Vinay Kumaran

The right wing in politics is in the ascendant all over the world. In India, it is represented by the BJP and Modi, in the US by the Republican Party and Trump and in the UK by the Tories and Brexit. Erdogan in Turkey is another example. The right wing is comprised of otherwise normal people. Many of them are intelligent and have done well in their professions. They tend to be less educated, more religious and older than the left wing but that's a statistical measure. There are representatives from all ages and all levels of education. There is an excellent book by Jonathan Haidt called "The Righteous Mind" which attempts to analyse how the right wingers think and is well worth a read. It is obviously futile to dismiss right wing politics as 'short-sighted', 'self-serving' and 'cruel'. That strategy does not work and the fact is that they are in the ascendant. It is important to understand how they think so that a viable way forward can be fou...

The World Congress of Bioethics is being held in Bangalore next month. There is a pre-congress workshop for transplant coordinators where ethical issues related to brain death and organ donation are going to be discussed. One of the issues being discussed is how we define death. Before organ donation became an integral part of modern medicine, there was little discordance between the medical definition of death and the religious ones. If the heart stopped beating and the breathing stopped (usually in rapid succession), and if efforts to restart them failed then the person was declared dead. Religious leaders who defined death as the soul leaving the body were happy to confirm that the moment of the departure of the soul was when the heart stopped beating. It is still common for people who have recovered after a cardiac arrest to claim that they died and came back. Images created by disordered firing of neurons short of oxygen were interpreted according to the cultural norms of the s...

Discussions with a couple of my friends on Facebook persuaded me to write down my thoughts about religion and why I think most religions are doing more harm than good. Denial of Death. A factor which seems common to all religions is the denial of the finality of death. Practically all the religions seem to have the concept of a soul, something that continues after we die. The soul may be reincarnated (as in Hinduism and Buddhism), rewarded (Heaven in Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Moksh in Buddhism and Hinduism) or punished (Hell, Purgatory, an unpleasant reincarnation etc). In any case, the soul apparently retains the memory of actions performed in life (what would be the point of punishing someone for a crime they do not know they committed?), retains the ability to suffer (Hell) or enjoy pleasures (Heaven, Valhalla). There is, of course, no reason to believe that anything like this occurs. One can imagine ancestors, intelligent enough to recognize that death is inevitable but no...

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...

Sometimes when I contemplate a visit to the US, I am reminded of the many things we do better in India. Some of these might be surprises. Couriers. Indian couriers are much more economical and quicker than the monoliths in the US. Competition, lower labour costs etc contribute I assume. Advertisements. Most American ads are bland and boring. They tout things like awards or special offers. Indian advertisements are often funny or thought provoking and make a point about current affairs. The difference is so great they simply cannot be compared. This is an advertisement for Verizon. It is not only boring, it is misleading. The actual cost of an unlimited plan is $75 plus taxes. https://www.verizonwireless.com/plans/verizon-plan/ The advertisement is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3zptG2nVmM. Now compare this with this advertisement for Fevikwik. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4WZF74dAg4. Online grocery shopping. There are so many options from Big Basket to Grofers...

How long has it been since you actually listened to music? I know you probably have music playing when you're driving and you're probably also talking to someone and answering your phone and wondering which would be the best route home. The music is something playing in the background to which you are not paying much attention. How different from going to a concert hall and listening to a live performance. The difference, of course, is in focus. At the hall, you're not doing anything else. All your attention is on the performance and you are able to really appreciate it. It's like the difference between going to a theatre to watch a movie and watching it on TV at home. You get up to answer the doorbell, make a few phone calls, have dinner. At the end of the movie you wonder why people were raving about it when it was released. You can get the concert hall effect at home. Set aside enough time to give the music a fair listening. Don't do anything else. No TV, no m...