Random Musings

There are days when a bunch of thoughts come flooding in and they are disconnected subjects. This blog is more a random collection on some issues than a single subject matter.

The Rural doctor:

Way back in the 80’s a popular joke was that the cows of Gujarat had far better access to healthcare facilities than humans. I still recall the doyen of Gujarat Mr. Tribhuvandas Patel attempted to improve this situation though I have no idea what the latest situation is. 40 years later, little has changed. We are still debating that the rural populace lacks healthcare facilities and a primary reason for that is the reluctance of doctors to go serve in these areas. They neither see career progression, economic development, lifestyle improvement and invariably the open dirty secret is that they use every trick including bribery and influence to avoid such stints. They start their life with compromise and then on it’s a downhill ride.

When one reads books of the earlier times or our own younger days, the family doctor was the king of all he surveyed, highly respected and the word family literally meant what it said. The doctor was so intimately aware of our lives that he would tell the wife of a patient to use less spices in her cooking or a child to eat less sweets or the husband of a patient to buy his wife a gas stove without being told why they suffered from some ailment. The doctor from the ailment knew what the problem was and often medicines were just not needed.

The reason why such doctors don’t exist and that too in rural areas is because 1) The generalist is shunned, shamed, discarded, forgotten, forget about being paid a living wage. So, everybody prefers to work in a large corporate city hospital even if a glorified helper 2) Doctors are also human with aspirations and want to spend time with family, send their children to a good school, go out for a meal or a cinema with friends and live a life with modern amenities of toilets, water, power. They get none of these in a rural posting. 3) Lack of adequate healthcare infra is often a good excuse but unfortunately true, but then without a doctor nobody will focus on infra either.

What then can be a solution?

Learn from the all India system of veterinary medical care of the dairy industry.

1. Post the doctors in the nearest District headquarters/ town/city which has basic facilities that the doctors want like housing, power, water, schooling, entertainment etc
2. Provide good comfortable cars (No, cars cannot be based on the hierarchy of the person) with a driver and all requisite medicines and basic instruments.
3. The doctor would traverse by road each day covering a set of villages and the villagers would know the day/time on which the doctor visits them.
4. Have an emergency doctor with a car and driver so that on those days when no visit is scheduled, and a medical emergency arises this doctor can rush to that village area and help.
5. Pay such doctors if needed twice what his city-based counterpart will be paid and given the encyclopaedia of exposure such a doctor gets, they will become highly paid and sought-after general physicians in corporate hospitals in a few years.

Like Ralph Waldo Emerson conveyed - If a man can build a better mouse trap, the mouse will come running to it.

Is the rise in Muslim population the issue?

Swaminathan Iyer a writer whose articles are worth reading writes once again on how the BJP, RSS and Hindutva brigade opines that the rise in Muslim population means that they will overtake Hindus and India will become Islamic. He rebuts this opinion with figures that cannot be argued with. Like always, I again say – explore the real intent versus the stated intent and sometimes things can be fact, but not true.

Very recently Ganesh Chaturthi was celebrated and as against many pandals, processions and visiting each other’s homes like in the past, it was subdued due to Covid. But even in normal times, its fervour has been far lesser than 3 to 4 decades ago. Then, as youngsters we visited 10, 50, 100 homes like a contest and had a darshan of the lord.

Diwali meant bursting crackers at 6 AM, never mind that on other days we refused to get up before 8. Holi meant our mothers couldn’t recognise us when we were finished playing. We literally went house to house and chased timid adults into kitchens, bathrooms, inside cupboards to throw colour on them.

When I visited a neighbour recently, for Ganesh Chaturthi he remarked that even without Covid, the socialisation and celebration of such festivals would die a natural death in a few decades time. He said if we look around, we would not be able to find one household in the area where one could say there is a next generation who celebrate the festival and socialise like we did. A busy world means that most don’t have the time to celebrate such occasions. It’s become a materialistic, mechanical world he said.

The campaigns against Diwali and Holi using logical arguments of air pollution, water conservation etc have been unrelenting since years and in less than 2 decades one finds the festivals passing by with little notice. That there is a concerted campaign against every cultural, societal system can be seen from the recent campaign against “Giving away the bride or Kanyadaan” (which incidentally is followed even in Christian systems).

