Blissful Life

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

Author: akshay

  • Nirbhau Nirvair Niramaya

    Nirbhau Nirvair Niramaya

    Ajay (AN) introduced to me the above words at Kozhikode during the mid-annual mfc meet last year. It means without fear, without hate, with love. The last one was added to the Sikh saying by AN themself.

    When I met AN at the meet, I was brimming with negative energy (likely hatred) at the institutions AN represented and their politics. I projected all of those at AN too.

    But we had long chats. And we ended up hugging. And it was the most useful for me.

    I don’t like hating people. But I hate it when people are perpetuating and reinforcing systems of injustice. And countless experiences have taught me to be sceptical of privileged caste men who are progressing in their career without explicitly addressing these injustices.

    In the larger society, there’s internalized misogyny. Where there’s an inherent hatred towards women. In the smaller society of social justice work, there is an internalized hatred towards savarna men. I have that internalized hatred. (Also towards doctors, academicians, and so on, but that’s a different post).

    Except I don’t like hating people. I’ve been trying to adopt a love ethic. And this was a contradiction.

    It is probably a contradiction that cannot be avoided. The world sees a lot of suffering. And the suffering doesn’t happen on its own. There are people propelling systems of oppression. And those people deserve intolerance. (Paradox of intolerance).

    So to completely eliminate hate, we would need complete elimination of suffering.

    Yet, my hate was sometimes being directed at the wrong people. People who were trying their best.

    For example, AN above has a life story very similar to mine. Hating the violence of medical colleges, going to work with very marginalized communities, using technology in transformative ways in some places, and being stuck in larger economics of technology and health. The hatred was unjustified. And I turned to love.

    After that, it was Parth’s (PS) turn. There was this day on Twitter when Cyriac Abby Philips had retweeted a casteist video and blocked everyone who called it out. I had indirectly called PS an asshole for asking me to be patient with CPA that day. (2023-12-18).

    Then a few months later I apologized for calling PS an asshole. (2024-02-12)

    Hello Parth.
    I saw that you changed your name on Twitter. I assume that it is related to your introspection and growth on the topic of caste. I congratulate you for the same.
    And on the same note I apologize for being unnecessarily mean to you on Twitter in regards to the Abby Philips situation. There are indeed many of my own biases which led to me calling you an asshole. I should have shown better behavior. I also saw that nivarana is having technical issues. I have been working on wordpress for several organizations like tribalhealth.org and saakarnataka.org
    If you need technical assistance, let me know.

    Unfortunately, PS had blocked me on WhatsApp and didn’t receive that message. In the same mfc meeting at Kozhikode, I suggested that a bulletin made by younger folks at mfc should have just been released as articles on nivarana.org even though I disagree with certain politics of Parth. Sebin (SG) was in the audience and asked me later as to why I disagree with PS. I told the above story and SG told me how PS’ idea is not to become a Global Health expert, but to settle in Assam taking care of palliative care needs.

    So I sent that note on email. (2024-08-12)

    PS replied immediately appreciating it and looking forward to working together.

    Later that month, nivarana website broke down again. And this time Parth reached out to me to redeem my offer to help. I helped to get it back online. Then PS asked me to join the team.

    We had a long phone call where I grilled PS about every narrative I had built in my mind. About caste, about plagiarising, about appropriation, and so on. Turns out I was wrong with my narrative on all those. I was wrong on enough counts that even if I had found something to hold PS responsible for, it wouldn’t have mattered.

    I joined the nivarana team that day (2024-08-28).

    It is unlikely that my emotion in all these was purely hatred. There could possibly be elements of envy too. Swathi shared a therapy insight with me once about how we envy people who are doing things we wanted to do.

    There might also be frustration that society isn’t changing fast enough. I’m pretty sure I was also of the belief that “calling out” was an important aspect of social change.

    That last point has been crucial. How do you reconcile calling out with love? To call someone out you’ve to be convinced they’re wrong. You’ve to refuse to “understand” where they’re coming from. You’ve to invalidate their experiences and shout above their voice. That’s how calling out works. It’s incompatible with love.

    In parallel I had also been developing another way of demanding change. It involves framing every wrong as an education problem. To use the language of a loving teacher. (As I’m writing this I remember reading about “calling in” as opposed to “calling out”)

    But that mindset also can’t be applied for everyone. When people who are in positions of power and have many years of life and experience over me are being problematic, it is difficult to reframe the problem as an education one. I can’t be “mothering” these weirdos.

    I’ve found two more mindsets that can help in this situation.

    Don’t feed the troll mindset

    This one is where you consider those people as trolls, and then apply the sane advice of not feeding trolls. By engaging (even through calling out), you’re amplifying their ideas, giving them too much importance, and in general giving them fodder to continue.

    Just stop engaging. Ignore. Mute. Silence.

    If pen is mightier than sword, silence is mightier than pen.

    I’m too busy for this shit mindset

    In cancel culture debate, there’s this weird “nuance” argument made by some people (like Arundhati Roy) that it is okay to engage with the art of problematic artists. But my take has always been this:

    There are literally hundreds of other pieces of art.

    You don’t need to engage with problematic artists. Because there are so many more artists on the planet! And they all need your attention too. Why waste it on a problematic person?

    I heard something similar from Bhumika Saraswati when I asked her about how she deals with the contradiction, she said “I don’t have the time for it.”

    By doing so much more in the time that it takes us to hate others, we will be able to avoid hatred.

  • ‘The Good Place’ is Good

    ‘The Good Place’ is Good

    Swathi and I started watching ‘The Good Place’ after we finished watching ‘A Man on the Inside’ (thanks to Pooja’s recommendation in the South Central podcast) and craving for more Ted Danson.

