Vinay Kumaran

Consider an animal in a resource-scarce environment. It makes a crude kind of sense to be selfish. The animal, presumably being stronger than other animals, takes the food it needs and mates with partners of the opposite sex without or without their cooperation and leaves more progeny than weaker animals. However, this animal comes up against a problem if other animals, individually weaker than it, learn to cooperate. With force of numbers, they can fight off the selfish animal. They can cooperate to look after progeny and thereby, their progeny have a survival advantage over those of the more selfish animals. They form herds and prides and the purely selfish animals die out. The herds/ prides grow into tribes as intelligence increases and we get a situation like the human animal which seems set to take over the entire planet and then perhaps starve to death as the resources are used up by uncontrolled population growth. Humans are at a stage in evolution when they have clearly sur...

This is from an invited post I wrote on the Facebook group 'Learning General Surgery'. During my residency at Maulana Azad Medical College, I was initially assigned to the unit of the head of the department, Dr TK Malik. The less said about that part of my residency, the better. However, I did have good second and third year residents from whom I learnt how to look after patients. Halfway through my second year, Dr Malik retired and a new unit was created with two Consultants, Dr  Vinod Malik  and Dr  Ram Kaza . Being the most junior unit at the time, they had the Saturday emergency and were always short of staff. For a considerable period of time, there were no third year PGs, no first year PGs and no regular Senior Residents. There were, however, two second year PGs,  Brundaban Nahak  and me. Dr  Vinod Malik  and Dr  Ram Kaza  were gentle bosses, allowing us to figure out how to keep the day to day running of the unit going, putting up...