It’s not that these cultures and festivals will vanish but compared to 3 decades back, today, it’s a tenth of what it used to be, and reducing each year visibly. Look at western nations across USA, UK, EU and you will find Christianity has got diluted in society hugely. Very few go to churches anymore and with a focus on material aspects of life, their society depends on migrant labour, refugees to survive. A German recently told me he is unable to find Germans to recruit and looking for an Indian to hire.

Globally life has changed in many ways with modernisation and development and in many cases the family/ society networks have weakened. But fact is that historically the religious thread kept these networks alive and functioning.

On the other hand, when one looks at the Muslim community globally, the religious fervour has increased manifold, and even with western education and exposure the religiosity has increased hugely. Taking the statistics (facts) presented by Aiyar, its true that even after a few decades the Hindu population in India may still be 70% and the Muslim population 20%. But societal behaviour, political and legal power/ influence is not decided by just total numbers. An 80% religious Muslim population versus a 10% religious Hindu population means that the real balance of power would be between 7 % and 16%. No surprises for guessing which will prevail – 7 or 16.

Without debating this religiously, the REAL issue at hand is that globally in the last 4 decades Islam has been aggressively marketed, sold, expanded within their own faith, across the globe. This identity, keeping the faith, following festivals/cultural customs have been ingrained deeper and deeper into the DNA and actively marketed/advertised. In contrast, western Christian societies have moved away from their identity, affiliation, culture, and the church has abysmally failed to sell their faith even to their own globally. Further, the liberal attitudes of the west has meant that the increasing religiosity and identity of Islam is actually encouraged thus creating a double impact.

The entire efforts of the BJP RSS Hindutva movement however much it may be interpreted as a religious identity, it is an attempt to maintain the cultural heritage, spiritual foundation of what is Bharat. It is an attempt to protect this cultural and spiritual ethos which embraces every citizen of India. Never mind that the messaging can still be misinterpreted with anecdotal evidence, this fact cannot be wished away. To quote the Vision of RSS;

“The Hindu culture is the life-breath of Hindusthan. It is therefore clear that if Hindusthan is to be protected, we should first nourish the Hindu culture. If the Hindu culture perishes in Hindusthan itself, and if the Hindu society ceases to exist, it will hardly be appropriate to refer to the mere geographical entity that remains as Hindusthan. Mere geographical lumps do not make a nation.”

The focus is not on religion but culture and culture transcends all differences. I had earlier spoken of Bharat versus India. If the RSS used the word Bharat instead of the more ancient Hindusthan, this message would have better marketing impact.

http://rvasisht.blogspot.com/2020/08/bharat-versus-india.html

In a Hindu/ Indian society, there has been a way of life since centuries, bound by a common foundation of life and beliefs without becoming religious dogma. The effort is to preserve this culture so that as a society India/ Bharat does not go the western way where people become rootless, and a material world gets increasingly controlled by Chinese/ Communist ideologies by leveraging this weakness. One needs to look at this without the politics, look at it inwardly from one’s own identity prism. The REAL intent of the Hindutva movement is not about numbers but preserving the foundational roots. When one understands that, it starts making sense.

The Congress Conundrum:

The author in a delusional state desires that it is maybe time for the Congress to split and create a Revolutionary Rahul Congress while the rest not accepting of the family leadership can walk away and become facilitators. Facilitate what? Erstwhile Congress members, Pawar, Mamata, Jagan etc the author thinks can create a new Congress. Using the word facilitator instead of broker the author demonstrates the political bankruptcy within Congress.

If Rahul indeed had this kind of dynamism, he would have become PM in 2009 itself. In his political career he didn’t even become a Panchayat Chairman to demonstrate leadership and vision.

What this article demonstrates is that even the most fervent supporters of the owner promoter family of Congress want the promoters to step down and bring in professional politicians to lead the party. Again, if the promoters had any vision, they would have stood firm and taken over the mantle of PM in 2004 itself or had the courage to make someone like Pranab Mukherjee or Sharad Pawar the PM. That these supporters didn’t have the courage to suggest these options for the last 17 years speaks volumes of their analytical intelligence. The same author made a virtue of a so-called sacrifice in 2004. When one tastes power without accountability, responsibility, involvement and then packages that as high flatulence sacrifice failure is guaranteed.