Goodbye, ICSE 2023

It is end-November, and for the umpteenth time I have just said goodbye to another batch of class ten pupils. Sometimes it seems I have been going on forever, and the stopping will be far more sudden and surprising than the going on…

This year’s batch, unlike the previous one, was good to teach, and judging by the final reminiscent essays some of them wrote, they enjoyed my classes. I hope they also learnt some useful things for keeps. To them I say, remember, ‘education is what remains with you after you have forgotten all that you have been taught.’ Wise saws like this one become more and more meaningful as you grow older – wait for a decade or two.

These days I don’t write goodbye posts any more, but if you are interested, you might look up To those who are about to become ex-students, and Bye-bye time again. As usual, most of those for whom I wrote those posts have long forgotten them, and probably even me, as most of you will within a few years. No matter. I have long accepted that that is what people are like, especially in this day and age, and at my age I don’t really care, though I keep being happily surprised by a few people every year who give solid evidence that I still remain strongly alive in their minds, many many years after they left. A few of you will be like that. Enough for me.

Good luck to all of you, those of you who appreciate the good wish and those who don’t alike. As Shakespeare said, may every one of you get exactly what you deserve, but may my good wishes help you along.

This is the first time EVER that three boys wanted to hug me before leaving, and I let them. I must be getting really old… but very happily old, God be thanked. I look back and vaguely remember all the mountainloads of mud that have been slung at me for years and years, and it feels good to have arrived where I am now.

Keep Sir’s parting shot with you. You will see how it will become more and more meaningful as the years pass. And remember: I forget all those who do, but if you choose to keep in touch, I reciprocate most gladly.

Especially for those who expressed the regret that they didn’t get to know Sir as well as they would have liked, there is always my book To My Daughter. It is part autobiography and part elaboration of all the really important things that I have tried to teach all along. You will find it on Amazon. My only request is, if you buy it, read it through till the last page with patience and attention.

May the GP culture come back

I am always thrilled when I hear of some famous expert saying that something I have been insisting on for ages as necessary to make a better India and a better world has become not only important but urgent. Whether that be a renowned economist or doctor or businessman or lawyer/activist. So I was delighted to read in my newspaper on Sunday the 13th that Andrew Elder, President of the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh, has lamented the proliferation of specialists (or, as they say rather ridiculously in India, 'super'-specialists) in the medical profession. It particularly badly affects the elderly, he says, who tend to suffer from multiple problems simultaneously, and running endlessly from one specialist to another is an often very difficult-to-bear drag on their time, patience and purse. No healthcare model, he says, in any country, can deliver the goods for the majority of the population by relying overly on the specialists. The general physician, or, as they used to call him when we were young, family physician, has to come back in a big way.

I have been insisting on this all my adult life, particularly because we in our family have been very lucky: we have enjoyed the invaluable services of excellent GPs almost all our lives. I myself had grown an almost superstitious faith in our own doctor, who had looked after us for nearly forty years before he passed away earlier this year. He only had an MBBS degree, but he was never once wrong in his diagnoses, prescribed very few costly tests, and gave us medicines which worked like charms. I have come to believe beyond the reach of any kind of persuasion to the contrary that a good, experienced, hardworking GP can take care of 90% of your ailments; you should go to specialists only upon his recommendation, and other than in the case of things like heart attacks or liver or kidney failure and serious accidents and major genetic disorders, the 'specialists' can do precious little for you, especially if your time is up, which is generally the case if you fall seriously ill in old age. 

Why has the 'specialist' culture become so widespread? There are many reasons which have worked together and reinforced one another. Only two of them have been mentioned in the above article. One is that young people have developed a childish faith in specialists (ironical, in an age when most of them pretend to be scientifically educated!): 'someone with simple indigestion ... seeks an appointment with a gastro-enterologist'. Another is pure greed for relatively quick money and status, so 'younger doctors almost always want to obtain a specialist degree before they start practising'. True and serious as these reasons are, I have come to be convinced that there are several other reasons, too. One is that - and this I have learnt from some of my best old boys who are now studying medicine - standards of teaching, learning and examination have become so lax that people with just an MBBS (or even MD in general medicine) simply don't have the confidence that they can handle all kinds of patients well: they need to bolster their own egos with one or more additional degrees. Another is that the corporate culture, promising young medical graduates modest but assured salaries, and fabulous packages to 'specialists', has nearly destroyed the ambition of fresh medical graduates to set up their own private practices ... the proliferation of clinical labs and tests has only helped to reinforce the tendency: why learn much of medicine when the tests will tell you everything (and the therapy can be googled)? 

The upshot has been that, as I can see in my own town, private hospitals have become almost as crowded, chaotic and messy as their government equivalents, and people are having to pay through their noses for often highly unsatisfactory, not to say sometimes disastrous, services. I have myself worked hard to find a replacement GP I can trust and respect, I hope he will see me through the rest of my life, and I pray that his tribe may prosper. This much I know: no 'specialist' who gives me all of ten minutes when I visit him for the first time is likely to do better than the GP with whom I can sometimes chat at great length in a relaxed atmosphere, who has treated me for ages, and who knows all my history.

William, Billy Bunter and glorious England

I have just been re-reading some of the books in the William series by Richmal Crompton about feisty little boys in the years immediately before and after World War II. YouTube has directed me to a TV series based on those books, so I am in seventh heaven. And William has reminded me of the Billy Bunter series by Frank Richards. I must get my hands on some of them soon, if only via Kindle.

What wonderful childhoods they had, these boys (at least in the author's imagination) and how poor the children I deal with are in comparison, for all their material wealth and enhanced security! I couldn't think of writing any entertaining stories about the latter, simply because, beyond parties and shopping sprees and exams, virtually nothing happens in their lives! And if anything, things have only gotten worse over the last quarter century...

Also, how incredibly rich a country England between the 40s and 70s must have been, aesthetically and intellectually speaking, that so many writers of the highest calibre and of the most diverse interests could have lived and worked there simultaneously ... P.G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie and J.R.R. Tolkien, George Orwell, Nevil Shute, C. S. Lewis, Alistair Maclean and John le Carre and Frederick Forsyth and James Herriot and Richmal Crompton and Gerald Durrell and Roald Dahl, not to mention so many highbrow authors catering to the elite (by which I expressly do NOT mean stupid rich businessmen): by God, if one little country of 50 or 60 million can support so many superb talents in reasonable comfort, how far must England have progressed along the road to civilization before backsliding within a few decades into worshipping only footballers and pop singers and moneygrubbing investment bankers and Princess Diana! I really think visiting England today would be a deeply disappointing, not to say upsetting, experience for someone like me. See this 11-year old post. Do decent Englishmen exist any more, the sort of whom none less than Tagore said 'they are the finest people in the world'?

P.S.: Without denigrating J.K. Rowling's talent, I should venture to say that had she been born fifty years earlier, when far more people could be held to high standards, she could not have achieved literary super-stardom with so little competition!