    There are 4 seasons and we finished it within a month!

    It was a whirlwind ride on philosophy. Although not as exciting as Matrix, The Good Place’s take on afterlife is much more relevant to our every day life.

    I have to include some spoilers ahead to speak about my favorite parts.

    While there are interesting episodes discussing philosophical concepts like trolley problem and free will, the parts I really loved are the satire on people.

    There is the good place committee. When the situation arises where they have to stand up and do something, they go into writing “strongly worded” letters and forming a selection committee for forming the committee that will deliberate on the issue. This is an apt description of much of the “progressive” society which keeps expressing their collective shock and disbelief in the same words and manner forever.

    Then there’s the character named Brent – a very accurate depiction of a savarna man. Completely delusional about his importance and contributions. Immune to feedback. Absolutely incorrigible. Total pain in the ass.

    There are so many characters which are possible only in The Good Place universe. Janet, the all knowing (not a) robot. The Judge. Michael. It is worth watching purely for the intellectual exercise of thinking about these characters.

    And then there are so many real world characters. Michael again, Eleanor, Vicky. The story, through these characters, weaves issues like love, friendship, sacrifice, workplace rivalry, jealousy, boredom, and purpose into the fictional world seamlessly.

    I liked The Good Place for its exposition of the philosophy around “doing good”. It is a must watch for activists.

  • Who’s the Default Cook in your Home?

    There’s plenty written by women about how unfair division of household chores is the classic symptom of patriarchy.

    They’ve written about how it is not just about cooking, but also about the mental burden of thinking about the house — about grocery shopping, about making a list for grocery shopping, about keeping a mental checklist of other household details.

    Socialized as a man, I’ve had to learn a lot of this the hard way in my house living with Swathi.

    I’ve written about how I hate cooking. The harder question for me is to figure out whether I would have hated cooking if I was brought up in a culture where I’m expected to cook. I can keep thinking about how I am not a foodie, how I eat most meal in a couple of minutes, how I love washing plates, and so on. Yet this question will never be resolved.

    But Swathi had some very difficult conversations with me where I’ve realized it doesn’t matter whether I like cooking or not. It is a household chore, and it has to be taken care of. Like if the pipe in the bathroom is broken, it’ll have to be fixed. Or the bulb will have to be replaced. Or the internet has to be recharged.

    Cooking, grocery shopping, and shopping list building are household chores that one has to do regardless of whether one likes them, or is good at them.

    If two people are living in a house, they’ve to divide the chore.

    You live in an unequal society where it is acceptable to take services of a domestic worker. But still talking to them and describing what to be made, and ensuring ingredients are available are all remaining chores. And they have to be shared by members of the household.

    If this sounds complicated, think of how difficult it is for Swathi. She likes cooking for joy. And if I’m even a tiny bit lazy, she will become the “default cook”. And then she will be wondering whether she’s suffering from patriarchy or just enjoying something she likes. These western ideas like feminism have ruined her ability to like cooking.

    Not just that. She now has the additional burden of having to do a PhD in figuring out whether my dislike for cooking is an “Akshay problem” or a “man problem”. Whether it is an unacceptable remnant of patriarchy, or whether it is an ignorable trade-off.

    So instead of torturing her, I try to handle the household an equal number of days. And like many other things I’ve had to learn (like not misgendering people, not making ableist assumptions, being aware of my biases, etc), this also becomes easier as I practice it. And I’m also trying to reframe cooking in my mind such that it becomes an enjoyable activity for me. I think of it as a break from work, as a time to listen to podcasts, and so on.

    It is an ongoing struggle where I fall back to my old patterns of starting with my phone and work every day morning, and it becoming too late, and then me suggesting “let’s go outside for breakfast”. But like exercise, I manage to do it on some days. And I hope to have more such days.

  • Read Everything

    In hindsight, this was the most important advice I got as a child. Read everything. Newspaper. Books. Textbook. Children’s magazines. Even the paper which the shopkeeper uses to wrap vegetables in.

    I followed it religiously for most of my life.

    I used to wake up and read the whole newspaper from first page to last. I would read every sentence in my textbooks. I would finish all the books I started. And I would subscribe to every blog I liked on Google Reader and read each post from them.

    One could argue whether this advice is sound. Even for myself it became impractical as the amount of text around me grew. I couldn’t read all sentences of the medical college textbooks (mostly because I was busy doing many other things). There was an explosion of blogs on the internet. While I used to read every message in every WhatsApp group I was in, I found this also to drain a lot of my time.

    But all the while, I’ve been noticing one pattern. There are people who do not read. And they land up in all kinds of trouble.

    This is starkly visible in navigating websites. You can put all the warnings and give people all kind of preparation on what to do on a website. But they’ll still go “I couldn’t figure out how to do this”.

    I used to assume this was a problem with “tech literacy”. That people were afraid of technology, and they didn’t bother to lovingly explore.

    But I’m beginning to form an alternate hypothesis. People are having difficulty with technology because they don’t read!

    They don’t read the description written under a checkbox. They don’t read the warning messages that they’re pressing “OK” to. They don’t read instructions in an email. They read nothing.

    And there could be many reasons why people don’t read. Some people don’t know how to read. Some people have not developed reading fluency to be able to quickly read a sentence or a paragraph. Walls of text are scary for some. This post is not about criticizing people.

    This post is about opening up a potential. If people could read, they could

    • learn about things on their own
    • verify facts by themselves
    • operate independently
    • gain wisdom from umpteen number of books

    There is so much written online about topics like gender and caste it genuinely surprises me how people are eager to “unlearn and relearn” in any online courses. Hello? Why did you not unlearn stuff till 2025?

    But now I think their problem could be that they are not used to reading.

