Thatched House

The government of India is planning to launch a new medical course called B.Sc. Community Health, which will be of three and a half years duration. This new cadre of health personnel will be trained at District Hospitals and will be posted in Sub Centres and Primary Health Centres in the villages. They will be trained on diagnosis and treatment of basic medical cases. The idea the government clarifies is not to produce mini-MBBS doctors but to produce a work force to address scarcity of trained health manpower in the rural areas. The Times of India reports that this is to address the ‘menace of doctors unwilling to serve in rural areas’. Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad expressed his disappointment in a similar vein stating that young doctors are unwilling to work in rural areas. He says, ‘A s the health minister I can make policies and the state government has to implement... and put some kind of genes in doctors to change them, otherwise I cannot do anything’. There is truly...

Reader’s Digest says that good writing is simple ABC: Accuracy, Brevity, and Clarity. I took that to heart. Another advice is to keep the language as simple as possible. So, I try to write in a language where readers will not need the dictionary. I break down complex words and shorten sentences. I follow certain rules that I learned from other writers, for example: never fall in love with your first draft, break the rules but after having learned the rules, to be a writer there’s no other way but to write, and so on. That’s how I write. I remember how I started writing my thoughts. My dad who was also my headmaster made us write essays. In one class, he decided to read out one essay. He said that one of us wrote it but he won’t tell who. As he started to read the essay titled ‘My Neighbor’, my ears started to warm up. It was mine. Dad might have noticed my discomfort and he made sure that no one knows it’s me and he remarked in the end, ‘It is a good essay’. When other student...

Zero Bulb Ideas is a series featuring whacky ideas of a noodle-headed nincompoop.   (whyismarko.com) Waterproof Bible was in the news a while ago. There is no news or statistic thereafter if reading the Bible in the shower has increased or what is the percentage of ministers using it during water baptism. We have a host of other Bibles like Cowboys Devotional Bible, Soul Surfer Bible, the colorful Rainbow Study Bible, Good News for Modern Man, Super-Heroes Bible, Outdoors Bible, Woman Thou Art Loosed Bible, Students Bible, The Grace for the Moment Study Bible, Women Bible, Brides Devotional Bible, Couples Bible, etc, etc. At Bamora, a new Bible called the Background Music Bible is conceptualized. The idea is to use background music to create the right mood for the passages being read, so that readers can connect emotionally with the biblical text. A Bamora church believes this will increase spiritual fervor of readers and make reading the Word of God an enjoyable experience....

For Eastern  Mirror column In my presentations, I point to the health statistics and say that these are not just numbers in a table, shades of colors in a chart, or dots in a map; but they are measures of human suffering. Behind such mathematical and statistical figures of our health and disease data are real people who either suffered or died. Chances are that in the process data entry, compilation, and reporting; health statistics can lose sight of this and reduce human suffering to nothing but statistical data to measure performance of various policies and programs. I say this, to also stress on the need for reliable data, because those who manipulate or give false reports are not simply playing with numbers, but with human lives. It is also a motivating force for me that even though I don’t work in a hospital anymore to treat patients; through the use of health data, I try to study the dynamics of human health and think of ways to lessen human suffering and death. Everybody...