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“To be a medical doctor, then, means much more than to dispense pills or to patch up or repair torn flesh and shattered minds. To be a doctor is to be an intermediary between man and GOD”, wrote Felix Martin Ibanez in his magnum opus TO BE A DOCTOR. Dr. Ankur Singhal, a consultant orthopaedic surgeon, is indeed an intermediary between his patients and God, using both surgical and non-surgical means to treat musculoskeletal trauma, sports injuries, degenerative diseases, infections, tumors and congenital disorders. He diagnoses and treats spinal disorders, arthritis, trauma, fractures, joint/hip replacements and bone settings.

It is humanly impossible not to be moved by the magnitude and quality of the humanitarian disaster that has visited Nepal and the adjoining regions of India and Bangladesh as a result of the April 25 earthquake of magnitude 7.9. The death toll has already crossed 5,000. The entire world, and India in particular, must do all it can to help the earthquake’s victims with rescue and relief.

The bus stops in front of our house and honks every day, from Monday to Friday, between 9.15 to 9.30 am. It belongs to Burlington Council of Aging and gives us ride to Burlington senior centre, along with others, mostly Indians and a few whites. There some of us work out in a well maintained gym or join in an aerobic exercise session for almost an hour. After that we take repose in the leisure room there, have a cup of coffee and some donuts, read magazines and books or chat with other people for a while, before taking the return ride at 11-30. All for free.

Every statue in the subcontinent is a political site, their erection a political act. This is perhaps true outside the subcontinent too. Mohandas Gandhi’s statue was unveiled in the Parliament Square of London, England. The statue was unveiled by Arun Jaitley, finance minister of the Indian Union and a senior member of a party that looks up to the RSS for political direction. The same RSS was banned by the Indian Union government in 1948, in the aftermath of Mohandas Gandhi’s assassination.

Sureshbhai Patel, a 57-year-old grandfather from rural Gujarat, had gone to visit his prematurely born grandson in the state of Alabama, USA. He was brutally assaulted by the local police as he was taking a stroll in the neighborhood where his son lives. The man received severe spinal injuries and is now partially paralyzed. While such gross injustice should attract condemnation as it has from various sectors of US civil society and elected representatives, the there is something about the reaction of powerful brown people resident in the subcontinent that requires introspection. After the Sureshbhai Patel assault news broke, Delhi’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) sprang into action, putting on its ‘empathy’ for brownman Sureshbhai and ‘outrage’ hats at the same time at the excessive use of force by the police.

Ever since Sureshbhai Patel was assaulted by the police in the Alabama state of USA, there has been a lot of outrage in the government and media circles of the Indian Union and correctly so. This 57-year-old man from the village Pij in Gujarat's Kheda district was visiting his prematurely born grandson, born to his son who had gone to the USA to study engineering and is now a USA citizen. The police confronted Sureshbhai as he was walking on the footpath in his son's neighbourhood and for a brief period grilled him in English, a language that Sureshbhai didn’t know. Then he was brutally attacked, resulting in him being bloodied and paralyzed due to severe spinal injuries.

In this world of 'breaking news' and constant 'update', we sometimes need some distance in time to digest the full implications of an 'event' and its implications. A good example is the recent 'terror-boat' incident off the Porbandar coast of the Gujarat state of the Indian Union, where a boat caught fire (still unclear how) and sank without any known survivors. The incident revealed the state of our media and will go on to affect fishermen who earn their livelihood from those waters.

For decades, the ruling groups of the subcontinent have duped its peoples into submission by using so-called ‘national security’ smokescreens and various other whipped-up concerns. This should not come as a surprise. The word ‘con’ is right there in the middle of the subcontinent.

So far Asian countries, particularly India and Pakistan, have faced the brunt of terror but the menace has now spread to Europe. The continent has faced, perhaps, for the first time, the terrorist attack of this magnitude when the press was attacked. In the worst form in France in recent decades, masked gunmen shouting “Allahu Akbar” stormed the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical weekly for lampooning religion including radical Islam, killing 12 people—two policemen and ten journalists including the editor—before escaping in a car. Speaking fluent French, the gunmen are believed to be from al Qaeda. They were shot dead by the French police on Friday.

The brutal death of Korpan Shah has raised enough hue and cry amid the media and public, partly because of its viciousness, and mostly because of its alleged perpetrators. The students, the supposed carrier of the societal consciousness has allegedly committed this crime, not as an individual act, but acting as a collective. And they were medical students, hence, the hypocrisy-laden society would also have the opportunity to shout about so-called ‘medical ethics’ (which they are completely unaware of). However, the resultant sensationalisation has, successfully, moved the needle of the discussion from the true issue that is so toxic to discuss that everyone would rather argue in circles than to acknowledge the presence of the real elephant in the room.