  • No, You Don’t Understand Intersectionality

    Most people who use the word intersectionality understand it as “sum of various identities”.

    Ask them to explain what intersectionality means and they’ll go “Oh, so think about a Dalit woman, she’s doubly oppressed — through caste and through gender”

    This is a crude and problematic understanding of intersectionality.

    Firstly, it leads to what’s called “oppression Olympics”. You start looking at various identities that can be put on a person and then literally count the number of such identities. Then you call them “most oppressed”, “less oppressed”, etc. You compare oppression.

    Secondly, it frames oppression as something that’s static, mathematical, and homogenous. You make intersectionality all about “Dalit women”, “tribal women”, or “black women”.

    And thirdly, you lose the whole point of intersectionality.

    The idea of intersectionality is to not see everyone with a particular identity the same. It is to see whose realities are left out when speaking about a group. One early example is in a women’s right convention, Sojourner Truth standing up and saying “Ain’t I a Woman?“

    It is also about realising oppression isn’t a commodity item that adds up neatly when identities intersect. Say a company has a policy to hire 50% women and 50% from scheduled caste. If the company hires 100 people strictly following this policy, how many scheduled caste women will get hired? 50? 25? 0?

    If you think about intersectionality mathematically, the answer is 25. If you think about it with my preamble in mind, you’ll say 0. But the real answer is “closer to 0”. All women hires would be privileged caste individuals. And most scheduled caste hires would be men.

    Scheduled caste women will get left out from both categories, except the few with class privilege who might get selected. And there will be 0 people with visible disabilities among all the 100.

    You can’t ignore the intersections of “other” realities when you’re talking about intersectionality. It is those “other” factors that make intersectionality different from addition.

    When most maternal deaths in a state are indigenous/tribal women, it’s intersectionality at play. But it is also intersectionality when Dalit men and savarna women call each other out on twitter. And it is indeed intersectionality illustrated when all the CEOs are savarna men. And it is intersectionality which lets you look at things outside the larger identities of class, caste, race, gender and go look at the numerous smaller identities and situations that shape a person.

    One could say “we don’t need to understand intersectionality like this to be able to work for social justice”. And they would be limiting themselves. This understanding of intersectionality is what makes it possible to find solidarity and allyship across movements, to be nuanced when it comes to cancel culture, and to be not stereotyping people based on two or three of their identities.

    This understanding of intersectionality is also a starting point to examine how power operates differently in every moment, every interaction, and every relationship.

    And it’s also the foundation for a love ethic.

  • The Logic of Social Justice

    Today in a discussion at IPH, Meena said “we should all fight against discrimination”. And Prashanth asked “Isn’t that your personal politics? What if people don’t agree with it?” What Prashanth was really asking was “Is there any logic to the demand for social justice?” “Isn’t it just politics?”

    This is the same discussion I had over lunch with Viswanathan (CVN) at MFC’s mid-annual meet in Kozhikode. CVN is widely known for saying “Science is the only way of knowing” which I have wrote about in the past. In the meet also CVN made the same point (I have posted a transcript of the comment here). CVN told about the enlightenment project

    […]By the term “modern society”, I mean a society that upholds the values of “liberty, equality, fraternity and justice”. These values, which we call constitutional values, are really values of ‘Enlightenment’ – or ‘European Enlightenment’ if you insist.

    Enlightenment project is a sociopolitical project that nobody likes in today’s India. The right wing hates it, the left wing has only contempt for it. Of course, this was always a minority’s concern in our country, historically speaking. Unlike the ‘National movement’, this ‘movement’ – if you can call it that name – came up from the ‘depressed castes’. If I am to name a few ‘big names’ that would represent this camp, almost everyone comes from the Dalit-Bahujan background. Mahatma Phule, Babasaheb Ambedkar, Thanthai Periyar, Mahatma Ayyankali, Sahodaran Ayyappan – all from the depressed castes. This is a movement that developed as a response to the day-to-day existential insults heaped upon the depressed caste people over millenia.[…]

    So while eating chicken and ghee rice, I asked CVN, “if you say science is the only way of knowing, how do you know that the values of enlightenment is what we need to work towards?” I was asking what’s the “logic” of working for social justice. 

    CVN initially said “This is outside the realm of science. It is a question for morality.”

    But I wouldn’t relent. I was like “We KNOW that social justice is the right thing. And ‘science’ is the only way of knowing. Then what’s the logic with which we say social justice is the right thing?” I said it was important for us to articulate that logic or if not we wouldn’t have any way to convince others that it was important to fight for social justice.*

    *I actually said that we do have a few other ways. One is to use guns. Another is to use love. And that I am exploring the latter. But the quest for a logic was so important.

    CVN sought more time to think about it.

    And that brings me to an important fight with the postmodernists. In mfc group, I’ve had several sleepless days debating with a bunch of people who think that we have no way of knowing whether homeopathy, ayurveda, etc could be bullshit. That there’s a “possibility” that these are true. That our ability to know the “truth” will always be influenced by where we’re coming from. They think we’re living in some crazy world where we can never know anything, and just everything could be true.

    In that fight, it became clear to me that there is some sort of “logic” which I was looking for in everything. That it is this “logic” or rationality that I was calling science. In another discussion with Prashanth we decided to not call it ‘science’ because it was confused by several people to mean the establishment, but to call it ‘jnana’ or so.

    So, science (broadly construed), or rationality, or ‘jnana’ whatever you call it, is how we tend to get answers to everything.

    Then what’s the science of social justice? What’s the logic of social justice? 

    How do we ‘know’ that social justice is necessary?

    That’s the crux of the challenge.

    One way to answer this would be that this is beyond the realm of science. That it is politics. Or morality.

