications, describes a three year “medical edu...

This paper was published 13 years ago in the BMJ. It raises issues which are unfortunately as relevant today as they were when it was published. I am reproducing it, hoping that it will help to educate us to some of the issues that face healthcare today. It can be found here   Selling sickness: the pharmaceutical industry and disease mongering Ray Moynihan, Iona Heath, David Henry There's a lot of money to be made from telling healthy people they're sick. Some forms of medicalising ordinary life may now be better described as disease mongering: widening the boundaries of treatable illness in order to expand markets for those who sell and deliver treatments. 1 , 2  Pharmaceutical companies are actively involved in sponsoring the definition of diseases and promoting them to both prescribers and consumers. The social construction of illness is being replaced by the corporate construction of disease. Whereas some aspects of medicalisation are the subject of ongoing deb...

The relationship between doctors and their patients has undergone a sea change in India . Gone are the days of paternalism, when doctors ordered and the patients listened. But in today's consumer driven market place, this no longer holds good. However such concerns are not just Indian. Similar concerns consume American doctors as well. I am reproducing an opinion by an American anesthesiologist  Shirie Leng  , . Originally from the KevinMD, this post examines one reason for the gulf that has appeared in the trust between doctors and patients. " The subject matter has hit a nerve.  The first post was about how we use and misuse numbers in medicine, and the second made the case that patients are not customers in the retail sense. The opinions in both cases were pretty much split between people who agreed with me wholeheartedly and those who thought me the most misguided idiot doctor ever to approach a keyboard. Why these subjects?  Why are issues of buyi...