Blissful Life

When you apply skepticism and care in equal amounts, you get bliss.

Month: February 2019

  • On (Not) Judging People

    Human beings have an in-built sense of “morality” that they routinely apply against everything that they come across. There are multiple ways one’s sense of what is moral and what is immoral emerges – including religion, upbringing, exposure, rationality, mental health, and so on.

    Is morality necessary?

    Morality is necessary. Not just because it allows people to live together without killing each other. But also because it helps an individual answer their own questions about what to do in any particular situation. It is the moral compass that often shows the direction to forge.

    Should we use morality to judge others?

    A distinction needs to be made before answering this. When “judging” someone, are you judging the person or their action? The answer matters a lot.

    When you judge a person for a particular action, you are labeling that person as “good” or “bad” based on that action. For example, if you see the CEO of a company scolding an employee for a “small” thing and judge the CEO to be a bad person, you may be making two mistakes.
    1) You do not know the reasons why the CEO is scolding the employee. It may even be for the good of the employee in the long term.
    2) By labeling the CEO as a bad person, you have created a barrier between you personally and them which might make it difficult for you to work with them.

    There are several cases where reason 1 does not apply at all. For example, say the CEO is actually doing something, say, being corrupt, which they themselves might not be able to defend.

    But reason 2 is more important for someone who is trying to get things done. People are not dispensable. Human resource is hard to come by. If you start judging people by a few of their actions and dismiss them as “bad”. If you make it impossible for you to be working with them. Then you have one less person to work with. And when we are all humans and everyone will have some or the other “follies”, especially when you are viewing them through your sense of morality (which, having been formed by your own unique experiences in life, is going to be different from anyone else’s sense of morality), judging people will soon leave you with nobody you can work with.

    In other words, every human is different. If you keep looking for people who think, walk, and talk exactly like you to forge teams, you will never be able to move forward.

    But, does it make sense to judge actions? Yes. As long as the judgement does not spill over to the person as a whole. In fact, judging actions is natural and direct consequence of morality. But extrapolating that judgement to an entire person is human bias.

    But what if someone is wrong in all areas of their life? I think it is quite right to be mathematical here. The total value of a person is the sum of all their individual values and the added value that interaction of values give them.

  • Why are the question papers of NEET PG not available anywhere?

    If you are a medical student, you know what I am talking about. The PG medical entrance test, called NEET PG, is a proprietary test conducted by National Board of Examinations. You have to sign a non-disclosure agreement to attempt this test. You cannot, according to the agreement, disclose the questions asked to anyone. Neither does NBE publish the question papers anywhere.

    How is this fair at all?

    For comparison, all the JEE advanced question papers from 2007 are put on the official website of JEE advanced. The USMLE website has content description booklet, plenty of sample questions, and practice tests. While the NBE’s website proudly writes everywhere that their exams (not just NEET, all of them) are “proprietary“.

    This would not have been a problem if NBE was some private body which conducts test for the sake of individuals. But NBE is not that. NBE is an autonomous body under the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare. NBE is not a private entity.

    How come they are doing this then? Well, turns out they have been doing this for years and nobody dared to ask. The DNB exams have been happening the same way from the beginning. Candidates take DNB exam with no knowledge of what they will be assessed on. Professor Suptendra has written about this in this IJME article titled “A farce called the National Board of Examinations“.

    I have filed an RTI yesterday with the following content:

    I, as a citizen of India, hereby exercise my right to information granted under sec (6) of RTI Act, 2015 by requesting the following.

    1) Please provide me with the questions asked (including answer options) in the NEET PG Entrance exam held on Jan 6, 2019.

    2) Please provide me the answer key of the above questions.

    3) Please provide me with the questions asked (including answer options) in the NEET PG Entrance exam held on Jan 7, 2018.

    4) Please provide me the answer key of the above questions.

    5) Please provide me with the reason why there was a non-disclosure clause at the beginning of the NEET PG entrance test held on Jan 6, 2019.

    The information may be emailed to my address: asdofindia@gmail.com

    Thank you

    This was addressed to National Board of Examinations. I’m sure the response will be “proprietary test”. Also remember that NBE makes 30 crores profit on NEET PG registration alone with no sanction from MoHFW.

    What are students supposed to do to prepare for NBE’s proprietary examinations? Go to entrance coaching institutes? Read textbooks and continue working? The atmosphere around entrance tests is so tense that students are scared to prepare on their own. They are forced into joining medical entrance coaching centers.

    But why? How can a test that decides who gets access to the very few postgraduate seats in India’s medical education system be made proprietary? Are you saying that only students who have the time and resources to go to entrance coaching centers should be able to prepare and score well? Should only people with time and money be becoming pediatricians and gynecologists?

    What will that mean to India’s health system?