    If you’ve gone through Michael Sandel’s famous course or book on “Justice”, you’ll notice that MS gives many different “logics” – utilitarianism, libertarianism, Kant, Aristotle, etc. But again, the choice is left to us. So we’re again left with the question of “what’s the logic of our choice to work for social justice and how do we objectively describe it to a skeptic?”

    Let’s do the 2024 thing, and ask Claude.ai what it thinks.

    You’ve raised a profound and challenging question that gets to the heart of moral philosophy. You’re correct that there’s no universally agreed-upon, objective foundation for pursuing justice or any other moral goal. This leads us to the realm of metaethics – the study of the nature of ethical statements and judgments.
    There are several perspectives on this:

    • Moral Realism: Some philosophers argue that objective moral truths exist independently of what any individual or culture believes. Under this view, pursuing justice could be objectively right, even if we can’t always discern what justice entails.
    • Moral Relativism: This view holds that moral truths are relative to cultures or individuals. From this perspective, justice is indeed optional, as it’s just one of many possible value systems.
    • Moral Non-Cognitivism: This approach suggests that moral statements aren’t truth-apt (capable of being true or false) but are expressions of emotion or prescriptions for action.
    • Evolutionary Ethics: Some argue that our sense of justice and morality evolved because it was beneficial for group survival, but this doesn’t necessarily make it objectively “true.”
    • Pragmatism: This view suggests we should pursue justice because it leads to better outcomes for societies, even if we can’t prove it’s objectively correct.

    You’re right that, in a sense, all moral frameworks are “optional.” There’s no physical law of the universe that compels us to be just or moral. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that morality is arbitrary or unimportant.
    Many philosophers argue that even without an objective foundation, we can still have robust, rational discussions about ethics and justice. They suggest that we can use reason, empathy, and shared human experiences to build ethical frameworks that, while not objectively provable, are defensible and beneficial.
    Moreover, from a practical standpoint, societies need some shared ethical framework to function. While the specifics of what constitutes justice may vary, the concept of justice itself seems to be a near-universal feature of human societies.
    In the end, whether to pursue justice (or any moral goal) is a choice we make as individuals and societies. But it’s a choice with profound implications for how we live and interact with others. The lack of an objective foundation doesn’t negate the importance of these choices; if anything, it makes our moral deliberations even more crucial.

    That should settle it. If generations of philosophers haven’t found an answer, can we really find a logic to social justice?

    But there’s an alluring charm to the search for a logic. If only we had an objective way to say justice is right, we could go about our lives much more easily. We just have to tell everyone the logic and abracadabra they are now working for social justice too. The whole world could just be transformed.

    Yet there’s no logic. And therefore the fight for social justice is hard. It is an illogical choice. It is something we enter into through our own free will. And so all the methods of how we transfer “knowledge” comes of no use for us. Because it is not “knowledge”. Social justice is a choice. How do we convey our choice to someone else? That’s the question we actually need to answer. 

    As I’ve written before, after exploring power and realizing it doesn’t work I’ve been exploring love as a framework for this. I’ll write soon about how this has been working out for me in the last two years.

  • Don’t Jump On Private Healthcare

    People from Koodam asked for opinion on the PIL in Supreme Court regarding fees in private hospitals (and clinical establishments act). They shared a folder collating views of various individuals, including this excellent working paper which I refer to in the text below as Oxfam publication.

    ***

     Hi Gayatri, I went through the whole folder. All I wanted to know was
    what Koodam was. But, lol. Anyhow. What I’m going to write is obviously
    my personal understanding of the transformative nature of law (and the
    limits of it). It is going to be biased by my worldview. I’m going to
    label them explicitly as much as possible.

    Regarding the nature
    of documents in the folder    . The compilation, over all, is very nice.
    That’s mostly because of the excellent documents prepared by JSA. Minus
    that, the arguments and the scholarship is rather weak. Koodam which
    explicitly says “diverse views” has the least diverse of views. The
    Oxfam publication by Abhay Shukla, et al is perhaps all that one needs
    to read.

    Regarding non-additive nature of law, and the paradox of
    how parts are worse than the whole    . I am not sure how well I can
    articulate this. But basically, for law to act in transformative way, a
    series of measures that are all reinforcing each other need to be
    enacted together. This is hinted to in the JSA/Oxfam publication. If
    there’s unbalanced law that’s enacted, it creates all kinds of
    unpredictable troubles. In law, 1 + 1 + 1 is not the same as 3. The
    order of laws, the simultaneousness of it, everything matters.

    If
    there’s unbalanced push for price regulation, without other mechanisms
    that lead to a holistic transformative change (eg: competition
    introduced by well functioning public healthcare, financial support from
    government, in-sourcing of private healthcare providers, control on
    corruption, etc), then there’ll be more failures than success. Examples
    of this generated by AI: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/Give-me-examples-k9aCXE9ERCyq9LnFzWDvZA

    Private
    sector is not a homogenous villain    : Various documents here takes a
    black-and-white opposition to “private”. This is wrong in two ways –
    politically and conceptually.

    Politically, if one were to really
    get this going against the “medical industrial complex” and IMA and so
    on, one has to cleave the opposition (divide and rule). And the easiest
    (?) way to do that is to turn small clinics against big hospitals.
    Putting all private providers in one bucket only helps solidifying them
    as one bloc

    Conceptually, all the accusations against medical
    industrial complex applies only to big hospitals. But the “dominant”
    private healthcare system is not big hospitals, it is the clinics and
    the single practitioners. If the argument is that these are all corrupt,
    it is an unwinnable argument. Firstly, a lot of these clinics and
    single practitioners are not corrupt. They’re just people like you and
    me going about their daily lives, with as much influence of capitalism
    as every other profession has. Secondly, one just can’t call an entire
    class of profession corrupt unless one is also going to radically
    restructure the world and actually thinking of revolution.

