The photograph of young boys and girls going to take the NEET barefoot to prevent cheating in the medical entrance examination is an eye opener. One fails to understand why civil society chooses to ignore it.
Going barefoot to class is by no means unheard of but to do it to prevent cheating is demeaning. Why only medical aspirants, when the same holds true for the JEE or the UPSC?
What it does to the self-esteem of around 6 lakh 17-18 year olds, at least some of who will shoulder the heath concerns of the society a few years later, is anybody's guess.
Just because you cannot make your exams and admission system foolproof, do you play with the psychology of young adults? Why does this not happen in the GMAT/GRE which is conducted in so many centres across the world?
In a society where doctors are living on the edge both due to patient's perceptions of them and the employers’ expectations of them, this is further demoralising. One wonders who would cheat to enter a system as rotten as this!
As an elder citizen and parent, one would tell young minds on the brink of a career to hold their heads high and minds without fear and face the world. Not shaking with fear to take an entrance exam, where you are thought to be a cheat unless proved otherwise. A couple of years later some of these very aspirants would be expected to fight cancers and HIV!
This country does not need doctors, not even mothers like that of Google's Sunder Pichai's who said she was disappointed when her son did not become a doctor! It needs money tellers, accountants and business managers who manage the business of healthcare but who do not help heal.
That is why we have more and more malls and hospitals that look like malls coming up but no city centres like they have in Europe which have squares dedicated to Joseph Lister, the father of Antiseptic Surgery or Christian Doppler, the inventor of the Doppler.
So let us give science and scientific thought a fitting burial or maybe even wait for its natural death and let us all make money by hook or by crook. For that sweet child of mine you need not go barefoot to take a medical entrance exam!
But remember as you must have heard many a time -it is not we who control money. When it is only little it behaves meekly, when it grows it becomes brash and has its way with us.
(The writer Dr Gita Gangadharan Shrivastav is MBBS, MS - ENT, FRCS. She is Senior Consultant - ENT at Max Hospital, Noida.)
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