Hafta letters: Doctors' protest, English subtitles, plans for UP election

Hi NL team,

Thank you very much for reading my letter in Hafta 360 (no pun intended). I think I was mistaken about placing Hafta in time and space. In its present format, Hafta is a discussion of weekly issues of India north of the Vindhyas, for north Indians. Thus, mixing Hindi with English is okay. Like you have said, non-Hindi speakers should look at other areas of NL.

I was overambitious in thinking that someone from the team would read the Guardian article that I had linked and comment on the ideas of Yanis Varoufakis. In short, Yanis argues that present day capitalism has become "techno-feudalism" that supports big business with cash while people starve; hence stocks are sore while economies collapse. He has radical suggestions such as; only employees owning stock of a company. Another Now is a fictionalised version of this idea. Let it be my suggestion to the team for this week :-). Maybe NL can think of a Let's Talk About on future socio-economic orders?

Regards.

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Dear Hafta team,

One of the Hafta letters last week by Abhishek pointed out the problematic takes by the Teen Taal podcast. I started listening to it on the recommendation of Atul Chaurasia in Charcha and I have a diametrically opposite opinion to Abhishek's. In fact, I was surprised to see such a podcast which is critical of Modi, BJP and RSS on Aaj Tak's platform.

I don't think they have justified lynching anywhere. Their point was about how social media is used to amplify and gain legitimacy. If even this kind of nuance is termed problematic, there won't be any space left for good faith arguments. You can't just call everyone else's opinions problematic just because they differ from yours.

Love the work you guys do. Especially Ayush Tiwari and Prateek Goyal.

Regards,

Kiran

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Hi, please write or speak about what good and positive changes happened in 2021 which bring hope for the future. Thanks.

Happy new year,

Antisen

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Hello NL team,

Regular listener of Hafta here. Request to the internal NL panel to at least read up on topics of the week before the podcast. Abhinandan not knowing what the NEET exam was for (Ep 361) and then asking questions like whether the media hasn't covered it properly was jarring. Most of the panel did not know anything on crypto when it was the topic. I know Hafta is an opinion show, as subscribers we would like your learned opinion and not some half-baked comment.

Love Newsance. I'm from Tamil Nadu. Tried to introduce NL to a friend by showing him a few Newsance episodes, the generous mixing of Hindi and English on Newsance was a put off for him and he lost interest. Is there a way to have separate Newsance episodes in English and Hindi? Or at least official English captions when the show goes into Hindi?

Keep up the good work! Happy new year 2022!

Venkatraman

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Hi Hafta team! Happy new year!

I wanted to know your opinions on two issues.

1) If BJP loses the 2022 UP election, can we see the Noida media finally being held accountable for its divisive and communal coverage? Most of the media offices and "journalists" would suddenly have a state government that is actively "hostile" towards them and people like Chavanke, Gullu, Tihadi, Aman Chopra be reprimanded by the government?

Personally I felt that our media shifted from hailing the supreme leader to actively divisive, communal agenda post Yogi winning in 2017.

2) Kalicharan of Raipur Dharam Sansad fame is absolutely despicable but I read somewhere that the Chhattisgarh police charged him with sedition. I am a firm believer that modern liberal democracies have no space for sedition, but how to deal with the Kalicharans of the world otherwise?

Finally, do bring Anand Vardhan of The Public YouTube channel as a guest for an episode where you discuss UP election. He seems to have a lot of insight into the field.

Ayush

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Manisha and Anand were of the view that doctors are politically neutral/just not involved. I would disagree.

I have just completed by MBBS and waiting for PG counselling. I did my MBBS from a top institute where you need to be among toppers in NEET UG to get admission.

The majority of my batchmates and seniors are bigoted to the core. "Mullo ko nikalo" is a statement you'll easily hear in hostel. My sister had the same experience when I asked why they have switched off poore hostel ka light when Modi said to do so last year, and I had to undergo surgery for ACL tear.

The majority of docs and students in top institutes are privileged morons who treat patients as if they are inferior. And when one of those hundreds of patients they have mistreated turns out to be a gunda and beats them up for it, they cry about it.

Yes, there are some good people but very few. Four in the whole institute, to be precise, who are honest, hard-working docs.

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Really enjoy listening to NL Hafta. Find it really insightful, especially Anand Sir's commentary, so thank you. As UP election will be on shortly, can we have a ground report to see the actual report card of the BJP 2017 manifesto? There's lot of divergent coverage on this.

Kishore

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I was very disappointed in the way the doctors' issue was covered, even mentioning that doctors are selfish in India.

First of all, the delay in PG counselling is affected not just the batch of doctors waiting to get admission but also every single patient. Because the patients are being handled by junior residents who have not slept for 36-48 hours. Because of the delay in admission, the already bad doctor-patient ratio in hospitals is affected even more.

Hospitals are working at 50 percent capacity because there have been no new admissions. And this 50 percent strength also has to deal with the Covid pressure. The situation in India cannot be compared to the system in the UK. Every person is overworked. Everyone in my friends' circle protested about the Ramdev issue. Even the IMA wrote a strongly worded letter to the government regarding this. But it was not covered like most issues.

I am sorry but if you want to know about the situation in India, ask someone working in the Indian scenario to talk about it.

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One of your guests stated that in India, the persecution of minorities isn't state-sponsored whereas in China, it is.

Isn't there an affiliation between the Hindu groups that attack churches in Karnataka, harass Muslims in Gurgaon, and the BJP?

Can you please share your thoughts on why secular parties opposing the BJP are unable to articulate their secularism in unequivocal terms?

Shashank Narendran

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The British doctor on your NL Hafta got the facts wrong.

NEET PG is being protested by resident (aka junior) doctors, but it is actually for graduated MBBS students. In a three-year PG (MD/MS) course, since NEET PG has not been done for a while, first-year resident doctors aren't being appointed. Current second-year resident doctors have been working for more than a year. And third-year resident doctors have graduated, leading to an acute shortage of doctors while the work has only increased manifold.

Workload varies according to the year in which a doctor serves, with a first-year male resident doctor being able to only do one of these in a day: shit, shave or sleep (common saying)!

The digress on the non-activism of Indian doctors is justified to a point, but the profile of medical students is different in India vs the UK. India selects those who have devoted their student life to mugging up with zero role of extracurricular achievements in MBBS selection. So, you get what you pay for!