    On the
    specifics of fixing price    : Fixing price is a thoroughly impractical,
    de-contextualized solution. Chinu’s very brief response is very
    important. Fixing price might actually cause increase in price. I have
    written about consultation fees in general practice https://mbbshacker.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-curious-case-of-consultation-fees.html
    – the biggest challenge for me as a practitioner is that I’ve to make
    it sustainable while at the same time charging a bit fairly. Fixed price
    almost never works for me. If I’m forced to, I’ll choose a higher
    price. And there’s nothing in the CEA that prevents me from choosing a
    higher price. So, in turn, there’s not much that transparency achieves
    (is this the point that Amar  is making? I read it too fast)

    On
    market    : My father had a sagittal sinus thrombosis a few years back. I
    am thankful that there was an Aster MIMS in Kannur. I didn’t care about
    the money at all. There’s an upper class in India (like my family) that
    prefers to not worry about cost, but only worry about health. This
    market exists.
    I hate capitalism. But one thing I know about the
    world is that when there is a market for something, there’s no
    regulation which can stop that from being capitalized. By hook, or by
    crook, things will happen. This is true for banning alcohol, weed,
    drugs, and so on. This is true for organ trade, human trafficking, and
    so on. This is true for almost everything. We really can’t fight the
    market.

    On the political climate: There’s a section on political
    economy in the Oxfam publication. But what about the political climate?
    What political will is there in the present political scenarios to look
    at deep societal transformation in the areas of health. This is a high
    risk gamble with low rewards for politicians.

    Am I being too
    pessimistic    ?: No, I’m really surprised why the Koodam didn’t take up the
    issue of “right to healthcare” which is much easier to understand, has a
    momentum going for it, and can be used to focus both on public
    healthcare and private healthcare. Taking CEA from a decade ago seems
    ill-timed. Unless of course, this is placed in the larger context of
    right to healthcare and the focus is shifted to the patient rights
    charter. We really need to build an alliance with small private clinics
    and practitioners. Something like patient rights charter is such an easy
    first step

  • What is mfc?

    A year ago, I asked in mfc‘s own e-group this question. You can read that long email and another long email after a week with more ideas of what mfc is here. It ends with an appreciation of what the website presently says about mfc:

    It is an organization which has operated for forty eight years as a ’thought current’ without allegiance to a specific ideology. Its only commitment has been to intervene in and understand the debates, policies and practices of health in Independent India. The understanding that our present health service is lopsided and is in the interest of a privileged few prevails as a common conviction.  It has critically been analyzing the existing health care system and has tried to evolve an appropriate approach towards health care which is humane, and which can meet the needs of the vast majority of the people in our country.

    [If anyone knows who wrote this, please let me know]

    Of course, this has to be updated to say “50 years” now because mfc just had its 50th annual meet at Sewagram last week.

    In the 49th annual meet during the general body meeting there was a comment by someone that they didn’t want people who ask things like “what is mfc” [in a mocking tone] in their volunteer group for 50th year meet. Funnily enough, the 50th meet and the bulletin released was revolving around exactly this question on identity.

    Ritu Priya’s article was titled “The Debt I Owe to MFC as the ‘Informal University’”

    Anant Phadke’s article was titled “My Reflections on MFC A Consistent Yet Feeble Pro-People Platform in Health care; The Fee-less, Open University of Community Health”

    Sathyamala quoted from their own previous editorial

    MFC is an organization. No, it is a circle of friends. No, it is a thought current. No, it is not even an effective thought current. MFC should debate issues. No, mfc should act. No, mfc is only for Mitra Milan. No, mfc should take stands. MFC has missed the bus. MFC members are unfriendly. MFC is like a family. The Bulletin serves no purpose. Bulletin must continue. Close the Bulletin. The Bulletin is MFC’s life line. Let us decide once and for all what is mfc. How can we decide once and for all what is mfc? MFC is not professional enough. MFC is too elitist. MFC which way to go, which way not to go. (Sathyamala 1998)

    Sathya then goes on to call mfc as an “epistemic community”.

    The rest of the articles are also about what expectations from mfc have been and what mfc have been able to or not able to do.

    Similarly, in the meet, there was a session about mfc and its future. There was the idea of forming a steering group to define a constitution for mfc and decide on questions like maintenance of website, bulletin, etc. The Q&A session here also spent considerable time in the question of what mfc is. This took the form of a debate between mfc defined as a “friend circle” and mfc as defined in the brochure:

    The Medico Friend Circle (mfc) is a nation-wide platform of secular, pluralist, and pro–people, pro-poor health practitioners, scientists and social activists interested in the health problems of the people of India. Since its inception in 1974, mfc has critically analyzed the existing health care system and has tried to evolve an appropriate approach towards health care which is humane and which can meet the needs of the vast majority of the people in our country.

    In this post, I’ll look at this issue once again and try to define what mfc is, or at least what mfc is not (as Ashok Bhargava once suggested).

    ***

    Before we go into that, we need to discuss a couple of things about defining mfc.

    Firstly, defining what mfc is and defining what mfc should be are two different things. What mfc is is a (difficult) question of describing the reality of mfc as close to possible which can be done by anyone who has spent sufficient time observing mfc. What mfc should be is an even more difficult question which requires consensus and vision, and brings up plenty of other operational issues. In this post I’ll focus first on defining mfc, and at the end venture slightly into what mfc should be.

    Secondly, what mfc is and what mfc did are two closely related yet separate questions. Plenty of times people equate these questions and end up in a soup. The answer to what mfc did is indeed useful in understanding what mfc is. But if we just rely on what mfc did to define what mfc is, we will land up in improbable expectations from it.

