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| Edited By: |Source: DNA |Updated: Jul 30, 2016, 08:15 AM IST
Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi has been making short, and disappointingly dramatic, interventions in the Lok Sabha. There was one on Thursday, and it was about the soaring prices of the pulses. Gandhi naively asked the Treasury Benches whether any of them had ever gone to the market. All that evoked was cynical simpers from the other side. The speech was short and it there were sharp thrusts at Prime Minister Narendra Modi because it seems Gandhi would not want to address anyone other than Modi on the other side. When Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had to respond, he did not seem to have a difficult job on hand to demolish the rant from the other side. But Jaitley was actually on weak ground. It was not Gandhi’s attack that proved dangerous to the government but the government’s own weak argument rationalising price rise of certain commodities as seasonal, and expressing the naive hope that a good monsoon will take the economy out of the rut. Jaitley also seems to forget that after two years in power, he cannot cite the bad performance of the previous government. People are judging the Modi government. They have judged the Manmohan Singh government. It was voted out.
Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti walked unwittingly into a trap as it were when she said that the security forces were not aware that Burhan Wani was one of the persons killed in the encounter. Had the forces known about Wani’s presence, they would have given him another chance. It is a curious statement to make at the best of times. It is not surprising that it has drawn sharp criticism from former chief minister Omar Abdullah. It clearly shows that the Mufti government is trying to make sense of why there were such strong and violent protests in the wake of the Wani killing. Was the young militant an icon of sort as is being made out in the Kashmir circles? Or, was his killing a mere pretext for the simmering anger among the youth in the Valley to spill over into the open? The local buzz seems to be that Wani’s death went viral on the social media and that it was the trigger for the protests. The irony lies in the fact that Wani was no dreaded militant. He seems to be a young millennial who liked posting his pictures with a gun in hand on the social media.
The Government proposes to modify the ethics committee regulation of the Medical Council of India (MCI) by which doctors are required to prescribe generic medicines -- which are affordable for the majority of people -- instead of branded drugs. More importantly, doctors have to write the prescription for the generic drugs in clear handwriting -- the bugbear of doctors -- and if necessary in capital letters. It seems that the scrawl of the doctors has reached such an alarming state that it has become to regulate and direct them to write clearly and legibly, something which many students were asked to do in their primary school. It would be going too far afield to analyse the reasons for the bad handwriting of the doctors, though psychoanalysts should be able to throw some light on the issue. Has the convoluted and illegible handwriting got something to do with the complex thinking process as they diagnose the patient? Will the doctors, in the first place, even accept the fact that there is indeed a problem with their handwriting? For once, everyone can turn around and say to the doctors, ‘Physician, heal thy handwriting!’
