Reflections

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...