    And finally, defining mfc is an attempt to seriously engage with mfc and should not be seen as an attempt to diss mfc.

    So, let us first look at what mfc is not:

    …an organisation coming together for collective action at times of a crisis

    Yes, mfc did it. During Bhopal disaster, mfc came together for collective action. During carnage in Gujarat in 2022, mfc came together for collective action. For access to drugs, AIDAN was formed collectively. But these are things that mfc did. There’s no guarantee that mfc will come together at times of a crisis. Manipur and Gaza were made discussion topics at mfc annual meet in Feb 2024 probably in an effort to resume this collective action. But that’s not what mfc is. mfc is not an organization meant for action. It doesn’t have a budget. It doesn’t have any paid staff. It is not meant for any action.

    …an epistemic community influencing health policy

    Yes, many people from mfc did participate in the run up to National Rural Health Mission. Yes, people from mfc have done judiciary activism. Yes, mfc has a big role in JSA. But mfc cannot be an epistemic community because an epistemic community is a network of recognized experts. mfc has always been open to anyone – expert or not. Of course, mfc does include experts who could form an epistemic community of their own. But mfc also includes non-experts. And therefore, by definition it cannot be an epistemic community.

    …a friend circle

    This is probably the hardest to convince people in mfc that mfc is not. Even people who don’t want to define mfc primarily as a friend circle will say that it is indeed a friend circle, at least secondarily. I believe that this definition of mfc is also in the realm of what mfc did and also what mfc should be, rather than what mfc is. To define mfc as a friend circle, though, would be stretching the definition of friend circle. Sure, I have made and nurture several deep friendships through mfc. But mfc is primarily composed of strangers. In the e-group, as of today, there are 716 members. I barely know 50 of them. Most people in mfc don’t know most people in mfc. There are also people I find annoying within mfc. People I would never call friends. It is very difficult to call mfc a friend circle, no matter how warm the environment is and how friendly people are.

    …a think tank

    Think tank is defined as a “group of experts brought together, usually by a government, to develop ideas on a particular subject and to make suggestions for action”. mfc disqualifies for reasons mentioned above under epistemic community.

     …a thought current

    If you read the emails linked above, you’ll see that the word thought-current itself is a buzzword that leaves us no further than what we began with. If you define thought-current as think-tank above, then mfc doesn’t qualify. Basically, it is a circular definition.

    …a platform for exchange of ideas related to people’s health

    This probably would have been a nice definition for mfc in 1970s and 80s assuming there was no other platform for exchange of ideas related to people’s health. But in 2024 when you have plenty of avenues for publishing ideas and exchanging it with the rest of the world and instantly getting feedback thus furthering the exchange, to call mfc a platform would be demeaning the word “platform”. Of note is also the fact that mfc had a barely functioning website till last year. mfc continues to not have a social media presence. It is very difficult to convince someone interested in people’s health in 2024 to join mfc for exchange of ideas.

    What is mfc?

    Let me reiterate what I said above. By discarding these “definitions” I’m not trying to say that mfc has not served these roles or that mfc should not be these things. I’m simply trying to say that mfc needs to be defined more accurately to represent the reality.

    At this point, it would be a disappointment if I didn’t present an alternate definition.

    Let me first document a couple of definitions that I discarded.

    I had tried to draw an analogy to an alumni association. An alumni association is just a group that exists because of some historical coincidence. It doesn’t have particular objectives or structure. It is just a group that exists, have shared nostalgia, etc. This doesn’t accurately describe mfc either.

    Then I thought about saying “mfc is a hashtag”. mfc is like a hashtag people use on twitter where there is not much of a structure, but things could happen sporadically. And there is a lot of discussion around the same hashtag. But then I found something better (thanks to AI)

    mfc is a community of interest

    Wikipedia says the following:

    A community of interest, or interest-based community, is a community of people who share a common interest or passion. These people exchange ideas and thoughts about the given passion, but may know (or care) little about each other outside this area. Participation in a community of interest can be compelling, entertaining and create a community where people return frequently and remain for extended periods. Frequently, they cannot be easily defined by a particular geographical area.

    The difference from epistemic communities and “community of practice” is that in community of interest, expertise is not a pre-requisite. Anyone can join a community of interest.

    Let’s not forget what a “community” is: “A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with a shared socially significant characteristic, such as place, set of norms, culture, religion, values, customs, or identity.”

    mfc is a community of interest that’s formed around the shared interest of a pro-people, pro-poor health system. Experts and non-experts are welcome to participate. The main mode of exchange of ideas in mfc have been through yearly meeting, publishing a bulletin, and discussing on an e-group, all organized democratically and with a spirit of friendship that transcends ideological divides.

    mfc going forward

    I would have to be the kind of academic I hate to describe something to great detail and do nothing with that.

    Going forward, there are a few things I would like to do with/through the mfc community (that should be the name!):

    1. Tap into the knowledge that is embedded within individuals in the mfc community and make this tacit knowledge more explicit through discussions that are centered around such knowledge — for example, knowledge on how to solve some of the problems encountered while traveling towards Health-for-all.
    2. Surface individuals and groups that are setting good examples into the public consciousness through corrective and creative use of powerful tools like the internet.
    3. Develop the strengths of mfc as a healing community for saving disillusioned medicos from anti-people healthcare system and manifest in them the vision of a pro-people health system and the skillset required to reach there.
    4. Embrace the concept of an open/informal university and bring together all groups/individuals with similar thought-processes (SOCHARA, CMC Vellore, THI/travel fellowship, etc) to double down on the concept of open/informal university and internet based pedagogies.
    5. Nurture the/a community of practice within mfc that serves as a reliable knowledge respository for communities of action like JSA and SAA-K.
    6. …
    7. …
    8. …
    9. …
    10. …

    References

  • Why Medical College Work Culture is So Horrible

    A number of junior residents at Jipmer have raised allegations of mental and physical harassment against the head of department, medicine, and called for action against the senior faculty.
    In recent complaints lodged with the Jipmer Dean (Academics), the residents alleged they were subjected to various forms of harassment at the hands of the department head during the three-year PG residency. They sought re-examination of the results of the exit examination on December 23 as they suspected they were deliberately failed in the practical segment by the faculty member.

