My Year 2020

Op-Ed essays in Newslaundry: Algebra of an epidemic India continues to deny commubnity transmission Ministers set a poor example in Covid treatment How do we know a treatment works We need also to know how well a treatment works Between Trump and Ayurveda science is Covid’s latest casualty Ayurveda should sell itself on faith, not…

7 deadly sins of India’s Coronavirus repsonse

India’s response to the Coronavirus epidemic can best be described as inadequate and confused at best, and ineffective and damaging at worst. To use the metaphor of the seven deadly sins (Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, and Pride) would be a far stretch but it is easy enough to identify 7 clear failings of…

The Mathematics of Epidemics

This blog was published on 2 June 2020 on https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/06/02/the-algebra-of-epidemics-how-indias-covid-crisis-may-unfold On 5 March India reported a cumulative total of 28 cases of Covid-19. On 31 May, 86 days later, there were 1,82,142 cases. This growth in the number of people infected ( quite a few recovered, more than 5,000 have died so far), is what…

WhatsApp Lies and Deceit

WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned social media messaging service has been used as a tool for spreading fake news and rewriting history to create hatred and mobilise support for a political party of movement. In India the Hindu #Rightwing has extensively and effectively used WhatsApp to further its political aims. Many WhatsApp forwards that are shared among…

Scepticism and a scientific temper

India’s Constitution is unusual in explicitly setting out a list of duties of citizens (in Article 51A [1]), one of which is: ‘to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform’. Obviously, the founding fathers, influenced no doubt by Nehru [2], reposed their faith and belief in science as the springboard…

Too much medicine – too little understanding

India and Indians are enamoured of high-technology healthcare. You haven’t truly arrived unless you possess an iPhone, have had a foreign holiday, and have had an MRI scan. But while health technology has reached India, another quiet revolution in how we understand and use clinical science appears to have passed us by. This is the…

Five decades of clinical medicine

Fifty years. That’s how much time has gone by since I was one of 200 young idealistic 18 year -olds that entered medical college. A lot has changed since then. Science and technology has developed in astonishing, unpredictable and unimaginable ways. So too has the practice of medicine. Not just the ‘what’ of clinical science…

Sabarimala – what a mess!

I agree with all those regressive, superstitious, religious, nut-cases protesting at  India’s Supreme Court verdict that menstrual age women should NOT be barred from the Sabarimala Temple. But for entirely different reasons from theirs. Sabarimala is the wrongest possible priority for a battle over a matter of fundamental rights. Yes, there is such a thing…

DeMonetisation and Digital Payments

DeMonetisation did not promote the uptake of digital transactions Driving India towards a less-cash, digital payments economy was one of the aims claimed by the Prime Minister when he invalidated 86% of India’s circulating currency. The reasoning was that India was a largely cash-based economy; if circulating cash was reduced, people would rapidly move towards…

India’s (Not So) Great Leap Forward

A year on the Indian Prime Minister’s Great Idea may have turned out to be a dud Mao ZeDong’s Great Leap Forward [1]  has to be the most outstanding example of the devastating harm from the unintended consequences of a state policy that aimed to modernize and develop an entire country.  It resulted in the…