    This is from The Hindu a couple of days ago.

    This is just one among the many thousands of such incidents across medical colleges. It would be really difficult to find a medical college which doesn’t have harassment and bullying.

    When this came up for discussion in a WhatsApp group I am part of, there was an interesting debate. While everyone acknowledged that there is a hierarchical culture in medicine and that this needs to be rectified, there was a slight disagreement on the exacts of how and why.

    One argument was that the medical college culture is an extension of the casteist culture outside and that it will go away only when caste based discrimination disappears. To this some disagreed a bit and said it is not the same in institutions like nursing colleges.

    Today morning I tweeted: “If you apply the corporate workplace harassment standards to medical colleges, you’ll have to fire *all* doctors. That’s how horrible that culture is.”

    I do think there’re more issues that lead to the culture in medical colleges apart from casteism. I list down the potential causative factors here.

    As you might know, I believe in intersectionality and in the contribution of all these causes (including causes that’s not mentioned here) to the problem. The listing here is by no means a suggestion that “X is the reason ABC happens”. If you remove X, you’ll still have Y, Z, and so many other issues.

    There is a lot of work to be done in medical colleges

    A medical college (especially in government settings) has a lot of things happening at once. There’s out patient department and the rush of patients. There are new admissions being made. There are existing in-patients who need follow-up care. There are constantly new developments (new symptoms or worsening of symptoms, new investigation results). There are plenty of learning requirements to be met. There are procedures to be performed. There are resources that need to be mobilized. There is paper work to be done. There are a lot of people talking to each other, lots of communication and miscommunication. There are duty rosters and handovers. There are emotions and sickness playing beneath all of this.

    Almost everything requires to be done as soon as possible too, if not stat.

    There is a lot of gap in resources

    Often (especially in government settings) the resources required for getting a lot of work done is simply not there. This could be things like medicine, dressing equipments, and suturing material. Or this could be human resources like nurses, specialists, doctors, cleaners, attenders, pharmacists, and technicians.

    There is poor spending on healthcare in Indian budget

    As a country, India spends much less than what it should on healthcare.

    The science of medicine is imperfect and the art of medicine is really hard

    Medicine as we practice it has only evolved in the last few decades or so. We still have no idea what’s going on in a lot of situations. It’s an imperfect science. Biology has a lot of secrets.

    Add to that we’re dealing with human beings. The art of handling sickness and patient care is always complicated by the intensity of emotions.

    Who wants to work hard?

    I’ve left hospital based practice long ago. And I’ve not been even doing clinic based practice in the last couple of years. Because it is a lot of work.

    When there’s a lot of work, some people find ways to make it fun. They focus on the learning and growth. Or they focus on the people they’re serving. If you can make hard work fun, you can do it for a while.

    But it is not possible to do it forever.

    Medicine is not fun

    After a point, you get a lot of similar patients. There’s plateau in learning and drudgery in work.

    Even when you find ways to enjoy some of that, you can’t enjoy death. People literally die. Despite all of what we do. How do you make death fun?

    There are not many options for a change in scenery

    It’s the same kind of work from the end of MBBS till retirement. You go to hospital. You see patients. Medical college faculties don’t even get transfer. You’re stuck in the same department of the same building for your entire career.

    Lack of skills leads to insecurities

    We established that medicine is hard. Many doctors lack skills – be it in the clinic, or in their life. They are sometimes aware of their incompetency too. And some of this manifests as insecurities.

    Everyone loves delegation

    The best way to get something done while hating it is to delegate it. Patient care is complicated. If it can be delegated, it is less of a headache.

    Delegation requires power structures

    The easiest way to ensure you can always delegate work is to ensure that there are people “below” you who can do your work at your command. Maintaining a hierarchy is essential for delegation.

    Hierarchies are easy to maintain in a hierarchical society

    How do we build a hierarchy? We just need to belittle others. There are numerous ways to belittle others when the society has trained many people in things like:

    • caste
    • gender
    • language
    • physical appearance

    In medical colleges there is a much easier way to belittle people – using their years of experience. Someone who is “junior” can be belittled easily as they will have that much lesser experience.

    Individuals can’t fight the hierarchy

    Because medicine is hard no individual can do it alone. You can’t run a hospital by yourself. Especially if you’re a junior doctor who is still learning, you absolutely would be terrified of doing patient care without support from seniors. How can you fight someone whose support you need for your work?

    There’s always something more urgent

    There is no space for conflict resolution in medical colleges. Patient care always comes up. There’s no time for cooling down. There’s no time for empathy.

    The individuals who get in are of questionable merit

    Most doctors are doctors who have gotten good marks in an entrance examination. This is a test of their memory and cognitive skills in a very narrow domain. This makes the selection process to medical colleges be highly skewed. The skills in various other domains – like social skills, emotional intelligence, empathy – are not regarded at all.

    Without these other skills, it is very difficult to even acknowledge when something wrong is happening.

    There are not many role models for better culture

    Where does one find examples of good work culture in healthcare in India? Very few “alternative” healthcare institutions provide such an exposure. This is not accessible to a wide variety.

    Medicine is mostly seen as a job, and not as a passion by many

    There aren’t a lot of people who think in terms of quality improvement, safety, etc in medicine. For many it is a job. A way to make money and live.

    And hundred other reasons

    These are what I quickly wrote down. I’ve not gone to a medical college in a powerless position since about 7 years. I do go to medical colleges very often as an “external” “senior” instructor. I’ve used this “power” to understand some of the power structures within medical colleges from up close. That has led to some of the insights above.

    There are possible many other things that contribute to the mess. Some of the ones above could be wrong too. There are possibly many interventions one can do on many of these problems.

  • How the World Should Be and How the World Is

    There are two modes of thinking in society and social work. “How The World Should Be” mode, and “How The World Is” mode. There is a constant friction between these two. This friction explains hundreds of debates I’ve been in and many of my own moral dilemmas. Understanding this friction and being able to categorize arguments/politics into these categories helps in navigating the human world.

    Let’s start with simple examples.

    Examples

    Example 1

    Situation: Let’s say you’re driving on the road. You drive at a reasonable speed using indicators and avoiding sudden movements of your vehicle. Suddenly someone cuts lanes and jumps in front of you forcing you to break and swerve to a side. Another vehicle behind you hits your back.

    How the world should be: “Nobody should be cutting lanes all of a sudden. That’s dangerous. People who do that should face consequences.”

    How the world is: “People cut lanes. People drive unsafe. You can try to drive defensively, yet you can get involved in an accident. And you will face some or the other consequences.”

    Example 2

    Situation: You’re taking a sick patient to a hospital. You dialed 108 emergency ambulance service which is supposed to be free. After reaching the hospital, the ambulance team wants ₹₹₹ from you.

    How the world should be: “Ambulance service should be free. Healthcare should be free. People shouldn’t have to suffer from lack of money in accessing healthcare”

    How the world is: “There is a lot of corruption. People demand bribe in healthcare in many different ways.”

    Example 3

    Situation: It is election time. Politicians are using religion to swing votes. Issues like healthcare, education are being neglected.

    How the world should be: “People should hold politicians accountable and not let them get away with corrupted politics”

    How the world is: “People are voting for the corrupt politicians (for whatever reasons they may have).”

    Differences

    As might be obvious from the examples, there are several differences between how the world should be and how the world is.

    It is easy to see how the world is. One just has to live in it. Every day is a lesson in “the world as it is”. It doesn’t take much effort to understand and study it. It is accessible to everyone at all times. It is, in fact, unavoidable.

    The world that should be is an imaginary world. It requires us to think of something that doesn’t exist already.  It is set in the future. It is described using values, morality, and philosophy. It is harder to envision.

    The world that should be is controversial too. Different people believe in different futures. There is often mutually exclusive worlds that come up. You can’t have hyper-industrialized cities and clean air together. You can’t have an authoritarian state and a democratic state together. You can’t have religion and science together. Sometimes the imaginations aren’t that starkly different, but they’re still different in nuanced ways. It is those nuanced differences that leads to very many debates and fights within progressive groups.

    Implication

    The differences between the two ways of looking at the world immediately leads to the following important points.

    There is a vast amount of things to know about how the world is

    What’s happening in the world? How do human beings behave? What guides their actions? Is there any predictability? Why is there corruption? Why is there caste? Why is there religion? Why are people violent? Why is there inequity? Why is there gender? Why is there sickness? Why is there hate? Why is there love? Why is there harmony? Why is there peace? What is it that makes human beings tick? How do humans survive? What is the human spirit?

    There is a vast amount of things to know about how the world should be

    How might the world be? How would it be organized? What will be the weaknesses of that world? What would the strengths be? What challenges will we face? What human potential will we unlock in that world?

    There is a vast amount of things to know about how we can reach the world that should be from the world that is

    Knowing how the world should be is one thing. Knowing how to get from here to there is another thing. Any action we need to take towards the world that should be should start from the world that is. Firstly because that is the only world we have access to (by the laws of physics). But more importantly because it is the same people we are talking about. It is the same human beings. It is the same world that we want to transform.

    We need theories of change. We need experiments and examples. We need strategies, intermediary states/goals, milestones, checkpoints, and so on.

    Many dilemmas are manifestation of the friction between these stages of change

    I have struggled thinking about power. I hate hierarchy. And I see power as the core of hierarchy. In my “how the world should be” thinking, I used to constantly do things to give up power. But then, I discovered that without power it is very hard to do anything useful. This was very hard to accept though. I found even more reasons to not gain power. I said “Love is Enough“. But love wasn’t enough. “Love without power is sentimental and anemic” says Martin Luther King. 

    Here’s how the above framework helps in my dilemma.

    How the world is: Power centered and hierarchic.
    How the world should be: Love centered and anarchic/anti-hierarchy.
    How do we go from here to there: Power and love applied as needed for the change.

    There is another dilemma that’s been with me since my childhood. That of religion. I am a rationalist. I do not even use the word “atheist” to describe myself because I don’t want to discuss the idea of god even for saying that there is no such thing. For a long time I stayed with the idea that religions should be rejected en masse. Then I realized that a very huge number of human beings are deeply religious. So as per the framework this is how it should be resolved.

    How the world is: Religious and intolerant.
    How the world should be: Rational and secular.
    How do we go from here to there: Infuse rationalism into and through religion.

    This is very much in line of how Gandhi uses Gita and Rama to make Hindus become better. Or how Ambedkar uses Buddha to make life better for many people. Religion has been used by them creatively. They infused modernity into religion.

    Conclusion

    If you find yourself in the middle of a heated debate with people who are politically aligned, or with yourself (dilemmas), see if you can categorize the sides into “How the World Is” and “How the World Should Be”. Then think about how you would strategize for going from here to there.

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